Imagine this for a second. You're walking through
the the crooked winding streets of 19th century
Copenhagen. It's the 1840s. So we're talking
cobblestones, gray skies. Exactly. A very polite,
very structured society. It's a city of rituals,
of top hats, of, you know, everyone going to
church on Sunday. Most people are walking right
up against the walls of the buildings, trying
to avoid the mud and the carriage wheels splashing
everywhere. Right. But there's this one man.
And he actually prefers the sidewalk. He's not
just avoiding carriages. He's, well, he's looking
for people to talk to. He wants an audience.
He's almost hunting for conversation. He is.
And he's a strange looking figure. He's slight,
small in stature. You get the sense he's almost
fragile. Looks like a strong gust of wind could
just, you know, blow him right over. But the
very first thing you'd notice before he even
says a word is the hair. The famous strange coiffure.
It's iconic. It really is. The historical records
all mention it. It rises, they say, almost six
inches above his forehead. It's this sort of
tousled, wild crest of hair. It makes him look
like he's perpetually electrified. Or just completely
bewildered by the universe. Right. He's wearing
a coat the color of red cabbage. And he stops
everyone. I mean, not just the professors or
the wealthy merchants he knows. He stops the
maid servants, the laborers, the street sweepers.
He wants to know what they're thinking about.
It's such a powerful image. And you have to think,
for the average person in Copenhagen, this guy
was just a daily fixture, a harmless, eccentric
oddball, you know, a local character. There goes
Saren again. Exactly. But the people who really
knew him, the ones who grew up with him or tried
to debate him, they knew there was something
much, much sharper underneath that polite sort
of quirky exterior. In fact, when he was just
a child, his own father gave him a nickname.
And I think this nickname just sets the stage
for everything we're going to talk about today.
He called him The Fork. The Fork. That is such
a strange thing to call your own kid. It's not
exactly, you know, champ or buddy. It is, isn't
it? But it was so accurate. He had this uncanny,
really precocious ability to just spear people
with satirical remarks. Wow. Even as a boy, he
could pick apart an argument or, you know, a
person's whole self -image with a single piercing
sentence. He could just stick a fork in you and
expose whatever truth you were trying to hide.
And that tendency, that need to poke, to prod,
to unsettlingly expose the things we'd all rather
keep hidden, that really became the defining
characteristic of his entire life's work. We
are talking, of course, about Saren Kierkegaard.
The man who is, for all intents and purposes,
considered the father of existentialism. That's
the label he gets, right. But the more I dig
into the source material we've got for this deep
dive, the more I realize that father of existentialism
is just way too neat. It's too tidy. It sounds
like a chapter title in a textbook. It does.
And it completely misses the weirdness of the
man, the sheer intensity of his life. I mean,
this is a guy who wrote his most famous books
under a dozen different fake names. He staged
a public breakup with his fiancee that scandalized
the entire city. And he ended his life engaged
in a literal all -out war against the state church.
He is a figure of just immense contradictions.
And I think that's what makes him so endlessly
fascinating to study. Totally. He was a man who,
you know, deeply loved Socrates and the whole
idea of irony, yet he absolutely despised the
crowd and public opinion. He was a devout Christian
who spent his final years attacking the very
institution of the church. He championed the
idea of the single individual, yet he felt he
could never truly, deeply connect with another
human being. So for our deep dive today, our
mission is pretty specific. We're not just going
to do a standard biography. You know, he was
born here. He died there. We want to try and
understand three core things that really jump
out from this massive stack of documents. OK.
First, we really need to parse this distinction
he made between Christendom, which he saw as
just the culture and Christianity, the actual
difficult practice. The huge distinction. Crucial.
Second, we have to tackle his most famous and
maybe most misunderstood assertion that subjectivity
is truth. Which, you know, today sounds like
a postmodern slogan, but for him it meant something
completely different. And finally, and I think
this is maybe the most important part for anyone
listening who has ever felt stressed out or overwhelmed,
we have to look at anxiety. Kierkegaard is really
the first major thinker in the West to treat
anxiety not just as a, you know, a medical symptom
to be cured, but as a fundamental unavoidable
part of being human. Right. If you have ever
felt that dizziness of just having too many choices,
that feeling of possibility. That's a concept
Kierkegaard was mapping out almost 200 years
ago. It's incredible how modern he feels. It
is. And the sources we have for this deep dive
are, frankly, intimidating. We have the biographical
accounts. We have his major published works like
Either Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto
Death. But maybe the most important source we
have is his journals. All 7 ,000 pages of them.
7 ,000 pages. That's where you see the man behind
all the masks, all the pseudonyms. That's the
raw material. So let's get into it. Let's unpack
this guy. If we really want to understand the
fork, we have to start with the environment that
forged him. And that means we have to talk about
his father. Yes. The story of Surin Kierkegaard
really begins in the shadow of his father, Michael
Peterson Kierkegaard. Michael Peterson. So tell
us about him. What was he like? Well, to understand
Surin, you really have to understand the enormous
shadow Michael cast over his life. Michael was
a... A well -to -do wool merchant. He was originally
from Jutland, which is the harsh, windswept peninsula
of Denmark. A tough place. Very tough. And by
the time Sirin was born, Michael was already
quite old. 56, I believe. He was a stern man.
The sources describe him as dry, prosaic, always
wearing this rustic cloak. But, and this is key,
beneath that sort of boring merchant exterior,
they say he had a concealed active imagination.
And when we say active imagination, we're not
talking about him writing fairy tales for the
kids. No, not at all. We mean he was brooding.
deeply profoundly melancholic there was this
dark cloud that just hung over the entire Kierkegaard
household it was a wealthy home you know they
hosted intellectuals and bishops for dinner but
there was this pervading inescapable sense of
guilt Michael was deeply religious but it wasn't
a joyful hallelujah kind of religion not a happy
clappy thing not in the slightest it was a heavy
fearful almost Old Testament kind of religion.
He was intellectually devoted to the rationalism
of Christian Wolf, which is very logical and
systematic. But emotionally, he was absolutely
convinced that he had earned God's wrath. And
this is where we get into this concept that Surin
later calls the Great Earthquake. Right. This
is a term Surin uses in his journals much later
in life, looking back. And for a long time, scholars
have tried to pinpoint exactly what this Great
Earthquake was. It seemed to refer to a specific
moment, a revelation Okay. There's a draft of
a story in his papers where he describes a father
who has this terrible belief that none of his
children will outlive him. He believes this is
a divine punishment hanging over his family.
A divine punishment for what? I mean, what could
a wool merchant have possibly done that was so
terrible he thought God was going to kill all
seven of his children? That is the big question.
It's the subject of a lot of speculation, but
it's derived from hints in the journals and some,
you know, historical gossip of the time. There
are two leading theories. OK, what's the first
one? The first is that as a young, impoverished
shepherd boy on the heath in Jutland, suffering
from the biting cold and hunger, Michael had
stood on a hill and in a moment of despair, he
had cursed God. He cursed God. He cursed the
heavens for his misery. And the terrible twist
is that even though he became rich later. remarkably
rich, he never shook the feeling that the wealth
wasn't a blessing. He thought it was a trap.
He thought it was a setup. He believed he had
committed the one unforgivable sin, the sin against
the Holy Spirit, and that God was just, you know,
fattening him up for the slaughter. Wow. That
is some heavy psychological baggage to carry
around. What's the second theory? The second
theory involves Surin's mother, Aime, and Surin's
daughter, Lund. She was a... originally the family
maid, Michael's first wife, died childless. And
he married Ayn remarkably quickly after that.
So the speculation is that he had either impregnated
Ayn out of wedlock or maybe even forced himself
on her. and that this moral failing, this sexual
sin, was the source of the divine curse on his
family. It's so interesting you bring up the
mother, Ayn, because in all of Surin's thousands
and thousands of pages of writing, I mean, 7
,000 pages of journals, all those books, she's
basically a ghost, isn't she? She's conspicuously
absent. It is one of the strangest silences in
all of literary history. He never mentions her
in his published works, not once. That's incredible.
It is. We know from other family accounts...
specifically from his niece, Henriette Lund,
that Anne was a nice, unassuming woman. She was
uneducated, very quiet, and she wielded her influence
by cosseting the children. Henriette said she
protected Surin and his brother Peter like a
hen her chicks. So she was a nurturing presence,
but intellectually, she just didn't exist for
him. Seemingly not. She just... Wasn't part of
his intellectual world. The father dominated
that mental landscape completely. And here's
the really chilling thing about that great earthquake
prophecy. The idea that the father would outlive
all the children. It seemed to be coming true.
It was coming true. There were seven children
in the Kierkegaard family. Five of them died
before their father did. Five out of seven. That's
just horrifying to even imagine. It is. So you
can imagine being young Sören. Growing up in
this house where your father is walking around,
convinced that he is, in essence, killing his
own children with his sin. Every time a sibling
died, it wasn't just a personal tragedy, it was
a confirmation of the curse. It was proof. Surin
and his older brother Peter were the only two
who survived past their father. And Surin later
wrote that he felt he was never really young.
He said he was an old man from the very beginning.
born into a child's body, inheriting this heavy
form of Christianity that was centered entirely
on dread and guilt. It definitely primes you
for a philosophy that's going to grapple with
the darker sides of existence, doesn't it? He
wasn't exactly set up to be a sunny optimist.
No, not at all. But he didn't just sit in a dark
room his whole life, right? He went to school.
He was out in the world. He was. He attended
the School of Civic Virtue. And true to his later
form, he was a bit of a contradiction there as
well. He was known for being very conservative,
you know, respecting the king and the police.
But at the same time, he's constantly getting
into altercations with the other students. The
fork was already at play. The fork came out to
play. Exactly. He had that sharp tongue. He wore
strange clothes. He wasn't so much bullied as
he was the one doing the intellectual bullying.
And then he goes off to the University of Copenhagen.
And this seems to be where we see the first real
signs of his rebellion against the standard way
of thinking. You know, most people go to university
to learn facts, to learn the truth as it's written
down in books. CERN wasn't having any of it.
No, he was deeply, deeply dissatisfied with the
philosophical landscape of the time. which was
just completely dominated by the German philosopher
GWF Hegel. Right. Hegel. We hear about Hegel
a lot in philosophy. But for the listener who,
you know, hasn't dusted off their 19th century
German idealism lately, why did Kierkegaard have
such a problem with his ideas? Well, we don't
need to get bogged down in the really dense mechanics
of Hegelian dialectics, but the key thing to
understand is this concept of the system. System.
Hegel was all about the big picture, the grand
sweep of history. He saw all of human history
as this massive, logical, rational progression
of what he called the world spirit. And in Hegel's
system, the individual human being is just a
tiny, tiny cog in this giant historical machine.
And CERN did not want to be a cog. He absolutely
did not want to be a cog. He felt that this abstract,
all -encompassing system completely ignored the
actual lived experience of being a human being.
It had no room for anxiety, for choice, for passion,
for suffering, or for the terror of death. It
was a philosophy for spectators, not for actors.
And this frustration leads him to write one of
the most famous entries in his early journals.
He's only 22 at the time, but it's like a mission
statement for his entire life. It really is.
Do you have it there? I do. He writes, what I
really need to do is to get clear about what
am I to do, not what I must know. The crucial
thing is to find a truth which is truth for me,
to find the idea for which I am willing to live
and die. A truth which is truth for me. That
is the seed of everything that comes after. That's
the birth of existentialism right there in that
sentence. It really is. He's drawing this sharp
line between objective truth and subjective truth.
It's not about arguing whether the earth goes
around the sun. That's an objective truth. It's
a fact. But you can't live and die for that fact.
It doesn't keep you warm at night. He's asking
a different question. He's asking, what am I
going to do with my one and only life? Precisely.
He had this profound realization that you can
be a walking encyclopedia, you can know everything
there is to know about the wound objectively,
and still be completely, utterly lost on how
to actually live your own life. You can know
everything and understand nothing. He wanted
a life of what he called human validity, not
just abstract intellectual speculation. So we
have this brilliant, prickly, melancholic young
man wandering the streets of Copenhagen, obsessed
with finding his purpose, and then... Something
happens that changes the entire trajectory of
his life. He meets a girl. Regine Olsen. This
is segment two in our breakdown, and honestly,
you can't overstate the importance of this. This
is the emotional core of his entire life story.
I mean, if you think modern dating is complicated
with the ghosting and the breadcrumbing and all
of that, wait until you hear about Surin and
Regine. It is the defining event of his life.
He met her in May of 1837. She was very young,
barely 15 at the time, and he was just instantly
smitten. He falls for her heart. Completely.
He courted her for a long time, three years.
He would go to her family's house. They would
play music together, read books. It was all very
proper. And finally, in September of 1840, he
proposed, and she accepted. So on the surface,
everything looks great. He's finished his degree.
He's got the girl. He's all set up for a respectable
life as a pastor or maybe a professor. He's checked
all the right boxes. And then he completely panicked.
Is this the great earthquake mentality kicking
back in? The family curse? It's the melancholy.
He became convinced that he was fundamentally
unsuitable for marriage. He believed that his
internal darkness, his heavy spirit that he got
from his father, would just crush her. He famously
wrote in his journal that he was an eternity
too old for her. Wow. He saw her as pure sunshine,
and he saw himself as a storm cloud. So less
than a year after they got engaged, in August
of 1841, he breaks it off. But the way he does
it is so Kierkegaardian. He doesn't just sit
her down and have a mature, honest conversation.
He does it in this very specific, almost theatrical
and you could say cruel way. He sends the engagement
ring back to her with a letter. But it's so much
more complex than just getting cold feet. He
writes obsessively about this in his journals.
He felt that he had to make her hate him. He
wanted her to hate him. Why? Yes. His reasoning
was that if she thought he was a good guy who
just had some issues, she would pine for him
forever. She would be the tragic victim of a
sad story. But if she thought he was a complete
scoundrel, a jerk who had never really loved
her, then she would be angry. And anger is easier
to move on from than heartbreak. Anger empowers
you. It gives you the strength to move on. So
he deliberately played the villain to try and
save her from a lifetime of sadness. He took
on the role of the scoundrel. He did. He wanted
her to believe he had just been trifling with
her feelings, that he was this callous esthete
who got bored and moved on. He started treating
her coldly in public. It was a performance. He
called it a benevolent cruelty. That's exactly
how he saw it. And this is so crucial. All the
sources, especially his own journals, tell us
he was absolutely deeply in love with her. He
never loved anyone else. He kept a picture of
her in his desk until the day he died. This wasn't
a lack of affection. It was a self -imposed sacrificial
exile. And the fallout from this breakup didn't
just result in a couple of broken hearts. It
resulted in one of the most explosive, productive
bursts of writing in the history of philosophy.
Regine became his muse. She did. It's almost
as if everything he wrote in the few years right
after the breakup was a kind of coded message
directly to her. He was writing books for the
entire world, but they were written to this one
person. Let's talk about some of those messages.
Take his book Repetition, which came out in 1843.
Right. It's a very strange little book. It features
a main character called a young man who is suffering
from this intense anxiety because he has to sacrifice
his love for a girl. to God. It's barely disguised
autobiography. It's not disguised at all. He's
trying to explain to her through fiction why
he did what he did. He wants her to understand
that he didn't leave her because he didn't love
her, but because he felt he couldn't be the kind
of person she needed him to be. And then there's
Fear and Trembling, which is probably his most
famous work. On the surface, it's a commentary
on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. You
know, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac
up on a mountain and sacrifice him. And Abraham,
terrifyingly, He travels up the mountain. He
builds the altar. He raises the knife. Right.
So most people read that as a purely theological
commentary on the nature of faith. And it is
that. But for Kierkegaard, he's Abraham and Rigin
is Isaac. Yes. He is sacrificing his most beloved
regime because God told him to. Is that how he
saw it? In a sense, yes. He seemed to believe
that his specific calling as a writer and a religious
thinker required him to be utterly alone. He
couldn't be a husband and also be the single
individual he felt he was meant to be. So in
Fear and Trembling, he coins this incredibly
dense but important phrase, the teleological
suspension of the ethical. OK, that is a mouthful.
We have to break that down. Teleological suspension
of the ethical. It sounds super complicated,
but the idea is fascinating. The ethical. for
Kierkegaard, refers to the universal rules of
right and wrong that apply to everyone in society.
Like do not kill your son. Do not kill your son
is a great example. Or keep your promises. Or
marry the girl you got engaged to. That is the
ethical life. It's rational. It makes sense.
It's how society functions. Right. Those are
the rules we all agree to live by. But Kierkegaard
argues there is a higher plane of existence,
the religious, and sometimes the telos. which
is the end goal or purpose which for him is god
requires you to suspend those ethical rules abraham
has to ignore the universal rule do not kill
in order to obey his personal command from god
and kierkegaard felt he had to ignore the ethical
rule marry your fiance in order to fulfill what
he saw as his higher religious destiny that's
the parallel he's drawing He sees himself as
attempting to be a knight of faith, making this
terrible, incomprehensible sacrifice for a higher
purpose that no one else can understand. Or at
least he's desperately trying to understand if
he is one. It's important to remember he writes
fear and trembling under a pseudonym, Johannes
de Cilentio. Johannes Silence. Exactly. He's
looking at Abraham from the outside and saying.
i don't understand this man he is amazing but
he is also terrifying because to the outside
world abraham just looks like a would -be murderer
and to the outside world in copenhagen kierkegaard
just looks like a colossal jerk who dumped his
fiance but internally they might be making this
private, absurd movement of faith. It's a genuinely
terrifying thought when you stop and think about
it, because how do you ever really know? How
can you be sure if you're a knight of faith or
if you're just a delusional person making a terrible
mistake? That is the risk. And Kierkegaard says
there is no objective validation. There's no
external proof. You can't show your work to anyone.
You are, as he says, out over 70 ,000 fathoms
of water. You have to take the responsibility
entirely upon yourself. This brings us to the
whole way he wrote these books. You mentioned
a pseudonym, Johannes de Silencio. He didn't
just use one. He used this whole cast of characters.
Victor A. Amida, Judge William, Johannes Climacus,
Anticlamicus. Why not just put his own name,
Saren Kierkegaard, on the cover? This is what
he called his strategy of indirect communication.
It kinks right back to his hatred for Hegel's
system and for any kind of easy answer. If he
just wrote a book that said, here's the truth
about life. Step one, step two, step three. He
knew what would happen. People would just memorize
it. They'd memorize it and think they possessed
the truth. It would be like a textbook or, you
know, a modern self -help book. Five easy steps
to becoming a knight of faith. Right. And he
absolutely hated that. He didn't want to be an
authority figure handing down doctrine. He wanted
to force the reader to choose for themselves.
So he created these characters. And they don't
just have different names. They have completely
different personalities, different writing styles.
And they argue with each other across the books.
It's like he created a literary puppet show where
all the puppets are debating the meaning of life
and he's just the puppet master hiding in the
background pulling the strings. That is a perfect
analogy and the best example of this is his first
major work, his magnum opus, Either Or, published
in 1843. The title alone tells you so much. It's
not both and, it's either or. A choice. Exactly.
The book is presented as a collection of papers
that were supposedly found in a secret drawer
of a writing desk by an editor named Victor Aramita.
Okay. The first half of the book is written by
A, who is known as the Esthete. These papers
are all over the place. They're disorganized,
witty, cynical. They contain essays on Mozart's
opera Don Giovanni, an analysis of tragedy, and
most famously, the seducer's diary. So A is focused
on avoiding boredom at all costs. He treats life
as a work of art to be enjoyed. Correct. This
is what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic stage
of existence. It's about living for the moment,
chasing interesting experiences, and above all,
keeping your options open. The fear of commitment
is central. To commit is to be boring. For A,
yes. If you get married, you're trapped. If you
take a permanent job, you're just a cog. So he
just floats through life, savoring experiences,
but never investing himself in anything. That
sounds remarkably like a lot of people today.
You know, the fear of missing out, constantly
swiping, keeping all your options open so you
never have to choose. It's incredibly modern.
The aesthetic life is the life of the spectator.
But then the second half of the book is written
by B, a man known only as Judge William. He is
the ethicist. And his papers are the opposite
of A's. Completely. They're very organized, sober,
maybe even a little bit boring to read. He writes
these long formal letters to A. arguing that
the ascetic life is a dead end. He says it ultimately
leads to despair because it's meaningless. And
he defends things like marriage. He champions
marriage. He defends duty. He argues that true
freedom isn't found in having infinite options,
but in choosing to commit to something, in having
a history, in taking on responsibility. So you
have the fun, flightiest Theodore on one side
and the boring, responsible judge on the other.
And how does the book end? Does Kierkegaard or
Victor Eremita tell us who wins the argument?
It doesn't really conclude in that way. It doesn't
end with a chapter that says, and the moral of
the story is, the judge is right. It simply presents
you with the two options, either the aesthetic
life or the ethical life, and it leaves you,
the reader, to make the choice. It pushes all
the responsibility back onto you. That is brilliant.
But it's also incredibly risky because a lot
of people probably read that first half and thought,
hey, this seducer's diary stuff sounds pretty
great. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah.
The book was a bestseller in Copenhagen, mostly
because people loved the scandalous first half.
They skipped the boring judge part. But Kierkegaard
was playing the long game. He wanted to show
you the appeal of the aesthetic life and then
show you that ultimately it leads to a fractured,
desperate self. Amidst all these pseudonyms and
stages of life, there's one concept that he writes
about that we really need to dive into because
it's one of his most powerful and enduring contributions.
And that's his idea of anxiety, or as he called
it, angst. Yes, this comes from the book The
Concept of Anxiety, which was written by, let
me check my notes here, Vigilius Hofniensis.
Which translates to The Watchman of Copenhagen,
a great pseudonym. It is. So how does the watchman
define anxiety? Because, you know, today we think
of it as a disorder. It's something to be medicated.
We try to get rid of it. Kierkegaard saw it very
differently. Very differently. For him, anxiety
is not the same as fear. This is the crucial
distinction he makes right at the beginning.
Fear is definite. You are afraid of a spider.
You are afraid of a tall cliff. Fear has an object.
Right. It's concrete. Exactly. Anxiety, however.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. The dizziness
of freedom. I just love that phrase. Unpack that
for us. It's the experience of standing on the
edge of that tall cliff. You fear falling. Yes,
that's natural. That's fear. But you also experience
this terrifying. dizzying realization that you
could jump. There's nothing physically stopping
you. You have the freedom to throw yourself off.
That feeling at internal trembling, at the awareness
that you are free to choose that anything is
possible, even self -destruction, that is anxiety.
So anxiety isn't about something bad that might
happen to you from the outside. It's about the
confrontation with your own possibility. Precisely.
He calls anxiety the psychological steed of possibility.
He says it precedes sin. Think of Adam and Eve
in the garden. They didn't sin because they were
inherently bad. They sinned because they were
free. God says, don't eat from that tree. And
in that moment, the possibility of disobedience
opens up. Anxiety is that vibration you feel
right before you make a choice. It's deeply uncomfortable,
but it's also the proof that you are a spiritual
being with free will. If you were just an animal
guided only by instinct, you wouldn't feel anxiety.
You wouldn't. A rock doesn't feel anxiety. A
lion doesn't feel anxiety about whether it's
living an authentic life. Only a being who is
a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the
temporal and the eternal, a human being can experience
it. So that reframes it completely. If I'm feeling
anxious about a big life choice, like taking
a new job or getting married or moving to a new
city, Kierkegaard would say that's actually a
good sign. He would say it's a necessary sign.
It means you are awake to your own freedom. You
are facing your responsibility to create yourself.
He calls anxiety the possibility of possibility.
In his view, if you don't have any anxiety, you
aren't really human yet. You're sleepwalking
through life. You're what he would call a spiritless
bourgeois. A spiritless bourgeois. He really
did have a way with insults. He was the master.
OK, that is a lot to digest. We've got the estate,
the ethicist, the anxiety of freedom. But we
haven't really touched on the absolute core of
his religious thought yet. And that's the idea
that subjectivity is truth. This is segment four
for us. This is the heavy lifting. This is the
central thesis of his massive work, concluding
unscientific postscript to the philosophical
friedmans. And the key phrase, the one that gets
quoted all the time, is subjectivity is truth.
Now, we have to be really, really careful here,
because in our world in 2026, when someone says
subjectivity is truth, it sounds like they're
saying my truth is my truth. Your truth is your
truth. And objective facts don't matter. Right.
It sounds like pure relativism. Yeah. And that
is absolutely not what he meant. Kierkegaard
was a realist. He knew a table was a table. He
wasn't talking about scientific or historical
facts. He was talking about existential and religious
truth. So what's the difference? What does that
look like in practice? This really fun example
about praying. It's a fantastic thought experiment.
Imagine one man who lives in a strict Christian
country. He goes to church. He prays to the one
true God, the Christian God. But he does it with
a false spirit. He's just going through the motions.
He's bored. He's thinking about his lunch. He
has the correct what, the right object of worship,
but the wrong how. He has no passion. Okay, I
can picture that guy. He's just bored in the
pew. Now imagine another man who lives in a pagan
culture. He kneels down in a temple. Whoa. That
is seriously controversial. So he's saying the
passion and commitment of the believer matters
more than the objective correctness of their
doctrine. When it comes to being a human being
relating to the divine, yes. Because for Kierkegaard,
religious truth is about a relationship. It's
not about owning a fact like you own a pencil.
It's about how you relate to what you believe.
And this is why he said the crowd is untrue.
The crowd is untrue. Because truth only happens
to the single individual in their inwardness,
in their passion. If you are just following the
crowd, just repeating the creed because everyone
else in your society does, you aren't actually
relating to the truth at all. You're just a parrot.
This leads us directly to the famous leap of
faith. Now, you mentioned earlier in our prep
for this that the specific phrase leap of faith
isn't actually in his original Danish text. That's
right. It's a common misconception. The Danish
text links the words for faith and leap constantly.
But the specific idiom leap of faith is more
of an English translation convention. But the
concept behind it is 100 percent. Kierkegaard.
So what is the leap? Is it just closing your
eyes and believing in fairies because you want
to? Is it irrational? It's not irrational. It's
transrational. It's beyond reason. And Kierkegaard
insists, and this is the hard part for a lot
of people, that true faith requires doubt. So
doubt isn't the enemy of faith. It's the prerequisite
for it. It's the absolute prerequisite. If you
had objective scientific proof that God existed,
like if God appeared in the sky and signed autographs.
You wouldn't need faith. You would just have
knowledge. You don't have faith that two plus
two equals four. You just know it. Faith is only
necessary where there is objective uncertainty.
So faith is seeing the doubt, seeing that it
might not be true, seeing that it looks absurd
from a rational perspective and choosing to commit
your life anyway. It's a risk. It is the ultimate
risk. He talks about what he calls the. absolute
paradox, the central claim of Christianity, that
the eternal, infinite God entered into time as
a finite human being, Jesus, is absurd. It offends
reason. It doesn't make any logical and mathematical
sense. You cannot reason your way to believing
it. You have to make a lead across the chasm
of doubt. And he has this ideal figure, this
character he calls the Knight of Faith. Yes.
And the most fascinating thing about the Knight
of Faith is that he looks totally and completely
normal. He's not a monk on a mountaintop. Not
at all. Kierkegaard describes him not as some
mystic floating on a cloud, but as a guy who
looks like a tax collector or a clerk. He walks
home from work. He genuinely enjoys his dinner.
He loves his wife. He loves the world. But internally,
at every single moment, he is making the absurd
movement of faith. He has resigned everything
in his life to God, and then, by virtue of the
absurd, he has received it all back as a gift.
So externally, he's just a regular guy, a tax
collector. But internally, he's Abraham on the
mountain. That is the perfect way to put it.
He lives fully in the finite world, but he is
grounded in the infinite. He is joyful because
he has trusted the absurd. I want to pivot here
because we've been very high -minded, very philosophical.
We're talking about infinite leaps and absolute
paradoxes. But Kierkegaard was a real person
living in the real world, and that world wasn't
always kind to him. We have to talk about the
trousers. Ah, yes. The Corsair affair. This is
segment five. This feels like the moment where
the profound intellectual meets the 19th century
equivalent of Internet trolls. That is a very,
very apt comparison. So up until about 1845,
Kierkegaard is this respected, if somewhat mysterious,
author. He's a known figure. Then a literary
figure named Peter Ludwig Muller wrote a critical
article about Kierkegaard's book Stages on Life's
Way. Now, Muller was trying to impress the literary
elite. But he was also associated with a very
popular satirical newspaper called the Corsair.
And the Corsair was like the Gawker or the TMZ
of its day in Copenhagen. Exactly. It was scandalous.
It was satirical. It was read by absolutely everyone
but respected by almost no one. It could be very,
very nasty. And Kierkegaard, being the fork,
couldn't resist writing a sarcastic response
to Muller. And in it, he essentially dared the
Corsair to come after him. He wrote a piece where
he literally asked to be abused. He basically
said, you make fun of all the important people,
so why aren't you making fun of me? Am I not
important enough? Oh, no, he fed the trolls.
He invited the trolls into his house and served
them dinner. The Corsair was more than happy
to oblige. For months on end, they published
these absolutely brutal caricatures of him. And
they didn't attack his philosophy. They attacked
his body. That's where the trousers come in.
That's it. They drew him with one trouser leg
that was shorter than the other. They made fun
of his thin legs, his slightly hunched back,
his weird hair. They turned him into a pathetic
cartoon character. And this wasn't just, you
know, a few jokes in the paper that he could
ignore. This had real world consequences for
him. It completely destroyed his ability to be
that man on the street. Remember, his great joy
in life was walking around Copenhagen and striking
up conversations with common people. Now, when
he walked down the street. Street urchins and
students would point at his legs and laugh. They'd
shout insults. They would mimic the cartoons.
He became a public laughingstock. That must have
been absolutely devastating for someone so sensitive
and introspective. It was. He writes about it
in his journals. He felt deeply persecuted. But
in true Kierkegaard fashion, he didn't just wallow
in it. He integrated it into his philosophy.
This experience hardened his view against the
crowd more than anything else. He began to see
the press and public opinion as a form of tyranny.
He called the press the most wretched, the most
contemptible of all tyrannies. It really seems
like this moment was a turning point. It pushed
him away from being the subtle, indirect author
hiding behind pseudonyms and towards something
much more direct and combative. That's absolutely
right. The Corsair affair was the catalyst. It
convinced him that the world, the public sphere,
was fundamentally hostile to truth. It proved
to him on a personal level that the crowd is
always wrong. And it set the stage perfectly
for his final and most dramatic act. Yeah. The
all -out attack on the church itself. This is
segment six in our outline. And honestly, it's
the most punk rock part of his entire life. He
literally goes to war with the Danish state church.
And to understand why. We have to go right back
to that distinction he made between Christianity
and Christendom. Kierkegaard looked around at
Denmark and felt that being a Christian was just
like being a citizen. You were born, the priest
sprinkled some water on you at your baptism,
you got a certificate, and boom, you were a Christian
for life. It was easy. It was comfortable. It
was a career path for pastors. It was a social
club. And for Kierkegaard, true Christianity
was supposed to be the opposite of easy and comfortable.
He thought it was a lifelong task, a process
of suffering and dying to your selfish nature
in order to follow Christ. He believed the state
church had turned God into a monstrous illusion.
They had taken the Lion of Judah and turned him
into a harmless house cat that you could pat
on the head on Sundays. He called it playing
Christian. So what was the final straw? What
triggered the public explosion? A funeral. In
1854, Bishop Minster died. Minster was the primate
of the Church of Denmark, the most powerful religious
figure in the country. He was also a close friend
of Kierkegaard's late father. Kierkegaard had
known him his whole life. So there was a personal
connection. A deep one. But Minster was, for
Kierkegaard, the absolute epitome of the comfortable,
worldly cleric. He was rich. He was powerful.
He was polished. He was a statesman. And then
someone gave a eulogy that said, Kierkegaard
off. Yes. Professor Martinson, who was slated
to be Minster's successor, gave a glowing eulogy
where he called Bishop Minster a truth witness.
He put him in the same sacred chain as the apostles
and the martyrs who were tortured and killed
for their faith. And Kierkegaard just snapped.
He completely snapped. He couldn't take the hypocrisy.
He knew Minster. Minster was a good administrator.
A nice man, maybe, but he lived in a palace.
He died with the king. He was not a martyr. To
call him a truth witness was, for Kierkegaard,
a blasphemous lie. It was counterfeit currency
that devalued the real sacrifices of the past.
So he picks up his pen. He picks up his pen and
goes on the warpath. He launches a series of
attacks in a newspaper called The Fatherland.
And then when that's not enough, he starts using
the last of his family inheritance to self -publish
these little pamphlets called The Moment. And
what's he saying in them? The rhetoric is just
scorching. He argues that the modern Parsons,
the pastors, are just government officials protecting
their jobs and their pensions. He calls them
cannibals who are metaphorically eating off the
sacrifices of Christ. It is brutal. He literally
told people to stop going to church, didn't he?
He did. He said that by participating in this
comfortable Sunday theater, you are actively
mocking God. He urged people to stay home. He
said it is better to be an honest sinner drinking
in a bar than a self deceived hypocrite sitting
in a church. That is an incredibly bold move
to make in Copenhagen in 1855. How did people
react to that? It was a massive scandal. He was
burning every bridge he had left. He was spending
the last of his money funding these pamphlets.
He was totally alone, writing with this frantic
fury that suggests, I think, that he knew he
didn't have much time left. He was literally
spending his last penny to publish these attacks
on the institution he was raised in. And as it
turns out, he didn't have much time left. No.
In October of 1855, right in the middle of this
firestorm of controversy, he collapsed in the
street. He was only 42. Just 42 years old. They
took him to Frederick's Hospital. And even on
his deathbed, he absolutely refused to compromise.
A pastor, a friend from his childhood named Emil
Bozen, came to visit him. And Bozen asked Surin
if he wanted to receive communion. And Kierkegaard
refused. He refused. Why? He said he could not
accept the sacrament from a royal official. He
saw the pastor not as a representative of Christ,
but as an employee of the state. He told Bozen
he would gladly take communion from a layman.
a regular person, but not from an official pastor.
The pastor refused, and so Kierkegaard died without
receiving communion. Wow. That is commitment
to your principles right to the very end. It's
absolute consistency. He died exactly as he lived,
as the single individual standing in opposition
to the institution, to the system. And there's
a crazy story about his funeral, too. It didn't
end quietly. Oh, the funeral was a whole scene.
Since he was such a famous, albeit notorious,
figure, the church, of course, had to bury him.
They held the service at the Church of Our Lady,
the main cathedral, the very institution he had
just been attacking. But at the cemetery, his
nephew, Henrik Lund, interrupted the proceedings.
What did he do? He stood up and launched a public
protest. He shouted that his uncle had been a
fierce opponent of the official church and that
the church had no right to appropriate his body
and bury him as if he were one of their own.
It caused a huge disturbance. Henrik was actually
fined by the authorities for it, but he made
his point. Kierkegaard remained a thorn in their
side even as they were lowering his coffin into
the ground. So he dies at 42. He's widely mocked.
He's seen as an enemy of the church. You would
think that would be the end of the story. You
know, he'd be a weird footnote in Danish history.
But that's not what happened at all. Not even
close. For a while, there was relative silence.
But then, slowly, he was discovered. A famous
Danish critic named Jorg Brandes helped bring
him to light in the late 19th century. German
translators picked up his work in the early 20th
century. And then the explosion happened. Who
did he end up influencing? It might be easier
to ask who he didn't influence. It's hard to
overstate his impact. In philosophy, Martin Heidegger
or Jean -Paul Sartre built the entire modern
movement of existentialism on the foundations
Kierkegaard laid with his concepts of anxiety,
freedom, and existence. Although, interestingly,
Heidegger did his best to hide how much he stole
from Kierkegaard. A classic academic move. Indeed.
Sartre, of course, took all the freedom and the
anxiety, but just dropped the God part. And Ludwig
Wittgenstein, the great analytic philosopher,
was in awe of him. He called Kierkegaard too
deep for him and referred to him as a kind of
saint. And it wasn't just philosophy. He had
a huge impact on theology, too, right? Massive.
The theologian Karl Barth used Kierkegaard's
ideas to completely dismantle the comfortable
liberal theology of the 19th century and kickstart
the Neo -Orthodoxy movement. He brought back
that radical Kierkegaardian idea of the infinite
qualitative distinction between a transcendent
God and a finite man. And psychology. Absolutely.
He is widely considered the father of both Christian
psychology and existential psychology. Thinkers
like Rollo May and Ernest Becker, who wrote the
Pulitzer Prize -winning book The Denial of Death,
they all draw a straight line back to Kierkegaard's
original analysis of anxiety, dread, and despair.
It's just amazing. The fork. the guy who was
mocked in the streets for his trousers, ended
up fundamentally shaping the 20th century mind.
It really validates his core belief in the power
of the single individual. He didn't write for
the crowd of his time. He explicitly wrote for
that single individual whom I, with joy and gratitude,
call my reader. He seemed to know that his time
would eventually come. So let's try and synthesize
all this. We've gone from the boy nicknamed The
Fork. to the heartbroken lover sacrificing his
fiance, to the literary puppet master with all
his pseudonyms, and finally to the public agitator,
the martyr fighting the church. It's just a wild
and intense life. It is. And the through line,
the consistent thread, is that tension we talked
about right at the very beginning. It's the struggle
of the individual to be real and authentic in
a world that constantly pressures you to be fake.
The struggle to find a truth which is truth for
me. It all comes back to that question of subjectivity
versus objectivity. It does. And here's where
I think we should leave the listener with a final
thought. Kierkegaard's great challenge to all
of us is that we are all by nature prone to being
spectators in our own lives. We love to watch.
We love to analyze things from a safe distance.
We love to read reviews of movies before we see
them or, you know, listen to deep dives about
philosophers instead of reading the philosophers
themselves. Guilty as charged. We all are. It's
human nature. But Kierkegaard's point is that
looking for objective proof or certainty before
you commit to anything meaningful in life is
a trap. If you are sitting there waiting for
the perfect undeniable evidence before you make
your life's choices, whether that's about a marriage,
a career, or a leap of faith, you are missing
the entire point. You will wait forever. The
evidence doesn't make the choice for you. You
have to make the choice. You have to leap. So
the provocative final thought for you listening
right now is this. In your own life, when it
comes to the things that matter most, Are you
an active participant who is willing to make
the leap into the uncertain? Or are you just
a spectator standing on the sidewalk of life,
waiting for a certainty that is never going to
arrive? That is the question. And on that note,
we're going to wrap up this deep dive into the
life and mind of Soren Kierkegaard. It's been
a pleasure unpacking the paradoxes. Until next
time, keep diving deep. Welcome to The Debate.
Today, we are walking down the cobblestone streets
of 19th century Copenhagen to examine a man who
describes himself as a spy in the service of
God. We are talking, of course, about Soren Kierkegaard.
You know, he is often hailed as the father of
existentialism, but that title feels, well, a
little too academic for a man who spent his life.
trying to detonate a bomb underneath the comfortable
armchairs of the establishment. The central conflict
of his life wasn't just philosophical. It was
a war between the single individual and the crowd.
And it's a war that I think he ultimately lost,
or at least a war where the collateral damage
was, frankly, his own sanity. I mean, we are
looking at a thinker who posited that subjectivity
is truth. That sounds poetic, sure, but what
it's effectively arguing is that the objective
world... The world of consensus, community, science,
reason is secondary to the passionate inner drama
of the individual. Precisely. And so the question
we are wrestling with today is, well, it's terrifyingly
simple. Is truth something found through objective
consensus, rational evidence, and participating
in the institutions of society? Or is truth,
as Kierkegaard insisted, exclusively a subjective,
passionate, and often isolating leap that the
individual must take alone. I'm here to argue
for the necessity of that leap. I believe Kierkegaard
correctly identified that the crowd is untruth
and that genuine existence is only found in the
infinite qualitative distinction between man
and God. And I come at it from a completely different
angle. I'm here to critique Kierkegaard's dismissal
of rational evidence and community. I believe
his extreme focus on the inner voice leads not
only to social isolation and philosophical incoherence,
but, as we'll get into, a dangerous suspension
of ethics that really borders on fanaticism.
All right, let's get into the position statements
then. To understand why Kierkegaard was so radical,
you have to understand what he was fighting against.
I mean, he wasn't just being difficult for sport.
He was trying to figure out how to become a Christian
in a culture where everyone was already assumed
to be a Christian. This was Christendom, the
state church of Denmark. Which was a stable,
functioning society, let's just keep in mind.
Stable, perhaps, but spiritually dead. Kierkegaard
saw a world where religion had become easy. It
was rational, it was mediated by the state, and
it was basically just good citizenship. He looked
at the Hegelian philosophy dominating the universities,
this attempt to quantify the spiritual and mediate
everything through logic, and he just, he rejected
it wholesale. He argued that speculation, you
know, it helps us build bridges or understand
history. but it cannot help a human being find
salvation. He wrote in his journals that he wanted
to find the idea for which I am willing to live
and die. Not a fact, but an idea that demanded
his life. And so he posited that the crowd is
untruth because the crowd removes personal responsibility.
If everyone is a Christian by default, then being
a Christian means absolutely nothing. I see why
you emphasize the cultural context, I do, but
I have to look at the psychological context.
I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that this was
a purely philosophical stance derived from some
neutral observation. Kierkegaard was a man deeply
shaped, perhaps even warped by personal trauma.
His father, Michael, was this stern, guilt -ridden
man who believed his children were cursed to
die young because he had once cursed God on a
hilltop. I mean, this was not a healthy household.
It was intense, certainly. It was damaging. Kierkegaard's
own niece, Henriette Lund, she described him
as a boy wearing a coat the color of red cabbage,
whom his father called the Fork. Why? Because
he had a tendency to make these sharp satirical
remarks that pricked people. He was an outsider
from childhood. So when he builds a philosophy
that rejects mediation, that third term that
connects individuals like community or shared
logic, he isn't discovering some universal truth.
He's rationalizing his own inability to fit in.
He treats the church as merely a bureaucracy
or herd mentality, but he fails to see that institutions
provide the necessary structure for human flourishing.
You cannot build a civilization or even a theology
on the single individual. But can you build a
self on a civilization? And that brings us to
our first core area of debate, the crowd, the
church, and this whole concept of Christendom.
You mentioned structure, but Kierkegaard saw
that structure as an illusion, a way to hide
from God. In his later years, he went to war.
He published the Attack Upon Christendom pamphlets,
specifically a series called The Moment. And
he was ruthless. He claimed pastors were merely
political officials and even, uh, cannibals.
Which was an incredibly uncharitable characterization
of men who were often doing good charity work.
But were they telling the truth? I mean, consider
the specific spark for this fire. Bishop Meinster.
Meinster was a family friend, a man Kierkegaard's
father admired. Yet when Meinster died and was
eulogized by Hans Lassen Martinsen as a truth
witness, Kierkegaard just exploded. He argued
that calling a man who lived comfortably, dined
with royalty, demanded little of his flock and
took no risks a truth witness was a lie. It was
blasphemy. He argued that the state church made
Christianity a fashionable tradition. You were
a Christian by default. There was no anfik tongue,
no spiritual trial, no dispute. It was safe.
And for Kierkegaard, a safe Christianity is no
Christianity at all. I'm just not convinced by
that line of reasoning because it completely
ignores the consequences of dismantling the institution.
When Kierkegaard died, Exhausted by this very
attack, I might add, the Danish National Church's
obituary for him actually warned of the fatal
fruits of his views. They noted that without
ecclesiastical discipline, believers are in communion
with unbelievers. You destroy the vessel, the
water spills out. He wasn't trying to save the
water. He was trying to find the source. But
look at the irony. Even Kierkegaard couldn't
fully escape the structures he loathed. Scholars
have noted he showed, you know, marked elements
of convergence with medieval Catholicism and
he remained profoundly Lutheran in his categories.
And his attack? Well, it led to the 1857 abolition
of compulsory infant baptism. That was a reform,
yes, but it strengthened the institution by clarifying
membership. It didn't destroy the crowd, it just
reorganized it. Kierkegaard's attack was a suicide
mission that didn't actually offer a viable alternative
to the political officials he despised. He offers
a vacuum where the church used to be. I would
frame it differently. He wasn't offering a vacuum.
He was offering a space for the leap of faith.
And this is where the rubber really meets the
road. Or where the road ends and the cliff begins.
Perhaps. But that cliff is where we find God.
Let's talk about the leap. Now, we should be
precise here. The source material clarifies that
the exact phrase leap of faith isn't in the Danish
text as a single idiom. But the concepts faith
and leap are, well, they're inextricably linked
in his work. Kierkegaard argues that faith requires
doubt. This is the crucial point that rationalists
miss. If I look at a pencil, I don't need faith
to believe it's there. I have objective certainty.
But God? God is an objective uncertainty. Which
is exactly why building a life on it is problematic.
If I cannot be certain, why should I commit my
entire existence to it? Because that uncertainty
is the only thing that allows for passion. If
God were a math problem, loving him would be
as meaningless as loving the number four. Because
we cannot objectively prove God, we must grasp
him through inwardness. Kierkegaard uses the
example of the bleeding woman in the Gospels.
She touched Jesus' robe. It was a secret, inner
movement. She didn't ask for a doctrinal statement.
She acted. That is the originality of faith.
It is a passion, not a conclusion to a syllogism.
I'm sorry. I just don't buy that we can divorce
faith from rationality so completely. Kierkegaard
talks about the offense. He demands we look at
the incarnation, the God -man, and either believe
it or be offended by it because it is an absurdity.
He admits it. He says it is a paradox that the
rational mind cannot process. That's the point.
If it fit neatly into your brain, it wouldn't
be God. But that is such a dangerous point. If
you remove the middle ground of rational inquiry,
what the source calls the difference between
offense and doubt, you'll leave people vulnerable.
I'm reminded of Jean -Paul Sartre's critique.
If this inner voice cannot be demonstrated to
another person, how do we distinguish it from
madness? If I say God told me to do this, and
you say prove it, and I just say, well, subjectivity
is truth, we've left the realm of discourse entirely.
We're just isolated atoms colliding. There is
no way to verify if you're a saint or a sociopath.
I see why you think that. But let me give you
a different perspective on that isolation. It
isn't madness. It's the ultimate responsibility.
When you have no objective proof, you have to
own your choice entirely. And this ties directly
into our next point, which is, I admit, the most
controversial part of his philosophy. the suspension
of the ethical. You brought up sociopathy, and
I'm sure you're thinking of fear and trembling
in the story of Abraham. I am. And this is where
Kierkegaard stops being just a quirky philosopher
and becomes truly terrifying. Okay, so Kierkegaard
uses the story of Abraham being commanded to
sacrifice Isaac to illustrate the teleological
suspension of the ethical. To the ethical world,
the world of universal moral laws, Abraham is
a murderer. He is a father about to kill his
son. There's no justification he can offer the
crowd. He can't explain it. If he speaks, he's
crazy. Because what he is doing is ethically
wrong. Ethically, yes. But religiously, he is
a knight of faith. He enters into a relationship
with the absolute, with God, that transcends
the universal. Now we have to look at the biographical
context here. Kierkegaard wasn't just writing
about Genesis. He was writing about Regine Olsen.
This fiancée. Yes. He broke off their engagement.
He loved her, but he felt a higher religious
calling to his writing. He felt he couldn't be
a husband and a spy for God, so he sacrificed
the ethical reality of marriage. He made himself
look like a scoundrel to make it easier for her
to let go. He became the knight of hidden inwardness,
sacrificing his reputation and his love for a
higher purpose. That is a very compelling narrative
for him to tell himself to sleep at night, but
apply it universally. Emmanuel Levinas offered
a scathing critique of this. He argued that leaving
the ethical stage for the religious is a form
of violence. When you say, I am suspending the
ethical, you are opening the door to amoralism.
Levinas places ethics at the top of the pyramid.
Kierkegaard places God there. Right, but if God
commands you to kill, is he God? Levinas argues
that we meet God in the face of the other, our
neighbor. If Abraham ignores the ethical command
thou shalt not kill for a private voice, What
stops anyone from committing atrocities and claiming
a teleological suspension? God told me to do
it is the excuse of every fanatic in history.
Kierkegaard seems to turn God into a projection
of inner desire, a projection that overrides
our duty to our fellow man. It's narcissistic.
I'm not convinced by that line of reasoning because
it misses the double movement of faith. Abraham
didn't just resign himself to murder. He believed
by virtue of the absurd that he would get Isaac
back. That is the difference. The fanatic destroys.
The knight of faith trusts in the impossible
restoration. It wasn't just a resignation. It
was a trust in the impossible. Trust in the impossible
is indistinguishable from delusion to the victim
of the sacrifice. I don't think Isaac cares about
Abraham's double movement when the knife is raised.
And that is why it must be done in fear and trembling.
It isn't easy. It's the hardest thing a human
can do. And because it's so hard to explain,
Kierkegaard had to write in a very specific way.
He didn't just write textbooks. He used indirect
communication. He used pseudonyms. Which makes
reading him a nightmare of contradictions. I
think it's brilliant. He created characters.
Victor Aramita, Johannes the Silentio, Anticlimacus.
He wanted to trick the reader into the truth.
If he wrote, here are the three steps to being
a Christian, the reader would just memorize them
and think they were finished. By using pseudonyms
with conflicting viewpoints, the estate. the
ethicist, the religious author, he forces the
reader to stand in the middle and choose. He
forces them to face either or. He refuses to
be the authority, so you have to be. That sounds
noble, but I come at it from a different way.
Theodore Adorno critiqued this heavily. He argued
that if you take the pseudonyms literally, or
treat the authorship as a whole, you end up with
confusions and contradictions. It makes Kierkegaard
appear philosophically incoherent. And frankly,
this strategy backfired on him in his own life.
You can't talk about his indirect communication
without talking about the Corsair affair. A pivotal
moment, yes? Kierkegaard thought he could control
the narrative. He publicly challenged the satirical
paper The Corsair to attack him. He thought that
by being attacked, he would be separated from
the mediocre crowd, making him a martyr for the
truth. He thought it would be a battle of wits.
He underestimated the pettiness of the crowd.
He did. They didn't engage his ideas. They mocked
his trousers. They mocked his uneven gait. They
drew cartoons of him looking like a hunchback.
It didn't produce a noble single individual.
It produced a victim of bullying. Children in
Copenhagen would point at him and yell, look,
a Kierkegaard. The indirect communication failed
because the crowd didn't get the joke. They just
laughed at the man. It caused him immense distress,
yes. He was humiliated. But I would argue it
proved his point. The crowd is untruth. They
couldn't engage with the idea, so they attacked
the appearance. It solidified his isolation.
It stripped away his last vanity. It forced him
to become That single individual he always wrote
about because he had no one left. The ridicule
of the crowd baptized him in isolation. But at
what cost and for what gain? If you cannot communicate
your truth because you are wrapped in layers
of irony and pseudonyms and the only result is
that you are mocked in the streets, have you
actually served the truth? Or have you just served
your own ego? You claim he became the single
individual, but he also became a man who died
young, exhausted, and largely misunderstood.
The service was to the idea that faith is not
a group activity. As we wrap up, I want to reassert
that Kierkegaard remains the ultimate champion
of the individual against the leveling of the
modern age. I mean, think about today. We live
in an era of data, statistics, algorithms, consensus.
We are more crowd now than ever before. Kierkegaard
reminds us that while reason can build machines
and politics can build states, Only subjectivity
can build a self. He wanted his epitaph to read
that single individual. He succeeded in becoming
that, and he challenges us to do the same. I
will concede that he diagnoses the malaise of
the present age correctly. We're the lost in
the crowd. We're leveling everything down to
the lowest common denominator. But his cure,
this total uncompromising subjectivity, is too
dangerous. Faith cannot exist entirely in a vacuum
without the ethical or the community to ground
it. You ask if we should be the single individual,
but I question if one can truly live as a knight
of faith without losing touch with humanity.
We are social animals. To deny that is to deny
our nature. And that is the paradox we leave
you with. Kierkegaard forces a choice that cannot
be mediated. You must decide if you are a spectator
in the crowd, safe in the consensus. or participant
in your own existence, risking everything on
a leap. Is the crowd around you the truth, or
is truth something you must suffer to find alone?
Thank you for listening to The Debate. Goodbye.