WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.259 Imagine this for a second. You're walking through 00:00:02.259 --> 00:00:06.879 the the crooked winding streets of 19th century 00:00:06.879 --> 00:00:09.460 Copenhagen. It's the 1840s. So we're talking 00:00:09.460 --> 00:00:12.460 cobblestones, gray skies. Exactly. A very polite, 00:00:12.539 --> 00:00:15.339 very structured society. It's a city of rituals, 00:00:15.539 --> 00:00:18.800 of top hats, of, you know, everyone going to 00:00:18.800 --> 00:00:20.839 church on Sunday. Most people are walking right 00:00:20.839 --> 00:00:22.539 up against the walls of the buildings, trying 00:00:22.539 --> 00:00:24.739 to avoid the mud and the carriage wheels splashing 00:00:24.739 --> 00:00:27.199 everywhere. Right. But there's this one man. 00:00:27.719 --> 00:00:29.760 And he actually prefers the sidewalk. He's not 00:00:29.760 --> 00:00:32.240 just avoiding carriages. He's, well, he's looking 00:00:32.240 --> 00:00:33.939 for people to talk to. He wants an audience. 00:00:34.119 --> 00:00:36.500 He's almost hunting for conversation. He is. 00:00:36.719 --> 00:00:39.640 And he's a strange looking figure. He's slight, 00:00:39.759 --> 00:00:42.119 small in stature. You get the sense he's almost 00:00:42.119 --> 00:00:43.939 fragile. Looks like a strong gust of wind could 00:00:43.939 --> 00:00:46.820 just, you know, blow him right over. But the 00:00:46.820 --> 00:00:49.299 very first thing you'd notice before he even 00:00:49.299 --> 00:00:54.159 says a word is the hair. The famous strange coiffure. 00:00:54.179 --> 00:00:56.689 It's iconic. It really is. The historical records 00:00:56.689 --> 00:00:59.369 all mention it. It rises, they say, almost six 00:00:59.369 --> 00:01:01.369 inches above his forehead. It's this sort of 00:01:01.369 --> 00:01:04.109 tousled, wild crest of hair. It makes him look 00:01:04.109 --> 00:01:06.129 like he's perpetually electrified. Or just completely 00:01:06.129 --> 00:01:08.730 bewildered by the universe. Right. He's wearing 00:01:08.730 --> 00:01:11.450 a coat the color of red cabbage. And he stops 00:01:11.450 --> 00:01:13.250 everyone. I mean, not just the professors or 00:01:13.250 --> 00:01:15.290 the wealthy merchants he knows. He stops the 00:01:15.290 --> 00:01:17.670 maid servants, the laborers, the street sweepers. 00:01:17.689 --> 00:01:20.069 He wants to know what they're thinking about. 00:01:20.310 --> 00:01:23.450 It's such a powerful image. And you have to think, 00:01:23.510 --> 00:01:26.370 for the average person in Copenhagen, this guy 00:01:26.370 --> 00:01:31.129 was just a daily fixture, a harmless, eccentric 00:01:31.129 --> 00:01:34.849 oddball, you know, a local character. There goes 00:01:34.849 --> 00:01:38.189 Saren again. Exactly. But the people who really 00:01:38.189 --> 00:01:41.269 knew him, the ones who grew up with him or tried 00:01:41.269 --> 00:01:43.209 to debate him, they knew there was something 00:01:43.209 --> 00:01:46.489 much, much sharper underneath that polite sort 00:01:46.489 --> 00:01:49.349 of quirky exterior. In fact, when he was just 00:01:49.349 --> 00:01:51.709 a child, his own father gave him a nickname. 00:01:52.280 --> 00:01:54.239 And I think this nickname just sets the stage 00:01:54.239 --> 00:01:55.560 for everything we're going to talk about today. 00:01:55.659 --> 00:01:58.219 He called him The Fork. The Fork. That is such 00:01:58.219 --> 00:02:00.319 a strange thing to call your own kid. It's not 00:02:00.319 --> 00:02:02.780 exactly, you know, champ or buddy. It is, isn't 00:02:02.780 --> 00:02:06.260 it? But it was so accurate. He had this uncanny, 00:02:06.379 --> 00:02:09.520 really precocious ability to just spear people 00:02:09.520 --> 00:02:12.699 with satirical remarks. Wow. Even as a boy, he 00:02:12.699 --> 00:02:14.819 could pick apart an argument or, you know, a 00:02:14.819 --> 00:02:17.479 person's whole self -image with a single piercing 00:02:17.479 --> 00:02:20.180 sentence. He could just stick a fork in you and 00:02:20.180 --> 00:02:21.919 expose whatever truth you were trying to hide. 00:02:22.199 --> 00:02:25.000 And that tendency, that need to poke, to prod, 00:02:25.300 --> 00:02:29.139 to unsettlingly expose the things we'd all rather 00:02:29.139 --> 00:02:31.740 keep hidden, that really became the defining 00:02:31.740 --> 00:02:33.860 characteristic of his entire life's work. We 00:02:33.860 --> 00:02:36.340 are talking, of course, about Saren Kierkegaard. 00:02:36.580 --> 00:02:38.680 The man who is, for all intents and purposes, 00:02:38.840 --> 00:02:41.099 considered the father of existentialism. That's 00:02:41.099 --> 00:02:43.360 the label he gets, right. But the more I dig 00:02:43.360 --> 00:02:45.080 into the source material we've got for this deep 00:02:45.080 --> 00:02:47.719 dive, the more I realize that father of existentialism 00:02:47.719 --> 00:02:50.719 is just way too neat. It's too tidy. It sounds 00:02:50.719 --> 00:02:52.680 like a chapter title in a textbook. It does. 00:02:52.819 --> 00:02:55.259 And it completely misses the weirdness of the 00:02:55.259 --> 00:02:58.120 man, the sheer intensity of his life. I mean, 00:02:58.120 --> 00:03:00.319 this is a guy who wrote his most famous books 00:03:00.319 --> 00:03:03.360 under a dozen different fake names. He staged 00:03:03.360 --> 00:03:06.479 a public breakup with his fiancee that scandalized 00:03:06.479 --> 00:03:09.259 the entire city. And he ended his life engaged 00:03:09.259 --> 00:03:12.819 in a literal all -out war against the state church. 00:03:13.199 --> 00:03:16.479 He is a figure of just immense contradictions. 00:03:16.599 --> 00:03:18.419 And I think that's what makes him so endlessly 00:03:18.419 --> 00:03:21.180 fascinating to study. Totally. He was a man who, 00:03:21.219 --> 00:03:24.099 you know, deeply loved Socrates and the whole 00:03:24.099 --> 00:03:27.560 idea of irony, yet he absolutely despised the 00:03:27.560 --> 00:03:30.659 crowd and public opinion. He was a devout Christian 00:03:30.659 --> 00:03:33.539 who spent his final years attacking the very 00:03:33.539 --> 00:03:36.199 institution of the church. He championed the 00:03:36.199 --> 00:03:39.080 idea of the single individual, yet he felt he 00:03:39.080 --> 00:03:41.280 could never truly, deeply connect with another 00:03:41.280 --> 00:03:44.069 human being. So for our deep dive today, our 00:03:44.069 --> 00:03:46.009 mission is pretty specific. We're not just going 00:03:46.009 --> 00:03:47.889 to do a standard biography. You know, he was 00:03:47.889 --> 00:03:50.250 born here. He died there. We want to try and 00:03:50.250 --> 00:03:52.509 understand three core things that really jump 00:03:52.509 --> 00:03:54.710 out from this massive stack of documents. OK. 00:03:54.849 --> 00:03:56.789 First, we really need to parse this distinction 00:03:56.789 --> 00:03:59.490 he made between Christendom, which he saw as 00:03:59.490 --> 00:04:01.409 just the culture and Christianity, the actual 00:04:01.409 --> 00:04:04.590 difficult practice. The huge distinction. Crucial. 00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:07.719 Second, we have to tackle his most famous and 00:04:07.719 --> 00:04:11.500 maybe most misunderstood assertion that subjectivity 00:04:11.500 --> 00:04:14.439 is truth. Which, you know, today sounds like 00:04:14.439 --> 00:04:16.860 a postmodern slogan, but for him it meant something 00:04:16.860 --> 00:04:19.680 completely different. And finally, and I think 00:04:19.680 --> 00:04:21.420 this is maybe the most important part for anyone 00:04:21.420 --> 00:04:24.819 listening who has ever felt stressed out or overwhelmed, 00:04:25.180 --> 00:04:29.029 we have to look at anxiety. Kierkegaard is really 00:04:29.029 --> 00:04:32.329 the first major thinker in the West to treat 00:04:32.329 --> 00:04:35.670 anxiety not just as a, you know, a medical symptom 00:04:35.670 --> 00:04:38.769 to be cured, but as a fundamental unavoidable 00:04:38.769 --> 00:04:41.050 part of being human. Right. If you have ever 00:04:41.050 --> 00:04:43.089 felt that dizziness of just having too many choices, 00:04:43.189 --> 00:04:45.740 that feeling of possibility. That's a concept 00:04:45.740 --> 00:04:47.819 Kierkegaard was mapping out almost 200 years 00:04:47.819 --> 00:04:50.139 ago. It's incredible how modern he feels. It 00:04:50.139 --> 00:04:52.620 is. And the sources we have for this deep dive 00:04:52.620 --> 00:04:55.420 are, frankly, intimidating. We have the biographical 00:04:55.420 --> 00:04:58.339 accounts. We have his major published works like 00:04:58.339 --> 00:05:00.860 Either Or, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto 00:05:00.860 --> 00:05:02.879 Death. But maybe the most important source we 00:05:02.879 --> 00:05:05.500 have is his journals. All 7 ,000 pages of them. 00:05:05.560 --> 00:05:09.220 7 ,000 pages. That's where you see the man behind 00:05:09.220 --> 00:05:11.300 all the masks, all the pseudonyms. That's the 00:05:11.300 --> 00:05:13.550 raw material. So let's get into it. Let's unpack 00:05:13.550 --> 00:05:15.790 this guy. If we really want to understand the 00:05:15.790 --> 00:05:17.970 fork, we have to start with the environment that 00:05:17.970 --> 00:05:20.230 forged him. And that means we have to talk about 00:05:20.230 --> 00:05:24.029 his father. Yes. The story of Surin Kierkegaard 00:05:24.029 --> 00:05:27.129 really begins in the shadow of his father, Michael 00:05:27.129 --> 00:05:29.529 Peterson Kierkegaard. Michael Peterson. So tell 00:05:29.529 --> 00:05:31.930 us about him. What was he like? Well, to understand 00:05:31.930 --> 00:05:34.470 Surin, you really have to understand the enormous 00:05:34.470 --> 00:05:38.129 shadow Michael cast over his life. Michael was 00:05:38.129 --> 00:05:42.009 a... A well -to -do wool merchant. He was originally 00:05:42.009 --> 00:05:44.829 from Jutland, which is the harsh, windswept peninsula 00:05:44.829 --> 00:05:48.449 of Denmark. A tough place. Very tough. And by 00:05:48.449 --> 00:05:50.089 the time Sirin was born, Michael was already 00:05:50.089 --> 00:05:53.149 quite old. 56, I believe. He was a stern man. 00:05:53.680 --> 00:05:56.839 The sources describe him as dry, prosaic, always 00:05:56.839 --> 00:05:59.759 wearing this rustic cloak. But, and this is key, 00:05:59.939 --> 00:06:02.040 beneath that sort of boring merchant exterior, 00:06:02.360 --> 00:06:05.079 they say he had a concealed active imagination. 00:06:05.500 --> 00:06:07.259 And when we say active imagination, we're not 00:06:07.259 --> 00:06:09.399 talking about him writing fairy tales for the 00:06:09.399 --> 00:06:12.060 kids. No, not at all. We mean he was brooding. 00:06:13.290 --> 00:06:15.529 deeply profoundly melancholic there was this 00:06:15.529 --> 00:06:18.889 dark cloud that just hung over the entire Kierkegaard 00:06:18.889 --> 00:06:20.970 household it was a wealthy home you know they 00:06:20.970 --> 00:06:23.649 hosted intellectuals and bishops for dinner but 00:06:23.649 --> 00:06:26.490 there was this pervading inescapable sense of 00:06:26.490 --> 00:06:29.810 guilt Michael was deeply religious but it wasn't 00:06:29.810 --> 00:06:32.629 a joyful hallelujah kind of religion not a happy 00:06:32.629 --> 00:06:35.089 clappy thing not in the slightest it was a heavy 00:06:35.089 --> 00:06:38.180 fearful almost Old Testament kind of religion. 00:06:38.459 --> 00:06:41.240 He was intellectually devoted to the rationalism 00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:44.040 of Christian Wolf, which is very logical and 00:06:44.040 --> 00:06:46.540 systematic. But emotionally, he was absolutely 00:06:46.540 --> 00:06:48.620 convinced that he had earned God's wrath. And 00:06:48.620 --> 00:06:50.740 this is where we get into this concept that Surin 00:06:50.740 --> 00:06:53.139 later calls the Great Earthquake. Right. This 00:06:53.139 --> 00:06:55.459 is a term Surin uses in his journals much later 00:06:55.459 --> 00:06:58.819 in life, looking back. And for a long time, scholars 00:06:58.819 --> 00:07:01.220 have tried to pinpoint exactly what this Great 00:07:01.220 --> 00:07:04.439 Earthquake was. It seemed to refer to a specific 00:07:04.439 --> 00:07:11.399 moment, a revelation Okay. There's a draft of 00:07:11.399 --> 00:07:14.180 a story in his papers where he describes a father 00:07:14.180 --> 00:07:16.959 who has this terrible belief that none of his 00:07:16.959 --> 00:07:19.519 children will outlive him. He believes this is 00:07:19.519 --> 00:07:21.560 a divine punishment hanging over his family. 00:07:21.839 --> 00:07:25.019 A divine punishment for what? I mean, what could 00:07:25.019 --> 00:07:27.000 a wool merchant have possibly done that was so 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:28.759 terrible he thought God was going to kill all 00:07:28.759 --> 00:07:31.079 seven of his children? That is the big question. 00:07:31.470 --> 00:07:33.490 It's the subject of a lot of speculation, but 00:07:33.490 --> 00:07:35.990 it's derived from hints in the journals and some, 00:07:36.050 --> 00:07:38.829 you know, historical gossip of the time. There 00:07:38.829 --> 00:07:40.870 are two leading theories. OK, what's the first 00:07:40.870 --> 00:07:44.529 one? The first is that as a young, impoverished 00:07:44.529 --> 00:07:47.569 shepherd boy on the heath in Jutland, suffering 00:07:47.569 --> 00:07:50.410 from the biting cold and hunger, Michael had 00:07:50.410 --> 00:07:53.670 stood on a hill and in a moment of despair, he 00:07:53.670 --> 00:07:56.050 had cursed God. He cursed God. He cursed the 00:07:56.050 --> 00:07:58.250 heavens for his misery. And the terrible twist 00:07:58.250 --> 00:08:01.319 is that even though he became rich later. remarkably 00:08:01.319 --> 00:08:04.079 rich, he never shook the feeling that the wealth 00:08:04.079 --> 00:08:05.839 wasn't a blessing. He thought it was a trap. 00:08:05.959 --> 00:08:08.040 He thought it was a setup. He believed he had 00:08:08.040 --> 00:08:10.819 committed the one unforgivable sin, the sin against 00:08:10.819 --> 00:08:13.300 the Holy Spirit, and that God was just, you know, 00:08:13.339 --> 00:08:15.839 fattening him up for the slaughter. Wow. That 00:08:15.839 --> 00:08:17.939 is some heavy psychological baggage to carry 00:08:17.939 --> 00:08:19.720 around. What's the second theory? The second 00:08:19.720 --> 00:08:23.040 theory involves Surin's mother, Aime, and Surin's 00:08:23.040 --> 00:08:26.060 daughter, Lund. She was a... originally the family 00:08:26.060 --> 00:08:30.000 maid, Michael's first wife, died childless. And 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:32.100 he married Ayn remarkably quickly after that. 00:08:32.460 --> 00:08:36.159 So the speculation is that he had either impregnated 00:08:36.159 --> 00:08:38.860 Ayn out of wedlock or maybe even forced himself 00:08:38.860 --> 00:08:42.000 on her. and that this moral failing, this sexual 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:44.720 sin, was the source of the divine curse on his 00:08:44.720 --> 00:08:46.820 family. It's so interesting you bring up the 00:08:46.820 --> 00:08:50.299 mother, Ayn, because in all of Surin's thousands 00:08:50.299 --> 00:08:52.340 and thousands of pages of writing, I mean, 7 00:08:52.340 --> 00:08:54.919 ,000 pages of journals, all those books, she's 00:08:54.919 --> 00:08:57.779 basically a ghost, isn't she? She's conspicuously 00:08:57.779 --> 00:09:00.399 absent. It is one of the strangest silences in 00:09:00.399 --> 00:09:03.480 all of literary history. He never mentions her 00:09:03.480 --> 00:09:06.360 in his published works, not once. That's incredible. 00:09:06.700 --> 00:09:08.860 It is. We know from other family accounts... 00:09:09.039 --> 00:09:10.659 specifically from his niece, Henriette Lund, 00:09:10.720 --> 00:09:13.200 that Anne was a nice, unassuming woman. She was 00:09:13.200 --> 00:09:15.779 uneducated, very quiet, and she wielded her influence 00:09:15.779 --> 00:09:20.179 by cosseting the children. Henriette said she 00:09:20.179 --> 00:09:22.179 protected Surin and his brother Peter like a 00:09:22.179 --> 00:09:24.919 hen her chicks. So she was a nurturing presence, 00:09:24.940 --> 00:09:27.279 but intellectually, she just didn't exist for 00:09:27.279 --> 00:09:30.019 him. Seemingly not. She just... Wasn't part of 00:09:30.019 --> 00:09:32.700 his intellectual world. The father dominated 00:09:32.700 --> 00:09:35.620 that mental landscape completely. And here's 00:09:35.620 --> 00:09:37.820 the really chilling thing about that great earthquake 00:09:37.820 --> 00:09:40.720 prophecy. The idea that the father would outlive 00:09:40.720 --> 00:09:42.720 all the children. It seemed to be coming true. 00:09:42.919 --> 00:09:45.340 It was coming true. There were seven children 00:09:45.340 --> 00:09:48.159 in the Kierkegaard family. Five of them died 00:09:48.159 --> 00:09:51.000 before their father did. Five out of seven. That's 00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:53.860 just horrifying to even imagine. It is. So you 00:09:53.860 --> 00:09:56.529 can imagine being young Sören. Growing up in 00:09:56.529 --> 00:09:58.169 this house where your father is walking around, 00:09:58.269 --> 00:10:01.830 convinced that he is, in essence, killing his 00:10:01.830 --> 00:10:04.690 own children with his sin. Every time a sibling 00:10:04.690 --> 00:10:07.110 died, it wasn't just a personal tragedy, it was 00:10:07.110 --> 00:10:10.590 a confirmation of the curse. It was proof. Surin 00:10:10.590 --> 00:10:12.230 and his older brother Peter were the only two 00:10:12.230 --> 00:10:15.129 who survived past their father. And Surin later 00:10:15.129 --> 00:10:17.009 wrote that he felt he was never really young. 00:10:17.090 --> 00:10:18.789 He said he was an old man from the very beginning. 00:10:19.279 --> 00:10:21.919 born into a child's body, inheriting this heavy 00:10:21.919 --> 00:10:24.340 form of Christianity that was centered entirely 00:10:24.340 --> 00:10:27.159 on dread and guilt. It definitely primes you 00:10:27.159 --> 00:10:29.580 for a philosophy that's going to grapple with 00:10:29.580 --> 00:10:32.500 the darker sides of existence, doesn't it? He 00:10:32.500 --> 00:10:35.039 wasn't exactly set up to be a sunny optimist. 00:10:35.059 --> 00:10:37.320 No, not at all. But he didn't just sit in a dark 00:10:37.320 --> 00:10:39.200 room his whole life, right? He went to school. 00:10:39.200 --> 00:10:41.759 He was out in the world. He was. He attended 00:10:41.759 --> 00:10:44.799 the School of Civic Virtue. And true to his later 00:10:44.799 --> 00:10:46.840 form, he was a bit of a contradiction there as 00:10:46.840 --> 00:10:49.259 well. He was known for being very conservative, 00:10:49.460 --> 00:10:51.580 you know, respecting the king and the police. 00:10:51.960 --> 00:10:53.879 But at the same time, he's constantly getting 00:10:53.879 --> 00:10:56.120 into altercations with the other students. The 00:10:56.120 --> 00:10:58.639 fork was already at play. The fork came out to 00:10:58.639 --> 00:11:01.370 play. Exactly. He had that sharp tongue. He wore 00:11:01.370 --> 00:11:04.289 strange clothes. He wasn't so much bullied as 00:11:04.289 --> 00:11:06.389 he was the one doing the intellectual bullying. 00:11:06.570 --> 00:11:08.629 And then he goes off to the University of Copenhagen. 00:11:08.710 --> 00:11:11.309 And this seems to be where we see the first real 00:11:11.309 --> 00:11:14.289 signs of his rebellion against the standard way 00:11:14.289 --> 00:11:16.490 of thinking. You know, most people go to university 00:11:16.490 --> 00:11:19.149 to learn facts, to learn the truth as it's written 00:11:19.149 --> 00:11:21.389 down in books. CERN wasn't having any of it. 00:11:21.509 --> 00:11:25.190 No, he was deeply, deeply dissatisfied with the 00:11:25.190 --> 00:11:27.820 philosophical landscape of the time. which was 00:11:27.820 --> 00:11:30.120 just completely dominated by the German philosopher 00:11:30.120 --> 00:11:33.019 GWF Hegel. Right. Hegel. We hear about Hegel 00:11:33.019 --> 00:11:35.580 a lot in philosophy. But for the listener who, 00:11:35.639 --> 00:11:38.879 you know, hasn't dusted off their 19th century 00:11:38.879 --> 00:11:42.240 German idealism lately, why did Kierkegaard have 00:11:42.240 --> 00:11:45.409 such a problem with his ideas? Well, we don't 00:11:45.409 --> 00:11:47.750 need to get bogged down in the really dense mechanics 00:11:47.750 --> 00:11:50.250 of Hegelian dialectics, but the key thing to 00:11:50.250 --> 00:11:52.429 understand is this concept of the system. System. 00:11:52.649 --> 00:11:54.970 Hegel was all about the big picture, the grand 00:11:54.970 --> 00:11:57.809 sweep of history. He saw all of human history 00:11:57.809 --> 00:12:00.049 as this massive, logical, rational progression 00:12:00.049 --> 00:12:03.049 of what he called the world spirit. And in Hegel's 00:12:03.049 --> 00:12:05.409 system, the individual human being is just a 00:12:05.409 --> 00:12:08.409 tiny, tiny cog in this giant historical machine. 00:12:08.860 --> 00:12:10.960 And CERN did not want to be a cog. He absolutely 00:12:10.960 --> 00:12:13.720 did not want to be a cog. He felt that this abstract, 00:12:13.899 --> 00:12:16.440 all -encompassing system completely ignored the 00:12:16.440 --> 00:12:18.600 actual lived experience of being a human being. 00:12:18.740 --> 00:12:21.539 It had no room for anxiety, for choice, for passion, 00:12:21.620 --> 00:12:24.299 for suffering, or for the terror of death. It 00:12:24.299 --> 00:12:26.600 was a philosophy for spectators, not for actors. 00:12:26.860 --> 00:12:29.340 And this frustration leads him to write one of 00:12:29.340 --> 00:12:31.700 the most famous entries in his early journals. 00:12:31.860 --> 00:12:34.360 He's only 22 at the time, but it's like a mission 00:12:34.360 --> 00:12:36.639 statement for his entire life. It really is. 00:12:37.129 --> 00:12:39.450 Do you have it there? I do. He writes, what I 00:12:39.450 --> 00:12:41.789 really need to do is to get clear about what 00:12:41.789 --> 00:12:45.309 am I to do, not what I must know. The crucial 00:12:45.309 --> 00:12:48.610 thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, 00:12:48.750 --> 00:12:51.610 to find the idea for which I am willing to live 00:12:51.610 --> 00:12:55.009 and die. A truth which is truth for me. That 00:12:55.009 --> 00:12:57.570 is the seed of everything that comes after. That's 00:12:57.570 --> 00:12:59.730 the birth of existentialism right there in that 00:12:59.730 --> 00:13:01.929 sentence. It really is. He's drawing this sharp 00:13:01.929 --> 00:13:04.950 line between objective truth and subjective truth. 00:13:05.070 --> 00:13:06.750 It's not about arguing whether the earth goes 00:13:06.750 --> 00:13:08.990 around the sun. That's an objective truth. It's 00:13:08.990 --> 00:13:11.529 a fact. But you can't live and die for that fact. 00:13:11.610 --> 00:13:13.649 It doesn't keep you warm at night. He's asking 00:13:13.649 --> 00:13:15.750 a different question. He's asking, what am I 00:13:15.750 --> 00:13:18.250 going to do with my one and only life? Precisely. 00:13:18.620 --> 00:13:20.919 He had this profound realization that you can 00:13:20.919 --> 00:13:23.559 be a walking encyclopedia, you can know everything 00:13:23.559 --> 00:13:25.159 there is to know about the wound objectively, 00:13:25.460 --> 00:13:28.860 and still be completely, utterly lost on how 00:13:28.860 --> 00:13:31.000 to actually live your own life. You can know 00:13:31.000 --> 00:13:34.019 everything and understand nothing. He wanted 00:13:34.019 --> 00:13:36.980 a life of what he called human validity, not 00:13:36.980 --> 00:13:39.940 just abstract intellectual speculation. So we 00:13:39.940 --> 00:13:42.639 have this brilliant, prickly, melancholic young 00:13:42.639 --> 00:13:45.379 man wandering the streets of Copenhagen, obsessed 00:13:45.379 --> 00:13:48.429 with finding his purpose, and then... Something 00:13:48.429 --> 00:13:51.129 happens that changes the entire trajectory of 00:13:51.129 --> 00:13:54.730 his life. He meets a girl. Regine Olsen. This 00:13:54.730 --> 00:13:57.289 is segment two in our breakdown, and honestly, 00:13:57.450 --> 00:13:59.409 you can't overstate the importance of this. This 00:13:59.409 --> 00:14:02.549 is the emotional core of his entire life story. 00:14:02.970 --> 00:14:05.230 I mean, if you think modern dating is complicated 00:14:05.230 --> 00:14:07.190 with the ghosting and the breadcrumbing and all 00:14:07.190 --> 00:14:09.289 of that, wait until you hear about Surin and 00:14:09.289 --> 00:14:12.049 Regine. It is the defining event of his life. 00:14:12.639 --> 00:14:15.639 He met her in May of 1837. She was very young, 00:14:15.740 --> 00:14:17.840 barely 15 at the time, and he was just instantly 00:14:17.840 --> 00:14:20.080 smitten. He falls for her heart. Completely. 00:14:20.120 --> 00:14:22.759 He courted her for a long time, three years. 00:14:23.080 --> 00:14:24.820 He would go to her family's house. They would 00:14:24.820 --> 00:14:26.720 play music together, read books. It was all very 00:14:26.720 --> 00:14:29.679 proper. And finally, in September of 1840, he 00:14:29.679 --> 00:14:32.759 proposed, and she accepted. So on the surface, 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:34.840 everything looks great. He's finished his degree. 00:14:35.039 --> 00:14:37.500 He's got the girl. He's all set up for a respectable 00:14:37.500 --> 00:14:40.419 life as a pastor or maybe a professor. He's checked 00:14:40.419 --> 00:14:43.940 all the right boxes. And then he completely panicked. 00:14:44.019 --> 00:14:45.960 Is this the great earthquake mentality kicking 00:14:45.960 --> 00:14:49.720 back in? The family curse? It's the melancholy. 00:14:50.039 --> 00:14:52.159 He became convinced that he was fundamentally 00:14:52.159 --> 00:14:54.940 unsuitable for marriage. He believed that his 00:14:54.940 --> 00:14:57.419 internal darkness, his heavy spirit that he got 00:14:57.419 --> 00:15:00.139 from his father, would just crush her. He famously 00:15:00.139 --> 00:15:02.399 wrote in his journal that he was an eternity 00:15:02.399 --> 00:15:05.899 too old for her. Wow. He saw her as pure sunshine, 00:15:06.039 --> 00:15:08.720 and he saw himself as a storm cloud. So less 00:15:08.720 --> 00:15:11.019 than a year after they got engaged, in August 00:15:11.019 --> 00:15:13.740 of 1841, he breaks it off. But the way he does 00:15:13.740 --> 00:15:16.779 it is so Kierkegaardian. He doesn't just sit 00:15:16.779 --> 00:15:18.840 her down and have a mature, honest conversation. 00:15:19.059 --> 00:15:22.120 He does it in this very specific, almost theatrical 00:15:22.120 --> 00:15:25.299 and you could say cruel way. He sends the engagement 00:15:25.299 --> 00:15:28.500 ring back to her with a letter. But it's so much 00:15:28.500 --> 00:15:30.679 more complex than just getting cold feet. He 00:15:30.679 --> 00:15:32.559 writes obsessively about this in his journals. 00:15:32.679 --> 00:15:34.840 He felt that he had to make her hate him. He 00:15:34.840 --> 00:15:38.759 wanted her to hate him. Why? Yes. His reasoning 00:15:38.759 --> 00:15:40.960 was that if she thought he was a good guy who 00:15:40.960 --> 00:15:43.419 just had some issues, she would pine for him 00:15:43.419 --> 00:15:45.759 forever. She would be the tragic victim of a 00:15:45.759 --> 00:15:49.340 sad story. But if she thought he was a complete 00:15:49.340 --> 00:15:52.120 scoundrel, a jerk who had never really loved 00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:55.039 her, then she would be angry. And anger is easier 00:15:55.039 --> 00:15:57.559 to move on from than heartbreak. Anger empowers 00:15:57.559 --> 00:15:59.919 you. It gives you the strength to move on. So 00:15:59.919 --> 00:16:02.600 he deliberately played the villain to try and 00:16:02.600 --> 00:16:05.220 save her from a lifetime of sadness. He took 00:16:05.220 --> 00:16:07.779 on the role of the scoundrel. He did. He wanted 00:16:07.779 --> 00:16:09.659 her to believe he had just been trifling with 00:16:09.659 --> 00:16:12.480 her feelings, that he was this callous esthete 00:16:12.480 --> 00:16:15.279 who got bored and moved on. He started treating 00:16:15.279 --> 00:16:17.759 her coldly in public. It was a performance. He 00:16:17.759 --> 00:16:20.120 called it a benevolent cruelty. That's exactly 00:16:20.120 --> 00:16:22.899 how he saw it. And this is so crucial. All the 00:16:22.899 --> 00:16:25.120 sources, especially his own journals, tell us 00:16:25.120 --> 00:16:27.240 he was absolutely deeply in love with her. He 00:16:27.240 --> 00:16:29.440 never loved anyone else. He kept a picture of 00:16:29.440 --> 00:16:32.000 her in his desk until the day he died. This wasn't 00:16:32.000 --> 00:16:34.840 a lack of affection. It was a self -imposed sacrificial 00:16:34.840 --> 00:16:37.419 exile. And the fallout from this breakup didn't 00:16:37.419 --> 00:16:40.100 just result in a couple of broken hearts. It 00:16:40.100 --> 00:16:42.840 resulted in one of the most explosive, productive 00:16:42.840 --> 00:16:45.399 bursts of writing in the history of philosophy. 00:16:46.500 --> 00:16:49.799 Regine became his muse. She did. It's almost 00:16:49.799 --> 00:16:52.899 as if everything he wrote in the few years right 00:16:52.899 --> 00:16:55.139 after the breakup was a kind of coded message 00:16:55.139 --> 00:16:58.059 directly to her. He was writing books for the 00:16:58.059 --> 00:17:00.620 entire world, but they were written to this one 00:17:00.620 --> 00:17:02.639 person. Let's talk about some of those messages. 00:17:02.779 --> 00:17:05.960 Take his book Repetition, which came out in 1843. 00:17:06.180 --> 00:17:09.359 Right. It's a very strange little book. It features 00:17:09.359 --> 00:17:11.900 a main character called a young man who is suffering 00:17:11.900 --> 00:17:15.440 from this intense anxiety because he has to sacrifice 00:17:15.440 --> 00:17:19.250 his love for a girl. to God. It's barely disguised 00:17:19.250 --> 00:17:21.329 autobiography. It's not disguised at all. He's 00:17:21.329 --> 00:17:23.529 trying to explain to her through fiction why 00:17:23.529 --> 00:17:25.930 he did what he did. He wants her to understand 00:17:25.930 --> 00:17:27.950 that he didn't leave her because he didn't love 00:17:27.950 --> 00:17:30.150 her, but because he felt he couldn't be the kind 00:17:30.150 --> 00:17:32.490 of person she needed him to be. And then there's 00:17:32.490 --> 00:17:34.549 Fear and Trembling, which is probably his most 00:17:34.549 --> 00:17:37.250 famous work. On the surface, it's a commentary 00:17:37.250 --> 00:17:40.190 on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. You 00:17:40.190 --> 00:17:42.410 know, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac 00:17:42.410 --> 00:17:44.750 up on a mountain and sacrifice him. And Abraham, 00:17:44.890 --> 00:17:48.519 terrifyingly, He travels up the mountain. He 00:17:48.519 --> 00:17:50.799 builds the altar. He raises the knife. Right. 00:17:50.859 --> 00:17:53.019 So most people read that as a purely theological 00:17:53.019 --> 00:17:55.779 commentary on the nature of faith. And it is 00:17:55.779 --> 00:17:59.880 that. But for Kierkegaard, he's Abraham and Rigin 00:17:59.880 --> 00:18:03.359 is Isaac. Yes. He is sacrificing his most beloved 00:18:03.359 --> 00:18:07.039 regime because God told him to. Is that how he 00:18:07.039 --> 00:18:09.279 saw it? In a sense, yes. He seemed to believe 00:18:09.279 --> 00:18:12.140 that his specific calling as a writer and a religious 00:18:12.140 --> 00:18:14.799 thinker required him to be utterly alone. He 00:18:14.799 --> 00:18:17.240 couldn't be a husband and also be the single 00:18:17.240 --> 00:18:19.759 individual he felt he was meant to be. So in 00:18:19.759 --> 00:18:21.859 Fear and Trembling, he coins this incredibly 00:18:21.859 --> 00:18:24.859 dense but important phrase, the teleological 00:18:24.859 --> 00:18:27.500 suspension of the ethical. OK, that is a mouthful. 00:18:27.519 --> 00:18:29.279 We have to break that down. Teleological suspension 00:18:29.279 --> 00:18:31.599 of the ethical. It sounds super complicated, 00:18:31.799 --> 00:18:35.059 but the idea is fascinating. The ethical. for 00:18:35.059 --> 00:18:37.740 Kierkegaard, refers to the universal rules of 00:18:37.740 --> 00:18:40.140 right and wrong that apply to everyone in society. 00:18:40.480 --> 00:18:42.680 Like do not kill your son. Do not kill your son 00:18:42.680 --> 00:18:45.500 is a great example. Or keep your promises. Or 00:18:45.500 --> 00:18:48.180 marry the girl you got engaged to. That is the 00:18:48.180 --> 00:18:50.440 ethical life. It's rational. It makes sense. 00:18:50.440 --> 00:18:52.180 It's how society functions. Right. Those are 00:18:52.180 --> 00:18:54.819 the rules we all agree to live by. But Kierkegaard 00:18:54.819 --> 00:18:57.119 argues there is a higher plane of existence, 00:18:57.500 --> 00:19:01.210 the religious, and sometimes the telos. which 00:19:01.210 --> 00:19:04.109 is the end goal or purpose which for him is god 00:19:04.109 --> 00:19:08.049 requires you to suspend those ethical rules abraham 00:19:08.049 --> 00:19:10.430 has to ignore the universal rule do not kill 00:19:10.430 --> 00:19:13.289 in order to obey his personal command from god 00:19:13.289 --> 00:19:15.630 and kierkegaard felt he had to ignore the ethical 00:19:15.630 --> 00:19:18.450 rule marry your fiance in order to fulfill what 00:19:18.450 --> 00:19:20.990 he saw as his higher religious destiny that's 00:19:20.990 --> 00:19:23.599 the parallel he's drawing He sees himself as 00:19:23.599 --> 00:19:25.819 attempting to be a knight of faith, making this 00:19:25.819 --> 00:19:29.380 terrible, incomprehensible sacrifice for a higher 00:19:29.380 --> 00:19:31.900 purpose that no one else can understand. Or at 00:19:31.900 --> 00:19:34.460 least he's desperately trying to understand if 00:19:34.460 --> 00:19:36.680 he is one. It's important to remember he writes 00:19:36.680 --> 00:19:39.420 fear and trembling under a pseudonym, Johannes 00:19:39.420 --> 00:19:42.339 de Cilentio. Johannes Silence. Exactly. He's 00:19:42.339 --> 00:19:44.240 looking at Abraham from the outside and saying. 00:19:44.960 --> 00:19:47.940 i don't understand this man he is amazing but 00:19:47.940 --> 00:19:51.240 he is also terrifying because to the outside 00:19:51.240 --> 00:19:54.160 world abraham just looks like a would -be murderer 00:19:54.160 --> 00:19:57.220 and to the outside world in copenhagen kierkegaard 00:19:57.220 --> 00:19:59.400 just looks like a colossal jerk who dumped his 00:19:59.400 --> 00:20:02.579 fiance but internally they might be making this 00:20:02.579 --> 00:20:05.720 private, absurd movement of faith. It's a genuinely 00:20:05.720 --> 00:20:07.839 terrifying thought when you stop and think about 00:20:07.839 --> 00:20:10.019 it, because how do you ever really know? How 00:20:10.019 --> 00:20:11.880 can you be sure if you're a knight of faith or 00:20:11.880 --> 00:20:14.559 if you're just a delusional person making a terrible 00:20:14.559 --> 00:20:17.420 mistake? That is the risk. And Kierkegaard says 00:20:17.420 --> 00:20:19.380 there is no objective validation. There's no 00:20:19.380 --> 00:20:21.700 external proof. You can't show your work to anyone. 00:20:21.779 --> 00:20:25.079 You are, as he says, out over 70 ,000 fathoms 00:20:25.079 --> 00:20:26.759 of water. You have to take the responsibility 00:20:26.759 --> 00:20:29.500 entirely upon yourself. This brings us to the 00:20:29.500 --> 00:20:31.700 whole way he wrote these books. You mentioned 00:20:31.700 --> 00:20:34.640 a pseudonym, Johannes de Silencio. He didn't 00:20:34.640 --> 00:20:37.099 just use one. He used this whole cast of characters. 00:20:37.380 --> 00:20:40.319 Victor A. Amida, Judge William, Johannes Climacus, 00:20:40.380 --> 00:20:43.000 Anticlamicus. Why not just put his own name, 00:20:43.140 --> 00:20:45.920 Saren Kierkegaard, on the cover? This is what 00:20:45.920 --> 00:20:48.339 he called his strategy of indirect communication. 00:20:49.059 --> 00:20:51.759 It kinks right back to his hatred for Hegel's 00:20:51.759 --> 00:20:55.259 system and for any kind of easy answer. If he 00:20:55.259 --> 00:20:57.339 just wrote a book that said, here's the truth 00:20:57.339 --> 00:21:00.710 about life. Step one, step two, step three. He 00:21:00.710 --> 00:21:02.410 knew what would happen. People would just memorize 00:21:02.410 --> 00:21:04.250 it. They'd memorize it and think they possessed 00:21:04.250 --> 00:21:06.769 the truth. It would be like a textbook or, you 00:21:06.769 --> 00:21:10.170 know, a modern self -help book. Five easy steps 00:21:10.170 --> 00:21:12.230 to becoming a knight of faith. Right. And he 00:21:12.230 --> 00:21:14.650 absolutely hated that. He didn't want to be an 00:21:14.650 --> 00:21:16.829 authority figure handing down doctrine. He wanted 00:21:16.829 --> 00:21:18.490 to force the reader to choose for themselves. 00:21:18.970 --> 00:21:20.869 So he created these characters. And they don't 00:21:20.869 --> 00:21:22.650 just have different names. They have completely 00:21:22.650 --> 00:21:24.569 different personalities, different writing styles. 00:21:24.789 --> 00:21:27.230 And they argue with each other across the books. 00:21:27.690 --> 00:21:30.349 It's like he created a literary puppet show where 00:21:30.349 --> 00:21:32.109 all the puppets are debating the meaning of life 00:21:32.109 --> 00:21:34.289 and he's just the puppet master hiding in the 00:21:34.289 --> 00:21:36.630 background pulling the strings. That is a perfect 00:21:36.630 --> 00:21:39.890 analogy and the best example of this is his first 00:21:39.890 --> 00:21:43.650 major work, his magnum opus, Either Or, published 00:21:43.650 --> 00:21:46.930 in 1843. The title alone tells you so much. It's 00:21:46.930 --> 00:21:50.250 not both and, it's either or. A choice. Exactly. 00:21:50.609 --> 00:21:52.930 The book is presented as a collection of papers 00:21:52.930 --> 00:21:54.849 that were supposedly found in a secret drawer 00:21:54.849 --> 00:21:57.910 of a writing desk by an editor named Victor Aramita. 00:21:58.069 --> 00:22:00.269 Okay. The first half of the book is written by 00:22:00.269 --> 00:22:02.809 A, who is known as the Esthete. These papers 00:22:02.809 --> 00:22:04.950 are all over the place. They're disorganized, 00:22:04.990 --> 00:22:08.150 witty, cynical. They contain essays on Mozart's 00:22:08.150 --> 00:22:11.670 opera Don Giovanni, an analysis of tragedy, and 00:22:11.670 --> 00:22:14.950 most famously, the seducer's diary. So A is focused 00:22:14.950 --> 00:22:18.190 on avoiding boredom at all costs. He treats life 00:22:18.190 --> 00:22:20.390 as a work of art to be enjoyed. Correct. This 00:22:20.390 --> 00:22:22.309 is what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic stage 00:22:22.309 --> 00:22:24.230 of existence. It's about living for the moment, 00:22:24.329 --> 00:22:27.230 chasing interesting experiences, and above all, 00:22:27.289 --> 00:22:29.990 keeping your options open. The fear of commitment 00:22:29.990 --> 00:22:33.029 is central. To commit is to be boring. For A, 00:22:33.289 --> 00:22:35.930 yes. If you get married, you're trapped. If you 00:22:35.930 --> 00:22:38.369 take a permanent job, you're just a cog. So he 00:22:38.369 --> 00:22:41.049 just floats through life, savoring experiences, 00:22:41.450 --> 00:22:44.039 but never investing himself in anything. That 00:22:44.039 --> 00:22:46.180 sounds remarkably like a lot of people today. 00:22:46.259 --> 00:22:48.680 You know, the fear of missing out, constantly 00:22:48.680 --> 00:22:51.099 swiping, keeping all your options open so you 00:22:51.099 --> 00:22:53.480 never have to choose. It's incredibly modern. 00:22:53.920 --> 00:22:56.700 The aesthetic life is the life of the spectator. 00:22:57.160 --> 00:22:59.259 But then the second half of the book is written 00:22:59.259 --> 00:23:02.680 by B, a man known only as Judge William. He is 00:23:02.680 --> 00:23:04.720 the ethicist. And his papers are the opposite 00:23:04.720 --> 00:23:08.000 of A's. Completely. They're very organized, sober, 00:23:08.240 --> 00:23:11.259 maybe even a little bit boring to read. He writes 00:23:11.259 --> 00:23:14.180 these long formal letters to A. arguing that 00:23:14.180 --> 00:23:16.980 the ascetic life is a dead end. He says it ultimately 00:23:16.980 --> 00:23:19.140 leads to despair because it's meaningless. And 00:23:19.140 --> 00:23:21.460 he defends things like marriage. He champions 00:23:21.460 --> 00:23:25.000 marriage. He defends duty. He argues that true 00:23:25.000 --> 00:23:27.220 freedom isn't found in having infinite options, 00:23:27.400 --> 00:23:29.980 but in choosing to commit to something, in having 00:23:29.980 --> 00:23:32.759 a history, in taking on responsibility. So you 00:23:32.759 --> 00:23:35.279 have the fun, flightiest Theodore on one side 00:23:35.279 --> 00:23:38.140 and the boring, responsible judge on the other. 00:23:38.640 --> 00:23:41.670 And how does the book end? Does Kierkegaard or 00:23:41.670 --> 00:23:44.529 Victor Eremita tell us who wins the argument? 00:23:45.250 --> 00:23:48.130 It doesn't really conclude in that way. It doesn't 00:23:48.130 --> 00:23:50.349 end with a chapter that says, and the moral of 00:23:50.349 --> 00:23:53.710 the story is, the judge is right. It simply presents 00:23:53.710 --> 00:23:56.069 you with the two options, either the aesthetic 00:23:56.069 --> 00:23:59.150 life or the ethical life, and it leaves you, 00:23:59.210 --> 00:24:01.430 the reader, to make the choice. It pushes all 00:24:01.430 --> 00:24:04.210 the responsibility back onto you. That is brilliant. 00:24:04.369 --> 00:24:06.789 But it's also incredibly risky because a lot 00:24:06.789 --> 00:24:08.730 of people probably read that first half and thought, 00:24:08.829 --> 00:24:11.210 hey, this seducer's diary stuff sounds pretty 00:24:11.210 --> 00:24:13.390 great. And that's exactly what happened. Yeah. 00:24:13.430 --> 00:24:15.750 The book was a bestseller in Copenhagen, mostly 00:24:15.750 --> 00:24:18.230 because people loved the scandalous first half. 00:24:18.369 --> 00:24:21.269 They skipped the boring judge part. But Kierkegaard 00:24:21.269 --> 00:24:23.730 was playing the long game. He wanted to show 00:24:23.730 --> 00:24:25.849 you the appeal of the aesthetic life and then 00:24:25.849 --> 00:24:28.529 show you that ultimately it leads to a fractured, 00:24:28.529 --> 00:24:31.099 desperate self. Amidst all these pseudonyms and 00:24:31.099 --> 00:24:33.720 stages of life, there's one concept that he writes 00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:35.900 about that we really need to dive into because 00:24:35.900 --> 00:24:38.660 it's one of his most powerful and enduring contributions. 00:24:39.579 --> 00:24:42.880 And that's his idea of anxiety, or as he called 00:24:42.880 --> 00:24:46.019 it, angst. Yes, this comes from the book The 00:24:46.019 --> 00:24:49.380 Concept of Anxiety, which was written by, let 00:24:49.380 --> 00:24:51.400 me check my notes here, Vigilius Hofniensis. 00:24:51.700 --> 00:24:54.920 Which translates to The Watchman of Copenhagen, 00:24:54.980 --> 00:24:58.539 a great pseudonym. It is. So how does the watchman 00:24:58.539 --> 00:25:00.720 define anxiety? Because, you know, today we think 00:25:00.720 --> 00:25:02.740 of it as a disorder. It's something to be medicated. 00:25:02.839 --> 00:25:04.920 We try to get rid of it. Kierkegaard saw it very 00:25:04.920 --> 00:25:07.140 differently. Very differently. For him, anxiety 00:25:07.140 --> 00:25:09.539 is not the same as fear. This is the crucial 00:25:09.539 --> 00:25:11.200 distinction he makes right at the beginning. 00:25:11.460 --> 00:25:14.380 Fear is definite. You are afraid of a spider. 00:25:14.579 --> 00:25:18.059 You are afraid of a tall cliff. Fear has an object. 00:25:18.359 --> 00:25:21.799 Right. It's concrete. Exactly. Anxiety, however. 00:25:22.380 --> 00:25:24.920 Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. The dizziness 00:25:24.920 --> 00:25:28.079 of freedom. I just love that phrase. Unpack that 00:25:28.079 --> 00:25:30.519 for us. It's the experience of standing on the 00:25:30.519 --> 00:25:33.460 edge of that tall cliff. You fear falling. Yes, 00:25:33.539 --> 00:25:36.480 that's natural. That's fear. But you also experience 00:25:36.480 --> 00:25:38.880 this terrifying. dizzying realization that you 00:25:38.880 --> 00:25:41.000 could jump. There's nothing physically stopping 00:25:41.000 --> 00:25:43.940 you. You have the freedom to throw yourself off. 00:25:44.059 --> 00:25:47.720 That feeling at internal trembling, at the awareness 00:25:47.720 --> 00:25:50.180 that you are free to choose that anything is 00:25:50.180 --> 00:25:53.500 possible, even self -destruction, that is anxiety. 00:25:53.799 --> 00:25:56.539 So anxiety isn't about something bad that might 00:25:56.539 --> 00:25:58.240 happen to you from the outside. It's about the 00:25:58.240 --> 00:26:01.220 confrontation with your own possibility. Precisely. 00:26:01.220 --> 00:26:04.519 He calls anxiety the psychological steed of possibility. 00:26:05.319 --> 00:26:08.240 He says it precedes sin. Think of Adam and Eve 00:26:08.240 --> 00:26:10.099 in the garden. They didn't sin because they were 00:26:10.099 --> 00:26:12.119 inherently bad. They sinned because they were 00:26:12.119 --> 00:26:14.859 free. God says, don't eat from that tree. And 00:26:14.859 --> 00:26:17.180 in that moment, the possibility of disobedience 00:26:17.180 --> 00:26:19.900 opens up. Anxiety is that vibration you feel 00:26:19.900 --> 00:26:22.119 right before you make a choice. It's deeply uncomfortable, 00:26:22.380 --> 00:26:24.599 but it's also the proof that you are a spiritual 00:26:24.599 --> 00:26:27.480 being with free will. If you were just an animal 00:26:27.480 --> 00:26:30.000 guided only by instinct, you wouldn't feel anxiety. 00:26:30.339 --> 00:26:33.710 You wouldn't. A rock doesn't feel anxiety. A 00:26:33.710 --> 00:26:35.950 lion doesn't feel anxiety about whether it's 00:26:35.950 --> 00:26:39.150 living an authentic life. Only a being who is 00:26:39.150 --> 00:26:41.910 a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the 00:26:41.910 --> 00:26:45.349 temporal and the eternal, a human being can experience 00:26:45.349 --> 00:26:47.329 it. So that reframes it completely. If I'm feeling 00:26:47.329 --> 00:26:50.150 anxious about a big life choice, like taking 00:26:50.150 --> 00:26:52.549 a new job or getting married or moving to a new 00:26:52.549 --> 00:26:55.569 city, Kierkegaard would say that's actually a 00:26:55.569 --> 00:26:57.849 good sign. He would say it's a necessary sign. 00:26:58.009 --> 00:27:01.680 It means you are awake to your own freedom. You 00:27:01.680 --> 00:27:03.819 are facing your responsibility to create yourself. 00:27:04.420 --> 00:27:07.440 He calls anxiety the possibility of possibility. 00:27:07.599 --> 00:27:10.140 In his view, if you don't have any anxiety, you 00:27:10.140 --> 00:27:11.819 aren't really human yet. You're sleepwalking 00:27:11.819 --> 00:27:14.160 through life. You're what he would call a spiritless 00:27:14.160 --> 00:27:16.339 bourgeois. A spiritless bourgeois. He really 00:27:16.339 --> 00:27:18.140 did have a way with insults. He was the master. 00:27:18.599 --> 00:27:20.599 OK, that is a lot to digest. We've got the estate, 00:27:20.799 --> 00:27:23.660 the ethicist, the anxiety of freedom. But we 00:27:23.660 --> 00:27:26.359 haven't really touched on the absolute core of 00:27:26.359 --> 00:27:28.799 his religious thought yet. And that's the idea 00:27:28.799 --> 00:27:31.420 that subjectivity is truth. This is segment four 00:27:31.420 --> 00:27:34.559 for us. This is the heavy lifting. This is the 00:27:34.559 --> 00:27:37.480 central thesis of his massive work, concluding 00:27:37.480 --> 00:27:39.680 unscientific postscript to the philosophical 00:27:39.680 --> 00:27:42.319 friedmans. And the key phrase, the one that gets 00:27:42.319 --> 00:27:45.539 quoted all the time, is subjectivity is truth. 00:27:46.089 --> 00:27:48.650 Now, we have to be really, really careful here, 00:27:48.730 --> 00:27:51.710 because in our world in 2026, when someone says 00:27:51.710 --> 00:27:54.349 subjectivity is truth, it sounds like they're 00:27:54.349 --> 00:27:56.930 saying my truth is my truth. Your truth is your 00:27:56.930 --> 00:27:59.890 truth. And objective facts don't matter. Right. 00:27:59.990 --> 00:28:02.109 It sounds like pure relativism. Yeah. And that 00:28:02.109 --> 00:28:04.329 is absolutely not what he meant. Kierkegaard 00:28:04.329 --> 00:28:06.950 was a realist. He knew a table was a table. He 00:28:06.950 --> 00:28:08.710 wasn't talking about scientific or historical 00:28:08.710 --> 00:28:11.509 facts. He was talking about existential and religious 00:28:11.509 --> 00:28:13.869 truth. So what's the difference? What does that 00:28:13.869 --> 00:28:16.109 look like in practice? This really fun example 00:28:16.109 --> 00:28:18.289 about praying. It's a fantastic thought experiment. 00:28:18.589 --> 00:28:20.849 Imagine one man who lives in a strict Christian 00:28:20.849 --> 00:28:23.069 country. He goes to church. He prays to the one 00:28:23.069 --> 00:28:25.630 true God, the Christian God. But he does it with 00:28:25.630 --> 00:28:27.630 a false spirit. He's just going through the motions. 00:28:27.789 --> 00:28:29.890 He's bored. He's thinking about his lunch. He 00:28:29.890 --> 00:28:32.829 has the correct what, the right object of worship, 00:28:33.049 --> 00:28:37.750 but the wrong how. He has no passion. Okay, I 00:28:37.750 --> 00:28:39.309 can picture that guy. He's just bored in the 00:28:39.309 --> 00:28:42.029 pew. Now imagine another man who lives in a pagan 00:28:42.029 --> 00:29:08.769 culture. He kneels down in a temple. Whoa. That 00:29:08.769 --> 00:29:10.509 is seriously controversial. So he's saying the 00:29:10.509 --> 00:29:12.250 passion and commitment of the believer matters 00:29:12.250 --> 00:29:14.490 more than the objective correctness of their 00:29:14.490 --> 00:29:16.930 doctrine. When it comes to being a human being 00:29:16.930 --> 00:29:20.089 relating to the divine, yes. Because for Kierkegaard, 00:29:20.170 --> 00:29:22.630 religious truth is about a relationship. It's 00:29:22.630 --> 00:29:24.509 not about owning a fact like you own a pencil. 00:29:24.710 --> 00:29:26.630 It's about how you relate to what you believe. 00:29:26.869 --> 00:29:29.609 And this is why he said the crowd is untrue. 00:29:29.750 --> 00:29:32.369 The crowd is untrue. Because truth only happens 00:29:32.369 --> 00:29:34.630 to the single individual in their inwardness, 00:29:34.670 --> 00:29:37.279 in their passion. If you are just following the 00:29:37.279 --> 00:29:39.160 crowd, just repeating the creed because everyone 00:29:39.160 --> 00:29:41.660 else in your society does, you aren't actually 00:29:41.660 --> 00:29:43.940 relating to the truth at all. You're just a parrot. 00:29:44.119 --> 00:29:46.799 This leads us directly to the famous leap of 00:29:46.799 --> 00:29:49.430 faith. Now, you mentioned earlier in our prep 00:29:49.430 --> 00:29:51.930 for this that the specific phrase leap of faith 00:29:51.930 --> 00:29:55.589 isn't actually in his original Danish text. That's 00:29:55.589 --> 00:29:58.170 right. It's a common misconception. The Danish 00:29:58.170 --> 00:30:00.549 text links the words for faith and leap constantly. 00:30:00.730 --> 00:30:03.990 But the specific idiom leap of faith is more 00:30:03.990 --> 00:30:06.690 of an English translation convention. But the 00:30:06.690 --> 00:30:10.099 concept behind it is 100 percent. Kierkegaard. 00:30:10.259 --> 00:30:12.700 So what is the leap? Is it just closing your 00:30:12.700 --> 00:30:14.980 eyes and believing in fairies because you want 00:30:14.980 --> 00:30:17.559 to? Is it irrational? It's not irrational. It's 00:30:17.559 --> 00:30:20.660 transrational. It's beyond reason. And Kierkegaard 00:30:20.660 --> 00:30:22.579 insists, and this is the hard part for a lot 00:30:22.579 --> 00:30:25.579 of people, that true faith requires doubt. So 00:30:25.579 --> 00:30:28.259 doubt isn't the enemy of faith. It's the prerequisite 00:30:28.259 --> 00:30:31.380 for it. It's the absolute prerequisite. If you 00:30:31.380 --> 00:30:34.619 had objective scientific proof that God existed, 00:30:34.859 --> 00:30:37.539 like if God appeared in the sky and signed autographs. 00:30:38.059 --> 00:30:39.720 You wouldn't need faith. You would just have 00:30:39.720 --> 00:30:41.660 knowledge. You don't have faith that two plus 00:30:41.660 --> 00:30:44.799 two equals four. You just know it. Faith is only 00:30:44.799 --> 00:30:46.880 necessary where there is objective uncertainty. 00:30:47.380 --> 00:30:50.000 So faith is seeing the doubt, seeing that it 00:30:50.000 --> 00:30:52.059 might not be true, seeing that it looks absurd 00:30:52.059 --> 00:30:54.740 from a rational perspective and choosing to commit 00:30:54.740 --> 00:30:57.960 your life anyway. It's a risk. It is the ultimate 00:30:57.960 --> 00:31:00.109 risk. He talks about what he calls the. absolute 00:31:00.109 --> 00:31:03.509 paradox, the central claim of Christianity, that 00:31:03.509 --> 00:31:06.210 the eternal, infinite God entered into time as 00:31:06.210 --> 00:31:09.829 a finite human being, Jesus, is absurd. It offends 00:31:09.829 --> 00:31:12.069 reason. It doesn't make any logical and mathematical 00:31:12.069 --> 00:31:14.250 sense. You cannot reason your way to believing 00:31:14.250 --> 00:31:16.369 it. You have to make a lead across the chasm 00:31:16.369 --> 00:31:18.809 of doubt. And he has this ideal figure, this 00:31:18.809 --> 00:31:20.589 character he calls the Knight of Faith. Yes. 00:31:20.650 --> 00:31:22.470 And the most fascinating thing about the Knight 00:31:22.470 --> 00:31:24.710 of Faith is that he looks totally and completely 00:31:24.710 --> 00:31:27.369 normal. He's not a monk on a mountaintop. Not 00:31:27.369 --> 00:31:30.559 at all. Kierkegaard describes him not as some 00:31:30.559 --> 00:31:33.500 mystic floating on a cloud, but as a guy who 00:31:33.500 --> 00:31:36.599 looks like a tax collector or a clerk. He walks 00:31:36.599 --> 00:31:38.900 home from work. He genuinely enjoys his dinner. 00:31:38.960 --> 00:31:42.299 He loves his wife. He loves the world. But internally, 00:31:42.440 --> 00:31:44.819 at every single moment, he is making the absurd 00:31:44.819 --> 00:31:47.440 movement of faith. He has resigned everything 00:31:47.440 --> 00:31:50.059 in his life to God, and then, by virtue of the 00:31:50.059 --> 00:31:52.500 absurd, he has received it all back as a gift. 00:31:53.019 --> 00:31:55.380 So externally, he's just a regular guy, a tax 00:31:55.380 --> 00:31:58.160 collector. But internally, he's Abraham on the 00:31:58.160 --> 00:31:59.799 mountain. That is the perfect way to put it. 00:31:59.859 --> 00:32:02.140 He lives fully in the finite world, but he is 00:32:02.140 --> 00:32:05.059 grounded in the infinite. He is joyful because 00:32:05.059 --> 00:32:07.380 he has trusted the absurd. I want to pivot here 00:32:07.380 --> 00:32:09.519 because we've been very high -minded, very philosophical. 00:32:09.779 --> 00:32:11.640 We're talking about infinite leaps and absolute 00:32:11.640 --> 00:32:14.539 paradoxes. But Kierkegaard was a real person 00:32:14.539 --> 00:32:16.460 living in the real world, and that world wasn't 00:32:16.460 --> 00:32:18.599 always kind to him. We have to talk about the 00:32:18.599 --> 00:32:21.079 trousers. Ah, yes. The Corsair affair. This is 00:32:21.079 --> 00:32:23.140 segment five. This feels like the moment where 00:32:23.140 --> 00:32:25.720 the profound intellectual meets the 19th century 00:32:25.720 --> 00:32:29.160 equivalent of Internet trolls. That is a very, 00:32:29.220 --> 00:32:32.799 very apt comparison. So up until about 1845, 00:32:33.279 --> 00:32:36.900 Kierkegaard is this respected, if somewhat mysterious, 00:32:37.079 --> 00:32:40.220 author. He's a known figure. Then a literary 00:32:40.220 --> 00:32:43.140 figure named Peter Ludwig Muller wrote a critical 00:32:43.140 --> 00:32:45.579 article about Kierkegaard's book Stages on Life's 00:32:45.579 --> 00:32:48.740 Way. Now, Muller was trying to impress the literary 00:32:48.740 --> 00:32:51.400 elite. But he was also associated with a very 00:32:51.400 --> 00:32:54.200 popular satirical newspaper called the Corsair. 00:32:54.240 --> 00:32:57.599 And the Corsair was like the Gawker or the TMZ 00:32:57.599 --> 00:33:00.720 of its day in Copenhagen. Exactly. It was scandalous. 00:33:00.759 --> 00:33:03.200 It was satirical. It was read by absolutely everyone 00:33:03.200 --> 00:33:05.549 but respected by almost no one. It could be very, 00:33:05.589 --> 00:33:08.029 very nasty. And Kierkegaard, being the fork, 00:33:08.210 --> 00:33:10.569 couldn't resist writing a sarcastic response 00:33:10.569 --> 00:33:13.190 to Muller. And in it, he essentially dared the 00:33:13.190 --> 00:33:15.430 Corsair to come after him. He wrote a piece where 00:33:15.430 --> 00:33:17.210 he literally asked to be abused. He basically 00:33:17.210 --> 00:33:18.650 said, you make fun of all the important people, 00:33:18.730 --> 00:33:19.970 so why aren't you making fun of me? Am I not 00:33:19.970 --> 00:33:21.849 important enough? Oh, no, he fed the trolls. 00:33:22.190 --> 00:33:24.710 He invited the trolls into his house and served 00:33:24.710 --> 00:33:27.359 them dinner. The Corsair was more than happy 00:33:27.359 --> 00:33:30.579 to oblige. For months on end, they published 00:33:30.579 --> 00:33:34.400 these absolutely brutal caricatures of him. And 00:33:34.400 --> 00:33:36.680 they didn't attack his philosophy. They attacked 00:33:36.680 --> 00:33:38.519 his body. That's where the trousers come in. 00:33:38.599 --> 00:33:40.440 That's it. They drew him with one trouser leg 00:33:40.440 --> 00:33:42.359 that was shorter than the other. They made fun 00:33:42.359 --> 00:33:44.420 of his thin legs, his slightly hunched back, 00:33:44.559 --> 00:33:47.420 his weird hair. They turned him into a pathetic 00:33:47.420 --> 00:33:49.559 cartoon character. And this wasn't just, you 00:33:49.559 --> 00:33:51.279 know, a few jokes in the paper that he could 00:33:51.279 --> 00:33:54.259 ignore. This had real world consequences for 00:33:54.259 --> 00:33:56.660 him. It completely destroyed his ability to be 00:33:56.660 --> 00:33:59.619 that man on the street. Remember, his great joy 00:33:59.619 --> 00:34:02.140 in life was walking around Copenhagen and striking 00:34:02.140 --> 00:34:05.339 up conversations with common people. Now, when 00:34:05.339 --> 00:34:07.920 he walked down the street. Street urchins and 00:34:07.920 --> 00:34:10.159 students would point at his legs and laugh. They'd 00:34:10.159 --> 00:34:12.400 shout insults. They would mimic the cartoons. 00:34:12.760 --> 00:34:15.599 He became a public laughingstock. That must have 00:34:15.599 --> 00:34:18.559 been absolutely devastating for someone so sensitive 00:34:18.559 --> 00:34:21.719 and introspective. It was. He writes about it 00:34:21.719 --> 00:34:25.119 in his journals. He felt deeply persecuted. But 00:34:25.119 --> 00:34:28.679 in true Kierkegaard fashion, he didn't just wallow 00:34:28.679 --> 00:34:31.000 in it. He integrated it into his philosophy. 00:34:31.670 --> 00:34:34.250 This experience hardened his view against the 00:34:34.250 --> 00:34:37.070 crowd more than anything else. He began to see 00:34:37.070 --> 00:34:39.829 the press and public opinion as a form of tyranny. 00:34:39.869 --> 00:34:42.409 He called the press the most wretched, the most 00:34:42.409 --> 00:34:45.349 contemptible of all tyrannies. It really seems 00:34:45.349 --> 00:34:47.690 like this moment was a turning point. It pushed 00:34:47.690 --> 00:34:50.110 him away from being the subtle, indirect author 00:34:50.110 --> 00:34:52.230 hiding behind pseudonyms and towards something 00:34:52.230 --> 00:34:54.929 much more direct and combative. That's absolutely 00:34:54.929 --> 00:34:57.719 right. The Corsair affair was the catalyst. It 00:34:57.719 --> 00:34:59.599 convinced him that the world, the public sphere, 00:34:59.860 --> 00:35:02.639 was fundamentally hostile to truth. It proved 00:35:02.639 --> 00:35:04.820 to him on a personal level that the crowd is 00:35:04.820 --> 00:35:07.500 always wrong. And it set the stage perfectly 00:35:07.500 --> 00:35:10.599 for his final and most dramatic act. Yeah. The 00:35:10.599 --> 00:35:12.900 all -out attack on the church itself. This is 00:35:12.900 --> 00:35:15.360 segment six in our outline. And honestly, it's 00:35:15.360 --> 00:35:17.800 the most punk rock part of his entire life. He 00:35:17.800 --> 00:35:20.119 literally goes to war with the Danish state church. 00:35:20.400 --> 00:35:23.210 And to understand why. We have to go right back 00:35:23.210 --> 00:35:25.090 to that distinction he made between Christianity 00:35:25.090 --> 00:35:27.510 and Christendom. Kierkegaard looked around at 00:35:27.510 --> 00:35:30.489 Denmark and felt that being a Christian was just 00:35:30.489 --> 00:35:33.489 like being a citizen. You were born, the priest 00:35:33.489 --> 00:35:35.469 sprinkled some water on you at your baptism, 00:35:35.650 --> 00:35:37.869 you got a certificate, and boom, you were a Christian 00:35:37.869 --> 00:35:41.969 for life. It was easy. It was comfortable. It 00:35:41.969 --> 00:35:44.670 was a career path for pastors. It was a social 00:35:44.670 --> 00:35:47.210 club. And for Kierkegaard, true Christianity 00:35:47.210 --> 00:35:49.909 was supposed to be the opposite of easy and comfortable. 00:35:50.760 --> 00:35:53.699 He thought it was a lifelong task, a process 00:35:53.699 --> 00:35:55.780 of suffering and dying to your selfish nature 00:35:55.780 --> 00:35:58.920 in order to follow Christ. He believed the state 00:35:58.920 --> 00:36:01.340 church had turned God into a monstrous illusion. 00:36:01.699 --> 00:36:04.300 They had taken the Lion of Judah and turned him 00:36:04.300 --> 00:36:06.019 into a harmless house cat that you could pat 00:36:06.019 --> 00:36:08.340 on the head on Sundays. He called it playing 00:36:08.340 --> 00:36:11.039 Christian. So what was the final straw? What 00:36:11.039 --> 00:36:14.099 triggered the public explosion? A funeral. In 00:36:14.099 --> 00:36:17.130 1854, Bishop Minster died. Minster was the primate 00:36:17.130 --> 00:36:19.329 of the Church of Denmark, the most powerful religious 00:36:19.329 --> 00:36:21.829 figure in the country. He was also a close friend 00:36:21.829 --> 00:36:24.429 of Kierkegaard's late father. Kierkegaard had 00:36:24.429 --> 00:36:26.610 known him his whole life. So there was a personal 00:36:26.610 --> 00:36:29.869 connection. A deep one. But Minster was, for 00:36:29.869 --> 00:36:33.349 Kierkegaard, the absolute epitome of the comfortable, 00:36:33.489 --> 00:36:36.409 worldly cleric. He was rich. He was powerful. 00:36:36.630 --> 00:36:39.190 He was polished. He was a statesman. And then 00:36:39.190 --> 00:36:41.840 someone gave a eulogy that said, Kierkegaard 00:36:41.840 --> 00:36:44.460 off. Yes. Professor Martinson, who was slated 00:36:44.460 --> 00:36:47.360 to be Minster's successor, gave a glowing eulogy 00:36:47.360 --> 00:36:49.380 where he called Bishop Minster a truth witness. 00:36:49.880 --> 00:36:53.079 He put him in the same sacred chain as the apostles 00:36:53.079 --> 00:36:55.199 and the martyrs who were tortured and killed 00:36:55.199 --> 00:36:57.380 for their faith. And Kierkegaard just snapped. 00:36:57.539 --> 00:37:00.000 He completely snapped. He couldn't take the hypocrisy. 00:37:00.099 --> 00:37:02.000 He knew Minster. Minster was a good administrator. 00:37:02.570 --> 00:37:05.349 A nice man, maybe, but he lived in a palace. 00:37:05.469 --> 00:37:08.289 He died with the king. He was not a martyr. To 00:37:08.289 --> 00:37:11.309 call him a truth witness was, for Kierkegaard, 00:37:11.510 --> 00:37:14.210 a blasphemous lie. It was counterfeit currency 00:37:14.210 --> 00:37:16.929 that devalued the real sacrifices of the past. 00:37:17.030 --> 00:37:18.949 So he picks up his pen. He picks up his pen and 00:37:18.949 --> 00:37:20.769 goes on the warpath. He launches a series of 00:37:20.769 --> 00:37:22.750 attacks in a newspaper called The Fatherland. 00:37:23.130 --> 00:37:25.489 And then when that's not enough, he starts using 00:37:25.489 --> 00:37:27.869 the last of his family inheritance to self -publish 00:37:27.869 --> 00:37:30.769 these little pamphlets called The Moment. And 00:37:30.769 --> 00:37:32.820 what's he saying in them? The rhetoric is just 00:37:32.820 --> 00:37:36.119 scorching. He argues that the modern Parsons, 00:37:36.159 --> 00:37:38.739 the pastors, are just government officials protecting 00:37:38.739 --> 00:37:40.980 their jobs and their pensions. He calls them 00:37:40.980 --> 00:37:43.639 cannibals who are metaphorically eating off the 00:37:43.639 --> 00:37:46.440 sacrifices of Christ. It is brutal. He literally 00:37:46.440 --> 00:37:48.380 told people to stop going to church, didn't he? 00:37:48.460 --> 00:37:51.119 He did. He said that by participating in this 00:37:51.119 --> 00:37:53.519 comfortable Sunday theater, you are actively 00:37:53.519 --> 00:37:57.960 mocking God. He urged people to stay home. He 00:37:57.960 --> 00:38:00.159 said it is better to be an honest sinner drinking 00:38:00.159 --> 00:38:03.099 in a bar than a self deceived hypocrite sitting 00:38:03.099 --> 00:38:06.000 in a church. That is an incredibly bold move 00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:09.219 to make in Copenhagen in 1855. How did people 00:38:09.219 --> 00:38:11.739 react to that? It was a massive scandal. He was 00:38:11.739 --> 00:38:14.380 burning every bridge he had left. He was spending 00:38:14.380 --> 00:38:16.940 the last of his money funding these pamphlets. 00:38:17.059 --> 00:38:19.940 He was totally alone, writing with this frantic 00:38:19.940 --> 00:38:22.559 fury that suggests, I think, that he knew he 00:38:22.559 --> 00:38:24.599 didn't have much time left. He was literally 00:38:24.599 --> 00:38:27.139 spending his last penny to publish these attacks 00:38:27.139 --> 00:38:29.420 on the institution he was raised in. And as it 00:38:29.420 --> 00:38:31.380 turns out, he didn't have much time left. No. 00:38:31.460 --> 00:38:34.340 In October of 1855, right in the middle of this 00:38:34.340 --> 00:38:36.940 firestorm of controversy, he collapsed in the 00:38:36.940 --> 00:38:40.539 street. He was only 42. Just 42 years old. They 00:38:40.539 --> 00:38:42.900 took him to Frederick's Hospital. And even on 00:38:42.900 --> 00:38:45.860 his deathbed, he absolutely refused to compromise. 00:38:46.320 --> 00:38:49.280 A pastor, a friend from his childhood named Emil 00:38:49.280 --> 00:38:52.519 Bozen, came to visit him. And Bozen asked Surin 00:38:52.519 --> 00:38:55.079 if he wanted to receive communion. And Kierkegaard 00:38:55.079 --> 00:38:57.840 refused. He refused. Why? He said he could not 00:38:57.840 --> 00:39:00.860 accept the sacrament from a royal official. He 00:39:00.860 --> 00:39:03.039 saw the pastor not as a representative of Christ, 00:39:03.239 --> 00:39:06.420 but as an employee of the state. He told Bozen 00:39:06.420 --> 00:39:08.480 he would gladly take communion from a layman. 00:39:08.860 --> 00:39:11.519 a regular person, but not from an official pastor. 00:39:12.139 --> 00:39:15.219 The pastor refused, and so Kierkegaard died without 00:39:15.219 --> 00:39:17.780 receiving communion. Wow. That is commitment 00:39:17.780 --> 00:39:19.920 to your principles right to the very end. It's 00:39:19.920 --> 00:39:22.420 absolute consistency. He died exactly as he lived, 00:39:22.480 --> 00:39:24.380 as the single individual standing in opposition 00:39:24.380 --> 00:39:26.780 to the institution, to the system. And there's 00:39:26.780 --> 00:39:28.800 a crazy story about his funeral, too. It didn't 00:39:28.800 --> 00:39:31.619 end quietly. Oh, the funeral was a whole scene. 00:39:32.260 --> 00:39:34.980 Since he was such a famous, albeit notorious, 00:39:35.300 --> 00:39:37.699 figure, the church, of course, had to bury him. 00:39:38.260 --> 00:39:40.380 They held the service at the Church of Our Lady, 00:39:40.480 --> 00:39:42.699 the main cathedral, the very institution he had 00:39:42.699 --> 00:39:45.440 just been attacking. But at the cemetery, his 00:39:45.440 --> 00:39:48.179 nephew, Henrik Lund, interrupted the proceedings. 00:39:48.460 --> 00:39:51.139 What did he do? He stood up and launched a public 00:39:51.139 --> 00:39:53.860 protest. He shouted that his uncle had been a 00:39:53.860 --> 00:39:56.300 fierce opponent of the official church and that 00:39:56.300 --> 00:39:58.539 the church had no right to appropriate his body 00:39:58.539 --> 00:40:01.139 and bury him as if he were one of their own. 00:40:01.380 --> 00:40:04.559 It caused a huge disturbance. Henrik was actually 00:40:04.559 --> 00:40:06.820 fined by the authorities for it, but he made 00:40:06.820 --> 00:40:09.900 his point. Kierkegaard remained a thorn in their 00:40:09.900 --> 00:40:12.139 side even as they were lowering his coffin into 00:40:12.139 --> 00:40:15.300 the ground. So he dies at 42. He's widely mocked. 00:40:15.300 --> 00:40:17.239 He's seen as an enemy of the church. You would 00:40:17.239 --> 00:40:19.019 think that would be the end of the story. You 00:40:19.019 --> 00:40:20.940 know, he'd be a weird footnote in Danish history. 00:40:21.380 --> 00:40:23.420 But that's not what happened at all. Not even 00:40:23.420 --> 00:40:25.659 close. For a while, there was relative silence. 00:40:26.400 --> 00:40:30.039 But then, slowly, he was discovered. A famous 00:40:30.039 --> 00:40:32.860 Danish critic named Jorg Brandes helped bring 00:40:32.860 --> 00:40:35.349 him to light in the late 19th century. German 00:40:35.349 --> 00:40:37.730 translators picked up his work in the early 20th 00:40:37.730 --> 00:40:41.090 century. And then the explosion happened. Who 00:40:41.090 --> 00:40:43.630 did he end up influencing? It might be easier 00:40:43.630 --> 00:40:45.769 to ask who he didn't influence. It's hard to 00:40:45.769 --> 00:40:49.150 overstate his impact. In philosophy, Martin Heidegger 00:40:49.150 --> 00:40:51.650 or Jean -Paul Sartre built the entire modern 00:40:51.650 --> 00:40:54.150 movement of existentialism on the foundations 00:40:54.150 --> 00:40:56.349 Kierkegaard laid with his concepts of anxiety, 00:40:56.730 --> 00:40:59.480 freedom, and existence. Although, interestingly, 00:40:59.780 --> 00:41:01.960 Heidegger did his best to hide how much he stole 00:41:01.960 --> 00:41:04.599 from Kierkegaard. A classic academic move. Indeed. 00:41:05.059 --> 00:41:06.940 Sartre, of course, took all the freedom and the 00:41:06.940 --> 00:41:09.539 anxiety, but just dropped the God part. And Ludwig 00:41:09.539 --> 00:41:11.239 Wittgenstein, the great analytic philosopher, 00:41:11.539 --> 00:41:14.199 was in awe of him. He called Kierkegaard too 00:41:14.199 --> 00:41:16.199 deep for him and referred to him as a kind of 00:41:16.199 --> 00:41:18.159 saint. And it wasn't just philosophy. He had 00:41:18.159 --> 00:41:21.019 a huge impact on theology, too, right? Massive. 00:41:21.519 --> 00:41:24.519 The theologian Karl Barth used Kierkegaard's 00:41:24.519 --> 00:41:27.159 ideas to completely dismantle the comfortable 00:41:27.159 --> 00:41:30.760 liberal theology of the 19th century and kickstart 00:41:30.760 --> 00:41:33.429 the Neo -Orthodoxy movement. He brought back 00:41:33.429 --> 00:41:36.210 that radical Kierkegaardian idea of the infinite 00:41:36.210 --> 00:41:38.690 qualitative distinction between a transcendent 00:41:38.690 --> 00:41:41.530 God and a finite man. And psychology. Absolutely. 00:41:41.690 --> 00:41:44.489 He is widely considered the father of both Christian 00:41:44.489 --> 00:41:47.389 psychology and existential psychology. Thinkers 00:41:47.389 --> 00:41:49.650 like Rollo May and Ernest Becker, who wrote the 00:41:49.650 --> 00:41:51.670 Pulitzer Prize -winning book The Denial of Death, 00:41:51.849 --> 00:41:54.690 they all draw a straight line back to Kierkegaard's 00:41:54.690 --> 00:41:57.909 original analysis of anxiety, dread, and despair. 00:41:58.150 --> 00:42:00.599 It's just amazing. The fork. the guy who was 00:42:00.599 --> 00:42:02.699 mocked in the streets for his trousers, ended 00:42:02.699 --> 00:42:05.360 up fundamentally shaping the 20th century mind. 00:42:05.480 --> 00:42:07.820 It really validates his core belief in the power 00:42:07.820 --> 00:42:10.099 of the single individual. He didn't write for 00:42:10.099 --> 00:42:12.380 the crowd of his time. He explicitly wrote for 00:42:12.380 --> 00:42:15.440 that single individual whom I, with joy and gratitude, 00:42:15.679 --> 00:42:18.340 call my reader. He seemed to know that his time 00:42:18.340 --> 00:42:20.980 would eventually come. So let's try and synthesize 00:42:20.980 --> 00:42:24.000 all this. We've gone from the boy nicknamed The 00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:26.960 Fork. to the heartbroken lover sacrificing his 00:42:26.960 --> 00:42:30.260 fiance, to the literary puppet master with all 00:42:30.260 --> 00:42:34.199 his pseudonyms, and finally to the public agitator, 00:42:34.300 --> 00:42:37.420 the martyr fighting the church. It's just a wild 00:42:37.420 --> 00:42:40.139 and intense life. It is. And the through line, 00:42:40.179 --> 00:42:42.380 the consistent thread, is that tension we talked 00:42:42.380 --> 00:42:44.820 about right at the very beginning. It's the struggle 00:42:44.820 --> 00:42:47.559 of the individual to be real and authentic in 00:42:47.559 --> 00:42:49.860 a world that constantly pressures you to be fake. 00:42:50.099 --> 00:42:53.739 The struggle to find a truth which is truth for 00:42:53.739 --> 00:42:56.329 me. It all comes back to that question of subjectivity 00:42:56.329 --> 00:42:58.730 versus objectivity. It does. And here's where 00:42:58.730 --> 00:43:00.349 I think we should leave the listener with a final 00:43:00.349 --> 00:43:02.599 thought. Kierkegaard's great challenge to all 00:43:02.599 --> 00:43:05.440 of us is that we are all by nature prone to being 00:43:05.440 --> 00:43:07.980 spectators in our own lives. We love to watch. 00:43:08.079 --> 00:43:09.920 We love to analyze things from a safe distance. 00:43:10.139 --> 00:43:12.780 We love to read reviews of movies before we see 00:43:12.780 --> 00:43:15.000 them or, you know, listen to deep dives about 00:43:15.000 --> 00:43:16.599 philosophers instead of reading the philosophers 00:43:16.599 --> 00:43:19.460 themselves. Guilty as charged. We all are. It's 00:43:19.460 --> 00:43:22.079 human nature. But Kierkegaard's point is that 00:43:22.079 --> 00:43:25.300 looking for objective proof or certainty before 00:43:25.300 --> 00:43:27.679 you commit to anything meaningful in life is 00:43:27.679 --> 00:43:30.579 a trap. If you are sitting there waiting for 00:43:30.579 --> 00:43:33.579 the perfect undeniable evidence before you make 00:43:33.579 --> 00:43:35.920 your life's choices, whether that's about a marriage, 00:43:36.119 --> 00:43:39.179 a career, or a leap of faith, you are missing 00:43:39.179 --> 00:43:41.860 the entire point. You will wait forever. The 00:43:41.860 --> 00:43:44.019 evidence doesn't make the choice for you. You 00:43:44.019 --> 00:43:46.639 have to make the choice. You have to leap. So 00:43:46.639 --> 00:43:48.940 the provocative final thought for you listening 00:43:48.940 --> 00:43:52.659 right now is this. In your own life, when it 00:43:52.659 --> 00:43:55.750 comes to the things that matter most, Are you 00:43:55.750 --> 00:43:58.190 an active participant who is willing to make 00:43:58.190 --> 00:44:01.030 the leap into the uncertain? Or are you just 00:44:01.030 --> 00:44:03.449 a spectator standing on the sidewalk of life, 00:44:03.590 --> 00:44:05.909 waiting for a certainty that is never going to 00:44:05.909 --> 00:44:08.210 arrive? That is the question. And on that note, 00:44:08.250 --> 00:44:10.130 we're going to wrap up this deep dive into the 00:44:10.130 --> 00:44:12.389 life and mind of Soren Kierkegaard. It's been 00:44:12.389 --> 00:44:14.789 a pleasure unpacking the paradoxes. Until next 00:44:14.789 --> 00:44:18.090 time, keep diving deep. Welcome to The Debate. 00:44:18.380 --> 00:44:21.940 Today, we are walking down the cobblestone streets 00:44:21.940 --> 00:44:26.400 of 19th century Copenhagen to examine a man who 00:44:26.400 --> 00:44:30.000 describes himself as a spy in the service of 00:44:30.000 --> 00:44:33.579 God. We are talking, of course, about Soren Kierkegaard. 00:44:33.820 --> 00:44:37.000 You know, he is often hailed as the father of 00:44:37.000 --> 00:44:40.619 existentialism, but that title feels, well, a 00:44:40.619 --> 00:44:43.360 little too academic for a man who spent his life. 00:44:43.760 --> 00:44:46.380 trying to detonate a bomb underneath the comfortable 00:44:46.380 --> 00:44:49.659 armchairs of the establishment. The central conflict 00:44:49.659 --> 00:44:52.239 of his life wasn't just philosophical. It was 00:44:52.239 --> 00:44:55.000 a war between the single individual and the crowd. 00:44:55.239 --> 00:44:57.420 And it's a war that I think he ultimately lost, 00:44:57.539 --> 00:45:00.159 or at least a war where the collateral damage 00:45:00.159 --> 00:45:02.920 was, frankly, his own sanity. I mean, we are 00:45:02.920 --> 00:45:05.739 looking at a thinker who posited that subjectivity 00:45:05.739 --> 00:45:09.059 is truth. That sounds poetic, sure, but what 00:45:09.059 --> 00:45:11.280 it's effectively arguing is that the objective 00:45:11.280 --> 00:45:14.710 world... The world of consensus, community, science, 00:45:14.949 --> 00:45:19.030 reason is secondary to the passionate inner drama 00:45:19.030 --> 00:45:21.849 of the individual. Precisely. And so the question 00:45:21.849 --> 00:45:25.869 we are wrestling with today is, well, it's terrifyingly 00:45:25.869 --> 00:45:29.349 simple. Is truth something found through objective 00:45:29.349 --> 00:45:32.230 consensus, rational evidence, and participating 00:45:32.230 --> 00:45:35.909 in the institutions of society? Or is truth, 00:45:36.010 --> 00:45:39.889 as Kierkegaard insisted, exclusively a subjective, 00:45:40.250 --> 00:45:43.710 passionate, and often isolating leap that the 00:45:43.710 --> 00:45:47.469 individual must take alone. I'm here to argue 00:45:47.469 --> 00:45:51.050 for the necessity of that leap. I believe Kierkegaard 00:45:51.050 --> 00:45:54.309 correctly identified that the crowd is untruth 00:45:54.309 --> 00:45:57.389 and that genuine existence is only found in the 00:45:57.389 --> 00:46:00.110 infinite qualitative distinction between man 00:46:00.110 --> 00:46:03.159 and God. And I come at it from a completely different 00:46:03.159 --> 00:46:06.340 angle. I'm here to critique Kierkegaard's dismissal 00:46:06.340 --> 00:46:08.699 of rational evidence and community. I believe 00:46:08.699 --> 00:46:11.079 his extreme focus on the inner voice leads not 00:46:11.079 --> 00:46:14.820 only to social isolation and philosophical incoherence, 00:46:14.840 --> 00:46:17.659 but, as we'll get into, a dangerous suspension 00:46:17.659 --> 00:46:20.280 of ethics that really borders on fanaticism. 00:46:20.480 --> 00:46:22.960 All right, let's get into the position statements 00:46:22.960 --> 00:46:26.530 then. To understand why Kierkegaard was so radical, 00:46:26.690 --> 00:46:29.309 you have to understand what he was fighting against. 00:46:29.730 --> 00:46:32.630 I mean, he wasn't just being difficult for sport. 00:46:32.710 --> 00:46:35.769 He was trying to figure out how to become a Christian 00:46:35.769 --> 00:46:38.449 in a culture where everyone was already assumed 00:46:38.449 --> 00:46:41.730 to be a Christian. This was Christendom, the 00:46:41.730 --> 00:46:44.510 state church of Denmark. Which was a stable, 00:46:44.510 --> 00:46:46.750 functioning society, let's just keep in mind. 00:46:47.030 --> 00:46:50.900 Stable, perhaps, but spiritually dead. Kierkegaard 00:46:50.900 --> 00:46:55.219 saw a world where religion had become easy. It 00:46:55.219 --> 00:46:58.760 was rational, it was mediated by the state, and 00:46:58.760 --> 00:47:01.860 it was basically just good citizenship. He looked 00:47:01.860 --> 00:47:04.559 at the Hegelian philosophy dominating the universities, 00:47:04.900 --> 00:47:08.980 this attempt to quantify the spiritual and mediate 00:47:08.980 --> 00:47:11.699 everything through logic, and he just, he rejected 00:47:11.699 --> 00:47:15.400 it wholesale. He argued that speculation, you 00:47:15.400 --> 00:47:17.820 know, it helps us build bridges or understand 00:47:17.820 --> 00:47:21.269 history. but it cannot help a human being find 00:47:21.269 --> 00:47:24.530 salvation. He wrote in his journals that he wanted 00:47:24.530 --> 00:47:27.849 to find the idea for which I am willing to live 00:47:27.849 --> 00:47:31.530 and die. Not a fact, but an idea that demanded 00:47:31.530 --> 00:47:35.230 his life. And so he posited that the crowd is 00:47:35.230 --> 00:47:39.030 untruth because the crowd removes personal responsibility. 00:47:39.469 --> 00:47:42.619 If everyone is a Christian by default, then being 00:47:42.619 --> 00:47:45.900 a Christian means absolutely nothing. I see why 00:47:45.900 --> 00:47:49.219 you emphasize the cultural context, I do, but 00:47:49.219 --> 00:47:51.199 I have to look at the psychological context. 00:47:51.480 --> 00:47:53.800 I'm sorry, but I just don't buy that this was 00:47:53.800 --> 00:47:56.900 a purely philosophical stance derived from some 00:47:56.900 --> 00:48:00.400 neutral observation. Kierkegaard was a man deeply 00:48:00.400 --> 00:48:03.760 shaped, perhaps even warped by personal trauma. 00:48:04.409 --> 00:48:07.449 His father, Michael, was this stern, guilt -ridden 00:48:07.449 --> 00:48:09.710 man who believed his children were cursed to 00:48:09.710 --> 00:48:12.550 die young because he had once cursed God on a 00:48:12.550 --> 00:48:15.489 hilltop. I mean, this was not a healthy household. 00:48:15.869 --> 00:48:19.909 It was intense, certainly. It was damaging. Kierkegaard's 00:48:19.909 --> 00:48:22.449 own niece, Henriette Lund, she described him 00:48:22.449 --> 00:48:25.150 as a boy wearing a coat the color of red cabbage, 00:48:25.349 --> 00:48:28.800 whom his father called the Fork. Why? Because 00:48:28.800 --> 00:48:31.440 he had a tendency to make these sharp satirical 00:48:31.440 --> 00:48:34.159 remarks that pricked people. He was an outsider 00:48:34.159 --> 00:48:36.659 from childhood. So when he builds a philosophy 00:48:36.659 --> 00:48:39.599 that rejects mediation, that third term that 00:48:39.599 --> 00:48:42.000 connects individuals like community or shared 00:48:42.000 --> 00:48:44.920 logic, he isn't discovering some universal truth. 00:48:45.039 --> 00:48:47.800 He's rationalizing his own inability to fit in. 00:48:48.090 --> 00:48:50.289 He treats the church as merely a bureaucracy 00:48:50.289 --> 00:48:53.789 or herd mentality, but he fails to see that institutions 00:48:53.789 --> 00:48:56.530 provide the necessary structure for human flourishing. 00:48:56.670 --> 00:48:59.269 You cannot build a civilization or even a theology 00:48:59.269 --> 00:49:01.690 on the single individual. But can you build a 00:49:01.690 --> 00:49:05.429 self on a civilization? And that brings us to 00:49:05.429 --> 00:49:08.929 our first core area of debate, the crowd, the 00:49:08.929 --> 00:49:11.809 church, and this whole concept of Christendom. 00:49:11.989 --> 00:49:14.130 You mentioned structure, but Kierkegaard saw 00:49:14.130 --> 00:49:16.869 that structure as an illusion, a way to hide 00:49:16.869 --> 00:49:19.610 from God. In his later years, he went to war. 00:49:19.769 --> 00:49:22.530 He published the Attack Upon Christendom pamphlets, 00:49:22.590 --> 00:49:24.889 specifically a series called The Moment. And 00:49:24.889 --> 00:49:27.369 he was ruthless. He claimed pastors were merely 00:49:27.369 --> 00:49:30.250 political officials and even, uh, cannibals. 00:49:30.389 --> 00:49:33.150 Which was an incredibly uncharitable characterization 00:49:33.150 --> 00:49:35.789 of men who were often doing good charity work. 00:49:35.949 --> 00:49:39.369 But were they telling the truth? I mean, consider 00:49:39.369 --> 00:49:44.050 the specific spark for this fire. Bishop Meinster. 00:49:44.730 --> 00:49:48.449 Meinster was a family friend, a man Kierkegaard's 00:49:48.449 --> 00:49:52.489 father admired. Yet when Meinster died and was 00:49:52.489 --> 00:49:55.969 eulogized by Hans Lassen Martinsen as a truth 00:49:55.969 --> 00:50:00.130 witness, Kierkegaard just exploded. He argued 00:50:00.130 --> 00:50:03.130 that calling a man who lived comfortably, dined 00:50:03.130 --> 00:50:06.369 with royalty, demanded little of his flock and 00:50:06.369 --> 00:50:10.769 took no risks a truth witness was a lie. It was 00:50:10.769 --> 00:50:14.139 blasphemy. He argued that the state church made 00:50:14.139 --> 00:50:17.320 Christianity a fashionable tradition. You were 00:50:17.320 --> 00:50:20.340 a Christian by default. There was no anfik tongue, 00:50:20.559 --> 00:50:24.340 no spiritual trial, no dispute. It was safe. 00:50:24.539 --> 00:50:27.980 And for Kierkegaard, a safe Christianity is no 00:50:27.980 --> 00:50:30.420 Christianity at all. I'm just not convinced by 00:50:30.420 --> 00:50:32.380 that line of reasoning because it completely 00:50:32.380 --> 00:50:35.800 ignores the consequences of dismantling the institution. 00:50:36.139 --> 00:50:39.059 When Kierkegaard died, Exhausted by this very 00:50:39.059 --> 00:50:41.900 attack, I might add, the Danish National Church's 00:50:41.900 --> 00:50:44.420 obituary for him actually warned of the fatal 00:50:44.420 --> 00:50:46.940 fruits of his views. They noted that without 00:50:46.940 --> 00:50:49.800 ecclesiastical discipline, believers are in communion 00:50:49.800 --> 00:50:52.380 with unbelievers. You destroy the vessel, the 00:50:52.380 --> 00:50:54.920 water spills out. He wasn't trying to save the 00:50:54.920 --> 00:50:57.900 water. He was trying to find the source. But 00:50:57.900 --> 00:51:00.320 look at the irony. Even Kierkegaard couldn't 00:51:00.320 --> 00:51:03.030 fully escape the structures he loathed. Scholars 00:51:03.030 --> 00:51:05.070 have noted he showed, you know, marked elements 00:51:05.070 --> 00:51:07.269 of convergence with medieval Catholicism and 00:51:07.269 --> 00:51:09.630 he remained profoundly Lutheran in his categories. 00:51:10.010 --> 00:51:14.110 And his attack? Well, it led to the 1857 abolition 00:51:14.110 --> 00:51:17.309 of compulsory infant baptism. That was a reform, 00:51:17.530 --> 00:51:20.489 yes, but it strengthened the institution by clarifying 00:51:20.489 --> 00:51:23.090 membership. It didn't destroy the crowd, it just 00:51:23.090 --> 00:51:25.869 reorganized it. Kierkegaard's attack was a suicide 00:51:25.869 --> 00:51:28.510 mission that didn't actually offer a viable alternative 00:51:28.510 --> 00:51:31.699 to the political officials he despised. He offers 00:51:31.699 --> 00:51:34.539 a vacuum where the church used to be. I would 00:51:34.539 --> 00:51:37.400 frame it differently. He wasn't offering a vacuum. 00:51:37.519 --> 00:51:40.179 He was offering a space for the leap of faith. 00:51:40.500 --> 00:51:42.500 And this is where the rubber really meets the 00:51:42.500 --> 00:51:45.579 road. Or where the road ends and the cliff begins. 00:51:46.079 --> 00:51:49.280 Perhaps. But that cliff is where we find God. 00:51:49.940 --> 00:51:52.679 Let's talk about the leap. Now, we should be 00:51:52.679 --> 00:51:55.619 precise here. The source material clarifies that 00:51:55.619 --> 00:51:59.039 the exact phrase leap of faith isn't in the Danish 00:51:59.039 --> 00:52:02.079 text as a single idiom. But the concepts faith 00:52:02.079 --> 00:52:04.840 and leap are, well, they're inextricably linked 00:52:04.840 --> 00:52:08.139 in his work. Kierkegaard argues that faith requires 00:52:08.139 --> 00:52:11.320 doubt. This is the crucial point that rationalists 00:52:11.320 --> 00:52:14.460 miss. If I look at a pencil, I don't need faith 00:52:14.460 --> 00:52:16.920 to believe it's there. I have objective certainty. 00:52:17.239 --> 00:52:21.340 But God? God is an objective uncertainty. Which 00:52:21.340 --> 00:52:23.860 is exactly why building a life on it is problematic. 00:52:24.260 --> 00:52:27.159 If I cannot be certain, why should I commit my 00:52:27.159 --> 00:52:30.000 entire existence to it? Because that uncertainty 00:52:30.000 --> 00:52:33.400 is the only thing that allows for passion. If 00:52:33.400 --> 00:52:35.880 God were a math problem, loving him would be 00:52:35.880 --> 00:52:38.800 as meaningless as loving the number four. Because 00:52:38.800 --> 00:52:41.539 we cannot objectively prove God, we must grasp 00:52:41.539 --> 00:52:44.699 him through inwardness. Kierkegaard uses the 00:52:44.699 --> 00:52:46.719 example of the bleeding woman in the Gospels. 00:52:46.820 --> 00:52:50.219 She touched Jesus' robe. It was a secret, inner 00:52:50.219 --> 00:52:52.940 movement. She didn't ask for a doctrinal statement. 00:52:53.179 --> 00:52:56.699 She acted. That is the originality of faith. 00:52:57.039 --> 00:53:00.059 It is a passion, not a conclusion to a syllogism. 00:53:00.219 --> 00:53:02.639 I'm sorry. I just don't buy that we can divorce 00:53:02.639 --> 00:53:05.719 faith from rationality so completely. Kierkegaard 00:53:05.719 --> 00:53:08.760 talks about the offense. He demands we look at 00:53:08.760 --> 00:53:11.900 the incarnation, the God -man, and either believe 00:53:11.900 --> 00:53:15.360 it or be offended by it because it is an absurdity. 00:53:15.699 --> 00:53:18.800 He admits it. He says it is a paradox that the 00:53:18.800 --> 00:53:21.639 rational mind cannot process. That's the point. 00:53:21.719 --> 00:53:24.280 If it fit neatly into your brain, it wouldn't 00:53:24.280 --> 00:53:27.000 be God. But that is such a dangerous point. If 00:53:27.000 --> 00:53:29.260 you remove the middle ground of rational inquiry, 00:53:29.579 --> 00:53:31.699 what the source calls the difference between 00:53:31.699 --> 00:53:34.400 offense and doubt, you'll leave people vulnerable. 00:53:34.760 --> 00:53:37.219 I'm reminded of Jean -Paul Sartre's critique. 00:53:37.559 --> 00:53:40.099 If this inner voice cannot be demonstrated to 00:53:40.099 --> 00:53:42.400 another person, how do we distinguish it from 00:53:42.400 --> 00:53:45.420 madness? If I say God told me to do this, and 00:53:45.420 --> 00:53:48.159 you say prove it, and I just say, well, subjectivity 00:53:48.159 --> 00:53:50.659 is truth, we've left the realm of discourse entirely. 00:53:51.099 --> 00:53:53.900 We're just isolated atoms colliding. There is 00:53:53.900 --> 00:53:56.699 no way to verify if you're a saint or a sociopath. 00:53:57.000 --> 00:53:59.099 I see why you think that. But let me give you 00:53:59.099 --> 00:54:01.440 a different perspective on that isolation. It 00:54:01.440 --> 00:54:04.340 isn't madness. It's the ultimate responsibility. 00:54:04.900 --> 00:54:07.420 When you have no objective proof, you have to 00:54:07.420 --> 00:54:10.480 own your choice entirely. And this ties directly 00:54:10.480 --> 00:54:13.199 into our next point, which is, I admit, the most 00:54:13.199 --> 00:54:15.869 controversial part of his philosophy. the suspension 00:54:15.869 --> 00:54:18.329 of the ethical. You brought up sociopathy, and 00:54:18.329 --> 00:54:19.789 I'm sure you're thinking of fear and trembling 00:54:19.789 --> 00:54:22.929 in the story of Abraham. I am. And this is where 00:54:22.929 --> 00:54:25.210 Kierkegaard stops being just a quirky philosopher 00:54:25.210 --> 00:54:28.590 and becomes truly terrifying. Okay, so Kierkegaard 00:54:28.590 --> 00:54:30.929 uses the story of Abraham being commanded to 00:54:30.929 --> 00:54:34.150 sacrifice Isaac to illustrate the teleological 00:54:34.150 --> 00:54:37.610 suspension of the ethical. To the ethical world, 00:54:37.750 --> 00:54:40.969 the world of universal moral laws, Abraham is 00:54:40.969 --> 00:54:43.349 a murderer. He is a father about to kill his 00:54:43.349 --> 00:54:45.840 son. There's no justification he can offer the 00:54:45.840 --> 00:54:48.679 crowd. He can't explain it. If he speaks, he's 00:54:48.679 --> 00:54:50.920 crazy. Because what he is doing is ethically 00:54:50.920 --> 00:54:54.880 wrong. Ethically, yes. But religiously, he is 00:54:54.880 --> 00:54:57.679 a knight of faith. He enters into a relationship 00:54:57.679 --> 00:55:00.820 with the absolute, with God, that transcends 00:55:00.820 --> 00:55:03.900 the universal. Now we have to look at the biographical 00:55:03.900 --> 00:55:06.659 context here. Kierkegaard wasn't just writing 00:55:06.659 --> 00:55:09.780 about Genesis. He was writing about Regine Olsen. 00:55:10.019 --> 00:55:13.099 This fiancée. Yes. He broke off their engagement. 00:55:13.519 --> 00:55:15.679 He loved her, but he felt a higher religious 00:55:15.679 --> 00:55:18.320 calling to his writing. He felt he couldn't be 00:55:18.320 --> 00:55:21.280 a husband and a spy for God, so he sacrificed 00:55:21.280 --> 00:55:24.059 the ethical reality of marriage. He made himself 00:55:24.059 --> 00:55:26.340 look like a scoundrel to make it easier for her 00:55:26.340 --> 00:55:29.420 to let go. He became the knight of hidden inwardness, 00:55:29.579 --> 00:55:32.480 sacrificing his reputation and his love for a 00:55:32.480 --> 00:55:35.000 higher purpose. That is a very compelling narrative 00:55:35.000 --> 00:55:37.519 for him to tell himself to sleep at night, but 00:55:37.519 --> 00:55:40.679 apply it universally. Emmanuel Levinas offered 00:55:40.679 --> 00:55:43.869 a scathing critique of this. He argued that leaving 00:55:43.869 --> 00:55:46.469 the ethical stage for the religious is a form 00:55:46.469 --> 00:55:49.829 of violence. When you say, I am suspending the 00:55:49.829 --> 00:55:52.570 ethical, you are opening the door to amoralism. 00:55:53.230 --> 00:55:55.969 Levinas places ethics at the top of the pyramid. 00:55:56.610 --> 00:55:59.670 Kierkegaard places God there. Right, but if God 00:55:59.670 --> 00:56:03.309 commands you to kill, is he God? Levinas argues 00:56:03.309 --> 00:56:05.889 that we meet God in the face of the other, our 00:56:05.889 --> 00:56:08.889 neighbor. If Abraham ignores the ethical command 00:56:08.889 --> 00:56:12.039 thou shalt not kill for a private voice, What 00:56:12.039 --> 00:56:14.800 stops anyone from committing atrocities and claiming 00:56:14.800 --> 00:56:18.119 a teleological suspension? God told me to do 00:56:18.119 --> 00:56:20.619 it is the excuse of every fanatic in history. 00:56:21.460 --> 00:56:23.699 Kierkegaard seems to turn God into a projection 00:56:23.699 --> 00:56:26.659 of inner desire, a projection that overrides 00:56:26.659 --> 00:56:29.300 our duty to our fellow man. It's narcissistic. 00:56:29.440 --> 00:56:32.539 I'm not convinced by that line of reasoning because 00:56:32.539 --> 00:56:35.769 it misses the double movement of faith. Abraham 00:56:35.769 --> 00:56:39.090 didn't just resign himself to murder. He believed 00:56:39.090 --> 00:56:42.429 by virtue of the absurd that he would get Isaac 00:56:42.429 --> 00:56:46.130 back. That is the difference. The fanatic destroys. 00:56:46.670 --> 00:56:49.269 The knight of faith trusts in the impossible 00:56:49.269 --> 00:56:52.590 restoration. It wasn't just a resignation. It 00:56:52.590 --> 00:56:56.059 was a trust in the impossible. Trust in the impossible 00:56:56.059 --> 00:56:59.420 is indistinguishable from delusion to the victim 00:56:59.420 --> 00:57:02.539 of the sacrifice. I don't think Isaac cares about 00:57:02.539 --> 00:57:05.079 Abraham's double movement when the knife is raised. 00:57:05.460 --> 00:57:08.699 And that is why it must be done in fear and trembling. 00:57:08.860 --> 00:57:11.139 It isn't easy. It's the hardest thing a human 00:57:11.139 --> 00:57:13.800 can do. And because it's so hard to explain, 00:57:14.159 --> 00:57:16.559 Kierkegaard had to write in a very specific way. 00:57:16.760 --> 00:57:19.949 He didn't just write textbooks. He used indirect 00:57:19.949 --> 00:57:22.670 communication. He used pseudonyms. Which makes 00:57:22.670 --> 00:57:25.510 reading him a nightmare of contradictions. I 00:57:25.510 --> 00:57:28.250 think it's brilliant. He created characters. 00:57:28.690 --> 00:57:32.769 Victor Aramita, Johannes the Silentio, Anticlimacus. 00:57:32.989 --> 00:57:35.989 He wanted to trick the reader into the truth. 00:57:36.289 --> 00:57:39.429 If he wrote, here are the three steps to being 00:57:39.429 --> 00:57:41.809 a Christian, the reader would just memorize them 00:57:41.809 --> 00:57:44.630 and think they were finished. By using pseudonyms 00:57:44.630 --> 00:57:47.590 with conflicting viewpoints, the estate. the 00:57:47.590 --> 00:57:50.389 ethicist, the religious author, he forces the 00:57:50.389 --> 00:57:53.230 reader to stand in the middle and choose. He 00:57:53.230 --> 00:57:56.409 forces them to face either or. He refuses to 00:57:56.409 --> 00:57:59.309 be the authority, so you have to be. That sounds 00:57:59.309 --> 00:58:01.309 noble, but I come at it from a different way. 00:58:01.829 --> 00:58:05.030 Theodore Adorno critiqued this heavily. He argued 00:58:05.030 --> 00:58:07.250 that if you take the pseudonyms literally, or 00:58:07.250 --> 00:58:09.969 treat the authorship as a whole, you end up with 00:58:09.969 --> 00:58:12.909 confusions and contradictions. It makes Kierkegaard 00:58:12.909 --> 00:58:15.670 appear philosophically incoherent. And frankly, 00:58:15.909 --> 00:58:18.269 this strategy backfired on him in his own life. 00:58:18.489 --> 00:58:20.369 You can't talk about his indirect communication 00:58:20.369 --> 00:58:23.670 without talking about the Corsair affair. A pivotal 00:58:23.670 --> 00:58:26.369 moment, yes? Kierkegaard thought he could control 00:58:26.369 --> 00:58:29.219 the narrative. He publicly challenged the satirical 00:58:29.219 --> 00:58:32.079 paper The Corsair to attack him. He thought that 00:58:32.079 --> 00:58:34.380 by being attacked, he would be separated from 00:58:34.380 --> 00:58:37.119 the mediocre crowd, making him a martyr for the 00:58:37.119 --> 00:58:39.500 truth. He thought it would be a battle of wits. 00:58:39.659 --> 00:58:42.000 He underestimated the pettiness of the crowd. 00:58:42.260 --> 00:58:45.519 He did. They didn't engage his ideas. They mocked 00:58:45.519 --> 00:58:48.440 his trousers. They mocked his uneven gait. They 00:58:48.440 --> 00:58:50.460 drew cartoons of him looking like a hunchback. 00:58:50.679 --> 00:58:52.840 It didn't produce a noble single individual. 00:58:52.980 --> 00:58:55.690 It produced a victim of bullying. Children in 00:58:55.690 --> 00:58:57.630 Copenhagen would point at him and yell, look, 00:58:57.750 --> 00:59:00.750 a Kierkegaard. The indirect communication failed 00:59:00.750 --> 00:59:03.130 because the crowd didn't get the joke. They just 00:59:03.130 --> 00:59:06.070 laughed at the man. It caused him immense distress, 00:59:06.510 --> 00:59:10.309 yes. He was humiliated. But I would argue it 00:59:10.309 --> 00:59:14.030 proved his point. The crowd is untruth. They 00:59:14.030 --> 00:59:16.670 couldn't engage with the idea, so they attacked 00:59:16.670 --> 00:59:19.449 the appearance. It solidified his isolation. 00:59:19.710 --> 00:59:22.750 It stripped away his last vanity. It forced him 00:59:22.750 --> 00:59:25.619 to become That single individual he always wrote 00:59:25.619 --> 00:59:28.480 about because he had no one left. The ridicule 00:59:28.480 --> 00:59:31.440 of the crowd baptized him in isolation. But at 00:59:31.440 --> 00:59:34.400 what cost and for what gain? If you cannot communicate 00:59:34.400 --> 00:59:36.119 your truth because you are wrapped in layers 00:59:36.119 --> 00:59:39.000 of irony and pseudonyms and the only result is 00:59:39.000 --> 00:59:40.880 that you are mocked in the streets, have you 00:59:40.880 --> 00:59:43.159 actually served the truth? Or have you just served 00:59:43.159 --> 00:59:45.760 your own ego? You claim he became the single 00:59:45.760 --> 00:59:48.199 individual, but he also became a man who died 00:59:48.199 --> 00:59:50.400 young, exhausted, and largely misunderstood. 00:59:51.159 --> 00:59:53.659 The service was to the idea that faith is not 00:59:53.659 --> 00:59:57.380 a group activity. As we wrap up, I want to reassert 00:59:57.380 --> 00:59:59.599 that Kierkegaard remains the ultimate champion 00:59:59.599 --> 01:00:02.659 of the individual against the leveling of the 01:00:02.659 --> 01:00:05.840 modern age. I mean, think about today. We live 01:00:05.840 --> 01:00:09.179 in an era of data, statistics, algorithms, consensus. 01:00:09.719 --> 01:00:14.199 We are more crowd now than ever before. Kierkegaard 01:00:14.199 --> 01:00:16.460 reminds us that while reason can build machines 01:00:16.460 --> 01:00:20.760 and politics can build states, Only subjectivity 01:00:20.760 --> 01:00:24.400 can build a self. He wanted his epitaph to read 01:00:24.400 --> 01:00:28.300 that single individual. He succeeded in becoming 01:00:28.300 --> 01:00:31.099 that, and he challenges us to do the same. I 01:00:31.099 --> 01:00:33.980 will concede that he diagnoses the malaise of 01:00:33.980 --> 01:00:36.639 the present age correctly. We're the lost in 01:00:36.639 --> 01:00:39.139 the crowd. We're leveling everything down to 01:00:39.139 --> 01:00:41.639 the lowest common denominator. But his cure, 01:00:41.840 --> 01:00:45.400 this total uncompromising subjectivity, is too 01:00:45.400 --> 01:00:49.059 dangerous. Faith cannot exist entirely in a vacuum 01:00:49.059 --> 01:00:51.699 without the ethical or the community to ground 01:00:51.699 --> 01:00:54.619 it. You ask if we should be the single individual, 01:00:54.900 --> 01:00:57.579 but I question if one can truly live as a knight 01:00:57.579 --> 01:00:59.699 of faith without losing touch with humanity. 01:01:00.360 --> 01:01:03.519 We are social animals. To deny that is to deny 01:01:03.519 --> 01:01:06.079 our nature. And that is the paradox we leave 01:01:06.079 --> 01:01:09.300 you with. Kierkegaard forces a choice that cannot 01:01:09.300 --> 01:01:12.619 be mediated. You must decide if you are a spectator 01:01:12.619 --> 01:01:15.699 in the crowd, safe in the consensus. or participant 01:01:15.699 --> 01:01:18.719 in your own existence, risking everything on 01:01:18.719 --> 01:01:21.599 a leap. Is the crowd around you the truth, or 01:01:21.599 --> 01:01:23.820 is truth something you must suffer to find alone? 01:01:24.099 --> 01:01:27.139 Thank you for listening to The Debate. Goodbye.