The Godfather of Existentialism

8/3/2019 The Godfather of Existentialism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-godfather-of-existentialism 1/24

of 24

EXISTENTIALIST GODFATHER BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

The corpus of theologian Soren Kierkegaard, godfather of anti-systematic

existentialism, elevates the arrogant individual to self-righteous superhuman divinity,

giving disenchanted secular socialists and spiritual communists further cause to



of 24

eschew existentialism and to embrace alternatives such as personalism, a less well

known yet influential response to the horrors of world wars.

Since existentialism is ideally anti-systematic hence irrational, and since a

person cannot make a meaningful statement without resorting to a linguistic system, it

is difficult if not impossible to say just what existentialism is if anything at all, except

that it was originally associated with a hodgepodge of antithetical notions bandied

about in smoky post-war Paris jazz cellars: An American reporter wanted to label the

scene there and inquired into the nature of the cultural movement. What were they

doing? Someone said they were “just existing.” A jazz singer flippantly dubbed the

movement “Existentialism.” The term caught on but it was some time before theprominent existentialists admitted to being existentialists instead of muddle-headed,

basement philosophers-at-large. One thing was for certain: existentialists like other

people were war-weary and they hated the systems that had murdered millions and

leftEurope in ruins. Existentialists therefore put concrete individual existence before

abstract general being. The abstract constitutions of being were in effect systematic

explanations of existence that subordinated the individual to the whole, that

incorporated and made cannon meat out of persons. Ironically, existentialists

inherited and unwittingly embraced the skeptical and materialistic enlightenment they

cursed; some turned to an even more systematic materialistic exploitation of

humankind; namely, communism.

Personalists also deplored the war, particularly the degradation of personal

being to a matter of eking out material subsistence. In fine, personalists were

indignant over the indignities persons had suffered at the hands of those materialists

and idealists who gave lip service to persons but who were not respecters of persons

and who believed persons were mere things or animals to be scientifically manipulated

to suit the ulterior motives of the power elite. Instead of focusing on the existing



of 24

individual, personalists wanted to restore the person as a sort of inviolable shield

against utter incorporation and corruption by collectives.

Ancient pagans had giving little truck to the concept of person. It was the

Christians who firmly staked a claim to the discovery if not invention of the personal

concept, holding that the person is a substance in its own right. The Christian person

is ideally free and independent: although the Christian person might cooperate with

the group, s/he stands apart from the collective, as a person, while at the same time

recognizing other persons as self-conscious, free-willed beings. The church made

Christian persons of individuals and set them apart from the secular political

organization as the personal property of the Church, which offered a viable alternativeto the usual way of the world. Yet a growing number of individuals became displeased

with a church that had apparently sold their souls to the state if not to the devil

himself. They protested against the imperial marriage of church and state; when

greeted with repression, they ironically looked to nations for protection from the old

world order – our new world order may soon resemble the old one, but without a

viable, catholic alternative.

Catholic philosophers described the person as a rational, individual or

undivided substance that is separate from others and subsists by itself, hence is

purportedly “incommunicable.” This magic circle seemingly isolating the individual

from harm differs somewhat from the one penned by existentialists for the existing

individual: The person was deemed “rational” by nature, but existentialists discounted

rationality as a virtue. Of course rational communication is in fact common to human

nature: “reason” is the “natural law” of human beings, that which differentiates them

from other beings or forms of existence. In fact the person as we presently

understand the person is the foundation of society and its communication. The

person has so many edges in common that the edge between one person and another

is blurred despite the obvious physical existence of the body, the instrument of



of 24

personal expression, which exists in time and space. Christian salvation depends on

that blur, the inter-subjective commune of persons in the divine person. Indeed,

persons are only found in communities. While the competing individual often defines

individuality by acting against other individuals, the cooperative person loves all

persons alike; that is, to the extent of their goodness in the truth of harmonious

fellowship – the person is decisively fashioned by acts in accord with those goods.

Now the idol of existentialism is the existing individual. Existentialism is out of

vogue today, so we speak of existentialists as if they are extinct, perhaps transformed

into something else again. Many existentialists were atheists. Christian existentialists

were largely “protesting” Christians if not philosophical anarchists or so-calledanarcho-Christians. Catholic scholars respect existentialism, but may express rightful

reservations about its subjective tendency and its ethical relativism – God‟s

commandments should be dutifully obeyed in all circumstances. We notice that many

of the philosophical notions of the existentialists who survived World War II

resemble aspects of the anti-intellectual, anti-ideology of their worst enemy the Nazis

and fascists. Most of all, existentialists are supposed to hate systems – their

predecessor Kierkegaard believed that intricate systems of thought were in fact

enormous lies guiding the world to ruin. Does not the gospel doom all who do not

incessantly protest the degradation of the once noble (arab) man of the wilderness,

whose descendents emigrated to the cities, where seeds are systematically mixed in the

civic harlot, where men became liars and hypocrites?

The greatest existentialists systematically decried the middling, milling systems

at length. Their literature sometimes interchanged the term “person” with

“individual,” as if the terms were synonymous, but we should not be confused by the

naming game. Inasmuch as the person is a social system, anti-systematic thinkers

would rid the world of that supposedly fictional entity, the persona, along with the Big

Lie: the System, the Establishment. But the reduction of the person to a supposedly



of 24

“responsible” individual would unwittingly leave him stripped of his husk, in anxious

discontent and vulnerable to the charismatic likes of Mussolini and Hitler, who had

no qualms about conflating god, ego and persona, and presenting themselves as the

Supreme Person.

Of course the subject of personalism is the person. We cannot get rid of the

personal category simply because we happen to have bad examples, at least not if we

want to communicate effectively, for the person is the platform of communication.

The socially integrated individual is a person, a synthetic personal system or

compromise between I and We, if not a substantial being in itself. Persons or personal

forms vary according to different circumstances including their various biologicaldeterminants yet are essentially alike or equal in communal spirituality. That is, a

person is a spiritual, mental, moral being, a human being, and as such is a

communicating terminal engaged in continuous social compromise. But for

Kierkegaard, whose assiduous study of dialectics turned him against its dynamic

logical system, there could be no compromise, no golden mean, no higher Hegelian

unity: there was only either-or, a choice first of all between an art of living that refuses

to judge lest ye be judged and an ethics that would do nothing but judge in order to

exist, ultimately decided by a leap to foolish faith in the apotheosis of the absurd

individual, the self-caused, narcissistic existent who drowns himself in his own image

because he is nothing without his peers,

Even Kierkegaard, whose contempt for society led him to prefer the abstract

individual or “category of one” behind imperfect personal masks, preferred to project

his inner conflicts and conceal his self-contradictions and hypocrisy by speaking

indirectly through several personifications. His thought-provoking Either-Or, for

instance, appeared in the guise of a conversational work of fiction, a novel inhabited

by fictional persons and not as a direct philosophical tome in the form of a coherent

system of thought. Notwithstanding the complexity of the novel‟s subject matter,



of 24

which is essentially an analysis of his romantic contradictions, the work was popular

with readers who were ordinarily put off by philosophy. Kierkegaard, perhaps for

want of concrete unity with all individuals in his category of one, used the indirect

form of communication, or his multiple masks, to slander the person as such rather

than to spiritually substantiate it. Following suit, prominent existentialists deliberately

tried to popularize their abstract philosophy by presenting it in fictional form, that is

in plays and novels, behind which their fundamental spiritual incoherence might be

hidden and their personal confusion exposed through neurotic caricatures. Albert

Camus, for one, who very much admired Kierkegaard, is best known as the

philosopher of The Absurd; he noted in his diary that a good novelist must be aphilosopher. Camus, incidentally, was an atheist educated by Jesuits, who are capable

of writing the best and most sympathetic books on atheism. Jean Paul Sartre,

profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard, was a novelist and playwright when not

preoccupied with infinite reflections on being and nothingness.

Personalists, whose person is essentially rooted in spirituality, have claimed that

the person is not merely the biological and social development called personality but

is in itself a blessed spiritual substance. Furthermore, personalists may hold that reality

consists of interacting self-conscious persons, each of them depending on the divine

or supreme person for their singularity, which may somehow survive the obvious

death of the body. Personalists and existentialists alike may speak conventionally of

the person, and say a person, generally speaking, is an individual human being. It

follows that the categorical person is not merely a thing or animal. At the very least, a

human being is the most dignified member of the animal kingdom. Again, the human

being as an individual person is allegedly an undivided, self-conscious, willful, free,

moral agent who has such dominion over his world that he might either deliberately

or unwittingly destroy it. Yet human beings are social creatures.



of 24

Existentialists overemphasize the singular or existent aspect of persons, and

unduly decry the rational and moral organization of personality, thus throwing out the

person to save the undivided individual, leaving him free to “sin at will.” And

personalists commit the same sin against their personal concept when they

overemphasize its individual aspect. On the other hand, devout personalists might say

that, given the divine order that is best obeyed, the individual is only free to sin, a

freedom extended to humankind as a divine common courtesy. Persons are free to act

and thus shape their personalities, but they would be better off obeying God‟s

commandments. Although persons are dignified by the image of their creator, they sin

in their pride. Before god all persons are equal, particularly when freed from sin; freedof their freedom, they have in humble obedience no cause for arrogance.

Absent mistakes or sins there would be no human progress towards perfection,

however perfection may be conceived. Self-reflection reveals flaws; something better

is conceived; idols are cast down and ideals raised up as standards for action. The

term „human‟ is derived from root-terms meaning “he who draws out thought,” or he

who thinks. The human person is rational. The spirit or breath that inspires man is

physically communicated by means of meaningful words; the meaning conveyed

depends on a mental process of rational choices. The ability to choose and

discriminate among particulars and to abstract general or higher concepts from

particulars is a moral process; therefore, the terms spiritual, mental and moral are to a

certain extent virtually synonymous. A person is at once a spiritual, mental and moral

being. The emphasis here is on being, and not on the individual existent which is a

unique coincidence of universal qualities or predicates without which the individual

would not suffer his uniqueness nor imagine his independence. That is, although the

person may not be abstracted from individuality and individuality may not be

substracted from personality, the personalist puts personal being before individual

existence, for existence is nothing without being, and in being the individual has



of 24

dignity over particulate existence or dirt. The being placed before the existent is the

person. The person is supreme; but that does not mean that each and every private

person is free to run amok as his independent “conscience” might dictate. The person

is the supreme mode of moral action.

But behold what enlightening reason has done: It has dissolved the

metaphysical notion of the person and reduced the person to the complicated dirty

details of a mental construct – personality, a heuristic device for understanding how

individuals and collectives behave differently or similarly given the same or different

circumstances. In fine, the personality is presumably nothing but a complex

psychological structure. Moreover, personality is an organization of traits thatdistinguishes one person from another – there are different types of persons. But

what a person is, objective scientists, notwithstanding their careful experiments,

cannot really say. In fact there has been little or no success in typecasting people, for

the measurements tend to lump everyone in the middle. A psychologist might write

an entire book on personality, entitle it Person, and not offer a single definition of just

what a person is because his person is insubstantial. Contrary to what we expect, the

experts cannot really predict what a person will do, especially since so many persons

have been depersonalized – demoralized. Too many good scientists, despite their

good intentions, seemingly ignore or have forgotten the most famous inscription on

the temple at Delphi – Know Thyself. In any case, so-called persons are so

commonplace nowadays that it might be said that persons are no respecters of

persons. In fact, a frustrated Christian cult that despises “humanism” for its humanity

and calls Jesus its “political hero” is virtually lording it over the most Christian nation

on Earth, or rather the most Roman nation in the imperialistic sense – thus does one

take on the characteristics of the hated enemy.

The personalist philosopher Karol Wojtyla (the late John Paul II), confronted

with the despairing and anxious mental processes of war-shocked intellectuals whose



of 24

main concern was their dreadful existence as alienated individuals, worked to

rejuvenate the conception of the substantial person in his early work, The Acting

Person . As a devout Catholic the budding saint undoubtedly had a universal model in

mind; that is to say, a supreme personal model all persons could freely choose and

systematically imitate and identify with rather than losing themselves speculating

infinitely on an incomprehensible unknown god or impersonal force. Before all,

spiritual Personalists preach a gospel of communal life made possible by the

appearance of a Personal Saviour; that is, a savior for all persons as social persons, not

just for selfish individuals who want to exist forever. The objective norms of

humankind are drawn from our personal nature, our being, and are realized in ourbehavior. Since the person is a social being, love is essential to persons; their

conscience is an inter-subjective universal ethic that strives for a loving order in

voluntary social cooperation as a personal commune. Such cooperation cannot

depend on faith alone but must involve rational works. But existentialists were wary of personalism. They were personally familiar with

the crimes against humanity fomented by charismatic personalities; accordingly, they

abhorred the cultivation of personal being in any shape or form. For them, personality

was simply a fictitious system or lie; leaders donned messianic personas to delude

people into conformance with one evil social system or the other. Furthermore,

existentialists decried the “rational”, “enlightened” or “illuminated” systems of

thinking, the abstract masks that had seemingly led to the widespread havoc and panic

of competing mob behavior instead of a loving world order. Against the mob they

raised the banner of the existing individual.

Kierkegaard, the godfather of modern existentialism, was the foremost self-

appointed apostle for the absolute freedom of the individual, the sort of individual

who is not determined by society but who chooses his identity. By virtue or vice of

blind faith, Kierkegaard found his identity in the absolute and his certitude in



of 24

ignorance. He conjoined himself with the divine anarch who allegedly appeared on

earth as his own son, a convicted criminal who obediently subjected himself to capital

punishment in an ancient version of suicide-by-cop. The notion that god would

murder himself is patently absurd if god is by definition immortal and eternal. Yet

suicide proves the freedom of mortal man, who fashions god in his ideal image;

ironically, to avoid the immediate satisfaction of his death instinct, his religion may

constitute virtual suicide through its repressive morality, and if his freedom were not

sin it would be voluntary slavery or absolute submission and obedience to the

arbitrary authority of the representatives of the unknown god. For example, the so

called free man becomes the prisoner of god, a monk subdued in his cell, but one whofeels he is free in his repudiation of worldly life. And we have good cause to admire

the saintly man who has conquered himself, even more than the hero who conquers

the world. At least the monkish man who loves people in the abstract does little

damage in fact, and with an ample supply of popcorn and iced tea and an Internet

connection he might effectually invoke good works in the name of his god. On the other hand, the realization of freedom in incipient Totalitaria relies on a

totalizing social order wherein individuals, freed from the inhibition of high

civilization hence enslaved by base passions, are encouraged to run amok in concert

and commit all sorts of crimes against humanity, crimes authorized, sanctioned, and

condoned by a charismatic father or messianic leader, and they do so in the name of

love for one‟s kind and country and fuehrer, perchance pursuant to a political religion

called national socialism if not democracy, and, when spiritual religion is invoked, they

kill one another in the name of the god of life and death, the invisible arbitrator who

hands down victory and defeat according to the luck of the contingencies drawn and

the might of the self-righteous. To the victors belong the spoils; eventually the entire

world shall be conquered and therefore saved by supermen led by the messiah.But of

course such a massive criminal enterprise is doomed to disorganization and



of 24

disintegration in the end, for it is not rational at all: it is essentially an irrational,

degenerate, and demonic adventure based on the lust for cheap thrills, and thrives on

brutish, uneducated emotions that lead nowhere. Since fanatic mob leaders

rationalized their fanaticism, many existentialists erroneously placed the blame for the

horrors of human misbehavior on human reason, whereas the fanatics had, in their

despair and dread, resorted to uninhibited feelings and simple emotions as their saving

grace. Notwithstanding the rationale, the massive violence was rooted in that

irrational resort to begin with; hence the frustrated brutes tend to be their own worst

enemies, sometimes forsaking their precious individuality to secular communism after

a brief period of anarchism.Kierkegaard renounced reason reasonably and he repudiated intellect

intellectually. He resigned himself to the unknown god who is the one and only god,

that is to say his version of the Christian god: he presumed before his leap to faith

that fundamental Christianity is the only truth, no matter how absurd its expressions

might seem to the worldly wise. Indeed, he argued that the greatest passion may only

be had in believing absurd doctrine. And the true Christian apostle, not the hypocrite

of the established church, has faith in such absurd doctrine on his own authority as

long as it is pronounced in the name of highest authority: “An apostle has no other

authority but his assertion, and at most by his willingness to suffer everything for the

doctrine,” claimed the man who called himself a “knight of resignation.” We wonder

not at his Christian foolishness: Kierkegaard, we note well, was a Lutheran, and

Luther was wont to refer to his contradictions as “God‟s mysteries.” Well, then, any doctrine would do, would it not? Say, the Nazi doctrine. Indeed,

Hitler might be deemed a god-incarnate. And if god ordered a father to sacrifice his

son or the children of his country or all the children in the world, the father would do

so forthwith, and plead at the murder trial that the voice of god had told him to do it.

In Fear and Trembling , Kierkegaard celebrates Abraham‟s willingness to murder his son



of 24

Isaac. And did not the Hebrew father in Heaven have his innocent son tortured and

murdered on Earth, thus converting evil to good and providing superstitious

regressives with a sufficient reason for humiliating child abuse for centuries to come?

Fortunately, Churchmen who actually read, understood, and valued the Gospel knew

very well that Jesus did not preach nor condone child abuse. But according to

Kierkegaard‟s theology, it would not have mattered even if Jesus had advocated

infanticide, or had condoned beating children with rods, or, a prescribed by Judaic

law, stoning them to death for disobeying their parents. Christianity; as Kierkegaard

conceived it, was not of this world; nor, he said, did Christ intend it to be. For

example, Christian women should be content with their subjugated lot on Earth:“What Christ said of this realm, that it is not of the world, applies to everything

Christian. Foolish people have tried foolishly, in the name of Christianity, to make it

secularly manifest that the wife is empowered with the same rights as man. Christian

religion never demanded or wished anything of that sort.” Kierkegaard posited three ways of being: aesthetical, ethical, and religious. We

concoct three equations accordingly: For the aesthetical, the relative: I am of that

multiplicity. For the ethical, the duality: I am not that. For the religious, the absolute: I

am I. In the last instance, I AM, or I=I, would of course suffice. Kierkegaard, an

aesthete who did not have to work or compromise himself for his daily bread,

espoused the ethical life before he became a spiritual. As far as he was concerned, an

ethical man had no choice but to choose himself, the penultimate good. But the

ethical life was not good enough for him for there was no end to the choices to be

made, just as there is no end to the number of things aesthetes might appreciate,

hence the ethical man leaped to faith and became a religious man who worshipped the

unknown god, purportedly the ultimate good. Kierkegaard despised the aesthete he obviously was; the aesthete was a sort of

dissolute pantheist, finding his illusory good in whatsoever happened to please him at



of 24

the moment, but incapable of taking any decisive action but avoidance. "You are

capable of spending a whole month reading nothing but fairy tales”, Kierkegaard

writes in Either/Or, “you make a profound study of them, you compare and analyze,

and your study is not barren of result - but what do you use it for? To divert your

mind; you let the whole thing fire off in a brilliant display of fireworks… We have the

disgusting sight of young men who are able to mediate Christianity and paganism, are

able to play with the titanic forces of history, and are unable to tell a plain man what

he has to do in life..." Thinkers given to infinite reflections have oft recommended that aesthetes

withdraw from their addictive substances and take up philosophy instead. Philosophy may be a lot of nonsense about common sense, yet it provides salve for the wound.

Philosophy is a poetic art and not a predictive science. Few philosophers foreswear art

nowadays: they would not have psychologically afflicted people forsake therapeutic

art. The diversity of artistic expression in contrast to the unity of ethical tyranny is no

reason to abandon art – quite to the contrary. In truth, the highest aesthetic

expression of the intelligent love and celebration of life found in art may vary in

technique but not in principle – works of art would be worthless without striving for

an accord or harmonious agreement. Perhaps we can thank Kierkegaard and the

existentialists for helping art degenerate even further, into abstract symbols

representing arrant arrogance. The so-called anti-art movement of the contemporary

cult of individualism rejected the social or objective principle of art and left us with a

lazy reduction to the absurd claim that art is merely subjective, hence one individual

work is as good as another, and any criticism of an individual work is an unwarranted

“fascist” intrusion into the right of “contemporary” artists to individual equality. Thus

does the “Contemporary” artist bury his head in sand and thereby save himself and

his work from reality and from the criticism of “cultural fascists.” He succeeds on

whim – some piece of nonsense or an accident widely publicized may turn him into



of 24

an instant celebrity. Since the anti-artist is unable to think coherently, that is, along

social lines, his concepts are as incoherent as his constructions – he is unable to give

us a beautiful drawing of a person; may heaven forbid if he does turn to fine art, and

that his gift of personal beauty is the ideal beauty of a clothed Madonna or nude

Venus. The postmodern aesthete cannot mediate Christianity and paganism, or depict

the titanic forces of history – his flyers are filled with absurd explanations. Again, the aesthetically inclined person, whom Kierkegaard would save with a

moralizing novel, hopes to escape from the ultimate cause of anxiety – mortality –

into the enjoyment of ephemeral feelings and the appreciation of beauty found in

nature and art, including the art of personal living. But Kierkegaard‟s ethical individualfinds his solace in absolute solitude, in premature or living death, in the choice of

nothing, really, in virtual suicide. "(The Ethical) is not a question of the choice of

something.... The alternative is the aesthetical, the indifferent ...."

Kierkegaard mistakenly charges the aesthete with his own melancholic

indifference to the world at large: he claims that the ethical realm is an infinite

movement along hierarchically arranged values whereby one becomes (not creates) his

genuine being by making important choices. But the plethora of choices available in

the aesthetic realm are relative hence of equal value, constituting a flight from the

ultimate Either/Or, that of good or evil – Kierkegaard‟s ethical doctrine does not

require a preoccupation with choosing good things: an individual must make willful

decisions, and it is in those decisions and not in the particular things or acts chosen

that he eventually finds his real self. In fine, the distinction drawn between the

aesthetic and ethical spheres is specious. The only way out is to delude oneself into

believing in an absolute, and then choosing it once and for all as one‟s salvation

forever and evermore.

The absolute is not really an absolute, for it is indefinite, it does not include all

instances in a concrete universal, and may be nothing at all, or, say the omnipotent



of 24

feeling in the womb, yet it shall do as long as one feels good about it and sincerely

espouses it as an existent. It is a matter of attitude, really, and one's attitude in

choosing oneself must be sincere, for as one believes, so one is. What counts, says

Kierkegaard, is the energetic sincerity of choosing the real either/or over the mere

either/or, such as choosing to visit the bank or barber. The real choice is ultimately

between good/evil, good being the real self. Kierkegaard admits that many other

worthwhile decisions may be made along the way to finding/receiving one's self. But

if the religious man places his faith in feeling and sincerity, as did Kierkegaard, how

does he differ from the aesthete, except that the aesthete has many objects to feel

instead of no-thing? The aesthete‟s preference for felt qualities instead of abstract ideation is

deemed to be mistaken because feelings are manifold and divide the individual instead

of saving him from the conflict rooted in the basic conflict between the existent

individual and its society. That basic conflict, as internalized separation, gives the

person over to anxiety, depression and despair. The person‟s joint role as an “I” and a

“We” – with the “I” as part and parcel of “We” – are both introjected as social

conditions, yet the mystical unification and at-one-ment of subject and object wanted

by the anxious ethical individual in flight from his existence as an individuate cannot

be obtained in fact short of death. After death the hated objective world ironically

survives the particular subject who would outlast it if only he could; but his existence

as an individual was in fact the temporary, unique coincidence of universal qualities.

Still, when alive he might have taken pleasure in his existential crucifixion on the

crossbars of time and space, maintaining, in his temporal torment, the notion of

eternal life free of the very impediments that gives him cause to suffer life in hopes of

salvation from it. In his finality, this particular supreme arbiter loves himself only; he

cannot part with himself to merge with the nymphs calling to him from the social

forest. Life then, for Kierkegaard‟s ethical person, who is burdened by the necessity of



of 24

dreadful choices which in effect constitute a negation of possibilities, is a bitter thing.

But the lemon can be made sweet by a faithful leap to the religious sphere, a

transcendental planet far removed from both the aesthetic and ethical planets.

Not that we want to stereotype the existentialist saint who called himself a

“knight of resignation” for giving his confounded ethics up to god, but we cannot

help but repeatedly observe from his personal behavior that he was a sublime instance

of the frustrated, indecisive aesthete he denounced when wearing his ethical hat. That

is precisely why his corpus, especially Either/Or, can be of enormous assistance to

discomfited intellectuals whose fearful skepticism and weak-kneed armchair wisdom

provides them with neurotic justification for their defensive habit of indecisiveness. Itis evident that Kierkegaard 's Either/Or is a self-divisive elaboration of his personal

conflict with society, a war he preferred to fight within, from his armchair, instead of

the field without – that is, he took the path of the saint instead of the hero. Supported

by an inheritance that he refused to invest lest he be guilty of usury, Kierkegaard, in a

despairing state of bourgeois self-contempt, composed a conflict between art for its

own sake and the realistic business of the mind, that he might continually choose

something valuable upon which spiritual profit can be realized and infinitely accrued

rather than something of fleeting gratification that must be eliminated as waste.

Finally, why not pile up treasure in heaven instead of counting on earthly things,

including vain thoughts that are bound to be relatively disappointing simply because

they must inevitably fall short of the ideal? Kierkegaard chose for the sake of

choosing, and in the end he thought he made the ultimate choice, of his absolutely

good self, as distinguished from creating art for its own sake. The god he leaped to in

the end, in a grand renunciation of ethical behavior, resembled the inchoate self he

grew weary of choosing. He fled from the irrational to the Irrational;salir de Guatemala

y entrar en Guatepeor.



of 24

Kierkegaard‟s incisive psychoanalysis of our indecisiveness cuts us to the quick

and moves us to bite the hand that feeds us the truth about our vanity. He is a self-

fulfilling prophet for those of us who fancy ourselves to be creative artists and

intellectuals, and whose works are unappreciated by the vulgar mobs and their

established authorities. When we blame Kierkegaard we blame ourselves, hence we do

not blame him alone for disengaging himself from the world to reflect on it at

considerable length, for that was his calling, and it is ours as well. He published some

of his work at his own expense, and we sometimes do the same, for we are not as in

love with our art for art‟s sake as we think we are, for we want the dignity of

recognition one way or another, in the form of critical blame if not praise. PoorKierkegaard engaged himself in attacking the authors of an established magazine; they

in turn made a fool out of him – today the established intelligentsia ignores our bitter

attacks or dismisses them as hysterical. He finally attacked the established Christian

church in such a way that one wonders who is really a Christian and who is an atheist

– how many of us, including avowed atheists, are consciously or subconsciously

Christians-of-one? In any case, is it not a fundamental duty of Christians to call each

other hypocrites? The primary ethical action we find in Kierkegaard is symbolic action - thinking

– exercised in the main to criticize others for not acting ethically, for not taking the

one-god versus the satanic multiplicity seriously. We hear the familiar song handed

downed from ancient times: The treasure is within, in the inner unity where man is

reconciled with himself if not his collective self projected as god. Kierkegaard

criticizes critics for not taking up the inner life, for losing themselves in illusions,

professions, callings and other forms of escape. And yet his approach is also an

escape, an escape that is, for a few of us, the most wonderful one of all, one that

causes us to just say no intoxicating substances that we may enjoy the good death in

solitude. In any event, life is an escapade! Introverts given to the withdrawn life would



of 24

naturally deride the rare philosopher who says, “As a matter of fact, I am not slightly

interested in self-spelunking, given all the objects the universe has to offer

instead.What fool compares the depth of his inner life with the extent of the cosmos

and insists that the cosmos is merely cosmetic?” Kierkegaard‟s repudiation of rational systems obviously enhanced his

appreciation of a pretty woman, at least at a distance. Unlike Madame Bovary, who

married and went from lover to lover because no lover was good enough for the

romantic inclination she had acquired from the reading of cheap novels, Kierkegaard,

the quixotic knight of resignation, would not eat wedding cake to begin with. Still, his

ethical self was unscientific and romantic: it sincerely and passionately loves its Self, which is apparently, if capitalized, the highest good or Good if not God. The dualist

refrain is familiar: self is good; world is evil. He would forsake the evil world for

himself, for the category of one; once he is at one with the category of one, only then

may he sincerely love the world: "If the despairing man makes a mistake, if he believes

that his misfortune lies in his multifarious surroundings, then his despair is not

genuine and it will lead him to hate the world.... When in despair you have found

yourself you will love the world because it is what it is." And what is despair? "Despair

is doubt of personality," he says.

Yes, we agree: we despair when we cannot trust other people‟s personalities;

the persona archetype is a social device, a means of conformity, of playing several

roles - we admit that it can be viewed as a part of the whole self and not the whole.

But if we doubt the reliability of personalities because people have betrayed us, how

then can we better trust unmasked brutes? If we hate the social system and choose

and love our individuality, how might that be converted into love for other individuals

without taking up personal roles, and, in sum, being the person responsible for

acting?



of 24

Kierkegaard, to pursue what he believed was the ethical life of Either/Or,

ultimately choose the apotheosis of his self. Some of us may choose things to get rid

of them, and then feel miserable for doing what we thought was the self-righteous

thing to do. Only a mate can adequately sum up humanity. Kierkegaard dismissed the

flawed queen of his own mundane affections, his girlfriend, Regine, upon whom he

literally reflected at length in lieu of the consummation he had forsworn. She was not

good enough or god enough for him: only the unknown god was worthy of his

debasement. The true lover must always be wrong; the beloved must always be right.

He thought he had ditched her to save her from the mistake of loving the likes of

him, a man with cold feet. He eventually made the ultimate choice, a suicidal leap tofaith in perfection. Only god can do no wrong despite appearances to the contrary.

But nothing is perfect. Kierkegaard‟s faith was really in his own reflection in the pool

slowly swirling around the drain, the very mirror of his perturbations, as it were, from

which only a chimpanzee with distorted figure could foolishly grin back, for the

apostle gazing therein had renounced his reason with an open proclamation of his

foolhardiness. Only faith in something absurd can escape the torment of doubting

reason; absolute certitude can only be had in ignorance. Nothing, no thing in

particular, is really worthy of unadulterated love. That leaves us with universal ideals. Kierkegaard was an idealist in the Platonic sense: the ideal is the real; reality is

in heavens unknown as of yet – if only horses had wings. "The poetic ideal is always a

false ideal, for the true ideal is always the real. So when the spirit is not allowed to soar

up into the eternal world of spirit it remains midway and rejoices in the pictures

reflected in the clouds and weeps that they are so transitory. A poet's existence is

therefore, as such, an unhappy existence, it is higher than finiteness yet no

infiniteness." Infiniteness is, to wit, the ineffable X – we might aptly call it Nothing,

or, if you wish, the Origin. The path to X is heady stuff; as Kierkegaard himself

remarks: "There is hardly an anaesthetic so powerful as abstract thinking." But his



of 24

tolerance for the anaesthetic led him to take a fatal step. Despairing Kierkegaard

wanted out of the hypocritical world; it seemed that only unity with the unknown

arbitrary god would save him from himself, in which case he would be an amoral

mystic, beyond good and evil, relieved of agonizing decisions. He catches his self-

contradiction on the diving board that constitutes his existence, and further

contradicts himself with a grand gesture, a daring leap into the unknown:

"I do not create myself. I choose myself. Therefore while nature is created out

of nothing, while I as an immediate personality am created out of nothing, as a free

spirit I am born of the principle of contradiction." And, "The mystic chooses himself

abstractly ... out of the world ... The truly concrete choice is that wherewith at the very same instant some instant I choose myself out of the world I am choosing myself

back into the world. For when I choose myself repentantly I gather myself back into

the world ... in all my finite concretion, and in the fact that I have thus chosen myself

out of the finite I am in the most absolute continuity with it.”

Is not that self-choice the principle of original sin? Is not that the hypocrisy or

underlying crisis of man? Is not that the principle of original slavery that dooms us to

choose or to die? Free will disobeys god‟s law; hence Kierkegaard‟s formerly lauded

ethical choices were in fact sinful acts. He says he repents even of his father's sins. But

why does he throw himself back into then pit? Why does he not repent of the original

sin, that of individuality? In effect he has repudiated his creative choice and his

freedom. Afraid to love another, he had no choice but to choose himself, but that self

must die. In the end, once he finds his true nature, he must resign his freedom and

accept god‟s law that all individuals are born in sin and therefore must die. Repenting of it all, the existentialist theologian gets it all back: "He repents

himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds

himself in God." Repentance, he says, is the only word that expresses love for God.

He chooses to surrender to X. His choice destroys all options. He sets the self up as



of 24

god and chooses god, thus destroying self and god, for he has not chosen something

but has rejected everything. From nothing he came and to nothing he returns - god or

nothing is permanent. It appears that he identifies his instinct to survival with his

particular self or the apotheosis thereof. In the final analysis, Kierkegaard‟s distinction between his ethical and religious

self is as false as the one drawn between the ethical and the aesthetical spheres, for the

ethical self he chose and the god he leaped to is one and the same thing, and

constitutes nothing. Kierkegaard wanted it all for himself: unity, freedom,

omnipotence. Enthusiastic individuals or people who have been possessed by god

confess that anything goes as long as one has faith in the salvation of the self by virtueof faith alone. But what has he chosen?

"Only when I absolutely choose myself,” wrote Kierkegaard, “do I infinitize

myself absolutely, for I myself am the absolute for only myself can I choose

absolutely, and the absolute choice of myself is my freedom, and only when I have

absolutely chosen myself have I posited an absolute difference, the difference, that is

to say, between good and evil.... The good... being in and of itself, and this is

freedom.... It is... not so much a question of choosing between willing the good or the

evil, as of choosing to will, but by this in turn the good and evil are posited...." Despite his assertion that the ethical man chooses his true self instead of

creating it from scratch, Kierkegaard‟s fondness for the individual reveals the

individual, his abstract “category of one,” as the indefinite or infinite, the unknown I-

god, or I-AM of yore. That absolutely free, impersonal supreme being or nothing has

no cause to fear and therefore to think ethically as an “I”; that being or nothing is

absolute power and unadulterated will unhampered by resistance; that negatively

defined quiddity or nothingness is the arbitrary arbitrator, supreme anarch, almighty

merciful terrorist; and so on. In effect, then, Kierkegaard would be rid of his

individuality and its doctrine.



of 24

Moreover, the absolute singularity chosen by Kierkegaard is a private and

absolutely free godhead, an anarch, in a word, that disposes of and therefore

transcends relative good and evil by fiat, therefore making itself in god‟s image. Of

course the essence of this "category of one," the universal individual and god

presumably chosen by all self-chosen, self-integrated, hence speciously ethical

individual, differs from the nature admired by unethical persons; that is, the dissolute

aesthetes who are preoccupied with the highest sort of feelings of something called

beauty. Beauty is normally associated with pleasurable feelings ascetics abhor because

the painful contrary is implied by pleasure felt – in either case, of pain or pleasure, the

dignity of the self-caused person, an arrogance found in his freedom, is threatened tobe demolished by an external cause. To rid themselves of pain, presumably ethical

ascetics would dispose of pleasure as well; they would throw out the baby with the

bath water and lay claim to transcendental indifference to the felt qualities of life, the

relative value of which philosophers tend to interminably dispute.

The transcendental religious sphere, fortunately for Kierkegaard‟s

temperament, would not be presided over by the established church of the socially

compromising and therefore hypocritical Christians he knew on Earth. As a devout

Christian-of-one, Kierkegaard, instead of loving his neighbors wholeheartedly, that is,

notwithstanding their relative sins, was moved to hatefully denounce professed

Christians for falling far short of his fundamentalist notions. He chose to elevate

himself to the rooftop and to cry out to his neighbors, “Hypocrites!” When he

collapsed on the street in the midst of his violent attack on the Danish National

Church, he told a friend that someone must die for the cause, and he died shortly

thereafter. It is no wonder that the seemingly absurd commandment, to love thy neighbor

as thyself, had to be written down long ago for lip services, since it is so easily

forgotten by the human heart. Thus does the anarcho-Christian become the reflection



of 24

of his fellow enemy – a bigoted, irrational, unethical hypocrite – instead of the

reflection of the only Christian who has walked upon this Earth thus far, the very

Criterion of Christianity, Jesus the Christ.

Although Kierkegaard may not have been the Alien God‟s prophet, he was

certainly a seer; in his frustrated aestheticism and representative anxiety and egoism,

he was a prefiguration of the “existentialism” to come, particularly spiritual

existentialism. In fact, our godfather of existentialism is highly regarded as a

theologian in some chambers. And he was a good Christian as far as many

fundamentalists are concerned. He was a Christian who died for a good cause; he

called organized Christians hypocrites for the usual reasons: for selling their souls tothe devil and their consciences to the state.

Of course Kierkegaard advocated individual integrity and responsibility. But to

what end? What did he integrate his self with? Kierkegaard‟s ethical individual

abandons his reasonable reflections, which are the very means to ethical conduct, and

leaps blindly to faith in What, which, when described, turns out to be some nude

quiddity if anything at all. He evidently no longer has faith in his ability to choose, so

he sincerely chooses nothing, really, but non-sense, and he passionately does whatever

might come to mind, perchance in the form of an authoritarian command from the

charismatic leader of a totalitarian state of being – Kierkegaard admired the biblical

willingness of a father to kill his own son (Isaac) upon command of the unknown

god. Thus do intelligent men, whose criticism eventually leads them to suspend

judgment even in the value of criticism, fall prey to the preaching of that ignorance in

which they find their bliss. But then they might go forth to wreak havoc throughout

the world for its own sake. Wherefore, until freedom is realized in death, let

individuals rebel. “Down with the Establishment! Down with the System! Give me Liberty or

give me Death!” is the rebel‟s slogan until his own system is established in tyranny.



of 24

Wherefore let us compromise. Freedom from compromise is found only in

omnipotence. He who believes he is god has his noun spelled backwards and shall be

brought to heel by his master soon enough.

To say the least about Soren Kierkegaard‟s personality, he had a personal

problem with his existence. Given the unhappy personal circumstances of his

existence – his mother and five siblings died within two years, purportedly because of

a curse placed on his family because his father had cursed God – Soren did not want

his personal existence: he did not want to be the frustrated aesthete, melancholic

philosopher, and discontented Lutheran theologian that he was. He answered

Hamlet‟s question in the negative because his being did not suit him in this world, andhis ghostly father had assured him of a better existence in the next. Unable to fill the

poverty of self-centered existence from without and to lovingly commune with other

persons in this world, he turned inward and had foolish faith in unworldly things. We

wish he had gotten married, which was, as he said to the aesthete, the ethical thing to

do. He might have taken a job with an insurance company, as did Franz Kafka, his

great admirer. And if he had invested his inheritance prudently, that job might have

been part-time. But his maker did not so provide. He is indubitably at one with the

unselfish and communicable divine person, who is in the next world pending the great

correction. Whenever we are having trouble making important personal decisions, we

are behooved to revisit Kierkegaard‟s works. We shall not forget him, for he saw

through us that we might eventually see through him.

ne obliviscaris

The Godfather of Existentialism

Documents

Transcript of The Godfather of Existentialism