It is difficult to categorise Søren Kierkegaard: to some readers he is primarily a philosopher, to others a Christian thinker or theologian. He was also a perceptive psychologist and incisive cultural critic. But above all, Kierkegaard was a writer. Much of his adult life was spent pacing around his Copenhagen apartment, composing out loud the sentences that he would then write down, still standing, at his tall desk.
He was extraordinarily prolific, producing on average a couple of books each year during the 1840s. Some of these are provocative, genre-defying works on philosophical and religious themes, written under a variety of pseudonyms and sometimes featuring biblical and fictional characters. Others are collections of sermon-like discourses, written explicitly for the reader's spiritual edification. All are, however, unmistakably Kierkegaardian, distinguished by his eloquent and exuberant prose style, by a love of word-play, irony and paradox, and by a rare combination of sardonic wit and profound sensitivity to the human condition. Even more distinctive is Kierkegaard's attempt to address his readers personally and to encourage them to reflect on their own lives.
For those reading Kierkegaard for the first time, a good starting-point is the short 1843 book Fear and Trembling, or the slightly longer 1849 text The Sickness Unto Death. Despite their daunting titles, these are among Kierkegaard's most popular and engaging works. Over the next few weeks we'll look at some of the themes and ideas explored in them, although I'll touch on some of his other books too.
We may as well begin with a question that is at the heart of Kierkegaard's philosophy: what does it mean to exist? In his 1846 book Concluding Unscientific Postscript – which, at over 600 pages, is surely one of the lengthiest postscripts ever written – he suggests that "people in our time, because of so much knowledge, have forgotten what it means to exist". Even though all sorts of things exist, for Kierkegaard the word "existence" has a special meaning when applied to human life. This meaning arises from the fact that we always have a relationship to ourselves. For example, we can be more or less self-aware; we can wish to be other than how we are; we can trust or mistrust, like or dislike ourselves. Perhaps we can even make decisions about who we will become.
For Kierkegaard, the most pressing question for each person is the meaning of his or her own existence, which arises from this relationship with the self. Indeed, this is what might be called an existential question: it is not just an abstract intellectual question, to be posed by experts – by professional philosophers, for example – but a question that really matters, in an immediate and urgent way, to every human being, because it has an direct impact on choices about how to live. Kierkegaard's insistence on the importance of such questioning has led him to be regarded as the "father of existentialism".
When Kierkegaard writes that we have "forgotten" what it means to exist, his point is not so much that we have forgotten the answer to this question, but that we have forgotten about the question itself. The cause of our forgetfulness, he claims, is the ever-growing amount of knowledge. He is not arguing that knowledge is a bad thing, but pointing out that its pursuit, however worthwhile in itself, can be a distraction from existential issues. And even if we pause to reflect on the purposes of knowledge, and conclude that it should be pursued for the sake of enhancing human life, we are still led back to the question of what this life means, and why it matters.
I will explore further Kierkegaard's attitude to knowledge next week, but we can begin to reflect on how the growth of knowledge might be linked to a neglect of the question of the meaning of our existence. This accusation is directed specifically at the modern age, and it seems to be as pertinent today as in the mid-19th century. Kierkegaard's own time was characterised by an accelerated expansion of knowledge – particularly of historical knowledge, including the history of the bible and of Christian doctrine, which came more and more to be viewed as human phenomena that, despite claims to articulate eternal truths, evolved through time just like other ideas, customs and institutions. An increase in knowledge was also manifest in technological developments, such as faster transportation and new methods of printing that facilitated, for the first time, a culture of mass-media. A century and a half later, of course, we now live in a world that is far more highly developed in these ways. If Kierkegaard thought he lived in a time of too much knowledge, he would no doubt say today that we live in an age of too much information.
We may now worry that such "progress", in spite of all the advantages it brings, is damaging primarily to the natural world. But Kierkegaard's main concern was with damage to the ethical and spiritual aspects of human life. He might even see our current focus on environmental problems as yet another factor contributing to the neglect of the question, "What does it mean to exist?" – or perhaps as a symptom of this existential forgetfulness. From Kierkegaard's own perspective, which was shaped by his Christian upbringing and beliefs, the question of the meaning of existence was ultimately a religious question since the self to whom we relate is given by God. However, as he writes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "if people have forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they have probably also forgotten what it means to exist humanly". If Kierkegaard were simply defending traditional Christian beliefs, it would be difficult to explain his profound influence on philosophers who rejected these beliefs, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.