Kierkegaard study notes

materials

background & overview

Studied for 2wks, inside Mar 11 -> Mar 31. In a Vienna University library and my aunt/uncle’s.

  1. Read the wiki, encyclopedia summary, watched intro video.
  2. Listened to an audiobook of Fear and Trembling (on 2x speed, like all videos/audiobook I consume) to skim through and get a feel.
  3. Read Fear and Trembling, summarizing paragraph-by-paragraph.
  4. Read Either/Or, summarizing paragraph-by-paragraph for some sections, and skimmed others (especially the more literary ones). Read the seducer’s diary with text-to-speech on very fast.

    takeaways

Studied Mar 11 -> Mar 31. Vienna library and at aunt/uncle’s house.

What I got out of Kierkegaard was a better understanding of “faith” and the contrast between supposed aesthetic vs. ethical lifestyles. I expected to find his works depressing, but they weren’t at all sad or depressing to me.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard shares the story of Abraham and Isaac. If someone behaved the way Abraham behaved, Kierkegaard suggests the only explanation is “faith”. He also expresses that whether someone chooses faith or rationality, the belief in that system comes before its usage to decide what to believe. He seems to dislike where rationality leads, so he prefers faith.

In some ways, Abraham and Issac is a great story to explain faith, but in other ways it’s flawed. I liked how it was a clear paradox where there are few explanations why Abraham would act the way he did. Something strange was going on in him, and it was either this thing called “faith” or something comparably bewildering. Kierkegaard picks the few decisions that Abraham appears to make that align with what he’s trying to portray. Did faith decide every Abraham’s every moment without planning or did he use other decision-making tools too? I find it unlikely that faith is an all-encompassing tool, that has no overlap with other modes of thinking/decision-making.

In Either/Or some of his aesthetics vs. ethics debate kind-of landed, but it seems like the culture I have experienced has managed to merge the two together to the point that there’s a different axis now. Maybe it’s because he’s rather absolutist in many ways, kind of like, “you must go all the way ethically otherwise you are living all the way aesthetically”.

Some other insights from Either/Or:

Preface

People don’t do what they say or say what they do. Unlike Descartes.

Doubt takes time to learn. People seem to want to go beyond faith. “F- the system.”

Prelude

There once was a person who wanted to be there for the Abraham and Isaac story.

Story of abraham and issac.

A panegyric upon abraham

Heroes cling to the past image of themselves.

Faith made Abraham great across all dimensions.

Abraham had to make a big sacrifice. Abraham didn’t have the eternal life to look forward to because they didn’t know about heaven - his sacrifice now was an eternal one because his only son wouldn’t survive. And he didn’t even hesitate.

ChatGPT says: This opening serves multiple purposes:

^ all of that is done implicitly. Kierkegaard never says anything like, “don’t these ethics look sus?” so the reader has to do some interpretation

PROBLEMATA: PRELIMINARY EXPECTORATION

People who haven’t worked hard gloss over the dread of Abraham’s choice. They think of sacrificing “the best” like their favourite toys, not their eternal future.

If someone today did what Abraham did, a priest would say they’re crazy.

Kierkegaard kind of understands Hegel, but the story of Abraham leaves him blown away.

He’s really dedicated to faith, and it feels all kinds of good and bad.

The knight of resignation acts assured, while those carrying the “jewel of faith” act deluded. The knight of faith acts assured with faith, but Kierkegaard has never met someone like that.

Philosophy should not give faith, but it should understand itself and not take anything away from things.

Abraham does things in all the ways the prove faith - not resisting God’s request, then not committing to hard to it when God changes his request. He lost exactly the right amount of rationality, then regained exactly the amount of rationality he lost. He didn’t sacrifice early or late, he believed rather than just loved God.

Difference between knight of faith and knight of infinite resignation: The knight of infinite resignation has accepted the loss of everything and doesn’t think more of it. The knight of faith both accepts the loss and believes, in the moment, that it is not lost. So the knight of infinite resignation is defended from the future loss of everything because he never gets anything more, while the knight of faith is both defended from the future loss of everything, and also gets to live a normal life gaining things. He is living as if everything is both lost and gained. The knight of faith is absurdist.

What is existentialism? It’s when you believe that you have to create internally meaning in life, because meaning does not come from an external source.

Problem 1: Is there such a thing as a teleological suspension of the ethical?

Overall, the argument is that ethics are universal, but faith (a divine personal relationship) can be an exception to the rule. But the exception should not be a rule itself. So ethics can be temporarily be excepted under leap-of-faith conditions that transcend.

Telos is everything outside the universal. Ethics are universal.

Faith is a paradox where the individual is higher than the universal. It’s like individual < universal < individual.

You don’t need to understand faith to think you understand the world. So Pagans didn’t have faith.

And the paradox isn’t temptation itself.

Kierkegaard can’t find any stories comparable to Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is not a tragic hero, says he can understand the tragic hero, but not Abraham. The tragic hero is still ethical - they’re making the sacrifice for an ethical greater good. Abraham is not - he’s doing it purely from a position of faith. It’s even an ethical bad. “One cannot weep over Abraham. One approaches him with a horror religiosus…”

Abraham is paradoxically justified by being the particular individual, not the universal. Because anyone else would not be justified.

People who think, “It is to be judged according to the result” are arrogant and miserable. Because no one like that is great, but they are often secure in a solid position with good prospects. The hero only gets the result when it’s all over, and that’s not why or how he became a hero - he was a hero when he started.

Mary is also an absurd hero. How she got pregnant. She’s not a hero, like Abraham is not a hero. She’s just placed in a paradox.

Problem 2: Is there such a thing as an absolute duty toward God?

The phenomenon that Abraham experienced did not benefit him in any way. He was made worse in every way, but he still did it. Either there is an absolute duty to God, or there is some other explanation for what happened to Abraham.

He explains how faith is not communicable. It is too deeply personal and rooted in the individual’s relationship with the divine. Faith is an absolute commitment, makes ethics relative.

Key quote:

The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual … determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. The paradox can also be expressed by saying that there is an absolute duty toward God; for in this relationship of duty the individual as an individual stands related absolutely to the absolute.

Faith itself cannot be mediated into the universal, for it would thereby be destroyed. Faith is this paradox, and the individual absolutely cannot make himself intelligible to anybody.

The tragic hero renounces himself in order to express the universal, the knight of faith renounces the universal in order to become the individual.

Problem 3: Was Abraham ethically defensible in keeping silent about his purpose before Sarah, before Eleazar, before Isaac?

Kierkegaard argues that faith is inward and can’t be communicated outwards. If it were possible to communicate, there wouldn’t be a paradox - it’d be back into the realm of the universal (ethical) instead of the absolute (faith). Faith requires Abraham to act in certain ways that contradict ethical norms and human logic.

He also argues that Abraham’s silence is another way the teleological suspension of the ethical is happening. And that concealment is part of navigating faith.

epilogue

Genuine faith is rare and difficult to attain. Lots of people think they have it, but don’t realize the existential commitment involved. People misunderstand faith and try to put it inside ethical and rational boundaries. Kierkegaard cal for a renewed understanding of faith that reflects its complexity, paradoxes, and existential attributes.

Every generation has to figure their own thing out. They get a little bit of context from the previous generation, but it’s always different.

Generations should focus on the task set for them.

Faith is the highest passion and many people don’t achieve it.

either/or

preface

There are two points of view, described as characters, A and B. A will explain how to live the aesthetic life. B will explain how to live the ethical life.

Disapsalmata

Themes explored: melancholy and despair, irony and detachment, happiness, individualism and isolation.

Artists are misunderstood and in pain.

It’s best to be rational, but rational people are horrible.

Living is horrible, but it is to be savoured.

Generally speaking, the imperfection in everything human is that its aspirations are achieved only by way of their opposites.

To have the best sense of how things really are in a given domain, you have to be outside of that domain. (not completely correct, but roughly)

Pain and humour are very closely related.

My sorrow is my castle.

Some people feel that their “bad” moods are “good”. In a familiar kind of way.

Folk literature is a lot about desire.

Wonderful things in childhood become everynothing.

43 It’s easy to perform active things, but hard to look inside yourself.

Things are hard to grasp onto or make sense of. It can feel good and bad.

Life’s simple pleasures are worth focusing on.

Kierkegaard found too early what life is all about.

63 People are hedging everything too much, not really living life.

67 Either you’re faithful to a partner and you suffer from rejecting new experiences or you aren’t and you have to find a new partner.

Notable:

In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

76 Philosophers use actuality as a sign for something they can’t exactly point to.

84 He has disdain for the lack of seriousness and intensity of people in doing things.

He was sure of the immortality of the soul in his youth, but now he can’t even remember how he could have believed in it.

He talks so frequently about his soul being low/exhausted/doubting.

View everything in the model of eternity.

Pleasure disappoints, possibility does not.

Too much sentimentality is “bad for the health”.

THE IMMEDIATE EROTIC STAGES OR THE MUSICAL-EROTIC

Kierkegaard explores aesthetic life, contrasting different musical characters and how they mirror different erotic ways of being. Music is the language of the immediate. So erotic themes are better explored in music, because they can be felt rather than explained. Don Giovanni is the archetype of musical-erotic.

He says how Mozart lucked into his abilities like Homer lucked into his stories (about the Trojan wars). He expresses a lot of admiration and importance to Mozart, seems to identify with him. “Last pillar supporting me.”

Any future age will deem Mozart unworthy of being considered the best.

Faust is historical and in writing, so every age will have its Faust. Don Giovanni is music and about the present, so there can be only one.

He sees Don Giovanni as the aesthetic ideal, both the character and the piece.

Christianity brought sensuality into the world by highlighting the opposite of sensuality, excluding sensuality.

The greek god of erotic love (eros) does not engage in erotic love - he is the reason it can happen for everyone else. The greek god of painful longing would not experience painful longing. Others get to have the properties of the god, only if they worship that god. The properties are manifested in the people, and the god is the opposite of it. In this way, Christianity posited sensuality-erotic as a principle.

The ear is the most spiritually gifted sense, with music and language. Other media have space as “their element”, while music has time. Music only exists while it’s being performed, which other media can exist moment-to-moment. That makes music a more spiritual artform. Harder to break apart in the moment.

The more religious music is, the more words and less sounds there are.

an intoxication with erotic love can also have two effects, either a heightened transparent joy of life or a concentrated obscure depression.

only when there is an object is there desire; only when there is desire is there an object.

Desire and the object of desire come into existence as a pair, at the same time.

When insanity has a mental basis, it is always due to a hardening at some point in the consciousness.

Music is a bandage, not a cure, for mental illness. A root cause has to be fixed.

Greek desire is characterized by seeking a new lover, then getting bored of them. The desire is purely physical, not sensual. The Greek accidentally loves many, and accidentally falls for one after another. Whereas Don Juan is intentional, sensuos - unfaithful, he seduces all. Sensuous love doesn’t expect or desire committed love back.

He (Don Giovanni) does not have that kind of continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music, which is over as soon as the sound has stopped and comes into existence again only when it sounds once again.

It’s impossible to write a different Don Juan after Mozart. Every generation will have their new kind of Faust.

THE TRAGIC IN ANCIENT DRAMA REFLECTED IN THE TRAGIC IN MODERN DRAMA

He explains how the individual in ancient dramas inevitably suffers from outside phenomena while the individual in modern dramas inevitably suffers from their own decisions.

If someone sins, and they say that sin is because of how they were raised, then they might get lenience in punishment at first. Then they will realize the sin is within them, and that sin has to be overcome. They become the tragic hero.

Guilt vs. Sorrow: a child suffering provokes guilt while an adult suffering provokes sorrow. Guilt is “I should do something next time” while sorrow is, “I should contemplate what was lost”. In modern tragedies, pain is greater. In ancient times (greek tragedy), sorrow was greater.

in Greece; the wrath of the gods has no ethical character, only esthetic ambiguity

While in Christianity, god gives ethical punishments.

The Greeks do not express themselves figuratively simply because their lives did not have the reflection required for this.

SILHOUETTES PSYCHOLOGICAL DIVERSION

Kierkegaard explores the individual, subjective experience. Personal perception and emotions tend to beat out the usual moral standards. Immediate, transient experiences are so intense, that they can override other kinds of rationality. He explores desire quite deeply, and how it shapes relationships.

I call them Silhouettes partly to suggest at once by the name that I draw them from the dark side of life and partly because, like silhouettes, they are not immediately visible. If! pick up a silhouette, I have no impression of it, cannot arrive at an actual conception of it; only when I hold it up toward the wall and do not look at it directly but at what appears on the wall, only then do I see it. So it is also with the picture I want to show here, an interior picture that does not become perceptible until I see through the exterior. Perhaps there is nothing striking about the exterior, but when I look through it, only then do I discover the interior picture, which is what I want to show, an interior picture that is too delicate to be externally perceptible, since it is woven from the soul’s faintest moods.

Faust is like Don Giovanni, but coming from a place of needing one feminine soul to complete himself. The woman he captures reveres him and in comparison to him, finds herself as nothing becoming nothing. Whereas the nun Don Giovanni seduces, she gives up everything to gain him, then loses him too. But she chooses not to lose her love for him, so that she still has something. And she is exceptionally angry about her losses. She is more of an equal. And Don Giovanni wants her again once she becomes this new person.

THE UNHAPPIEST ONE

Boring. Mostly skimmed.

THE FIRST LOVE

A creation is a production out of nothing, but the occasion is the nothing that lets everything come forth.

Not that interesting.

ROTATION OF CROPS

Kierkegaard points out that boredom is highly problematic. He proposes a solution, “rotation of crops”, where one should make a habit of fundamentally changing one’s approach and content of life. He then goes on to make counter-arguments to that approach, expressing that for happiness, meaning, and transcendence to the divine needs more commitment.

Boredom is highly problematic.

Children are most problematic when they become bored. Eliminating people because they are boring is terrible, but somehow feels necessary.

Boredom is rife through historical stories. Groups of people getting bored are as problematic as individuals.

All humans are boring.

those who do not bore themselves generally bore others; those, however, who bore themselves entertain others.

Boredom isn’t cancelled out by work. It isn’t the opposite of idleness.

England is a model nation of riding boredom. Admiration or indifference are treated the same with their all-encompassing boredom. The same is true of those with monotonous enthusiasm.

“Rotating the crops” doesn’t mean just changing the topsoil. It means changing the crops and the method of cultivation.

You need to gain control over your ability to forget and recall.

The more poetically one remembers something, the more effectively they forget it.

It’s useful to forget the pleasant just as much as the unpleasant.

Your friends should change, but then you eventually won’t recognize them. If they don’t change, there’s something wrong with them.

With your S.O., one of you will find something wrong with things, then one will be unfaithful, then both will be unfaithful, but then divorce is too much of a pain.

Relationships of all kinds limit your freedom as an individual.

Continually vary yourself, anticipate and leverage your changing moods.

It’s best to be arbitrary in a very particular, satisfying way.

The so-called social pleasures for which we prepare ourselves a week or a fortnight in advance are of little significance, whereas even the most insignificant thing can accidentally become a rich material for amusement.

THE SEDUCER’S DIARY

Read on text-to-speech. Yeah, it’s some solid literature. The dude is creepy and unethical by modern standards. Modern aesthetes aren’t like that, maybe because it’s easier to be an aesthete these days. Maybe that’s why contrasting the aesthetic vs. ethical lifestyle doesn’t feel as relevant. The truly ethical modern lifestyle has to be balanced to be maximally effective, it’s not sustainable without indulging in aesthetics, and sustainability of a life practice is more important than short-term performance 99% of the time, and anyone with any self-awareness knows this.

31 Mar 2024