Something About Kierkegaard

Continued from here.

A note on Kierkegaard. In his time, the nation of Denmark believed itself to be Christian because each and every citizen could state confidently that he had been instructed on the dogmas of the Christian faith and that he believed them to be true. The primary focus of Kierkegaard's mission was to unsettle the Danes from this notion by making a stark distinction in his authorship between knowing something intellectually and religiously-ethically incorporating that knowledge into one's heart and soul. As far as Christianity was concerned, the former did nothing, was nothing. The latter, however, meant not only a changed heart but a changed life - a new birth, if you will.

 In this mission, Kierkegaard was explicitly working on the assumption that for a changed life to occur as Christianity demanded, work must be done by each individual person within their subjective personality, work that only they could do. Rote following of commands, dogma of the Church, or Kierkegaard's own authority as an eminent thinker in Danish society, would not activate this potential in his readers. So he highlighted in both the structure and arguments of his books and in the plan of his whole authorship to withhold satisfaction from normal reader expectations, so that each reader would begin to do that deep, mysterious human agency thing that was needed.

Whether he was successful or not, whether he was altogether too artful in his production, is for the literary and philosophical critics to say.  But it is not true in the slightest to find in him support for the post-modernist presumption that all talk of faith or morality is groundless or nonsense. Contra Conant, the Postscript was not a work dedicated to branding high philosophical speculation about faith and morals as nonsense; to the contrary, it mapped a road of rationality to its pinnacle of perfection in a Paradox, and said, "No further." In doing so, Kierkegaard was not denigrating rationality or the truths of human reason, but bounding it all within its proper sphere where it is most effective. In this, he was in solidarity with the tradition of Kant, Aquinas, Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato.