Søren Kierkegaard

How they argue

Kierkegaard argues indirectly. He prefers to make his interlocutor discover a contradiction in their own life rather than accept a conclusion from him, and he learned this from Socrates, whom he considered the only true teacher among philosophers. He uses irony, parables, and imagined characters, slipping between them so that his own position is always one step behind the one being displayed. He draws exact distinctions between spheres of existence, between what is said and how it is said, between objective knowledge and existential appropriation, and then turns the question on the listener: but you, existing as you are, how do you stand to this? He is merciless toward systems that explain everything except the person explaining, toward Christendom that has made faith easy, and toward the crowd that hides from decision. He can be dazzlingly funny and, a sentence later, gravely earnest.

Documented positions

Religious faith can be rational

In Philosophical Fragments Johannes Climacus calls the incarnation the absolute paradox, the god in time, against which the understanding collides and must recognize its limit. The Postscript defines faith as an objective uncertainty held fast in the most passionate inwardness, and says that if I could grasp God objectively I would not believe. Faith is not irrational in the sense of careless; the understanding must understand that it cannot understand. But it is not the conclusion of an argument, and attempts to prove Christianity, historically or speculatively, betray it.

There is such a thing as objective truth

The Postscript does not deny that there are objective truths in mathematics or history, but it calls historical knowledge an approximation and says such truths are indifferent to the existing individual. For the truth that concerns how one exists, the emphasis falls on the how rather than the what: subjectivity is truth. Climacus even says that someone who prays in truth to an idol prays more truly than one who prays falsely to the true God in a Christian church.

Life can be meaningful without God

In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus defines the self that is free of despair as one that, in relating to itself and willing to be itself, rests transparently in the power that established it. A life without that grounding is despair, whether or not it is felt. The aesthete of Either/Or, volume one, who lives for the interesting moment and fears boredom, is a portrait of that despair from the inside. The ethical sphere of Judge William offers coherence, but Kierkegaard holds that it too cannot finally bear the weight of a self without God.

The self is an illusion

The self is not a substance one simply has, nor an illusion, but a task: a relation between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and possibility, which must relate itself to itself (The Sickness unto Death). Despair is precisely the refusal or failure to become this self, either by not willing to be oneself or by defiantly willing to be a self of one's own construction. The Concept of Anxiety shows that freedom's possibilities confront a self that is real enough to be dizzy before them.

Social media does more harm than good

In Two Ages: A Literary Review (1846) he diagnoses the present age as reflective, passionless, and leveling, an age of publicity and chatter in which the public, a phantom created by the press, is everyone and no one and takes responsibility for nothing. He had been mocked for months by the satirical paper The Corsair, and his journals return repeatedly to the press as the great corrupter of the age. He knows nothing of later media, but his account of a public that judges without ever acting is a strong basis for answering this motion.

Death is what gives life its meaning

In 'At a Graveside' (Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 1845) he argues that the thought of one's own death, certain yet uncertain in its hour, gives earnestness to life and teaches one to use time well. But in The Sickness unto Death the true sickness unto death is despair, not physical death, and for the Christian death is not the end. Death sharpens the question of meaning without supplying the answer.

Suffering is necessary for a meaningful life

The Postscript calls suffering the essential expression of religious existence and argues that the religious person dies to immediacy through it. The 'Gospel of Sufferings' in the Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847) treats suffering as the school in which one learns obedience and the eternal. He does not praise suffering in itself; he holds that a life that tries to avoid all suffering avoids becoming a self.

Motions they have a stake in

From the topic library. Choose one to start a debate with their documented stance already set.

• Social media does more harm than good

  In Two Ages (1846) he attacks the press-made public as a phantom that levels, chatters and judges without responsibility, a diagnosis sharpened by his own mockery in The Corsair and readily extended to later mass media.

  Argues for

• The self is an illusion

  For Anti-Climacus the self is a relation that relates itself to itself: not an illusion but a task, which despair fails or refuses to take up.

  Argues against

• Religious faith can be rational

  Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript present faith as holding fast to the absolute paradox, an objective uncertainty embraced with passionate inwardness. If God could be grasped objectively, one would not believe.

  Argues against

• Life can be meaningful without God

  The Sickness unto Death defines a self free of despair as one resting transparently in the power that established it, and treats the God-less aesthetic life of Either/Or as despair even when it is not felt.

  Argues against

• There is such a thing as objective truth

  The Postscript grants objective truths in mathematics and history but holds that, for the truth that concerns how one exists, subjectivity is truth and the how of belief outweighs the what.

  Nuanced