On Kierkegaard’s Birthday

“A detached reason that cannot enter into the viewpoints of others cannot be fully objective because it cannot access whole areas of the real world of human experience. Kierkegaard taught me the importance of attending to the internal logic of positions, not just how they stand up to outside scrutiny. This is arguably even more vital today than it was in Kierkegaard’s time. In a pluralist world, there is no hope of understanding people who live according to different values if we only judge them from the outside, from what we imagine to be an objective point of view but is really one infused with our own subjectivity... But perhaps Kierkegaard’s most provocative message is that both work on the self and on understanding the world requires your whole being and cannot be just a compartmentalised, academic pursuit.”

Julian Baggini - https://aeon.co/essays/happy-birthday-kierkegaard-we-need-you-now. Kierkegaard’s 212th birthday was on 13 May. The essay summarizes his persistent relevance. I have just finished a book on empathizing with different religious viewpoints, which is scheduled for publication later this year. I’ve come to realize that my approach to the study of philosophy, religion and ethics remains quite Kierkegaardian. I hadn’t realized how rare that is in philosophy, but Baggini summarizes his uniqueness quite well.

I suppose it’s worth noting a point of contrast with the above article in that Kierkegaard doesn’t speak of a leap of faith so much as a leap to faith in his Journals and Papers (III, 20). He talked about it in this context as a kind of boiling point. On the one hand, faith is a disposition to be developed. On the other hand, it is totally inadequate in the face of the qualitative difference between our immanent materiality and transcendent otherness. Leaping to a faithful disposition involves a kind of pathos, passion, and infinite interestedness. Ferreira discusses this well in the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (p. 217-218). Whatever Kierkegaard meant by paradox, it spoke to this human experience of waiting for a boiling point that seems beyond our control. His caricature of Hegel made the point in a different way: “Leaping means to belong essentially to the earth and to respect the law of gravity so that the leap is merely the momentary, but flying means to be set free from telluric conditions, something that is reserved exclusively for winged creatures, perhaps also for inhabitants of the moon, perhaps – and perhaps that is also where the [Hegelian] system will at long last find its true readers” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 124). One wonders whether Kierkegaard will be read on the moon someday.