Absurdism+4+Existentialism+and+Kierkegaard

=Søren Aabye Kierkegaard= Søren Kierkegaard & ExistentialismThe individual Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on the 5th of May 1813, and died in early November 1855, at the age of 42. He is widely considered the first existentialist, or the father of existentialism, alongside Friedrich Nietzsche.

1. Life of Søren Kierkegaard 2. Philosophies/Writings of Kierkegaard 3. Existentialism

1.Life of Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard was the son of an extremely religious man, Michael Kierkegaard. Michael had cursed god in his youth as a shepherd, and believed that his entire family was cursed because of his mistake. Michael ascended the ladder of the new merchant class, using his knowledge of wool, gained through his life as a shepherd as the basis for a successful merchant practice. Michael had seven children, five of whom would be claimed by death before he was. This he believed to be a manifestation of the curse that he had unknowingly placed upon his family. Søren was born in 1813, to Michael's second wife, who had been a maid in the household that Michael had established with his first wife. As the years progressed Michael became more and more religious, being harsh with his family believing that the entire family was cursed and would suffer for his misdeeds.

Søren himself was small and sickly, picked on in school for his size and his weakness. His wit however was extremely sharp, and he was reportedly capable of reducing these brawnier classmates to tears. He enrolled in the university at Copenhagen at the age of seventeen and at the behest of his father. That was in 1830, after he'd already suffered the death of two older siblings.

At university he found himself in his element. He excelled, much as his older brother Peter had before him. Here he was influenced by a number of teachers, one of whom he'd incur altercations with at a later point in his life. Among these were Møller, Sibbern, and Martensen. He considered Martensen one of his primary intellectual rivals, despite his being five years Kierkegaard's senior, and an instructor at the university.

In 1834 Søren's mother and the last of his sisters died. Around that time the young Kierkegaard began to rebel against his father's desires and power, spending money freely on pleasurable items, including clothes, food, drink, and similar. He expressed a dissatisfaction with this aspect of living however, feeling himself to be a distant observer, learning what had already been formulated and contributing nothing to the sum of knowledge.

Then, in 1835 Kierkegaard discovered the reason for his father's pious nature and belief in a curse on the family, this being his terror that he, Michael Kierkegaard, had called down the wrath of god on him and his family by cursing god's name. In 1838 Michael Kierkegaard died suddenly, and seemingly in response to it the young Søren returned to his studious habits and completed his master's degree of theology in 1840. He also seemed to take on his father's superstitious nature, believing perhaps that his father had died as a sacrifice for his own sins.

Then in September of 1840 he became engaged to the daughter of a civil servant, Regine Olsen. This was to be one of the hardest years of his life by his own report in his diaries. In 1841 he broke off the engagement and worked to drive Regine, who attempted to salvage the relationship, away from him. He claimed he wanted to drive her to marry another man, but his motives remain unclear.

After this Søren Kierkegaard buried himself in writing working freelance, until he died in 1855. The rest of his life was far from free of conflict however. His personal life came under attack by a journalist named Møller in 1845. He responded to this vicious attack in a local journal, but found himself fighting new public notions when a paper reminiscent of today's tabloids selected him as a favorite target of derision until he was publicly shamed everywhere he went in Copenhagen.

A year before he died he attended the funeral of one of the most powerful religious (Christian) leaders in the city, Bishop Mynster. Martensen, his old rival and instructor from the university eulogized the deceased, and praised him as a religious figure. Kierkegaard took extreme issue with the view that the Bishop Mynster had been a good Christian and set out on a crusade against Martensen, the Church, and the Church's power. Martensen meanwhile took the role of the ranking religious official in Copenhagen.

Kierkegaard continued this battle for the next year until his death. He founded a local journal to assist this battle and spared no expense in his holy war. This was where his time, wit, and money were invested. His accusations were that the church had become a secular institution, more interested in temporal power than spiritual enlightenment; he desired not to tear the church down or destroy faith, but rather to encourage the church to return to the basic teachings of the bible, and encourage humanity in that way.

2. Philosophies/Writings of Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard was a rather prolific writer, keeping journals his entire life and writing a master's thesis in an unexpected style, entirely surprising some of his instructors, and failing to impress others. This paper __On the Concept of Irony__ was published in 1841, finished just a year after its conception. After that he continued to write furiously until his early death, at forty two years of age.

Much of his writing focused on the individual, or society with a constant undercurrent of the relationship between the two. This naturally also dragged powerful social constructions, like the church, the government, or the "public" as he addresses it, into the equation. This is exemplified by his conflicts with the church and Martensen in his later life, but also in his rocky relationship with his father, and his conflict with the journalist Møller. But it was really the individual that was his muse, the solitary man or woman and their progression, he claimed that society serves the individual, not the masses, or at least that it should. He posited that the personal, the individual slipped from one stage of life, that is maturity, to another.

The first of these stages was the Aesthetic, where pleasure was pursued, often for its own sake. It is, all told, a very hedonistic stage of life. The second is the Ethical, in which the individual realizes the insignificant, irreverent, and irrelevant nature of the Aesthetic values and despairs, looking to take part in a meaningful society. In this stage the individual looks beyond themselves, developing and using an ethical system to govern their interactions with other individuals, and frequently learning more about themselves when viewing the contrast between themselves and others. This stage is also where the highly important birth of individual subjectivity occurs. The final stage is the religious, at which the suffering that the individual experiences through the rest of his or her life is still felt, but it is tempered by a faith and knowledge of a higher power. For Kierkegaard this was the christian god. Notably Kierkegaard's life process was reflected in this guide to human maturation that he created.

His faith was one of the most integral parts of his philosophy, despite the apparent contradictions that it created. Because of his belief and reliance on subjective truth. There was no such thing as absolute truth to Kierkegaard, that was a figment of the ethical stage, the religious stage consisted of a personal connection to god, and through faith the affirmation of their personal truth. Because of the personal level of interaction with God, and the personal determination of what various happenings mean Kierkegaard's style of writing frequently acted as an action of irony and paradox, taking away knowledge to display the fact that God could not be known by man. He was likewise adamant that belief was not a logical thing, rather it was a statement of faith, standing against reason on a level of personal recognition. There were two aspects of Christianity that continued to cause difficulties in his philosophy and he centered some of his writing around them. The first of these is that the individual does not meet the creator until death, but suicide is not an option. The second is that according to the Christians freedom is a punishment, not a reward, yet humanity loves its freedom.

Some of the more poignant and relevant elements of Kierkegaard's writing, specifically those thoughts that are echoed by Artaud appear in his essay "The Present Age". These thoughts are focused primarily on "the public", an abstract force which can never truly be realized and which people only exist as a part of, when they are not a part of something else. When they sit and do nothing, having no sense of self or purpose, and do not despair of their lack of purpose, because even this despairing gives them some sense of being, they are a being despairing their existence, and that gives them identity outside of being "the public". He blames much of this particular phenomenon on the press. He also argues against language, and suggests that communication is largely impossible in today's world, largely because society is a largely passionless thing in this day and age. The passion, skill, and daring that would at one point have made a man a hero, no longer do so. In society's passionless haze of egalitarianism such things may make him skillful, or insane, but they make him no more of a man. In his words:

"The world's deepest misfortune is the unhappy objectivity (in the sense of the absence of personality) characteristic of all speech and teaching, and that the one great mechanical discovery after the other has made it possible to expound doctrines impersonally in constantly increasing measure. There no longer exist human beings: there are no lovers, no thinkers, etc. By means of the press the human race has enveloped itself in a atmospheric what-not of thoughts, feelings, moods; even of resolutions and purposes, all of which are no one's property, since they belong to all and none. It is a torture to the soul to note the callous incorrigibility with which a human being can resort to wherever he thinks there is some truth to be had, for the sole purpose of learning to expound it,so that his music box may had this piece to its repertoire; but as for him doing anything about it the thing never even occurs to him."

3. Existentialism
Existentialism in general and Kierkegaard in particular are two powerful influences on Antonin Artaud and his creation of the theatre of cruelty, later grouped into the category known as Absurdism. There is a reason that it is frequently said that Kierkegaard influenced Artaud, and not existentialism. This reason is that existentialism is difficult to define. It is a vague topic and mindset, which apparently is bound together almost entirely by despair. That doesn't mean that existentialism is a harsh, sad, or otherwise dreadful topic though. It is actually rather the reverse. It is a thought pattern about life, and the despair that occurs inside of it. Kierkegaard believed for example that philosophy did not go far enough, it examined, objectively what could be known, without examining what he called "the truth". That is, philosophy observes life, but never really partakes of it, never really lives. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche called forerunners of existentialism, and both were radical individualists. It does not follow however that existentialism and radical idealism are one and the same. Notably both of these "forerunners" were also convinced that human behavior has some outside limitations placed upon it, that some of our choices are already made for us, by either god, or out own inescapable natures.

C.S. Wyatt addresses the nature of existentialism quite thoroughly at his website: []. As he truly sets into defining existentialism he hopes to assist our understanding by letting us know some of the things it is not, including the following: the good life is a materialistic, hedonistic, or honorable one; that the individual is not subservient or inferior to society, to accept life and the world without questioning, that science is a panacean solution, or that people are naturally good.

One of the assumptions that most existentialist theory submits is that humans are not naturally good, beings, that we act as children, and are brutish, thieving, horribly little monsters. "“Mine” is naturally a child’s way of thinking. It is soon followed by “I didn’t do it!”" says Wyatt. Under this creed the existentialists refuse to believe that the idea of morality should change with it. Just because it is not in our nature to be good and charitable doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be. The existentialist argument is that we are at our best when we extend ourselves and fight our nature.

Wyatt's next method of establishing a method and definition for existentialism is by comparing it to Buddhism. He says that Buddhism, like existentialism, sees all of life as suffering, and that unlike existentialism this is accepted by the Buddhists, their goal is to rise above the suffering by leading good lives. The existentialists refuse to take such a way out and fight tooth and nail to carve out a meaning from the world of suffering they find themselves immersed in.

Finally Wyatt displays a short list of themes that are central to existentialism: the idea that mankind has free will, that life is filled with choices, and that whatever an individual does when faced with these choices will probably have at least some negative consequences, that some things don't have explanations, and that one must follow through on one's actions.

Existentialism is a hard thing to nail down entirely, but it always seems to come back to the idea of the individual and individual decisions, including the fact that we as solitary beings are capable of making those decisions regardless of law or custom previously associated with them, and that we are responsible for the consequences that ensue from the actions stemming from these decisions, and that these reactions, along with our freedom are things we must face and accept to truly understand and have power over ourselves and our human condition.

Bibliography

Wyatt, C.S.. "Existential Primer: Introduction." //Tameri Guide for Writers: Index Page//. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 May 2010. <[]>.

Wyatt, C.S.. "Existential Primer: Søren Kierkegaard." //Tameri Guide for Writers: Index Page//. N.p., n.d. Web. 3 May 2010. <[]>.

"Søren Kierkegaard (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)." //Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy//. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 May 2010. <[]>.

AUDEN, W H. //KIERKEGAARD//. London: Cassell & Company, 1955. Print.