Kierkegaard vs. Hegel on Religion and Individuality

foreign [Music] Ard on individuality modern philosophy has clear birth and death dates 1637 marks its beginning with the publication of Descartes discourse on method and 1831 marks its end with hegel's death modern philosophy begins with Descartes who ignored all previous philosophy and built a new system a closed and complete system which was not just an ordered and outlined summary or Summa of theology like Aquinas this closed system building ended with Hegel whose system is the most complete so complete that it blows up like an over-inflated balloon Hegel was the last metaphysical system builder nearly every

major philosophical development since Hegel began with the rejection of Hegel in many different directions Marxism atheistic existentialism theistic existentialism personalism positivism logical positivism analytic philosophy pragmatism phenomenology deconstructionism we're no longer living in the era of modern philosophy we are post-modern that term post-modern is not very clear about what it affirms what it is very clear about what it denies it denies the enlightenment project of building a complete rational system as Hegel did Hegel is a kind of negative Touchstone or a benchmark or a turning point in Philosophy from the modern to the postmodern which as

Aristotle was a touchstone and Benchmark for ancient Greek philosophy and his Aquinas was for medieval philosophy after all three of these thinkers philosophy became more skeptical and critical of itself and of Reason itself after the Hellenic age Hellenistic philosophy in late Greece and in Rome became much more modest and human and practical it's two main schools where epicureanism and stoicism late medieval philosophy became increasingly skeptical because of nominalism and the positive thinkers were Mystics not rational system builders the same thing in more diverse forms happened after Hegel after the balloon had popped there is a

remarkable parallelism between the most radical critic of the first great modern philosopher and the most radical critic of the last great modern philosopher that is between Pascal's critique of Descartes and kierkegaard's critique of Hegel we could label the issue common to both critiques existentialism versus rationalism as long as we did not reduce what we meant by existentialism to irrationalism and as long as we did not reduce what we meant by reason to calculating reason existentialists come in many different varieties but all existentialists both atheistic and theistic focused on concrete individual human existence rather than on

metaphysical Essences as known by abstract reason but to understand both Pascal and character guard we also need to focus on a more concrete issue than the issue of reason we need to focus on the issue that was the central issue for both Pascal and Kierkegaard which was Jesus Christ himself very few establishment Scholars of either Pascal or Kierkegaard today dare to do that they either ignore or patronize that focus and that Center thus they radically misunderstand both of these two philosophers they were existentialist Christians not Christian existentialists for both Christ was not an adjective but

a noun Pascal began by identifying the four most Salient pieces of data for any philosophy to explain as the universal human longing for certainty the universal longing for happiness the universal failure to achieve certainty and the universal failure to achieve happiness notice that these data are all concrete and human and practical they're about human existence not essences Pascal's data was the christ-shaped hole in the human heart or the christ-shaped keyhole in the door of human life and Pascal then argued that Christ Alone fully explained all four of these basic data that Christ was the strangely

shaped key the only key that fit the strangely shaped lock in the door of the human life Pascal also made the same Central Point in another way he identified the four Great questions of philosophy as the meaning of life of death of man and of God and asserted boldly that whoever knows Christ knows these four things and whoever does not does not kindergarten philosophy has the very same unfashionable Center as pascals in his last Complete Book the point of view for my work as an author Kierkegaard tells us the strategy and purpose of all of

his many and very varied works and he says that the single point of everything he had ever written was becoming a Christian usually the connection is indirect but it is always there Christ is the end and Center that unifies all that character guard ever wrote unsurprisingly the book where he explains that is the one book that most guard Scholars most deciduously ignore even though it is the most authoritative guide to Kierkegaard because it is the only one character guard himself gave us it takes a very clever scholar to ignore an elephant in the middle of

the living room from Pascal's point of view who Descartes was both a Christian and a philosopher but not a Christian philosopher in Descartes thought Christianity and philosophy were separated as radically as the mind and the body spirit and matter from kierkegaard's point of view Hegel claimed to be a Christian but he subverted Christianity by reducing it to a Mythic primitive version of his own pantheistic philosophy which was the higher truth both Descartes and Hegel exalted reason above Faith philosophy above theology science above religion and both were more concerned with perfecting the human secular temporal Society

than with the sanctification and salvation of Eternal individual Souls and both Pascal and character guard thought this set of priorities was upside down they were the two most centrally and completely Christian philosophers of modern times I shall summarize Hegel first then kierkegaard's critique and alternative Hegel emerges historically from Kant through his response to the central point of cons epistemology namely what Kant called his copernican revolution in philosophy which was the redefining of Truth as not the Mind conforming to his object which all previous philosophers had assumed but the object conforming to the mind all form

and meaning and Truth itself was imposed on the object by the subject though this was not subjective in the sense that it was individual and free but it was Universal and necessary this was Khan's attempt to answer hume's skepticism but it actually exacerbated that skepticism since Hume at least allowed that we had probable knowledge of objective reality through our senses while Kant denied that we could ever know any things in themselves or objective reality as it really is we could know only the appearances that were structured by our own forms of knowing both sensory space

and time and logical the basic categories of thought and metaphysical the ideas of God's self and world as what he called the ideas of pure reason these three structures were necessary and Universal but they were subjective they were from us not from reality all categories were our categories not realities categories now Hegel perceived that Khan's dualism between knowable phenomena and unknowable things in themselves was self-contradictory if we could not ever know things in themselves how could we know that such things existed at all how could we know unknowables as Wittgenstein later said in order to

draw a limit to thought thought must think both sides of that limit think about that for a minute not only to think what x is but also to think that X is is to think X otherwise we would not be thinking that X is but that something else is we can't think what we can't think we can only think what we can think so even Kant can't turn can't into can so Hegel simply dropped the distinction between thought and being between reason and reality between the rational and the real and he famously said that the

real is the rational and the rational is the real that did not mean that he returned to Common Sense realism but he departed from it even more seriously than Khan did Kant at least believed in the distinction between reason and reality he believed in the existence of objective reality though he said we could not know it as it really was Hegel denied the very existence of anything outside thought thus he replaced Khan's so-called critical idealism or idealism with what's called absolute idealism everything is idea for Hegel Kant was Radical because he reversed the causal relationship

between thought and its object by his copernican Revolution but Kant agreed that they were in a causal relationship thus that there was still a distinction between the two but Hegel collapsed constableism between thought and its object for Hegel everything is thought or Spirit Divine thought everything is a stage in the progress of God or Spirit coming to know himself a stage in the process or inner evolution of divine thought including all the things in the world and all human beings and all human thoughts and Hegel made an elaborate map of the structures and stages of

this Divine thought a map of everything so for Hegel everything is identified with God God is identified with spirit Spirit is identified with thought and thought is identified with reason even history says Hegel is a rational process so Hegel is a rationalist pantheist pantheists claim that all is one that everything is a part of God or a form of God or for Hegel a stage of God's progress but hegel's God is not a distinct person like the god of the Bible God is everything so for Hegel there are not two kinds of reality the changing

and the unchanging but only one all pantheists say that but while other pantheists usually deny the reality of time and temporal reality Hegel denies the reality of the Timeless even God changes everything is a stage in God's progress everything evolves because God himself evolves and God is everything in fact God is the very process of spirit evolving and progressing this is historical relativism since everything changes truth itself changes over time truth is historically relative it is this historical relativism not his pantheism or rationalism that the modern world has taken over from Hegel for instance Marx

picked up the idea of historical relativism from Hegel and taught that there were no Universal standards Transcendent to history itself to judge between capitalism and communism and thus every concept and term in one system means something radically different from what it means in the other system all standards of judgment are historically socially and politically relative nothing is timeless for Hegel this lack of Timeless Universal standards means that there is no Universal and unchangeable Justice or natural moral law to judge between nations so Hegel concludes that war is the only possible referee and Authority between nations

so each nation-state is the supreme authority with no Universal Timeless standard outside of them or above them to judge them or to judge between them this is an implicit political totalitarianism and it is one of the themes in Hegel that Kierkegaard most passionately opposes with his typically existentialist emphasis on the free individual Hegel actually identified the state with the kingdom of God on Earth is really undoing the moral revolution of the ancient Jewish prophets who introduced into human history an absolute standard above Kings or tyrants or even Emperors and Empires and that could judge them

care guard not only argued against Hegel he satirized him he wrote that Hegel was a genius and he might have been seen as the greatest thinker of all time if only he had added a single sentence to his works but the lack of that sentence made him a buffoon the sentence is everything I have ever written is an elaborate joke a joke for Kierkegaard is that hegel's philosophy is like a great castle with Outdoors human beings cannot enter it or live in it it is like a book that claims to be the secret of God's

Own inner life but it has human fingerprints on it it's a book that claims to explain everything but it leaves one crucial thing out the existence of the author himself the actual individual who writes the system in reaction to Hegel and to an Era that he saw as increasingly collectivistic and self-forgetting Kierkegaard designed his own Tombstone to read simply the individual ironically the name kirkegaard means churchyard or graveyard Kierkegaard saw the loss of individuality of honest self-consciousness of the inner life and personal responsibility not only in hegel's philosophy but in the whole modern world around

him which was substituting groupthink for I think it tried to read the Zeitgeist the spirit of the times but it ended up reading the times instead of the eternities kierkegaard's own philosophy asks not how thought or Spirit or God progresses through stages as Hegel does but how an individual human being progresses through life and how is that here surprisingly Hegel and his two most important critics Kierkegaard and Marx agree concerning The Logical form or structure of change though not about the content the essential structure or form of all historical change and also of all human

thought for Hegel is dialectical which means for him a kind of three-step Waltz beginning with a thesis which then generates its own antithesis or opposite and then move to a higher synthesis which is not a compromise or a blending but a progress to a higher more comprehensive and inclusive level Marx applied that dialectic to history with Communism as the final stage remarks history moved not by Spirit but by manner Marx was a materialist and ultimately by money and economics thus Marx is a dialectical materialist whereas Hegel was a dialectical spiritualist the content couldn't possibly be

more different but the form was the same Kierkegaard 2 hegel's other great opponent changed the content but kept the form kierkegaard's dialectic is not about the stages of universal history or of the pantheistic progress of God or Spirit or reason but about three very different modes of human existence three different ways an individual can live which Kierkegaard calls the three stages On Life's way they are the stages of spiritual growth the stages of self-discovery or self-maturing the aesthetic or self-indulgent Hedonism a kind of original sin that we're born into then the ethical which is an

essentially conscient view of universal law and moral duty and finally the religious which is essentially a personal relationship with the god of the Bible the essential categories of good versus evil in the aesthetic stage are the interesting versus the boring even pleasure gets boring it does not fulfill our desire so we seek diversions and distractions as Pascal said including Wars the essential categories of good versus evil in the ethical stage are obedience versus Disobedience to moral law conceived as universal and rational as in God finally the essential categories of good versus evil in the religious

stage are Faith versus Sin Fidelity versus infidelity to God spiritual marriage versus spiritual divorce guard the aesthetic stage does not necessarily mean a Devotion to beauty or art or sense experience which is the literal meaning of the Greek word from which the word aesthetic comes it could be intellectually aesthetic like hegel's philosophy which is a game of Concepts Hegel is a sophisticated intellectual Estee he is a genius stuck in kindergarten and the progress of the individual Up character guards three stages is not predetermined and predestined as progress is for Humanity in general in both Hegel

and Marx rather forget this progress is freely chosen both Hegel and marks deal with Humanity in general not with the individual that's why both deny free choice and free will in the three-stage dialectic of Hegel the third stage the higher synthesis not only unites the thesis and the antithesis but perfects them both and this is true in Kierkegaard too the aesthetic stage which has the minus of seeking only pleasure and the relief of boredom has at least the plus of being concrete and individual and personal and passionate unlike the ethical stage which is abstract and

Universal and impersonal and rational but although the ethical has the plus of being unselfish and morally responsible while the aesthetic stage is selfish and irresponsible yet it has the minus of being abstract and impersonal while the aesthetic is concrete and personal so the religious stage is a higher synthesis of both the other two because it's concrete and individual like the aesthetic and at the same time responsible and unselfish and moral like the ethical the aesthetic is creative but unfaithful the ethical is faithful but uncreative and the religious is both creative and faithful it is what

Marcel called creative fidelity it is even more self-transcending and self-forgetful than the ethical and there is also even more passionate and individual than the aesthetic for it is an infinite passion a passion for eternal life but its passion is Inward and invisible and its outer appearances are humble and ordinary the Supreme drama of human life is an invisible inner drama guard calls this ordinary religious person a night of faith faith is a drama far more dramatic than anything else and the hero of faith is more heroic than the Knights of King Arthur's Roundtable the three

stages are a very useful device for defining basic options in life and classifying both real and fictional people as to which stage they have attained Kierkegaard would probably classify the sophists bacon Hegel and probably Descartes as aesthetic Buddha Confucius Kant Aristotle and Zachary is as ethical although Socrates was also religious he was a Pious agnostic and certainly Augustine and Pascal and the Saints and all repentant Sinners as religious the three stages are not just three different goals that any self can choose and live there are three different meanings of very termed self the estate subordinates

everything and anyone around him to his own happiness which of course also ends in despair the ethical person subordinates his own will and even his own happiness to the impersonal Universal and absolute moral law and the religious person surrenders neither to his individual desires nor to universal law but to God he surrenders his mind in faith and his will in love and his desire and hope and he finds Resurrection through this death finds himself by losing his self karengaard is a psychological Master at describing these three stages in concrete detail especially in either or which

is about the aesthetic versus the ethical and in fear and trembling which is about the ethical versus the religious both these books read much more like a novel than like a philosophical argument either or is a series of fictional letters between a brilliant but dissolute young Playboy Don Juan The Seducer and judge William a middle-aged moralist who sees the inner emptiness of the S Thief fear and trembling is about Abraham's agonizing choice between the ethical absolute which says Thou shalt not murder and the religious absolute The God Who commands him to sacrifice his only son

Isaac both books are about choice not the choice between two things but between two or rather three kinds of choices the aesthetic choice between the interesting and the boring or the selfish and the unselfish the ethical choice between obeying and disobeying the moral law and the religious choice between faith and sin Kierkegaard also describes the uncertainty of someone who is stuck between the stages in the concept of dread which is about angst a kind of anxiety which is anonymous and Universal and also in the sickness unto death which is about despair and also in philosophical

fragments which is I think the profoundest comparison I know between the two most important persons who ever lived Socrates and Jesus and their different concepts of Truth although these are not character guards terms we could say that for the aesthetic person truth is subjective for the ethical person truth is objective and for the religious person truth is relational kindergart actually says that in the religious stage truth is subjectivity but this refers to the passion of the faith of the individual believer in relation to God Truth for the Christian is Christ himself who said I am

the truth the Hebrew word for truth amethyst really means truthfulness it is a property of a person not first of all a proposition kierkegaard's point is the same one that C.S Lewis made in the last battle with the Pagan Saint whom Lewis deliberately named emeth Kierkegaard put the point this way if one who lives in the midst of Christendom and goes up to the house of God the house of the true God with a true concept of God in his knowledge and praise but praise in a false spirit and one who lives in an idolatrous

Community prays with the entire Passion of the infinite although his eyes rest on the image of an idol where is there the most truth the Pagan Praise In fact to God though he worships an idol the Christian prays falsely to the true God and hence in fact worships an idol Socrates and Jesus are kierkegaard's two greatest heroes and as we shall see in the next lecture they were Nietzsche's two greatest villains both kindergarten and Nietzsche saw a western civilization as a planet orbiting around this double star for two thousand years and now detaching itself from

both and becoming either something more than human which is Nietzsche's Superman or something less than human which is character guard's prophecy very much like that of C.S Lewis in the abolition of man and of Aldous Huxley and Brave New World kiergart saw himself as a kind of Christian Socrates making things harder in a world that was trying to make things easier here is a delightful quotation that tells us the origin of his philosophical vocation Kierkegaard is sitting in a park in Copenhagen musing he writes so there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed

into reverie among other thoughts I remember this you are now I said to myself on the way to becoming an old man without being anything and without really undertaking to do anything on the other hand wherever you look around you in literature and in life you see the celebrated names and figures the precious and most heralded men who are the benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier some by Railways others by omnibuses and steamboats others by the telegraph others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of

everything worth knowing and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence easier and easier and yet more and more significant and what are you doing hear my self-communication was interrupted for my cigar had burned out and a new one had to be lit between those two cigars kierkegaard's location was born so I smoked again and then suddenly their flash through my mind the thought you must do something but in as much as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become you must with the same

humanitarian enthusiasm as the others undertake to make something harder this notion pleased me immensely and at the same time it flattered me to think that I like the rest of them would be loved and esteemed by the whole community just like Socrates of course for when all combined in every way to make everything easier and easier there remains only one possible Danger that one want is left although not a felt one that people will want difficulty out of love for mankind therefore I conceived my task to create difficulties everywhere the one thing that character guard

wanted to make harder above all was Christianity not that he wanted to change it into something harder than it is but that he believed his culture had changed it into something easier than it is easier than Christ made it and he saw Hegel as part of this Taming of the Tiger in at least four ways through his historical relativism through his reducing Christianity to a myth for the masses through his pantheism which reduced God to everything and the church too Here Comes everybody and through his dialectic which avoids all hard choices all either oars and

substitutes a higher synthesis for every antithesis but that is not how Christianity has thrived throughout history and throughout the nations of the world wherever Christianity thrives the most is where it is persecuted where it is hard and costly the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church Esther tullian said and wherever Christianity is established and made easy and comfortable wherever it is the default position it always decays and declines and today it is declining rapidly in both numbers and Powers both in quantity and quality in almost all places and All Nations where it

used to be established that is in Christendom or western civilization especially where it was established most securely for instance Quebec Holland Ireland France Italy Germany England Spain but it is growing remarkably in both quality and quantity and passionate commitment and in numbers almost everywhere where it is hard and poor and persecuted and terrorized in Islamic countries in China and most of all in Africa character guard was a prophet who solved this process and saw his vocation as a spy smuggling Christianity back into so-called Christian Society or Christendom Kierkegaard wrote almost 200 years ago but nothing

is more up to date and relevant to our needs than that location his attack upon Christendom is the answer to the question that puzzles all Christians today how can the church reclaim the world and win the culture War answer to that question which so many Christians are asking today is nothing more and nothing less than the answer of the New Testament and smuggling in New Testament Christianity into Christendom was kierkegaard's lifelong vocation it is exactly what saint Pope John Paul II called the new evangelization Kierkegaard describes it as an undertaking which means neither more nor

less than proposing to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom I am not for a Christian severity as opposed to a Christian leniency I am neither for leniency nor for severity I am for a human honesty the leniency which is the common Christianity in the land I want to place alongside the New Testament to see how these two are related to one another then if it appears if it can be maintained face to face with the New Testament with the greatest joy will I agree to it but one thing I will not do not for anything in the

world I will not by suppression or by performing tricks try to produce the impression that the ordinary Christianity in the land and the Christianity of the New Testament are alike at kierkegaard's funeral one of his admirers interrupted the service by reading Revelation 3 verses 14 through 22. look it up it is the only place in the Bible where God threatens to vomit [Music] [Applause] [Music]