 When European philosophy emerged from the 18th century, it was enveloped in what can only be called a metaphysical fog, a drift and perhaps way off course, there came a light, one which gave hope of one day returning from our long voyage on this speculative sea. This light was none other than philosophy's melancholic dain, Soren Kierkegaard. And for us to understand the philosopher who was Kierkegaard, it is important that we first understand the man. He was born in the spring of 1813 and from this time until the day of his death, he managed to adventure outside of his native country Denmark, a record-breaking three times. His father was a rather wealthy and rather religious man of gloomy and melancholic temperament. His religious convictions caused him to believe that not one of his seven children would survive beyond the age of thirty-two. This, he believed, was because of the many sins committed in the past which would, without question, bring upon their family divine retribution. In fact, Kierkegaard himself was the product of an affair with one of the household maids. He once expressed that his childhood was one of insanity and that he had entered into the world as a result of a crime. We can see here the influence his father had over the young Soren's development. If this was not already enough, this temperament he began to develop was only further enforced by the near-realization of his father's prediction. All but Soren and his elder brother Peter had perished. One now begins to see why our philosopher may have developed the unrelenting religious melancholy which was to characterize his later works. Being of wealthy descent, it was natural that he was to receive only the best of educations. It would begin in Borgeskolan, a prominent school in the area. From there, at the age of seventeen, he would begin with his post-secondary education at the University of Copenhagen where the initial plan was to study theology. It would not be long before plans changed and Kierkegaard found himself steeped in vices. He gained quite the reputation for wholesale debauchery, even for a time acquiring various debts which required the financial aid of his father to settle. And like any good rebel, he found himself gravitating toward philosophy, as far as was possible from the beliefs of his father. This phase in Kierkegaard's life came to an abrupt end following the death of his father in 1838. From here, he began his theological studies once again, earning his master's shortly thereafter. What came next is certain to have had an equally influential impact on the way he lived and wrote. This next was Regina Olson, Kierkegaard's first and only romantic adventure. He proposed to her shortly after the beginning of the relationship in 1840. This sounds par for the course in a young romantic experience in love for the first time. But as quickly as he had posed the question, he began ruminating on the grand mistake to which he had just committed himself. It would take the entirety of a year for him to end the engagement on the grounds that his melancholy made him unsuitable for marriage, as well as the proclaimed fact that the life of a writer and the life of a married man were not in any way reconcilable. This harrowing experience remained with him throughout his life. This is particularly evident in his 1843 work, Repetition, where he tells the story of a young man himself, unable to make the ethical commitment of marriage, despite the love which spurred him on. It was of Kierkegaard's own admission that his work would be largely ignored in the Hegelian age of which he was a part. This was predominantly true, as he would not be recognized by most of philosophy's elite until well into the 20th century. This newly acquired fame came as a new trend of thought burst onto the scene. This would come to be what we know today as existentialism. He would come to be recognized in some ways as the father of existential thought. Its most defining characteristic was its focus on the subjective experiences and dilemmas we face and how, through freedom of choice, we create our own personal meaning. Like many other philosophic belief systems, those who adopted it were not clones, but held considerably different views on what constituted truth. The most striking difference we find between Kierkegaard and those existentialists around in the 20th century is the importance they placed on religious faith. The work of the later existentialists tended to be thoroughly atheistic, whereas Kierkegaard's was saturated with copious religious themes and undertones. Despite this, and some other exceptions, it stands that he, through his emphasis on the subjective dimensions of lived experience, paved the way for what existentialism developed into. Throughout his literary career, he often criticized the predominant school of thought that reigned supreme during his day. Hegelians, he believed, held tightly to the idea that life could be explained objectively through rational means. To Kierkegaard, this was the height of absurdity. Life, he thought, is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. What he means to convey by this all-too-famous quotation is that life, and the ultimate meaning behind it, can only be understood through the subjective experiences unique to each individual. This emphasis on subjectivity and individual experience spurred him on to publish many of his works suit anonymously. He had no real wish to conceal his identity, but it was rather to shed light on the many contrasting ways of living. The use of irony, satire, and humor also remained instrumental in conveying what it was he wished for his audience to experience. In what he labeled indirect communication, he made use of irony to force his readers to make their own decision on where they stood on particular issues. It was his thought that, without the authority which accompanied direct communication, one might more easily determine where they stand on important topics as individuals. We come to his first suit anonymous work in 1843. It was to be named either-or, and aimed to set before us the differing existential stages that characterized the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious ways that life can be lived. The book itself is composed in two separate, but interconnecting parts. The first being focused on the aesthetic life, the first being focused on the aesthetic life, while the second expounded the advantages and superiority of the ethical. We will begin with the aesthetic in part one. He writes predominantly under the pseudonym A until the final section named the seducer's diary, wherein he writes as the aptly named Johannes Climacus. The aesthetic individual is hedonistic in character, focusing on what pleasures can be obtained immediately and rarely looks to the future. What the aesthetic individual wishes to avoid most of all is boredom. A even goes as far as to label it the root of all evil. To truly obtain pleasure, a methodical approach must be taken. We cannot, as was alluded to in the book, be like Don Juan, jumping from pleasure to pleasure with passion as our only guide. If lasting pleasure is to be found, we must take imagination as our guiding force. Let us review the seducer's diary for clarification. The diary entails Johannes' romantic dealings with a woman. For the majority of the diary, he speaks not one word to the woman, but rather plans and calculates the seduction which he will carry out. When at last he makes his move, she is convinced to marry him, but unsatisfied and perhaps bored with how the seduction had played out, he convinces her by various means to break off the engagement, only then to proceed on seducing her again for further enjoyment. What's important here is Johannes' enjoyment, not in the success of his seduction, but in the process of imagining and constructing the plan. Once he exhausts this imaginative spring, he promptly abandons the relationship. Underlying all of this is his desire to manipulate and control those around him for the sake of creating interesting situations, thus quelling his boredom. Moving on to the latter half of the book, we investigate the ethical life. We are guided by two more of Kierkegaard's aliases, respectively named B and Judge William. It is written as a response to A, pleading with him on the superiority of the ethical life. He attempts to reason with A on the basis that the choices which he must make are more significant because unlike A, he must grapple with the impact they will have on those around him. There is also the reality of the pleasure to be experienced, whereas A experiences pleasure only in his imagination, B experiences a pleasure rooted in external reality, making the case that this sort of pleasure is more impactful. He insists to A that in order for him to achieve any semblance of fulfillment, he must abandon self-centered asceticism and assume the moral responsibility which comes with the ethical path. After making his plea, the section ends with a sermon delivered to Judge William by an outside party. Its title was the edification which lies in the fact that in the relation to God we are always in the wrong. What can be taken away from this is that no matter where we take our stand, whether it is with the aesthetic or with the ethical, we can never be in the right, for it is only through the nature of God and his will that we can escape the labyrinth of misery which consumes us. While either or may seem to be a comparison meant to persuade the reader away from the aesthetic and toward the ethical life, there is in truth no choice to be made between these two. They both become in some respect interested in the aesthetic and the ethical, neither of which can give an individual true peace and happiness. This work is actually a choice between either the aesthetic and ethical life or the religious. No matter the system which a human being conceives, it remains that it will always be flawed and to truly conceive of a complete system, one needs God and must make this choice individually. In the very same year in which either or came to us there was another major work called fear and trembling, in which he was determined to investigate the conflict between the unique demands of ethics and religion. In this work he begins by selecting an example on which we will perform the analysis. This example is none other than the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In the first section he begins by stating the story from four differing viewpoints and then in the second proceeds to analyze them. The primary conundrum presented to us in the story of Abraham is that the decision to go through with the killing of his son Isaac is simultaneously both ethically reprehensible and religiously commendable. There is also a grave importance placed upon the separation of faith and resignation and how Abraham embraced the former while avoiding the latter. The essence of this distinction is apparent because Abraham does not commit to the atrocity because of God's absolute authority and what is said must be done, but instead because he had absolute faith that God would not commit an act which was ethically bankrupt. We have here what would later come to be known as the leap of faith. It is a decision which must be made without justification, a decision which can only be made on the strength of one subjective relationship with God. When Abraham commits himself to this leap of faith there must be what Kierkegaard called a teleological suspension of the ethical, simply meaning that Abraham decides to suspend his ethical judgment in favor of God's will, trusting that whatever end God has in mind will be the correct one. It is this personal faith, the faith that God will not command any action which will result in an unethical end, which ultimately affirms his commitment. On June 17, 1844, under the pseudonym Vigilius Hofniensis, Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety, subtitled A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. In it he aims to explain why anxiety seems to be so prominent in the lives of men and how, by adopting the religious life, one might climb from the depths of despair to lasting supreme happiness. The picture of anxiety Kierkegaard paints is explained through this example, one that may just be relatable to you or I. A man stands precariously on the edge of a tall structure. He looks to the ground far beneath. In this situation there persists a conflict within the man's mind. He fears the thought that he could fall to his death, but there is also, lurking within him, the impulse to jump. It was Kierkegaard's belief that in these circumstances we experience a dizziness of freedom, or in other words, anxiety, and anxiety believed Kierkegaard, is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility. When we are placed beneath the weight of our own existence, forced to make the choices which may just determine whether we live or die, the possibility of possibility overtakes us. For if the man had never looked down and had no concept of his proximity to the ground below, anxiety would be never present. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility, whatever. To address the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin, Kierkegaard brings us back to Adam's decision to consume the forbidden fruit, an event which constituted the first instance of anxiety for man. When Adam was presented with a choice, he was not conflicted by good and evil, as prior to eating the fruit, evil was not yet a possibility for man. It was simply a choice to follow God's directive or not. It is shown here that, chronologically, anxiety comes prior to sin, and is, in fact, its presupposition. But while anxiety is first required to produce sin, it also provides us with the possibility of salvation, because it is only through anxiety that we can confront our true selves and come to embrace the freedom which we possess. The final major work which we'll cover comes to us in 1849 under the pseudonym anti-climacus. He titled this work The Sickness unto Death, and claimed that this sickness is common to all individuals without exception, a sickness called despair. From the outset, he endeavors to define what exactly despair is, how it manifests, and whether or not it can be constituted as a positive or negative in the lives of human beings. In its essence, he explains despair to be a pathology of what can be called the self. This self is made up of the relations between the individual and the external world that surrounds him, that may be likened to that of one's will. It is the very possession of the self that brings despair upon the individual, and consequently, when one's self-awareness increases, so too does his despair. There are a few different types and intensities of which despair takes its form. These are, despair stemming from an unawareness of one's own despair, that which stems from the wish to simply not exist, and from the wish to end one's desire not to exist. It was his belief that human beings are both finite and infinite, the old distinction between body and soul, and when these two collide, despair is the natural result. But it would be wrong to assume that despair is all bad in the life of man. It is, in truth, something that lies between bad and good. It seems contradictory, but when despair is increased, so too is self-awareness, and self-awareness is strength. So how would one go about ridding themselves of despair? It is no easy feat. According to Anticlimacus, it is only through our relationship with God that we are able to abolish despair, but there is a catch, because we first must sin in order to be saved. How does this work? Well, despair itself is the gravest of sins, and when we place our faith in God, our self-awareness increases. When our self-awareness increases, despair does as well, and when despair increases, sin along with it. So in essence, to become free from despair, we must first endure its apex, but when our faith becomes complete in relationship to God infinite, despair evaporates into lasting supreme happiness. All of this does, of course, leave one wondering if the author himself ever managed to achieve such a feat. That being said, it goes without saying that the man who was Soren Kierkegaard had considerable literary talent, of which he applied in the defense of faith. Not faith as was common to the people of his day, but faith as an unfounded act of spiritual commitment. It can be said that the reader of Kierkegaard is presented with an array of self-conscious persona, a constantly changing wardrobe of disguises, and if he presses to know what lies behind them, he finds only an enigma, described now as faith, now as truth, now as subjectivity, but unknowable and unsayable under any of its names. We have covered only some of his considerable library of works, but I would encourage you, if the philosophy of this man stirred your interest, to research further, as I am sure you will find much more outside of what this video is covered. As always, thank you for talking philosophy with me. Until next time.