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Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with the category of subjectivity
that ran like a continuous thread through his theoretical writings was
integrally linked to his conception of human beings as individual and
self-determining participants in the ‘existential process’.
The view that freedom and the possibility of change constituted fundamental
conditions of human life and fulfilment was delineated in his so-called
‘psychological works’, The Concept of Anxiety and
The Sickness Unto Death [we are reading a significant
chunk of the latter] In both books the structure of human
personality is portrayed in developmental and volitional terms; individuals
exist in the mode, not of being, but of becoming, and what they become
is something for which they themselves are ultimately responsible. In
this connection certain pervasive attitudes and emotions can be seen
to possess a special significance, Kierkegaard giving priority of place
to a form of anxiety or dread (Angst) which differed from sentiments
like fear in lacking any determinate object and in being directed instead
to ‘something that is nothing’. Such a state of mind might
manifest itself in a variety of ways, but he made it clear that his
fundamental concern was with its relation to the consciousness of freedom.
Thus he referred to the particular kind of dizziness, or vertiginous
ambivalence between attraction and repulsion, that was liable to afflict
us when, in certain circumstances, the realization dawned that there
was nothing objective that compelled us to opt for one course of action
rather than another; in the last analysis what we did was up to ourselves
alone, freedom being said to ‘look down into its own possibility’
as though into a yawning abyss or void. Kierkegaard believed that the
psychological phenomenon so identified had momentous consequences, not
least for its bearing on the religious alternatives of sin and salvation.
On the one hand, the story of Adam represented a mythical illustration
of how the awakened consciousness of freedom could arouse an anxiety
whose occurrence in this case was the precursor of sin. On the other
hand, however, such an emotion might also arise when there was a possibility
of making a qualitative leap, not into sin and alienation from God,
but towards the opposite of this, namely, faith and the promise offered
by Christianity. But here Kierkegaard reiterates the point that a presentiment
of the difficulties and sacrifices entailed made the latter a course
which there were strong temptations to resist; it followed that people
were only too prone to conceal from themselves their potentialities
as free beings, such self-induced obscurity serving as a convenient
screen for inaction and a failure to change. Self-deception of this
sort in fact formed a component of many of the varieties of spiritual
despair which Kierkegaard picked out for analysis, as well as underpinning
his diagnosis of some of the broader types of malaise he detected in
the social and cultural climate of his time.
In his insistence upon the ultimacy of human freedom and his correlative
attention to the devices and strategies whereby people may seek to protect
themselves from a recognition of some of its disturbing implications,
Kierkegaard anticipated themes that were taken up, albeit much later
and often in an explicitly secular setting, by a number of leading twentieth-century
writers [mostly Existentialists, of course].
Subjectivity and the primacy of the individual, the ‘burden’
of freedom, the contrast between authentic and inauthentic modes of
existence – these and associated topics became familiar through
the works of existentialist philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and
Martin Heidegger [some people you will know soon]
as well as figuring in the wider field of imaginative literature. Nor
were those the only areas in which his ideas eventually made an impact.
In the sphere of ethics his emphasis on radical choice indirectly contributed
to the growth of non-cognitivist theories of value, while in religion
his conception of faith had a profound influence on the development
of modern Protestant theology, notwithstanding understandable reservations
about some of his more extreme claims regarding its paradoxical character.