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Exploring Kierkegaard: Individuality, Existentialism, and Political Ethics with Charles Dashings
Charles Dashings joins us for a fascinating exploration of the enduring relevance of Søren Kierkegaard. A teenage discovery of Kierkegaard's existential musings on anxiety and self-meaning sparked Charles's profound appreciation for this complex thinker. Despite his initial skepticism of Christian theology, Charles found that Kierkegaard's unique approach to individualism resonates with the broader questions of political ethics and community building. Together, we unravel how Kierkegaard's journey from royalist sympathies to ideas potentially aligning with Christian socialism provides fresh insights into the integration of individuality in leftist politics.
Our conversation ventures into the personal and philosophical depths of Kierkegaard's life, from the haunting guilt of his father to the familial tragedies that fueled his literary fervor. We explore how these experiences, alongside his unique class status, allowed Kierkegaard the freedom to focus on the inward journey of self-discovery, inspiring later existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger. By delving into Kierkegaard's challenges to conventional faith and his skepticism toward systemization, we contrast his existentialist individualism with bourgeois individualism, prompting listeners to reflect on personal and communal transformations.
As we traverse Kierkegaard's textual self-exploration, we draw intriguing parallels with Nietzsche, highlighting the intricate relationship between existentialism and ethics. The episode examines how Kierkegaard's existentialist ethos challenges moral realism's universal principles, offering a fresh perspective on ethics as a social construct. Through this dialogue, we aim to inspire a renewed interest in Kierkegaard's philosophical thought, encouraging listeners to explore beyond the typical perceptions and discover the richness of his contributions to existentialism and political theory.
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Hello, welcome to VarnBlog. And today I'm here with Charles Dashings and we're talking about everyone's Well, not everyone's, actually, a lot of people don't read them anymore Maybe sort of the founder of existentialism, soren Kierkegaard, and his implications for well the left-ish, well the left ish, um, although this one's a little bit, uh, a little bit harder to parse in regards to what kirkegaard's actual politics would have been. But, uh, charles, how do you get so interesting in good old kirkegaard?
Speaker 2:well, uh, while many people in their teens were reading Friedrich Nietzsche, I happened upon Soren Kierkegaard, which was interesting because by the time I reached the so-called age of reason 14, 15, 16, I was pretty much convinced that theism was false and I wasn't particularly interested in Christian theology.
Speaker 2:But suddenly I came across this ostensible Christian thinker writing very powerfully about issues that seemed very important to me or seemed very relevant to my experience experience I'd never encountered a philosopher who so eloquently described the experiences of anxiety, of melancholy, of depression, of the search for meaning and the self. And the whole Christian theologian thing didn't really bother me because it seemed what was most important about what he was saying had to do with questions of autonomy, questions of our contingency and historicity. And it just really hit me at the right time because, as anyone who's ever been a teenager knows, it's a time filled with a lot of angst and with a lot of uncertainty and self-discovery. And I found in kirkagard, I think you're really working through these issues, through these trials of the self so how have you tried to integrate that into any kind of political ethics or political practice?
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things about kirkagardard is he's often seen as a hyper-individualistic philosopher, which I'm not sure if that's totally true, but that is often how he's betrayed. So how do we deal with Kierkegaard in the political sphere?
Speaker 2:It's a very interesting question. As far as Kierkegaard's actual politics, I mean as a young man he was born basically at the end point of Danish monarchy, in the beginning of the 19th century. He lived from 1813 to 1855. And as a young man he was pretty much a default royalist. I mean he had an opportunity to hold court with the King of Denmark at the time. But over the course of his life and through the development of his philosophy, he approached something more like what we'd call Christian socialism or Christian universalism.
Speaker 2:It's a difficult question to map on Kierkegaard's political orientation to the 21st century. Suffice to say that I think any left politics that doesn't grapple with questions of individuality is incomplete. Certainly he was no collectivist. Certainly he, much like Nietzsche, was suspicious of revolutionary movements going on at the time. But there's something in his consistent emphasis on the fact that we are thrown into the world, that we are subject to forces beyond our control, Uh, and that we are forced to confront, um a world seemingly unanchored from meaning, Uh, and we are forced to do that on our own terms.
Speaker 1:Hmm, so I mean. So I mean, one of the things about Kierkegaard in dealing with his existentialism is that he is a figure like a couple of existentialists that I do figure out how can I phrase this that I do figure are more important to understand their biography, to really get what they're going on about. Yeah, I think that's important for Nietzsche, I think that's somewhat important for Sartre and I think it's very important for Kierkegaard. So can you go into that intersection a little bit?
Speaker 2:Sure, really, you could see his corpus as a form of personal apology as well as a way of coming to terms with a self that he has become that he did not anticipate. The central event in Kierkegaard's life, and which is depicted or represented again and again, is his failed engagement to a woman named Regine Olson. Kierkegaard was pursued, regine Olson, for over a period of two years, and it became apparent to him that, after his initial period of deep infatuation and love, that he was unsuited to be a husband and a father, a husband and a father. So he found himself in the situation where he was deeply in love with this woman and there would be no other woman for him. Yet he found himself psychologically unsuited for marriage, not willing to make the kind of lasting commitment that marriage requires, lasting commitment that marriage requires. So the question for him became well, what am I to do If my meaning in life is not to be through this marriage to Regine Olson? What was the purpose of this event in my life? How can I make sense of and rationalize this fact that I have this great love but this love cannot find expression through marriage? So you can see his authorship as his coming of age, as an author, as a poet, as a philosopher, through this primal encounter or failure of being able to marry. And the great mystery for both historians and readers of Kierkegaard is exactly what went wrong From Regine Olsen's perspective, it blindsided her.
Speaker 2:She did not understand at all what happened. In fact, he went to great lengths to try to extricate himself from the relationship in kind of devious ways. Frankly, um, he, he tried to create a distance between regina and himself over time, uh, by being uh sparing in his affection, being detached in the hope that she would break off the relationship. He was unwilling to just say straight up to her like I can't do this, I can't explain why. I mean, he intimates to her in various letters that she would be unhappy with him because he has this deep-seated melancholy. He feels that he has a divine mission to be a writer, strange things to say to a woman you're engaged with and have her like say, oh, that makes sense. Um, but he, he, he tried through his letters to explain why he suddenly because it was a bit of an about face uh was unwilling to make this commitment and uh, the, the methods he used, he uh, perhaps, uh, hyperbolically, would dramatize most famously in his two-volume work Either, or where he has this version of the kind of life he was leading or could have led if he had not had this impactful encounter with regime. And that was primarily a life of aesthetic reflection.
Speaker 2:In the seducer's diary, which is the main section where we get this idea of the seducer, we have an individual whose chief pleasure in life is the methodical seduction of women.
Speaker 2:And interestingly for the seducer, the point of seduction is not the fulfillment, it's to gradually and meticulously ensnare women into deep infatuations with them and, at the moment where they have them capture, to move on to something else because it no longer is interesting to them. Uh, whether or not this was what was going on with Regine, I think not. I mean, he maintained throughout his life that he was virtually or spiritually married to Regine. He kept, for instance, he kept copies of every book he ever wrote, one for himself and one for Regine, and he kept it in a locked cabinet. So he sees Regine as married to him, not in a finite worldly sense but in an eternal sense, and he dedicates his entire authorship to her. I know that's a lot of biographical information, but that's the basic story. That Kierkegaard's authorship is can be seen some as an autobiographical expression of what this crisis of a failed relationship meant for him and how it leads him to the decisive choice to become an author, and how it sustains his authorship so his authorship.
Speaker 1:So I mean, here we have a philosophy that really seems to develop explicitly, as opposed to implicitly, out of some kind of primary trauma, to use, you know, modern, problematic, uh, psychologizing terms. Yeah, um, but it's interesting where Kierkegaard goes with this, because I mean, I know that many Christians, for example, love him, but he's also critiqued by a lot of Christians for being, for effectively rendering Christianity irrational Um, that's a common critique thrown at him. Um, and rational, um, that's a common critique thrown at him, um, and. And the reason why is because face becomes like an individualist, existentialist choice, as opposed to something that is obvious in terms of natural law, a la aquinas, or even calvin or somebody like that. Um, so that.
Speaker 1:So this leads us to an interesting development in character guardian existentialism. In some way, he's the first person to inspire a movement that is largely atheistic and yet, both from personal biographical reasons and his own theological implications, you can't separate his existentialism from theology, and I think that's an interesting kind of thing to square. So what about his descriptions of melancholia and anxiety? Do you think really helps speak to you, given that so much of it comes out of theological prepos propositions? But they may not be theological, but they may ultimately be theological. It's actually kind of like hegel. It's like a winner, we being theological and when we're not, it's actually very hard to parse.
Speaker 2:And kirk regard's a similar thinker uh, he's not like hegel in almost any other way, but um well, I, I think he's more like he's willing to admit, I mean, we, we must remember that the intellectual environment in which kierkegaard educated, was educated in the 19th century denmark, was thorough going hegelian. I mean, this is someone who had read and reread Hegel very carefully and the kind of the play of his authorship is this upfront disavowal of dialectics while re-employing dialectics for his own purposes. You can see Kierkegaard grappling with the dialectic uh, or rather reapplying the dialectic to existence itself, and that that is what gives birth to a kind of proto-existentialism, because he sees, in at least the danish hegelians and that's important to keep in mind that he's not necessarily parroting Hegel but parroting specific Danish Hegelian professors that he encountered. That is the target of his parliament. But you see that his principal criticism of Hegelianism of his day is that it's too abstract criticism of hegelianism of his day is that it's too abstract? Uh, it it's. It's proclamations of kind of unifying world history and kind of understanding everything has forgotten a very important point uh, that there are actually existing people who have to figure out how to live right uh, how how to live uh with, uh, the place they find themselves in the history of world spirit.
Speaker 2:So for Kierkegaard there's a kind of inner development, an inner dialectic of the individual that first has to be grappled with before we go further and start talking about the eminent movement of history. There's an eminent movement of the soul of the individual. So you see in Kierkegaard a kind of absorption and radicalization of the dialectic, or kind of appropriation of the dialectic for the purposes of understanding how we are to be in the world. This is why existentialism in general and Kierkegaard in particular are often seen as philosophers of becoming rather than philosophers of being. They think the task of philosophy begins with the individual in his concrete historical circumstances, working out how he is to live or how they are to live, what to value, uh, and what to anchor meaning on. I think there's a second part to your question. I kind of I kind of went off on on a different note, but you were. What else were you asking about?
Speaker 1:um, I'm actually so absorbed in that I was actually kind of lost. What I was thinking about. Yes, um, I'm thinking about, I mean, kirk regard is an interesting figure for me because I mean I was talking about his theological, uh, orientation. And how do we, how do we, how do we?
Speaker 2:square, the fact that uh, kirk guardard has been largely appropriated by secular philosophers. I mean, of course there's theologians who have found inspiration. But what is Kierkegaard's relevance to leftist secularists, which I think the majority perhaps of your listeners might be? That's an interesting question. And I think you also asked uh how his analysis of anxiety and melancholy fits into this uh, particularly because he sees it, or analyze it, in terms of theological uh categories such as sin and repentance.
Speaker 2:Um, I I think the the the tendency has been to basically bracket uh his more explicitly theological statements or conceptions uh and read him phenomenologically right. So what? What is valid in his analysis of melancholy and anxiety is what it feels like from the inside, like anyone who has read the concept of anxiety or the sickness unto death will recognize, and who has experienced anxiety and depression will recognize themselves in that he's a very good psychologist, much like Nietzsche. In this way, now, it's not necessary for us as non-Christians to impute the ontological source of anxiety to sin consciousness like he does, but we can analogize this idea of sin consciousness and we can certainly see how we have absorbed, in a society that has been so impacted by Christian metaphysics and Christian philosophy, this idea of sin consciousness, in our internal experience of anxiety. So we need not call it what he does, but we can see the validity in his, his penetrating psychological analysis of anxiety.
Speaker 2:And that's that's the experience I had as a teenager reading about Kierkegaard's depression. I mean, his writing is suffused with melancholy and this is understandable, once again, when you bring in some autobiographical details. I mean, kierkegaard was the one of two surviving um, sons and daughters of a very unhappy, mismatched marriage. His father was this very imposing uh pietist lutheran figure um who mangled uh his understanding of his body and of sexuality. So there there is this repressive element in kirkegaard that you have to grapple with.
Speaker 2:That's why he's been so amenable to psychoanalytic readings, because it's it's it's not subtext, it's, it's the, the foreground. So you have to see him as someone who has literally inherited a melancholic disposition. A very severe, very rigid, very Kantian father had terrified the young boy, the young Kierkegaard, in this very strict understanding of the moral law as divine command. So you have a young man who's simultaneously rebelling against his father but is psychologically, indeed psychologically, indebted to his father in terms of his overall disposition. He was born into an unhappy family and inherited this unhappiness, and it's through his fundamental unhappiness and dissatisfaction that he is able to be such a that he is able to be such a prodigiously productive author. He's able to take this um, the removal of, like any possibility of romantic love and sexuality uh, and sublimate it uh into a far deeper uh contemplation of the inner motions of his self.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. I want to go into Kierkegaard's father a little bit, because I've read a little bit about him and he seems particularly strange and and I mean, you know, I think maybe it was your show I was listening to, but I I think I'd read this somewhere before and not really incorporated because I hadn't studied court regard since I was probably 20, to be completely honest you want to go into the primal scene?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. No, it's just.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, it's just Go ahead, ok. So the thing you should know about Kirigar's father, other than what I've already said, is that this seems, this appears to be a man haunted by a tremendous sense of guilt stemming from supposedly illicit activities as a young man. We don't really know, perhaps he was a frequent patron of prostitutes and because of his pietist faith he felt tremendously guilty about it. He did end up marrying a serving maid. He impregnated a serving maid this is Kierkegaard's mother shortly after the death of his first wife. So Kierkegaard is actually sired under very unsavory, unchristian at least according to their understanding of the faith circumstances. Tremendous pressure, uh, of a burden of guilt or of debt that hangs over his father perhaps explains his, his deep melancholy, uh. But there's a particular incident that was relayed to gregor guard by his father, uh, that stuck with him his whole life. It's an incident that happened to his father when he was a young man in the hills of Denmark. He came from a shepherding family and he was stuck out in the hills with the sheep and it was raining and it was freezing and he was was miserable and he was just not having a very good time and he was so frustrated and in such resentment of his, his lowly origins and the fact that he was stuck out here in the cold and wet with these sheep, that there's this moment where he curses God, right, in the cold and wet, with these sheep. That there's this moment where he curses God, right, uh, and this seems to be an incident that he never forgave himself for. Uh, and it, and Kierkegaard never forgave himself. It's a very I mean, it's hard to put ourselves in this mindset of like you know what's the big deal, right, but when you come from this kind of um devotionalism, this pietist faith, the idea of even a young man, in a moment of like weakness and suffering, cursing god, is something that can rebound across the generations, and it certainly did for kierkegaard's father and for kierkegaard himself. This is kind of a a a primal scene, uh, not only in terms of inheriting this kind of melancholy or our feeling of worthlessness, right, uh, worthlessness before god, but it becomes a unrepayable debt that the family then internalizes as a curse.
Speaker 2:I alluded to the fact that Kierkegaard was one of two surviving children, was originally a family of seven and his five other siblings died before reaching the age of 32. And the significance of this is Christ, christ, oh, sorry, 33, uh, the historical age of christ, at the time of the crucifixion, right? So imagine yourself being this really devotional pietist. This is the like, the background of your thought. And you see, all your siblings die tragically at a young age, before the age of 33, right? So they interpret this as some kind of divine curse for this, uh, primal guilt, this inherited sin of the, the father's young man cursing gods in the hills of denmark.
Speaker 2:And kirkgaard really believed this. He believed that, that not only was there a curse or unrepayable debt that he inherited from his father and that had impacted his siblings, that God, instead of you, know what's the severest punishment God could have brought upon his father? Well, killing his children, right? And Kierkegaard really believed, as a young man, that he was not long for this world. He thought he would die before the age of 33, because this is a family wrought by tragedy, where people keep dying at a young age.
Speaker 2:Uh, and this really spurs his desire, uh, to be in a great hurry to become a writer. I mean, this is someone who, in 1843 alone, publishes Either or, which is over a nearly thousand page book, fear and Trembling Repetition and Four Upbuilding Discourses, which is kind of. He has this segmentation between his more philosophical, speculative works and his more conventional sermonizingizing right. But this is someone who basically publishes everything he will ever publish and it's voluminous, and it doesn't even include all his his letters and his journal entries in a period of less than 10 years because he's convinced he's going to die. Spoiler he doesn't.
Speaker 1:He lives to 41, but he doesn't live a very long life I'll say, yeah, he doesn't die when he thought he was gonna die. He gets past. He gets past his jesus year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but not a lot not a lot, no, no, uh I mean. But you have to understand, like, think, think about, like the kind of like strenuous effort involved in writing thousands of pages of both published texts and unpublished journals. This is, this is an individual because of his class position, and this is important. Kierkegaard's father was a merchant, fairly successful merchant, established a sizable family fortune, uh, which Kierkegaard and his brother largely inherited.
Speaker 2:Kierkegaard, in his youth, was a bit of a prodigal son. He was kind of a wayward youth. He didn't know what he was going to do. I mean, this is a story that many of us could relate to. He didn't really know what he was doing. He just kind of was a flaneur about time. He spent a lot of money, a lot of his father's money. A flaneur about time. He spent a lot of money, a lot of his father's money on, on coffee shops, on fancy dandyish clothing, on expensive cigars.
Speaker 2:He was a individual really living the life he would later dramatize in, either or as as an aesthetic voyeur, just kind of going about just enjoying the finer things in life. But at the time his father dies he inherits the family home and a reasonably sizable fortune at the time that he, for the most part is able to live on until, because of his prodigal spending, which he never really gives up, he's convinced, or he rationalizes to himself, that his spending habits are part of his vocation as a writer. It's necessary, right, he needs to be an observer of the crowd, he needs to get out among people, have his people baths in order to fulfill his mission as a writer. But Kit Cart is basically someone who lives off of inherited wealth and he's not very savvy as an investor. He's not capitalizing on his existing capital. He's just kind of in this transitional between a, a person who works for a living, and an actual capitalist who's valorizing their capital. So this is a way to understand kind of his apoliticism, because he's not really. He doesn't really have any stake in anything. Right, he as a, as a, a deeply devout christian, he has a great humanitarian sympathy for the poor. By the way, much of his fortune fortune and we don't really know how much was just given out to people. He knew people would ask him for money. He would just, he would just give it away. Uh, but I I don't want to make him into some kind of great saintly figure who's just giving away all of his money. Like I said, he was spending it on himself as well, but he would never refuse anyone who asked him money and he gave a lot of his fortune away to the poor.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry I'm getting very far filled from your question.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry I'm getting very far filled from your question, but I'm just trying to give you a sense of the kind of person that Kierkegaard was, his class position and why to go back to a previous question, why it's difficult to talk about what his politics were in his own time, because he had the luxury of kind of being above it all and Adorno.
Speaker 2:Very interestingly, I don't know if you're aware that his first published work, his actual doctoral dissertation, was on Kierkegaard and he I believe it's called the Construction of the Aesthetic and he basically makes a lot of this kind of liminal class position of Kierkegaard and he uses it to understand why he would be the kind of person to focus on this kind of interior development of the self. He calls it like the bourgeois interior of the imagination. Right, it's like this is someone who, like you, can literally look at where he lived, like the kind of room, the room he wrote in like, and like the view he had from the street Like this is why this is what happens. When you're kind of in this liminal class position, where else are you going to turn?
Speaker 1:You're going to turn inward well, this inward turning is is kind of interesting to think about, because on one hand, uh, one of the ironies to think about kirkgaard is, you know, for somebody who's so theologically driven, he mostly inspires an atheistic movement. I I mean existentialism, I mean there are still Christian existentialists after.
Speaker 2:Kierkegaard but there's not a ton, I mean there are people like Martin Buber Martin Buber, carl Jaspers I mean these terms of the people who are most obviously influenced by this kind of existential ontological turn that Kierkegaard inaugurates, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Yeah, there is a kind of atheistic appropriation of someone who set as his task in life becoming a christian right. That was the most difficult thing for kierkegaard, uh. But there's a kind of inherent anti-conventionalism, uh, uh suspicion in this notion and it's something he would proclaim at the end of his life that he wasn't even sure that this Christian country contained a single Christian right.
Speaker 2:He makes the idea of being a Christian a personal task for the individual right. It's something that you have to work for. That is actually incredibly difficult. That involves grappling with certain absurdities and by grappling with them, somehow overcoming the absurdity and believing in virtue of the absurd, he wants to make Christianity difficult again, because he sees that life, the life of freedom, the task of freedom, is making difficult choices that will determine who you become and the kind of world you live in into the future, and owning those choices so one other thing that you see in the existentialists with the notable exception of jasper's and sartre um is a skepticism, if not an outright hostility towards systemization.
Speaker 1:Now, this is a leftist podcast and, uh, we kind of have the opposite tendency. I mean, you know, despite all the post-structuralists saying we're going to stop doing that, we very much have not stopped doing that. We're system builders par excellence. Do you think that's why Kierkegaard may have been kind of acknowledged but also semi-ignored in left political philosophy?
Speaker 2:Well, I think he's been cast as like an arch reactionary, right, I mean, and there are good reasons to kind of put him in this position historically. We've already alluded to it in terms of his kind of liminal class position. He's someone who didn't really have, you know, material stakes in the liberation of the working class and certainly was seemingly aloof to the reality of capitalist exploitation. But I mean, that's something that's less so at the end of his life. But you can see that not only his class position but there's historically been this hostility to any philosophy or politics that grounds itself in individuality itself, in individuality, right, uh. But I think it's important that we distinguish it between the kind of, uh, bourgeois individualism that is critiqued, um, in the marxist tradition and the kind of existentialism, existentialist individualism espoused by kierkegaard and later by by-Paul Sartre. Many people think that it just reduces bourgeois individualism. This is just kind of an apology for bourgeois individualism, that it emerges from a certain bourgeois individualist standpoint. This is certainly the thesis of de Dornot in his dissertation, but I think my framing earlier is correct. Uh, that kierkegaard's uh hostility to the system, systemizers and something, hostility shared by, as you know, uh emerges from this idea that in our mania for systemizing, for comprehending the totality we ally the fact that we are all individual people. Yes, we are in complex social relations and interdependencies, but we first must grapple with the concrete tasks of the fact that we have to make difficult decisions and choices and that the choices and decisions we make will impact what kind of future we build. So I think the anti-systemization has to do with what is left out or what is bracketed in a more systematic approach to philosophy as opposed to something that's grounded in the concrete individual experiences and motions of, of the psychological development of the individual.
Speaker 2:And I think I think that's I think that's important and I don't think that's just a bourgeois mystification or individualism. I think that's something that we all grapple with. It's like what do I want? What am I willing to do to get it? Am I able to live with the choices involved to get what I want evolved to get what I want? And if we can answer that question positively, that's part of constructing the kind of not only the kind of selves we will be, but the kind of communities we will build. So I think the question of individuality is inescapable and I think it's primary.
Speaker 1:So you don't think, for example, that Kieragard would could be accused of lapsing into something like hobbesian atomic individualism or atomized individuals like how does relation play into kirkagardian thought I?
Speaker 2:I think. I think there is a kind of um, existential primitivity. What I mean by that is that the individual is giving, is given a large sway of the. The individual is conceived as someone who has a tremendous amount of control over the type of person they build themselves into. Right, so we have this idea, and it goes back to Plato and Aristotle, that we do exercise a degree of control over our character.
Speaker 2:Right, and for Kierkegaard, the reason we do this is because and this will be later elaborated by Sra in a much more explicit way, but I think it's also present in Kierkegaard is that when we abstract from the big things around us, when we abstract from our community and our society and we look inward at ourselves, what is there inward at ourselves? What is there? Nothing, right, there's, there's a nothingness, there's a, a um, only pure possibilities. Right, kiergard has this. This kiergard has this idea that the self is essentially nothing but the infinite play of possibilities that we, for him, he experiences by going to the theater. Right, the theater helps us visualize, helps us in our imagination, possible paths of life, possible ways of living, possible orientations. Right, and it's only the only thing that can make a possibility into an actuality is the fact of our choosing right, the decisions we make, the actions we take.
Speaker 2:So when we abstract or we don't start with abstraction, but we start with what we see when we look inward, we see nothing. We see only the play of possibilities. How do we actualize our existence? Well, we actualize our existence by acting in the world, by choosing. We take that nothing and make it into something. That, for kick garden, for sartre, is the task of freedom. And because it's the task of freedom, it's the essential task that we begin with before we get anything else. Does this make sense?
Speaker 1:No, it makes sense. It's one of these things where the relationship to politics is both obvious and not obvious simultaneously, because there's an ethical demand to this, but it doesn't go in any particular way.
Speaker 2:and I think we see, I mean I think we see that in the politics of existentialists, which range wildly across the political spectrum, right, right, if, if we if we read martin heidegger as an existentialist, it seems like existentialism leads an extra bleed to fascism, whereas we, if we read Sartre as the the arch existentialist, we we get a kind of more ambivalent politics. But it doesn't seem like we can look at any of these existentialists, a proto existentialist and get a clear leftist politics. So what are we going to make of that? Is that the line of thought, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, although I'd also say I don't think we get a clear politics out of Hagel either, despite people trying to pretend that we do, even though Hagel has explicitly political writings. Yeah, so, or Kant, if you look at the range of where neocontinism ended up and it's also huge from you know, possibly uh a relationship to jacobin thought in france, all the way to arch reactionary neocontians and the early 20th century leading up to fascism, so yeah, you have a huge like these german uh existentialist and idealist philosophers tend to be uh, generative in like wild chaotic ways, even when they're not chaotic philosophers, although I think kirker kind of is a little bit chaotic, but um, uh, it's a bit of a messy bitch right yeah, I mean more, more, in some ways, even more than nicha.
Speaker 1:I mean, like, like I you know I'm not here to to uh replay the it is left nichianism uh defensible because I think like sort of um, but Nietzsche is a figure, who's his personal politics and where various Nietzscheans went with it is somewhat hugely divergent, both, both people using him on the right and people using on the left.
Speaker 2:frankly, Well, I mean with Nietzsche, at least I mean he does, we know that he I mean with with Nietzsche, at least I mean he, he does. We know that he, he, he played, paid explicit attention to the political developments of of his time and he, he had various opinions of it, whereas Kierkegaard, we don't really get any direct political engagement, we, we don't have someone who seems to be a common, uh, commenting or making note of, like note of what the newspapers are saying. I mean, in fact, he has the opposite inclination, he has complete contempt for the press and the media, and we see this to an extent in Nietzsche.
Speaker 1:But we do see a more serious watchfulness in terms of political, both like national political events and geopolitical events, and there's not really that in kirkagore and that's kind of an important thing to notice right like um and so, and that's why I'm like I can like, for example, I might defend the idea of a nietzschean leftist but still go. But nietzsche was the arch, reactionary kind of, and we all know it. He's not the worst. I don't think he's a Nazi Right, but he's an anti-liberal in a way that's thorough.
Speaker 2:Right, I mean. But of course, what we have to do with that is does his anti-liberalism tell us something important about the limitations of liberalism? That's the move that has been made, someone who is easily and perhaps appropriately taken towards more right-wing policies. What's redeemable about him? I think, if we read him as an anti-liberal, we have to see him more as a critic of liberalism and we have to use what he identifies, insofar as it is accurate, for a politics that perhaps he would oppose. Hmm, I mean, do you disagree with that perspective? I mean, if he's valuable, he has to be valuable as a critic of liberalism.
Speaker 1:He has to show us some shortcomings, right so, and I mean uh, one of the reasons why I wanted to moderate the, if it ever happens. I haven't even proposed yet a debate between uh, devin and daniel uh on this topic yeah, um, I might make it happen if anyone can make it happen.
Speaker 1:It's me. Um, I also like to get the cuck philosophy guy on too, just, and some other, uh, anti-nichean on, yeah, uh, just for a brawl, um, but actually because I feel, as a person who spent a lot of my life studying nicha and I studied kush regard to study nicha even though that's not they're not in direct you know conversation with each other during their lives. It was to get around this idea that there is something to the Nietzschean critique of liberalism that I'm with you on, but there's also something I do think profoundly reactionary to parts of it. I don't think it can be reduced to simple fascism or aggressive liberalism or even just an aristocratic bent. There's something more profound going on there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kierkegaard to me is more interesting for this because you could read Kierkegaard and like, other than his individualism, which in some ways seemed out of a you know you can accuse that of being a bourgeois subjectivity and thus liberal. Um, it's not that he's anti-liberal, it's almost just absent. It's just not there, like, and I find that actually more fascinating and thought provoking and problematizing, like, how can you live in a Christian society that is clearly transitioning to modern liberal society and yet barely pick it up other than an individual focus that is enabled for you by that liberal society, but of which you're not really that invested in any meaningful way for yourself. Like it's not like well it's a bourgeois subject?
Speaker 2:No, certainly not. I mean, you have to remember this is someone who very conscientiously isolated himself from people. He had very few interpersonal relations, the great relation of his life obviously being Regine Olson. Um, he had a few course respondents, um, but he, I wouldn't describe him as someone who had friends, uh, he, his, uh, his main correspondence were with uh, the, the, the phantom critics in his head, like I mean part of his struggle as an author.
Speaker 2:He was certainly known about town. He was known as the eccentric feller, the author of either or right, even though he cloaked, you know, not really cloaked but kind of ironically distanced himself from his writings by this revolving series of pseudonyms. People knew who he was, he was recognizable. He was famously pilloried in a periodical, the Corsair, which actually was very psychologically devastating to him and kind of revived his authorship and the purpose he saw for it. But he was someone who spent more than half his day in his room writing, writing volumously, uh and the, the, the people uh, he he corresponded with for largely uh in his head, you know, he, that's part of his, his reason for uh, various pseudonyms, these imaginative constructions.
Speaker 2:He wants to bring forth personalities textually, right, and he wants to bring himself to the fore textually, but because he's not in direct contact with any human being, or very few, he has to achieve this through, uh, suggestion and irony. And irony of course is, you know, saying one thing but meaning another in the very basic sense. So his, his textual play enacts his kind, the very social isolation, and intentional social isolation that he actually lives. So you have to see in a very significant way his texts as his creations, as kind of this glimpse into his own, uh, inaccessible, hidden interiority, which he writes so eloquently about. And he thinks everyone has this and he thinks the, the, the, the ironic uh feature of this is that the interior of ourselves, the core of ourselves, is by nature inarticulable. It can't be communicated, right? But his whole authorship is devoted to this idea of communicating this very idea of the inarticulability of the self I mean, I think of two things.
Speaker 1:I mean the obviously the obvious comparison the nicha of the great existentialist is actually also that nicha was pretty much a weirdo recluse who had a failed relationship and never really did anything else in regards to sociality. Um, I, I feel like nicha was more of, to use a modern corocial term, an incel than kirkagard, who just seems like loves burned and obsessed and asexual right like he's like his. His relationship with regine seems to be deep and completely not about sexual reproduction whatsoever.
Speaker 2:I mean, in fact, he barely was able to touch her hand. That is the most physical contact he ever writes about is brushing up against her hand. I mean there is obviously repression in Nietzsche present as well, but I mean you get a sense of sexual frustration in Nietzsche, in hence why he's so concerned about this, like inarticulable interior interiority, the soul as the essence of who he is, rather than the body. He just seems to have no relationship with the body he avoids. You will not find in a single journal entry, in a single letter, any crudities right entry in a single letter, any crudities, right? You won't hear, you won't hear any mentions of expressions of affection, uh, of the body itself. I mean it's all, uh, this ethereal stuff of the self. There's nothing, there's nothing bodily in kirkagard, and which is a great contrast to, because nicha is very much, uh, concerned with our embodiment and our animality. But for Kierkegaard, who perhaps had no real or no really developed sense of himself as an embodied human animal, it's just completely absent that's.
Speaker 1:That's a fascinating problem to think about. I mean it just the, the lack of embodiment which is, I mean that is fundamentally different than most other existentialists who you know where the, the existence coming before essence. To use sartre's phraseology for existentialism is is very bodily, even for Nietzsche, kierkegaard, I remember reading either, or, and this feels like an emo brain in a vat.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like you know. No, that's accurate. I should attenuate my statement about having no relationship with the body. Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, was a very sickly frail person. He had a very weak constitution, particularly in his stomach, much like Nietzsche, and there's centuries of literature on the relationship between gastrointestinal disease and mental disturbance. Perhaps that's an avenue that's certainly been explored.
Speaker 1:The person with gastrointestinal disease may or may not have mental disturbance.
Speaker 2:I relate so I mean that's certainly a connection that's been explored in Nietzsche's scholarship but as far as I know know it's not something that has been much discussed about in kierkegaard scholarship. I mean part of the reason he doesn't really write about it. But like I mean it's, it's known that he, he was unwell, uh, or prone to bouts of sickness, or that like a, a cold would put him out for a week, I mean, and he does die very early, principally in his own account, from the strain of his task. He felt like he had reached an apotheosis in his writing and he had done everything he wanted to and at that point he just expired from exhaustion. Of course that's not the official medical diagnosis, but you do see in Kierkegaard someone at odds. Maybe he's not complete, have no relationship with his body, but he doesn't identify with it. It's weak, it fails him his entire life, it does nothing good for him. And given how much of his family died, was that congenital like? Do we know, um that his, the, the various members of his family, died under different circumstances, some of a freak accident? But no, they're uh.
Speaker 2:As far as I know, there's no suggestion of some kind of congenital uh illness that manifests in middle age, that that took them all. That does not seem to be the case. It it does literally seem to be the case that he was a frail person, his entire life prone, prone to severe bouts of illnesses, and at the point in which he died he had been engaged in a radical campaign, basically burning all his bridges, all the people he had ever admired ministers, philosophers and just trying to take them all out, literally trying to martyr himself, literally trying to martyr himself. Martyr himself for an idea which is a theme in Kierkegaard. As a Christian, he has this motif of sacrifice or martyrdom becoming necessary in order to enact not only a transformation of consciousness but social transformation. So perhaps that is the end in terms of seeing Kierkegaard's politics it's a politics of the necessary martyrdom of an individual to enact social transformation.
Speaker 1:That's a hard sell on politics, to be completely fair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean right, I mean, we're not social transformation.
Speaker 1:But you must destroy yourself.
Speaker 2:Well it's not. It's not vague social transformation. For kicker guard, I mean.
Speaker 2:His mission, uh, which he proclaims in a series of articles called the Moment, is to wake people up of their complicity in a society that has become too comfortable in the belief that they are virtuous Christians. Right, and he wants people to rethink what being a Christian would actually mean. Like it's not just going to church every Sunday, it's not just attending mass, you know, it's not just going through these social performances, right, and in this way he's a great social critic. He's a great social critic of a certain bourgeois comfort. He wants to get people to re-examine the message of the gospel of Christ and what is required, required, and he sees that as a message that every individual must reckon with themselves. So that's, that's the connection back to the, the, the individuality.
Speaker 2:So at the end of his life, he's not just trying to enact some kind of a vague gesture of social transformation. He's trying to break the spell of a certain bourgeois conformity, laziness, adherence to social norms, and get people to rethink, like the difficulty of living, and particularly the difficulty of living supposedly, as a christian, when we have all become christian, when it just become the you know part of the air we breathe. It's like no, it's, it's not. It's not like that it clearly is. These people aren't really christians. They're not people who are motivated by a passionate intensity. These people haven't really thought through their beliefs and what they entail. They are just part of a society that is roughly and disorganized around this vague sense of Christian values. But what does that even mean? So in that sense, he's a great revaluator of values, like Nietzsche.
Speaker 1:Nietzsche. He's trying to enact a rethinking of the received wisdom and values of his society. Well, that leads me to I mean, I think about that. It's something interesting about Kierkegaard in that he takes Christianity so seriously although it is still a very Protestant, very post-liberal Christianity in a very stringent way, but he takes it to the ninth degree in some way, for lack of a better term. In a way, he calls out the bullshit on bourgeois interiority by actually trying to embody that interiority. Not that he would understand it as bourgeois, but so incredibly deeply that it almost becomes an auto critique of the performativity for lack of a better word of bourgeois interiority. Does that make sense? I mean, that's kind of like if I'm trying to read him in a more leftist mode. Right and take, take his work as m m like, as as um emblematic yeah of something you know, uh, that he also lived.
Speaker 1:It seems to me that, like he's so bourgeois, he can't be. I don't know, um, no, no I know what you're.
Speaker 2:You're, I think you're on the right track. I mean, for you, you must understand that for kicker guard, kick guard had two great uh models in his life socrates and christ. Right, uh, and the socratic element of kierkegaard is that he sees himself like socrates was for the, the men of athens. He sees himself as a gadfly, he sees himself as someone uh questioning, receive wisdom and through a, a, a performative, ironic uh authorship, he's gradually, gradually bringing to the fore uh, the, the falsity of people's claims to, to know. Right, but for him, the question is not to know, like it was for socrates.
Speaker 2:You know, socrates was uh great insofar as he, he recognized his own ignorance, which, of course, is an ironic statement. Right, because you know, socrates is not completely ignorant. He, he, he couldn't, you know he's. That's just the ironic position he starts from in order to draw people out to show, to see if they actually do know something, right. So for for socrates, it was a question of exposing the falsity of beliefs or the lack of foundation for people's beliefs. For kickard, it's exposing the faithlessness amongst those who claim to have faith. Right, he's, he's, he's the, the, the Christian, socrates. Right he's. He's exposing the hollowness of the conventional, understanding what it means to faith, and he wants to make it difficult again.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, so I'm going to take off my Marxist hat. Well, I mean, so I'm going to take off my Marxist hat, okay, and I'm going to pick up my semi-amateur staller of Hellenistic philosophy hat. Sure, sure, plop it back on, yeah, yeah, you know his emulating of socrates and jesus. In this weird way there's a third figure that emerges as a historical gap, because I think he historically influenced. Um, I mean, I'm one of these people who think the senate movement actually had a lot of profound effect on early christianity. Yeah, that Kierkegaard's like a antisocial diogenes, like, yeah, like, but more Christian about it, which is probably way more neurotic and anxiety driven.
Speaker 1:Way less way less given to stuff like calling people into hypocrisy by performative masturbation, but nonetheless it does seem like that's part of what he's trying to do and we always have to remember that, like the cynics come from this, from from the stoics they're, they're radical, uh development out of the stoics and the stoics themselves are radical development out of the socratic tradition. Like there's a direct line. I mean, there's other stuff involved, there's weird metaphysics involved, but there's a direct line. There's other stuff involved, there's weird metaphysics involved, but there's a direct line there. It does seem like in some ways, more than Nietzsche even though Nietzsche was way more into Hellenistic, socratic and pre-Socratic philosophy that in some ways K kirk regard is, uh, actually almost like a throwback to that. I mean, what do you make of that reading? Like this idea that you embody your philosophy to the point that it kind of destroys you. But also it's to point out how hypocritical and un and unwise so much of this is, and for him it would be unfaithful, I'll be honest, I had never made that connection before.
Speaker 2:I mean, he doesn't really speak of Diogenes in particular or Stoicism. I mean, certainly there are Stoical elements to how he actually lived his life and to the extent to which he gives prescriptions for living there is a continuity with stoicism. But I really do think we have to take him seriously as a Socratic figure because I've mentioned before he was a well-known figure about town and much like Socrates did in Athens, you know he would engage people in conversations uh and kind of a question and answer for him. Like he, he tried uh to emulate, uh in conversation understanding of Socratic irony, a new kind of performative textual irony, because Socrates primarily philosophizes through speech right, because he's so isolated, he has to or wants to perform a similar function through textual play and through pseudonymous distancing and he wants to force the same kind of midwifery of the idea that Socrates describes his own philosophical method as aimed at. And he wants to do that through having each reader the singular individual which he writes about his reader. That's more of a Nietzschean phrase, my reader, but Kierkegaard is inclined to say things like that as well, but it usually comes out as the singular individual, uh, the one who my entire authorship is directed at. He wants each individual to encounter his texts and decide for themselves.
Speaker 2:Amongst these competing life views that are represented through the various interplay of pseudonyms and the, the thick layers of parody and irony, and just like seemingly tangential remarks, right like that, all is there uh to, as he says in repetition, make it difficult for the heretics to understand, right, he writes in a deliberately evasive way, uh, which seemingly makes it difficult to uh say what his positive philosophy is, what his positive beliefs, uh, whether he actually considered himself a christian. That is a. That is a big question in kierkegaard scholarship. Did kierkegaard himself consider himself a Christian or did he see that as his life task, as expressed his authorship, not only to make other people realize the difficulty of becoming a Christian, but express the fact that he was not yet sure that he had become a Christian?
Speaker 2:So as far uh I I see him. I see him as a Socratic figure, I see him as a midwifery, for, as a midwife for the faithful, or for those who claim to have faith, and I also see the continuity with the Oracle's proclamation to know thyself right. I mean it's kind of a radicalization of that starting point of Western philosophy that knowledge begins with self-knowledge. So I read him Socratically, I don't. I mean it's interesting to think about these later figures or later followers of Socrates, later figures or later followers of Socrates. But I think Socrates is primary and I think the actual work is Socratic in spirit.
Speaker 1:I could agree with that, although I think my point is is not somebody that I thought that Coker would be influenced by Hellenistic philosophers I, like you, have not found the shred of evidence that he even read them but more that the christianity part of it and the socratic part of it actually do probably bring some of these more ancient hellenistic philosophies to bear. Just because you're dealing with these intersections that happened anciently, um, and in that I mean I find that interesting because that means that there is something to the idea that um well, you you can't really you can't really separate helenistic philosophy from christian theology.
Speaker 2:I mean, the whole project of the middle ages was to to reconcile the, the wisdom of the ancient philosophers, with you know, divine, divinely received or divinely inspired texts. Like how do we reconcile the Gospels with what Plato says, right? I mean, ultimately they end up favoring Plato. So in a sense, christian theology is both helenistic and and something else right.
Speaker 1:I mean like middle, middle, middle and high platonism are all over medieval christian theology and thus they survive into the modern world, uh, through christian, through christian and islamic mysticism as much as through scholastics. Yeah, I find that interesting To me. Kierkegaard's actually a good reason to take theology, even if you're an atheist or secular or whatever, to take theology very seriously. I think Hegel's actually another reason. I am one of the people who will tell you when people try to tell me you can read Hegel without theology, I kind of laugh at them. I mean, I just think, like no man, everything in the phenomenology and most of the stuff in the logic is a pun and it reads. And I mean that not in that it's a joke, but that everything reads both as a logical statement and a theological statement simultaneously, and that's on purpose.
Speaker 2:You're certainly not the first to suggest that. I mean, you might think that our whole society as it stands today is hopelessly mired in theological presuppositions, right, mired in theological presuppositions, right, that our politics are inherently theological, that they presuppose a cosmological view of the universe itself. I mean, and I think that's true. And the question is like are we okay with that? Is there something about theology that's inescapable, or is theology the problem? I mean, certainly this is a, in a broad sense, the question that we've been grappling with since the Enlightenment, you know, of human beings and our role in the world in relation to some divine purpose or plan. Even if we secularize that, even if we deify that as reason and virtue, right, I mean, we really haven't gotten that far away from theology.
Speaker 1:We've just we're quibbling over semantics well, I mean, yes, I, we've talked about my love of lester mcintyre, and I think this brings me to another place where I find kirkgaard so fucking interesting. Um, is that there? There are, you're right, there are political notions in his vision. There kind of has to be, and but they're political notions in the way that, like anti-politics is political it is. It is a rejection of the false promise of politics and a lot of people would see that as reactionary.
Speaker 1:I don't inherently see that as reactionary. I think it can become reactionary very easily. I mean, I think of someone like Gomez de Villa or someone like that, who is a quietist about almost everything but is clearly a hyper reactionary. For those of you who don't know, he wrote a bunch of very snarky quotes inspired by Nietzsche but was also a super Christian and a weirdo. But what I find interesting about de Villa versus, say, someone like Kierkegaard Davila, is still explicitly political.
Speaker 1:I mean, even though his anti-politics is an anti-politics, it's a political anti-politics. It is aimed against leftism primarily and then sees conservatism and reactionaryism as actually conceding to the false political promises of leftism in some way or another. And the only way to be truly reactionary is just go do the Plato thing and contemplate perfection in your library away from every fucking body. That's his conservative vision, but it is a conservative vision. I don't think that I could say that, even though I see some of that in Kierkegaard. I don't think his vision is conservative. It's like almost so Christian. It's almost alien to modern politics, life to the exclusion of sexuality and romance to being a philosopher or a theologian or a social critic.
Speaker 2:Choose Whatever you do, make a decision about who you want to be and see if you can make that, if you can project that into the future, see if you can live with the decisions you have made.
Speaker 2:He's, in that sense, very much concerned with all of our historical circumstances. We are both burdened by the past and terrified of the future. How do we reconcile this contradiction of feeling weighed down by what has been and uncertain about an unknowable future? Well, for Kierkegaard, it starts with the individual deciding for themselves the type of life they want to lead, what they're willing to stake their life on right. You know the idea and there's admittedly a kind of platonic, reactionary reading of this that we should stake everything for the sake of giving birth to this perfect idea or ideal. But at the same time, this task is different for everyone and it must be decided on a different basis with different consequences for every individual. Kierkegaard is in no way saying that he's living an exemplary life or the model of a philosophical life. He's principally concerned with the task of freedom. He's principally concerned with the task of freedom, and the task of freedom is the ability to will.
Speaker 1:Not only this moment, but the next and what will become of oneself and whether one can live with that. I guess this maybe leads me to the end of this discussion and maybe to get into some of the finer points of Kierkegaardian philosophy. Like one of the things I find so fascinating about Kierkegaard is he's not a non-dualist in the normal, like Dharmic religion sense, but he also. He also is a non-dualist Like he really wants to get past either or binaries and move past that. I mean you, you know literally that's the ending to either or and that's the text by him. I admit that I, I know either or and feel and trembling. Those are the two I know the best.
Speaker 1:Uh, um yeah you know, I guess read repetition all right, um, and I think there is something about, there's something interesting about his attempt to get beyond these binaries, um, through ethical encumbrance, that sees a lot of these binary choices as a fundamentally socially inscribed false choices and that until we can get beyond them and he doesn't, I mean he's very clear that he doesn't necessarily have an easy way to get beyond. There's no like clear, even ethical program for exactly how to do that, but that seems to be what he's aiming at. So what do you make about that? And how does that tie into his concept of anxiety and repetition and difference? These are all very important themes in Kierkegaard get really get picked up later and like post-structuralist philosophy, for example.
Speaker 2:As full of these kind of contradictions or competing claims made against us, claims from the ethical sphere, claims drawn from social expectation and ziklikite social morality, and the claims that come from within, from this sense of, of, of a passionate purpose, right? So I think the the principal uh collision he sees is between, uh, the kind of aesthetic, uh um the reflective aesthetic position where you are merely trying to increase variety of experiences, uh, while making no real commitments, or uh um ensnaring yourself, and uh social obligations, right, just kind of being in the world, but above it, um and the demands uh that immediately confront, confronts one, when you're engaged in any kind of interpersonal uh interaction, whether that's with your friends or your communities, your comrades, or with your relationship between the citizen and their government, right, or our obligations to each other in terms of being citizens of the world or being human beings. So I see that the either-or is rejected, insofar as that these claims do have are compelling to us, like we are compelled by, like aesthetic allows us not to reconcile the contradictions, not to sublate them, but will the same but with a difference, right? So for Kierkegaard, the Hegelian concept of mediation is inadequate because it's stuck merely in the conceptual world. Right, it's something, a kind of movement that takes place purely in logic, in the play of ideas, while ignoring what's on the ground, which is actual, existing, fucking human beings who are confronted with dilemmas in which they're forced to make choices right, with dilemmas in which they're forced to make choices right.
Speaker 2:And he sees repetition as the kind of corresponding ontological, existential version of mediation that doesn't require this kind of third term, but is transformed through everything that has come before, instead of like something new emerging from it.
Speaker 2:Right, something does, something does emerge that is new, but it's something that cannot be anticipated. Right, it's not like a clashing of thesis and antithesis, uh, uh, but it's more the, the conscientious, willing of the same as my um, as the product of my choice, of my choosing right, and at the fact that it's the product of my choice. And choosing is what makes the difference. Right is what transforms what has been into what will be right. So, uh, unlike the uh flaneur like a steep as feet, who goes from one experience to the next, whether it's, uh, the experience of seduction, or it's the rapturous experience of a masterful theatrical performance, or it's the writing of poetry, and just depends upon a variety of experiences in order to make their life feel whole. The one who wills repetition in many ways wills one thing right uh, they will what they've committed themselves to, they will the choices they have made and they will the person they will become because of their choices now, how does this tie into anxiety?
Speaker 2:yes, you did ask that. Um, so for kirigar, the experience of anxiety, uh, is kind of much like the experience of despair, and they are related concepts are are these experiences that come when we are, um, in places of transition between aesthetic, ethical, and this idea of this religious stage of existence? Um, we despair or we feel anxiety when we recognize the groundlessness of our existence? Right, so the estate for the reflective, estate, who is dependent upon a variety of different experiences in order to make their life feel whole, the transitional phase to a more ethical life view, which depends upon making commitments and willing that we have certain obligations to others and as opposed to just kind of, you know, uh, floating from one experience to the next, you know, and leaving, you know, people in our wake with, uh, no sense of responsibility or to them. The feeling of despair and anxiety is that recognition of the lack of foundation in our lives, the insufficiency of our becoming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So I guess that leads us to repetition. A theme for these early existentialists.
Speaker 2:Nietzsche was also obsessed with it yeah, that's a very interesting point of convergence because I think there are overlaps in the concept, or Kierkegaard's concept, of repetition and eternal return, but I think they have different things in mind. I think repetition, for Kierkegaard, is a psychological prophylactic, right. It's something to gird yourself for the task of living, to gird yourself for the task of living, and it's also an ontological claim, right About the nature of becoming and what becoming requires for people endowed with self-consciousness and who have to reason about what they are to do, whereas the eternal recurrence, it's been read a variety of ways, if you know. It's been read as kind of a psychological prophylactic. You know something, a myth, you know something that is a litmus test for the future philosophers, or that Nietzsche envisions, like whether you can hold this thought. You know that you, you would will that everything that has ever happened to you, all the pain, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the joy, all of it, whether you would will for it to return to you eternally, whether you can hold fast to this thought and uh, affirm it, uh, as a kind of psychological test, uh, for a new brand of philosophers or perhaps a a new kind of political animal.
Speaker 2:It's been read that way, uh, or whether it is a cosmological principle that, uh, it is a cosmological principle that uh, nietzsche really believed, that he had some kind of mystical experience in which it was revealed to him that, as a matter of cosmological fact, that we existence does work that way that it does eternally return to us. Um, I don't think that kind of cosmology is present in Kierkegaard like it potentially is present in Nietzsche, but the common thread is that both are highlighting the role of a conscientious willing in the determination of whether a life is bearable or, more importantly, uh, is meaningful. So I would, I would read both the eternal recurrence and repetition as a prescription for a human determined, uh or enacted meaning.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right. I mean, I think it's interesting to, because we have to get in, I think. I think people don't realize how fucking weird Nietzsche is, like you know once you've read if you've actually read dust or Zarathustra and not read a gloss on it, you're like, no, this is wild yeah and and also like. Sometimes I think people are taking him metaphorically like no, I think he might actually mean that literally. Uh, we don't have that problem with kukugawa, because we know it was religious mystic, basically.
Speaker 2:And unlike, uh, unlike, you know he was very concerned with a certain kind of religiosity and he saw that the religious orientation as the highest form of self-consciousness. And I don't think Nietzsche would agree with that per se.
Speaker 1:Oh, look at all.
Speaker 2:But I mean there certainly is a shared kind of mystical vision in nietzsche and kierkegaard. It's just that in. In kierkegaard it gets uh translated in uh platonic christian terms, and nietzsche devotes his entire philosophical project to the destruction of both destruction of both.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes he's basically at war above plato and socrates and jesus, I mean. I mean, it's interesting that there's so many. I mean, one of the things that's been fascinating about the origins of existentialism is, you know, you have your two key figures, uh, the proto-existentialists, and their kirkegaard and nietzsche, and they rhyme so much. They're both uh, very interior, they're both, uh, very active psychologists, but they're philosophical projects, with the exception that they're both opposed to hegelian systemization, and abstraction would also be diametrically opposed to each other, like and I find that fascinating I don't know if they're diametrically opposed.
Speaker 2:I I like. I said like it will. It does matter in the end whether we read kicker guard's christianity as um extractable from his philosophical vision, like just something that we we'd like to like close our eyes to uh, or whether we can't really in a systematic way. Ironically and I think there is there is something systematic to kicker guard's vision, despite himself, uh, yeah, the. The question will be like whether his philosophy uh lends itself best to a, a christian theological vision, or whether what is valuable and lasting in it uh is amenable to uh secularization. Um, I think it's explicit in nietzsche that he wants to excise all what he sees as unhealthy outgrowths of Western philosophy's I don't know usurpation by Christianity. He wants to just kind of well, not erase it, but overcome it. Uh foregrounds the, the role of will uh and the, the power of self-creation.
Speaker 1:Hmm, I guess that leads me in an interesting space because, on one hand, I do think I've listened to your show about this. I've actually been like, oh, I should go back and read Kierkegaard again Maybe I won't treat him as a religious weirdo and because I remember actually loving reading Kierkegaard when I, uh and cause I, I remember actually loving reading Kierkegaard when I read him 20 years ago. Uh, I thought it was great to read, um, I don't remember, however, like being very systemic about it, being very organized about it and also being go, ah, this is really fun to read, but it's like, it's like reading a, a more paying Christian, but tie, uh, and that I find that really fun to read too, but I don't take a whole lot from it. Um and so, but I I, you know your episodes in this and our discussion today makes me think maybe there is more to going back and thinking about this influence of anxiety and this kind of existential, because I think the left, our maybe philosophy, the big TMs behind it and with all the appropriate scare quotes has moved away from dealing with that interiority. We've gone back to system building land, and sometimes I do think, even when I deal with someone like Miguel Bakhtin or someone like that, you know, soviet, very influenced by Hegel, dialectics, marx, all that, but has actually a critique of over relying on the dialectic because it's too abstract that even the multiple voices and polyvocality and all that fun stuff is actually rooted in specific human relationships. That, yes, you can abstract uh, uh in a dialectical way and learn stuff about and through the movement of history, and you should, but it's wrong to treat everything that way that that misses something fundamental about the nature of, of those interactions and I think, something you know, the, the existentialist uh philosophers really do challenge us to put that like commitment to some kind of uh meaning, norm, and norm here not just in the ethical sense but in like the, about almost in also an aesthetic uh, in in a.
Speaker 1:We have the capacity to interpret this as meaningful, um, in a normative way. But that is an act of will, it is not an eight and uh, the. To get a little bit back to that, because I think not only has the left gotten away from that, our philosophy and that's an even bigger, bigger abstraction, um has gotten away from that. But I think about like ethics today, like uh, um, the. The existentialists are not moral realist in that they don't really think morality inherently emerges from the physical world in a universal, inconsistent way. Right, that's, that's part of their gambit in a way. Maybe there are some moral realist existentialists, but I don't really know how you square that with fundamental propositions of existentialism.
Speaker 2:I think it'd be very strange. Yeah, I can't. I mean, kierkegaard is actually a kind of moral realist, but it only emerges when you realize that he, or struggle with the individual, the particular, that the universal has validity. Right, so there's a dialectic to our relationship to ethical demands. Right, and Kierkegaard is certainly. Well, he certainly believes in something like divine command theory. Right, because he lauds figures like Abraham and Job who have this direct confrontation with God, a trial with God that they can't really communicate or justify to anyone and they act on the basis of their understanding of this divine will and command. And I won't get into how that's not really moral realism. But in theological circles, that's what grounds morality is that it's an expression of God's will or his divine commands. Right, that's what makes it real.
Speaker 2:So, no, I think it's very difficult to map on existentialism to an analytical meta category like moral realism. Uh, if, if you had to, if you're gonna force it, you would say that existential existentialism is a, uh, a, a realist construal of ethics in terms of social construction. Right, you can. You can think of the development or origin of moral norms in terms of intersubjective interaction and agreement upon time around certain sets of behaviors and rules around them. Right, it's constructed over time, it's a historical product and, of course, that's not the kind of realism that I have, from time to time, been known to advocate, but it certainly seems to be what existentialism leads to. It leads to this human focus task of constructing meaning on the basis of our free choices.
Speaker 1:Which would be like, say, the opposite of evolutionary, emergent moral realism, which is probably the vogue right now in analytic circles. Well, in some anyway.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it might be out of vogue in some of them too you're talking about ethical naturalism and of course that's one version of a of moral realism is that we can reduce, uh our moral norms to some kind of evolutionary selection for cooperative human behavior or something like that. Right, we, we can understand uh, the, the voice in our head that says one ought not to lie in terms of the social and socially conducive effects of uh keeping your promises. Right, that's, that's kind of a naturalistic view of the origin of moral norms, and they're real insofar as they are reducible to certain natural categories like that. But that's not something that really. I mean, I guess it's kind of a kind of ethical naturalism, of a kind of ethical naturalism to existentialism, because it both, because both focus on uh, human sociality, uh and some idea about what the innate tendencies of, or the evolved tendencies of human nature are and the sort of things that we desire and want.
Speaker 2:Right, we want meaning. Why do we want meaning? Uh? Because we want to form some kind of unity uh to our lives in order to, you know, reach some destination where we are, I mean from biological standpoint, where we live long enough to survive and reproduce, but of course, like that's not satisfactory, we don't all care about, you know, just surviving long enough to reproduce. Uh, I think for the, I think the existentialist approach to ethics moves beyond kind of that vulgar uh evolutionary reductionism, because clearly uh, the meaning of life for many people uh doesn't revolve around the perpetuation of the species.
Speaker 1:I mean, some people will never even think about that no, I mean the number of childless people indicate that, even if they're right, it doesn't apply one to one.
Speaker 2:It could only apply an aggregate yeah, I am one of those childless cat persons. I am.
Speaker 1:I am proudly so, yeah yeah, uh, I also do not have children. Um, I take care of other people's children, so I guess in some ways I still live up to my evolutionary perspective, but I don't think that's why I do it. Um, I mean, you're doing praxis. You're doing post-family praxis, right, yeah, um you're ready to talk about, like liking being a, liking being an aloe parent, which is also historically the norm, yeah, and it still is in impoverished or economically undeveloped countries.
Speaker 2:It's the norm by necessity right.
Speaker 1:Even as a foreigner.
Speaker 1:When I lived in Egypt, in particular, but a little bit so when I lived in Mexico, I was actually kind of surprised how comfortable people were with like kids just hanging out with me, yeah, like like come up and talk to me for 15 minutes in front of the parents.
Speaker 1:There was nothing considered weird about that at all and I'm like I mean, if nothing else, they were like, oh, we're practicing English and you're practicing your really really, really, really shitty Arabic that you don't really have, and but I mean it's, it's a, it's a vastly different atmosphere. And you're right, some of it's by necessity, some of it's that certain kinds of cultural relations have not been marketized to the point that they have been here, um, right, and I don't want to, I also don't want to romanticize that, but I do think we have to think about this. I mean, I like existentialism for the fact that, that it is a essentially ethical proposition, but it's one that goes in so many different ways, um, in the creation of meaning, whereas I, just I, I, I I'll be quite frank with you I find a lot of moral naturalism, which I I don't know is the primary form of moral realism coming out of analytic philosophy, but it is the most annoying and loudest.
Speaker 2:Well it has the most scientific respectability right.
Speaker 1:Right and that's huge.
Speaker 2:That's huge for analytics right. I mean the trend since mid-century in analytic philosophy is to basically transform the philosophy department into the physics department. Right, basically transformed the philosophy department into the physics department right To close the gaps between this, you know, last vestige of like humanity's bullshit and make it objective and scientific, which, of course, is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll tell you the one time, and as another defensive existentialist, I went to a narratology conference, which is also something I don't necessarily advise people doing, um back when I was still a professor, back in those days of my life and um, it was about 15 years ago and it's back when people were trying to do the uh markets are evolutionary and also, uh, narrative is evolutionary, and so I was listening to humanities majors divvying up psychological eye movement reports from the 1950s to try to come up with theories about yeah the length of narrative and me just going, you realize I and I, I was, I was, I consider myself ascience person, but I was, like you realize this is bullshit, right like it's like this is all metaphorical.
Speaker 1:You seem like this is a step over memetics, which is also a a nonsense, uh, pseudoscientific, uh thing based off of a fucking metaphor, literally based off a metaphor. Actually, in that case, um, and when I go back and read existentialist, I'm like no, there's something actually respectable about being honest that you can't actually that there is some truth to the inability to totally derive. It is from an alt and that makes analytics. I'll be honest. It also makes marks. It's uncomfortable, like, um, you know I think it's strange to me.
Speaker 2:I mean like I don't know what marks they're reading, but like the the is ought gap does not exist for marks no, not at all he's not working from purely from descriptive premises like his.
Speaker 2:His descriptive premises are always impregnated by a vision of, of social transformation. It's just I, I don't. I mean, I partly know where this anti-moralism, or really it's anti-ethic. I mean, of course, uh mark is a great critic of moralism and the political inefficacy of mere moralism, of just pure moral suasion, but that's different from the question of whether Marx is merely dispassionately describing historical transformations in the means of production. Of course he's not just doing that, because what would be the fucking point? Why would we even care? I mean, how can you describe capital as a vampire?
Speaker 1:that sucks the blood from labor dispassionately. You're telling me that's not a moral prescription or a moral judgment on the, the, the nature of capitalist exploitation. Get the fuck out of here it's. It's absurd, right? Well, I mean, you know, I do think we have to take seriously that marx is having his cake and eating it too, in a way that a lot of people who both are post-german idealist and actual german idealist, did where they were trying to be like we can't abide by this humian english bullshit. Um, we must come up with a way that the ought and the is are reconcilable. Um, yeah, uh, so you know, um, but I'm not always convinced they succeed either no, I mean it just it's.
Speaker 2:It's always just seem intuitively obvious to me that any, any description of the world is going to presuppose some kind of normative, uh of vision, right like the world is just normatively laden. Even in our best attempts to be some kind of godlike third person objective spectator, we can't.
Speaker 1:This is why empiricism doesn't actually work, because usually there's norms hidden in your descriptors that color your empirical descriptions.
Speaker 1:And I think you know I like to give you shit, but he actually talks about this the empiricists tended to be more so to reproduce the biases of their society sexism, racism, whatever even when they were trying not to, largely because it was already in their descriptors. More so, reproduce the biases of their society sexism, racism, whatever even when they were trying not to, largely because it was already in their descriptors, like um, and, and thus it's hidden in their norms in a way that makes it seem like it's objectively scientific and isn't. And I think we also I mean, like you want to get into more advanced ways that this comes up. Um, think about, like how machine learning and ai replicate social biases as if they're objective facts, because the social biases are reflected in the statistics unless they reinforce each other. Yeah, um, that even trying to move it in the pure mathematics doesn't get out of that normative lens, because how we're counting what counts in what category of the map is still actually a qualitative judgment, not a quantitative one.
Speaker 2:Um I think this takes us nicely back to one of the uh unsung advantages of existentialism, uh, that it doesn't presuppose this uh uh descriptive gap, uh, descriptive, prescriptive gap at all. In fact, it begins with us, with, with internal experience, uh, with human psychology, with the phenomenology of being in the world right, which, because we are uh meaning rapacious animals, is incredibly normatively. It begins with the question of it's like, what is meaningful, or how, how do I make my life meaningful? Right, that's the, the, the first philosophy of the existentialist not what is you know, but what is meaningful. Is meaning possible? And that's a normative question and I.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great point to to end up on. Thank you, charles. You and Devin will probably be semi-regular guests on my show whenever I need to talk about philosophy, cause that's what I started out doing all many years ago, talking about left philosophy, before I became an ass arts Mark scholar, which I say with with both love and utter contempt. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to talk about Kierkegaard. I could do it all day long. I don't see a lot of podcasts political or philosophical covering kick guard. Uh, not anymore besides my own and now yours. So I I thank you for giving me a platform for that, and I hope people are inspired to read kicker guard and not dismiss them as some uh uh, a centric, a sexual Christian theologian, cause I think he's much more than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I kind of agree. And also, even if he wasn't a centric, a sexual Christian theologian, some of those guys are actually interesting. So very true, all right. I'm like I actually get a weird amount out of reading Thomas Aquinas, so it's very strange. All right, yeah.
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