Kierkegaard and Being

As a (non-humanistic) rationalist I have always relished in the works of Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Descartes, Kant and the like. While I may not necessarily agree with all of the philosophical premises or ideas that they have discovered, I greatly admire them for their contribution to human thought and culture. Yet, nothing has been more foundational to my philosophical framework as the writings of Søren Kierkegaard.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Kierkegaard’s ultimate rejection of the authority of the Scriptures due to it’s objective propositional truth was erroneous at best and heretical at worst. This does not mean the rest of his work should be rejected, however. In fact, there is quite a lot of wisdom that Kierkegaard has to give the church and us as Christians.

Kierkegaard seemed to realize, like Aristotle, that all things have a telos. Contradictory to his non-Christian colleagues, he believed that “Christianity is the solution to the problem of human existence” (Evans, 1990, p. 21). Essentially, Kierkegaard declared that the telos, or the ultimate end of Christianity, is to function as the perfect answer to human ontology. I believe that Kierkegaard was correct. Without the hope and redemption that Jesus Christ gracefully bestowed on us through the cross, human existence would be meaningless.

To thoroughly appreciate our existence, we must first reach a point of self-actualization. Kierkegaard described this as the understanding of the spiritual and relational essence of the “self”. Conventionally, people believed that “People are the products of human societies…and the personhood of those who do not have significant social roles to play is very much in doubt” (p. 46). Our thinking as humans unfortunately has not changed very dramatically, if at all. Kierkegaard’s relational view was in opposition to this thinking. Indeed, if people began to accept that who we are is rooted in the spirit and relationships, society would drastically change. Value and appreciation of human life is lost when social status, race, gender, etc. influence our judgments of others. As I have mentioned before, only when we recognize the concept of imago dei will we be able to truly understand and relate to others and ourselves. This classic Latin phrase is encapsulated appropriately by Evans: “Every human being has a relationship to God the Creator, on whom our ultimate status as a person depends” (p. 47).But this is where it gets really good. As a Christian existentialist, Kierkegaard deviated immensely from the belief in the autonomous self that his secular counterparts embraced. Kierkegaard believed that we are created by God, and although we shape our selves through choice and experience, we are not truly autonomous. Evans explains that for Kierkegaard, “the term ‘person’ describes both something I am, by virtue of God’s creative activity, and something I must become, in and through my relations with God and other people” (p. 47).

So, the self is both a product of God’s creation and a journey toward a certain ideal. I think that this revelation about the self is incredibly insightful. We are not merely beings that are who simply do things, or if you are a Cartesian, think things (cogito ergo sum). But we are also creatures who are being and becoming. We have been charged by God to become something greater than we are individually as well as greater than we are from where we started our journey.

I will let Kierkegaard have the last words:

“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity”.