In Our Time - Kierkegaard

Episode Date: March 20, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the rich and radical ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, often called the father of Existentialism.In 1840 a young Danish girl called Regine Olsen got engaged to her sweetheart – a modish and clever young man called Søren Kierkegaard. The two were deeply in love but soon the husband to be began to have doubts. He worried that he couldn’t make Regine happy and stay true to himself and his dreams of philosophy. It was a terrible dilemma, but Kierkegaard broke off the engagement – a decision from which neither he nor his fiancée fully recovered. This unhappy episode has become emblematic of the life and thought of Søren Kierkegaard - a philosopher who confronted the painful choices in life and who understood the darker modes of human existence. Yet Kierkegaard is much more than the gloomy Dane of reputation. A thinker of wit and elegance, his ability to live with paradox and his desire to think about individuals as free have given him great purchase in the modern world and he is known as the father of Existentialism.With Jonathan Rée, Visiting Professor at Roehampton University and the Royal College of Art; Clare Carlisle, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool; John Lippitt, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1840, a young Danish girl called Regine Olsen got engaged to her sweetheart, a difficult and brilliant young man called Soren Kierkegaard. The two were much in love, but soon Kierkegaard began to have doubts.

He worried that he couldn't love Regine and stay true to himself and his philosophy. It was a dilemma and Kierkegaard broke off the engagement, a decision from which neither he nor his fiancée fully recovered. This unhappy episode has become emblematic of the life and thought of Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher who confronted the painful choices in life in the light of his philosophy and endured dark times perhaps as a consequence. Yet Kekigard is much more than the gloomy Lutheran dine of reputation. A thinker of wit and elegance, his ability to live with paradox,

His admiration for both Socrates and Christ, his hatred of Hegel, and his desire to think about individuals as free, have given him great purchase in the modern world, and is known as the father of existentialism. With me to discuss Soren Kierkegaard, a John Lippet, Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Hertfordshire, Claire Carlisle, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Liverpool, and Jonathan Ray, visiting professor at Roehampton University

and at the Royal College of Art. Jonathan Wright, as a young man at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard was a devotee of Socrates. What did he admire about Socrates? He was a student, I think, for about 10 years in the 1830s in Copenhagen University, student of philosophy, and he would have been taught about the history of philosophy as a huge narrative that begins really with Socrates. Socrates is the father of philosophy.

Socrates is the first person who tried to use logical argument as a route to truth. And then the idea was that once that had been started, in 5th century BC Athens, it was carried forward by Plato and Aristotle, and it grew into a great, you know, massive oak tree of metaphysics that flourished, perhaps over-flourished in the Middle Ages, and then it was pruned by Descartes, the father of modern philosophy,

and then it gradually developed again, and it blossomed in the work of Hegel. Hegel, who provided, out of the clues that had been scattered around the previous history of philosophy, he provided a complete system, theory of everything. Now, Hegel died in 1831, the very year that Kierkegaard began his studies at Copenhagen University. And Kierkegaard slowly began to become convinced that this whole story was a mistake and that the idea that Hegel was the truest disciple of the

Socratic tradition was a lie. In truth, Hegel's ambition to create a whole system of philosophy was something that Socrates would have laughed at like a drain because it's Socrates' secret, according to Keogart, was that Socrates reckoned everyone was a fool, and he was the biggest fool of all. The difference was that he knew it. And he thought that the task of philosophy was not to build up a system of knowledge, but to take down our pretensions to know more than we really do. Would it be correct, Jonathan, to say that one of the attractions that Socrates had for Kekegaard was that he, according to Keogar, Socrates, did not propose one correct point of view of the world.

Exactly. The by word for Socrates is, irony. Socrates was the paradigm of an ironist. That means not just he's a joker, it does mean that, but it means that he's someone who engages in conversation not in order to express the truths which he takes himself to be

in possession of, but in what he goes with the ebb and he thinks that truth happens in the ebb and flow of conversation of engagements with other people. And you can't, the idea was that you could never tell from what Socrates said what Socrates really thought, because all he was interested in doing was teasing

out, or particularly teasing out the inconsistencies in what his interlocutors were saying. That's what's meant by saying he's an ironist. And that's exactly what Kierkegaard took from him, because Kierkegaard then developed a theory, the theory of indirect communication, which said that with regard to the truths that are most important to us, they're not the kinds of things that can be transferred from one mind to another. You may be able to provoke someone into discovering those truths. In fact, Kierkegaard said you may be able to seduce someone or deceive someone into the truth. I suppose you could say he wanted to be the Socrates for the 19th century.

Socrates famously never wrote anything down, but there are all these stories of what he said. Kierkegaard wrote enormously, but he wrote under many different pseudonyms, he wrote in different styles, he wrote in different genres. So one of the great things about Kierkegaard is that you can never be quite sure whether what you read in his books is what Kierkegaard meant

or whether it's some kind of stunt that he's performing in order to try and kind of read. rearrange the furniture inside his readers' heads. Claire Carler, can we turn to Hegel then, if Socrates was his hero, this is a bit of a simplification, but not too much perhaps. Hegel was his villain. Now, Jonathan said something about that already. Can we develop that?

What did Hegel done to earn Kikigar's ire? Well, yes, as Jonathan says, Hegel is the epitome of a systematic philosopher. That's to say he wants to construct a self-grounding and all-encompassing totality. of thought that incorporates nature, history, religion, art, and, of course, the human being within that totality. And for Kierkeh, he did accept that man is a part of nature, a part of history, a part of society, to some extent. But he also thought that the human being has an inner life, inwardness, as he calls it,

that is separate from this outside world. and that can't be assimilated into a system, that can't be rationalised, that can't even perhaps be articulated, and it's that inward sphere that Keirghe thinks Hegel's philosophy doesn't do justice to. Kikagard had been brought up by Lutheran Father. He was a Christian, but he was very strongly against, as it were, the Christian state church, particularly the Danish Christian state church. And as I understand it, I thought that it was soporific,

and it missed the point. It was nothing to do with being a real Christian in understanding what was going on. What do you think? Keikha made a distinction between Christianity and Christendom, and Christendom is the sort of social, institutionalised, religious state, whereas Christianity is to do with the inner life of the individual

and that individual's relationship to God. And Keikil said that basically to be a Christian is to have faith, i.e, to live one's life with a certain relationship to God, and he identified a complacency in Denmark. Precisely because Christianity had become so institutionalised, Kierkech thought that everybody just assumed that they were automatically Christians just because they've been born into this Christian country,

because they'd been baptised because perhaps they went to church every Sunday and that's what it meant to be a Christian. And it's that complacency that Kierkeh wants to unsettle. And to say that having faith is something that lies beyond the sphere of, reason. It's not something that can just sort of cleverly be grasped and then one has it. It's a much more of an existential task. John Lippet, because of his stance on faith, that's called it a stance, although it's slightly wrong, really, given that they did do the philosopher in many voices.

Kierkegaard has been accused of irrationalism, going against reason as a basis of judgment. Would you like to explore this a bit? Do you think that's true? Well, I mean, the charge that's sometimes made is that he thinks reason is just completely redundant, and that really isn't his position. What he's rejecting, though, I think, is not reason per se, but reason conceived of, rather in the way that Claire was saying in describing Hegel, as some kind of timeless, godlike faculty, reason with the capital R, if you like. And instead, what he's emphasizing is the actual reasoning possibilities of creatures like us, historically and temporally situated, finite, flesh,

blood human beings who can't occupy anything other than a limited finite perspective. So it isn't that he thinks that reason is redundant. Rather, he's part of a long philosophical tradition that's trying to understand what the limits of human reason are. One final thing to say about that would be to say, I think it's important to connect this with, you know, there's a religious dimension to this explicitly in the sense that Kirchel's view of human reason, I think, is connected with his view of our creatureliness. So our beliefs are always partial, provisional, defensible. We always see through a glass darkly, as it were.

To try to construct a philosophical system is to take up an objective standpoint, almost a God's eye kind of perspective on the whole. And Keikor thought that that that's not a perspective that we as human beings are entitled to. You know, in a sense it's a sinful self-assertion to try to occupy that godlike position. So on the one hand, there's a religious motivation for that critique.

but there's also a philosophical motivation for it too, namely that Kierkega thinks that we each of us are alive, we're living in the world, we're temporal beings, we're always in the process of becoming. And if we do philosophy, then we do so from a subjective perspective, from the perspective of what he calls the existing individual. And from this perspective of the existing individual, there are elements to our existence, elements to our life,

that are unknown that can't be rationalized, So, for example, we live our lives forwards, and Kirchial famously said we can only understand them backwards. So we live our lives forwards towards the future, and that future is something that's unknown. And also, we live our lives in relationship to God. God is something that's unknown. So for Keikil, there's an unknown, unknowable,

unrationalizable dimension to human existence that can't be reduced to some kind of systematic explanation. John Lippet, can I ask you before we, moving to a more general discussion. When he was 22, he wrote, what I really need to be clear about is what I'm to do, not what I must know.

Can you fit that in? I think to understand that journal entry, Kikko, or famously a keeper of voluminous journals, we need to understand one or two of the other ideas that are in there. He talks about the need to find a truth which is true for me,

the idea for which I'm willing to live and die. Now, the contrast there between action and knowledge is in one sense slightly misleading. He does recognise in that very same journal entry an imperative of knowledge. So it isn't that knowledge doesn't matter, but he says it must be taken up alive in me. So we've got here introduced very early on this important idea of truth as subjectivity, which is, again, a slightly misleading phrase. It isn't the rejection of objective truth. It's not relativism. It's not subjective. Rather, it's an insistence on placing this concrete, finite human subject at the centre of inquiry.

Can I go to Jonathan Ray here? There are no universal answers, as you said in your opening remarks, no final goal. But if truth is an objective, where does take up what John Lippertr said, where does Kierkegaard think truth is to be found? Well, in a way, he thinks it's going to be found in Jesus Christ. That's the short answer, but not in the way that most Christians. think that. He was very preoccupied by a problem that

was sort of buried in 2000 years of Christianity about the relationship between classical pagan philosophy, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and the true you know, the Christian tradition that was written in Aramaic and Hebrew.

And his idea, and it's true that both Socrates and Jesus were heroes to him, but he thought they pulled in different directions. Socrates thought there was such a thing truth and that it's just that we couldn't get hold of it, and that truth existed eternally and pre-existed us. That's to say he thought that the task of learning was actually a matter of recollecting. The really important truths are things that we knew in a former life, that

we originally knew, or that nature would teach us. Kichagat says you can't be a Christian and by any of that, because if you're a Christian, you think that at a particular date a new truth came into history, that Christianity is historical in a way that pagan philosophy is not, that a truth became possible that had never existed before. And that's why there's a rather confusing set of discussions that Kehaghergarde has about the idea of repetition, about truth is something that is to be repeated. And I think the key to that is he's saying it's the opposite of recollection. Truth is something that goes towards the future.

It goes towards something that's open. And there are truths that existed, thanks to Jesus Christ, which never, which didn't exist in the world before him. And that was a thought that pagan philosophy couldn't have. It's not a denial of truth, but it's an idea that truth is historical rather than eternal. How does this play to the idea of subjectivity, though, John,on? I find the, I mean, there is this slogan of Kierkegaard,

which says something like truth is inwardness, truth is subjectivity in some of the books from the middle 1840s. But as I understand it, I mean, maybe I'm rather to the literary end of the interpretations of Kiergaard, As I understand it, he's saying if there was a truth that could be directly communicated, then it would be that truth, at least truth in regard to the really important matters, is subjective and inward. But of course that can't be communicated,

and that's why we have to use all these roundabout storytelling, lyrical, dialectical methods rather than simply cite. So the phrase, truth is subjective, expresses a truth that can't be expressed. In other words, by putting it like, that you're deforming it? Yes, I mean, I think just to add to that, Kikha somewhere says that the distinction between objective truth and subjective truth can be understood as a distinction between what and how. So objective truth is a matter of what is known or what is believed. Subjective truth is a matter of how one appropriates that truth, or in other words, how one lives.

So Kikil thinks that we can live truthfully or we can live untruthfully. And to live untruthfully involves self-deception, hence the Socratic methods to try to illuminate that self-deception, or we can live truthfully. And that's, I think, what he means by saying that subjectivity is truth. Can I turn to you, John Leverd. His Kekegaard had a vision or an idea of three stages in life, the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Let's start with the aesthetic. What is it to live an aesthetic like? Can you briefly tell us that?

Okay, well, the aesthetic emerges first and perhaps most clearly in a book called Either Or, which is a particularly good example of the many voices that Jonathan was alluding to earlier. The book is divided basically into two parts. There's this story about the sets of papers having been found in a secret drawer of a desk. Things are always being found in unusual places in Kierke, or in one case. case, a locked box at the bottom of a lake. These seem to be papers which represent two different life views, the aesthetic and the ethical.

And in the first, the aesthetic papers are, the papers seem to be the papers of an unnamed young man who's known only as A, that represents a state of extreme en wee and boredom with life. In one of the essays... The question of the times, you must remember, living at a time of high romanticism. Precisely so, and that's a big issue.

influence on this. What did he mean by which might be useful to go to the word aesthetic? Because he didn't mean what it's now become really. Are we talking about a different interpretation of the word, aren't we? To understand that, we need to understand a little bit about the tradition of German aesthetics, Kant and so on, which talks about the aesthetic attitude as being one of essentially disinterest. So what the East The character of the East Theteat is trying to do is to bring this disinterested,

disengaged, contemplative kind of attitude. to life as a whole. And the result is that people become like pieces to be moved around on his chessboard, manipulated. But he's not prepared to engage with anything. He's not prepared to throw himself into existence, as it were. The aesthetic person is really one who organizes his life around the principle of pleasure.

He just wants, he's a hedonist in a sense. But the irony of the aesthetic way of life is it actually, it's sort of self-defeating. It leads to despair, not just a kind of melancholy, but more profoundly what Keiko means by despair is the loss of oneself or the failure to be or to become oneself. So the young man sort of like sets himself the idea that the most important thing is to avoid boredom. And in order to do this, he says one needs to avoid the things that might inspire boredom, such as commitments.

So he advises avoid marriage, avoid friendship, avoid kind of a useful career. the ethical character, Judge William, will try to persuade him that this is precisely what is of value in life. Would you like to add to that, Clare? Kirchior thinks that the aesthetic sphere is what you end up with if you try to live in accordance with Hegelian principles. So in a sense, part of his critique of Hegel is to say that doing philosophy, thinking abstractly, trying to take up an objective standpoint, is to actually, from an existential point of view, just to be confined to this aesthetic sphere

which Keiko thinks is the lowest of the different kinds of existence that he outlines. Why, Jonathan, does I think it's the lowest? Well, I'm not sure that he does exactly think it's the lowest. That's to say, I'm not sure that he's got such a clear sense of there being three different phases called the aesthetic ethic. and religious. My questions.

Because to think of it like that is to put it in a kind of objectivising kind of way already. And one of the great things about either or, I mean, it looks as though it's presented, and John was making this point, it looks as though it's two sets of papers. And the editor says, well, you know, they're written on different kinds of paper.

Then actually the papers contain transcripts of stuff by other people. And then the editor says, actually, I don't think they're by two different people at all. I think they're all by the same person. And so you end up thinking, actually, it's not as though there's a choice between different ways of going about. There's a wonderful, the only bit that's actually called either or in the book, Either Or, is a little discussion. I think it's in the aesthetic bit. Where the guy says either or, marry, you'll regret it, don't marry, you'll regret it.

Laugh with the followers of the world or weep over them, you'll regret it either way. Hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way. So, in fact, it's not as though he's saying you have to make the right choice. have to be aware that there are choices to be made, but the most important thing is that you have to realize that your interests are vitally at stake in what you think, and the important thing is not so much what opinions you have, but how you live those opinions.

Right. I got the impression, and just be emphatic if I'm completely wrong, I don't mind, that there was a hierarchy, that the aesthetic was, it was a sort of three-tier view, that the aesthetic was useful and in the end inadequate, and you move to the ethical, and you moved kind of up or along, or you improved or matured or we can keep going on with those. Is that completely wrong, John Lippet?

If not, can you talk about the ethical and we can do the rest of the programme? Okay, I think this is where the many voices becomes kind of important. In someone like the pseudonym Johannes Climachus, for example, I think it is quite clear that there is a hierarchy of stages, and he uses this imagery of height all the time, and so like ascending at various stages. But I think what I agree with about what Jonathan was suggesting is that it isn't like when you move on to the ethical stage,

you leave behind the aesthetic stage altogether. There's the form. Well, let's now listen a little bit more. Sorry to interrupt, and obviously I'm a complete amateur here, but still. Judge William, who's also in this discussion with A, he's the older person, does say what you're doing will not be, a satisfying life. Does say marriage might require a sacrifice,

but if you stay with it, the sacrifice will be well worth it, and so on. So there is a distinction, there is a different attitude to life. And one of the things that fascinates, I mean, I think Kekegaard was the philosopher of a choice for people who didn't read philosophy, because he talked so much about the things that interest you

at that stage. But there is a difference there, isn't there? Right. That's right. But in the case of Judge William, one of his two long letters to A is called this well, named by the editor the aesthetic validity of marriage. And part of the technique there is not to say, oh, young man, you've got all this completely wrong.

In general, the tactic, the communication tactic, seems to be to try to persuade A, but what he truly values... That's the boy, the young man, the aesthetic guy. What he truly values, he will get in a sort of, in a transfigured form if he moves onto the ethical. So, for example, A, he thinks,

you mentioned romanticism, earlier. A is besotted by... Precisely. And he's besotted by the idea of first love. Butterflies in the stomach and all that. What the judge tries to do...

Perpetually recurring first love. Precisely, precisely. What the judge tries to do is to say, look, you claim the kind of beauty that you claim to see in first love, you sort of marital love gives you this squared. So it's an attempt to try to

persuade A, that what you're really valuing, you can get by this kind of move, rather than just preaching at him directly. Can we enter into this, Claire, from your view of, is there a sense of a movement from the aesthetic? Jonathan has quite correctly fudget it and confused it,

and that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, the Kierkegaard, that's fine, but I would like to see if we can also make distinctions, and I think the distinction has begun to be made, can, will you develop, or not, John Lippitt has just said. Yes, I mean, I mean, I think one way of looking at this theory of the spheres or stages is precisely as an aid to self-reflection. So Kierkeh thinks that people, you know, deceive themselves, they don't really know where they stand,

they just assume that they're Christians. And what Kierkeh does in his text is presents characters who are living different kinds of life. And that invites the reader to identify him or herself with one of these characters. So, for example, what Kierkeh is saying is that, You can live what from the outside seems to be a Christian life, but actually you're living in a purely aesthetic way. And then the ethical sphere has a different organising principle, and that is the principle of living a moral life

and having duties and responsibilities and so on. And Kierkegaard says that ultimately that is self-defeating too. That's also going to lead to despair because the human condition is such that the ideal moral life is not attainable, You know, we could say because we're finite creatures, because we're not perfect, or as Kierka will say, because we are all sinners. And so the ethical ends in despair too, because we're not able to live up to the moral standards that are required,

and that's where the move to the religious sphere comes. So the distinction between the ethical sphere and the religious sphere is the individual's realization that he's not sufficient to attain the ideal by himself and that he needs to turn to God, he needs to open himself up to divine grace, he needs some kind of help, and that's where the transition from the ethical sphere to the religious sphere takes place.

John Lundaray, that takes place mostly, I think, in, well, anyway, it certainly takes place, in his book Fear and Trembling, where he uses the story of Abraham's decision to obey the injunction to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to, as it were, move from the aesthetic to the ethical I've long since talked about moving up or over, but he'll move into the religious sphere.

Can you tell us about what he meant by that and why that was an extremely pertinent story to tell in this instance? Well, I think the thing about the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, is that by any ordinary moral or indeed aesthetic standards, it's a completely outrageous thing to do. You know, the father of the faiths turns out to be a child. murderer, or, you know, willing to be a child murderer. And he did it just because God told him to.

And a lot of, and in a generation before Kierkegaard, Kant had said this was absolutely immoral. If Abraham seriously wanted, seriously intended to carry out God's injunction, then that was immoral of him. He should have told God what you're demanding is impossible. And Kikin is saying, actually, there's something much more interesting here. And I love the way he begins this book, Fear and Trembling. Fear and Trembling, subtitled a dialectical lyric, which is to say a kind of logical poem. of contradiction in terms. It's a generic nothing, this book. It has this wonderful little section called Atunement, where it says, The Once was a man. Cunement. Attunement. The once was a man, once upon there was a man, and as a child,

he'd read the wonderful story about Abraham and Isaac, and as he grew older, he kept going back to it, and the more he thought about it, the more he loved this story, and the more he was fascinated by it, and the less he could understand it. And the idea is that somehow the old man who recognized that he couldn't, there was something. something about Abraham's faith he couldn't understand was wiser than the philosopher Kant who said Abraham's faith was immoral because there was, it was just an acknowledgement that there is something about leading a good life that we're never going to be able to pin down and reason about. And that's what is involved in faith. But as I understand, Kirkga, I didn't necessarily think it was leading a good life. He said if a man in a church, even in a Danish church at the time at Sudhap and said, I will now go and kill my son for God. the congregation would have lynched him or at least prevented him. Absolutely. And I mean the thing about being a Christian,

and there's a very useful phrase that Kehagard uses, which is becoming a Christian. And you might think, at first sight, the idea of becoming a Christian, you might think, well, it means, you know, you grow out of being an ethete, you grow out of being an ethicist, and you become a person of faith. That's not really what Kehaggard means by becoming a Christian. His idea is that the very idea of being a Christian is contradictory, because to be a Christian would be to think of Christianity as a doctrine that you could relax into like a comfortable armchair. But the whole point about being a Christian is that you always have to be on your guard against relapsing into taking things for granted.

Clark Carlisle, where do you, how do you interpret, Jonathan's given us a very good outline of the Abraham and Isaac's story. And Kierkegaard, one of the many things he does is to seek out what it is to be a real real, Christian, just like he seeks out what it just leads to truth for life. He doesn't seem to find or want to find any certainty, does it? Well, no, I mean, I think there's a question that's raised in

fear and trembling. In fear and trembling, Abraham is presented as the father of faith. And Kierke will say is that normally Christians are very complacent about this. We admire Abraham because he's someone who has faith. But in fact,

when we reflect on the story of Abraham, We can't understand it. Can we really imagine ourselves doing what Abraham did? And so the question is raised here, is it really possible to have faith? Just as Socrates wanted to disrupt people's assumptions that they already possessed knowledge by saying, actually, I don't know anything. Do you really know something? So Kirke wanted to unsettle people's assumptions that they were already Christians

by saying, or by using his pseudonyms to say, actually, I'm not a Christian. I don't know if I do have faith. I don't know if I can have faith. Is it even possible? Because in the case of Abraham, having faith involves believing something that's completely paradoxical and contradictory.

And Abraham has faith because he is willing to sort of hold that contradiction and to live his life and to live his relationship to God, not just in spite of this contradiction, but in full light of this contradiction. And what Abraham achieves in the end is to receive Isaac back. He's prepared to give him,

up. He goes through this movement of resignation as Kierkega describes it. And then God changes his mind. Abraham receives Isaac back. And so in a sense, one always has to give up oneself or give up what is most precious to one in order to be able

to receive it back as a gift from God. And it's that receptivity that is the essence of faith. It's not something that we do. It's something that we receive. There's this theme that comes up in Kierkega, in a number of different and in a number of different voices of giving something back and giving something up and getting it back in some kind of heightened or transfigured kind of form.

Well, let's move on a little bit because he wrote about so many different subjects. And let's take his ideas on love. John Lippet, can you give us an introduction to this? Okay. There's a lovely line in the journals where he says, we've just been talking about fear and trembling. He said, actually, fear and trembling is not the prime moment. mover of the Christian life, for this is love. And I think he's, so love is a theme that runs throughout the, the so-called aesthetic writings,

like either or that we've been talking about seduction versus married love in the case of the aesthetic versus the ethical. But I think Kierkegaard's mature ethical and religious thought on love is found in an 1847 book called works of love, where what he's doing, and this, he's writing under his own name, so this is not pseudonymous, he unpacks some of the, the key New Testament passages on love. So, for example, you shall love your neighbour, which he divides up into three different parts. You shall love the neighbour. You shall love the neighbour. It's commanded. It's a duty. And you shall love the neighbour. So, you know, exactly who is the neighbour as opposed to

someone that you're inclined towards or have some kind of friendship with or whatever. And there's several themes that emerge from this. One is the sheer demandingness of Christian love. He has this notion of love as being a duty, and he emphasizes the Christian injunction that kind of like, your neighbor includes your enemy, and just the sheer difficulty of this, and yet it's commanded. Another is a worry about preferential love, like he's forever contrasting Christian love, agape, with erotic love and friendship. And the main point that he seems to be making there is that preference or inclination can't be the basis of of responsibility for the other person.

Can I just bring Jonathan in here in this? It should love your neighbour as yourself. I mean, a lot of people don't particularly love themselves, so they give themselves a hard time. They might want to give their neighbours a hard time. I mean, this is, I sound horribly flippant, but I don't apologise for it. It gets us to the next stage.

I think it's a really important point. And I say, as a kind of morose 21st century secularist, I find myself a bit surprised sometimes at finding no one more interesting about these kinds of. of issues than the great Christian killer guidance. Sometimes, you know, there's this old Christian thing about how the devil has the best tunes. I think we secularists. I have to think that actually maybe the Christians have the best tunes, certainly as regards to love.

In works of love, it's a very complex book, but the main thing I take from it is the idea that when you say you should love people, love others as you love yourself, the usual way to hear that is to say, exactly as you were suggesting, that there's no problem. We have no problem loving ourselves. And then the question is, how do we kind of lend a bit of our self-love to other people, who can include them in our kind of favouritism towards ourselves? And Keogne's point is that it's not like that at all. And that the Christian teaching about loving others as yourself is also a teaching about, loving yourself as another.

And it's a question about how, what it is to relate, what your duty is to yourself, as well as what your duty is to others. John is? He makes a distinction, which I think is important in connection with what Jonathan's just been saying between proper self-love and selfish self-love. So the real challenge is what is it to love oneself properly as opposed to selfishly. And what distinction does it make, then? Well, this is actually kind of quite hard to pin down exactly what kind of proper self-love is actually concerned with.

I mean, one thing that I would say is that in connection also with what he says about erotic love and friendship, he says the friend, the spouse is first and foremost the neighbour. So you have this important kind of notion that God is the middle term, he says. So both the friend, the spouse, and also the self need to be loved in a sense through God, that God is the kind of invisible third in these various kind of love relationships. So proper self-love would need to incorporate that. Jonathan Wright, given Kierkegaard's religious religion and what he was trying to do, It's rather surprising that he is known as the father of existentialism.

It's a philosophy that presumes the absence of God, and yet, and it was, let's say, it wasn't, the phrase wasn't around in his day. The German philosopher Jasper, as I understand it, coined it in about 1920. How did Jasper's carry Kirkegaard into existentialism? Well, I'm not sure you're right in the presumption that existentialism and Christianity are incompatible, and I think a lot of the 20th century existentialists were Christians as well. So existentialism is a house with many rooms. I'm not sure about Yasper, it's rather difficult to make out where he stood about religion.

But what's definitely true is that, I mean, you can't really object to Kiergaard being classified as an existentialist, although it's true that Existence Philosophy is a term that wasn't invented till 1990, 1920. And existentialism didn't get into the English language until the 1940s, I think. But Kierkegaard did talk about existence as being the particular. particular quality of the being of the individual subject as opposed to the being of other things. And Jasper's called Existence Philosophy after Kierhgard. So, I mean, in a way, existence philosophy is his name for Kierhaggardianism. And I think of, I think you're probably thinking of Sartre as the paradigmatic existentialist.

He was an atheist, but he paid enormous tribute to Kihagard. He, you know, there's this phrase of Kikigards about how the problem for the Christian is becoming a Christian that it's something you can never settle into. For the centenary of Kierkegaard's death in 1955, Sartre gave a lecture saying, well, for us atheists, the problem is becoming an atheist, that it says it's difficult for atheists to be atheists, as Kierkegaard recognized it was difficult for Christians to be Christians as well. Claire Kala, would you like to develop this idea of becoming, which seems to pertain to what Kierkegaard says about being a Christian and about existentialism, too?

Yes, that's right. I mean, Kierkew in fact says that not only is Christianity a matter of becoming a Christian, but he also says that to exist is to be continually in a process of becoming. So in a sense, that's what it is to be human, is to be a thoroughly temporal, finite creature who lives towards the future. And to make that claim involves a critique of systematic philosophy. And we can see both Kierkega and Nietzsche as two. 19th century thinkers who criticise idealism, criticise

systematic philosophy in the name of becoming, in the name of life as it's lived from the perspective of the existing individual. And those two critiques, very different critiques, of course, Keikles and Nietzsche's philosophies are in many ways very

different, but these two critiques, both very polemical, are then taken up in the 20th century by philosophy, like Martin Heidegger and of course Sartre and given more sort of flesh in a sense and in a sense

with both Heidegger's book being in time and Sartre's book being in nothingness there's almost an attempt to systematise this idea of becoming to try to articulate an account of what it is to be an existing individual whereas we just get

sort of flashes of this in Kikirkels and Nietzsche's writings but these ideas are taken up and developed and worked out much more coherently, in a sense, in the 20th century existentialists. The other great 20th century sort of existentialist who learned from Kiergaard is, of course, W.H. Orden, who did regard himself as something of an existentialist.

And it was through Kierkegaard. It was through, when Kierkegaard started being translated into English in the late 1930s, Auden absorbed it and he said it knocked me completely sideways. And he became a Kierigard lover. And I think that he, there were things about Orden's Christianity that owed a great deal to Kyrgyzgaard and also about Auden's sense of the kind of sadness

of people who are excessively logical was something that he took from Kierkegaard. How significant all of you are too, Pinch? How significant do you think his work is now in philosophy and in the general Ron? Jonathan has indicated that he, through Orden and through a great number of others, he influenced or was certainly much enjoyed by writers,

by many creative writers and so on. Where has he placed now? What's the view of him? Can we start with you, John? Well, I think Claire's already connected Kierkegaul with Nietzsche, and I think one thing that they have in common is the sheer range of different philosophical positions that have tried to claim both Nita and Kierkegao

for their own. I think he kind of straddles in a sense the often made analytic continental kind of distinction. And I think one way in which he is being, we've been talking mostly about existentialism, but one way in which a more kind of like traditional kind of Anglo-American philosopher might locate him is in terms of his contribution to the virtues. There's been a lot of work recently on kind of virtue ethics and the significance of the virtues. And I think from Kierkegaur is one source that we could draw on for an understanding of maybe specifically theological virtues like faith, hope and love and so on. And there's quite a bit of work being done on drawing on that aspect of Kierkega at the moment.

Kerkowla. Kerkow is a bottomless pit, really. You know, his philosophy is so rich and so complex that there's a wealth of resources there. in various different philosophical traditions that we find ourselves with. Because Keirchior has these theological categories that he operates with, people often would be reluctant to see the connection between him and more secular philosophers. For example, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, I think is very much indebted to Keirke in a way that's perhaps not recognised

with someone like Derrida who's emphasising the fact that ideals are not necessarily, possible, there's an aspect of human existence or there's an aspect of language that always undermines itself, that there's never any sort of closure on concepts, on theatres and so on. That kind of very modern idea is one that we can trace back to Kyrgyz or Anta Kierkeg as imaginative reinterpretation of Socrates. Jonathan finally. I guess philosophy in our time is a heavily professionalised

industry in a way that Kierigard would have loathed. I mean, he hated professors. He said, take it, what's the difference between the thinker and a professor? Take away the paradox and you have a professor. It's a term he used, and it seems to me that he would think that contemporary philosophy is dominated by the professors, and I think that contemporary philosophy would be in a much better condition if it would allow itself to learn more from Kierkega. There's a wonderful phrase he had in his notebooks about, even if you offered me a place in the great edifice of the system. I would rather be the kind of thinker who just sits on a branch. Thank you very much. Thank you, John Lippet, Claire Carlyle and Jonathan Ray. And next week on in our time, I'll be discussing Henry the 8th and the dissolution of the monasteries. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at bbc.co.com.com.com.