Teenage Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard (and yes, that o should be an o-with-a-slash, but I'm not sure of how to type that) was an influential philosopher of the Modern period, and one of the few whose name still invokes disagreement as to the nature of its pronunciation. For the record, it's /ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/, though in conversation, I usually say "Keer-ken-guard."

More importantly, Kierkegaard is widely recognized as the Father of Existentialism, and was an early proponent of the importance of subjectivity over objectivity. He was influenced indirectly by Immanuel Kant, and more directly by the desire to completely disagree with Georg Hegel.

A brief aside: perhaps to illustrate his belief in the importance of subjectivity, the majority of Kierkegaard's work is written under pseudonyms, with different pseudonyms holding different points of view. Some of his pseudonyms even disagreed with one another (his atheist Johannes Climacus and the ultra-Christian Anti-Climacus are the most obvious example of this). It gets confusing.

Kierkegaard wrote extensively on the subjects of despair, dread, alienation, and angst, which you might think ought to make him popular reading for all those emo middle-school philosophy students. In fact, Kierkegaard easily out-emos any of them, and yet still comes off as a fairly positive guy.

For instance, in Begrebet Angest (translated as The Concept of Dread) Kierkegaard defines 'dread' as a sort of unfocused fear. The German 'angest', that is, dread or angst, is a seperate concept from 'furcht,' fear of a particular threat. According to Kierkegaard, dread is the natural result of the recognition of our free will. In recognizing a choice, we also must recognize the possibility of making the wrong one, and because this threat is internal rather than external, little can be done to alleviate this anxiety.

His example is of a man standing at the top of a tall building. Looking over the edge, he feels a direct fear of falling, but also a strange impulse to throw himself over the edge. This sounds silly in text, but I've stood on top of my fair share of tall buildings, and I always, always get this feeling. The fact that we have the decision of whether to stand or jump inherently holds the possibility we will jump, and the fear of this leap is the essence of dread.

It should be noted that the fear associated with pirate attacks would be classified as 'furcht' rather than 'angest'; that is, your fear is of the direct threat of being pillaged, rather than any internal threat posed by free will. Thus, the Dread Pirate Roberts would more accurately be called the Frightening Pirate Roberts, though I suspect an exception to percise usage should be made in this instance.

In this way, the feeling of dread is an unconcious reminder of our ability to make decisions. An animal (according to Kierkegaard, or more accurately to his pseudonym for that book, Haufniensis) does not experience dread, since it always acts in accordance with its instincts, which, while not infallable, are at least always in accordance with the animals understanding of its own best interest. A human being, on the other hand, does experience dread, and this indicates that a freedom of choice exists to make self-destructive decisions.

Thus, it is only through the experience of our own dread that we can come to grips with our potential as freely-acting beings. Even though I won't ever jump off a building, I can recognize the possibility that I could, and the fact that I don't is a reflection of my ability to make good decisions.

So the next time you have to deal with some angst-filled teenager's drama, just try to think of it as an expression of that person's inherent free will. Given the rapid increase in personal freedoms around that period of life, a little angstiness is probably excusable.

Next Time: Calvinball & Magic: The Gathering