THE
JOURNALS OF KIERKEGAARD 1834-1854
Do you sometimes have trouble sleeping? Do you dream in colour? Have
you ever had the feeling that the life you're living is not the one
you're meant to be living? That your destiny might lay elsewhere?
That fate might have other plans for you? When you're reading
Kierkegaard do you ever have a problem with him?
Cited as being the father of Existentialism, Kierkegaard rang the
bell for melancholia but I suspect he was no less happy than most
other men. 'I can say of my sorrow,' he wrote 'What the
Englishman says of his house: my sorrow is my castle.' Which is
quite a witty line if you think about it and one that he was no doubt
amused and pleased by.
I think it's a truism that what Kierkegaard did was to get to the
core of it as in what is man's individual purpose in the world? What
is the point of his existence? The distinction he made was of that
between the individual man and mankind - and it was an important
distinction. Whilst political systems at that time were a dialectical
relationship between the individual and the community in the
representative individual, Kierkegaard didn't care for being merely
represented so he sought his own system.
He recognised that culture was his enemy and so too that religion as
represented by the Church was not his friend but for all that he was
irrevocably tangled up in Christianity. To be fair, when reading
Kierkegaard we need to consider the age in which he was living for
not only was it before the Internet was invented (I know, it's hard
to imagine there could have been a world before the Internet, but
try) but it was before the exploration of space was even
considered, before the World Wars, before the rise of Fascism and
Communism, and so on and so forth. Christianity and God was all there
really was as ways of understanding the world. Like the good
Christians Kierkegaard wanted us to be, we have to forgive him
for his lack of religious, philosophical, scientific or political
instruments. But still...
To Kierkegaard, Christianity was God's thought but had little to do
with such things as Christmas and Christmas puddings and the
perception of it as preached by Ministers to the masses. Rather, it
was all to do with becoming a moral character, a witness to the
truth, to be willing to suffer for the truth and to be ready to give
up worldly wisdom. It was all to do with loving one another.
He wasn't seeking to reform the doctrine of the established Church
but to reform us all because the lives of his fellow men - in his
eyes - were wretched. Salvation was only to be found in the spiritual
and those in most need of it were the poor.
If God, as John Lennon once surmised, is merely a concept by which we
measure our pain then using that as a methodology, Kierkegaard was in
agony.
On reading The Journals Of Kierkegaard as edited and
translated by Alexander Dru, it left me wondering: Does anyone give a
flying fuck about Kierkegaard nowadays?
Thought not.
Me neither.
One last thing: Christianity as represented by the established Church
these days is like a gift-wrapped box sitting in the corner, trying
to look like a present for mankind. It's like the bottle that Alice
drinks from in Alice's Adventures In Wonderland but rather than
saying 'Drink me', the label on the box says 'Open me'. So you open
it up and what's inside? Tony fucking Blair, soaked in the blood of a
million dead but still wearing his convictions rather than his heart
on his sleeve, grinning maniacally and repeating ad nauseam "I'd
do it again, I'd do it again..." And then there's another box in
another corner but labelled 'Islam', and there's something just as
horrific moving around inside of that one that's trying its utmost to
get out...
John Serpico
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