Soren Kierkegaard believes that life is a surd, at the bottom of things, with all rationalizations stripped away, and Max Stirner would agree, though his wording would be quite different than Kierkegaard’s. Also, Stirner would not be so quick to favor subjective truth as a wholly ardent inner commitment to experiencing God, as does Kierkegaard, who does not believe at all that his subjective truth is a spook—indeed this is one abstraction that Kierkegaard completely, enthusiastically embraces.
Paul Strathern in his book on Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard In 90 Minutes), on Page 52, elaborates on Kierkegaard’s characterization of subjective truth: “According to this view, no morality can originate from objective fact. Consciously enough, here Kierkegaard aligns himself with that profound atheist and skeptic, David Hume. According to Hume, all we can know is what we experience. From this we derive so-called facts. But from these facts it is not possible to derive any morality. Just because sobriety is conducive to consistent behavior, we cannot therefore say that we ought to remain sober. Both Kierkegaard and Hume agree that we cannot derive as ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ (This process which attempts to include ethics in philosophy, is now known as the Naturalistic Fallacy.)”
My response: It may seem odd that Kierkegaard aligns himself with an atheist and irreverent skeptic like Hum, but what they share is skepticism about objective truth, the correspondence theory of truth, and that the myth of the given is indeed an unreliable myth. These two thinkers and Max Stirner share the same subjective, irrational epistemology. They deny that a scientific fact leads to objective truth in values, in ethics, in statements about how to worship God, to insist that God exists.
All we can know is what we experience, and this phenomenological limitation will not allow us to make true statements about reality, science, facts or about God. Stirner would agree. We are solipsistic at least in part, we cannot escape our subjective bubble, so our characterization of that lived experience as a concrete, existent individual is the subjective version of truth that we live by and communicate to the rest of the world. The concepts and language that one resorts to will fall short of making clear what existence is and why we exist and what we should do with our lives. The world is a surd and no abstraction will give us a clear picture of what we experience. We are just to take that leap of faith into nothingness and passionately live our love for God.
Strathern continues: “But when we come to examine our existence, we discover it’s more than just ‘there,’ It has to be lived out. It has to be turned into action by means of ‘subjective thought.’ This is the essential element of our subjectivity, and it leads to subjective truth. Here we see what Kierkegaard means when he asserts that ‘subjectivity is truth.’”
My response: Existing is experiencing and living subjective truth in action in one’s life; it is not to be endlessly analyzed and conceptualized about by some dry scientific observer. Though Stirner would have regarded Kierkegaard as too pious, to prescriptive, too dogmatic espistemologically, and too inclined to subject himself to worship his religious abstraction that does not exist according to Stirner.
Strathern continues from Pages 50, 51, 52 and 53: “For Kierkegaard there are two kinds of truth. Objective truth, such as the truths of history and science, are related to the external world. They can be confirmed by reference to outer criteria. In other words, objective truth depends upon what is said. Subjective truth on the other hand, depends upon how a thing is said.
Unlike objective truth, subjective truth has no objective criteria. Kierkegaard gave the example of two men at prayer. One is praying to the ‘true conception of God’ (the Christian one for Kierkegaard)) but is doing so in a ‘false spirit’. The second man is a pagan, praying to his primitive idol, but with an ‘entire passion for the infinite’. For Kierkegaard it is the second man who has the greatest subjective truth, because he prays ‘in truth.’ Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective truth is akin to sincerity, only more so. It involves a passionate inner commitment.”
My response: It seems that Kierkegaard comes close to insisting that one’s ideas about the divinity worshipped are less about serving the one true God, than it is for that devotion to be total, lived, passionate and sincere. Stirner would not be so categorical in making these pronouncements, but he might accuse the rational Christian believer of being an inauthentic unwilling egoists sacrificing himself for the sake of following a religious phantasm
Strathern continues: “Subjective truths are the most important for Kierkegaard because they are fundamentally related to our existence. As we have seen, they are not related to any objective criteria; instead they are related to the ‘surd’ that remains when all the objective criteria have been analyzed away. Subjective truth is thus concerned with the very foundation of our values—not so much with whether these values are ‘correct,’ but the nature of our commitment to them.”
My response: Subjective truths for Kierkegaard, and for Stirner to—though to a lesser degree and not so declaratively laid out to follow—are experiential acting to God, the world and others in our lives, and that lived experience is felt, conceptualized but lived and felt. Reason and logic fail us: the world is a meaningfulness surd, filled with mysteries, dead ends, and illogical facts. To be truthful subjectively is to interact with life with passion and ardor.
Strathern continues: “But Kierkegaard’s belief in the superiority of subjective truth (to objective truth) caused him to doubt Hume’s view regarding the primacy of fact. Kierkegaard rightly sees that even so-called facts can be determined by our attitude. To a considerable extent, our values determine our ‘facts.’ Faced with the same reality, the Christian and pleasure-seeker may see different ‘facts.’ (As for example, if both were introduced to a bordello or religious retreat.) In this way each individual is to a certain extent the creator of his own world. And he creates the world because of the values he holds.”
My response: Here there is converging thinking between Kierkegaard and Stirner. Both would avow that subjective truth has primacy over objective truth, should even that comparison be able to be made. Both thinkers would insist that the values and perspective of the existent will entail the facts that he construes from the surd that Being has flung him into. His freedom, self-possession, his individuality, his willing ego and his authenticity gain expression and satisfaction if how he creates the world around him, not worrying if his creation would withstand peer review
Strathern continues on Pages 53 and 54:: “It is not difficult to see in such thinking the seeds of present-day relativism, with its rejection of the entire notion of objective truth. Kierkegaard also anticipates twentieth-century phenomenology, which sees all forms of consciousness as ‘intentional’—in other words consciousness is always purposive. We see the world the way we see it because of what we intend to do with it. Likewise Wittgenstein’s remark: ‘The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy man,’ whose apparent banality takes on a more profound tenor when one realizes that he is speaking here of the exercise of the will. As Kierkegaard realized, the individual sees the world that he wills to see, and this depends upon the values he has previously chosen, the ones he lives by, the ones that make him what he is. Kierkegaard thus argues that the values that make the individual what he is, also make, the world what it is.”
My response: Existentialists like Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Stirner, with their irrationalism, their subjective, phenomenological epistemology, their rejection of objective truth and necessary values, were the forerunners of current neo-pragmatists and postmodernists. Life is lived for them in a linguistic community as the perspective of the participants, and how they describe that view, are what come to be accepted, rightly or not, as how reality is, not as how it is interpreted.
Strathern continues: “Existence is a colossal risk. We can never know whether the way we choose to live is the right way. Anyone who realizes this fully, who makes himself constantly aware of it, is bound to feel anguish, according to Kierkegaard. Such subjective truths, supported by no objective evidence, are grounded on nothing. Literally We thus come to know the nothingness of existence, the utter uncertainty that lies at its heart. Life is fundamentally tentative and elusive.
Even consciousness itself is a contradiction. This is the intersection between actuality and possibility, the meeting place of what is and what is not. (As Kierkegaard also puts it, ‘Life is understood backwards, but lived forwards.’) Consciousness is thus in opposition to itself: it as a ‘doubleness’.”
My response: When Kierkegaard states that subjective truths are based on nothing (no scientific facts, foundational axioms, or well-reasoned arguments), he sounds an awful lot like Stirner with the Unique as a creative nothing, lapsing at times into sweet self-forgetfulness. The existent must leap into the future, unknowable and terrifying, but that is required should he wish to be free and reach God and his, the existent’s, own version of subjective truth, his personal narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment