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PHILOSOPHERS and HISTORIANS (4 of 6)

Soren Kierkegaard (kêr'kegôr) (1813-1855), of Copenhagen, completed a masters degree in theology. He rejected rational justifications for belief in Jesus Christ. He rejected the attempts by Christians in the third and fourth centuries to superimpose philosophical arguments and reasoning upon Christianity's core belief that Jesus was humanity's savior. Kierkegaard believed choosing to believe in Jesus on the basis of passion. Certainty, he claimed, is found only in an unjustifiable "leap into faith." He rejected Hegel's attempt to rationalize Christianity, Hegel in general and any other attempt at reasoning one's way to a unified view of all. He challenged what he thought was nonsense at every opportunity, and this put him at odds with established Protestant churches. Kierkegaard rejected objectivity. Truth as Subjectivity was the title of one of his books. He claimed that it was in the mind that God existed. And he described people as responsible for their choices -- no blaming an exterior force, such as the Devil.

Kierkegaard's view was the founding of modern existentialism. Atheistic existentialists would join him in holding that humans were limited to choices and that there was no objective right and wrong that could be reasoned to. To the existentialists, living was a struggle with an exterior world that was fundamentally absurd.

He had a view on Schopenhauer, with whom he became acquainted late in his short life. In 1854 he wrote:

In the same way that one disinfects the mouth during an epidemic so as not to be infected by breathing in the poisonous air, one might recommend students who will have to live in Denmark in an atmosphere of nonsensical Christian optimism, to take a little dose of Schopenhauer's Ethic in order to protect themselves against infection from that malodorous twaddle.

Schopenhauer is so far from being a real pessimist that at the most he represents 'the interesting': in a certain sense he makes asceticism interesting--the most dangerous thing possible for a pleasure-seeking age which will be harmed more than ever by distilling pleasure even out of asceticism… is by studying asceticism in a completely impersonal way, by assigning it a place in the system.