Kierkegaard’s Perspective

Human Philosophy 3rd Meeting

Living a passionate life

 Living with passion is important.

 It does not mean that human should do impulsively lots of things
 Living with passion: Understand the MEANING, Long-term GOALS,
and MEASURABLE
 MEANING : for our individual life as well as social life
 Passionate Life → TRUTH → True SELF → Reflected by our LIFE
PURPOSES and our BEHAVIOR
Passion = Engagement

 Passion → Engagement in particular activities, NOT ALL THINGS

 A life of engaged passion reveals at least two qualities.
a.A passionate life emphasizes how you go about living and not what
you end up actually doing.
b.Living passionately means cultivating a bond with your own life that
doesn’t approach it as a problem to be solved, but as a relationship
that you need to involve yourself in and remain open to.
Freedom Reveals The Person

 Autonomous self-movement
 Self-directed behavior
 Transcend: We can rise above the physical cause and-effect
explanations that seem to govern nonhuman things
 Because freedom is an essential part of what you are, it’s a facet of your
existence that you must cultivate if you’re to live in an honest, truthful,
or authentic way. You must be true to this special aspect of what you
are. This management requires that you take the question of how to face
your future and your existence very seriously.
Passionately living : struggling

 the existentialists aren’t against fun.

 Passion: centers on a kind of focus and intensity, a type of deliberateness
about how you go about things→ inwardness
 We are SUBJECT (being active) not an object
 Focus on WHY (the reason) not only WHAT (the occurrence)
 Again, passion need ENGAGEMENT, no matter how hard it is.
 It’s up to us to figure out what path, out of all the ones possible for us, to
take.
 After we choose that path, the existentialists urge us to pursue it with
passion and engagement, with a fire of lived intensity.
Passionately living : struggling

 For the existentialists, a passionate life includes not only committing

resolutely to a path you’re willing to die for, but also doing so in a
way that embraces the fact that you can never be sure that you
picked the right road to tread → TRIAL and ERROR
 Passionate living means opening yourself to the vulnerabilities of life.
You realize that life is, in a way, bigger than you are.
 We can not KNOW about the RESULTS, but we do AWARE with the
process (even though the process is HARD and VULNERABLE)
 The WHY (reason/cause) will impact the EXPRESSION

“The thing is to a find a
truth which is true for me,
to find the idea for which
I can live and die.”
Kierkegaard
What kinds of
activities you will
fight for even
though it’s too risky?
→ e.g. cause death
Passionately living, We Need Make
Choices

 Cultivating a passionate relationship with our own existence

requires us to make choices whose significance and worth
can’t be definitely established. This means embracing mystery
and uncertainty into the core of your life
 We can never know for sure that we made the right decision.
The existentialists believe that there’s nothing external to us
that we can use to see whether our choices are actually
meaningful or significant. That task is ours alone
 SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES
Truth Is Passionate Living

 Because subjects are defined by how they exist, a notion of subjective

truth would have to take the engagement of the person into question. As
such, these truths wouldn’t be independent of you because their very
existence would require your own deep involvement in the world.
 truth is embodied in the way that you live your life.
 subjective truth deals only with what Kierkegaard calls essential truths
about our own personal existence, such as morality and religion.
Subjective truths concern the questions and issues surrounding walking the
right path in life.
Two Approach of Truth

Approximation: The method of knowing that’s

characteristic of objective, scientific truths about things→
The scientific route
Appropriation: The method of knowing that’s
characteristic of subjective, essential truths about your
own personal existence→ The existential route
 1. The crowd believes only
what’s authorized by many
2. The crowd embraces
anonymity→ hidden and
anonymous
3. The crowd is cowardice and
false courage

The crowd is untruth

Kierkegaard
Media & Internet → Lead Us to Be
Impassionate

Knowledge: No passion required →Anyone can be

anything!
Relationships: Idle and superficial → you create your own
identity, whether it accurately represents you or not.
How to be a religious existentialist
according to Kierkegaard?
Religious Existentialist

 Existential concerns and religion are strongly connected.

 Properly holding together in a state of tension the different aspects
of what you are as a self
 At some point, achieving this goal through a recognition of your
dependency on the divine
Being SELF

 Being a self means being conscious of that tension within you and
striving to grapple with, in the concrete situations that you live
through, what’s fixed and what’s possible by working to represent
them both in how you approach those situations.
 We have a capacity for self-determination
 The hard work of being a self: Bringing together polar opposites
Despair, anyone feel this way?

 Despair: Attempting to escape your true self

 Kierkegaard would say that choosing the path of despair: We have
the worst kind of sickness, a sickness of the self — one in which we
desperately try to escape being who we are and thus lead ourself
into a way of living that’s existentially unhealthy
 Despair, will lead us to do sin, include two dimension: WEAKNESS
(avoid true self) & DEFIANCE (overemphasizing your own freedom
and power.)
 Inauthentic Life Stages: Aesthetic (1)

 People often fail at being their concrete selves and instead live in despair, falling into one of the two inauthentic
life stages that Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic and the ethical.
(1) The aesthetic stage: Life without choices
 Aesthetes don’t take an active position in determining the significance of their existence. Instead, they find significance and
meaning in their lives through the enjoyment of passive experiences.
 Aesthetes jump ship by refusing to take their lives seriously. They refuse to acknowledge that they’re existing beings with the
freedom to carve a meaningful path for themselves through life.
(2) The unconscious aesthete: Sleepwalking through life → has no view of herself as spirit or as an actively self-
determining being who can take charge of her own existence. Instead, the spirit in these people lies dormant and is
sleeping, driven by what’s agreeable or disagreeable
 Example: Acquisition of material goods, such as money or possessions Attainment of approved social positions Cultivation of
the majority’s beliefs and opinions
(3) The hedonistic aesthete: Pleasure is king!
(4) The reflective aesthete: Lost in the imagination → this aesthete wants the pleasure to come from ways of
imaginatively manipulating the world. The goal of this aesthete is the mental cultivation of interesting experiences
Inauthentic Life Stages: Ethical (2)

 a person has moved out of the aesthetic stage and is finally ready to make commitments
and choices about who to be and how to live.
 The ethicist does this by freely electing to take her place in a larger social and moral
structure → be Universal → the set of objective moral truths that functions as the
foundation of meaningful and appropriate worldly interaction.
 Why this stage is categorized as despair?
 Using ethics to hide from yourself
 Life is not a rule book only, human should takes role and have their own choices
 Failing to capture the ambiguity in life
 The ethical life fails to deliver on its promises
Facing a Religious Life

 Giving up the earthly: What this means is that you shouldn’t think that what gives your life
meaning can be found within the world. Instead, Kierkegaard thinks that life’s meaning is
found in a relationship with God.
 Embracing the God who’s beyond ethics
 Experiencing ethics as a temptation
 Renouncing your worldly self (negotiation and interpretation)
 Believing the impossible: The knight of faith
 Although many existentialists weren’t religious, for Kierkegaard, the greatest way of living
in truth was to embody the life that contained the greatest passion — and to do that
required faith.