Kierkegaard’s Socratic
Approach to Epistemological Veracity
Søren
Kierkegaard’s salient thread of philosophical authorship grew
within the concept of irony he earned from Socrates. Socrates’
concept of irony becomes Kierkegaard's concept of irony; a conflation
of subjective and objective in epistemology that works to the
advantage of the informed by enfilading ignorance, uncertainty,
social relations, social knowledge and social errors. Socrates was
critical of the unreflective, ossified social praxis of the crowd
(and he was a subtle supporter of oligarchy and further; possibly the
perfect state along neo-fascist lines set out in Plato’s Republic).
Kierkegaard’s M.A. thesis; The Concept of Irony inspired by
Socrates’ introspective means of extrospection, is an important
work for its straightforward approach to self, society, truth and
social critique.
The
connection between Socrates and Kierkegaard is still relevant in the
world today. Socrates and the method of self-examination of The
Meno is a paradigm appropriated by Kierkegaard and applied to his
own day. Philosophy students today benefit from learning of the
Socratic approach and how it was updated and applied by Søren
Kierkegaard to his own era.
Socrates
tethered Kierkegaard’s philosophical development against the storms
of German romanticism and Hegelianism that drowned European politics
for the century 1845-1945. Critical self-reflective analysis of
Socratic thought differs substantially from the ideas of Karl Marx
and Frederich Nietzsche that grew in the cauldron of royalty in
turmoil locked in mortal combat with the revolt of the masses (cf
Ortega Y Gasset).
The
connection between Socrates and Kierkegaard is still relevant in the
world today. Socrates and the method of self-examination of The
Meno is a paradigm appropriated by Kierkegaard and applied to his
own day. Philosophy students today benefit from learning of the
Socratic approach and how it was updated and applied by Søren
Kierkegaard to his own era.
Søren
Kierkegaard regardied Socrates as having discovered the philosophical
point of view of subjective epistemology. Socrates may be considered
the great ancestor of Rene Descartes and Meditations on a Method.
Kierkegaard’s valuable rediscovery of the subjective perspective
of knowledge is a forerunner of some of the epistemological
researches of 20th century philosophers of logic I think,
such as W.V.O. Quine in Word and Object and P.F. Strawson’s
Individuals wherein the difficulties of supporting a purely
empirical point of view are viewed.
Kierkegaard’s
high regard for Socrates led him to modernize the role for the
individual exercising his/her right to objectively criticize society
objectively, impartially and with true opinion instead of just going
with the flow of social use-truths.
In
my opinion Kierkegaard’s ideas about applied social politics were
fundamentally off-the-mark or even wrong. In his preference for
monarchy as a paradigm in which an individual could concern himself
with his subjective concerns against the social exteriority and
unexamined collective consciousness of democratic movements he failed
to recognized the evil of the absolute state. An absolute monarch
such as Thomas Hobbes developed in ‘The Leviathan’ would be more
capable of repression of the individuals and of individuals (with
modern tools available even to Joesph Stalin) that a Democracy armed
with Facebook and Twitter. Rather than making a choice between
democracy and monarchy with Either/Or he might have found Neither/Nor
a little better.
The
individual’s interiority is the source of knowledge so far as one
may have knowledge. It is the first cause or principle of perception
and cognition. Socrates found that knowledge is just ‘tethered’
true opinion (the Meno sections 96-100). I am not sure if, arguably,
Kierkegaard’s best work; The Sickness Unto Death, is not a
development of interiority reaching its limits at what Sartre called
‘the reef of solipsism’ and transcending or overcoming that
absurdity through faith and a personal relationship with the Lord
Jesus Christ.
Jean
Paul Sartre's work; The Critique of Dialectical Reason’ is a
1000 page examination of the realm of exteriority of social
interaction/phenomenality that people exist or live within. That
would include political activities. If one equates Kierkegaard’s
interior-subjective epistemology with Sartre’s 1944 existential
viewpoint of ‘Being and Nothingness’, then the Critique
forms the right philosophical
response to the social world of interaction. I think that Søren
Kierkegaard lacked the philosophical support to reach Sartre’s
viewpoint written a century later.
To be aware of the nature of social reality
epistemologically, and to share that awareness in the popular realm,
would be the entry requisite for solving political issues well
informed with of mind and its place in nature. In theory well
informed rational citizens could address their actual quantifiable
social concerns more effectively than political parties and masses
acting in the unreflective, unexamined realm without inward free
thought group think of mass social behavior.
Kierkegaard’s attack on elements of the
Christian church seems natural. The non-interior,, inertially and
even career motivated facts of a socially ossified priestly and
ecclesiastical structure would inevitably be the target of his
criticism. Socrates would serve as the model again for finding
contradictions or errors in the approaches to belief.
Kierkegaard was a strong advocate for
individualism. The Danish Church, like the German church that had its
ministers appointed by royalty before the Schmalkaldic War with the
Hapsburgs, was the state church. Democracy except for the United
States seldom has unentangeled origins and often is subtly corrupted.
The United States had the great corruption of slavery until the civil
war, and that legacy continues to trouble the nation. Kierkegaard
apparently didn’t devise a perfect state for-himself; such as an
enlightened democracy with very smart and publicly spirited citizens.
He remained within the Socratic, negative way of clearing away
falsehoods rather than throwing new synthetic political or
theoretical ideas into the social dialect such as Hegel and Marx had.
In
discarding a view of Jesus as an Apollonian sort of God-man in favor
of Jesus as a humble God-man Kierkegaard threw out of the Temple of
Faith eisegesis of error, and that was a positive development from
Kierkegaard. He could have noted better, explicitly, that a
priesthood of believers is a better church structure than a dichotomy
between priestly class and laity. He refused to take communion from
a priest on his deathbed, preferring that it be given by a layman.
Martin Luther (all Christians are priests) and his 95 thesis might
have been a work Søren Kierkegaard appreciated. Ironically
Kierkegaard criticized bishops Mynster and Martinsen, who led the
Danish Church, vigorously for straying from the right Christianity
role models of early Christians. Luther also dampened down
eisegetical tendencies of a commercial clergy unified with royal and
secular interests, presenting an implicit conflict of interest.
Kierkegaard also attacked the outward characteristics of the church
(as did Tolstoy later) and was able to disambiguate his
interior-kingdom of God point of view enough from royalty (i.e.
Christian VIII) to have honest, thoughtful opinions about Christ. If
he had lived in an earlier or perhaps later era Kierkegaard might
also would have been a reformer.
I
must admit that I haven’t difficulty viewing Jesus as God and man
simultaneously ,for several reasons, including quantum and
M-theories. If God created the Universe and everything in it, why
should he not be able to exist in it too in any way, should He
prefer?
If one regards the kingdom of God for-oneself,
maybe hat is the best one might accomplish. It may be that the
kingdom-of-God-for-others is an external idea that would be too
impersonlized and instead exists as an illusory collective idea in
that list of invalid and illusory crowd-sourced concepts. God would
have the power to allocate where the kingdom of God may be
experienced, and when, within and/or without (in the empirical
realm).
It
is easy to discern the value of Kierkegaard’s subjectivist method
for Karl Barth where he has written on the kingdomof God. It may be
that Kierkegaard’s criticism of the church combined with his
subjectivism and his take on relativism influenced Paul Tillich’s
approach to theonomy.
In
my opinion reading or studying Kierkegaard’s works are a good way
to place German philosophical developments of the 19th
and 20th
centuries into a better historical context. Kierkegaard’s thought
is perhaps more classical than romanticism, relativism and nihilism.
Reason
in the historical development of ideas finds a place not as a
self-defining ratiocination as a computer might process mathematics
in a darkened box phenomenally, it interacts with the empirical world
of objects. Balanced subjectivism appears like a bridge between two
extremes of romanticism-nihilism and empiricism. Empiricism and
relativism each are like a computer in box through different
approaches. Subjectivism may be in a Schrödinger's quantum box, if
that is so.
And Kierkegaard’s most useful continuing value
is in informing philosophical minded programmers and even physicists
of the historical forms of subjectivism regarding epistemology. For
the question; what is truth, to be answered in programmable logic
useful for quantum mechanics requires a certain element of
enlightenment that a Kierkegaard course might potentially provide.
Subjectivism
for human thought is a fact that must be considered when determining
numerous criteria in particle-wave definitions. Truth or true opinion
of the existence of a quantum state; contingent self-determination of
quantum states accidentally-such topics probably have and will arise
in hard, scientific contexts. Chinese physicists recently performed a
quantum entanglement from an orbiting satellite to Earth. No time
needs to pass for the information of the state of the particle-waves
to be expressed. Conventional ideas of time and space seem to be
transcended so far as current theories go.
Scientists
like to be able to understand and predict various physical and
quantum states. Relativism in perceptions and subjectivism and
determinism in experimental designs are actual elements that play a
role now and probably far more in the future. If truth is a way of
confirming the relation between words and objects existentially,
definitions of words and objects, and ideas about what, when and
where they are, will continue to be supported by comprehensive
bootstrap epistemology helped along with Socrates, Descartes,
Kierkegaard and Sartre before moving on to Quine, Strawson, Kripke,
Heisenberg, Einstein et al.
