Kierkegaard and spiritual anarchy

[Treeshepherd]

Qualifications for this Thread:

1. I regard the various sacred scriptures to be inspired works. Their purpose is to evoke experiences and to raise questions, rather than to be authoritative instruction manuals for settling differences of spiritual opinions.
2. I am not a perennialist (ie. all religions lead to the same mountain top). I am a pluralist (Though all religions share common aspects, each religion makes a unique contribution to Man’s spiritual history).
3. When I use the term ‘God’ or ‘gods’ or ‘goddess’ or ‘Lord’ or ‘Tao’, it’s merely a convenient placeholder. It stands in for the eternally nameless, divine will, fountainhead of manifestation, Providence. These too are mental constructs and gross approximations.
4. SK = Soren Kierkegaard, (b.1813-d.1855), Danish philosopher.

This is a valuable exercise for my own spiritual journey, writing all this stuff down, but I welcome anyone who is interested to join in. The question: What can we learn from a study of SK as it relates to Man’s potential progression toward spiritual anarchy? I do believe that the endgame of Christianity is a harmonious anarchy. I don’t know if Man will ever arrive at that destination, but I do believe that is the goal.

“An architect builds a durable house with the aid of temporary scaffolding.” –St. Augustine

Civilizations are the impressive, complicated and bewildering scaffolding, machinamenta temporalia. The Leviathan (law, religion, social mores), as Hobbes put it, has been and still is a necessary framework. Augustine said that the house which eventually rises above it will be the City of God...

 

[Pogo]

Soren Kierkegaard: one of the coolest names EVER. Right up there with Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov.

Sorry, just marking a worthy ponderation thread for a future visit.

 

[Treeshepherd]

Introduction to Kierkegaard.

I myself am a beginner in the study of Soren Kierkegaard. You’ll find him in the philosophy section of your bookstore or library. People say he is better classified as a theologian. He described himself as a poet, and that is most apt.

SK inspired the modern existentialist movement. What is an existentialist? There is widespread disagreement on the term. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte said that “existence precedes essence”- in other words we create our own values and contrive a meaning for our lives because the human being does not possess any inherent identity. In response to that, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers said that you could count them out . You can count me out also because I believe that essence should shape the existence of a man, but only does if he is true to his Self (nature). But, all these differences between existentialists are in fact a crucial characteristic of existentialism, because every existentialist is deeply committed to the importance of individuality.

SK was devoutly Christian, but diametrically opposed to the Lutheran Church of Denmark. In his Attack Upon 'Christendom' he denounced organized religion, though not entirely upon principle. He felt that organized religion would always be a potential danger to an individual's deep quality of religious experience. He was hyper-critical toward the Hegelian philosophy of his time. In fact, he was opposed to schools of religion and philosophy altogether.

 

[Treeshepherd]

Leveling

As a youth, my interest in philosophy was sparked when a teacher described conditioning. It was the old story of Pavlov's dogs. Kierkegaard describes something similar-- leveling. For example, you're a poster on USMB. You write things and you get feedback. Someone says, "you're an idiot." You get a thank you, smiley or informative. When you get positive feedback from a preferable identity group, it positively reinforces your behavior. Kierkegaard would say that we tend towards becoming a reflection of the public. Leveling refers to a leveling-off. We conform according to the punishment and reward systems of society.

Funny side note: Kierkegaard wrote under numerous aliases. Sometimes he would have them disagree with one another, just to dick with people. He got a laugh out of that. If he were on USMB, he would have like 5 different socks and they would all argue with one another. But there is a method to his madness. It's not always important what he's saying, exactly. He's trying to evoke an experience, and perhaps that experience is different for everyone.

Anyway, we're all conditioned to various degrees. I'm conditioned against the eating dogs. I'd have to be awfully hungry, anyway. But, I know that my aversion to eating dogs is a product of conditioning. So, that's the starting point. And the leveling process is not all bad. Take an artist, for example. He begins by being trained in the basics of painting. Hopefully, he someday transcends the teachings of the master and becomes a true artist (expressing his unique nature/essence on the canvas).

 

[Treeshepherd]

Nietzsche said that what is of value is that which you write with your own blood. Hemingway said that writing is easy; just sit at the typewriter and bleed. Similarly, Kierkegaard said that the greatest truths are subjective. They are the product of experience.

SK suffered from tremendous angst. The cure was to get himself right with God and with his true Self. I'd be inclined to say that those two goals are one in the same. The Taoist asks, "Oh, the Lord within me! Oh, the Lords of selves! How to abide by it? " Easier said than done.
What Kierkegaard would say is that modern man is (to a large degree) a reflection of the public. He is out of alignment with his true unique nature, or what I would call Destiny. Consequently, modern man lives in despair, though he usually does not know it. His reflex is to seek comfort and avoid pain, numbing that despair.

SK embraced suffering. He rejected popularity and became the object of public ridicule. He rejected the religious and philosophical establishment of his day. He said that 'Christendom' was actually a barrier to becoming a Christian. Intentionally, he threw himself into a type of spiritual wilderness. Somewhere in the midst of what he describes as fear and trembling, he discovered what it meant for him to be a Christian.

Still, SK did not regard the Bible as a comforting blanket. He said that if a person was not deeply disturbed by the scriptures, then one's approach was flawed. He went as far as to say that it should deeply offend one's personal sense of morality. It should come off as totally absurd. He wrestled with the story of Abraham taking Issac up the mountain to be sacrificed. The story, he said, should evoke a furious anger at God. Abraham had not only abandoned the social mores of his day, but he set aside his most deeply felt personal moralities and loyalties. Kierkegaard regarded that as the paragon of transcendence.
Obviously, a white-bearded God riding on a cloud isn't whispering voices into our heads, asking us to sacrifice our own child, and then saying "Psyche! Oh, I really had you going there, haha" at the last second. It's a disturbing story that doesn't provide much in the way of answers. It's like a paint thinner. It's a scriptural device which can strip you of your own conditioning and personal morality.

You hear a lot of talk about people making up their own value systems. They profess the freedom to decide for themselves. It always surprises me then, how those people tend to all sound the same. They're leveled-off. They've abandoned scripture, but they haven't escaped from a common conditioning. Kierkegaard found freedom. Tolstoy was what I would regard as a Christian anarchist. Isaac Newton worked it out for himself what it meant to be a Christian. And as a spiritual anarchist, it isn't for me to copy any of them either. I've ended up in my own place, but it's not a destination I went shopping for. It's not something I chose. It's my Fate. It's my Destiny. It's a subjective truth. But it's not a relative truth in the sense of Aristotle's Golden Mean. It's a relational truth between my unique circumstance and my unique essence. To me, that is the goal of existentialism.

 

[Treeshepherd]

Treeshepherd's rain forest model of truth.

Say you've got a python and a monkey and a mango fruit. The mango fruit doesn't mind being eaten. That's going to serve its purposes by spreading its seeds. The monkey's goal is to eat the mango and avoid being eaten by the python. The python wants to eat the monkey, but the mango is totally irrelevant. Looking at it one way, they all have conflicting goals. Take the meta view, and you see that there's the perpetuation of an ever-evolving balance. Creative tension.

On an individual level, if we were all true to our selves (fulfilling our individual Destinies), mankind would be perfectly balanced. Speaking figuratively, I have faith that if individual 'trees' were left to grow spontaneously, the 'forest' as a whole would be in balance. What we have instead is a contrivance. We have a lot of pruning of the trees from the time they were saplings, so to speak. One day, we'll be able to handle anarchy. We're not able to handle it today because we're individually divorced from our destined paths.

The atheist doesn't believe in any such thing as destiny. The future is in our hands. Most atheists would agree that we have to logically program society and hack our genetics and seek salvation in technology. The modern atheist is like a Thomas Hobbes of the Digital Age.

On a meta-scale, it's a small world. Every religion is in contact with every other religion. It's an eco-system of religions, basically. But, I think it's possible for every religion to stimulate the evolution of all other religions. They don't do that through spiritual compromise either, or striving for sameness, but by being true to their individual essences. They each benefit from living in a state of creative tension.

Atheism serves a purpose within this eco-system of religions. The atheist is like a termite. It thins out the old diseased wood. You see them all the time in the religion forum, heckling and sneering. They love the religion forum, at any rate the evangelical atheists do. They represent a necessary function in society, what Heidegger called Destruktion. They eat away at the foundations of classical civilization and they flatulate. It's a base function, but a necessary one. More so than anything, modern atheism stimulates the evolution (regrowth) of modern theism.

Finally, I was reading Isaiah last night. There's a lot of imagery in there about trees and forests and fires and regrowth. God uses to Assyrians to militarily destroy Judah. The Assyrians are haughty and antagonistic toward the Hebrew God, but the Hebrew God is actually using them as a tool of renewal. The Assyrians don't fully destroy the House of David. They just sort of purify it, teach it a lesson, and then the remnant shall return. Isaiah 10:21. The Assyrians remind me of the atheists in the religion forum. They have a necessary purpose. They're unwittingly a part of the divine plan. At least, according to my cosmology. But I'm an individualist anarchist, so I don't encourage you to agree with me.

Well, this was a good exercise for me. I might not be back online until Tuesday. Maybe Monday. The world is spinning and everything is in flux. Maybe this is all tl/dr and it doesn't really matter to anyone else. But, if you're interested in the concept of spiritual anarchy, let's talk later...