Hello Ryobi! Now that is a very tricky question, tricky in the sense one has to tell the entire story of Kierkegaard to answer it. Clearly, Kierkegaard was a Christian, but if you asked him what is an existentialist he would not have any idea of what you meant. This is because "existentialism" is a term to denote a general category of philosophical literature (Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche) so the term can about long after he passed. Kierkegaard was man with a mission against...."Christendom" as the collection of his writings are entitled, "Attack Against Christendom." Christendom is State sanctioned religion in which everybody is a Christian resulting in nobody being a Christian. Kierkegaard wrote that "Christendom creates Christians by the millions...and all of the small quality." So if you asked Kierkegaard "how can you reconcile Christianity with Christendom?" he would say, you cannot. Hegel was the leading theologian of his day and represented the state and Christianity as the state religion of Germany. The Teleological Suspension of the Paradigmatic: A Theory of Spiritual Experience "The way to the spirit is the round about way...." Hegel. "I was leaning heavily toward the conclusion that everything I’d assumed about reality up to that moment might, in fact, just be a thin shaving, peeled from the trunk of the tree of life." --The Prophet's Way: A Guide to Living in the Now, by Thom Hartmann(p. 10). Adorno studied under the Christian Theologian, Paul Tillich, while he completed his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931. Kierkegaard's influence can be seen throughout Adorno's life writings and we can see a familiar pattern found in both philosopher's method. Adorno's Negative Dialectic seeks to formulate a contradiction in a paradigm (as in the case of Husserl's Logical Absolutism, or Kant's Transcendental Philosophy) in order to trace back its reified origins in the world. As much as he railed against Hegel's Dialectical System of Universals, Kierkegaard incorporates dialectical "contradiction" in his description of the stages of human existence, but going in the opposite direction! This is an anti-Hegelian dialectic which moves not toward Universal world-history, but the subjective individual existent; not to Absolute Knowledge, but to Uncertainty and Faith ; not theoretical integration, but fragmentary disintegration of truth. The individual human existent is "Unscientific," "Unconcluding," or dynamically ongoing; and a "Postscript," or unsystematic remainder of any philosophical system. Kierkegaard has described in his writings ( Either/Or, and Fear And Trembling, and The Sickness Unto Death ) three closely interacting moods, or attitudes of the self as it passes through life. The stages, or spheres of human existence are the aesthetic, ethical, and religious. The non-static self develops internal tensions and contradictions as it moves to development. These contradictions come to a moment of decision (Either/Or) when the self attempts to define itself in static reified terms. The aesthetic life is often, but not necessarily the stance of a young person that lives by the senses and emotions in pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment as the sole goal of the self. Sense experience is penultimate and all situations are judged for their value in generating hedonistic pleasure. The aesthetic attitude can have many disguises from the cynical antisocial rebel to the sophisticated businessperson. The aesthetic existence has deep emotional conflict for there is a limit to hedonism--satiation mixed with boredom that is a kind of mithridatization to pleasure. The single-minded hedonistic search results in pain, dissatisfaction, and frustration. The Epicureans where philosophically hedonists, but would monastically fast before meals in order to maximize the pleasure of eating food. The self becomes fractured and dispersed over a wide range of possible objects of momentary pleasure. As in Kurt Cobaine's song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" this form of consciousness says, "I taste; therefore...nevermind." This sense of unhappiness and dissatisfaction is a symptom of the meaninglessness of all finite objects. Despair brings the self to a point of existential decision. Kierkegaard wrote of the aesthetic, "He has not chosen himself; like Narcissus he has fallen in love with himself. Such a situation has certainly ended not infrequently in suicide." The ethical life is again often, but not in every case, the philosophical attitude of the older person. Obedience, and Duty are the universal categories by which the self lives in this sphere of human existence. Moral obligation and ethical principles of societal institutions like marriage, work, and military service subordinate the self, and its hedonistic pursuit. Kierkegaard wrote of the ethical consciousness, "the chief thing is, not whether one can count on one's fingers how many duties one has, but that a man has once felt the intensity of duty in such a way that the consciousness of it is for him the assurance of the eternal validity of his being." (Either/Or, II, p. 223). However, the ethical consciousness runs into the same familiar despair because law, like the Old Testament Law, is insufficient for human existence. The stone tablet of the Decalogue cannot substitute for the Bread of Life. Franz Kafka scholar, Jeff Fort, is interviewed about the novella, "The Metamorphosis" in which the contradiction of the ethical sphere is examined in the life of the miserable traveling salesman Gregor Samsa. The universal rules in Samsa's life is the work ethic, and to pay off the debts of his exploitive father's failed business. One morning Gregor overslept making him late to work for the first time in fifteen years and resulting in his utter demise. His employer sends the chief clerk to check on him, but Gregor will not open his bedroom's door because he has inexplicably turned into an insect type creature. Gregor is unable to work in his alien condition to support his extended family. However, his bodily transformation into an insect is only a metaphor of his inner condition. He was always in this inhuman condition so the transformation is really a shift in consciousness accidentally triggered by a minor event in his mundane life. Because he no longer fits in the ends-means context of the universal work ethic, Gregor is simply forgotten and one day "its" reified insect shell is thrown out with the trash by a house cleaner. For Kierkegaard, the human is the synthesis of the finite and the infinite. Despair drives the self to existential decision again, but toward religious consciousness. This is not a constructive progression to the higher religious stage so much as a stripping away of the masks the self uses to falsely define itself. This internal conflict, or contradiction is symptomatic of the inadequacy of rule-following and the need for spiritual self-realization. The self is both repelled and attracted to the religious sphere, which involves risk, self-commitment to uncertainty, and continuous leaps of faith. This aversion to the religious sphere is not the disappointment of emptiness like despair, but rather Dread (Angst) of the possibilities that freedom may actualize. The shift from the ethical to the religious is described by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, as "the teleological suspension of the ethical" and recounts the biblical story of Abraham ordered by G-d to sacrifice his son Isaac. Is Abraham to follow G-d's command to kill, or obey the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill?" Kierkegaard's purpose of retelling this story is to show the difference between the two spheres of the ethical and the religious. In addition, the story of Abraham is used biographically by Kierkegaard to explain his own sacrifice of not marrying Regina Olsen and obeying a higher calling for a religious life. The shift from ethical to the religion is not an intellectual exercise because intellectual reflection is never ending, or only an approximation at best. Kierkegaard argues that even if we assume the scriptures to be true... Kierkegaard, like some mystics, negates the conceptual for the non-conceptual. Kierkegaard embraces Fideism (Latin for fides, or faith) which holds that faith in matters of religion is antithetical to, and independent of, Reason. Wittgenstein has been accused of Fideism. He is not arguing for or against faith, but how religious language in used in the forms of life. Here Wittgenstein's method is closer to Adorno's demystification of reified concepts. The phrase "teleological suspension of the ethical" was used by Kierkegaard to explain the difference between the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of the self since these categories are the most general in human existence, or existential categories. With that distinction in mind, I want adopt the phrase "teleological suspension of the paradigmatic" since existential paradigms relating to the self sometimes fail to explain all of human experience and even contradict experience. "Teleological" is meant as "end." "Suspension" means that the self refuses to existentially commit to a governing paradigmatic principle. So, what would brings about suspension of a paradigm? Existential "paradigm atrophy" is a paradigm that no longer is able to give coherent meaning to experience resulting in a contradiction between thought and life. Symptomatic of existential paradigm anthrop is despairing doubt of the self for its place in existence. The resolution for the self is to find a new existential paradigm, yet this cannot be achieved by reason--but by choice, and ultimately, by faith. I know some of that may not be clear. We can discuss it later. Check out the links in the above text. Good question!
Did I write that? Of course I did! Look at all the spelling errors! Sorry for the dead “Metamorphosis” link, (Did I spell that right?) How rude of me...but the “Grege Sama” link worked!
Well, here is that famous Kierkegaard quote I messed up from his attack against Christendom. (My emphasis in bold)
Well, existentialism didn't really become an atheist thing until well after Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the solution to existential dilemmas was to become a "Knight of Faith." I never found it very convincing, and I think Camus's focus on authenticity was a better approach, but I'm biased when it comes to that.
