metonymy4u

Kierkegaard saw that what Kant was trying to reconcile through his critical philosophy was the problem of the universal in human affairs. This is the problem of how to reconcile our sense of ourselves as individuals with our sense of events that transcend our individual lives. For example, we have a sense that 10 marbles and 10 pigeons have something in common, a more universal aspect of the experience of seeing 10 marbles or 10 pigeons, something that we capture with the word “number,” or the inscription “10.” The problem of universals was first comprehensively articulated in the west by Plato in his famous theory of ideal forms. What Kierkgaard perceived was that Kant’s version of this model could be transformed through its actualization in the lives of real, existing people. What we see as the result of Kierkgaard’s reading of Kant is that the problem of universals actually crops up in all spheres of human endeavor including art, science, education, ethics and religion. All domains face their own particular form of the apparently universal problem of universals. In science we see the problem of creativity vs. empirical confirmation, in ethics private irony vs. public hope, in art metaphor vs. comprehension, in religion inwardness vs. tradition. What Kierkgaard wants us to understand is that Kant had put his finger on THE human problem of the ages and proposed a radically different solution than all his forbears. Cutting us off from absolute knowledge in a final decisive blow, Kant sets us free in a universe of brute force and unending anxiety. Kierkegaard believes that authors like Hegel have attenuated Kant’s teaching by re-presenting another systematized, sanitized, holistic, rationalistic vision of the universal, which for Kierkegaard both cheapens the message and unstrings the bow of human longing. For if anxiety is nothing but the dizziness of freedom, then system making is the closing of the eyes and the chanting of comforting mantras. What Kierkgaard wants to do instead is set us on a path of endless wandering resdescription after rediscription, each generation building on their forbears, doing its best to grapple with the eternal human problems, problems which the relativism of his age had largely abandoned thanks to the enervating urges of enlightenment reason and liberal political theory. In this context, Hegel’s system was nothing more than the mythical belief that the workings of history could forever resolve the problem of the universal, thus bringing the conditions of the satisfaction of the one eternally in line with the conditions of satisfaction of the many. The belief that the one could permanently be reconciled with the many was for Kierkegaard just one more rationalist pie in the sky. The problem for Kierkegaard starts when we take our words, mere hints and signs of what might be coming round the bend, as concepts that anchor us to an unchanging world out there. For if we start to believe that truth is elsewhere, how will we ever learn to describe it as we experience it right here and now?