[MUSIC] After the funeral at the church, the procession made its way here to the Assistens Cemetery for the burial itself. Here, Kierkegaard was to be interred in a family grave where his mother, his father and his siblings were buried. The pastor Tryde performed a simple burial ceremony, but suddenly Kierkegaard's nephew, a young man names Hendrik Lund, began to speak. Lund was a medical student, who was doing his residency at the Frederick's Hospital at the time and so he witnessed, first hand, Kierkegaard's decline in death. To the surprise of absolutely everybody, he addressed the crowd in the grave in a political and agitated tone. The pastor Tryde tried to object that since Lund was not ordained he had no right to speak during the ceremony. But the sentiment of the crowd of people present supported Lund and they loudly encouraged him to speak. And so there was little that Tryde that could do to prevent it. Lund began by speaking about his relation to Kierkegaard as the son of Kierkegaard's deceased sister Nicoline Christine Kierkegaard, who had died in 1832. But Lund explained he was more then just Kierkegaard relative rather he was also his friend. Moreover, he agreed with Kierkegaard's views. Lund pointed out that, at the funeral, everyone seemed to be talking around the point and carefully avoided mentioning Kierkegaard's actual opinions in writings. So he felt obligated to say something about Kierkegaard's criticism of the Church in his recent articles in the fatherland in the moment. Lund's main argument was that the official burial and funeral of Kierkegaard by the state church was merely a vindication of the correctness of Kierkegaard criticism. In his attack on what he derogatorily called the official church, Kierkegaard complained that being a Christian had become a simple matter of course. And thus, the actual content of Christianity, which makes very difficult demands on its followers, is distorted and even destroyed. In the last years of his life, Kierkegaard had done anything he could to criticize and distance himself from those few of the official church. But yet despite all this, the church still nonetheless seemed to regard him as a loyal member, and now to give him an official church burial. Lund argues that this would never happen in any other religion such as Judaism or Islam. If someone had attacked the religious establishment of these religions in the same way that Kierkegaard had attacked the Danish Church, then there would have been no question of giving him the usual funeral rites. But yet, the Danish Church nonetheless still clearly regards Kierkegaard as a member and accords him the rights of burial due to its members. For Lund, this is a clear demonstration of the fact that the Danish Church has no meaningful conception of Christianity, just as Kierkegaard himself had argued. Towards the end of his outburst, Lund issues a violent reproach of the Danish Church. He asks if the official church does not represent the true Christian church, what then does it represent? His answer is a merciless indictment. The Danish Church is a corrupt institution, it's utterly compromised by its relations to political powers, financial concerns and so forth. He directly enjoins people to leave the official church, implying that it's sinful to continue to be a participating member of it. He ends by protesting against the entire proceedings, claiming that Kierkegaard has been violated by in death being the object of a formal ceremony of the official church. Since he was dead and could not defend himself, Lund, as his friend felt obliged to do so on his behalf. But when he was done, some people applauded, some shouted bravo and even, down with the clergy. This was a major scandal at the time, which was recounted again and again by witnesses at the gravesite, to those who were not present. Some people agreed with the sentiment that informed Lund's protest while others, especially the clergy, were outraged by it. There were newspaper articles about the outburst and Lund, himself, published his speech, in full. Three days later on November the 22nd, 1855, in the fatherland. Needless to say, the clergy in the church establishment were extremely angry about this. Bishop Martensen exercised his authority in the matter by bringing legal proceedings against Lund which resulted in Lund being given a rather large fine for his actions. The whole affair simply added to the controversy, that was already caused by Kiekegaard's own articles. As a result, in the years following Kierkegaard's death, his name was, at least here in Denmark, was always associated with something scandalous and unpleasant. There can be little doubt that this had a negative effect on the initial reception of his thought since it discouraged people from exploring his work in a scholarly fashion since people were afraid of being associated with the scandal that he had caused. It took some time for the scandal to wear off and for a new generation to come of age which was no longer effected by it in the same way. Thus the reception of Kierkegaard's thought was slow to start, but once it began it continued to grow as the years passed. I'm joined here today by Professor Daniel Conway from Texas A&M University in the United States. Professor Conway's a prolific scholar in the field of 19th century continental philosophy. Just published major works on figures such as Kierkegaard's and others. Professor Conway, why are philosophies dominated by questions such as relativism and subjectivism and nihilism? Those questions run through the schools of for example existentialism, or post-modernism. In your opinion what contribution does Kierkegaard have to make to these modern discussions? Do you think he's still relevant for a modern life today? >> Actually, I think Kierkegaard is probably more relevant today than he's ever been before. We're only now beginning to understand just how prescient his diagnosis and criticism of modern life actually were. A number of his insights have been corroborated by subsequent thinkers, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre and Levinas. And I believe in this larger context, we can appreciate just how forward-thinking, how prescient he was. >> Thinkers that you mentioned are all known for their treatments of subjectivism, relativism and nihilism. These are the issues that dominate modern philosophy. You can see this in the schools of existentialism and postmodernism. >> In your mind, what contribution does Kierkegaard have to make in these modern discussions? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out that Kierkegaard didn't invent or introduce these particular philosophical problems. They are rightly perceived as threats to the possibility of an authentic existence. But his contribution was to diagnose them and suggest a form or a manner of treatment for them. Kierkegaard is perhaps most controversial for believing that these threats need to be kept alive and vital within us in order to connect us in an ongoing way to the fragility and finitude of the human condition. So for Kierkegaard, the goal could never be to vanquish these threats. That could only be accomplished under conditions of self deception. The goal is rather to address these threats in a way that galvanizes our passion for an authentic existence. >> And so what specific aspect of Kierkegaard's writings do you find is relevant for his treatment of these issues of relativism and nihilism? >> Well I think that his interests in keeping these threats alive and vital within the physic life of the individual, that this is most evident to us in the literary and rhetorical complexity of his writings. He seems to be interested in mobilizing all of his literary talents in order to make sure that these threats to the possibility of an authentic existence are not allowed to submerge, or to disappear from the scene. He wants to keep them front and center, and he understands just how difficult it is for most people to keep these particular threats in view. >> It's been a great pleasure to have with me today professor Wang Qi from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Professor Wang Qi is one of the leading figures in an important translation project where they're translating Kierkegaard's writings into Chinese. Professor, why are people in China today interested in Kierkegaard? What do they see in Kierkegaard that they think is relevant for life in China? >> Well, generally speaking, there are two groups of people, and one is the writers, the artists, and the lovers of literature and the arts. I'll give you an example is one top artist, he tried to combine the so-called Kierkegaard's diaries with his own writings and photographic works. Well it turns out his quotation of Kierkegaard from Seducer's Diary and other fragments of Either/Or Part One shows that these people, they don't care about the academic correctness. They just treat Kierkegaard as a creative writer and they get inspiration from his writings. >> Can you give us another example of how Kierkegaard is used in China today? >> Philosophers, professionals, and the students, and they think Kierkegaard is sort of different from the western philosophy we know, we know for long time from German classic philosophy. So Kierkegaard is very crucial for us to understanding the post-Hegelian Western philosophy. >> What do you see in Kierkegaard that is relevant for China today? >> Well it's quite a big question but I will just give you a short answer I think. At least there are two points that are relevant to life in China today. One is since China has already done its economic takeoff, I think it's time for the Chinese people to sit down and reflect upon their own innermost being. Since Kierkegaard is so keen at disclosing people's innermost being, and different living mood, so he will help us definitely in that respect. Sometimes, I'm really worried about my folks, people, and I don't want them to be trapped or lost in commercialism. So that's one point. Another point, it refer to Kierkegaard's individualism, and actually that is the very first reason that he attracts Chinese people to read him. Because the Chinese culture has been dominated by collectivism for a long time and they said, well now it's time for us to think about how to become an individual. An individual who enjoys freedom and also will take responsibilities. So that's my short answer to your question. Yeah, yes. >> What can we say about Kierkegaard's legacy or the reception of his thought by later philosophers, theologians, and writers? When historians of ideas sit down and try to tell the story of, for example, the history of philosophy, they don't really have the time to go into any great detail with respect to any individual thinker. Instead, they're obliged to paint in large strokes and to see certain continuities that allow them to treat groups of thinkers together. They thus tell the story of different schools of thought, rationalism, idealism, empiricism, materialism, and so forth. In short, it's the story of isms. But this approach invariably leads to certain distortions with respect to the nuances of the thought of the individual thinkers. There have been no shortage of attempts to see Kierkegaard as a member of a certain school of thought or ism. The existentialists, for example, were quick to hail Kierkegaard as an important forefather of their school. They saw in Kierkegaard important analyses of concepts such as freedom, alienation, authenticity, the struggle for meaning, despair, and anxiety. These were all points of great inspiration for others such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Carl Yaspers, Martin Heidegger, and others associated with existentialism. Philosophers and literary theorists associated with the movements of deconstruction and post-modernism have also seen Kierkegaard as an important precursor to some of their central ideas. They've been particularly attracted to Kierkegaard's interest in irony. They've seen Kierkegaard's use of the pseudonyms as a support of their views about the death of the author. They celebrate Kierkegaard's use of different perspectives and authorial voices as a forerunner of what has been referred to as the indefinite deferral of meaning. Figures such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard and Paul de Man Have been important figures in this dimension of the reception of Kierkegaard's thought. Theologians and religious writers have of course also been keen to make use of Kierkegaard's writings. Kierkegaard's initial reception internationally came from Germany, where he was seen as an important influence on the movement known as dialectical theology, which includes well known figures, such as Karl Barth, Emil Bruner, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. Although himself a Lutheran, Kierkegaard has been a source of inspiration for thinkers of various faiths and denominations, including reformed Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. Also literary writers including novelists, playwrights, and literary critics have found in Kierkegaard an important source of inspiration. Writers from countries around the world have attempted to create Kierkegaardian characters which would explore in a literary way emotions such as anxiety, despair, and so forth that Kierkegaard discussed in his works. Likewise, attempts have been made to imitate and further develop Kierkegaard's own often pioneering literary techniques. Well known authors such as Thomas Mann, Rilke, Kafka, Ibsen, Strindberg, and Joyce have all made active use of Kierkegaard and owe a debt to him. When tracing the history of ideas, it can perhaps be useful to see the way in which Kierkegaard's writings have been appropriated by these later thinkers. But we need to be careful about automatically associating Kierkegaard with later schools of thought and intellectual trends. Kierkegaard was a profoundly original and unique figure. And his writings resist the usual designations. To see him as a member of a specific school can lead to distortions of his thought. Later thinkers tend to pick and choose certain aspects of Kierkegaard's thinking that are relevant for their own intellectual agenda. Regardless of how important these aspects are, his approach invariably leads to a selective interpretation. And so it's probably a good idea to be a bit cautious about labeling Kierkegaard in any definitive way. To be sure, to call Kierkegaard an existentialist or a post-modernist and to associate him with later thinkers also creates a new context of thought that can indeed be fruitful and useful to explore. Kierkegaard scholars today examine these later schools of thought and compare them with Kierkegaard's own writings in a critical manner. It's probably safe to say that Kierkegaard's thought can't be reduced to a single aspect or a single intellectual trend. To fully appreciate his writings requires that we look at them from different perspectives and with different interpretations. We might be tempted to say of the reception of Kierkegaard's thought what he himself said of the reception of Socrates's philosophy. Since according to Kierkegaard's interpretation, Socrates was a negative figure in the sense that the Greek philosopher always claimed ignorance and refrained from giving any positive view in his own name. This left an open space for later interpretation to fill in. As a result, there were many different competing philosophical schools that all claimed their origin in Socrates. So also with Kierkegaard. His own Socratic mission made it such that he too was in many regards a negative thinker. This made it possible for him to be appropriated by many different schools of thought, some of which were even in conflict with one another. This negative or open ended dimension of Kierkegaard's thought perhaps explains why he continues to appeal to so many different kinds of readers with so many different kinds of interests. We recall from the second lecture that as a young student, Kierkegaard came here to Gilleleje in the summer of 1835, to try to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. It was here that he expressed his deep desire to find a truth that had a profound meaning for him personally. As he put it, a truth for which he was willing to live and die. It seems certain that both Kierkegaard's experience here in Gilleleje and his masters thesis on Socrates and irony had a profound influence on his later development. Only about a month after Kierkegaard's death a theologian named Hans Friedrich Helweg published an article entitled, Hegelianism in Denmark. This title is however somewhat misleading since Helweg only briefly mentions at the beginning some of the main works and figures in the movement of Danish Hegelianism. In fact, the large part of the article is dedicated to a book review of Kierkegaard's thesis, The Concept of Irony. The connection here is not in and of itself surprising, since as we've seen in this course, Kierkegaard was largely inspired by Hegel, and his interpretation of the Greek world and the figure of Socrates. So it makes sense that Helweg would treat the concept of irony as an important part of the Danish Hegel reception. Although modern scholarship tends to ignore the concept of irony and downplay its significance, Helweg saw the importance of this work for Kierkegaard generally. In one passage, Helweg writes, quote, the members of the Faculty of Philosophy who were supposed to judge the work hardly suspected that in this effort of a young author they had no so much a qualification for a master's degree but a program for life. That here, it was not a matter of giving a solution to an academic problem, but of a task of life. Here, Helweg emphasizes the difference between the world of academics and one's own actual existence. This reflects exactly what Kierkegaard said in Gilleleje about how he was not interested in any objective academic knowledge, but rather something that was true for him personally, and something that was relevant for his life. To back up the assertion, Helweg cites a sentence at the end of The Concept of Irony, where Kierkegaard claims, if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. What does Kierkegaard mean by this? On the face of it, he seems to be making a kind of protest against academic learning just for its own sake. The point of going to the university and learning new things is not just to understand the way the world works. Instead, this knowledge should be transformed or translated into something personal. Each person must, as Kierkegaard says, appropriate that knowledge in the context of their own situation in life. So the idea of appropriation is absolutely central to Kierkegaard's understanding of the proper acquisition and use of knowledge. But now here at the end of the course, we can see that there's much more in this single sentence than what Kierkegaard could have realized at the time. As we've seen, Kierkegaard had an early academic interest, namely Socrates and his conflict with the Greek world. He made this academic interest the subject of his masters thesis. But after this was done, he took the further step that he claims here is so important. He appropriates that knowledge in accordance with his own modern situation. He was attracted to many aspects of Socrates's thought and decided to use him as a model. But the world of ancient Greece in which Socrates lived was of course very different from Kierkegaard's golden age Denmark. So Kierkegaard needed to appropriate the main elements from the thought of Socrates and transfer them into his own time. So the key terms of the thought of Socrates such as irony, ignorance, negation, aporia, maieutics and the gadfly and so on, all came to take on a new meaning in the context of Kierkegaard's own life and time. Helweg was entirely right. Socrates was for Kierkegaard not just an object of scholarly investigation, but also a model to follow for his personal life. But there's another aspect of Helweg's observation. Kierkegaard was familiar with the scholarly field of theology, which he learned about at the University of Copenhagen. Again, as we've seen, in the Gilleleje entry in his journal, Kierkegaard is only interested to a certain degree in theology, as an academic discipline. Instead he believes that Christianity is not a doctrine, or an objective truth that can be taught in books or in the classroom. Instead, Christianity is a belief that must be appropriated by each individual personally in inwardness and passion. Christianity is all about the subjectivity of each individual. There are no easy answers that each person is obliged to appropriate the Christian message in one's own life and context. So no one can tell another person how this should be done. So Kierkegaard believes that Socrates can help us in the modern world. With his irony and negativity, he can help us to undermine mistaken views and modern illusions that people still suffer from. With his idea of maieutics or midwifery, he can help us to understand that each and every one of us individually has the truth within ourselves. Each and every human being has an infinite value that should be respected. These are important messages for us living in the 21st century, regardless of whether we think of ourselves as religious or not. We struggle to understand our role in the fast-moving anonymous society around us. What is my importance? What is the meaning and value of my life? Do I really count for anything as a person, or am I simply a number or a statistic? Kierkegaard is not just a figure locked into his own time who with every passing day becomes less and less relevant only to end up an object of interest for a handful of specialists in the history of ideas. On the contrary, I believe that every day, as society continues to develop, and new technological innovations change our way of living, interacting, and thinking about ourselves, Kierkegaard becomes more and more relevant. He might have died in 1855, but he's still very much with us today. Especially, for those like you, who have the ability to read his works, and appreciate his ideas. [MUSIC]
