them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are
intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you.
It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more
important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180
degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of
perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.”
“You’d be very odd if you did.”
“Faith is the most important factor in religious questions. Kierkegaard
wrote: ‘If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but
precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself
in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty,
so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water,
still preserving my faith.’ “
“That’s heavy stuff.”
“Many had previously tried to prove the existence of God—or at any rate
to bring him within the bounds of rationality. But if you content yourself with
some such proof or logical argument, you suffer a loss of faith, and with it, a
loss of religious passion. Because what matters is not whether Christianity is
true, but whether it is true for you. The same thought was expressed in the
Middle Ages in the maxim: credo quid absurdum.”
“You don’t say.”
“It means I believe because it is irrational. If Christianity had appealed to
our reason, and not to other sides of us, it would not be a question of faith.”
“No, I understand that now.”
“So we have looked at what Kierkegaard meant by ‘existential,’ what he
meant by ‘subjective truth,’ and what his concept of ‘faith’ was. These three
concepts were formulated as a criticism of philosophical tradition in general,
and of Hegel in particular. But they also embodied a trenchant ‘social
criticism.’ The individual in modern urban society had become ‘the public,’ he
said, and the predominant characteristic of the crowd, or the masses, was all
their noncommittal ‘talk.’ Today we would probably use the word ‘conformity’;
that is when everybody ‘thinks’ and ‘believes in’ the same things without
having any deeper feeling about it.”
“I wonder what Kierkegaard would have said to Joanna’s parents.”
“He was not always kind in his judgments. He had a sharp pen and a
bitter sense of irony. For example, he could say things like ‘the crowd is the
untruth,’ or ‘the truth is always in the minority/ and that most people had a
superficial approach to life.”
“It’s one thing to collect Barbie dolls. But it’s worse to be one.”
“That brings us to Kierkegaard’s theory of what he called the three
stages on life’s way.”
“Pardon me?”
“Kierkegaard believed that there were three different forms of life. He
himself used the term stages. He calls them the aesthetic stage, the ethical
stage, and the religious stage. He used the term ‘stage’ to emphasize that one
can live at one of the two lower stages and then suddenly leap to a higher
stage. Many people live at the same stage all their life.”
“I bet there’s an explanation on the way. I’m anxious to know which
stage I’m at.”
“He who lives at the aesthetic stage lives for the moment and grasps