Kierkegaard and the paradox as an authentic way of looking at the world

“Remember your Creator in the days of your youth”: this is the opening line of the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes by Qohelet, in the Old Testament. This wisdom verse inspired the first of the three edifying discourses by the great Danish philosopher and founder of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, which bears that title. Now available in bookshops from Lastaria, the Tre discorsi edificanti 1844 – discourses, not sermons, as the author points out – shine with the power of a thinker who seems more necessary than ever. Faced with the decline of Western values today, have we not perhaps lost those ‘moments of naivety’ that open up an authentic path, stripped of the world’s false realisms? Kierkegaard regards paradox as the true key to understanding reality, for example in the idea of an eternity of youth. The light of one’s own youth is Ariadne’s thread, which everyone loses and rediscovers along life’s journey.

All it would take is a change of perspective to glimpse the luminous signposts that open a secret passage through the labyrinth and lead into the dream from which we are dreamed. Genius (a category which the philosopher applies to himself and which he distinguishes from the figure of the apostle) is the guardian of possibilities and of lives unlived, possessing to the highest degree the capacity to create through dreams. The sensual genius of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Faust’s scepticism miss the mark, embodying the crisis of the aesthetic stage (the first of the three stages outlined by Kierkegaard, followed by the ethical and the religious).

Even Johannes’s (the protagonist of "Diario di un Seduttore") intellectual pleasure falls short: the epitome of the aesthetic stage, he too is a serial manipulator. But what sort of self-sacrifice does every missed opportunity evoke? Where can one find that lost, paradoxical realism, embodied by the paradox of Christ’s coming – in short, the strength of an authentic path, slumbering, alongside the righteous, in the folds of history? Probably precisely in the Individual, in the man standing against the crowd. A fundamental concept in Kierkegaard’s thought, conceived in sharp contrast to Hegel’s idealism (which sees the pinnacle of the spirit’s development in Absolute Knowledge), the Individual is subjectivity at its zenith: not a mass, not an abstract idea, but a concrete individual who chooses to enter into existence, to suffer and to take risks, transcending all totality and surrendering to the intimate, incommunicable dialogue with the divine.

“Finding the idea for which one is willing to live and die” – this is what saves us: the Individual dwells in his own inner solitude. In dialogue with God, he is a madman to the masses. Abraham (the subject of the second edifying discourse) is about to sacrifice Isaac: against all evidence and every human moral code, he believes in the absurd: he knows, in his heart, that God will restore his son to him. But how is the relationship between the Individual and history, between eternity and time, woven? In the Diaries (1834–1842) (Morcelliana), a spiritual autobiography and monumental work that brings together insights, reflections and notes revolving around these questions (in this sense, the break-up of his engagement to Regina Olsen is significant), Kierkegaard identifies the ‘true Archimedean point’ as the idea of God’s paternal love: an unshakeable place outside the world, it is the recognition of the transcendent nature of one’s vocation.

The author of "Aut-aut" makes use of numerous heteronyms. However, it is Johannes de Silentio in "Timor et Tremor" who, taking Abraham as an example, outlines the figure of the Knight of Faith: he takes a paradoxical leap and goes, free and eternally young, to meet God, without resignation and with resolve.