February 8, 2022

God, Secular Ethical Living, and Happiness: Kierkegaard Partially Digested

Sacrifice of Isaac. Michelangelo Merisi, detto il Caravaggio (Caravaggio, Milano 1571 – Porto Ercole, Grosseto 1610)

Ruminant stomachs have four compartments. So do the minds of some featherless bipeds. I have gnawed and swallowed Ryan Kemp’s essay on Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), “An Unlikely Meditation on Modern Happiness.” I have now regurgitated it from my mental rumen and begun chewing its cognitive cud. Next it will pass to my subsequent deeper mental stomachs to be fully digested. Ultimately to be assimilated into my being as knowledge or plopped behind me as, well, bullshit. Here are my initial ruminations.

I will not know, until I read and understand it, what Kierkegaard means in Fear and Trembling when he uses the expression “infinite resignation” to describe how he chose submitting to God. Based on my frustrations reading and comprehending other of K’s works, I am not looking forward to trying. But I will try unless life’s clock runs out on me before his book reaches the top of my must-read stack.

So, to Kemp. He says K succumbed to reasoned resignation over blind faith as his path to God believing there was no option. According to Kemp’s understanding of K, loving God “leaves no room for enjoying life, including the small pleasures of marriage or the consolations of friendship.”

Last week I concluded viewing the eleven episodes of the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited on BritBox, an inexpensive service of Amazon Prime. This is an outstanding production in every way. Laurence Olivier’s appearance in two episodes proved once again he is the best actor of all those I have seen, stage and screen, large and small.

At the end of the series, Waugh’s Julia Flyte decides she cannot marry Charles Ryder because her Catholicism does not allow her love to be divided between God and her beloved, godless Charles. For Julia such is the only choice she believes she has, an infinite loving of God to the exclusion of all other loves. But as I will come to soon not everyone sees this life-altering choice as an either-or proposition. I don’t.

Kemp says K reasoned that “faith, far from tempting a person toward worldly resignation, actually draws a person into a more gratifying relationship with it. Only the person of faith is positioned to truly embrace this life.” Therefore, K accepted an “infinite resignation” to a trusting faith in God.

Kemp next introduces Swedish philosopher and literary critic Martin Hägglund’s disagreement with Kierkegaard. For Hägglund, faith in a transcendent being, God, is an otherworldly distraction that thwarts humankind’s ability to, writes Kemp, “muster an enduring and wholehearted interest in this life and the people and things that populate it. So they, and not people of religious faith, are best disposed to engage meaningfully and happily with the world. Put succinctly, [Abraham’s] Isaac would have been much better off the son of the village atheist.”

From Hägglund, by extension, we can also conclude that the Hindu and Buddhist concept of karma, in its general cause and effect aspect, exists only as a human invention, not an inherent inviolable principle of human social life. And cosmically, there is no such thing as a moral arc inherent in the matter or processes of the universe contrary to American abolitionist minister Theodore Parker’s sermon in 1853, Abraham Lincoln participating with a group singing about it in the 1860s, Martin Luther King’s endorsement a century later, and Barack Obama mentioning such during his campaign and presidency. Such distractions are best understood as wrong and unnecessary encumbrances to our seeing the world as it is and doing what is by reason and evidence indicated for our, other lifeforms, and the planet's wellbeing. I agree.

Here is my disagreement with Kemp. He describes an ethical person as someone who

though by no means crudely egoistic, approaches life with specific ideas of what she is owed if she plays by life’s rules. Those rules are largely moral: If I respect you, you owe me respect in return. Many of these rules receive, if only implicitly, a cosmic emphasis when a person regards right conduct as having earned her a life free of pain and hardship, at least of the most traumatic kind. When the universe breaks the rules (a cancer diagnosis, car accident, or failed relationships), bitterness and resentment are justified. This is why one will often say of a particularly good person who is also dealt a bad hand, “He deserved better!” The fact that the language of “desert” recommends itself in these moments suggests that many of us move through life in this mode of ownership. Since most of us at least tacitly acknowledge that the universe doesn’t really respect these rules of ownership, we also carry around a constant low-level anxiety that the things we love can be robbed at any moment. … Kierkegaard supposes, credibly it seems, that the ethical person’s tacitly precarious sense of ownership actually diminishes her ability to engage wholeheartedly with the goods of the world. This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up.

Kemp’s understanding of an ethical person in modern times as he expresses it here is extremely limited. I had cancer five years ago. I did not feel bitter or resentful because I had been living a mostly ethical, moral life yet fell victim to the cancer. Following Cicero and the Stoics, I think virtue is its own reward.

Per Kemp, K proposes that “the ability to love the world and experience joy within it requires one to first love something that transcends it: that the move from a focus on earthly happiness to God is, against all expectations, the surest path to a kind of deep and stable joy.” That the alternative, “a life that exists solely in the ownership mode is one of despair, a spiritual sickness that finally becomes so acute a person begins to consider, even if they can’t yet comprehend, a religious solution.” Kemp then temps the reader by claiming that faith in God and attaining happiness might be inseparable. But Kemp concludes that the only reader of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling certain to take K seriously is “one who has tried and failed to discover happiness through life’s more traditional channels.”

Kemp claims someone living ethically “approaches life with specific ideas of what she is owed if she plays by life’s rules,” a transactional way of life that is inherently selfishly, reciprocal. But I and many others don’t live by an ownership code of ethics. Yes, I do engage in a hopeful transactional expectation of reciprocity from others I treat morally. But I am fully prepared for them not reciprocating or my not receiving any kind of reward. Others, life, or the cosmos are not here to live up to my expectations. Many other moderns among us think the same way. It is not an either-or choice as Kierkegaard and Kemp seem to portray it – resign to faith or live in an ownership/desert mode. Even Kemp hints at this when he says “many of us move through life in this ownership mode” – many maybe, but far from all.

As for those perplexed souls such as Waugh’s Julia, those who have “tried and failed to find happiness through life’s traditional channels,” surely there must be reasons for their failure. Surely there are events in their life experiences that upon further reflection offer options for re-trying secular ethical living without opting to dive headlong into “infinite resignation” to a faith in God.

I personally cannot accept that the best way to find happiness in modern life is to first believe in a transcendent God. But I can accept that for some it is. Perhaps there is something on this in Hägglund’s 2019 book Kemp refers to, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. But my must-read stack, like all else of my life, has entered the two-minute warning stage. I therefore feel compelled to pass K’s and Kemp’s cud to my third and fourth stomachs where it will become fully digested as knowledge or wisdom, or not.

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