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Contemporary Theology I:

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 05 of 24ST503

Themes in Existentialism

Contemporary Theology I:Hegel to Death of God Theologies

In the last few lectures, we’ve been talking about the thought of Hegel. Today I’d like to turn, in this lecture, to look at different themes in existentialism. But before we turn to that directly, let’s bow for a moment of prayer.

Lord, we thank You again for the opportunity to study. We pray that as we look at existentialist thinkers, that You would help us to understand what they are saying, that we may see wherein they have ideas that are helpful to us and wherein they have ideas that are problematic for orthodox theology. Bless our time together then in this lesson. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray it, Amen.

The theme for this lecture as I mentioned a few moments ago is “Themes in Existentialism.” Now you may wonder why we’re moving to existentialism at this point. And there’s a very specific reason. Søren Kierkegaard, in particular, follows Hegel and directly responds and reacts to many of the ideas that we find in Hegel. And Kierkegaard is taken to be the father of what is known as “Christian existentialism.” Friedrich Nietzsche is considered to be the father of “atheistic existentialism.” So having studied Hegel, we need to see the next reaction to him. But beyond that, as you move into the 20th century, you find that in the early 20th century, many contemporary theologians are adopting, in one way or another, the ideas of existentialism. Well, if that’s the case, then we need to understand carefully what existentialism is all about. I wish I could say it was easy to explain what existentialism, as a movement, is about. But it’s difficult in that existentialist thinkers like to go their own way. As a result, I’m sure that in terms of any of the themes I’m going to lay out today, you could probably find an existentialist thinker or two who either disagreed with what I’m going to say or at least if they held on to the idea that I’m going to talk about, they’d hold it slightly differently than the way that I’ll present it. That makes it very difficult to make generalizations. But I don’t think it’s impossible for us to talk about some basic themes and basic ideas that tend to appear and

John S. Feinberg, Ph.D.Experience: Professor of Biblical and

Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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reappear in the thought of existentialist philosophers. So what I’m going to do is look at a number of themes. In some cases, a particular existentialist is more noted for holding this view than others are, and I’ll point that out as well. Well, let’s begin.

The first theme that I would like to isolate in existentialism is a theme that we can call anti-essentialism. Now philosophers like Plato and Hegel involve themselves in detached reflections about ideal concepts, ideal forms, the ideal essences of things. And their emphasis was to turn out a system of philosophy that was constructed on the basis of pure thought as it interacted with these pure ideas, or general concepts, that supposedly represented the ideal form of various ideas. Now if you structure a philosophy that way, you can wind up being very, very abstract in your system, abstract to the point where you don’t really deal very much with people in the very act and process of existing. Well, that was precisely the complaint that the existentialists had with what people like Hegel were doing. Existentialists rejected this approach of trying to search for the ideal essences of things and to present the pure concepts and ideas of things. After all, those pure concepts, those ideal forms are static. They don’t particularly change at all, and that really isn’t the way life is. Life is dynamic. It’s moving. There are changes. People are becoming one thing and another. And so to try to focus solely on abstract thought, the existentialist felt, was to miss the whole point of what it means to exist. So Hegel, on the one hand, would identify the essence of a thing, the pure concept of it with its existence in the general idea of the thing. But the existentialist, on the other hand, would say that this leaves out the key thing that’s involved in existing altogether, namely, the individual in the act of existing. In fact this was Søren Kierkegaard’s basic objection to Hegel. And he felt that Hegel had spent all this time spinning out this great system of philosophy. And he had all these ideas, and it was supposed to encompass everything that existed. But you presented that system and when it was all done with, there it was on the table, so to speak. You put it down on paper. It was a set of ideas, but it was static. And that just isn’t the nature of existence. To be alive, to be existing, means that, in fact, there is change.

And as a result of that, the existentialists were very anti-essentialists. They didn’t want to talk about the exact nature or the exact essence of something, because that put things too much in static terms. Well another theme that you find quite frequently in existentialist thinkers is an emphasis on the individual as opposed to the emphasis on the crowd. Again we see in this



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theme a reaction and a rejection against Hegel. You remember that when we were talking about Hegel, we noted that for Hegel everything that exists exists in relation to other things. In fact, if you’re going to understand the nature of a given thing, you cannot see it and understand it in isolation from everything else. You have to understand it in relation to all the things with which it has relations. So you can see that the philosophy of Hegel was very, very much a philosophy of the crowd, so to speak. Hegel’s philosophy sought to incorporate everything in reality. And his argument was that all of reality had its ultimate meaning in relation to the totality of everything that existed. Kierkegaard and the existentialists more generally decided that this was a wrong idea; that you had to focus instead on the individual as opposed to the crowd. The feeling was that in modern society, there is just too much of a tendency for individuals to get lost in the crowd and that we have to place our emphasis back on the individual and on his needs. And specifically we have to place the emphasis on what it means to be an existing individual. In other words, there needs to be a focus on particular people and their particular acts of existence rather than focusing on the general mass of people.

Well, you can see then that this is not so much a social type of philosophy as it is an individual philosophy. And according to the existentialists as well then, social and political types of changes and advancements depend ultimately on the transformation of individual existence. They don’t depend on some super state, for example, changing things. You can see that this is a very individualistic type of philosophy. And as a result, the existentialist philosophers had their own version of these ideas about life and existence and all the rest. And they felt that you didn’t get your identity in the crowd, but you got your identity in isolation and individuality.

Well, we’ve talked about a couple of themes in existentialism. But let me move to another one which really is very much at the heart of the existentialist understanding of reality. For existentialists, existence is viewed as becoming. In other words, what it means to be an existing individual is to be someone who is changing, who is becoming something new. Existence, then, is defined by the existentialist as being engaged in becoming, being involved in time, being involved with freedom and history. And so obviously it involves change, and you can see why people like Kierkegaard and other existentialists would be so negative to Hegel. Because Hegel sought to spin out this system of ideas, but that system was



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static. It didn’t go anywhere. Existence isn’t like that. Existence is changing. It’s dynamic. Well, it’s an ongoing process then.

Objects or things may be static, but subjects, that is, people, existing individuals, are involved in becoming. They are involved in changing. Now this whole idea of existence as becoming leads to a distinction that you find in a number of existentialist thinkers. Namely, a lot of existentialist thinkers will say that God is, but He does not exist. Now we have to be clear as to what they don’t mean. They do not mean at this point that God is not existent at all, that there is no such person as God. They do believe that there is a God, but they believe that God fundamentally doesn’t change. So the proper way to talk about God is to say that God is. If you were to say that God exists, that would suggest that God is changing. But that’s not the way that theologians have typically understood God. They’ve typically understood Him to be immutable in some sense or other.

Well, the one who refuses to become and chooses to remain static with his own circumstances and situations is said by the existentialist not really to be existing, so one of the things that we’re going to find as we look at some of these existentialist thinkers is that they will view man as poised at various points in his life before important decisions that he has to make. He has to choose one thing, or he has to choose another. And if he decides to choose, at least he’s asserting the fact that he exists. He’s becoming something new. If he says I don’t like any of the alternatives therefore I won’t do anything, I’ll just remain with the status quo, an existentialist might say well, that’s not really existing. That’s something less.

Well, as you might have suspected from what I’ve just said in regard to existence as becoming, the notion of freedom is very, very important in existentialist thought. If existence is to be viewed as becoming, then how does this becoming occur? Well for the existentialist, it’s freedom that is the basis for becoming something new and making a new self out of yourself. If man is supposed to become himself then, how in the world is he supposed to do this? If he’s supposed to actualize whatever he’s going to be, how does that get accomplished? The answer that all of the existentialists will give is the use of freedom. Now, in the view of existential thinkers, part at least of what it means to be human is to be free. And when they talk about freedom, they mean freedom in a very radical sense of freedom. Man is literally in their thinking free to choose and become anything within the



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range of his humanity. It’s not possible to use your freedom to become something that a human being couldn’t become. For example, it’s not within humanity to have the ability to fly on its own bases or on its own abilities. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that human beings can do. They can choose to become. And we have freedom, according to the existentialists, to use our opportunities in life to become something new, to become something wonderful. And this is also our obligation to use this freedom, to create a new self.

Now, this sort of radical freedom is in fact one of the greatest assets that human beings have in their condition as humans. It is a value to be extremely highly prized. But according to the existentialists, it’s also something that entails some negatives. There’s a downside to it. Simply put, one can use freedom to make choices that will actualize an authentic self, but one can also use freedom to make wrong choices and therefore, really ruin your life. Freedom, then, is the basis for becoming a new self, but freedom also entails risk. Now notice here, as I have reflected upon the existentialist notion of freedom and the use of it for becoming, there is no particular emphasis on providential guidance from God so that people will move toward God’s appointed end. Now for some existentialists, they tend to leave God out of the picture a lot more than others do. Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, will speak very little of any kind of providential involvement in the process because he’s an atheistic existentialist. But what the existentialists are suggesting here is that this particular freedom that we have is to be used by each one of us to become the self that we envision. It’s not that God has some plan and we’re supposed to try to figure that out and actualize it, but rather, we sit and figure out what we want to become and then we make those decisions.

Well, choice becomes so important in existentialist thinkers that they emphasize the idea of choosing as opposed to refusing to choose as extremely important. In some existentialist thinkers, you’ll even find the following kind of idea: they will say that if a person is faced with a decision whereby he can either choose to do right or wrong and it turns out that he really can’t choose to do right, the existentialists, many of them, would say it’s better that he chooses to do wrong than that he decides to do nothing. At least then he exists. You see if you do nothing, that’s not the sign that you’re existing. It’s better even to choose something wrong than to do nothing at all.

Well, if man is supposed to use his freedom to become a new



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self, how is he motivated to become something new? Well, the existentialists have some very specific things to say about that as well. According to existentialist thinkers, there are various stimuli or encouragements to using our freedom to create a new self. And I’d like to mention several in particular that show up quite frequently in existentialist thought. In the first place, there is the stimulus of estrangement. Now when we were talking about Hegel, we talked about one sense of estrangement and alienation, namely an abandoning of oneself from oneself, a relinquishing of oneself to the whole group. But we noted that that was Hegel’s idea. But that’s not the typical notion that we think of when we think of estrangement. The typical concept that most of us think of in terms of estrangement is the idea that the existentialists have that we feel isolated. We feel estranged from other people, from other things in the world. And we feel very much alone.

The existentialists typically picture man as being thrown into the world by being born. None of us asked to be born. None of us were consulted in the matter. Someone else made that decision, and it’s as though we were simply thrown into the world by being born. We didn’t anticipate what sort of world it would be. We had no time to prepare. We were just there. And yet we find ourselves in the world, but it’s a world from which we are estranged. We don’t have relationships automatically with people in the world. We don’t understand what this world is all about. It’s not a world of our own choosing. According to the existentialist, man is estranged from the natural order. And you can see as you look at the natural order and you relate to it that, if you’re not careful, various things in the natural world can do you in. So there’s not harmony between man and the natural order. In addition, there’s estrangement between human beings. We don’t naturally form relationships with one another. Not everybody is going to be our friend or even our acquaintance. In addition, the existentialists say that there is a certain estrangement from human institutions. We feel that we’re locked out. We’re not part of the establishment. We’re not part of the elite.

Well, according to the existentialists, one needs to realize that he is estranged. And to realize that as estranged, we have to courageously resolve to use our freedom to overcome this estrangement, to get involved and make a life for ourselves in this world in which we are aliens. Now, depending on the specific existentialist thinker that you’re reading, he may say you have to do one thing or another in order to overcome this estrangement. But the existentialists do seem to agree in general that mankind



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is estranged from the world in which he finds himself and that part of what it means to be human and to become a new self is to work to overcome this sense of estrangement. So estrangement does stimulate you to becoming a new human being.

There’s another theme in the existentialist that points to another one of the stimuli for becoming a new individual, and that’s the theme of anguish. According to the existentialist, man, as he is here in the world, confronts nothingness. He realizes that he isn’t going to exist forever. He’s finite. There are limits to how long his life will last. And at some point what’s gonna happen is that he will die. As a matter of fact, he realizes that he might slip into nothingness at any particular point. A lot of us don’t like to think of an early death. We don’t like to think of death at all, but when we do we tend to think of our death as something far off in the future. But we all realize that at any moment, something could happen to take our life. And all of this awareness of the possibility of slipping into nothingness, of dying causes us anguish.

There’s another reason that man has anguish as well. The existentialists have said that each of us has freedom to become a new self. But there is an awful lot of risk with that freedom, as we pointed out a few moments ago. Freedom gives you opportunity to become a new self, but it also gives you an opportunity to make the wrong choices. So that when a person stands with his freedom, on the brink of becoming some new self as he looks at various decisions that he has to make, he realizes that he may make some very good decisions. But on the other hand, he may make some very bad decisions. And in the process of that, he may actualize a bad self. In other words, he may choose the wrong thing. And that realization causes us a great deal of anguish as well.

Now in existential anguish, according to the existentialists, man’s relationship to the world is totally shaken, and it becomes wholly questionable. This feeling of anguish and fear is not the kind of feeling that can be rationally explained or understood. It’s the kind of thing that has to be experienced. And if you’ve ever experienced it, I think the existentialist would say you’ll know what we’re talking about. You know the almost irrational and unexplainable sense of anguish that you face when you face a major decision. And you don’t know exactly which way to go. You know the anguish that’s there when you reflect upon going out of existence, dying. And all of these things are very, very stressful. All of them, though, also have creative significance for us. You see at the time that they are destructive, they are also positive



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in another respect. You can see here how that even though existentialists, on the one hand, are trying to reject Hegel. On the other hand, what they’re doing is something that is very Hegelian, namely, they’re pointing out the downside and the positive side of each concept that they’re talking about. And that you don’t understand this anguish, for example, if you only understand it as negative or if you only understand it as positive and creative.

Well, back specifically to the theme of anguish. The existentialists, as I mentioned a moment ago, agree that this anguish, though it can be a very negative thing, also can be very positive; because it stirs us on and it spurs us on to creativity and to becoming a new self. The awareness of the threat of making the wrong decisions or simply going out of existence altogether spurs the individual on to take responsibility for what he becomes. It stirs the individual to think very carefully about what he’s doing and to make his decisions with great, great consideration. We realize that we must actualize a new self, one that is going to be an authentic self in order to keep us from slipping into nothingness. And anguish moves us to such creative action.

Well, another stimulus that the existentialists point to which is an encouragement to become a new self is death itself. Death, of course, is viewed by the existentialists as the final step into nothingness. This is, if you will, the final cause for anguish. But everybody understands that death is inevitable, according to the existentialist. And life has to be lived in view of your upcoming death. Now the existentialist thinker is not particularly interested in death as some external objective event that we contemplate and we plan for that specific day and that specific event. Instead, the existentialist is interested in death in the sense that each person has to relate to his own death and reflect on how he should act in regard to the fact that he is someday going to die. In other words, death is not some external, disinterested topic or event that we can think about. But instead, the importance of death for the existentialist is that each person must consider the way he lives in light of his upcoming death. And so each person must ask himself how his upcoming death, whenever it occurs, affects the way he’s going to live right here and right now. The hour and the day of an individual’s death is, of course, uncertain, but the fact of it is certain. Now, one can live sort of mindless of this fact. You can sort of ignore the fact that someday you’re going to die and just put it out of your mind and go on and act as though everything’s okay and you have endless amount of time. But the existentialist would say that to live that way is to live inauthentically. You’re



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not really taking seriously the human condition and grappling with what it means to be a human being. On the other hand, you can live with a very, very serious approach to your death. You can live as if you might die any moment and realize that in light of that, you have to live right now in a way that takes that into account. You’ve got to make the most of this moment. To take your death seriously and live your life right now in virtue of your upcoming death is to live as an authentic self. Now according to the existentialists, the realization that you will die and that you need to take that seriously is supposed to move individual men and women to take responsibility for what they are becoming right now and to move them to use their freedom to make choices rather than sort of mindlessly slip through life avoiding choices or, if you make choices, you make choices that are really, really rather insignificant. You decide that you’ll have chicken rather than steak for dinner. You will take a bath rather than a shower, various decisions like that that really do not amount to anything. You may make those kinds of decisions. But the really significant decisions that determine what sort of person you’ll become, those you avoid. Well, the person who takes his death seriously will not trivialize it, but instead he will, in fact, make choices that are significant so that for as long as he is alive he can say I’ve really lived, I’ve really done something with my existence.

Well, as you reflect on what the existentialists are saying about death, you realize that while death is negative, there’s a sense in which it’s positive. Here again the old Hegelian dialectic of rejecting and incorporating and keeping one in the same thing at the same time. Death can be negative. But if you handle your upcoming death properly, it can be seen as constitutive of life. It can be seen, if you will, as the decisive motivating factor which urges a man or a woman on to existential resolve. That is, it urges him or her on to the resolve to use their freedom to become an authentic self.

Well, what happens if you do in fact use your freedom to become a new person? What are the kinds of results that occur? Well, there are several things that the existentialists point to as results of becoming or, if you will, several things that result from human beings using their freedom. And the first one I’d like to point to, is a transformation of personal existence for everyone: the estrangement that we talked about a few moments ago, the estrangement that everybody feels, the sense that the crowd is impersonal, the sense that institutions are impersonal, and I really don’t matter. All of those things can be overcome by the



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individual, personal resolve to use freedom to actualize a new self. Society then, as a whole, can be transformed by individuals transforming their own life. You don’t have a government that comes from outside and from above that tries to impose changes and transformations upon all of us. Instead, the goal is to change society by changing one’s individual existence. If freedom is used then, this will transform personal existence for individuals and ultimately for all of us. But if freedom is used to become a new self, this will also involve transformation of ethical norms. This is another result of becoming.

Now here I’m thinking more specifically of someone like Friedrich Nietzsche and what he has to say in this matter of making your own morality. According to Nietzsche, society basically follows what we can talk about as the morality of the herd or flock morality. In other words, there’s a number of activities that society has decided are okay to do, and so we all sort of mindlessly follow those rules without even thinking about it. These norms, these rules that people follow like a bunch of sheep, a flock of sheep, actually stifle innovation, and they stifle the works of genius. There’s no room left for someone who would really stand out and do something unusual. And as a result stagnation results, everybody does the same thing. There’s no novelty. There’s no creativity.

Now for someone like Nietzsche and for a number of the other existentialists, by using your freedom to become a new self, you can in fact surpass any achievements that you have reached up to that point, and you can surpass achievements that other individuals have accomplished. In fact, you can go to ever greater and greater heights. But in order to do this, you must free yourself from the accepted standards of society, standards which stifle growth. Because society gives certain rules of conduct, certain ways of proceeding and it wants to rigidly apply those to everyone. And if you work within those set of rules, there really isn’t much room for any genuine creativity, genuine novelty. And as a result, people wind up just basically doing the same old mediocre thing. On the other hand, the person who says I am going to transcend the accepted standards of society whether they be moral norms or whatever they may be, that’s (audio lost for a few seconds). For Nietzsche this sort of freeing of oneself from old values is to be done only by those who are especially gifted, namely the super man. So that while this is something that’s wonderful, it’s not for everybody, you have to be someone who’s really specially gifted. The majority of mankind, according to Nietzsche, is very, very much satisfied to be in the herd. And the majority of the people



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on this earth should stick by the standards of the herd and accept mediocrity.

Now when we turn from Nietzsche, we find someone like Kierkegaard who is also talking about stepping out on your own in certain circumstances. But in a sense, Kierkegaard is even more radical than Nietzsche. Kierkegaard believed that all people, not just the super men, but all people are capable of achieving the very highest in life, given the fact that we have freedom. Therefore, everybody should be given this option to really step out on his own. Now most existentialists come down somewhere between the position of Nietzsche and the position of Kierkegaard. That is, most of them are not willing to say it’s only the super men. And most of them are not willing to say it should be everybody. But they tend to agree that as a result of being given this freedom, we should use it. And if we do, it will transform our concept of ethical norms and ethical values. Now of course, this approach to morals involves the exclusion of God for most of these existentialists and the exclusion of any permanent standards of good and evil. Instead, you have to decide what your own standards are going to be for good and evil.

Well, there is another way in which the use of freedom will affect the outcome of things for individuals. And we’ve talked about two so far, namely that one of the results of using freedom is transformation of personal existence. Another is transformation of ethical norm. A third result of using freedom to become is constituting a world. Now we find this particular idea especially in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre. Jean-Paul Sartre applied Edmond Husserl’s phenomenological method which begins with a radical reduction of everything to the ultimate reality for each existing being, namely himself. You remember several lectures ago, in fact the first lecture, we talked about Descartes and the change that he made in philosophy and that everyone after him ultimately begins philosophy with man and with his perception of the world and of what he can know.

When you get to the phenomenologists, you really have that theme of beginning with man and constituting your own world from your own consciousness and your own awareness of things. You really have that theme played out to its extreme form. Well Sartre adopts this phenomenological method and agrees that each man, each woman is their own starting point. Sartre claims then



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that each person is aware of other centers of consciousness, other individual existing beings. But it is up to you to constitute your perception of reality. It is the job of each ego to constitute reality. And since that’s so, that means that it is the job of each individual self to endow a world with meaning, with organization, and with purpose. In other words, according to someone like Sartre, the objects in our world are to be understood as fragmented, as non-related to one another. There is no meaning to existence. If you look at your life, if you look at everything in the world, you can’t make sense out of it. There is no ultimate reference point. Well, what do you do? Well then, it’s up to you as the individual to make a world out of the unrelated mass of experience. It’s up to you to give your life some meaning. There’s nothing transcendent that is going to give it some meaning. You have to make the meaning that you find in life for yourself.

Well, let me move on to another one of these themes. And what I’d like to look at now is the existentialist understanding of the relationship of individual existing people to others. Now according to the existentialist, men and women must focus first on themselves as existing subjects, as existing people. Instead of getting lost in the crowd and sacrificing yourself to the collective group which, of course, the Hegelian philosophy would encourage, instead of doing that though, human beings must awaken the possibilities of self-determination that slumber within themselves. So in one sense, man’s relation to others is to negate them. That is, you’re supposed to step out on your own and not get swallowed up by the crowd. But on the other hand, one finds that he also needs other people. The individual has to realize that the nature of his existence is that he exists as a being in the world. He is not totally isolated. He exists in a world where there are other people. And while we need to focus on ourselves, we also must realize that there are others and we need them.

Now personal existence then for the existentialist, is coexistence, but it is coexistence not with things or objects but with fellow human beings. Each one of these other people in the world is to be respected as free subjects. We don’t treat other people as objects, but we treat them as subjects. For example, Heidegger, Marcel, and Jaspers, three very important existentialists, agree that mutual relations among different peoples, among selves, those relations are required for the perfection of human existence. So that, on

Transcript - ST503 Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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Themes in ExistentialismLesson 05 of 24

the one hand, you have to focus on yourself as the individual, but it is not a self that can exist in total isolation from everyone and everything. Another thing that the existentialists say about individuals in their relationship to others is that others must be treated as subjects, that is, as persons not as objects. According to the existentialists, a humane community rests upon the moral resolve to treat another person as a person rather than as a thing, as a “thou,” we might say, rather than as an “it.” Now this means that each person is to be recognized as a fellow existent or a fellow self, a subjective center, a center of consciousness, not just a thing in the world or a compilation of a bunch of things.

Well, I think you can see in a number of these different themes how the existentialists are both rejecting something in Hegel’s philosophy and at the same time they are adopting something, that things in one sense are not either/or, they are both/and. Yes, the individual is important as individual. And we cannot forget the fact that he has his meaning in and of himself. But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that we can ignore the others that are in the world. You have to pay attention to them and treat them as individuals who are important as well, so that there’s both the negating and the affirming of the other in the existentialist concept of what it means to be an individual existent. Well/ we’ve got some more ideas in terms of major themes in existentialism. But for this lecture, I think that will suffice.

I want to move in the next lecture to talk about existentialist views on whether God exists. I want to talk in the next lecture, as well, on their emphasis on subjective thought and subjective truth. And then we’ve got a few other ideas that are some key themes in existentialist thought. And then when I’ve finished laying out these existentialist themes, then I want to turn to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and see a specific example of existentialist thinking. And Kierkegaard is very, very interesting, not only because he’s an existentialist but because he’s an existentialist who includes God in the equation. So that’s for next time. We’ll talk again about themes in existentialism and then begin to see some of them played out in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.

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