Understanding Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard is at first brush not the most appealing character. His genius is hidden behind various masks. His voluminous writings makes it difficult to easily penetrate to his essence and summarize his contribution. His insistence to be called a religious writer rather than a philosopher makes him more difficult to relate to him from a modern point of view. So here is a synopsis of my understanding of the most salient points that can be extracted from Kiekergaard. This list does not claim to be definitive nor complete but a starting point towards a journey of understanding Kiekergaard

1. Irony is the individual’s tool that equalize the playing field between the individual and society as a whole irrespective of the culture and values of society at any point in time.
2. To truly live the individual must find a way to live, something worth living and dying for, something to make life significant.
3. The individual can not accept knowledge at face value but is obliged to assimilate his/her own knowledge.
4. To know truth is not to claim knowledge for ourselves but to hone our skill to identify inconsistencies. 5) The tension created by the exposed contradictions outweighs the value of soothing it away with complacency and ignorant acceptance.
5. Bringing everything into doubt, by questioning everything, however leads to despair and serve no purpose but ends where even the validity of a person’s own life is doubted.
6. Irony and wit are the tools for opening up points of significance that are essential to develop personal truths without alienating oneself from the world itself.
7. Significance is lost in a life of immediacy, discontinuity, being accidental, driven by interests and  external focus.
8. When life becomes a series of momentary excitements strung on a string like beads or a continual search for new interests, it leads to boredom and lack of significance.
9. Ethics is the threshold that must be crossed to enter into a relationship with Divinity for the ethical life grows in nobility an honor; it does not trickle away in a series of unconnected thrills and fascinating experiences.
10. Man must make a decisive choice to become an individual through an  ethical awakening
11. True significance is found in entering into the correct relationship with Divinity expressed through works of love.
12. Human love is transient, the love aspired to must have its source in the Divine, which is eternal.
13. Divine love is not a feeling but it is a duty – an obligation to recognize and value the otherness of others.
14. Divine love acknowledges the equality of all others without any differentiation and entice individuality to be expressed to everybody in the same way, irrespective of who they are.
15. Divine love involves the same emotions of fellow-feeling in every action in such a way that the individual can rejoice in his/her individuality.
16. Divine love however is also  such that each self is so identified with the other that they have absorbed each other, and find no “other” – no separate reality – in another person, for there is no person that exist apart.