Daniel Williams: Kierkegaard's Existentialism, Lewis, and the Subjective; 2/11/12

In the existentialist class that I am taking, I recently read several selections from the work of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. As I was proceeding through and studying the readings, I remarked upon some similarities they had to the discussion in our Lewis class. Most notable to me was Kierkegaard's insistence upon subjectivity as truth: he fundamentally argued that the abstract, the purely rational, was irrelevant or at least unrelated to concrete human experience. This reminds me of Lewis' arguments in the "Myth Became Fact" essay, in which he notes that human thought has a tendency towards the abstract, whereas human experience is necessarily concrete. Lewis contended that myth is one way of bridging the gap between the concrete and the abstract. In other words, myth is the means of expressing certain truths in a manner in which they can be understood experientially, even if it is experience of a Secondary (create) world, rather than the primary world.

I believe that Kierkegaard, although he wrote before Lewis, would have agreed at least in part with the thoughts Lewis expressed in that essay. While Kierkegaard was writing mainly as a reaction against several of the enlightenment philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, rather than commenting on the value of myth as did Lewis, I think that Kierkegaard would appreciate Lewis' position, namely because it implies that the abstract is separate from, and therefore disparate with, the concrete, subjective experience. Kierkegaard believed that pure rationality (the defining characteristic of Kant's works) took one far away from experience, and therefore was a mode of philosophy ultimately useless to the philosopher. Though Lewis seems to value rationality more than Kierkegaard, there nevertheless appears to be agreement about the difficulty of relating the abstract and concrete realities.

Although their writings and philosophies have more differences than similarities, it was interesting to note that both Kierkegaard and Lewis placed value on experience as a means to attaining truth. Kierkegaard wrote mainly about faith as the subjective means to truth, and while Lewis certainly shared that value of faith, he also emphasized myth and story as a means to grasping the more abstract truths about reality.

I find there is much to be admired about their emphasis on the subjective. I certainly believe in reason as a means to knowledge, yet I also agree with both Kierkegaard and Lewis that the abstract world may not be relatable to the experiential world in several instances, at least not without something like myth, story, or human narration in general acting as a medium through which the abstract may be understood. Mathematical truths, for example, are purely abstract truths, but they become meaningful to the world of experience because humanity has found a means to bridge the gap between the abstract and the experiential. In the same way, I think that Lewis' idea of myth as another bridge is a valuable idea. Kierkegaard, however, may have entirely rejected the idea that there was an abstract, rational world to which the experiential may be connected; nevertheless I cannot help note a similar line of thinking behind both Kierkegaard's and Lewis' philosophy about the objective and subjective.