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Monday, October 4, 2021

Kierkegaard and his critique of ‘Rationalism’ and the ‘Enlightenment’

From truth and reality to Corona and Totalitarianism.

by StFerdIII

 

How did we end up in the Fascism of a Flu tyranny in which 99.91% of the population have no difficulty in surviving the purported ‘pandemic’?  How were freedoms lost, so easily tossed away by the general and rather ignorant and deluded public?  The destruction of civilisation has gone on for many centuries with the endless attacks on Christianity and Western culture.  A logical outcome of this anti-reality, soul-less, God-less program, is totalitarianism.  The guise of ‘health or safety’ provides a perfect cover for an amoral governance, in which the soul, the mind, the truth of God can be destroyed and the imposition of complete control with the rendering of the human as little better than an animal, implemented.  Corona is the endpoint expression of the ‘Enlightenment’ and its animalism and amoral materialism.

 

Soren Kierkegaard is a famous critic of rationalism.  Writing in the mid-19th century, his philosophy is summarised in his 1846 work, ‘Two Ages’.  Presaging the violence of 1848, Kierkegaard regards mid 19th century politics as an irrational religion, in which pragmatic ‘rationalism’ finds little expression but dogma and zealotry reign, writing ‘Everything that looked like a religious movement became politics.’

 

Kierkegaard was a Christian and was as dismayed with false religiosity, as he was with false Hegelian rationalism.  Conforming to social conventions or dogma did not make one a Christian, anymore than believing that laws, institutions or societal practices were ‘rational’ or moral.  For Kierkegaard, politics was a thin, simplistic veneer hiding conflict and violence, with much of mediated political discourse, a brew of psychological struggle and confusion.

 

Kierkegaard understood that the ‘root’ of much politics is the quest to satisfy ulterior motives.  Logically, we could deduce from this, that the limitation of government and state power would be necessary to reduce the plundering and rapine effects of such a truism.  Likewise, a buttress and fortress of morality and truth in the form of Christianity, which defends freedom, would be absolutely fundamental to defending a rational, moral life.  In Kierkegaard’s view, politics is about violence, much of it steeped in envy and gluttony and the manipulation through ‘news’ of public opinion and opprobrium, manufactured for effect and purpose. 

 

For Kierkegaard the ‘Rationalism’ of political and social theology leads to a selfishness and primitive desire for personal gain.  Speeches, words, ‘news’ become full of nothing, just conceptual abstractions devoid of meaning or relevancy.

 

“When a man essentially puts his whole personality into communication…..eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction – there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, as abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous….”

 

Kierkegaard thus anticipates the Post-Modern, Post-Truth age, found in Orwell, ‘science’ of climate, or the pandemic of Corona.  Words have no meaning, truth is fiction and story-telling and data fabrication is now truth and science.  His work ‘Two Ages’ presages the modern dystopian of ‘information’ found in ‘social media’, the ‘mainstream news’, and the depersonalisation of life through technology.

 

By destroying the rational structures of faith, morality, and reality, the modern age cannot be taken seriously by Kierkegaard.  First hand experience is now replaced by word-smithing and philosophy parading as ‘science’.  Envy, greed, gluttony, violence and hate permeate ‘rational politics’, all of it disguised to hide its true objectives and intent.  As governments of all varieties grow, so does this illusion of reality, and so too does the violence against truth and life.