EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
43
Hegel (and, one might add, the unmentioned influence of Schelling,
whose later philosophy he knew from lectures). To the Hegelian sys–
tem, which pretended to grasp and explain the "whole," he opposed
the "single person," the individual man, for whom neither place nor
meaning was left
in
the Whole directed by the World-Mind. In other
words, Kierkegaard starts from the forlornness of the individual in
the completely explained world. The individual finds himself in per–
manent contradiction to this explained world, since his "Existenz,"
namely the pure factual character of his existing in all its contingency
(that, precisely, I am
I
and no one else, and that, precisely, I
am
rather than am not), can be neither foreseen by
re~son
nor resolved
into something purely thinkable.
But this Existenz, which I am continually but momentarily, and
which I cannot grasp by Reason, is the only thing of which I can
be unquestionably certain. Thus, man's task is to "become subjective,"
a consciously existing being, who perpetually realizes the paradoxical
implications of his life in the world. All essential questions of philoso–
phy-as, say, the immortality of the soul, human freedom, the unity
of the world, which means all the questions whose contradictory
structure Kant had shown in his antinomies of pure Reason-are to
be grasped only as "subjective truths," not to be known as objective
truths. The example of an "existing" philosopher is Socrates with
his
"If
there is immortality." "Was he thus a doubter?" Kierkegaard
begins one of the greatest interpretations in all his works which are
so rich in interpretations. "Not at all. On this 'if' he stakes his whole
life, he dares to die-the Socratic uncertainty was thus the expression
of the fact that the eternal truth is related to an existing individual,
and hence must remain a paradox to him so long as he exists."
Thus the universal, with which philosophy has so long been
occupied in the task of pure knowledge, is to be brought into a real
relation with Man. This relation can only be paradoxical insofar as
Man is always an individual. In the paradox the individual can grasp
the universal, make it the content of his Existenz, and thereby lead
that paradoxical life, which Kierkegaard reports about himself. In the
paradoxical life Man seeks to realize the contradiction that "the uni–
versal is staked as the individual" if it is to become at all real and
meaningful for Man. Kierkegaard therefore interprets such a life
later in ·the category of "exception,"-an exception, namely, from the
universal average everyday human existence; an exception on which
man decides only because God has called him to it in order to estab–
lish an example of how the paradox of man's life in the world is posed.
