Raymond Tallis - Michelangelos Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence

Except where indicated, all of the above editions are published by Princeton University Press.

At one level, Kierkegaards aim is straightforward: to strip you, the reader, naked at two in the morning, to sit you in front of a mirror and to force you to think about your life. His books are addressed to that solitary individual who may be willing to listen to what he says and to ask questions about his or her own life. He demands a willingness for self-examination, which many usually seek to avoid; he demands a willingness to take off the masks which everyone wears in everyday life and to be ruthlessly honest about what is true and false. Kierkegaard considers that we are all prone to self-deceit and he gives us his readers no peace until we can see ourselves truthfully, as a prelude to making decisions about the manner in which we should live.

In J. K. Rowlings Harry Potter books, the young wizard Harry discovers the mirror of Erisaid. This is a remarkable magical mirror; those who stare into it will see nothing less than the deepest desires of their hearts. It does not necessarily reveal the future. It reveals what the person yearns for most and this desire may or may not be satisfied in the future. The mirror enables people to confront and to address their desires, to ask whether or not this is what they should desire or what they really want to desire, and it gives them an opportunity to change the direction of their lives. Professor Dumbledore, Harry Potters inspiration and guide, says to him that those who look into the mirror and sees nothing else but themselves, just as they are, would have nothing more to desire and would be truly happy. Kierkegaard would have approved of the mirror as it would at least force you and I to engage with reality.

It might seem from this that Kierkegaard is a psychologist and so he is, well before Freud or Jung. However, he is also a brilliant philosopher and Christian theologian. He brings the three disciplines together in a remarkable way. Yet, though he is a philosopher, theologian and psychologist, there is also a sense in which he would have rejected all these disciplines. This is because they can be used to objectify knowledge so that it ceases to relate to the individual. In their technicalities, cleverness and desire to develop a complete and coherent account of what it is to be human, they lose sight of the real experience of humanity and become untrue and irrelevant in a sense. In all his writings he is passionately committed to communicate from heart to heart, to help his reader, that person who reads his works at a distance in time and place, to think deeply about his or her life and to make decisions about how to live and how to die.

Kierkegaard has been described by many as the father of existentialism. This is misleading. Existentialism was a twentieth-century movement particularly influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre which emphasized personal autonomy, individual freedom and the capacity for individual choice. In that Kierkegaard was concerned with the individual and with philosophy that related to life, the description of him as the father of existentialism may be relevant, but for many existentialists, truth depends on the individual and Kierkegaard would have rejected this. Kierkegaard was a philosophical realist maintaining a correspondence theory of truth in the classical tradition; as such, his work can illuminate the debate between realism and non-realism in contemporary philosophy. His great philosophical opponent was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831). Hegel saw truth emerging through history as a result of the dialectical process. A view was put forward (a thesis) and this view met strong opposition from those who rejected it entirely and who put forward a totally opposed view (the antithesis). Initially these views appeared irreconcilable but, Hegel held, they became reconciled over time (the synthesis). As the new synthesis was accepted it became in effect a new thesis, which would provoke an antithesis and so the processcontinued.