Kierkegaard and Zen

While Kierkegaard wasn’t a Daoist or a Buddhist, his Philosophy shares many similarities to them. At the beginning of the section, “On Becoming a Christian” in our book on page 24 Kierkegaard says, “What now is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal world has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born, has grown up, and so forth, has come into being just like any other individual human being, quite distinguishable from other human beings....” and about halfway down the page, “The almost probable: that he can almost know, or as good as know, to a greater degree and exceedingly almost know--but believe it, that is impossible, for the absurd is precisely the object of faith, and only that can be believed.” 

This view of god, of reality, is precisely the same kind of view Taoist or Zen Buddhists hold. Consider the first lines of the Tao Te Ching (English and Feng translation), “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”

How similar they are! According Kierkegaard, the idea that God can be known, can be qualified as a kind of being similar to man, as absolutely ridiculous. The moment you try to pick apart what God is, it stops being God. It requires wholeness and the only way to achieve that is through faith. Contrasted with the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, this idea is indistinguishable from it; from the absurdity of knowing God, to the fruitlessness in trying to come up with terms to define God (you will end up with ten thousand things). 

However, Kierkegaard falls victim to silly things like giving god a sex (he calls God a he), and spends far too much time referring to God as a being separate from us, . This is completely contrary to how Taoist and Zen Buddhists view the nameless source from which we all come. A Taoist would never ascribe a sex or anything remotely relating to a form for the Tao. It is indescribable, and utterly pointless to try to describe. I think Kierkegaard did his Philosophy a major disservice by attempting this. 

The other interesting idea of Kierkegaard’s was his idea of possibility. Kierkegaard said that anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and that “only this anxiety through faith absolutely educative, laying bare as it does all finite ends and discovering all their deceptions.” To Kierkegaard, being educated by possibility is of utmost importance. To the Taoist, only the present moment matters, because the future is an illusion. Possibility is an illusion. To stand in the moment, to detach yourself from all anxiety about the future or regrets about the past, is the only way to be one with the Tao. You must be like water, formless, accepting of all things. To resist, to try to force the world to your will, will end poorly. You must give up any notions of changing the world, and accept it as it is. Only then will you be moving in harmony with the Tao.

Of course, Kierkegaard wasn’t a Taoist, and his Philosophy isn’t a Taoist philosophy, so one cannot fault him for viewing things differently. However I much prefer the Taoist explanations of the nameless source of energy from which all things in the Universe spring forth from. Perhaps had Kierkegaard spent some time reading Taoist or Zen texts, his Philosophy would have been a little more concise and well defined. As it is, I think is rather lacking when attempting to describe the indescribable.