I was raised in a Catholic household, religious education ran parallel to my regular schooling, I went to church with my family once, sometimes twice a week, prayed at dinner and before bed, but all the while I was on autopilot. I understood the church, the community, the morality, but I couldn’t embody it; something was missing. The word faith had been thrown around all those years, but no one could ever explain or exemplify it in a way that I could be confident of my use of it. “You must have faith, you must believe, you must feel God within you.” As a child, I sat there beneath those empty words and thought, “What about you?” It was only half displayed on the faces and tongues our community, of my parents. Sometimes I saw their passion for God, sometimes I saw their devotion to the religion, sometimes I understood what it meant to believe, but never fully. I understood that devotion to our religion promised peace and eternal life and yet I saw fear everywhere. I thought that this faith must be a horribly fleeting faculty to allow fear such a comfortable seat beside it. It was as if sometimes they lived in faith, and sometimes they lived in fear (doubt, uncertainty, etc.); the change rang clearly in their voices and categorized the musculature of their faces. I knew that faith could not be such a thing. I understood God at the very least as infinite; it only made sense for faith to be equally resilient. I had a better foothold to leap from then I had known at the time.

“There is a man who wants to have faith, well, let the comedy begin.” – Soren Kierkegaard

Mathematics and other numbered pursuits always came curiously easy to me. I had always said that it was because they had a set answer, predetermined, simply waiting to be found through proof. About halfway through middle school, it was as if the problems were written as the answers themselves exposing an indifference that made me question their entire substance. It was around this time that I pursued the feeling of faith and began to wonder on whose authority two and two made four. Between me and myself could it not be five? Or potato? I realized that this piece-wise consciousness of a crowd had been the faith that I had witnessed all those years; Catholicism was an equation consisting of values that had been mashed into a church uncertain if together they equaled four or God.

“It is as if Christ were a professor, and as if the Apostles had formed a little professional society.” – Soren Kierkegaard

The individual was lost within the crowd; compromising on some of their own ideas and halfheartedly committing to those of others. Therein was my empty feeling; therein I lost faith. Happily, within this revelation, I found it: faith must be an individual and infinite passion for our I did not rush to apply it to God however, my individualism had been bursting at the seams all of my young life so it predominately made sense to apply this new found faculty of infinity to the indefinable absurdity that had stolen so much sleep from me; my own mind. I applied faith to the aspects of my consciousness that served me best and began to settle slowly but confidently into my existence. Possibility became a matter of belief; the curve of the world ceased to run from me; my mind found the horizon.

“On this ‘if’ he stakes his whole life, he is willing to die, and he has determined the course of his life in accordance with the passion of infinity, that it may be acceptable–if there is an immortality.” – Soren Kierkegaard

It was a discovery that made me resilient beyond measure, though I found that it was also an island. I have not met many people that see life and death in the way that I do; I have not met many people that know their own mind in the way that I do; I have not met many people who see the possibilities that I do.

“People strive to deceive themselves in the totality of things, in world history; no one wants to be an individual human being.” – Soren Kierkegaard

But all whom I have met have the capacity for faith; all whom I have met can command themselves beyond the superficial; all whom I have met can believe in the impossible.

 

Existential philosophy came to me about a year ago at an intellectual impasse seemingly sensing my need for a productive path within the boundless plane of my psyche. I had cultivated my share of connotations for the discipline in years prior, but mostly associated it with maddening disillusionment; I had never thought to seek it as a form of council in the same way I had been taught to seek God. It came to me against my predispositions on a midnight YouTube binge as I stumbled upon an 8-bit summary of the notions of Heidegger and Kierkegaard of being and the individual. It presented itself as a memoir, collecting all of my past conundrums, compartmentalizing and color coding them. I went on YouTube, ironically, out of boredom, and I left on a journey towards both revolution and inner peace.

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken; or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he star’d at the Pacific–and all his men look’d at each other with a wild surmise–silent, upon a peak in Darien.” – John Keats

Kierkegaard criticized systematic philosophy for the same reason that I, and I’m sure many comfortable folk including my father, avoid the discipline. When I began to share my studies with my dad his response was, “I don’t have time for philosophy, I’m a rational man.” It should be said that my dad has been a devout catholic for his entire life; the irony discouraged me from arguing. His view of the philosopher is that of an entitled existence of thought, pretension, and inaction fueled by handouts, open ended contracts, and empty promises. Kierkegaard recognized this stigma and the need to consolidate a philosophy which takes on the burdens of free existence and develops concrete motivations for individual action. Kierkegaard insisted on the responsibility of the individual to choose at crossroads of either/or; to choose to exist. He recognized the crippling anxiety that comes with this burden of choice, but with this anxiety and desperation comes the exhilaration and motivation of invention; action and revolution are inevitable.

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” – Soren Kierkegaard

I have taken on existential philosophy and the call to individualism as a sort of religion; I feel as though I should begin with solidifying faith in myself in order for my life to be an example of confident and unique action.

“Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.” – Sarah Bakewell

Kierkegaard sees a continuation of our paint by numbers existence as a complacent march towards getting nothing done. He calls for us to search for and define our individual essence and to reclaim them from the labels we have lent them to. In redefining and authenticating ourselves we authenticate humanity; humanity becomes a vast and diverse garden of ideas and personal culture rather than a filing cabinet of a few sections of the thoughts and action of the majority.