The Most Important Lesson I Learned from Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard

Everyone is different and everyone has different experiences.

Note: The proper Danish pronunciation of his name is “sorn KEER-ke-go.”

“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

July is graduation time at my university and our department honored our 63 BA, 11 MA, and 4 PhD graduates. In classic British tradition, the ceremony was formal and scripted with pomp and circumstance. The officials processed in (led by the university mace). Speeches were made. Names were announced one by one and graduands walked across the stage to pick up the empty cylinder that symbolized their accomplishment. (The actual certificate is for reasons unexplained handed to graduands after the ceremony.)

Amidst the highly regimented ritual, something else caught my attention. Despite the standardization, things were not all the same. As each granduand was named and walked across the stage, there was the standard polite applause. But there were differences. There were some whoops from friends, some ecstatic shouts of proud parents, and some quiet mixed feelings of graduates who were missing someone not there in the audience.

It reminded me of Søren Kierkegaard’s observations about experience. In the 1830s and 40s, Kierkegaard wrote some of the most provocative and compelling books in the history of philosophy. One of his themes was the idea that we each live unique lives and we come to understand anything only through experiencing it. We can only come to understand a truth by going through the process of obtaining it. No one knows what it is meant to have earned the honor of a degree unless one has put in the considerable time and effort to earn one.

Truth is not something you can appropriate easily and quickly. You certainly cannot sleep or dream yourself to the truth. No, you must be tried, do battle, and suffer if you are to acquire the truth for yourself. It is a sheer illusion to think…