I love teaching. It teaches me things. No matter if the material is old or new, I always learn something about a thinker, an idea, or myself.

This semester has been no different. I've had the new opportunity to teach Western Philosophy II, covering everyone from Descartes to Nietzsche. And learning so much in the process.

I find myself thinking a lot about the views of Soren Kierkegaard lately. I have not studied him much in my career. Yet, my thinking was like his during important times in my life.

Independently of Kierkegaard, but now with additional support in reading him, I find myself thinking about life in what I would call "existentialist" terms. As opposed to "sentimentalist" terms. Whether anyone will recognize this distinction the way I do I don't know. But what it means for me is that life is not uncomplicated by desire (sentimentality.) Life is defined by the frustration of desire more so, I think, than it's fulfillment.

But, start with Kierkegaard's views about the man who says confidently that he will come to a friend's dinner, only to be struck and killed by a falling tile that very same day. Kierkegaard's story to illustrate the fragility of life, our inability to speak with any confidence about the future, and our need to recognize the mystery of our existence, strikes me deeply. My own "tile" falling was the Falling Man at the World Trade Center. I meditated for months after the events of 9-11 on how those people that day went to work that morning thinking all about the future.

Those meditations reawakened in me and caused me to interpret anew my own mother's death at 48. She wanted a certain kind of future for herself, after many years of sacrificing for her children and husband. Yet, none of that came true for her.

What is desire then, which is future oriented? What is its function in God's world, which is fragile and contingent?

When desire is part of love, we say it comes from God. At least the first time, when you get married. After that, it's on its own.

What about desire for health, growth, self-development and success? Does that come from God? Even as it resides in the mind of the dying? At what point is it no longer "from God?"

What if we lose desire that "comes from God?" Is that possible?

Kierkegaard was puzzled by human desire. Yet, he tried ultimately to validate all of it through faith in God. Even faith in "impossible" things. He illustrates this in the story in Fear and Trembling of the common man who falls in love with a princess he can never possess. Yet, he will hold on to this impossibility through faith in God, in whom nothing is impossible. Of course, that faith no longer requires even the presence of the object of desire. The princess can go her way.

I interpret that story to say that the point is that the desire is held in faith as legitimate, despite its worldly impossibility and absurdity. Is Kierkegaard then validating desire in a Platonic fashion? The world can never fulfill the desire, but what we long for will find fulfillment nevertheless? Somehow?

Shades of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, which I read repeatedly in high school. Lewis puzzles over the death of his beloved wife, in the face of a all loving God. He draws the conclusion that he will not simply get back what he once had. He will get back something much more deeply satisfying than what he previously had.

Shades of Thomas Aquinas as well, who holds that in the afterlife, the beatific vision provides first the intimate knowledge of God as first cause (an intellectual satisfaction) but all things thereafter that we "desire" are fulfilled as a secondary effect. See my previous post on that here.

Why is desire secondary, here and in the hereafter?