Search for the Self (A Short Review of Kierkegaard: Purity of Heart)

A Short Review of Kierkegaard: Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing

Translated by Douglas V. Steere, Harper Torch, 1938

This little text has some relevance to my own personal affairs lately and my brief notes on the topic might highlight some of the links which may be made evident through review of Edward T. Hall's own thesis on individuality as being a filtered, conditioned facet of highly specific group cultural values determinants. I am all for the concept of selective filtering, and selective memory, specifically as it is detailed in the advertising and marketing theories of Messieurs Rossiter and Percy.

But is the human mind virtually an advertising sponge which only soaks up those rinds and juices which it might particularly find favourable in passing moments of consumptive awareness? Is that all individuals often allow themselves to be? Are we thus merely parrots of some cracker-driven spending and buying festival which ends up often with one more unsustained and thus failed awareness of happiness or fullfillment? Through purchase or credit versus a reoccuring craving, which would Kierkegaard say clearly begins and ends with the spiritual self entirely alone and wholey, thus completely existent within the conceptual confines of the solitary individual entity, pneuma, soul, or essence?

Luckily I am not alone in my questioning of conceptual frameworks which many might easily consider antique remainders of a more intellectually tweakish time. Business management these days appears to be all about spiritual organisation. However there is a border to which I have hovered but refuse to cross, culturally or theoretically. As in, convictions held by individuals, regardless if one thinks these were grown there, without soil, water, or minerals, grains or patterns of grains of thought, these are human patterns of behaviour. Convictions are often wholey engorged without tasting, as one might witness a fish rising out of the depths of itself to grasp something totally inappropriate to its continued well being and taking on new cultural values without proper congealing of the contents within an individual, or thus personal accounting as Kierkegaard might recommend. All this to appease the crowd. The churlish dogs who might often think themselves consuming the man when in reality, they merely perhaps consume their own ideas of individuality without executing them.

Thus it behooves me to relate that I do not wander the malls or strands in ill-cut, ill-fitting off white suits with matching fedoras, I do not attach a bolo tie with a plastic Jesus attached crucifix or the like. My eyes are not beady, black spheres wholey devoid of colour or wit. I do not fix my sweaty palms upon your lithe arms and thereupon squeeze out an answer to the perennial question (as if you were some risotto stuffed, pickled crab), "Do you believe in Jesus?" I do not wander the malls and strands with a full karaoke box tethered to my hip with a pig-tail wired microphone lustily chortling the chants and wailings upon the lots and reefs of the hopelessly damned. I do not raise my voice up out of the deeps as if I was resurrecting "The Wreck of the Hesperus" bowling itself out of salty sands and muds over distorted ranting chorale. I do not lie in wait like a vulture upon the vistas clear or peaks of yonder mountains mulling and waiting to stuff my tracts into the unsuspecting maws of the passing non-evangelist too polite to say just buzz off.

What I am saying is that Kierkegaard makes known and logically determines that man as an individual is spiritually alone before proverbial God, Higher Power, Thor, or Odin. Tkae your pick. As many of the Christian mystics, hell, most mystics, these trains of thought may attach themselves without obligation to grovelling or collection plate passing. That is, one cannot hide in the crowd from that which is spiritual or individual in the self neither now, nor in the hereafter, whatever it may be. Oprah cannot rule over the masses unless they willingly submit. Kierkegaard speaks mostly of inner light, inner awareness, knowing that each individual self, its thoughts, its feelings, are wholey unique in all of the world regardless of how much was moulded there and how much remains unmade. His context is wholely spiritual and of course God-related. For those for which there is no God, there is always something there even it be intellect alone, there is a belief system there within even if it be a non-belief. Inner nihilism, "the nihilistic cow or chichevache" resides there regardless to gnaw upon the bones of doubt never making clear that what is often so desperately missing it seems, to the great benefit of producers, buyers, and sellers, is a clearly defined sense of self in and among individuals.

A few quotes to rattle around in the great void or fragant garden of your inner world depending on how you will it:

"Oh, let us never forget this, let us not reduce the spiritual to the worldly."

"...a man can, to be sure, have an extremely different, yes, have a precisely opposite opinion

from ours, and one can nevertheless deal earnestly with him if one assumes that finally there may be a point of agreement, a unity in some universal human sense, call it what you will... One can dispute with a man, dispute to the furthest limit, as long as one assumes , that in the end there is a point in common, an agreement in some universal human sense: in self-respect."

'Then it follows so easily that the isolated voice of conscience (as generally happens to be a solitary one) becomes overruled- by the majority. But in eternity, conscience is the only voice to be heard. It must be heard by the individual, for the individual has become the eternal echo of the voice. It must be heard. There is no place to flee from it. For in the infinite there is no place, the individual is himself the place. It must be heard. "

Considering that I am rearing up on my final entry on The Silent Language, this book is being read at the right time I think. Furthermore, it gives comfort to that realm of the self which appears ever silent, peaceful, tranquil, deep, inviting, and so essentially that which speaks of the universal human longing for inner peace. I really needed to read this. Through my faith in selective filtering I believe I am consciously deciding which bits I wish to stick to my inner self and those which I shall let lie like dust upon the ways of being.