I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
During this brief second visit to Berlin, [Kierkegaard] cemented a cornerstone of his philosophy: there is something contradictory about being a human in the world. His social relationships shape his life and form his self-consciousness, but the way he appears to others never quite matches his inward truth. He is on display, seen and judged, and yet his inability to disclose himself makes him feel alone. Human existence is at once inescapably public and intensely private. And the deeper a person’s inner life, the more profound this contradiction becomes. Kierkegaard doubts that anyone can comprehend, let alone judge, another person’s religious life, for ‘the first thing the religious does is close its door and speak in secret’, as God spoke to Abraham and as the angel spoke to Mary. Of course, religious people have to live conspicuously in the world like everyone else, though they harbour a ‘secret’ that is not willingly concealed, but impossible to express: ‘Inwardness is incommensurable with outwardness, and no person, even the most open-hearted, manages to say everything.’
Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
Inwardness is Kierkegaard’s (1813–1855) term for the subjective lived experience of a person, in which you wrestle with meaning, choice, faith, freedom, and responsibility. For him, truth is not primarily something you observe or discover but rather something you appropriate through your own inner experience.
Kierkegaard believes that, to become a self, you must cultivate your inwardness and not just amass objective knowledge or take a detached perspective on intellectual perspectives. He believes that objectivity can tell you facts about the world but inwardness is required for deciding what those facts mean for your life. This involves confronting anxiety, making authentic commitments, and taking responsibility for who you become.
With inwardness, Kierkegaard was reacting to Hegelian metaphysics, which aimed to describe reality from a God’s-eye perspective: an all-encompassing, rational structure in which history, ethics, and spirit unfold according to universal laws (specifically, dialectically). The individual serves as merely a participant in the march of Absolute Spirit.
Kierkegaard’s position on meaning and truth can be contrasted with Hegel (who came before him) and also with Sartre and later existentialists:
- Meaning is not pre-given by a philosophical system (Hegel)
- Meaning is also not invented arbitrarily by the individual (Sartre)
- Meaning must be appropriated — taken up inwardly, personally, and with passion — through the individual’s lived relationship to ethical and spiritual commitments
To Kierkegaard, “truth is subjectivity”: not that it is whatever you want it to be, but if you don’t live it, if it remains unlived, it isn’t a truth for you.
I wrote recently about my own unlived life, and what it would mean to live it, symbolically or actually. I wrote that post based on ideas from Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson’s book Living Your Unlived Life.
Psychologist and thinker Carl Jung believed that young adults build a persona to fit society’s demands. This is necessary in their development but ultimately limiting. In this, his idea echoes existentialists who see that people are often overly swayed by forces outside themselves — Kierkegaard’s “crowd,” Nietzsche’s “herd,” Heidegger’s “das Man,” and Sartre’s “bad faith.”
Jung urges those at midlife to individuate: integrate their shadow (disowned parts of their self), accept contradictions in life and in their selves, and become whole. This is similar to what existentialists urge you to do: become a self that you define, practice and demonstrate authenticity, own your freedom and responsibility. To Jung and the existentialists, the self is a task not a fixed being.
Kierkegaard and later existentialists believed many people live according to roles, expectations, and inherited meanings — outwardly, in his terminology — instead of turning inward and claiming a life and meaning that is truly theirs. This produces what he calls despair: the condition of not being the self you are called to become.
But Kierkegaard placed this demand to take responsibility for your becoming firmly in a religious context: he says you should become the self you are before God.
I find Nietzsche’s similar idea “Become who you are!” more compelling, mainly because it doesn’t ground itself in religious thought and practice. Nietzsche (1844–1900), who was a child when Kierkegaard died in his forties, probably didn’t ever study Kierkegaard. Yet his work represents a similar turn. He also rejected Hegel and centered the individual over systems. They both emphasized becoming, choice, selfhood, and authenticity. Kierkegaard reached this place from Protestant Christianity and his idea of existential inwardness, Nietzsche from classical philology (the study of ancient texts and languages especially Greek and Latin), a critique of morality, and his idea of a will to power.
How can I work these abstract ideas around to myself, which is, after all, the main subject of this 1000-day project?
I have recently been thinking about the roles I play as mother and matriarch in my family. In my estimation, I do passingly well as mother, not as well as matriarch. But both roles weigh on me, in different ways.
Is it time to go inward, let go of the roles society asks me, as a midlife woman to play, explore my will to power, individuate? That’s what Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jung might advise.
This year, on the 4th of July, I wrote of a wish to leave the maternal role behind:
Now I have a problem; I easily slip into the maternal role, sometimes with other adults. I do it in romantic relationships, for men who, even in their fifties and sixties, are still searching for a mother figure. And, I continue to do it with my adult children.
I find myself, on Independence Day, craving more autonomy and more sovereignty than being in the maternal role allows me. I don’t always want to be on the sidelines, cheering other people on, seeing their shining light, listening when they are down, holding off on giving advice as they work things out themselves. I want to be at the center of my life.
I recently slipped into something of a maternal role with a friend, and it backfired badly. Maybe it is time to think again about how I might become less maternal, and what might take its place in my psyche and behavior.
I am also wondering if it time to let go of the role of matriarch that sits poorly on my shoulders. It is what society has asked me to do, but, as much as I’m excited about the Thanksgiving dinner I’m hosting today, I think it might soon be time to give it up. Or to transform it in some way so that I don’t feel like there is just one way to do it — hosting large family holiday dinners in my big, beautifully decorated house.
My maternal grandmother serves as my role model for what a matriarch should do and be. She was married to her college sweetheart, my grandfather, for her entire life until he passed away in his eighties. She kept a beautiful home, decorated in shades of cream, olive, and orange, with luxe fabrics like chenille and velvet. She held Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at her house, expertly put together and calmly produced. She was an artist and didn’t work outside the home, aside from a brief tenure as a Latin teacher when her husband was away at the war.
She lived a life unlike one that I could live, even though I had hopes of following her example. Because I got divorced in my forties, I destroyed that as a possible path forward.
My own mother also served as matriarch for years, hosting family holiday dinners, and opening her home to my two sisters with their families when they came in town. She did it only after divorce and then a second marriage (along with a move into her second husband’s large house), so she had reconstituted her life enough to do it. My father and his girlfriend would join us. It was not as polished or as stress-free as my grandmother’s enactment of family celebrations. My ex-husband would never attend so my children always had to choose between us. Still, we had joyous celebrations because of my mother’s efforts.
I took over when my mother and her husband moved into a senior living place and no longer had the space or energy for hosting holiday dinners and holiday guests. I remember back over the years and I see the inconsistency and strangeness once I took over. One year, my new boyfriend and I hosted my mother, her husband, her husband’s daughter, and her new boyfriend. We had a lovely time, but it was nothing like the perfectly traditional Thaksgivings my grandmother hosted. Another year, I tried to grill a turkey and lit it on fire. I took it off the grill and finished it in the oven, then served it as a charred version of the classic roast turkey. The year of my divorce, I was invited to my now ex-husband’s house. He was cold and curt, and I wished I didn’t go. We’ve never celebrated together again at a holiday gathering.
I just remembered that long ago — ten Thanksgivings ago — I wrote a blog post Thanksgivings Remembered. I shared my memories of my grandmother’s house and her holiday dinners; these must be important memories that they keep coming up in my writing. My conclusion, however, was not that I couldn’t be a matriarch because I didn’t do it like her but instead this:
I now know this. My grandmother’s holiday magic was not that her house looked like Nate Berkus decorated it or that she got the kitchen clean even before dinner was served. The magic of those past Thanksgivings she hosted didn’t depend upon the family tree’s being free of stepsiblings and remarriages and kids dealing, for better or worse, with multiplied households. Holiday magic is always available for channeling, for whoever believes in it, divorced or not, with or without the good china and crystal. My grandmother believed in it, the girl who brought the chocolate trifle believed in it, and I believe in it too.
We all create holiday magic by doing something extra-special for someone, with joy and love, not out of obligation. Putting together a chocolate trifle for people you’ve never met to say “thanks for having me over.” Screwing some shelves into the wall because it helps out your partner’s mother. Making a vegan-friendly rice dish for your stepdaughter. Staying up late to get the pecan pies for your family out of the oven. Serving a tv-perfect meal to your granddaughter and instilling within her forevermore the wish to make those around her feel special and loved, just like she felt so many years ago at your beloved home.
I didn’t expect to reach this conclusion — that I can host holiday dinners without feeling I must be a matriarch — from the starting point of Kierkegaard’s inwardness. But his inwardness idea says we appropriate our truths. I have lived holiday dinners for my whole life, and I get to live another one today. I get to do it out of my own truths about what I am doing and why.
The inward reality of it is that I don’t have to think of myself as a matriarch; I don’t have to live up to my grandmother’s example. I am just hosting people I love and care about for turkey dinner with two kinds of stuffing, two kinds of pie, many gluten-free options, Hatch green chile gravy, and a turkey roasted and carved by my partner.
I can put down the maternal and matriarchal roles and instead show up as myself and the self I’m becoming: happy, healthy, surrounded by people I love and who love me.
Perhaps this is my inward truth today: I don’t need to carry the matriarchal mantle to create meaning. I don’t need to perform the mother-role to feel connected. I don’t have to be the center or the support beam or the peacemaker or the woman-with-lots-of-guest-rooms-ready-for-guests. I can let those identities dissolve, like sugar in the vinegar for pickled red onions.
I can simply show up, with my partner beside me, with my loved ones around me, with gratitude for the home I have and the life I’m building. I can feel joy in the meal I’ve prepared while still feeling open to the person I’m becoming.
If there is a calling here, it’s not be a matriarch but to be myself: whole, present, loved, and loving. Maybe that is the most inward and most authentic Thanksgiving blessing I can offer.
Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃