Kierkegaard on Man’s Highest Perfection (Mythic Mind, ep. 193)
We are pressed to dissolve into the mass, to wear a demographic as a self, or to win identity from whatever community we most esteem. Kierkegaard’s answer cuts the other way: the glory of the human being is to recognize utter dependency on God.
In Mythic Mind episode 193, Dr. Andrew Snyder is joined by Zach and David for an Exploring the Psyche conversation on Kierkegaard’s discourse “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection.” They push past the easy proverb that a person needs only a little, through Job and vanity that can even dress itself as renunciation, to the Christian claim that greatness is not pagan self-sufficiency but knowing how much we need God. Along the way: first self and deeper self, the moving wheel of fortune versus the eternal, inwardness against self-enclosure, Christendom versus contemporaneity with Christ, and why casting Kierkegaard as a secular existentialist misses the Christian (even Boethian) grain of the text.
Topics include needing little versus needing God, praying for the powerful because they need God most, grace and being capable of nothing, the hard wine before the good wine, and how anchoring in God frees the temporal self for real community rather than atomism.
This is Mythic Mind, ep. 193.
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