Category: Kierkegaard
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Kierkegaard: “To Hell With the Pope!” and Monkishness. The Highest Life
I plan to spend a few days next month at a Benedictine monastery in the desert outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The suggestion was made that I give some of the monks a little talk. I think "A Philosopher Defends Monasticism" would be an appropriate title. So I have been reading up on the…
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The Essential Sermon
"The essential sermon is one's own existence." Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, #1056 Related articles Why Keep a Journal? Introverts and Inwardness
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Kierkegaard: Some Extracts with an Anti-Natalist Flavor
My 1995-1996 Turkish Journal contains quotations from, and commentary on, some of S.K.'s journal entries. Unfortunately, I don't have complete bibliographical data, just the entry numbers. What sent me back to my Turkish Journal was London Karl's request that I dig up Kierkegaardian passages that smack of anti-natalism. S. K. on Women, #4998. ". .…
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Introverts and Inwardness
Whereas the extrovert finds himself in socializing, the introvert loses himself in it: he experiences the loss of his inwardness, which is precious to him, a pearl of great price, not willingly surrendered. The clearest expression of this dismay at self-loss that I am aware of finds expression is an early (1836) journal entry of…
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A Kierkegaardian Passage in Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), ed von Wright, tr. Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 53e: I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.) It says that all wisdom…
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What is Man?
He is an animal, but also a spirit — and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. Thus he does not parrot the word 'I'; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness. Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt). Man envisages a Higher…
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Kierkegaard on Immortality
S. Kierkegaard/J. Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson and Lowrie tr., Princeton UP, 1941, pp. 154-155, emphasis added): All honor to him who can handle learnedly the learned question of immortality! But the question of immortality is essentially not a learned question, rather it is a question of inwardness, which the subject by becoming subjective must…
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The Thing About Kierkegaard
He presupposes the truth of Christianity. The question for him is not whether it is true but how it is properly to be lived. His concern is the existential appropriation of what is antecedently accepted as true. This is reflected in his otherwise absurd dictum, "Truth is subjectivity." So Heidegger was right when he called…
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The Knot at the End of the Thread
To philosophize without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of the thread. (Kierkegaard) But to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all.
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Kierkegaard’s Fear
Kierkegaard dreaded ending up the property and preserve of professional scholars. But who reads him apart from professors of philosophy, of religion, of divinity, of Danish literature, and their students? The professors read him for professional purposes, to make a living; the students also read him for professional purposes, to prepare for making a living.…
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No Chamber Pot in General, Danish Philosopher Maintains
Hans Brøchner on Kierkegaard: . . .I once spoke quite zealously about how no positive religion could be tolerant, precisely because, with its claim to be revealed religion, it must insist that it is the only true religion, and it would have to consign the others to untruth. From the point of view of positive religion,…
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If Kierkegaard Had a Weblog . . .
. . .what might it have been called? The Regina Monologues. (An MP original.)
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Husserl Introduces Shestov to Kierkegaard
Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard have much in common. Both are irrationalists, to mention the deepest commonality. Husserl and Kierkegaard have almost nothing in common except that both are passionate truth-seekers each in his own way. So I find it amazing that it was Edmund Husserl, of all people, who introduced Shestov to Kierkegaard's writings. As…
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Marx and Kierkegaard and Buddha: Comparative Notes
Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach protested that the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways, when the point is to change it. (Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.) His century-mate, Soren Kierkegaard, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, but sharing…