Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the stupidities of the world, and you will regret it; weep over them, and you will also regret it. The degree to which Kierkegaard was a self-dramatizing writer remains a major question about his work. A former slave, he almost immediately took advantage of slavery in the Caribbean as well as trade with India and China, making in one decade a business fortune that would support his wife and seven children.
Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard transferred his hard-earned severity to his children. They were steeped in Danish Lutheranism. Most of his siblings died young, and the remainder of the family fortune supported the philosopher in his pursuits—eventually he sold their house and lived in a series of apartments, but he never really wanted for money.
Yet his character was trained in opposition. He could not simply accept the redemptive promise of Christ:. From this tormenting self-examination would evolve new ways of posing philosophical questions—how is one to be human in the face of uncertainty? But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward. To obey the dictates of his God, Abraham must sacrifice his own son. Philosophy goes further. Yet Abraham believes. The position is irreducible. The problem is in one way simple: we cannot know the truth.
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in the dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what then would life be but despair?
If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!
But for that reason it is not so, and as God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero and the poet or speech-maker.
He sees faith as a necessary leap over the chasm of uncertainty. I do too, but I cannot accept Christian doctrine as the premise of the leap. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i. Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason.
The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being Jesus.
There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd. According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between eternal truth and time is distinct from the Socratic notion that eternal truth is always already within us—it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection anamnesis.
The condition for realizing eternal truth for the Christian is a gift Gave from God, but its realization is a task Opgave which must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization that over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we must realize that we are always in sin. This is the condition for faith, and must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins. Rather, it must have been introduced into the world from a transcendent source.
Once we understand that we are in sin, we can understand that there is some being over against which we are always in the wrong. On this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we can ultimately be atoned with this being.
The absurdity of atonement requires faith that we believe that for God even the impossible is possible, including the forgiveness of the unforgivable. Although God can forgive the unforgivable, He cannot force anyone to accept it. Kierkegaard is sometimes regarded as an apolitical thinker, but in fact he intervened stridently in church politics, cultural politics, and in the turbulent social changes of his time.
This latter desire gradually left him, but his relation to women remained highly questionable. While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel, he had grave reservations about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises. Hegel would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment.
Instead he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical. This authorship snipes simultaneously at German romanticism and contemporary Danish literati with J. Heiberg receiving much acerbic comment. However, it also draws heavily on the work of these authors, especially by taking seriously their framing of philosophical and theological problems.
Classical Greek art, in particular, is taken to be the gold standard by which artistic perfection is to be measured. However, Kierkegaard and the German romantics and German idealists share the view that classical Greek art lacks inwardness or subjective spirit. Modern art, by contrast, while unlikely to match the formal perfection of classical Greek art, contains the potential to explore subjective spirit.
One crucial dimension of subjective spirit is freedom, which becomes a distinctive preoccupation of modern art and post-Kantian philosophy. He uses narrative points of view, pseudonyms, vignettes, character sketches and case studies from life and literature to illustrate how dialectics of moods, emotions and spirit can both disable and enable individual freedom. Moods such as melancholy, boredom and irony can become demonically self-perpetuating, but they also have the potential to lift the individual to a state of self-reflection that amounts to higher order consciousness, thereby enabling the individual to see his or her former existence as what Wittgenstein called a limited whole.
The highest order of consciousness for Kierkegaard is God-consciousness, which enables the individual to see himself or herself as both a sinner and as open to divine grace. So it had little immediate effect as discursive action. Kierkegaard sought to remedy this by provoking an attack on himself in the popular satirical review The Corsair. Kierkegaard succeeded in having himself mercilessly lampooned in this publication, largely on personal grounds rather than in terms of the substance of his writings.
The suffering incurred by these attacks sparked Kierkegaard into another highly productive phase of authorship, but this time his focus was the creation of positive Christian discourses rather than satire or parody.
He realized he could no longer indulge himself in the painstakingly erudite and poetically meticulous writing he had practised hitherto. This addressed church politics directly and increasingly shrilly.
One was the influence of Hegel, largely through the teachings of H. Martensen; the other was the popularity of N.
Grundtvig, a theologian, educator and poet who composed most of the pieces in the Danish hymn book. Grundtvig emphasized the light, joyous, celebratory and communal aspects of Christianity, whereas Kierkegaard emphasized seriousness, suffering, sin, guilt, and individual isolation. His intervention with respect to Hegelianism also failed, with Martensen succeeding Mynster as Bishop Primate. Hegelianism in the church went on to die of natural causes.
Kierkegaard also provided critical commentary on social change. He feared that the opportunity of achieving genuine selfhood was diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in an age when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified feudal order and was contemptuous of the mediocrity the new social order generated.
One symptom of the change was that mass society substitutes detached reflection for engaged passionate commitment. Yet the latter is crucial for Christian faith and for authentic selfhood according to Kierkegaard. His pamphleteering achieved little immediate impact, but his substantial philosophical, literary, psychological and theological writings have had a lasting effect.
Ibsen and Strindberg, together with Friedrich Nietzsche, became central icons of the modernism movement in Berlin in the s. Taking his cue from Brandes, the Swedish literary critic Ola Hansson subsequently promoted this conjunction of writers in Berlin itself.
Berlin modernism self-consciously sought to use art as a means of political and social change. Many other writers have been inspired by Kierkegaard to tackle fundamental issues in philosophy, politics, theology and psychology. Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have all written extensively in response, to try to sort out the implications for ethics and faith.
Kierkegaard was a saint. This has produced quite a debate about the relevance of Kierkegaard for developing narrative accounts of the self, with notable contributions by Anthony Rudd, John Davenport, John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes. Paul Ricoeur and Judith Butler have also been influenced by Kierkegaard, especially regarding his use of rhetoric and narrative point of view to critique systematic philosophy.
It is impossible to give an exhaustive list of the important thinkers who owe an intellectual or existential debt to Kierkegaard. The diversity of the writers and thinkers mentioned above nevertheless testifies to the breadth and depth of his influence, which continues into the present age.
Published against his Will by S. Kierkegaard passed final theological examination - proposed to Regine Olsen, who accepted him broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen - defended his dissertation On the Concept of Irony with constant reference to Socrates Om Begrebet Ironi med stadigt Hensyn til Socrates - trip to Berlin, where he attended lectures by Schelling returned from Berlin Either-Or: A Fragment of Life edited by Victor Eremita Enten-Eller.
Af Johannes Climacus. Udgivet af S. Studier af Forskjellige. You can still go after your dreams at your own pace , without taking such extreme measures as Kierkegaard suggested. You can build a prosperous career and make a decent income to support your loved ones while pursuing your passion in your free time. Which one takes more courage?
To assume responsibility and provide while pursuing something extraordinary? Or to neglect everything else but that which makes us feel alive? For some, it is the first, for others, the latter. The philosopher knew that some decisions are almost impossible to make. Now, for these cases, Kierkegaard advised us to renounce to reason and surrender to emotions so that we can move forward.
Augustine found the conversion of his passions—his will, his desires—far more difficult than the conversion of his intellect. Biblical Christianity insists that the Good News is not the kind of news that leaves a heart and will unchanged, but rather finds its way into every nook and cranny of a human life.
Returning to the concept of the leap of faith, Kierkegaard thinks the church has long been guilty of over-intellectualizing Christianity.
He lays much blame on the medievals, though of course Protestants killed other Protestants over theological disputes about baptism. Because Christian faith has become less about transformed existence and more about correct doctrine, Christians frequently misunderstand how one becomes a Christian. No, Kierkegaard, contests, conversion is not primarily through the assent of doctrines about Jesus even though it includes that. Rather, it occurs through a deeply-rooted, ever growing trust in those claims.
It is similar to the trust required of a person learning to swim. Even if the would-be swimmer has read books about each stroke, been given instruction by an Olympian swimmer, and can recount the importance of efficient breathing techniques, this person cannot learn to swim without plunging into the water. So, too, does Kierkegaard advocate a leap, not out of reason or against reason the swimmer has done some intellectual preparation , but recognizing that forward movement in life is not primarily a function of our rational capacities but our will and our trust.
Forward movement in faith is also the product of a decision and choice. Mark A. He previously served as associate professor and program director of philosophy at the University of West Georgia.
The volume Writings is under development in pre-pub, which means the price goes up soon.
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