søren kierkegaard
[image linked.. from wikipedia]
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adding page this day/quote via Maria:
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 6:01 AM – 20 Oct 2016 :
The psychology of time and the paradox of how impulsivity and self-control mediate our capacity for presence https://t.co/r5X9VDTQfA https://t.co/DF3GRWvQwQ (http://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/789074099507257345?s=17)
Nearly two centuries after Kierkegaard lamented our greatest source of unhappiness — “Of all ridiculous things,” the Danish philosopher wrote, “the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.” —
and again here:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/05/kierkegaard-on-presence-unhappiness/
Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy —
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Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ˈsɔːrən ˈkɪərkᵻɡɑːrd/ or /ˈkɪərkᵻɡɔːr/; Danish: [sɶːɐn ˈkʰiɐ̯ɡ̊əɡ̊ɒːˀ]; 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom,morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
commitment..? ugh.. via – bravery to change mind ness.. how does commitment jive w personal choice..
He was against literary critics who defined idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time.Swedenborg, Hegel, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Schlegel and Hans Christian Andersen were all “understood” far too quickly by “scholars”.
Kierkegaard’s theological work focuses on Christian ethics, the institution of the Church, the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity, the infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, and the individual’s subjective relationship to the God-Man Jesus the Christ, which came through *faith.
love the take on *faith later.. a 100% trust ness not dependent on proof
Much of his work deals with Christian love. He was extremely critical of the practice of Christianity as a state religion, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. His psychological work explored the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices.
Kierkegaard’s early work was written under various pseudonyms that he used to present distinctive viewpoints and to interact with each other in complex dialogue. He explored particularly complex problems from different viewpoints, each under a different pseudonym. He wrote many Upbuilding Discourses under his own name and dedicated them to the “single individual” who might want to discover the meaning of his works. Notably, he wrote: “Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject.”
While scientists can learn about the world by observation, Kierkegaard emphatically denied that observation could reveal the inner workings of the world of the spirit.
Some of Kierkegaard’s key ideas include the concept of “Truth as Subjectivity”, the knight of faith, the recollection and repetition dichotomy, angst, the infinite qualitative distinction, faith as a passion, and the three stages on life’s way. Kierkegaard’s writings were written in Danish and were initially limited to Scandinavia, but by the turn of the 20th century, his writings were translated into major European languages, such as French and German. By the mid-20th century, his thought exerted a substantial influence on philosophy, theology, and Western culture.
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He had little interest in historical works, philosophy dissatisfied him, and he couldn’t see “dedicating himself to Speculation.” He said,
“What I really need to do is to get clear about “what am I to do”, not what I must know.”
He wanted to “lead a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge.” Kierkegaard didn’t want to be a philosopher in the traditional or Hegelian sense and he didn’t want to preach a Christianity that was an illusion.
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Kierkegaard wanted to have Regine, his fiancée (see below), as his confidant but considered it an impossibility for that to happen so he left it to “my reader, that single individual” to become his confidant. His question was whether or not one can have a spiritual confidant. He wrote the following in his Concluding Postscript: “With regard to the essential truth, a direct relation between spirit and spirit is unthinkable. If such a relation is assumed, it actually means that the party has ceased to be spirit.”
soulmate ness..?
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Kierkegaard’s journals were the source of many aphorisms credited to the philosopher. The following passage, from 1 August 1835, is perhaps his most oft-quoted aphorism and a key quote for existentialist studies:
“What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
He wrote this way about indirect communication in the same journal entry.
One must first learn to know himself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σεαυτόν). Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister traveling companion — that irony of life, which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing (Socrates) just as God created the world from nothing.
eudaimonia ness
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Hidden inwardness
Kierkegaard believed God comes to each individual mysteriously.
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He was writing about the inner being in all of these books and his goal was to get the single individual away from all the speculation that was going on about God and Christ.
Speculation creates quantities of ways to find God and his Goods but finding faith in Christ and putting the understanding to use stops all speculation because then one begins to actually exist
as a Christian or in an ethical/religious way. He was against an individual waiting until certain of God’s love and salvation before beginning to try to become a Christian. In Kierkegaard’s view the Church should not try to prove Christianity or even defend it. It should help the single individual to make a
leap of faith, the faith that God is love and has a task for that very same single individual.
He wrote the following about fear and trembling and love as early as 1839, “Fear and trembling is not the primus motor in the Christian life, for it is love; but it is what the oscillating balance wheel is to the clock-it is the oscillating balance wheel of the Christian life.
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He summed his position up earlier in his book, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, but this book was not published until 1859.
In the month of December 1845 the manuscript of the Concluding Postscript was completely finished, and, as my custom was, I had delivered the whole of it at once to Lune [the printer]-which the suspicious do not have to believe on my word, since Luno’s account-book is there to prove it. This work constitutes the turning-point in my whole activity as an author, inasmuch as it presents the ‘problem’, how to become a Christian.
In a Christian sense simplicity is not the point of departure from which one goes on to become interesting, witty, profound, poet, philosopher, &c. No, the very contrary. Here is where one begins (with the interesting, &c.) and becomes simpler and simpler, attaining simplicity. This, in ‘Christendom’ is the Christian movement: one does not reflect oneself into Christianity; but one reflects oneself out of something else and becomes, more and more simply, a Christian.
simple enough .. for all of us.. to rapidly prototype to slow.. and get back to us..
I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians. No, my contention has been this: I know what Christianity is, my imperfection as a Christian I myself fully recognize-but I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be, I should think, to every man’s interest, whether he be a Christian or not, whether his intention is to accept Christianity or to reject it. But I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one. And I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am ‘without authority’. Soren Kierkegaard, The Point of View of My Work as an Author Lowrie, 53, 144, 153-155
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Here he says, “Let others admire and praise the person who pretends to comprehend Christianity. I regard it as a plain ethical task – perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these speculative times, when all ‘the others’ are busy with comprehending-to admit that one is neither able nor supposed to comprehend it.”
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Kierkegaard wrote of moving forward past the irresolute good intention:
The yes of the promise is sleep-inducing, but the no, spoken and therefore audible to oneself, is awakening, and repentance is usually not far away. The one who says, “I will, sir,” is at the same moment pleased with himself; the one who says no becomes almost afraid of himself. But this difference if very significant in the first moment and very decisive in the next moment; yet if the first moment is the judgment of the momentary, the second moment is the judgment of eternity. This is precisely why the world is so inclined to promises, in as much as the world is the momentary, and at the moment a promise looks very good. This is why eternity is suspicious of promises, just as it is suspicious of everything momentary.
And so it is also with the one who, rich in good intentions and quick to promise, moves backward further and further away from the good.
let your yes be yes and no no.. and.. find the bravery to change your mind..
By means of the intention and the promise, he is facing in the direction of the good, is turned toward the good but is moving backward further and further away from it. With every renewed intention and promise it looks as if he took a step forward, and yet he is not merely standing still, but he is actually taking a step backward. The intention taken in vain, the unfulfilled promise, leaves despondency, dejection, that in turn perhaps soon blazes up into an even more vehement intention, which leaves only greater listlessness. Just as the alcoholic continually needs a stronger and stronger stimulant-in order to become intoxicated, likewise
the one who has become addicted to promises and good intentions continually needs more and more stimulation-in order to go backward.
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, Hong p. 93-94 (1850)
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Jaspers saw Kierkegaard as a champion of Christianity and Nietzsche as a champion for atheism
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when it comes to the absurdity of existence, war is a great convincer; and it was at the end of World War I that two German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, took up Kierkegaard’s ideas, elaborated and systematized them. By the 1930s Kierkegaard’s thinking made new impact on French intellectuals who, like Sartre, were nauseated by the static pre-Munich hypocrisy of the European middle class. After World War II, with the human condition more precarious than ever, with humanity facing the mushroom-shaped ultimate absurdity, existentialism and our time came together in Jean-Paul Sartre.
- Existentialism, Life, November 6, 1964, Volume 57, No. 19 ISSN 0024-3019 Published by Time Inc. P. 102-103, begins on page 86
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Martin Heidegger sparsely refers to Kierkegaard in Being and Time (1927), obscuring how much he owes to him.
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The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God or how a person would act in love.
Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love.
No such evidence could ever be enough to completely justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love. Faith involves making that commitment anyway.
trust.. no proof.. no strings attached.. that’s what we’re missing
…..For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God. Kierkegaard writes, “doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world
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Karl Popper referred to Kierkegaard as “the great reformer of Christian ethics, who exposed the official Christian morality of his day as anti-Christian and anti-humanitarian hypocrisy”.….
Kierkegaard has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges,Don DeLillo, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka,
David Lodge, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and John Updike. What George Henry Price wrote in his 1963 book The Narrow Pass regarding the “who” and the “what” of Kierkegaard still seems to hold true today: “Kierkegaard was the sanest man of his generation….Kierkegaard was a schizophrenic….Kierkegaard was the greatest Dane….the difficult Dane….the gloomy Dane…Kierkegaard was the greatest Christian of the century….Kierkegaard’s aim was the destruction of the historic Christian faith….He did not attack philosophy as such….He negated reason….He was a voluntarist….Kierkegaard was the Knight of Faith….Kierkegaard never found faith….Kierkegaard possessed the truth….Kierkegaard was one of the damned
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Kierkegaard is considered by some modern theologians to be the “Father of Existentialism.” Because of his influence and in spite of it, others only consider either Martin Heidegger or Jean-Paul Sartre to be the actual “Father of Existentialism.” Kierkegaard predicted his posthumous fame, and foresaw that his work would become the subject of intense study and research. In 1784 Immanuel Kant, many years before Kierkegaard, challenged the thinkers of Europe to think for themselves in a manner suggestive of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in the nineteenth century
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why haters hate – via Maria:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/13/kierkegaard-diary-bullying-trolling-haters/
he regards me as something great, maybe even greater than I am: but if he can’t be admitted as a participant in my greatness, at least he will laugh at me. But as soon as he becomes a participant, as it were, he brags about my greatness.
That is what comes of living in a petty community.
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the seemingly simple exchange had provided precisely that invitation for participation in greatness:
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Showing that they don’t care about me, or caring that I should know they don’t care about me, still denotes dependence… They show me respect precisely by showing me that they don’t respect me.
be you. 