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3.89 AVERAGE
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
We all know that life is the sickness unto death, not despair or sin.
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Kierkegaard is one of the most depressed, christian philosopher I have ever happened upon. Absolutely wonderful if you like that sort of thing!
just some random notes on this book I scooped up from my blog stonesoferasmus.com : A few years before his engagement to Regina Olsen, he seriously considered suicide. Kierkegaard grew up in a strict, religious family. His father was a melancholic, religious man who believed that God’s wrath was imminent. The father’s dire religious overtones hung over the family like a doomsday saying. Kierkegaard's father read to his son stories from the bible from an illustrated tome that depicted graphically the violence of the crucifixion. I think the young Kierkegaard was seared by those images of a brutally beaten Christ hanging on a cross.
The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who annointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Cophenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines human being is despair.
I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.
The central story of Sickness Unto Death is an interpretation of the rising of Lazarus by Christ recounted in Chapter 11 of John's Gospel. Lazarus, the brother of Martha and the Mary who annointed the body of Jesus with oil and dried his feet with her hair, is ill and near death. Kierkegaard reads the story as an explanation of despair. Christ says Lazarus's sickness is not unto death (John 11:4). The disciples misunderstand Jesus to mean physical death, but Jesus means spiritual death, the death caused by despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the greatest "sign" Christ performs in John's Gospel. In fact, it is the culmination event of many minor "signs" Jesus performs. Kierkegaard reads the story as an allegory on despair. Raising Lazarus from the dead is meant to serve a point: that death won't kill Lazarus. To raise him from the dead only for him to die, physically later on, is to suggest that Christ has saved him from the death caused by inner despair.
I wrote on Kierkegaard as an undergraduate philosophy major. I went to Cophenhagen to visit his grave, which turned out to be a great pun for in Danish graveyard is "kierkegaard" so when I asked someone where was the grave of Kierkegaard they thought I was asking where was the churchyard. It is fitting that Kierkegaard's name means graveyard.
On my way to Copenhagen I took a ferry from Germany to Denmark in a train. The train enters the ferry via built-in tracks. It was late at night. I was sitting next to a German girl who was going to Denmark for a summer job. Since we were talking to each other, when the train boarded the ferry, we both went on deck to look out into the sea. I remember looking down into the dark wine waters and feeling vertigo and this sudden desire to plunge into the vortex.
Perhaps what Kierkegaard was trying to say is that we can die way before our actual deaths. Feeling the vertigo made me feel alive but at the same time hearkened a baleful note to my mortality. I recognized the horrific contingency of my being, that I won't last long. Kierkegaard's point was that we succumb to death long before we physically die in a kind of covering up of our selves. Famously Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that is in relationship with its own self. Sometimes this relational structure becomes muddled, scratched over, hidden and we become lost to our self. We are unmoored from our relationship to our very self.
The greatest form of despair is the despair that does not even know it is in despair.
To know I am in despair is the first step to not be in despair. In other words, to know that I am born, introduced to this world without any instruction, or even with my permission, so I recognize that I am not at home in this world. To be in despair is to kid myself into thinking that I am at home in the world when really I am not.
Heidegger was influenced by Kierkegaard. What Heidegger has to say about anxiety is closely mirrored to Kierkegaard's theory of the self. Dasein (Heidegger's neologism for the human being, which means literally being-there) is a being whose very being becomes an issue for it. This is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to say. And I think it is what Walker Percy was trying to say in all of his novels: we are strangers in a strange land.
That night on the ferry to Denmark I wanted to jump into the void for it promised an escape. Not that I had any external reason to be in despair. At that time in my life I was feeling pretty good. But the recognition came to me that what defines human being is despair.
I think it was Thoreau who said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think he was onto something. And so was I at that moment. Since then I have forgotten. Only to find my notes on Kierkegaard in a notebook from my college days which I reconstructed to write this blog post. The me of 2000 when I was 20 is sending a message to me of 2012 at 32. I think that is how it works. There is no essential self. Just fragments. Thank god we can communicate.
Terribly disappointing.
Never before have I encountered a book that I found so disagreeable. I mean that in a non-metaphorical sense. I literally could not agree with one thing Kierkegaard argued for in this book. At times, it felt as if the book was arguing for the diametrical opposite of every one of the opinions I hold. How strange is it to read such a book? Quite. The stranger more is the fact that Kierkegaard keeps insisting upon certain points, but never adequately defines any of the words he uses to argue for those points. Even worse, at one point, almost as if he had a moment of self-doubt, Kierkegaard throws his arms in the air and proclaims, "But can anyone comprehend this Christian doctrine? By no means -- this too is Christian, and so is an offense. It must be believed. Comprehension is conterminous with man’s relation to the human, but faith is man’s relation to the divine. How then does Christianity explain this incomprehensible? Quite consistently, in an equally incomprehensible way, by means of the fact that it is revealed."
Now, this is not a novel idea. It is well understood that spiritual can never be put into words, to say that it must be experienced, but to proclaim such a thing, after arguing for 100 and so pages, that one can only orient oneself if one believes that center is old father God, is somewhat comical.
This book is theology, plain and simple. If you ask me, nothing wrong with theology. It has its place. So does philosophy. And this book is no philosophy.
Never before have I encountered a book that I found so disagreeable. I mean that in a non-metaphorical sense. I literally could not agree with one thing Kierkegaard argued for in this book. At times, it felt as if the book was arguing for the diametrical opposite of every one of the opinions I hold. How strange is it to read such a book? Quite. The stranger more is the fact that Kierkegaard keeps insisting upon certain points, but never adequately defines any of the words he uses to argue for those points. Even worse, at one point, almost as if he had a moment of self-doubt, Kierkegaard throws his arms in the air and proclaims, "But can anyone comprehend this Christian doctrine? By no means -- this too is Christian, and so is an offense. It must be believed. Comprehension is conterminous with man’s relation to the human, but faith is man’s relation to the divine. How then does Christianity explain this incomprehensible? Quite consistently, in an equally incomprehensible way, by means of the fact that it is revealed."
Now, this is not a novel idea. It is well understood that spiritual can never be put into words, to say that it must be experienced, but to proclaim such a thing, after arguing for 100 and so pages, that one can only orient oneself if one believes that center is old father God, is somewhat comical.
This book is theology, plain and simple. If you ask me, nothing wrong with theology. It has its place. So does philosophy. And this book is no philosophy.