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A review by books_ergo_sum
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.0
Ladies, if a man says Kierkegaard is one of his favourite philosophers—run. This guy (arguably the OG incel?) says the weirdest crap about women.
Still, what I actually disliked about this book was how poorly conceived of a critique it was of Hegel? More poorly conceived than I’d expected.
At first glance, the book’s arguments feel like unlikely bedfellows. It was:
▪️ part defense of divine revelation and the immediate relation between the individual and the universal (with bible study of Abraham sacrificing Isaac); and
▪️ part proto-existentialist defense of the “knight of the infinite” (aka an Everyman dude-bro who YOLOs everything, questions nothing, and lives in the absurd—plus mentioning, probably too many times, how dumb and naïve women are, but in a philosophically uninteresting way. Got it.)
Yet, these are actually two sides of the same coin, and a well-trodden mistake when trying to advance a philosophy of immediacy (contra Hegel’s philosophy of mediation). And I just don’t think Kierkegaard succeeded…
▪️ Can we agree that a philosophy that ends up being “inaccessible to thought” (his words, not mine) probably sucks?
▪️ We had a central misunderstanding of the difference between the singular/individual versus the particular in Hegel and others.
▪️ A ‘Because the Bible Told Me So’ moment, which wasn’t the soundest, even for it’s time; and
▪️ It contained a cringingly disingenuous romanticization of common sense (and even stupidity) from one of the most anxious and over-thinking philosophers of all time.
And that’s ignoring all the MANY thinly-veiled references to the woman he broke his engagement to… the philosophical relevance of which was questionable at best.
That said, I appreciate any philosophy that doesn’t try to diminish its universal concepts, so it gets a star for that. And this book pre-figured existentialism more than I’d thought, so there’s also that.
Still, what I actually disliked about this book was how poorly conceived of a critique it was of Hegel? More poorly conceived than I’d expected.
At first glance, the book’s arguments feel like unlikely bedfellows. It was:
▪️ part defense of divine revelation and the immediate relation between the individual and the universal (with bible study of Abraham sacrificing Isaac); and
▪️ part proto-existentialist defense of the “knight of the infinite” (aka an Everyman dude-bro who YOLOs everything, questions nothing, and lives in the absurd—plus mentioning, probably too many times, how dumb and naïve women are, but in a philosophically uninteresting way. Got it.)
Yet, these are actually two sides of the same coin, and a well-trodden mistake when trying to advance a philosophy of immediacy (contra Hegel’s philosophy of mediation). And I just don’t think Kierkegaard succeeded…
▪️ Can we agree that a philosophy that ends up being “inaccessible to thought” (his words, not mine) probably sucks?
▪️ We had a central misunderstanding of the difference between the singular/individual versus the particular in Hegel and others.
▪️ A ‘Because the Bible Told Me So’ moment, which wasn’t the soundest, even for it’s time; and
▪️ It contained a cringingly disingenuous romanticization of common sense (and even stupidity) from one of the most anxious and over-thinking philosophers of all time.
And that’s ignoring all the MANY thinly-veiled references to the woman he broke his engagement to… the philosophical relevance of which was questionable at best.
That said, I appreciate any philosophy that doesn’t try to diminish its universal concepts, so it gets a star for that. And this book pre-figured existentialism more than I’d thought, so there’s also that.