Kierkegaardian pieces
I was just browsing through my notes and I found some fragments from, well, the Philosophical Fragments and other parts of Kierkegaard’s ouvre. As a New Year’s gift, I thought I ought to share them.
“[The PF is] without any claim to being part of the scientific-scholarly endeavour in which one acquires legitimacy as a throughfare or transition, as a co-worker or as a volunteer attendant, as a hero or at any rate as a relative hero, or at least as an absolute trumpeter. It is merely a pamplhet and will not be anything more even if I [were] to continue it with seventeen more” (PF 5)
“I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life - not with anothers” (PF 8)
On the systematising of objective thought: “[it] translates everything in to results, and helps all mankind to cheat, by copying these off and reciting them by rote”. Compared with the subjective: “puts everything in process and omits the result; partly because this belongs to him who has the way, and partly because as an existing individual he is constantly in the process of coming to be” (CUP 68)
“Existence itself, the act of existing, is a striving, and is both pathetic and comic in the same degree” (CUP 84)
“Is a man who hopes to prove that he is sane by uttering a generally accepted and generally respected objective truth, insane?” (CUP 174)
“Just as it once required energy and determination to become a CHristian, so now, though the renunciation be not praiseworthy, it requires courage and energy to renounce the Christian religion, while it needs only thoughtlessness to remain a nominal Christian” (CUP 326)
Tags: kierkegaard
