Kierkegaard and Nietzsche revive an ancient approach to ethics that evaluates different ways of life considered as a whole. Comparing and contrasting their respective ideals of faith and individual sovereignty, this work reveals a valuable new path for contemporary ethics.
An accessible, expert introduction to one of the greatest minds of nineteenth century. Whether you're completely new to him, or if you're already familiar with his work, Kierkegaard: A Single Life presents a fresh understanding of his life and thought. Kierkegaard was a brilliant and enigmatic loner whose ideas permeated culture, shaped modern Christianity, and influenced people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Martin Luther King Jr. Though few people today have read his work, that lack of familiarity with the real Kierkegaard is changing with this biography by scholar Stephen Backhouse, who clearly presents the man's mind as well as the acute sensitivity behind Kierkegaard's books. Drawing on biographical material that has newly come to light, Kierkegaard: A Single Life introduces his many guises—the thinker, the lover, the recluse, the writer, the controversialist—in prose as compelling and fluid as a novel and pursues clarity to long-standing questions about him: What made this Danish theologian so controversial and influential? Why were so many people drawn to his books, even if they didn't understand what they were reading? Can his complicated relationship with the Church and religion be untangled? Or, for that matter, what about his complicated—at times almost paradoxical—relationship with every sphere of life from politics to poetry? To be considered everything from a great intellect to a dandy, from a martyr to a "false messiah" is no mean feat, and this biography sheds light on Søren Kierkegaard as he was with empathy and humor. Included is an appendix presenting an overview of each of Kierkegaard's works, for the scholar and lay reader alike.
A part of Harper Perennial’s special “Resistance Library” highlighting classic works that illuminate the “Age of Trump”: Soren Kierkegaard’s stunningly prescient essay on the dangers of mass media—particularly advertising, marketing, and publicity. An essential read as we reckon with, and try to understand, the media forces that have helped create our present political moment. “The Present Age shows just how original Kierkegaard was. He brilliantly foresaw the dangers of the lack of commitment and responsibility in the Public Sphere. When everything is up for endless detached critical comment as on blogs and cable news, action finally becomes impossible.”— Hubert L. Dreyfus, University of California, Berkeley “A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.”— From The Present Age In The Present Age (1846), Søren Kierkegaard analyzes the philosophical implications of a society dominated by the mass-media. What makes the essay so remarkable is the way it seems to speak directly to our time—i.e. the Information Age—where life is dominated by mere “information” not true “knowledge.” Kierkegaard even goes so far as to say that advertising and publicity almost immediately co-opts and suppresses revolutionary actions/thoughts. The Present Age is essential reading for anyone who wishes to better understand the modern world.
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short, it is a synthesis.
Philosopher of the Heart is the groundbreaking biography of renowned existentialist Søren Kierkegaard’s life and creativity, and a searching exploration of how to be a human being in the world. Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence—how to be a human being in the world?—while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him. Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancée. Clare Carlisle’s innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard’s life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom—as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.
There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.
Soren Kierkegaard is one of the prophets of the contemporary age, a man whose acute observations on life in nineteenth-century Copenhagen might have been written yesterday, whose work anticipated fundamental developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy, theology and the critique of mass culture by over a century. John Caputo offers a compelling account of Kierkegaard as a thinker of particular relevance in our postmodern times, who set off a revolution that numbers Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth among its heirs. His conceptions of truth as a self-transforming 'deed' and his haunting account of the 'single individual' seemed to have been written with us especially in mind. Extracts include Kierkegaard's classic reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, the jolting theory that truth is subjectivity and his ground-breaking analysis of the concept of anxiety.
The Passion of Infinity generates a historical narrative surrounding the concept of the irrational as a threat which rational culture has made a series of attempts to understand and relieve. It begins with a reading of Sophocles' Oedipus as the paradigmatic figure of a reason that, having transgressed its mortal limit, becomes catastrophically reversed. It then moves through Aristotle's ethics, psychology and theory of tragedy, which redefine reason's collapses in moral-psychological rather than religious terms. By changing the way in which the irrational is conceived, and the nature of its relation to reason, Aristotle eliminates the concept of an irrationality which reason cannot in principle dissolve. The book culminates in an extensive reading of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, who, in a critical retrieval of both Greek tragedy and Aristotle, prescribe their apparently pathological age a paradoxical task: develop a finite form of subjectivity willing to undergo an unthinkable thought ‐ allow the transcendence of a god to enter into the mind as well as the marrow, to make a tragic appearance in which a limit to the immanence of human reason can again be established.
This essay in unabridged, to include all footnotes and quotes from 'Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits: Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing' (1847) for which it was intended to accompany -