El otro lado de la luna: October 2016

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard, religious absolutism, grandfather of existentialism, the most important religious thinker of the modern age. he dramatized the conflict between religion and secular reason, between private faith and the public world. Society is a place of conventions. A lover of irony.

a moralizing Lutheran who excoriated the high officials of the Danish reformed church and held forth obsessively on themes of faith, sin, and anxiety. Among his most famous works are bitter satires and invectives against bourgeois conformity that are interlaced with the same veins of explosive resentment that Dostoevsky would mine in his Notes from Underground.

the pious Kierkegaard and the atheist Nietzsche

In the 1920s and 1930s Heidegger and Sartre began to pluck from Kierkegaard’s writings the themes of existential philosophy. they borrowed his image of the human being condemned to a worldly existente

Daphne Hampson does not share Kierkegaard’s beliefs. Although she favors some kind of “spirituality,” she rejects traditional monotheism, especially its patriarchal themes. she considers the notion of a God who resides “outside” the world the remnant of a defunct metaphysics.

For Lukács, Either/Or is a meditation on the conflict between two modes of existence, the hedonistic or aesthetic (as described in the “Diary of a Seducer”) and the ethical (in which one awakens to remorse and “holiness”). To the individual who must choose either one life or the other, Kierkegaard says, reason offers no guidance. But at the book’s conclusion we learn that neither path is right, for in prayer alone we find truth.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/10/kierkegaards-rebellion/