Soren Kierkegaard — "The specific character of despair is precisely this, that it is unaware of being…"
The specific character of despair is precisely this, that it is unaware of being despair.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"The present age is an age of reflection, an age of calculation, an age of thought, an age of analysis, an age of observation, an age of experimentation, an age of invention, an age of discovery, an ag…"
"The tragic and the comic are the same, insofar as both are contradiction; but the tragic is the suffering contradiction, the comical the painless contradiction."
"All communication is indirect communication."
"The highest good for an existing individual is to become an individual."
"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays."
About Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian considered the founder of existentialism; Either/Or (1843) and Fear and Trembling (1843) explored the leap of faith. Closely associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (his existentialist successor working in the opposite theological direction) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (literary parallel exploring faith-and-despair). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the totalizing system — Kierkegaard called Hegel's system a 'palatial residence' that nobody could actually live in — his entire authorship is structured against Hegelian abstraction in favor of the existing individual's inwardness.
The standard scholarly entry points to Soren Kierkegaard's work: Joakim Garff (University of Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre) — Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (2000); Walter Lowrie (Princeton, his major postwar English translator) — A Short Life of Kierkegaard (1942); C. Stephen Evans (Baylor University, philosophy of religion) — Kierkegaard: An Introduction (2009). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Soren Kierkegaard.