Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated by James W. Edited by Howard A. Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
Princeton : Princeton University Press , Either - Or. Skip to content. Either or. Literary Criticism. Kierkegaard Anthology. Augustine to Freud. Kierkegaard and Christendom. Author : John W. The Mind of Kierkegaard. A Short Life of Kierkegaard. On Kierkegaard and the Truth. The Theatre of Don Juan. Expressing his beliefs with a freedom not seen in works he published during his lifetime, Kierkegaard here rejects for the first time his father's conventional Christianity and forges the revolutionary idea of the 'leap of faith' required for true religious belief.
A combination of theoretical argument, vivid natural description and sharply honed wit, the Papers and Journals reveal to the full the passionate integrity of his lifelong efforts 'to find a truth which is truth for me'. Papers and Journals. Get Books. Taken from his personal writings, these private reflections reveal the development of his own thought and personality, from his time as a young student to the deep later internal conflict that.
Jon Stewart Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, , 23— In leaving those who comprehend the meaning of his own prophetic speech alone and vulnerable before an inscrutable God, the pastor nevertheless reveals a potentially inexhaustible source of ethical and spiritual renewal: the infinite love of the other that repeatedly conquers even the most terrible doubts about God and world. This resolution is not theoretical but strictly personal and practical.
The sermon is written for a congregation, but the pastor speaks directly to individuals, attempting to build up his audience for the essential tasks of human existence: doing justice and loving God and neighbor. The first three sections of this article concern the literary structure and existential drama of the book as a whole; the last three examine the sermon itself.
Levy Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, , Charles L. The preface and the Ultimatum, a 9 EO1, 9. The importance of the sermon is suggested by the fact that it is literally the last word of the Last Word. What is the significance of these relationships?
And what does the preface have to do with either of these? A is a highly cultured and profoundly disillusioned romantic idealist. His particular obsession with seduction and betrayal suggests that he is 10 EO1, 4—5. EO1, 47— Seemingly untroubled by doubt or anxiety, Judge William is concretely rooted in the very community A scorns. His letters admonish A, a man seven years his junior, 20 to follow his own dutiful example of marriage, work, and worship.
B argues earnestly and eloquently for an ethically substantial life— an existence that fulfills the shared norms of the community in all of its fundamental spheres, including the family, civil society, state, and church. He particularly emphasizes the inner beauty of married life, the quiet virtues of patience, humility, and moderation, and the psychologically unifying power of choosing oneself as an ethically serious person.
He seeks to convince A that everyday existence has its own aesthetic perfection and even its own heroism—that it is not merely good, but beautiful. Living ethically, B explains, is the art of expressing universality through particularity. Just as any regular verb but what of irregular ones? He urges A to make just one absolute or self-grounding choice: the choice to live under the categories of good and evil embedded in the concrete social practices of the present day.
In the richly developed characters of A and B, Kierkegaard fleshes out two basic modes of contemporary human existence. The fundamentally unhappy aesthete restlessly haunts the border of some other, vaguely intuited kind of life. In fact, both A and B are creatures of their age. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans.
Sibree Mineola, N. The idea that joins the finite and the infinite in human existence—the idea that Christianity presents in figurative or imaginative language, which A longs for but cannot find—is actualized in Sittlichkeit, the concretely articulated ethical life that is right under his nose.
Knox [Oxford: Oxford University Press, ], , a morality supported by a conception of history as the providential expression of Reason. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D.
Marino Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , He avoids despair and protects his claim to fully transparent, universally intelligible, and certifiably substantial selfhood only by drawing a bright line that he will not cross in thought or feeling. Two qualities do seem to place him closer to the measures of reality than B: his longing for transcendence, and his despair at the possibility of finding any salvation through baptism in the social conventions and practices that good and important men hold dear.
It renders contingent on personal preferences fundamental elements of individual identity that were previously understood to be ineluctably given, and it thereby makes particular individuals responsible for things that had previously been taken to be beyond individual control. He thus overlooks another kind of trap door opened by the Bible itself. Many readers today—nostalgic, perhaps, for a more self-confident age—would furthermore agree that, if A were to embrace the shared life and work of the community, he could hope to be saved from the twin plagues of late and postmodernity: depression and boredom.
Practically speaking, then, B would seem to be the wiser man. But this impression is undercut by his deep and anxious need for recognition. Between the lines of his exceedingly lengthy letters, one may read the vain hope of obtaining from A—who never mentions B and does not acknowledge his letters 39—an explicit confirmation of the superiority of his existence.
For B, in other words, the intrinsic goodness of the ethical life is insufficient to establish its ultimate value; it must also be certified as beautiful and poetic by another kind of judge, an acknowledged authority on aesthetic matters. Although B fancies himself a benevolent master, he is in fact in bondage to the slave he proposes to free. In his preface, Eremita tells us that he placed the papers of A and B in a box designed to hold dueling pistols.
The book would double back on itself without thrusting out into the wide world and confronting the true terrors and joys of reality. Eremita tells a story in the preface about how he came, a biblical seven years previously, to possess the writings of A and B. This story is rich with symbolism and meaningful on multiple levels.
It foreshadows the inner experience of both men and anticipates the possibility of existential rebirth with which the book concludes. Eremita explains that he is immediately attracted by an expensive writing desk he spots one day in a secondhand shop. Like a seducer studying an erotic prospect, he contrives to pass by it in the street every day. But it is he who is ultimately seduced. Eremita is provoked.
For his tale is on one level an allegory of the erotic activity of authorship. It anticipates the frustrations experienced by A and B in trying to fulfill their deepest longings through the medium of writing—longings that have, in turn, been nourished and shaped by reading. Eremita assumed he knew his desk inside and out, but he saw only what he wanted to see; its hidden depths were invisible to his erotic and poetic eye.
A and B suffer from a similar limitation; with characteristic human perversity, each lives in a dream world constructed by neediness and longing. A expresses in a strange way the shock he receives from his experience. Was he, in fact, sufficiently shaken by this double weight of truth to reform his life? We do not know. But he should have been. His name provides a clue to this level of meaning.
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