Citation of Kierkegaard - I

- Richard McCombs ''The paradoxical rationality of Soren Kierkegaard'',Indiana University Press,Bloomington,

2013,

-Both the Buddha’s and Kierkegaard’s practical teachings are roughly

medical or psychiatric in structure. The Buddha is a surgeon who teaches
the “four noble truths,” which describe sickness of soul, the causes of
this sickness, health of soul, and the therapeutic regimen, called the
“noble eightfold path,” that leads to spiritual health.Similarly, Kierkegaard
writes as a “physician of the soul” , who describes the
“sickness unto death,” its causes, health of soul, and the way to health.
Both the Buddha’s and Kierkegaard’s practical teachings are roughly
medical or psychiatric in structure. The Buddha is a surgeon who teaches
the “four noble truths,” which describe sickness of soul, the causes of
this sickness, health of soul, and the therapeutic regimen, called the
“noble eightfold path,” that leads to spiritual health.Similarly, Kierkegaard
writes as a “physician of the soul” who describes the
“sickness unto death,” its causes, health of soul, and the way to
health.FQ.80
-Fq.94Climacus describes this existential balance of the positive and the
negative in a highly compressed form: “simultaneously relating . . .
absolutely
to the absolute telos and relatively to the relative ends” .
Fear and Trembling develops this same idea much more expansively and
poetically in its account of the “double movement” that involves resignation
and receiving back the good that one has renounced . The
clearest account of the double movement in Kierkegaard’s authorship is
in Sickness unto Death, in the sections that describe the synthesis of the
poles of the self . Essentially and briefly, the double movement
consists, on the one hand, in existentially denying finite, created
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goods by being resigned to their possible loss and ready to renounce
them if necessary for the sake of the infinite and eternal God, and, on
the other hand, in existentially reaffirming these goods by enjoying and
loving them gratefully as the gifts of a good and generous God.fq.94
-fq137 -More provocatively, the “Socratic inwardness in existing is an
analogue to faith,” and “Socratic ignorance is an analogue to the category
of the absurd,” which is an essential element of Christian truth when it
is proclaimed to the world . Even though “Christianity was the
first to discover the paradoxes,” and paradox is essential to Christianity,
Socrates is paradoxical before Christianity, and the “Socratic paradox
consisted in this, that the eternal truth was related to an existing person”.
Similarly, Kierkegaard claims that when Socrates
talks about his death sentence “as if he were an entirely separate third
party,” he provides an “infinitely faint analogy to how God is infinite
subjectivity”. Finally, Socrates was analogous not just to Christian
ideas and practices, but even to Christ himself: “The difficulty with
Socrates is not to understand his teaching but to understand himself;
how much more so with regard to Christ” . As with Christ, so
with Socrates, the wonder is not the teaching but the man. Thus Socrates
showed that human reason and human nature anticipate the
Incarnation.fq.137
-fq170 -By the way, Fear and Trembling is quite clear that a
crucial quality of the knight of faith is his humility, which is “that power
whose strength is powerlessness” . The Sickness unto
Death similarly explains that “the self must be broken in order to become
itself,” or that “effective despair, radical despair” is the “thoroughfare
to faith” and healthy selfhood . In language closer to
Fragments, it also says that when a “person is brought to his extremity,
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when, humanly speaking, there is no possibility,” then “losing the
understanding” means to “believe that for God everything is possible”. But
in order to become eligible for divine assistance there must
be a strenuous straining of the “understanding to find help” .
This “losing of the understanding” is clearly a variation on the “downfall
of the understanding.” And the straining of the “understanding to find
help” at a person’s extremity is similarly a reformulation of the idea of
ethical and religious striving.fq.170
-fq.177 -For without powerful passion, a person lacks the resolve
for such a terrible deed. But, thoroughly impassioned, a person can gain
extraordinary strength and courage, since the “ultimate potentiation
of every passion is always to will its own downfall” . In Sickness
unto Death, Anti-Climacus chillingly and I think convincingly describes
a passionate, offended, and demonic consciousness which in order to
rebel against God wants to be (or to remain) unhappy so as to have a
grievance on which to base its rebellion . Many atheists
and political revolutionaries have admired Aeschylus’s Prometheus for
steadfastly defying the tyranny of Zeus under torture for 30,000 years,
thus declaring their wish to be as resolute as Prometheus in their dedication
to autonomous independence from divinity.fq 177
-fq 229 -Sylvia Walsh, in Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential
Mode,
describes another way in which Climacus indicates that Socrates anticipates
Christian
faith. “As a subjective thinker, Socrates sought to relate himself to eternal
truth
as an objective uncertainty negatively through ignorance. For example, he
did not

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know whether there is an immortality of the soul but he was willing to stake
his life on it, ordering his life ‘with the passion of the infinite’ so that upon
death it might be acceptable if there is . What Walsh says about Socrates
obviously mirrors what Climacus says about faith: “Faith,” which Climacus
thinks aims at “eternal happiness,” “is the objective uncertainty with the
repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the
relation of inwardness intensified to its highest” .fq.229
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- ''Kierkegaard and existentialism'' edited by Jon Stewart,Routledge,London,2016,Kierkedaard research volume 9

-fq 101 -Jaspers viewed Kierkegaard as stressing factical individual

existence over against universal man in general and criticizing idealism as
stressing a fantastic being indifferent to the existing person.Jaspers also
stressed the personal and enactment sense of passionate subjective truth.
in subsequent years, according to van buren, Heidegger continued to rely
on Jaspers’ detailed expositions of such Kierkegaardian concepts as
existent, the individual, subjective truth, passion, anxiety, and death in
which Heidegger often followed Kierkegaard point by point. additional
Kierkegaardian categories found in Heidegger include dispersion, repetition,
curiosity, inclosing reserve, conscience, guilt, indirect communication, time
and the moment.fq 101
-fq 105 -michael theunissen viewed Heidegger, in his treatment of being-
unto-death, as having used and reworked concepts pertaining to the
meaning of one’s own death from Kierkegaard’s edifying discourse “at a
graveside” (1845).39 Repetition had already made the point that one
cannot have a genuine existence if one has steered clear of life itself.
Heidegger finds the same point expanded upon in “At a Graveside” and
incorporates it in a major way as a structure of dasein, namely, being-unto-
death which must be appropriated on an existentiell level if authenticity is
to be achieved.achieving a genuine, conscious relationship to one’s own
death was a distinctive and original Kierkegaardian theme in the philosophy
of his time. notions of everyday avoidance of this by attending to a
generalized and abstract notion of death, other modes of flight from oneself,
hollow speech—all aspects of Heidegger’s concept of inauthenticity—are
highly indebted to Kierkegaard.41