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- Bruce on Ode to a Cat
- Aslandad on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
Tag Archives: Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship
Søren Kierkegaard’s expansive set of texts are complicated enough without considering the ambiguity or duplicity that his pseudonymous authorship presents. Involving and reacting to Hegel and other contemporaries, moving in stages, and talking deeply about matters of faith, philosophy, ‘individuals’, and systems of knowledge, Kierkegaard’s work is already significant. Yet, a reader who reads the whole of Kierkegaard’s work straightforwardly as ‘the words of Kierkegaard’ will be misled by the interplay of his texts, and led to believe in a certain kind of development in his writing, a development from an aesthetic author to a religious author. Also, the definitions of words (i.e. “sin”) can vary across the works. Only by taking into account the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard’s authorial method can one form a strong understanding of his life’s work.
Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Writings
Tagged Authors, Christianity, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Modernism, Plato, Postmodernism, Pseudonyms
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The Sublime in the Pedestrian
Most people live dejectedly in worldly sorrow and joy; they are the ones who sit along the wall and do not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers and possess elevation. They make the movements upward, and fall down again; and this too is no mean pastime, nor ungraceful to behold. But whenever they fall down they are not able at once to assume the posture, they vacillate an instant, and this vacillation shows that after all they are strangers in the world. This is more or less strikingly evident in proportion to the art they possess, but even the most artistic knights cannot altogether conceal this vacillation. One need not look at them when they are up in the air, but only the instant they touch or have touched the ground–then one recognizes them. But to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do–and this is the one and only prodigy.
– Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling, 1843