A couple exam questions I was given on S.K. a couple years back during an existentialism class.

1. What are the views expressed by “A” and by Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or? What are the objections to these positions articulated by Judge William in the selection on the validity of marriage? What is the alternative he is advocating? What is Kierkegaard’s reasoning for these claims? What is the philosophical significance of his position? All in all, is his account convincing? Why or why not?

The views expressed by “A” and Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or is that the life of an aesthete is the one path to happiness, and that aestheticism is the source of value and avoiding despair. In this worldview one considers sensation to be the highest form of experience.
Judge Williams propounds that the ethical lifestyle is more effective than the aesthetic lifestyle in finding true value in life, and thus better at avoiding despair. Instead of a life dedicated to reliving experiences and swimming in passions, Judge Williams states the only real thing to do is to make a commitment and take a stand; not only to elevate one out of passions and the maelstrom of emotion, but to even claim one’s own humanity as an autonomous moral agent. If one chooses love with the element of the eternal over simple lust, one can still enjoy lust and other worldly sensations, but tempered by the eternal. If one never makes a choice or commitment then one is nothing more than an animal, mechanistic and un-free. Poor Johannes is nothing more than an animal.
In Either/Or Kierkegaard declares that one must choose a perspective, that either one chooses to include good and evil, or one chooses to exclude them. There isn’t a grand synthesis of ideas that excludes the individual from existence like in Hegel’s system, which could fairly be called pantheistic idealism. Also, Kierkegaard’s philosophy flies in the face of scientific determinism in the sense that events are explained in ways in which aren’t determinable by causal law.
Kierkegaard’s account is entirely convincing. The idea of rejecting the freedom I feel on a visceral level does seem like rejecting the fundamental thing that makes me human. The Kierkegaard selections made me really examine my past and my status within the context of that past, and my own nature during it all. It does seem like at times I was more beast than human, and it was at a time when I had no thought of the eternal, no thoughts of good and evil, and I hadn’t made a choice. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is deeply soothing to me.

2. 2. What is the issue Kierkegaard is addressing in the discussion of the “Knight of Infinite Resignation” and the “Knight of Faith” in the selection from Fear and Trembling? What position is he arguing against? What is the point he is making in his recounting of the scriptural story of Abraham and Isaac? Is his argument convincing? Why or why not?

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard addresses which meaning of life would be the most effective in avoiding despair. The Knight of Infinite Resignation represents the life based on ethics, and the Knight of Faith represents the religious or spiritual life. The Knight of Infinite Resignation represents universal expression, the system, mediation and the loss of self, submission to the Absolute Mind, acting for the greater good at the expense of self. The Knight of Faith, by contrast, represents the individual, the double movement, the leap of faith, the paradox, the absurd, and anxiety with finitude; an individual relationship with God that transcends the universal and ethical.
The argument of Kierkegaard is that the religious is greater than the ethical; therefore something is higher than the universal. The universal is the highest aspiration of human reasoning, but humans extend beyond the rational. Kierkegaard uses the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to demonstrate that faith is superior to universals, particularly the Hegelian system. According to the Hegelian system, all interaction is a synthesis of a universal thesis and a universal antithesis, both belonging to an Absolute Mind, the realization of which is what we refer to when we say “history”. If Abraham acted according to the Hegelian system he would have spared Isaac and ignored God because the Father has a responsibility to the Son. But Abraham would have sacrificed Isaac on the orders of God and in doing so he elevated himself out of ethical and universal concerns, out of any Absolute Mind, and has an encounter with brute reality, an encounter with the unknown. The choice cannot be explained through causation or logic, only through pure human freedom and autonomy. There is no grand synthesis of ideas; there is a decision in the here and now, either/or.
Kierkegaard is convincing in his argument that the religious life is a path to living free of despair. In the end the Knight of Infinite Resignation rejects anything sensuous, anything worldly, and in the end renunciation of everything. In the end the Knight of Infinite Resignation gains nothing for his submission to the Absolute Mind. He throws in the towel. The Knight of Faith on the other hand, gains back everything he loses, in the double movement.


There. Those two questions kind of summed up S.K. big Fuck You to Hegelian philosophy, which if you know anything about this stuff, Hegel was huge, he was like Beatles defining pop music for generations huge. It was also his critique for the state institutionalized and political church of Denmark at the time, which he believed needed to move toward a new more viable belief system than the idea that god is a big all-knowing superhuman being in space watching us.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 28 2015 09:33am

stirnir offered economic and social solutions whereas kierkegaard only seems to have offered religion. that's why i say it "goes somewhere". and one day i'll get around to reading the marxman's attack on stirner, but they were spiritually and politically opposed so i'll take it with a grain of salt.



stirnir was disenfranchised with a society based on selfishness that didn't allow him, the individual, to be selfish. he mocked and derided society for the same reasons as kierkegaard.

All Things Are Nothing To Me, a short and interesting read if you're interested. and it's crawling in my skin-tier edgy.
http://www.alamut.com/subj/the_self/stirner/prefaceEgo.html

Seems interesting, cheers!
Seems selfishness can go nutty, radical, fascistic easily
Utopia that isn't very current interest maybe

I had a 5000 word final my sophomore year. That was one of the questions. The good ole days.

SK was concerned with bigger fish than the economic and social solutions that were all the rage then. His was a project of human psychology and how can a life in modernity have any real meaning in it, and how does one go about finding or creating real meaning or value in life in face of a nihilistic universe. That is an idea that is objectively human and isn't just contingent on time and place like Stirner's philosophy is, which is why SK's work endures in public thought among the intelligentsia, in academic life, and even in the church strangely among serious theologians, and Stirner is relegated by history to be nothing more than the subject of memes on reddit while many of his contemporaries have shaped the world we're in.

If you were to study philosophy, Stirner is worth a couple hours to look into. After that you have probably covered the entirety of his span of ideas.

Proudhon and Marx dwarfed him in their substantial works.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 28 2015 10:41am

i'm simply drawing similarities, i'm not too interested in a pissing contest. bebebburns said "Shame he was so into just christian god" so i brought it up.

It is worth mentioning that it isn't the Christian god envisioned today or then. He was an enemy of the Church...they hated him. He uses the Bible like Aesop's fables, creating philosophical and moral lessons from the stories, that are very divergent from Orthodox thought as canonized at the Councils of Nice and Trent.

I wasn't trying to start a pissing contest. I'm just saying Stirner is a lightweight And getting bogged down by the particular religion in his time and place is really missing the point, because he isn't engaging the ideas of the church, he is engaging the ideas of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer and what they might mean for the church and for everyday life.

Now that cognitive science is getting to a point where we're like "shit works like Kant said", SK is becoming more and more relevant. His work has really exploded within the past 30 years, and like usual it is due to science verifying some philosopher was right about something or that the direction a particular philosopher started in finally yielded some real scientific knowledge.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 28 2015 10:58am

posting in a thread about sidenotes of Hegel

Kierkegaard is one of the greatest philosophers to have ever lived and the Conclusive Unscientific Postscript is likewise one of the best books ever written
interestingly enough the pseudonymical works actually write differently enough that one can consider them to be different authors altogether, it's a proper dialogue that he's having


why exactly would that be a shame?


the parts about dat in The German Ideology aren't particularly good.

the First International did include both anarchists and Marxists

This post was edited by Gastly on Jun 28 2015 11:12am

Sickness Unto Death is pretty good too.