What does /lit/ think of Kierkegaard?
Particularly Either/Or? I found him recently, and holy shit, something about him really appeals to me.
He was like the first existentialist right??
Should I start with Fear and Trembling or Either/Or?
>>7443745
Either/or.
>>7443745
start with secondary literature senpai
i think he was a great author
brace yourself for a motherlode of christian influence
>>7443858
OP here
Honestly the way Kierkegaard puts it makes religion seem far less cancerous. He's refreshing. I love the individualism that's so heavy in his writings.
>>7443709
Kirkegaard is fantastic. If you want a suggestion, anon, go for Fear and Trembling next. You will find that its ideas compliment and build well upon those in Either/Or.
>>7443877
Kierkegaard is a fantastic and wonderful author, poet and philosopher. I had the privilege of talking to an Oxford professor on him, and it was wonderful.
Be careful how far you go down the K-hole: his philosophy can paint Daesh in a more ethical light than anyone in the West.
That's not too say it's wrong - just intriguing and upsetting.
>>7444777
explain how he paints isis as ethical please. i'm interested
>>7444777
Elaborate on the Daesh thing please. Nice trips btw
>>7444783
Not him, but Kierkegaard's ideal figure (whom he called the Knight of Faith) was the biblical figure Abraham. Abraham obeyed a call from God to kill his only son Isaac--though God stopped him before the act was committed. But Kierkegaard thinks that Abraham's eschewing of societal ethics and norms in order to follow an individual command from God is the highest path. He calls this the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical.
He certainly would not agree with ISIS, since he was a Christian, but his teleological suspension of the ethical could in theory justify ISIS's behavior, if their actions were commanded by Allah.
Kierkegaard is the ideal poster boy for 4chan.
>>7445178
I'm curious, what does he have to say on that point. Also, I once heard it's impossible to read Soren without having a decent knowledge of Hegel. How true is that?
>>7445178
Yeah, I agree. But I mean that if Allah was the one true God and did tell ISIS to cut people's heads off with dinner knives, then it would be justified under Kierkegaard's philosophy.
>>7445250
Soren is totally against Hegel - he admires him, and calls him nearly one of the greatest thinkers of all time.
His big issue, and sadly this is all you really need to know to understand the Dane's reaction, is that Hegel claimed he could logisticise philosophy to a point where - if you understood his entire works - you would see the world as God did.
A pretty big claim, and one which garnered a huge amount of traction in the local churches. Kierkegaard obviously felt God, or anything really, could not be understood objectively and tried to use Socratic irony to effectively strip down all of Hegel's assertions about self, spirit and reality to effectively leave his readers ignorant of life and left to formulate there own subjective views instead based on inner-conviction, passion or faith - really the only reliable tools we have for gauging any kind of truth (logic for instance, requires a first faith of sorts in logic).
Is The Essential Kierkegaard essential? Amazon says "The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, "
Should I just get the full books instead of this?
>>7446411
Get the full books
>>7446460
>Only faggots say Daesh
Are you a fool? Da'ish is the acronym of the Arabic and is similar to an insult.
>>7446460
Also re >>7445298
I think it's fair to say that Kierkegaard was more chronicling his own attempts to justify his personal existence, rather than preaching a universal doctrine.
>>7446473
Yes I know, but the only reason anyone (in the West at least) uses the term 'Daesh' is to avoid an acronym involving the word 'Islamic'.
>>7446486
I use it because I hate Da'ish and I know Arabic.
>>7446489
If you know Arabic, fair enough, but you're the exception to the rule.
>>7446496
Use whatever you wish but telling other people what they should use is similarly idiotic. If all parties can recognize what group is being discussed based on the name provided, then there is no issue.
>>7446508
Well the issue is that too many people are blind to the role Islam plays in Islamist extremism (baffling, I know). Using Daesh is, in general, the result of refusing to link ISIS with Islam. That is a very real problem.
>>7446519
How is it a real problem when the overwhelming majority of people discussing it have no affect on policies instituted overseas? Should people then say the Western-caused Islamic State/WCIS instead?
>>7446524
Meant "no effect"
>>7446524
Certainly the likes of you and I have no direct effect on foreign policy, but a) we have a vote, and b) it simply isn't healthy to ignore the reality of the situation. In failing to acknowledge the darker sides of Islam, a scary number of people end up completely rejecting the idea that terrorists and extremists are morally responsible agents.
>>7446553
I think you're putting up a strawman here. I highly doubt anyone with the least bit education would reject that Da'ish is influenced by certain Islamic political philosophers and legal scholars.
And who doesn't see these terrorists as culpable for their own actions? :s
>>7443771
terrible, terrible idea
>>7446571
Haven't posted ITT yet but can you further elaborate the Kierkegaard - ISIS link? Seriously it was explained for like two sentences before it was derailed re: terms.
Excuse me I'm responding to the wrong anon
>>7446638
I wasn't the person making the link. I was just confused why saying Da'ish instead of ISIS or vice versa makes you a faggot.
Based on my understanding of his posts, it's basically that if an ISIS member has faith in God and believes that God's command is to do X then he'd be justified in doing X regardless of worldly moral/legal convictions.
>>7446571
Well a great many politicians (including the vast majority of British MPs) say that ISIS represents a 'twisted' interpretation of Islam, which isn't good enough, some deny it has any connection to Islam whatsoever, and a lot of left wing journalists' arguments suggest, if they don't explicitly say so themselves, that extremists and terrorists do not have the same moral responsibility that we would expect of anyone else.
Cba to give you any sources, because at the end of the day this is 4chan and it's not worth it, but google Allan Hennessy.
>>7446658
I don't know who that is. Based on a cursory glance, he writes fanfic in newspapers?
If you don't think takfiri, Khwarij beliefs aren't "twisted", then I don't believe you've studied Islam. They're very outside the theological framework but it has a historical and a political/legal basis thanks to that political movement during Ali b. Abi Talib's caliphate and the writings of certain Salafist scholars.
Most people are uninformed on the history and politics of the situation but anyone with the least bit of education would understand the basic ideas.
>>7446676
He wrote an article called 'If I hadn't gotten into Cambridge I might have ended up a jihadist' or something along those lines.
>>7446411
Full books and the "essential" is completely different. You're not getting an as complete feel for his ideas from reading an essential as you will from reading the actual books.
>>7446486
I used Daesh because I work in Egypt.
>>7446638
Teleological suspension of the ethical.
All things are shaky, "if any man, were to judge himself according to outcome, he would never begin". What's necessary for an absolute morality is basically this bizzarre blend of deontology and teloeogy - that you believe, despite whatever other sense may tell you other than conviction - that God has commanded you to do the right thing. That's why the telos is supsended, the outcome is irrelevant to the the intent you feel but need to be assumed to justify any kind of means to reach it. In short, you could commit any attrocity in the highest mode of life (the religious, which is stage 3 compared to the ethical) and, providing you had total faith the end result would be good, any action you preformed would be like a Knight of Faith, or Abraham, leaping from one point to the next in a single motion of conviction.
In contrast, the standard Western subjective ethics, or even Enlightenment ethics, are seen as a rejection of the infinite relation of God (who is the only being capable in Kierkergaard's eyes of solving the finite/infinite tension of the human self by being it's original relator) would be morally lesser than the actions of a zealous Daesh bomber who felt he was improving the world for Allah - owing to the idea of "castles on nothing", that we build our fortress of ethics on nothing concrete or firm at all without religious faith.
It's interesting stuff. Of course, this is written by one of K's many pesudonmyms (Joahnnes D'Silencio, a faithless poet) so the idea is, his actual own faith, might be rather different to the very romantic interpretation of Abraham's story.
>>7445095
This is bullshit. People in ISIS don't suspend the ethical because they've transcended the universal, their political acts of murder, etc are fundamentally operating in the universal. Terrorists organizations don't justify their actions in terms of Kierkegaard's absolute. They usually explicitly say something like "the West is evil" and then send out videos to the world.
An example more comparable to God telling Abraham to kill Isaac would be a crazy person hearing voices. In that scenario the person has no obligation to the universal and can approach the absolute and kill his parents.
Do I have to have read The Bible to read Fear and Trembling?
>>7449311
Nope.
>>7449311
Just read Abraham killing Isaac, it's literally a page long. It makes Abraham seem like a retard so Kierkegaard tries to fill in the blanks.
