/lit/ - Literature

Reading Kierkegaard.

I'm interested in reading Kierkegaard Journals, has anyone read them?.
I'd like to read all of them, but there are more than 7000 pages of his journals, did anyone read all the journals?.
Or maybe I should read just a compilation of selected journals?. If that's the case, which selection should I pick?.

Thanks in advance!.

>1 year ago
>final year of kindergarten
>hear these two white transgender existentialists eating paint, throwing sand non-stop and usually discussing shit like the hungry caterpillar
>hear them mention it, didn't expect it since we never read 'The Gay Science' in our school
>god, don't you think Kierkegaard is so fucking smart? i mean, i would totally denounce the church and kiss him, i think we would understand each other like super good. like he is so misread so i can relate.
>yeah dude i will name my son ubermensch lol but seriously
>i just sit and stare as they change topic to good local cafes to grab a coffee and about some sartre novel

>>4120503
It is!
You should take a look to Kierkegaard's Journals -look up for it in scribd-. Since he is writing a journal he's being amazingly sincere and you cannot help but feeling empathy for him. Some notes are absolutely amazing.

As you probably know, /lit/, Kierkegaard has written a novel. Yes, Kierkegaard. The virgin. The man who played a scoundrel to break off his relationship with his fiancee and devote himself more earnestly to God. The hunchback who wrote under two layers of pseudonyms in Danish to confuse heathens.

You all know him.

That said, how does it make you feel that Kierkegaard is a knight of faith and you are not? How does it make you feel that he is able to teleologically suspend the ethical, regardless of whether the crowd is untruth, and you are not?

>inb4 ghostwritten
Even if it was, someone who's good enough to render something publishable has settled for doing just that, secretly writing for a hunchbacked virgin and not getting his/her own name on the cover of that book. How does it make you feel that someone good enough to write even a mediocre book has to settle for being the ghostwriter of a frail theologian?

>>4037162
Instead of having our morality decided by learned philosophers and theologians, we have our morality decided by the weird, amorphous mass of the "public", the crowd. It's also why it's hard to introduce yourself romantically to a woman without seeming like a total jackass by relying on clichéd "ice-breakers" - because there is no proper decorum on introducing yourself in this way and the propriety of your introduction being assessed by how gracefully you live up to the decorum, instead you a huge formlessness, an absence of decorum, where you have to try and guess what the best way of introducing is. This is why there are so many books about female psychology in the "dating scene", because you can no longer rely on decorum and manners to perform social actions, you have to turn to mystical arts like psychology to try and give you a upperhand.

>>4030868

>I am inevitably a product of my surroundings
Arguably. Free will is not completely incompatible with determinism in a sense that your free will can be exercised on the limited array of choices provided by 'faith', for lack of a better term.

> My opinions are a product of my surroundings
Along with a plethora of other factors such as intellect, will etc.

> Therefore no one's opinions are correct, just different
Firstly, as someone already pointed out this is a huge leap. Secondly, though opinions cannot be correct (unless they can be proven through empirical methods), some opinions are more valid than others. An opinion or assertion with a strong foundation on intelligence, logic, evidence and empathy (among others) is more valid than the opinion someone pulled out of his ass proclaiming: 'hurr durr i'm just a product of my subjective experiences brah'.

Where do I start? Is he as hard to read as I hear?

Are you proud of choosing to love only the extraordinary, the rare? If it were best to love only those who are extraordinary then God would be puzzled, because to him there is no extraordinary. This claim of loving only that which is extraordinary, then, raises a question, not against love and not against the extraordinary, but against that love which loves only that which is extraordinary. Perfection in the object is not perfection in the love. Romantic love is a desire for the extraordinary object, the beloved. Friendship is a desire for the extraordinary object, the friend. Only love of the neighbor is the desire for love. Therefore, authentic love is proved by this, that its object lacks any of those qualifications that differ in people, which means that this love is recognizable only by it being love.

>>3964319
>The answers can only be found in the sciences, the questions should be asked in those fields too. Our pretty little flower, if we want to understand why it's beautiful, can only be explained in a spectrum of non-philosophical fields.

>God creates out of nothing, but here, if I dare say so, he does more-he dresses an instinct in all the beauty of erotic love so that the lovers see only the beauty and are unaware of the instinct.

What book by this sexy son of a bitch should I start with?

>>3797579
>>3797577
>>3797579
>>3797577
not being conscious of your despair is the most common way to be in despair

people are in despair more than they think

>look at yourself in the mirror, see something that you don't like
this is despair. I know the response to this would be, "seeing your own faults is natural and healthy, it allows you to rectify them" but this isn't want I am talking about. I'm talking about the sinking and hopeless feeling that is very common when people look at themselves and would rather not be what the thing that they see. Even if this were healthy and practical it would still be despair, but it is often not practical at all - rather than being encouraged to "better themselves", when people see their faults they tend to want to run away from themselves into forgetful diversions; rather than being encourage to "better themselves" they often develop a kind of hatred, or at best an indifference, towards themselves, that causes them to neglect themselves.
This is all caused by the sickness in human vanity, and it's this same sickness in vanity that causes people to enjoy the suffering of others as a despairing way to temporarily forget the sickness in their own vanity.

How readable is Kirkegaard? I'm interested in getting into his thought, but I'm not ready for another really dense, difficult writer. Should I skip him over for now or is he pretty readable?

WHOA

guys, look at google right now

WHOA, WHOA

"A man enters upon his life, hoping that all will go well for him and with good wishes for others. He steps out into the world’s multiplicity, like one that comes from the country into the great noisy city, into the multiplicity where men engrossed in affairs hurry past one another, where each looks out for what belongs to him in the vast "back and forth," where everything is in passing, where it is as though at each instant one saw what he had learned borne out in practice, and in the same instant saw it refuted, without any cessation in the unrest of work, in multiplicity -- that all too vast a school of experience. For here one can experience everything possible, or that everything is possible, even what the inexperienced man would least believe, that the Good sits highest at the dinner table and crime next highest, or crime highest and the Good next highest -- in good company with each other. So this man stands there. He has in himself a susceptibility for the disease of double-mindedness. His feeling is purely immediate, his knowledge only strengthened through contemplation, his will not mature. Swiftly, alas, swiftly he is infected -- one more victim. This is nothing new, but an old story. As it has happened to him, so it has happened with the double-minded ones who have gone before him -- this in passing he now gives as his own excuse, for he has received the consecration of excuses."
This is Soren "Swag Prince of Existentialism" Kierkegaard, a miserable man that could

>>3703922

Would you fuck Soren?

>>3696878
>In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present).

"It's just a hunch" - Soren K.

This man had a indescribably better understanding than the culture we're living in than DFW had, and he lived 150-200 years ago.

Problems

You can't simulate the entire Universe from within the Universe. Like that thing people say, "the map is not the territory", and that if the map was a 1:1 representation of the territory, it would just literally be the territory, it would be identical to it. You would need every last bit of energy in the Universe in order to simulate the entire Universe. You could say that our Universe is just a very, very, very small Universe and that the Universe that is simulating us is a massive, huge Universe, but in that case why would we expect that "massive, huge Universe" to bare any similarities to ours. Why would we expect humans to exist that at all.
This guy seems to be implying that you don't need to simulate the Universe, you just need to simulate a person's consciousness. In other words, all he's done is make the same old solipsist argument and clothed it with "SCIENCE!".

Deism is rational, only when it is completely irrational.

Pic related.

>Anonymity has, in our time, a far more pregnant significance than is perhaps realized; it has almost epigrammatic significance. Not only do people write anonymously, they write anonymously in their own name, indeed speak anonymously. Just as an author puts his whole soul into his style, so a person essentially puts his personality into his speech, though this must be understood with the limiting exception pointed out by Claudius in a similar situation when he said that when you charm a book the spirit emerges – unless there is no spirit there. Nowadays it is possible actually to be speaking with people, and to be forced to admit that what they say is exceedingly sensible, and yet the conversation leaves the impression that one has been speaking with an anonym. The same person can say the most contradictory things, can coolly utter something that, coming from him, is the most bitter satire upon his own life. The remark itself is very sensible, would go over very well at a stockholders’ meeting as part of a discussion fabricating some resolution – much as, in an actual factory, paper is made out of rags. But the sum-total of all these many remarks does not amount to personal human discourse such as can be carried on by even the most simpleminded man able to talk of very little but who nevertheless does speak.

>>3607006

Study theology.

>>3500121

Please - don't go falling into that edgy atheist trap that theists cannot be reasonable.

Itt: yfw
>that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but Superior - yet in such a way, be it observed that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to to the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, inasmuch as the individual as the particular stands in absolute relation to the absolute