Posts tagged kierkegaard
Posts tagged kierkegaard
If others go to Hell, I will go too. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that all will be saved, myself with them—something which arouses my deepest amazement.
As soon as the will begins to cast a covetous eye on the outcome, the individual begins to become immoral - the energy of the will becomes torpid, or it develops abnormally into an unhealthy, unethical, mercenary hankering that, even if it achieves something great, does not achieve it ethically - the individual demands something other than the ethical itself.
To a knowledge of the truth, I perhaps have come; to salvation, surely not. What shall I do? Be active in the world, people say. Should I then communicate my sorrow to the world, make one more contribution to prove how pitiable and wretched everything is, perhaps discover a new, hitherto undetected stain in human life? I could then reap the rare reward of becoming famous, just like the man who discovered the spots on Jupiter. I still prefer to remain silent.
(via helikaon)
The last thing human thought can will is to will beyond itself in the paradoxical. And Christianity is indeed the paradoxical.
A crowd is indeed made up of single individuals; it must therefore be in everyone’s power to become what he is, a single individual; no one is prevented from being a single individual, no one, unless he prevents himself by becoming many.
Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of it; the only true way of acquiring it. Truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but a life. Truth is not a property of thought that guarantees validity to thinking. No, truth in its most essential character is the reduplication of truth within yourself, within me, within him. Your life, my life, his life expresses the truth in the striving. Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us truth must be lived.
The systematic idea is the subject-object, is the unity of thinking and being; existence, on the other hand, is precisely the separation.
Even if a person has achieved the highest, the repetition by which he must indeed fill out his existence, if he is not to go backward (or become a fantastical being), will again be a continue striving…
…and when one has learned that every urchin can say ‘we,’ one learns that it nevertheless means more to be one…
From a pathos-filled perspective, one second has infinite value; from a comic perspective, ten thousand years are but a prank…
