Postscript - a summation

God does not think, He Creates; God does not exist, He is eternal.
Man thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being,
holding them apart from one another in succession...

Subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality.

Soren Kierkegaard 1846 "Postscript: The Subjective Thinker"

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Another Quote...

Preliminary Expectoration

"Faith therefore is not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher, precisely because it has resignation as its presupposition; it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence."

"A purely human courage is required to renounce the whole of the temporal to gain the eternal; but this I gain, and to all eternity"

Fear and Trembling by Sören Kierkegaard 1843

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Soren Kierkegaard "Quoets"

I am just starting to read a book about S.K. Here are a few quotes from him:

1. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

2. Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

3. People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

4. Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.

There are many others and i will be posting them as i read more of his work.

From Wikipedia:

Thought:

Kierkegaard has been called a philosopher, a theologian,the Father of Existentialism, a literary critic, a humorist, a psychologist, and a poet. Two of his popular ideas are "subjectivity",and the "leap to faith," popularly referred to as the "leap of faith." The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God, or how a person would act in love. It is not a rational decision, as it is transcending rationality in favor of something more uncanny, that is, faith. As such he thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt that God exists; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought, without which the faith would have no real substance. Doubt is an essential element of faith, an underpinning. In plain words, to believe or have faith that God exists, without ever having doubted God's existence or goodness, would not be a faith worth having. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God.

Kierkegaard also stressed the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection. He argued in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." This has to do with a distinction between what is objectively true and an individual's subjective relation (such as indifference or commitment) to that truth. People who in some sense believe the same things may relate to those beliefs quite differently. Two individuals may both believe that many of those around them are poor and deserve help, but this knowledge may lead only one of them to decide to actually help the poor.

Kierkegaard primarily discusses subjectivity with regard to religious matters, however. As already noted, he argues that doubt is an element of faith and that it is impossible to gain any objective certainty about religious doctrines such as the existence of God or the life of Christ. The most one could hope for would be the conclusion that it is probable that the Christian doctrines are true, but if a person were to believe such doctrines only to the degree they seemed likely to be true, he or she would not be genuinely religious at all. Faith consists in a subjective relation of absolute commitment to these doctrines.



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Thought for today...

My whole life is an epigram calculated to make people aware-The Journals:1848: Soren Kierkengaard




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