Kierkegaard

Any time Kierkegaard has been quoted in Cooper's book, I have been hit with what he says. I haven't read any of his writing before but I am anxious to get into it. Possibly it's because of the general saturation of Sartreean ideas, but even in Sophie's World, the chapter on Kierkegaard generated something in me that was new and surprising, and this was a very big factor in me taking the existentialism class.

"[A] public is...an abstract void which is everything and nothing...the most dangerous of powers...the public is also a gruesome abstraction through which the individual will receive his religious formation - or sink...More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all - in order to become the public." - Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 63-4

"The 'aesthete' - whether in the shape of a dilettante, a Don Juan, or a busybody hopping from one activity to another - is a person 'sunk in immediacy.' He blows with the wind: follwoing the latest fashion, chasing the latest girl, or indulging in the latest pursuit to cure his boredom. His is a life of 'despair', not because he is buried in gloom, but because his life 'hinges upon a condition outside of itself'. Fasion, caprice, public opinion, external stimuli dictate the course of this life. The worst aspect of such an existence is that the person is dissolved into a 'multiplicity', and has lost 'the inmost and holiest thing of all in a person, the unifying power of personality'. So the person who fails to follow Kierkegaard's imperative, 'Be an individual!', through drifting with the prevailing breeze which blows from the 'public', also fails to follow it through the absence of a 'unifying power' in his life." - Cooper, Existentialism, 136

"That I can still experience guilt, however rigorously I obey the dictates of morality, means for Kierkegaard that there is a higher authority than the ethical - a God in comparison with whom I am bound to feel unworthy whatever I do." - Cooper, Existentialism, 145

"The Incarnation is an 'absolute paradox': but it is precisely a 'passion for paradox' that inspires, and is pre-supposed by, that 'leap of faith' which enables us to 'discover something that thought cannot think.' For Kierkegaard, indeed, 'proofs' of God's non-existence are more conducive to authentic faith than 'proofs' of His existence. These latter 'proofs' could anyway and at best establish the existence of what Pascal called the God of 'philosophers and scientists' - one 'abhorrent to Christianity' - not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of love and faith in whom we have our being." - Cooper, Existentialism, 147