This form of despair is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Or even lower: in despair not to will to be a self. Or lowest of all, in despair to will to be someone else, to wish for a new self. Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it…
Read moreKierkegaard on Self-Awareness
There is so much talk about human distress and wretchedness–I try to understand it and have also had some intimate acquaintance with it–there is so much talk about wasting a life, but only that person’s life was wasted who went on living so deceived by life’s joys or its sorrows that he never became decisevely…
Read moreKierkegaard on the Despair of Finitude
So it is with finitude’s despair. Because a man is in this kind of despair, he can very well live on in temporality, indeed, actually all the better, can appear to be a man, be publicaly acclaimed, honored, and esteemed, be absorbed in all the temporal goals. In fact, what is called the secular mentality…
Read moreKierkegaard on Being Base
[I]t is far from being the case that men regard the relationship to truth, relating themselves to the truth, as the highest good, at it is very far from being the case that they Socratically regard being in error in this manner as the worst misfortune–the sensate in them usually far outweighs their intellecutality. For…
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