Word: kierkegaard
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...psychology of the religious life . . . since St. Augustine." The Roman Catholic weekly, Commonweal, has rated him "perhaps the greatest Protestant-Christian of the 19th Century, a man equal in spiritual stature to . . . Cardinal Newman." But to many a college-educated American the strangely beautiful name of Sören Kierkegaard might as well be that of a new movie star or a kind of smorgasbord. Chief reasons: 1) only in the last decade have most of his works been translated from Danish into English†; 2) his ironical, passionate, introverted philosophy of religion is off beam for positivist, social-minded...
...Kierkegaard's 100-year-old philosophy seems well fitted to these days. It is basic to the modern Protestant "crisis theology" of Karl Barth; its influence is strong on the great Spanish Catholic philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno; it is the groundwork for France's atheistic, postliberation fad of "existentialism." Protestants, Catholics and atheists who would like to sample the thought of the great Dane without reading all 20 translated volumes should welcome last week's publication of A Kierkegaard Anthology, edited by youthful (33) Kierkegaard- enthusiast Robert Bretall (Princeton University...
Anthologist Bretall's judicious excerpting from 17 of Kierkegaard's major & minor works makes a 481-page compendium that is also almost a biography. For Sören Kierkegaard lived most intensely and dramatically in his thoughts...
...Inwardness & Absurdity." On the surface Kierkegaard's life was both short and dull. Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he spent his college years in dilettantism, passed a course of theological studies cum laude, but was never ordained, fell in love but did not dare ger married, used up his inheritance in publishing his books, and died in 1855 at the age of 42-just when his money had run out. But that was Kierkegaard's life on the surface. His real life was a long, exciting, bitter, lonely struggle within himself. The fruit of that' struggle...
Actually, not Kierkegaard but German Philosopher Martin Heidegger (a Nazi from 1932-34), begot Existentialism. Heidegger's ultimately cynical subjectivism rather than the Danish prophet's Christian profundity determined Sartre's concept of man's responsibility: "Man is free to act, but he must act to be free. If he fails to choose a social or political line of action, he is not a Being; he is Nothingness." Should, by chance, Christian ethics permeate man's action, Sartre does not mind-not because it is Christian but because it is moral...