Word: kierkegaard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tiny St. John's College in Annapolis, Md. brags of the world's most distinguished faculty-the authors (Homer to Kant to Kierkegaard) of the 100-odd Great Books, "the real original and ultimate teachers at St. John's." Last week the college added its first lady to the staff: Jane Austen. Newest Great Book: Pride and Prejudice...
...Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton-Burnett, Sartre, 'Scottie' Wilson. Who are they? What do they want?" The speaker, a blimpish Hollywood Britisher in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, sucked petulantly on his whisky & soda and stared at his outdated copy of Horizon, Cyril Connolly's British monthly for intellectuals. If he had lived long enough to investigate the matter, he might have wondered how Scottie Wilson, a half-educated furniture dealer turned artist, had ever made his list of the big guns in the 20th Century highbrow arsenal in the first place...
Later he actually wanted to be an actor, but failed; from play-acting he turned to playwriting. He read widely and weirdly; like Friedrich Schiller's heroes, he considered himself a rebel; like Kierkegaard, a pessimystic; like Darwin, a scientist; like Goethe's Faust, he turned to black magic (which he practiced in his attic). When he was crossed, he would roam the woods lashing at branches and hacking down young trees; sometimes he would climb a tree and yell defiance at the universe...
...fiction of Sartre's response to being alive. Descartes, who titillated the 17th Century intellectual world, thought he was creating a new philosophy on St. Augustine's premise: "I think, therefore I am." Sartre's fundamental observation, an overstatement of something found in the writings of Kierkegaard and the German existentialist, Heidegger, may be paraphrased as "I exist and find it sickening." The experience recounted in Nausea is one of deep physical and metaphysical horror, well beyond the ennui, already sufficiently sick, that such French post-romantic writers as Baudelaire liked to wallow...
Original Sin. This grand but somewhat anxious survey of man's fate Dr. Niebuhr clinches with a doctrine of original sin in which he leans heavily upon an insight of Kierkegaard's: "Sin presupposes sin." That is, sin need not inevitably arise from man's anxiety if sin were not already in the world. Niebuhr finds the agent of this prehistoric sin in the Devil, a fallen angel who "fell because [like man] he sought to lift himself above his measure, and who in turn insinuates temptation into human life." Thus, "the sin of each individual...