December 2009
45 posts
“Whenever in a stricter sense there is question of an either/or, one can always be sure the ethical is involved. The only absolute either/or is the choice between good and evil, but that is also absolutely ethical. The aesthetic choice is either entirely immediate, or it loses itself in the multifarious…The ethical choice is therefore in a certain sense much easier, much simpler, but in another sense it is infinitely harder. He who would define his life task ethically has ordinarily not so considerable a selection to choose from; on the other hand, the act of choice has far more importance for him.”
—Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Victor Eremita (Either/Or, 1843)
“In a logical system, it is convenient to say that possibility passes over into actuality. However, in actuality it is not so convenient, and an intermediate term is required. The intermediate term is anxiety… Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself.”
—Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (The Concept of Anxiety ,1844)
“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possiblity, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.”
—Søren Kierkegaard using the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (The Concept of Anxiety ,1844)
“I am free, and that is why I am lost.”
—Franz Kafka (via littlelemon)
“Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.”
—
Franz Kafka
(via earlyfrost)
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
—Soren Kierkegaard (via esteenabiela)
“People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.”
— Soren Kierkegaard (via rhiannonds)
“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one”
—Heidegger (German philosopher) 1889 – 1976 (via umalik)
“We can conclude only that “Being” is not something like a being.”
—Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Being and Time (via bleedingfromreading)
“What is meant by “Being-in”? Our proximal reaction is to round out this expression to “Being-in” ‘in the world’”, and we are inclined to understand this Being-in as ‘Being in something’ ….as the water is ‘in’ the glass, or the garment is ‘in’ the cupboard. By this ‘in’ we mean the relationship of Being which two entities extended ‘in’ space have to each other with regard to their location in that space……Being-present-at-hand-along-with in the sense of a definite location-relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being, are ontological characteristics which we call ‘categorial’ ”
—What Heidegger Means by Being-in-the-World (via wildcat2030)
“I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality, riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its basis in a mis-relation between my mind and body, for (and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and body, has gained an uncommon resiliency.”
—
Soren Kierkegaard
The spirit is one thing, the psyche another: The blues one thing, despair another.
“An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true despair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself.”
—Soren Kierkegaard
“A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself to itself in the relation.”
—Soren Kierkegaard begins “Sickness” with this famous albeit slightly ironic bit of word play.
“Thus I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death, and I refuse suicide.”
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus.
