Talk:Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

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The section on despair is seemingly short. There is alot more too it than that. There are about 6 or 7 different levels of despair, going from not realizing one is in despair, to embracing ones despair. I would do it, but I read Kierkegaard like 3 months ago in class and cant remember anything now. =/. Could osomebody please add to this section?

This page needs clean-up? Oh, wonderful--I love it when I can try to fix a bit and learn a helluva lot at the same time. This is what Wikipedia is all about. Sorry. I had to squee about it somewhere. Hee, excellent. Tamarkot 05:50, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Where is the history portion of the site? I remember it being here before.

--Jmnage 13:29, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry but this seems like someone worked on this as part of an undergraduate philosophy class. It does not seem encyclopedic. And what is with the the pictures of calc books and Groundhog's Day? Definitely not encyclopeic. --jabin1979 26 April 2006

As is the picture under individuality. "Try not to get lost in the crowd."???

Some parts of the article need revision, and to also take into acct his pseudonymous points of view. Poor Yorick 04:14, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Kierkegaard and postmodernism

Has Kierkegaard really been a "major" influence of postmodernism? I realise that nobody is entirely sure about what postmodernism is, but I've read a fair bit written by the ostensibly postmodern theorists, and they don't seem to invoke him all that often. I don't think the notion that truth is subjectivity, for example, is at all postmodern (postmodernism doesn't look for any non-social non-historical grounding for truth - objective, subjective or otherwise). I realise he might have had an indirect influence (via Heidegger, for example), but if you include indirect influences you get a bazillion "major" postmodern influences.

Heidegger was directly influenced by Kierkegaard; parts of Heidegger's Being and Time, esp. the sections on anxiety was pretty much lifted from Kierkegaard. As for pomo, there are lots of books that describe this connection, incl. "Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity", "God, the Gift, and Postmodernism", and "Gift of Death" by Derrida. – Poor Yorick 04:13, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

I realise that he had a major influence on Heidegger, but I wouldn't call Heidegger a postmodernist. I would say Heidegger was an influence of postmodernism. Names are only arbitrary, and we can keep pushing their geneology further and further back until they become meaningless. So I think it's best to take a prima facie, 'common person' understanding of the term "postmodernism". I think most people associate this with that 1960s-70s French crowd - Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, etc. This group of theorists took up some of Heidegger's ideas, and problematised others. But I think the parts of Heidegger derived from K were the very parts that postmodernism undermined most. Heidegger wanted to construct an alternative grounding in Being, ontology or whatever etc. Postmodernism, however, makes problematic all ultimate foundations. Now I think that it was these very ideas, the ones postmodernism tossed out, that were the ones Heidegger got from K - the individual's subjectivity, existentialist stuff.

As I think Heidegger is himself an influence of postmodernism, this would make K an influence of an influence, which I think is a bit too far removed to call "major". Pushing to this level would make practically everyone a postmodernist. Plato also had an important influence on Heidegger and Derrida. Ralph Waldo Emerson had a huge influence on Nietzche. But does it make sense to describe Plato and Emerson as "important influences of postmodernism?"

I wouldn't call Kierkegaard a postmodernist either and it's not like Kierkegaard founded Postmodernism, goodness no. His work can be seen as both anticipating and critizing postmodernism and he did create new lines of thought that would be later picked up by postmodernists, not just existential categories. Like Sartre and the existentialists who adopted concepts from Kierk, Niet, and Heid; so have the postmodernists. Hell, there's even Postmodern Christianity.. yikes. Especially when K reacts to the social and political mileu of his day, such as in The Present Age and the Corsair Affair, he discusses such pomo concepts like levelling, the masses ("crowd"), and other pomo ideas, which were highly utilized by such philosophers as Caputo, Levinas, and even Derrida. Anyways, there are many references in books and on the web which clearly explicate the connection, more clearly than I. Cheers! Poor Yorick 12:16, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Merge

Shouldn't this be merged with the Kierkegaard article?

The Kierkegaard article is 49kb, this article is 40kb. According to Wikipedia:Article Size, articles more than 50k should be divided. Poor Yorick 05:58, 13 June 2006 (UTC)