tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post583026620977474512..comments2023-07-30T04:01:41.842-07:00Comments on Moriae Encomium: It's not that most of us don't get the concept....rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-17300740304234533652019-07-30T19:12:08.410-07:002019-07-30T19:12:08.410-07:00I must of course defer to you when it comes to Kie...I must of course defer to you when it comes to Kierkegaard--you know him much better than me.<br /><br />I would say that of course Kierkegaard, as a nineteenth century writer, speaks from a far different time, addressing different social conditions and intellectual currents and literary forms. But he is "strange" to us in a way that, say, Hans Christian Andersen isn't. He is difficult I think because he was trying to articulate a radically new way of thinking about what it means to be human, to think through the implications of what it means to be a free being. <br /><br />And it's still a difficult concept to grasp. Last month I got around to starting Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra." It was also radically original in its day, but it's mostly easily comprehensible today, almost banal. I thought I was pretty familiar with Nietzsche when I started, but I don't think I had realized the extent that he has "won the day." Matter for another post, I suppose. Kierkegaard was a voice crying in the wilderness in his day. He still is.rick allenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-72422067990068728442019-06-27T10:20:35.686-07:002019-06-27T10:20:35.686-07:00And I gotta say (completely personal opinion), the...And I gotta say (completely personal opinion), the older Lowrie translations read too much like the KJV for my taste, v. the Hong (newer) translations. It's the difference between Tolkien's arch-archaic style for LOTR, v. the movies, which include all the story and action, but none of the sense of an "elder text" written in terms no one ever used but which sound "old" and even "reverent" (the continuing cultural legacy of the KJV). And that shift, between Lowrie and Hong, is part of the shift to "modern" that I'm writing about. Lowrie wants S.K. to sound authoritative; Hong wants S.K. to sound normal (Hong would say "more like S.K.", but let's not go there!).<br /><br />Which one you like is probably a generational thing. OTOH, I am four days older than you, so....Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-73523607515095810062019-06-27T10:11:53.819-07:002019-06-27T10:11:53.819-07:00There is a shift, and I struggle to explain it mor...There is a shift, and I struggle to explain it more clearly, between S.K.'s era and ours, and I mean a shift in vocabulary, and in conceptualizing. S.K. writes in the middle of the 19th century, a century dominated by the Romantic Revolution, but still using the language of the Enlightenment. The shift I mean is not the one brought by that revolution, but the later one of modernism. Even Bultmann, writing in the early 20th century, is a step behind modern thinking and the way we express our ideas (and even conceive them), Bonhoeffer finds himself on that cusp, arguing from a 19th century, almost Kierkegaardian model, in "The Cost of Discipleship," but by the end of his life (and many years older), moving toward a "Christianity without religion," which, arguably, is what Eliot was working toward from "The Waste Land" to the "Four Quartets." And which modern Christian theology has pretty much embraced (even as philosophers of religion embrace religion without any particular credo to it).<br /><br />Not making any sense, am I? Kierkegaard is obsessed with the psychology of the individual, but psychology is still a nascent topic (it later became "alienist", and finally after Freud, "psychology," although Freud was too "unscientific" for most modern discussions of the topic). So S.K. is trying to explain conditions and concepts we now have an entire lexicon for; but he has to invent one out of Romanticism and Hegelianism and Pauline letters and Augustinian ideas (there's a direct line from Augustine to Luther, who was an Augustinian monk, to S.K., the Lutheran seminary student) and whatever else he had at hand. There's a reason, for example, S.K. always talks about poets, a discussion no one has today on any topic except poetry itself. He's trying to invent a language (game?) to discuss what he's getting at. His attention to "the individual," after all, is part of the radical break of Romanticism, and that entire vocabulary of "self" that we are so comfortable with now, was as strange and arcane as quantum mechanics in mid-19th century Europe. Physicists made up terms like "quark" and "charm" to explain quantum states; S.K. is trying to do the same thing, just without transforming words like "charm" to have wholly new meanings.<br /><br />Like I said it doesn't make much sense without looking at a REALLY large picture. The other thing is, S.K. is loquacious, writing in a time long before Modernism and Hemingway taught us all to be terse and to the point. Even for 19th century Europe he loves the sound of his own voice a bit too much. Or maybe it's the 19th century version of Wittgenstein: neither comes to the point, because failing to do so IS the point.<br /><br />Maybe. I dunno.....Rmjhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06811456254443706479noreply@blogger.com