Nick Wellings’s Reviews > The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard > Status Update

Ok, a nice short semi-phenomenological reflection on what faith really is, buttressed by lots of good K quotes. Profound in places but gibberish in others. What remains above and beyond all verbiage though is K's sweet pellucid genius. One could just have shorn away the academic garble and left the quotes from CUP, to deliver a wonderful rumination on the being of faith, a faith having human. Good.

This last essay, "The utilitarian self and the 'useless passion of faith" is pretty much gibberish but I would like to finish it, seeing as it has been the only obstacle to my finishing this behemoth of a book for about 4 months.

S'been awhile, Søren. One essay to go.

Actually that was pretty fun. Now I can see more clearly Sartre's great debt to Kierkegaard in relation to freedom and self conception and being-for-oneself. And also how in terms of understanding transgression against self' and societies ethics, (sin) and psychological insight, K was proto-Freud.All of which reinforce again for me the impression of K's utter pellucid playful/serious genius +his abiding love for ppl.

cont: "anxiety...is entangled freedom."

From the K-Meister himself: "Anxiety is defined as freedom's disclosure to itself in possibility." Even today I think this stands up as correct. Why don't we grasp the nettle of life? anxiety. Every self help book counsels us to be brave and not fear the unknown, but K helps us see why we fear the unknown. Not that he was truly a self helpist, but he certainly tried to edify people into a more truthful stance w/God.

Great. An essay about a book of Kierkegaard that one scholar of Kierkegaard has said is "too difficult and probably needed a rewrite." where the first sentence says of the essay says: "The Concept of Anxiety is a maddeningly difficult book." and where one commentator said if it that it can't be taken seriously, it's a spoof with no value. A 19th Sokal hoax in other words. This essay might hurt my already taxed mind.