For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself! (Kierkegaard's Writings, Volume 21)
Søren Kierkegaard
Language: English
Pages: 317
ISBN: B0034EZE64
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For Self-Examination and its companion piece Judge for Yourself! are the culmination of Søren Kierkegaard's "second authorship," which followed his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Among the simplest and most readily comprehended of Kierkegaard's books, the two works are part of the signed direct communications, as distinguished from his earlier pseudonymous writings. The lucidity and pithiness, and the earnestness and power, of For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! are enhanced when, as Kierkegaard requested, they are read aloud. They contain the well-known passages on Socrates' defense speech, how to read, the lover's letter, the royal coachman and the carriage team, and the painter's relation to his painting. The aim of awakening and inward deepening is signaled by the opening section on Socrates in For Self-Examination and is pursued in the context of the relations of Christian ideality, grace, and response. The secondary aim, a critique of the established order, links the works to the final polemical writings that appear later after a four-year period of silence.
my friend, he would rather turn back, shuddering before the terror, but as soon as he turns to flee he sees-he sees an even greater horror behind him, the horror of spiritual trial, and he must go forward-so he goes forward; now he is perfectly calm, because the horror of spiritual trial is a formidable disciplinarian 26 who can give courage. The terror rises up. Everything that closely or remotely belongs to the given actuality arms itself against this man of spiritual trial whom it nevertheless
on the right cheek, turn the left." "If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also." "Rejoice always." "Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations " 38 etc.). It is all just as easy to understand as the remark "The weather is fine today," a remark that could become difficult to understand in only one way-if a literature came into existence in order to interpret What Is Required 35 it. The most limited poor creature cannot truthfully deny being able to understand the
on the right cheek, turn the left." "If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also." "Rejoice always." "Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations " 38 etc.). It is all just as easy to understand as the remark "The weather is fine today," a remark that could become difficult to understand in only one way-if a literature came into existence in order to interpret What Is Required 35 it. The most limited poor creature cannot truthfully deny being able to understand the
kind of doubt-and thus doubt arose and lived on reasons. It was not observed that the more reasons one advances, the more one nourishes doubt and the stronger it becomes, that offering doubt reasons in order to kill it is just like offering the tasty food it likes best of all to a hungry monster one wishes to eliminate. No, one must not offer reasons to doubt-at least not if one's intention is to kill it-but one must do as Luther did, order it to shut its mouth, and to that end keep quiet and
Why, then, do I not have any? Because I have nothing whatever to do with the world. I address myself to the single individual, every individual, or to everyone as an individualwould to God that all would read, but everyone as an individual. If every individual does as I did when I wrote, locks his door and reads to himself, fully convinced, and this is true, that I have not even remotely thought of affronting him or speaking about him to others, since I have thought only of myself; if he reads as