Monday, October 26, 2015

Theistic Existentialism

He really lays some groundwork with the idea of the self and its consciousness.  These ideas recur in Freud, and of course people like Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre and other modern humanist writers.  Yet Kierkegaard, as opposed to the others, holds our "existence before God."  This is seemingly unendurable, he writes, for many see their existence before God resulting in the impossibility for him to "come back to himself, become himself."  And Nietzsche and others develop this, declaring that God is Dead, and everything we need for fully developing ourselves is within ourselves.

1 comment:

  1. I, too found it interesting that Kierkegaard held his "existence before God" and refers to God quite a lot in this work. I guess with the other works we have read I assumed that he would not still hold to his Christian beliefs but seems to keep them as a significant part of his ideas.

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