8 ms·

Difficulties Everywhere: Can Kierkegaard tell us how to live?

67 points by lermontov 7y ago

cousin_it 7y ago
I think the internet has kind of inoculated us to such philosophies. There are so many people online who are depressed and try to channel it into insightful writing. In the end, these insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing. He should've married Regine and got on with it.
- daseiner1 7y ago
  the implication that internet edgelords of any flavor are holding a candle to or diminishing Kierkegaard in any way is pretty disgusting tbh. and “insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing” is incredibly trite. i don’t mean this to come across as a personal attack, but dismissing K’s project out of hand and then making a pithy reference to his biography in what i suppose is an attempt to signal knowledge (or worse yet, understanding) of the matter at hand is just incredibly weak.
  - fapjacks 7y ago
    Wow, so what does it look like when you are attacking someone personally?
    - DSingularity 7y ago
      That is not a personal attack. You have someone effectively dismissing a philosophers work using something that just sounds profound “life isn’t deep”. Sorry, it will take more than this to counter Kierkegaard!
      - fapjacks 7y ago
        Look, I have no horse in this race, but this is clearly a personal attack in the reply above. Regardless, on what basis are you disagreeing with someone's interpretation of life as having no meaning or lacking in depth?
        catawbasam 7y ago
        If a person with bad eyesight looks across a valley and tells a person with 20-20 vision that the view is terrible, the one with 20-20 isn't likely to agree.
        fapjacks 7y ago
        But you don't get to decide someone's got bad eyesight if they tell you they see something perfectly clearly and you don't. If someone asserts that they see life as devoid of meaning or depth, you don't get to decide they are wrong simply because you disagree.
        serf 7y ago
        >Look, I have no horse in this race, but this is clearly a personal attack in the reply above. in what way is it personal? In that he's attacking his conclusion for all of Kierkegaards' work? Or that he's trying to characterize your actions into a specific motivations? Being called wrong , even in the softest ways, is now a personal attack? I think it's fair to say that a 3-5 word sentence is a bit too shallow to characterize Kierkegaards' entire body of work. 'Sickness Unto Death' totally changed my outlook as a teenager reading it at the right time. Here's the thing that's missing : life is as deep as we give it credit for, and many philosophies seek to enrichen and deepen the experience of life. In my opinion, someone with the stance 'life isn't very deep' is in the perfect position to try to honestly absorb some of the pasts' philosophers and step away from the mammalian life of eat-sleep-breed. In other words : our biological life is shallow in reason, philosophy and human thinking itself is what fills the world with reason, objective, and depth. Anyone with the take-away that 'life isn't very deep' receives my greatest sympathy and sorrow. I remember how I felt when I came to the same conclusions, and i'm glad I have shifted away from that perspective with the help of philosophy and dialogue with others. Re-imagining the world with the tools that philosophy gives you through practice is a fantastic experience, and I hope that the parent who believes that life isn't as deep as people give it credit for has the chance to undergo that epiphany themselves one day.
    - humanrebar 7y ago
      Good point, fapjacks.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- cammil 7y ago
  > life just isn't a very deep thing Surely life is the most profound and magical thing you will ever experience?
  - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
    'surely'? - how does one justify saying that? 'profound' - what does that even mean in this context? 'magical' - Speak for yourself. Me & my brothers had our lives destroyed by appalling parents. It's not something you recover from. You don't speak for everybody. Don't try.
    - Arbalest 7y ago
      I guess 'surely' technically qualifies as you do not have anything to compare it to. But because of that, describing it in any quantity can only be guesswork. Edit: that is to say, you only have one life, and comparing the whole to individual parts doesn't really make sense.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      It's true by definition (of "your life" as the time during which you can at all experience things). In that sense it doesn't matter how profound and magical your life has been or will be; it's still the most profound and magical thing you'll ever experience.
      - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
        There have been large parts of my life where I would have been better off dead. I didn't choose suicide at those times, and I've always wondered if I made the right decision not to. Life these days is... tolerable. There is nothing 'magical' about a daily grind of loneliness and (until recently) nearly two decades of pain and isolation caused by mental illness caused by two people who should never have been allowed to breed. I know this isn't really good form under HN rules, but: fuck you.
        deleted 7y ago
- BucketSort 7y ago
  Oh, but it is. There's a riddle inside the mind of every man and when he solves it he gains a window into things far beyond himself.
- goto11 7y ago
  > life just isn't a very deep thing. He should've married Regine and got on with it. Kierkegaard is way ahead of you. Your viewpoint is already presented as one of his personas or stages (called something like "the model citizen").
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- golf3 7y ago
  Existentialists have a reputation as sophists and phonies, pessimists write a bunch of subjective pessimistic crap, optimists write a bunch of subjective optimistic crap.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  > In the end, these insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing. Three pounds of flax!
LatteLazy 7y ago
If you want to know how to live, start with the stoics. They answered this question VERY successfully thousands of years ago.
- goto11 7y ago
  If you already have all the answers, Kierkegaard would definitely be of little interest for you.
icu 7y ago
It might seem odd but I had a profound philosophical awakening playing Nier: Automata. You 'experience' Kierkegaard's philosophy in the game along with other philosophies which could be spoilers if anyone decides to play it. I almost didn't play the game, I passed on it a few times until SkillUp (a YouTuber I respect) did a video on it entitled "The Masterpiece You (Probably) Won't Play" (https://youtu.be/-NiyfG8Ctbo https://youtu.be/-NiyfG8Ctbo). If you aren't going to play the game, and I recommend you try it, Wisecrack did a really good philosophical analysis of the game here: https://youtu.be/UiOTSKBy6ME https://youtu.be/UiOTSKBy6ME and here: https://youtu.be/LCcednqOLwQ https://youtu.be/LCcednqOLwQ
throw0101a 7y ago
See also the recent post on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965049 Is it Philosophy Day on HN or something? :)
lidHanteyk 7y ago
Rendering is fucked up on this page and Reader Mode doesn't automatically engage. Explicitly do the "about:reader?url=" trick to fix it. The author's got a bad misstep in the first paragraph; Socrates, if he existed, was skilled, landed, honored in military service, and his "poverty" was part of his apology when he was sentenced to death. This matters deeply because there is another important Greek philosopher who, if he existed, lived a much more impoverished and simple life, namely Diogenes [0]. This contrast between Socrates and Diogenes is worth carrying into the rest of the piece. Kierkegaard was Christian, and living in an era where Christian foundational beliefs were considered scientifically supported. As a result, his philosophy cannot escape the Christian mindset. While the author name-drops existentialists, folks like Camus and Nietzsche, they don't seem to grok that existentialism aggressively rejected the same trappings of society to which Kierkegaard felt encircled and trapped, particularly the religious trappings to which Kierkegaard felt such obligation and wonder. At least Kierkegaard was right to criticize Hegelian dialectic as "nonsense". Plain language philosophy [1] is so much simpler, although it wasn't ready yet in Kierkegaard's time. The author uncritically accepts Kierkegaard's view that Christian myths much be accepted as paradoxical or absurd yet true. When countervailing evidence disproves each myth, we are not merely being fervent or zealous if we hold on to those stories, but actively denying reason and empiricism. The author concludes by suggesting that we look inward to an intuitive religious or spiritual path, and ignore the distractions of society. Further, they insist that the philsophical truths revealed here or there by Kierkegaard or his biographers are ageless and that the "peculiar challenges of our moment" are not "the meaning of our lives". That is high-minded, but simply not true. A lot of folks will think of COVID-19, but I think of secularism and the decline of the Church's ability to control minds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy
- zebrafish 7y ago
  I’m curious about the evidence that disproves each myth.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago

67 points by lermontov 7y ago

I think the internet has kind of inoculated us to such philosophies. There are so many people online who are depressed and try to channel it into insightful writing. In the end, these insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing. He should've married Regine and got on with it.

daseiner1 7y ago
the implication that internet edgelords of any flavor are holding a candle to or diminishing Kierkegaard in any way is pretty disgusting tbh. and “insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing” is incredibly trite. i don’t mean this to come across as a personal attack, but dismissing K’s project out of hand and then making a pithy reference to his biography in what i suppose is an attempt to signal knowledge (or worse yet, understanding) of the matter at hand is just incredibly weak.
- fapjacks 7y ago
  Wow, so what does it look like when you are attacking someone personally?
  - DSingularity 7y ago
    That is not a personal attack. You have someone effectively dismissing a philosophers work using something that just sounds profound “life isn’t deep”. Sorry, it will take more than this to counter Kierkegaard!
    - fapjacks 7y ago
      Look, I have no horse in this race, but this is clearly a personal attack in the reply above. Regardless, on what basis are you disagreeing with someone's interpretation of life as having no meaning or lacking in depth?
      - catawbasam 7y ago
        If a person with bad eyesight looks across a valley and tells a person with 20-20 vision that the view is terrible, the one with 20-20 isn't likely to agree.
        fapjacks 7y ago
        But you don't get to decide someone's got bad eyesight if they tell you they see something perfectly clearly and you don't. If someone asserts that they see life as devoid of meaning or depth, you don't get to decide they are wrong simply because you disagree.
      - serf 7y ago
        >Look, I have no horse in this race, but this is clearly a personal attack in the reply above. in what way is it personal? In that he's attacking his conclusion for all of Kierkegaards' work? Or that he's trying to characterize your actions into a specific motivations? Being called wrong , even in the softest ways, is now a personal attack? I think it's fair to say that a 3-5 word sentence is a bit too shallow to characterize Kierkegaards' entire body of work. 'Sickness Unto Death' totally changed my outlook as a teenager reading it at the right time. Here's the thing that's missing : life is as deep as we give it credit for, and many philosophies seek to enrichen and deepen the experience of life. In my opinion, someone with the stance 'life isn't very deep' is in the perfect position to try to honestly absorb some of the pasts' philosophers and step away from the mammalian life of eat-sleep-breed. In other words : our biological life is shallow in reason, philosophy and human thinking itself is what fills the world with reason, objective, and depth. Anyone with the take-away that 'life isn't very deep' receives my greatest sympathy and sorrow. I remember how I felt when I came to the same conclusions, and i'm glad I have shifted away from that perspective with the help of philosophy and dialogue with others. Re-imagining the world with the tools that philosophy gives you through practice is a fantastic experience, and I hope that the parent who believes that life isn't as deep as people give it credit for has the chance to undergo that epiphany themselves one day.
  - humanrebar 7y ago
    Good point, fapjacks.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cammil 7y ago
> life just isn't a very deep thing Surely life is the most profound and magical thing you will ever experience?
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  'surely'? - how does one justify saying that? 'profound' - what does that even mean in this context? 'magical' - Speak for yourself. Me & my brothers had our lives destroyed by appalling parents. It's not something you recover from. You don't speak for everybody. Don't try.
  - Arbalest 7y ago
    I guess 'surely' technically qualifies as you do not have anything to compare it to. But because of that, describing it in any quantity can only be guesswork. Edit: that is to say, you only have one life, and comparing the whole to individual parts doesn't really make sense.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    It's true by definition (of "your life" as the time during which you can at all experience things). In that sense it doesn't matter how profound and magical your life has been or will be; it's still the most profound and magical thing you'll ever experience.
    - throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
      There have been large parts of my life where I would have been better off dead. I didn't choose suicide at those times, and I've always wondered if I made the right decision not to. Life these days is... tolerable. There is nothing 'magical' about a daily grind of loneliness and (until recently) nearly two decades of pain and isolation caused by mental illness caused by two people who should never have been allowed to breed. I know this isn't really good form under HN rules, but: fuck you.
      - deleted 7y ago
BucketSort 7y ago
Oh, but it is. There's a riddle inside the mind of every man and when he solves it he gains a window into things far beyond himself.
goto11 7y ago
> life just isn't a very deep thing. He should've married Regine and got on with it. Kierkegaard is way ahead of you. Your viewpoint is already presented as one of his personas or stages (called something like "the model citizen").
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
golf3 7y ago
Existentialists have a reputation as sophists and phonies, pessimists write a bunch of subjective pessimistic crap, optimists write a bunch of subjective optimistic crap.
karatestomp 7y ago
> In the end, these insights turn out useless: life just isn't a very deep thing. Three pounds of flax!

LatteLazy 7y ago

If you want to know how to live, start with the stoics. They answered this question VERY successfully thousands of years ago.

goto11 7y ago
If you already have all the answers, Kierkegaard would definitely be of little interest for you.

icu 7y ago

It might seem odd but I had a profound philosophical awakening playing Nier: Automata. You 'experience' Kierkegaard's philosophy in the game along with other philosophies which could be spoilers if anyone decides to play it. I almost didn't play the game, I passed on it a few times until SkillUp (a YouTuber I respect) did a video on it entitled "The Masterpiece You (Probably) Won't Play" (https://youtu.be/-NiyfG8Ctbo https://youtu.be/-NiyfG8Ctbo). If you aren't going to play the game, and I recommend you try it, Wisecrack did a really good philosophical analysis of the game here: https://youtu.be/UiOTSKBy6ME https://youtu.be/UiOTSKBy6ME and here: https://youtu.be/LCcednqOLwQ https://youtu.be/LCcednqOLwQ

throw0101a 7y ago

See also the recent post on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22965049 Is it Philosophy Day on HN or something? :)

lidHanteyk 7y ago

Rendering is fucked up on this page and Reader Mode doesn't automatically engage. Explicitly do the "about:reader?url=" trick to fix it. The author's got a bad misstep in the first paragraph; Socrates, if he existed, was skilled, landed, honored in military service, and his "poverty" was part of his apology when he was sentenced to death. This matters deeply because there is another important Greek philosopher who, if he existed, lived a much more impoverished and simple life, namely Diogenes [0]. This contrast between Socrates and Diogenes is worth carrying into the rest of the piece. Kierkegaard was Christian, and living in an era where Christian foundational beliefs were considered scientifically supported. As a result, his philosophy cannot escape the Christian mindset. While the author name-drops existentialists, folks like Camus and Nietzsche, they don't seem to grok that existentialism aggressively rejected the same trappings of society to which Kierkegaard felt encircled and trapped, particularly the religious trappings to which Kierkegaard felt such obligation and wonder. At least Kierkegaard was right to criticize Hegelian dialectic as "nonsense". Plain language philosophy [1] is so much simpler, although it wasn't ready yet in Kierkegaard's time. The author uncritically accepts Kierkegaard's view that Christian myths much be accepted as paradoxical or absurd yet true. When countervailing evidence disproves each myth, we are not merely being fervent or zealous if we hold on to those stories, but actively denying reason and empiricism. The author concludes by suggesting that we look inward to an intuitive religious or spiritual path, and ignore the distractions of society. Further, they insist that the philsophical truths revealed here or there by Kierkegaard or his biographers are ageless and that the "peculiar challenges of our moment" are not "the meaning of our lives". That is high-minded, but simply not true. A lot of folks will think of COVID-19, but I think of secularism and the decline of the Church's ability to control minds. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy

zebrafish 7y ago
I’m curious about the evidence that disproves each myth.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago