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Kierkegaard on despair and the eternal

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References

  1. All parenthetical references are to: Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

  2. Alastair Hannay recognizes this in Kierkegaard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p.27.

  3. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet 2. 2. 14.

  4. Jeremy Walker claims that the point is: To lack the concept of the eternal is precisely to be in despair' (Kierkegaard: The Descent into God [McGill-Queen's University Press, 1985], p.105). This is not a precise translation of ‘Fortvivelse er at mingle det Evige’ (Despair is to lack the eternal’). Moreover pagans have the concept of the eternal. For example, Kierkegaard writes: ‘All paganism consists in this that God is related to man directly as the obviously extra ordinary to the astonished observer’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Wlater Lowrie [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], p.219). And Kierkegaard's position is that pagans must be in despair: ‘Everyone who has not undergone the transformation of duty's ‘You shall’ is in despair’ (54).

  5. Linnell E. Cody, ‘Alternative Interpretations of Love in Kierkegaard and Royce,’ The Journal of Religous Ethics 10 (1982), p.242.

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  6. Herodotus, Historiae 1 32–34.

  7. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (New York: New American Library of World Literature, 1942), p.10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy and Religion, American University, Washington, U.S.A.

    T. F. Morris

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  1. T. F. Morris
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Morris, T.F. Kierkegaard on despair and the eternal. SOPH 28, 21–30 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02782661

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02782661

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