The Book Depository Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs by Soren Kierkegaard
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Price: £8.99
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Description: Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs : Paperback : Oxford University Press : 9780199214198 : 0199214190 : 01 Jul 2009 : These two complementary works give the reader a unique insight into the breadth and substance of Kierkegaard's thought. One reads like a novel and the other a Platonic dialogue but both concern the nature of love, faith, and happiness. These are the first translations to convey the literary quality and philosophical precision of the originals. The Book Depository Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs by Soren Kierkegaard - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780199214198
MPN: 0199214190
GTIN: 9780199214198
Author: a sweet machine
Rating: 5
Review: Kierkegaard described Repetition as a "droll little book", written "without any philosophical pretension". But Kierkegaard's category of repetition was a major part of his thinking, popping up in other major works such as Fear & Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety. As with many of his most important ideas, Kierkegaard wants them to settle in almost unbeknownst to the reader; he wants repetition to work on the individual, rather than the individual to work on the ideas presented in Repetition. To lower our guard he presents repetition in the form of a romantic novella. Constantine Contantius (Kierkegaard's pseudonym) tells us about his personal search for repetition and a relationship he sparks up with a Young Man. Both Constantine and the Young Man are subsumed in the world around them. Neither have reached a point of reflective consciousness that would allow them to really appreciate loss in any significant way. They do both experience some minimal losses - Constantine finds himself unable to re-live the joys of a night in Berlin he'd experienced a few years earlier, whilst the Young Man discovers romantic love for the first time before losing it just as swiftly (as young men will). Against all this bathos Kierkegaard presents his real hero as the biblical Job. Job loses his family, wealth, possessions, and (seemingly) the esteem of his friends but still has faith enough to simply say, "the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Ultimately Job receives his world back; he experiences repetition not as someone desperately clinging on to what he had lost but as a man aware of the contingencies of the world and engaged in an honest question about suffering. Repetition is, if you like, a light shining into the empty breadth and depth of our own genuine possibility. At times of anxiety and despair, when we may no longer appreciate what the world potentially holds for us, repetition reveals to us new and reflective levels of meaning and (from a Christian perspective) wonder. For Job, repetition is an affirmation of God's love and power. For Kierkegaard's much lesser characters, it does more to demonstrate how insubstantial their striving really is. This modern and readable translation carries a good introduction, written by the contributor on Repetition to the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. Definitely recommended.
Author: pulling cheek swirl better shake up
Rating: 4
Review: It is difficult to describe the kind of shallow arch society in which the expectation that everything will keep repeating over and over without suffering from significant damage due to wear and tear on a psychological level which Kierkegaard describes so well: Everything has its time in youth, and what has had its time then has its time again later, and it is just as healthy for an older person to have something laughable in his past as it is for him to have something heart-rending. (p. 24.) There are page numbers in the margin which locate the passage above just before page 31 in Soren Kierkegaard Skrifter, which is described as "prohibitively expensive for anyone but the most dedicated scholars or libraries, but it is freely available online in a searchable edition." (Note on the Translation, p. xxxi). The 35W bridge which fell into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, was described as having a shallow arch design with low redundancy. Kierkegaard might have been thinking of his father when he wrote about an older person having something laughable in his past. Social systems which have rigid expectations are likely to crumble when everything that happens is dynamic. I was interested in the vibrations on the 35W bridge from traffic, wind, a train near the foundation of the overpass close to the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, and three jackhammers for a repaving project on the 35W bridge after spending 3 to 6 p.m. on the Lake Street - Marshall bridge between Minneapolis and Saint Paul for a demonstration of Beelzebub telling Satan: We still have our armies. We can keep fighting in Paradise Lost by John Milton, feeling the wind that day and vibrations from passing vehicles. It was an interesting time in my life, and laughable that I was not on the bridge that collapsed, like I had been in Vietnam a few years after the 35W bridge was built. This book strives for literary significance, but Americans are unlikely to derive much from anything which has so little in common with their highly creative views on spending freezes.
