Kierkegaard Research Paper

God gave men the free will to elect their own salvation. There is no sin until it is actually committed. Sin was now considered a voluntary act. It also consists of a change of heart, which revived the concept of limited atonement. Christ did not die for only a select few predestined elect, but for whosoever will accept God’s offer of salvation. Personal commitment also involved an active and useful Christian life in which individual action brings the kingdom closer.

Much of Jesus' teachings focused on the Kingdom of God, in which God reigns in the hearts of humanity (Chapter 6 (2014). Our strength comes from God and knowing that no matter what God always has our back and will take care of us. Life is one long series of tests and life is about choices we make and actions we take, if we live and take each test seriously we grow to find peace in ourselves and peace with God. We tend to rebel against God at times and we do so because sin is in our nature. We have to fight ourselves at times so that we do the right thing and not commit more sin. We make poor choices at times because we want to do the fun or exciting thing and not think about what we are doing and make bad decisions. This is dependent on the structure, culture and purpose of the organization in which you find yourself (Lips-Wiersma, M., & Morris, L. (2011). Poor choices affect us in so many ways and have different consequences but we as human will continue to make bad

Take a minute to relax. Enjoy the lightness, or surprising heaviness, of the paper, the crispness of the ink, and the regularity of the type. There are over four pages in this stack, brimming with the answer to some question, proposed about subjects that are necessarily personal in nature. All of philosophy is personal, but some philosophers may deny this. Discussed here are philosophers that would not be that silly. Two proto-existentialists, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, were keen observers of humanity, and yet their conclusions were different enough to seem contradictory. Discussed here will be Nietzsche’s “preparatory human being” and Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith”. Both are archetypal human beings that exist in

Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher and theologian who attempted to deliver his existentialist point of views. Specifically, Kierkegaard emphasizes the need for humans to take responsibility for their actions and go beyond their “socially imposed identities” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). According to his earliest major work “Either/Or,” he suggests humans are reluctantly stuck between two spheres of life that they must choose between: aesthetic or ethical. He delves into what constitutes a life as either and suggests the practicalities associated with each choice. He stresses the importance of being responsible for the truth and living according to the truth we’ve committed to. In addition, the existential choice can be

At this time, the author maintains, we have two kinds of lives. There is the natural life and the spiritual life and they are opposed to each other. The natural life knows that if the spiritual life got a hold of it, all its self-centeredness and its self-will would be killed. Therefore, it fights for its life. The author compares this to a child who tries to bring to life his toy tin soldier, but the toy soldier did not want to be alive. So, just like us, it would rebel. Because the toy soldier likes the tin, he would think that you are killing him if you tried to change him. Similarly, man has some things about him that he likes, and probably wants to keep. He, too, may become obstinate even if God tried to change him. The author explains, however, that God sent this one man through whom all other men could become a Son of God, and the natural man would have to change for this process to take place. Man could resist, but the opportunity is still there for

In Knausgaard’s My Struggle Volume 1, Knausgaard breaks down his own life story to its elementary particles, reliving memories, reopening wounds, and examining with candor the turbulence and the epiphanies that emerge from his own experience of fatherhood, the fallout in the wake of his father’s death, and his visceral connection to music, art, and literature. Volume 1 begins with a perspective on death, moves into a 100-page account of underage Karl and a pal sneaking beer for New Year's Eve, and builds to the burial of his father. He tells you a story of his life - as a small boy and a married father of four children. His fear and hatred of his dominating father. Knausgaard is able to capture events of his life- even after thirty years later. He captures the feelings of objects, humans, and situations that makes up a life. Knausgaard effectively

Kierkegaard believes that true faith can only be attained through a double movement of giving up rationality or logic, while at the same time believing one can understand logically. In “Fear and Trembling” Kierkegaard relates true faith to the Knight of infinite resignation and the Knight of faith; in this paper, I will examine this claim and show why Kierkegaard’s analogy is an excellent metaphor for the double movement which is required in one’s quest to attain faith and why.

In chapter 3 of Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard begins his discussion on the “Absolute Paradox” by revealing paradox as “the passion of thought.” Kierkegaard claims that humans desperately want to discover something they are unable to contemplate and are, thus, only leading themselves toward the downfall of all thought. We are unable to contemplate the “unknown”, and the unknown— according to Kierkegaard—is essentially God. Humans are foolish in their attempt to prove God’s existence; for humans’ attempted to do so already assumes god’s existence. In other words, , there would be no need for proof. The bible is in no way able to act as the only proof of God’s existence. To argue that the events in the world must derive from an all-good being (God) assumes that these events are all ultimately good—and this assumption is based on the belief that there exists an all-good author of these works.

Starting with Kierkegaard, it is best to understand that he has a deep fulfillment to God and that he feels is the absolute. This absolute is to live in the realm of a paradox and that paradox is proving the existence of God and experiencing it for yourself. To understand this is to go through the different stages, of aesthetic, moral and religious. The aesthetic is all about the individual and focuses on oneself as an individual. The moral is having to be antagonistic towards yourself in

Kierkegaard believed that subjective reflection was the key understanding meaning in life. He kind of complains with the objective reflection stating that it is impersonal and an indifferent relation to existence. As a matter of fact, this terminology as I shall call it, defines just what the objective world and objective reflection is: being independent of any human subjectivity. Subjective reflection naturally focuses on human existence in a personal, inward way without 'detachment' as Kierkegaard put it.

In order to attempt this sort of analysis, there are a number of factors that must be addressed first, with the most crucial being the understanding of Kierkegaard, his relevant works, and his Philosophy. Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen to Ane Sørensdatter Lund Kierkegaard and Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, the latter a pastor of the Danish National Church. According to Daniel Conway, a professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Texas A&M, “although influential today for his diverse contributions to the fields of philosophy, theology, rhetoric, literary theory, and depth philosophy, Kierkegaard was widely known in his own day as a provocative social critic” (Conway 2015, 1). He was highly critical of the church in his hometown, and the Danish National Church in general, in addition to Christianity and what it meant for one to have faith in the almighty. Thus, much of Kierkegaard’s work deals with faith and Christianity to some extent, as seen with Fear and Trembling, the work that will be most heavily sourced within this thesis. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was written and published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. Kierkegaard often wrote and published his works under different pseudonyms, each often having some sort of significance to the work in which it is situated. The significance of the pseudonym of Fear and Trembling, according to the author of

Firstly, he tries to give answer on question whether Jesus is always the same or he has changed in history and whether we can learn anything about him from history. To this question Kierkegaard responds: ‘Yes, He is the same yesterday and today.’[10] Therefore we can not learn anything new about him from history; we can know him only from sacred history. This means we can know God only as humbled, as ‘lowly one,’[11] but never as the one, who is in glory and who will in glory come. ‘about His coming again nothing can be known; in the strictest sense, it can only be believed.’[12]

Existentialism can be defined as a branch of philosophy that emphasizes individual existence, freedom, and choice. It focuses on the question of human existence and the feeling that there is no purpose or explanation for existence. Although they never used the term existentialism in their works, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are considered two of the first and significant philosophers to the existentialist movement. They focused on subjective human experience and were interested in the struggle to escape boredom and find meaning in life. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also stressed the importance of making free choices and how these choices change the identity of the individual. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche felt that life is

Sigmund Freud is a timeless figure in psychology. To this day, his work of psychoanalysis is still mentioned and dream analysis and so much more are still used. Even though many people may have argued that Freud was crazy himself, he was one of the most influential psychologist known all around the world. However controversial, Freud sums up his works to be a sort of sexual complex such as the Oedipus and the Electra complex. The way he was raised and the relationships he had with his family plays a great impact on his work throughout his years. If it were not for his life experiences, Freud would not be as iconic as he is today.

Kierkegaard's works are not straightforward proclamations of his philosophy: he wrote under pseudonyms and assumed the persona of these fictional characters in his writing. Thus, one must be careful when attributing a particular position to Kierkegaard -- often the view is advanced by a pseudonym, so various inferential processes must be applied in order to substantiate a claim that Kierkegaard really meant any statement.