"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

Godhead really means that I shall do, to find a truth which is truth
for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and to die . .
."

This Archimedean point was soon to be furnished him There came
a succession of blows, culminating in the death of his father,
whose silent disapprobation had long been weighing heavily on the
conscience of the wayward son. Even more awful, perhaps, was a
revelation made by the dying father to his sons, very likely
touching that very "sin against the Holy Ghost" which he had
committed in his boyhood and the consequence of which he now
was to lay on them as a curse, instead of his blessing. Kierkegaard
calls it "the great earthquake, the terrible upheaval, which
suddenly forced on me a new and infallible interpretation of all
phenomena." He began to suspect that he had been chosen by
Providence for an extraordinary purpose; and with his abiding
filial piety he interprets his father's death as the last of many
sacrifices he made for him; "for he died, not away from me, but for
me, so that there might yet, perchance, become something of me."
Crushed by this thought, and through the "new interpretation"
despairing of happiness in this life, he clings to the thought of his
unusual intellectual powers as his only consolation and a means by
which his salvation, might be accomplished. He quickly absolved
his examination for ordination (ten years after matriculation) and
determined on his magisterial dissertation.
Already some years before he had made a not very successful
debut in the world of letters with a pamphlet whose queer title
"From the MSS. of One Still Living" reveals Kierkegaard's inborn
love of mystification and innuendo. Like a Puck of philosophy,
with somewhat awkward bounds and a callow manner, he had
there teased the worthies of his times; and, in particular, taken a
good fall out of Hans Christian Andersen, the poet of the Fairy
Tales, who had aroused his indignation by describing in somewhat
lachrymose fashion the struggles of genius to come into its own.
Kierkegaard himself was soon to show the truth of his own dictum
that "genius does not whine but like a thunderstorm goes straight
counter to the wind."

While casting about for a subject worthy of a more sustained effort
he marks out for study the legends of Faust, Of the Wandering
Jew, of Don Juan, as representatives of certain basic views of life;
the, Conception of Satire among the Ancients, etc., etc., he at last
becomes aware of his affinity with Socrates, in whom he found
that rare harmony between theory and the conduct of life which he
hoped to attain himself.

Though not by Kierkegaard himself counted among the works
bearing on the "Indirect Communication" presently to be explained
his magisterial dissertation, entitled "The Conception of Irony,
with Constant Reference to Socrates," a book of 300 pages, is of