Thursday, July 17, 2008

Kierkegaard on the "reflective and passionless" age...

If you read this blog at all, you know I like Kierkegaard! Here is a great quote from his essay, "The Present Age." It's a bit dense, like all of his writing, but it's also full of wit, creativity, and brilliance. I may add my own thoughts to it soon, but for now, think about how this description might fit our current "age" in America (or Western culture as a whole):

"A passionate tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down; but a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and passionless transforms that expression of strength into a feat of dialectics: it leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance. Instead of culminating in a rebellion it reduces the inward reality of all relationships to a reflective tension which leaves everything standing but makes the whole of life ambiguous: so that everything continues to exist factually while by a dialectical deceit, privatissame, it supplies a secret interpretation -- that it does not exist."

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