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May 6th, 2019

gfish: (Default)
Monday, May 6th, 2019 09:54 am
I'm getting better at reading very long, very dense books. Having a daily page goal (usually 25) is becoming instinctual, and there is something comforting knowing that I'll finish something in PAGENUMBERS/DAILYGOAL days. Even if that means the book will take a month, it's less of a psychic burden to have a fairly firm date by which it will be done, and then any days that I do extra reading are a nice bonus. And since I always have a book club book and often an audiobook going at the same time, I'm still getting the dopamine hit of finishing a book often enough.

This was definitely a challenge, though. I've read some Kierkegaard before, but nothing this long. His worldview of Christianity+Kant+Hegel is pretty alien to me. Yet overall it was still a compelling read, and I'd go as far as to call some parts beguiling. It is full of very earnest introspective thoughts about how to choose one's own nature and personality, the kind of thing I obsessed over in my late teens. Kierkegaard is trying out potential personalities, aspects that he sees within himself, and having them argue with each other. Most of it is pretentious rubbish, of course, but it's rubbish that occasionally spoke directly to the pretentious teen inside me. It reminded me a lot of Herman Hesse in that way -- though being far less directly enjoyable, let's be honest.

I'm pretty sure I would have hated Soren in person. The misogyny is pretty thick throughout the whole thing, though no doubt he would have been shocked by the very concept. He might as well be the patron saint of "nice guys". He didn't even have the guts to directly say the things he was thinking. The book was published under a pseudonym, the contents are presented as mysterious manuscripts the pseudonymous author happened to stumble across in a contrived fashion, and even the "Diary of a Seducer" section (the most straight-forwardly interesting, though in the service of describing an utterly despicable character) is wrapped in yet another layer of deniability by itself being found by one of the anonymous authors of the found manuscripts being presented by the pseudonymous Kierkegaard!

Under the moralizing, much of the book is focused on questions of contingency vs. necessity, an issue I still find philosophically pressing. I can't accept its argument that the solution is to be Christian, of course, but that's an interesting approach to take. From my outsider perspective, a lot of the religious drive does seem to be driven by a fear of the contingent. I finally understand why Kierkegaard is considered a proto-existentialist, at least.