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The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

REISSUE-Ep. 29: Kierkegaard on the Self

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark Linsenmayer

Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.62.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2024

⏱️ 117 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What is the self? For K. we are a tension between opposites: necessity and possibility, the finite and the infinite, soul and body. He thinks we're all in despair, whether we know it or not, because we wrongly think we're something we're not, or we reject what we are, or we just don't pay attention to this dynamic at all: we just go along with the crowd. So we need to keep self-examining and (he thinks) ultimately embrace our subservience to God. Given all this, is there anything one can get out of the text if you don't subscribe to K's Christianity?

We're releasing this re-issue as a coda to our recent series on K.

Get the rest of our paywalled, vintage episodes at partiallyexaminedlife.com/support, along with a steady stream of new bonus content.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hey folks, it's Mark here in February 2024.

0:10.0

Next week you will get the first installment of our Aristotle's metaphysics series that looks to be four episodes long at this point.

0:17.5

We'll see, but we're not quite ready to release that.

0:20.5

We had some editing issues. We wanted to give ourselves more time to read so we

0:24.5

thought we'd try to do right by kirkagard you might have noticed that we

0:28.3

covered the aesthetic point of view and the ethical point of view in some detail, but then only got one discussion of fear and trembling

0:36.8

that didn't quite get his take on faith, or at least we seem very confused,

0:41.6

perhaps unsympathetic about it, and I think our Marcel discussion goes

0:45.9

some way in alleviating that, giving a more modern version of Kirkegaard's take on faith,

0:51.1

a version that is strangely less overtly religious.

0:54.6

But I'd had it in the back of my mind since we recorded the Fear and Trembling episode

0:58.4

that I would love to share this episode from November 2010, where we first exposed ourselves to Kickergarde.

1:06.7

Fear and trembling was among our assigned readings, but we barely talk about that at all.

1:10.5

It's mostly about the book's sickness unto Death. We recorded some reflections about this

1:14.3

episode for the nightcap that we were released at the end of last year. Even in the

1:19.2

public preview you should be able to hear pretty much all we had to say about that. But here is the

1:23.8

episode in its entirety pulled out from behind the paywall for you 13 plus years

1:30.4

after we initially recorded it. We hope you enjoy it and of course if you like

1:35.0

this, maybe you want to hear the rest of our paywalled episodes. You can do it. It's easy.

1:39.6

You go to partially examined life. Life. Come slash support.

1:43.2

You sign up, heck, you can pay $5, download all the paywalled episodes,

1:47.6

and unsubscribe immediately.

...

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