iwpoe wrote:

Seán Mac Críodáin wrote:

I've heard good and bad things about Kierkegaard. Does anyone here have an opinion to share about him?

Mmm. He's wrong about Hegel, but that's Schelling's fault, and he's too wary of systems of all kinds to see that his attitude to reasoning with respect to God is illegitimate, and that reason ought to be as authentic a mode of life as the others he presents. This idea that the life of reason isn't *really* a mode of life if strange indeed. Nietzsche suggests it also, so clearly it's in the air, but it has no ground.

Otherwise, I think he's a great writer. One of my core ethical thoughts is that the modern age contrasts with the ancient age in that our key vices are not excesses like lust or hubris but deficiencies like cowardice, but most especially acedia (ἀκηδία: "sloth"/negligence/depression), and I think that what Christians often take (because of the focus on the ancient context of the gospels) to be excesses are really kinds of deficiencies. The young college girl who sleeps with dozens of men in this age is is not usually lustful; she's apathetic and negligent. She doesn't even feel enough to know what lust is. She's so desperate to feel something that she'll shoot for what are traditionally acts of high passion just to feel something stronger than eating a bag of crisps. Kierkegaard, as all romanticists before him, and many of the "existentialists" after, sensed this and poured all his efforts into awakening a fuller affective life.which is intellectually necessary today if anyone is to do anything like philosophy seriously.

I think you're on to something there. It certainly lines up with my experience, both of observing others and myself. Is that what his ideas like the "knight of faith" are about, then? Trying to make the faith romantically engaging?

I've heard good and bad things about Kierkegaard. Does anyone here have an opinion to share about him?

I would like to draw your attention to a particularly insidious political tactic which is highly pervasive, yet widely unrecognised, namely, concern trolling. Concern trolling is the act of disrupting a group by pretending to be either a member or a sympathetic person, who is "concerned" about some tendencies, beliefs or actions of the target group. The concern troll claims that the target tendency or action is counterproductive to the group's broader goals; the target, believing the troll to be a legitimate concerned sympathiser, takes the "constructive criticism" on board, and either ends or moderates his activities. In attempting to defend oneself from concern trolling, it is possible to become hyper-vigilant and end up dismissing real constructive criticism from legitimate concerned sympathisers, so concern trolling in such a way that one will be found out by the target can itself be a useful tactic, because it can push the target towards an indefensibly radical position.

Some examples:

The concern troll infiltrates a group of radical Muslims and argues that terrorist attacks are counterproductive to the broader goal of proselytising Islam.

The concern troll infiltrates a group of radical animal rights activists and argues that attacking fur farms is counterproductive to the broader goal of convincing people to be sympathetic to the cause.

The concern troll infiltrates a group of pro-life activists and argues that showing gruesome images of aborted children is more likely to turn people away than convince them that abortion is evil.

Will you elaborate on that? I'm not sure what you mean.

Do you have an excess of lurkers here?