Wednesday, January 22, 2020

The Sickness Unto Death

I think it was Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling when I was 15. Or maybe I was 16. It was almost 50 years ago, who remembers?  At least that I considered "philosophy."  I'd read Emerson before that, and came at Thoreau as a philosopher, mostly on the reputation of "Civil Disobedience," though I read that and Walden before Kierkegaard.  Again, if memory serves.

I'd stand by Kierkegaard as my first.  (Sorry, I'm reading the responses to this tweet.  I don't consider any literary work as philosophy.  So I'm excluding those.  Kinda scary, though, to remember how much I've read in fiction.)

1 comment:

  1. Geesh,I wonder what it was. I think I'd read some of the Platonic dialogues by high school, Aristotle was, of course, not fashonable. I remember my Freshman year in college, a tweed-bedecked faculty wife and PhD in her own right admonishing someone that their thinking was too Aristotelian and not virtuously Platonic. I read a lot of Russell in HS but I wouldn't count that as philosophy, now. I know I read lots of other things in high school, I read some Spinoza and thought it was kind of dumb and pointlessly formalistic. I have never seen why he's considered so great. I read some of the existentialists, Sartre, certainly, Camus, lots of secondary literature from philosophy textbooks, books ABOUT philosophy. It's possible that the first thing I read was a textbook in Thomist cosmology - one of my older sisters went to a Catholic school where it was one of the textbooks for their theology requirement. I remember being amused by the sentence "Monism is repugnant" though now I understand why. I wish I'd read Kierkegaard, instead. Though I'm sticking with what I said about the quality of contemporary theology as opposed to contemporary philosophy, which is in the same decadence as theoretical physics, these days.

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