
I still love Kierkegaard - lermontov
https://aeon.co/essays/happy-birthday-kierkegaard-we-need-you-now
======
mschaef
Whenever I see Kierkegaard referenced, I can't help but think of Michael
Swaine's comments (1998) on how it influenced Stroustrup as he developed C++:

> Is modesty a virtue in a programming language? Stroustrup thinks so.
> Invisibility, even. "If you know what language you are using," he says,
> "there is something wrong. You shouldn't be able to tell." The "you" in this
> case is the user, I guess. Even Bjarne isn't modest enough to suggest that
> the programmer shouldn't be able to tell the difference between C++ and
> Java. But he may be mystical enough. Red Herring notes that Stroustrup's
> thinking was heavily influenced by the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard.
> Gosling, as we know, was influenced by an oak tree growing outside his
> window.

[http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Web...](http://collaboration.cmc.ec.gc.ca/science/rpn/biblio/ddj/Website/articles/DDJ/1998/9808/9808l/9808l.htm)

~~~
throwawayjava
When I'm feeling contemplative, I really want to read something continental
for the evening. But when I have shit to do, I snap into an analytic frame of
mind.

I feel the same way about programming languages; the Kierkegaardian crowd
(C++, Perl) are great for evening enjoyment, but I'd prefer something from the
more analytic tradition to language design when there's work to be done.

~~~
miloshadzic
so you program in prolog or coq when you _really_ need to get stuff done?

~~~
throwawayjava
It's just an analogy, and I didn't claim it's perfect :-)

But there's a divide between language authors who sound like
engineers/mathematicians and language authors who sound like continental
philosphers.

I'd include languages like Java, Python, Go, Haskell, OCaml to be in the
"analytic tradition" as well. And yes. lots of people get lots of work done in
those languages :-)

~~~
opportune
I'd agree that Python and OCaml are analytic. But personally I find Java much
more "continental" than C++, in that it combines aesthetics and function in a
way that is both time-tested/consistent and expressive. C++ has always felt
like a programming language designed with the same philosophy in mind that
Frankenstein had when creating his monster.

~~~
rtpg
Comparing C++ to Frankenstein is a bit of a dis-service to the time spent
developing this language.

There's some bad innards from C compatibility, but that's only a small sliver
of the overall language. The language overall is very big, but has a high
level of consistency and.... dare I say orthogonality.

The open-ness of the language at the outset, especially around the breadth of
available overloading, means that future improvements can work in an extremely
wide space. It's one of the few languages that stays true to the "every type
is a class, no type is special" philosophy.

It's powerful stuff and gives you more control than you can find almost
anywhere else, especially with the more modern improvements that pull in a lot
of goodies from other languages.

I'd say the biggest wart is the compiler-linking process... the fact that the
preprocessor is still a thing is rough.

~~~
barrkel
C++ is configurable in all the wrong ways. Its orthogonality is only with
respect to a C-oriented perspective on the world; it doesn't have a
philosophy, so much as "like C but let me customize most of the underlying
operations". That it is usable at all is mostly down to enormous amounts of
effort and careful selection of idioms. Writing C++ reminds me a bit of
playing chess: if you're deep in the idiom, there are only a handful of moves
to consider, but if you're out of it, there are so many mistakes you can make.

I like the "pit of success" analogy. In design (whether it's API or language,
or even physical mechanisms), doing the right thing should be the easiest way
to go. C++ has a narrow ridge of success, with cliffs not far from either
side.

A more orthogonal, more powerful and even more controllable language, to me,
would be some variant of Scheme or Lisp that let you produce fully typed ASTs
or even target code for the places where you need absolute control over
performance, but high level enough to focus on the business domain problems
most of the time. C++ demonstrably simply can't climb very far in the
abstraction stack; people don't write web apps in C++. That's the metric that
matters in the end.

------
nrjames
I always preferred Kierkegaard's contemporary, N.F.S. Grundtvig. If
Kierkegaard was "you have to be a good Christian before you can be a good
person," then Grundtvig was, "you have to be a good person before you can be a
good Christian." As the ideological founder of the folk high school system in
Scandinavia, he's had a long and lasting impact on the importance of
education.

------
baldfat
My son is named Soren after Kierkegaard. I was a Theology/Philosophy Major and
there isn't a single theologian/philosopher that means as much to me.

I figure if I named my son after him he will have to read some of his writing
and POSSIBLY gain some thoughts that lead to other thoughts that he will
always hold dear.

~~~
59nadir
Sören/Søren or Soren? They're not the same.

~~~
mborch
But they are... Unless you want to be pedantic.

~~~
59nadir
They're not pronounced at all the same, no. Naming your child Soren after
Sören makes about as much sense as naming a child Ålän after Alan. You do
realize that the "o" and "ö" are different letters representing different
sounds, right?

Edit: As a dane you should realize how stupid it sounds for you to argue that
Soren and Sören are the same, both with swedish and danish pronunciation. It's
not at all being pedantic. Do you also think that ч is a 4 and н is a h? The
only thing that "ö" and "o" have in common is that they're vowels.

~~~
3131s
I mean, neither the letter ø nor the sounds /œ/ or /ø/ exist in English, so
presuming the GP lives in an English speaking country they probably didn't
want to curse their kid with a name that nobody could pronounce. So, as has
been an American custom for a long time, they modified the name slightly by
substituting out a visually similar character with vaguely similar
phonological characteristics (the /ɔ/ in "Soren" is rounded, open-mid like
/œ/). And as they say, it's the thought that counts!

~~~
baldfat
Also it is common in English and most other countries to have different
spellings for the same name. In English it is called Anglicisation.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation)

Jesus was never called Jesus (probably). His name was Yehoshua (Joshua but
Hebrew has no J) but when translated to Greek we get Jesus. In French Jacob is
pronounced James due to some name meaning of James being having a limp. The
New Testament Book called James in English is Jakob in Greek. These things
happen for a thousand times.

Also I went to college in Minneapolis and Swedish is used as frequently as
Spanish is in most Northeast cities. I met dozens of Sorens and none of them
pronounced it differently.

~~~
59nadir
The argument about anglicized names usually works because there are lots of
shared names by way of shared religion. Иван can be anglicized as John because
it's an important name in the foundation of both western and eastern european
religion, not because someone just decided they seem similar.

> I met dozens of Sorens and none of them pronounced it differently.

And none of them were named the same as Søren Kierkegaard, being named Soren
and all.

Being from MN, by the way, you would think actually naming your kid the same
as the person you're naming them after wasn't such a big deal, considering
there's lots of scandinavian heritage there.

I think the big takeaway here is that americans, for all their talk of
heritage and mixed culture are still super resistant to actually embracing and
getting things from other cultures right. In general I'd say native English
speakers are extremely lazy when it comes to other languages.

This assumption that you can remove umlauts and diacritics from letters and
everything will be fine is everywhere in US media and it's pretty ridiculous.
Both umlauts and diacritics _specifically_ mark a difference in pronunciation.
That's their entire purpose.

~~~
baldfat
> Being from MN ...

I went to college in Minneapolis. I'm from Connecticut.

> I think the big takeaway here is that americans, for all their talk of
> heritage and mixed culture are still super resistant to actually embracing
> and getting things from other cultures right.

When it is actually IMPOSSIBLE for me to spell my son's name with anything
other then what is possible with the English Alphbet your just coming off as
Pedantic - overly concerned with minute details or formalisms, especially in
teaching.

------
jyriand
I would suggest listening to Hubert Dreyfus's lectures on Kierkegaard. You can
find some on youtube[0].Tried to read Kierkegaard before and did't really
understand anything. But these lectures give some good context.

[0] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKIWraaouu4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKIWraaouu4)

~~~
eevilspock
I took Dreyfus's _Existentialism in Literature and Film_ class at Berkeley,
and it is my favorite class to date. It had a profound effect on my life. It
was sad to hear he did earlier this year[1].

The thoughts of Kierkegaard that made him great had nothing to do with
religion, so those who are unable to read him due to his religiosity (see
other comments) are missing out.

It may seem like hyperbole, but I agree with:

> He was an existentialist a century before Jean-Paul Sarte, more rigorously
> post-modern than postmodernism, and a theist whose attacks on religion bit
> far deeper than many of those of today’s new atheists. Kierkegaard is not so
> much a thinker for our time but a timeless thinker, whose work is pertinent
> for all ages yet destined to be fully attuned to none.

Ahead of his time? Absolutely. Think about all the men in the news and not in
the news toady who use their power over women for sex, and then read this:
[http://www.readingtheology.com/the-king-and-the-maiden-by-
sø...](http://www.readingtheology.com/the-king-and-the-maiden-by-søren-
kierkegaard)

\--

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14259009](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14259009)

~~~
mynameishere
_and then read this_

I read that and it seemed to end abruptly, so I looked for a full version
elsewhere on the internet. No, that's the full version. Why did you link to
it? It's like half a story a child would write.

As for men using power for sex, well yeah. That's why we're humans and not
still lungfish.

------
interfixus
Kierkegaard annoys the crap out out of me, as almost all philosophers do.

But I will say this for the guy: He had humour. A weird, understated, tangled
one, but he had it.

Mind you, it is so tied up with his native language and culture, it ought not
travel well. And judging by whatever translations I have seen, it hasn't. His
worldwide fame is still a mystery to me.

And by the way, correct pronunciation is something like _Kierkegore_.
Fittingly, it means churchyard.

~~~
paulpauper
why would a philosopher be annoying. confusing, certainly, but annoying?

~~~
mr_toad
Socrates was annoying enough to get himself poisoned.

------
cerealbad
There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any
remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

given memories, things, and time.

------
pmoriarty
Reading Kierkegaard was one of the low points of my philosophy studies. K
writes in such a rambling, self-indulgent, muddle-headed way. Every few
hundred pages there might be a small gem, but for me it was not anywhere near
worth digging through all the refuse for.

As far as proto-existentialists go, give me Leopardi over Kierkegaard any day.

~~~
hprotagonist
> K writes in such a rambling, self-indulgent, muddle-headed way.

When he chose to, it was on purpose. He was wholly capable of writing clearly.
Nesting levels of meta-text, intentionally adopting a different authorial
voice as a metatextual gambit, etc. were all pretty new things when he was
alive.

They're trite or annoying now, but it's still important to know that he wasn't
just being a whiny prat. They're signs that maybe you should or should not
take this or that particular penname totally seriously. ('johannes silentio'
was super prolix, etc. )

~~~
baldfat
I blame the professor's reading material.

Read Soren K. when he was writing with his own name. I taught the Philosophy
class on Kierkegaard every semester, because our Philosophy Chair hated him so
much. We ended up being good friends and he now actually enjoys S.K. now.

S.K. is the most influential and impacting philosopher of the 20th Century
(Arguably but I'm pretty sure I'm right). You might not like what you know of
him but he took over almost all the theological/philosophy thought by storm 50
years after his death. Heck there were no English translations till the 1940s.
He went from a forgotten Danish philosopher to the founder of Existentialism.
Hegel never even knew he was alive let alone read his rebuke to his system of
philosophy, but S.K. surpassed all of his contemporaries.

------
jksmith
"Don't be a little Soren" \-- Old professor of mine.

~~~
baldfat
Soren K. was beloved and his funeral was HUGE. BUT Soren got out trolled and
he became the meme of his era.

------
nocoder
SO I have no clue about Kierkegaard, in India very few people know about him.
Having seen the discussion here, I am fascinated to learn more about him and
his ideas. What will be a good place for me to start? Any books or articles
that are recommended?

~~~
molteanu
The Present Age. Short, witty and fun. [https://www.amazon.com/Present-Age-
Rebellion-Harperperennial...](https://www.amazon.com/Present-Age-Rebellion-
Harperperennial-Thought/dp/0061990035)

------
wyclif
I still prefer Hegel, particularly his _Philosophy of Right_.

------
bambax
> _Kierkegaard’s greatest illustration of this is his retelling of the story
> of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is often held up
> as a paradigm of faith because he trusted God so much he was prepared to
> sacrifice his only son on his command. Kierkegaard makes us realize that
> Abraham acted on faith not because he obeyed a difficult order but because
> lifting the knife over his son defied all morality and reason. No reasonable
> man would have done what Abraham did. (...) So when Abraham took his leap of
> faith, he took leave of reason and morality._

I don't know if Kierkegaard actually said any of this, but it's wrong. Child
sacrifice is as old as time. Many myths or actual rituals involved killing
one's own children. It's found in most ancient cultures from the Middle East
to the Americas.

It was therefore not "irrational" to do so, but, rather, quite reasonable and
normal (if horrible), esp. in dire times.

The innovation found in some books of the Bible was just the opposite: to
declare that child sacrifice is in fact bad and should be avoided.

And of course Jesus is that exact same myth of child sacrifice (with a twist:
he dies but lives again).

~~~
coliveira
Like in mostly everything, the Bible is ambiguous about child sacrifice. A
lesser known character, Jephthah, committed child sacrifice after wining a
battle with the help of god, and in that case there was no scapegoat as in
Isaac's tale.

~~~
doulos
The account of Jephthah is vastly different than of Abraham; though neither
indicate any ambiguity on God's stance regarding child sacrifice.

Judges 11 1) The Spirit of the Lord had already come upon Jephthah before he
made his vow; showing that God was already intending to give him victory.
(v29) 2) Jephthah rashly made a vow to God of his own accord, which was never
affirmed by God nor required by God. (v30-31)

Even on a surface level reading of the passage, it would be difficult to
defend that it was ever God's desire that Jephthah sacrifice his daughter.
And, if he knew the character of God as proclaimed by God himself in Exodus
34:6-7, he could have repented and received grace and he still would have had
his daughter.

~~~
coliveira
> he could have repented and received grace and he still would have had his
> daughter.

This is just modern people creating a new interpretation of old writings.
Apparently Abraham also didn't know about the "grace", since he was decided to
kill his son and didn't even tried to ask God otherwise. God also was not
worried at all, since he didn't care to enlighten Jephthah about his "grace"
(even for the sake of the child).

------
kraig911
Søren has always kind of put me off to philosophy and existentialism. Creating
foundations within religion as matter of fact then using it as a principal to
state everything is meaningless... my mind couldn't make the connection.

~~~
burntrelish1273
Exactly. It's noncommittal, inconsistent and still at the mercy and
vulnerability of magical thinking. The positive part was watering-down ideas
enough to be palatable to those whom were predominantly religious. Reality is
too much for most people to accept, so they lie to themselves and each other.

~~~
runesoerensen
> still at the mercy and vulnerability of magical thinking

What magical thinking are you referring to?

~~~
mirimir
religion = magical thinking

~~~
runesoerensen
Well that's a silly thing to say. For the record, Kierkegaard doesn't claim to
_know_ or try to prove that god exist. Doubting is a crucial part of
believing, and literally requires a "leap of faith" according to Kierkegaard.
That's one of the major things that separates religious belief from for
instance scientific knowledge. Also:

 _" Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are
offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal,
infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal,
finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to
this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot
do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose
faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than
reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd."_
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/)

~~~
mirimir
Sure, but he goes on about religion a lot. And it's always been obvious to me
that faith is foolish. I was reading Popper, Kuhn, Nietzsche, Camus, Kafka,
Hesse and so on. And I had no patience for Kierkegaard's obsession with
fantasy. I mean, I enjoy fantasy. But I know that it's fantasy.

------
yarrel
Fear and Trembling reads like the fan of an aging rock band trying to convince
a bored listener that the comeback album really is as good as the old material
if they just listen to it enough times.

I cannot imagine being impressed by the contorted peregrinations of its
attempt at gaslighting.

