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Kierkegaard and The Logic of Insanity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Merold Westphal
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Yale University

Extract

Feigned madness can be a valuable asset. King David once used it to escape from the Philistines (I Sam. 21), and a twentieth century king, Pirandello's Henry IV pulled much the same trick on a modern philistine culture. Thrown from his horse and struck on the head while on his way to a masquerade party dressed as the Henry of Canossa's chill repentance, he had for twenty years insanely identified himself with the eleventh century monarch. At least this is what his family and the court they provided for his humour thought. As the play opens they are unaware that he has returned to sanity, but has continued to play Henry IV for the last eight of the twenty years, preferring the mad world in which he had lived to the sane world to which he would have to return.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

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page 193 note 2 See Marcuse's critique of one dimensional thinking in One Dimensional Man, especially chapters 4–5, and the suggestion that slogans function hypnotically.

page 194 note 1 244a, Hackforth translation.

page 194 note 2 Kierkegaard's favourite generic terms for non-Christian modes of thought are paganism, the natural man, and the human understanding or reason.

page 194 note 3 This is an Hegelian view of the tragic hero. The priority of the state to the family is developed in his Philosophy of Right, and this conflict is given as the paradigm for tragedy in the Phenomenology.

Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, Garden City, 1954, pp. 10, 31, and 37.

page 195 note 2 From the title of the sermon which concludes Either/Or.

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page 206 note 1 The relation between a theory of the analytic and a theory of inference is a very direct one. Thus meaning postulates can be described as rules which relate predicates in a language so that certain entailments take place, and entailment can in turn be defined in terms of analyticity (‘P’ entails ‘Q’ = df ‘if P then Q’ is analytic). Carnap proceeds in the first way, Strawson in the second'

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