Chuck a couple of pillows on the sofa, light the beeswax candles, and put a four-voiced whale song fugue on the CD player, folks - it's time to get cosy with Kierkegaard, the original exponent of the wonderful Danish concept of
hygge!
"If, in the immediately succeeding generation, there lived a person who, with the power and passion of an absolute ruler, had decided to concern himself with nothing other than to get to the truth on this point, would he thus become a disciple? Assume he seized all the contemporary witnesses and those who were closest to them, who were still living, had each independently interrogated as thoroughly as possible, shut them all up like the seventy interpreters, starved them as a means of getting them to tell the truth, cunningly confronted them with one another, simply to ensure in every way possible the most reliable account - would such a person, with the help of this account, be a disciple? Would not the god rather smile at him, that he wished in this way to procure for himself what can neither be bought for money, nor seized by force?"-
Philosophical Crumbs
Ahhh, so comforting. It's like a little bed-cap for the soul.
"Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. … A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety." -
The Concept of Anxiety
That was soothing, too, wasn't it? Let's allow ourselves to be soothed a little more.
"How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite." -
Either/Or
Wasn't that nice? Sometimes it's just nice to be reminded of niceness. It's the little things, you know?
"Thereby small-mindedness sticks together with small-mindedness; they grow together like an ingrown nail, and spiritually speaking it is just as bad." -
Works of Love
Every word is like a cushion!
"When the child has grown and is to be weaned the mother virginally covers her breast, so the child no more has a mother. Lucky the child that lost its mother in no other way!" -
Fear and Trembling.
I - I guess...
“The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” -
The Sickness Unto Death
Awwww, and so with those confusing, confounding, but oh-so-comforting words we leave old Kierkegaard for now.
C 'mere you, and let ol' Søren give you a hygge!
