fooloso4
He does not, as he says, write in such a way that readers can skim the book during the after-dinner nap. An interpretative challenge. I’m interested
Really? No, he is not easy at all. He is idiosyncratic and self absorbed to the point incoherence and neurosis. He does this intentionally, I mean, he is aggressively anti establishment and celebrates independence with complex attacks on orthodoxy. I think it is best to read K as if he were not a Christian at all, because all of his arguments are outside the "system". They're existential, not, as he says, exegetical. I can't say I understand everything he says, in fact it is best, I have found, to leave the inscrutable parts (to me, that is) for later, and move on expecting clarification to rise out of later reading.What I really like about him is both his intense analysis, and he gets very dialectical (no doubt mimicking Hegel and yet adopting Hegel's dialectical method both at once. Hubert Dreyfus takes him seriously because he knows K presents the same analyses consistently elsewhere,though Dreyfus, like, it seems, most philosophers, makes almost no reference to the religious conclusions K draws), and his passion which he is emphatic about. This passion is a repudiation of rationalism, and a great deal of his writing is all about this assumption that the rationalists of his day, as well as the historical theologians, make about the power of reason and history in determining faith. For K, reason is simply an abstraction trying to subsume eternity. Levinas is like this and for me, this is exactly right, though like K, I refuse to simply romanticize about it. K's arguments are objective, that is rationally accessible, about radical subjectivity.
God the tempter.
I don't know. Across the K literature, temptation seems to be our being here living and breathing and therefore estranged from god. K would have made a good Buddhist.
Doubt and going beyond faith.
K comes down very hard on those "of his day" and mocks them openly and with hostility, for they miss the the point entirely about what being a Christian is, yet they have the so much to say. reminds me of Meursault in Canus' Stranger at the end where he screams at the priest for his presumption of knowing. Camus wrote about K in his Absurd essays for they have kindred but divergent beliefs.
lifetime to be proficient at doubting
. As well as for having faith. They are two sides of the same coin and I think to doubt is a kind of apophatic technique, like inquiry itself, to undermine our assumptions about the world and realize our "falleness".
Doubt that faith is understood
Comprehending faith is like, like passing a camel through the eye of a needle, and it is, as K says elsewhere in Fragments and Anxiety, trying to take one thing, reason, to be explicatively commensurate with something, the world/eternity, that is qualitatively different.
exegetical scholar but knowing Hebrew perhaps he would have easily understood the story and Abraham
I think he is surely being ironic.
Various versions of the story of Abraham
As with the Concept of Anxiety, K uses biblical stories to make an existential point. An examination of this story lets him consider reason and ethical law (an kind or criticism of Kant and business of rationalizing ethics. K is basically saying: you think, you philosophers and theologians, think you understand ethics? Understand This!
out of time now. One of the most rewarding things about reading K is discovering Heidegger, Sartre, and the other in their original inspiration. They all read K, and they all were his intellectual/existential progeny.