Man For Himself

Hegel's lectures have had as great a historical impact as the works he himself published. Important elements of his system are elaborated only in the lectures, especially those given in Berlin during the last decade of his life.

Repetition means getting our cognitive and moral bearings not through prompted remembering, but quite unexpectedly as a gift from the unknown, as a revelation from the future. Repetition is epiphany that sometimes grants the old again, as new, and sometimes grants something radically new.

This book is the fruit of a love for Sartre that lasted more than twelve years, during which this French thinker lived within my breath; he was my sustenance and drink.

The thesis of the book is that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realisation of his individual self.

Freedom, though it has brought him his independence and rationality, has isolated him, and made him anxious and powerless.

This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realisation of positive freedom which is based on the uniqueness and individuality of man.

Reidar Thomte's Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion is an excellent read for students beginning their study of one of the "greats" of the nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy. Thomte directly appropriates Kierkegaard's insightful language and discussion of theological and philosophical issues that stimulated him, all of which are still alive and well today.