The Great Nay-Sayer

...Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Proudhon, and Kierkegaard stand closer to Blake, Kafka, Shelley, and Dostoevsky than to their fellow philosophers Kant, Russell, Marx, and Barth...

...Indeed, one can best describe the philosophers who are poets in terms of those poets (counting novelists) who are philosophers...

...Both the poets and the poet-philosophers proceed outside any system...

...Along with a fondness for irony and ambiguity, the poet-philosophers share with many literary figures a tendency to be poetes man-ques...

...By an act of able restoration, Thompson has put the writings back into the structure of Kierkegaard's actual life, allowing us to view them in terms of their author's intentions...

...The notion that Kierkegaard's thought or career can help us to understand or cope with existence must in the end be dismissed, because if Nietzsche was the great Yea-sayer, Kierkegaard was certainly the great Nay-sayer...

...It is Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard who are published in paperbacks and widely if often inaccurately read...

...Outside the universities the Kants and the Russells are without influence...

...Among artists, Oscar Wilde is perhaps the classic example of the writer who assumes from his failure to achieve communication that he must be manque, and who turns his life into an exemplum that will carry meaning where his works have failed to do so...

...This is what divides Nietzsche from Kant...

...He is a fascinating figure, and a haunting one, a genius at once pitiful and repellent...

...Nor do we see them presented in the context of 20th-century existentialist theorizing, for the biographer has carefully avoided any leaning toward philosophic partisanship...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde" and "The Writer and Politics" there is one basic division among philosophers that overleaps every school and all other categories...

...he spoke for them all, just as Whitman did when he said: "Do I contradict myself...

...Through the tensions of contradiction and the recognition of the deeper uses of such literary dimensions as irony and ambiguity, the poet-philosophers acquire a peculiar resilience, which brings them springing back out of misrepresentation (Nietzsche), out of misunderstanding (Wittgenstein), out of the political defeat of their disciples (Proudhon), or out of mere neglect (Kierkegaard...

...in political philosophy, Proudhon from Marx...

...Some thinkers are poets, creative artists fulfilling their imaginative destinies in the writing of books...

...the only exception among the systematizers is Marx, and he was more ambiguous, less rigorous, than his orthodox followers have been willing or able to grant...

...What Thompson constantly makes clear is the essentially literary character of Kierkegaard's activities during the larger and more productive part of his life...

...And in our own time they have become the most attractive and most influential of thinkers, whereas the systematizes have become academicsince their technical discourses can only be accommodated in an environment where the minute subdivision of scholarly disciplines is professionally recognized and desired...

...Josiah Thompson has so blended the works of his subject with the life that there is no final chapter of assessment...

...The realization of this pattern in Kierkegaard-who ended as the exemplary actor in his own tragedy, deliberately inducing mockery in others, and in whom the literary artificer often predominated over the philosopher-directs the strat-y of this biography...

...Wittgenstein from Russell...

...Very well, then I contradict myself...

...Even in posing a "philosophy of existence," Thompson points out, Kierkegaard wrote ironically and ambiguously...

...others are rational systematizes, attempting to comprehend the universe through an all-encompassing method or model...

...Kierkegaard destroyed his own life by a series of negative decisions and acts that exemplified his fear of living and his desire to remain estranged from existence...

...Kierkegaard, living on a small stage remote from the grand theaters of European culture, unheard most of the time and un-comprehended when he was heard, plays the equivalent role among the poet-philosophers...

...When Proudhon answered an earnest inquirer: "My system...

...He is like those Hindu, Buddhist and Christian anchorites who court disease and death, rejecting beauty as a deception, proclaiming the essential ugliness and corruption of all that is...

...Ultimately, these works "seek to show the vanity of all philosophy and metaphysics...

...in theology, Kierkegaard from Barth...

...I have no system...

...The advantage of this approach is that we no longer see Kierkegaard's work in isolation, or in carefully edited fragments (as is frequently the case throughout the English-reading world...

...In elevating the death's head to a leading symbol, they conclude by evoking a life of the spirit as joyless as the earthly life they have created for themselves...

...Instead, the book ends with an account of Kierkegaard's bizarre funeral, as gross a demonstration of the vanity of human pretensions as the philosopher himself could ever have desired...

...As a result, any attempt to claim him as a precursor of modern existentialist teachings is merely to make oneself the victim of a sardonic jester...

...Thompson says of the mass of Kierkegaard's most celebrated writings: "The ambience of all these works is that of duplicity, and their essential theme is the inherent volatility of human consciousness...

...Yet, as the biographer also shows, Kierkegaard was no mere man-of-letters, but an imaginative writer who played with ideas, and who created elaborate structures of irony intended to exemplify the essential duality-even deviousness-of human thought...