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[...] Kierkegaard, like Sartre, regards human existence as characterized by the tension between what one is and what one still has to become (as we know, Sartre calls these aspects facticity and transcendence). For Kierkegaard, becoming a self means relating both aspects of human-reality to each ot…

[...] Wanting despair, despairing, means recognizing that something has to change, and that means changing despair from a state that one is in (with or without knowing it) to a self-chosen act; and with that choice the individual leaes despair behind (for he has thereby taken on the task of bec…

[...] despite being the most empathetic character in the novel who is always perceptive of other people's pain and suffering, Mario himself does not feel pain. [...] this neurological deficit seems an unmistakable reference to Wittgenstein's question [...]: what determines the meaning of the uttera…

[...] In Infinite Jest it is exactly this abhorrence of 'unsophisticated naïveté', this 'transcendence of sentiment' through hyperreflexivity and irony, that leads to emptiness, to 'anhedonia, death in life'. The desire to avoid naïveté at all costs is itself a form of naïveté--the 'queerly persi…

Now, most theorists of authenticity prefer to speak of authenticity as the product of continuous self-creation and development and not of an inherent, fixed self-essence. But if there is nothing 'inherent' about the authentic self, then the question arises as to whether we can even speak meaningful…