“In spiritlessness there is no anxiety. It is too happy for that, too content, and too spiritless. But this is a very pitiable reason, and paganism differs from spiritlessness in the former being definable as directed toward spirit and the latter as directed from spirit. Paganism is, if you will, the absence of spirit and thus differs far from spiritlessness. Paganism is in this respect much to be preferred. Spiritlessness is spirit’s stagnation and ideality’s caricature. Spiritlessness is accordingly not literally dumb when it comes to repetition by rote, but it is dumb [has lost its sense] in the way in which it is said of salt that it has lost its flavor† and when one asks then how it can be salted.”
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Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.