📚 Starting a thread to track my reading journey — I’ll keep updating it as long as I’m here on Mastodon.
Right now I’m about to finish Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death (having already read Fear and Trembling, which I’ll reflect on alongside it). I’m also working through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Barthes’ Mythologies, and an intro to medieval philosophy (Basic Concepts).
I’ll be dropping thoughts, quotes, and reflections here as I go — philosophy, literature, history, whatever’s on my shelf.
“He who defends Christianity is Judas number two. The moment you try to defend it, you discredit it. The believer doesn’t defend—he attacks and wins. Faith itself is victory.”
If that’s not the rawest description of what faith feels like, I don’t know what is.
I may not always agree with Kierkegaard, but the man knew how to describe what faith feels like. Even as an agnostic, I can appreciate that. I rely on faith in some parts of my life — just not in belief in God. But damn, Søren could be so poetic it’s crazy.
Kierkegaard’s total commitment to Christianity is truly something to behold, but the most memorable part to me through the experience has been the way he waxes poetically about faith is just beautiful. That certainty — faith in the face of paradox, even in the face of destruction — is powerful to read, even as an outsider.
Socrates, Socrates, Socrates — yes, one may well call thy name thrice. People think the world needs a new republic, a new social order, a new religion. But what it really needs is a Socrates.
Scarily accurate for today’s world. We still need a modern Socrates — someone willing to admit they know nothing, and in that, understand they may know everything.
What struck me here is Kierkegaard’s critique: the sin isn’t being pagan, it’s wearing the Christian mask. For him, ethics without God is just self-enclosed philosophy dressed in borrowed robes.
Kierkegaard in Sickness Unto Death: “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.”
Socrates admitted ignorance and so was “the most knowing.” Christianity insists on the gulf between man and God, preserved only by paradox and faith.
But what happens when we try to collapse that gulf — to fuse human consciousness with machine reasoning? We risk confusing synthesis with transcendence, losing the self without noticing.
The danger isn’t just AI itself, but that in seeking mastery, we erase the very paradox that makes us human.
Kierkegaard: no one would have dreamed of likeness between God and man — until God proclaimed it in Christ. Yet once revealed, people treated it as if God had trapped Himself, as if paradox were only concession.
AI risks a similar collapse. A synthesis of human consciousness and machine learning may tempt us to believe we’ve achieved oneness with reality — our new Promethean fire. But in making transcendence a calculation, we risk turning mystery into program.
It’s been a journey, and I’m sure I’ll circle back to these books in more depth on Substack — maybe a deeper dive into Kierkegaard’s life, thought, and how these two works fit together. For now, I’ll just say: few writers make the paradox of faith feel so real.
Wittgenstein's Monster