November 11, 1855

And we are back in the land of Nordic Noir. Soren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813 to November 11, 1855) was an original and important thinker. He is the guy who gave the modern world its overriding trope: man is a creature defined by his interior world.

This could be a useful insight but what happened to Kierkegaard's original thinking was that his followers neglected the fact the human experience of self-awareness is part of a dipole reality. You are aware of something outside of yourself. There cannot be a subject without an object, as Derrida reminds us.

A quote from his volume Either/Or (1843 Danish publication date) includes these lines:

What is it that binds me? From what was the chain formed that bound the Fenris Wolf? It was made of the noise of cats' paws walking on the ground, from women's beards, from the roots of rocks, from the nerves of bears, from the breath of fishes, and of the spittle of birds.

The Fenris Wolf phrase is from Norse mythology and would not have confused his original audience. The chains binding the wolf were of non-existent things; the sounds of cats walking....

He goes on:

I too am bound in the same way by a chain of gloomy fancies, of alarming dreams, of troubled thoughts, of fearful presentiments, of inexplicable anxieties. This chain is very flexible...and cannot be torn apart.

How these last words echo in the hearts of modern man--"inexplicable anxieties". Kierkegaard points to the non-existent as imprisoning him. What Kierkegaard cannot see is that these forces, of his fantasy, only have power because he himSELF is non-existent. And by that I merely mean the obvious--- that the subjective only has meaning because it is actually a part of something larger.

So we have another Prince of Denmark, only this time, there is no revenge story to explain the drama. That drama is an example of something larger.

Our moody philosopher is trapped by the assumptions he makes about the priority of the subjective. But perhaps I should stop right there. The sound of those cat paws has carried us a good distance.