Itβs amazing how Donald D. Palmer manages to write some of the best introductions to some of the most complex topics. Like his βStructuralism and Poststructuralism for Beginnersβ, this work combines the complexity and subtlety of its subject matter with visual engagement.
Here we see Kierkegaard in his uncanniness: his tortured relationships, his pseudonymous authorship, his iconoclastic battles with orthodoxy, his irony and wit, and most of all, his depth of thinking, both theological and existential, that presages thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich, and Sartre. Whether itβs his rebuttal of Cartesian certainty; his anti-conceptualization of dread; his plumbing of despair as the abrogation of the self project; his analysis of objective truth as inconsequential belief; his emphatic plea for the individual discovery of truth as subjectivity; his elaboration of the three existential realms (aesthetic, ethical, religious) and its relationship to dread and the experience of existential (as opposed to physical) death; his understanding of faith as the double movement of infinite resignation and the crucifixion of reason; Donald D. Palmer conveys the essence of these ideas with the brevity and wit of a cartoonist.
Bravo Donald!