Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on texts and abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Spectre and the logic of error
- 2 The Spectre as Kierkegaard's concept of dread
- 3 The Spectre and the line of life
- 4 Mastered irony as the ground of human community
- 5 Irony and authority
- Conclusion. Los and the Spectre: master and slave in the labor of the negative
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Spectre and the logic of error
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on texts and abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 The Spectre and the logic of error
- 2 The Spectre as Kierkegaard's concept of dread
- 3 The Spectre and the line of life
- 4 Mastered irony as the ground of human community
- 5 Irony and authority
- Conclusion. Los and the Spectre: master and slave in the labor of the negative
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Thou art in Error Albion, the land of Ulro
One error not remov'd, will destroy a Human Soul
Repose in Beulah's night till the Error is remov'd
Reason not on both sides.
Blake, JerusalemWe read in fairy tales about human beings whom mermaids and mermen enticed into their power by means of demoniac music. In order to break the enchantment it was necessary for the person who was under the spell to play the same piece of music backwards without making a single mistake. This is very profound, but very difficult to perform, and yet so it is: the errors one has taken into oneself one must eradicate in this way, and every time one makes a mistake one must begin all over.
Judge William, Either/OrCrises in their personal lives contributed in large measure to the erratic evolutions of Blake and Kierkegaard as poet–philosophers. True to their own dialectic of crisis, of the individual, and of “life,” they perceived certain events in their lives as decisive turning points for their thought and literary production. “At the first glance I saw that he was a poet,” says Kierkegaard's Constantine Constantius, “ – for this reason, if for no other, that an occurrence which, if it had happened to a commonplace man would quietly have come to nothing, assumed in his case the proportions of a cosmic event” (R, 137).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Blake, Kierkegaard, and the Spectre of Dialectic , pp. 23 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991