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January 17, 2007
worldliness
The world really only interests itself in intellectual or aesthetic limitations, or in the indifferent, which is always what the world talks about most. For worldliness is precisely to ascribe infinite value to the indifferent. The worldly point of view always clings closely to the difference between man and man, and has naturally no understanding of the one thing needful, and therefore no understanding of that limitation and narrowness which is to have lost oneself, not by being volatilized in the infinite, but by being altogether finitized, by instead of being a self, having become a cipher, one more person, one more repetition of this perpetual one-and-the-same.
Be seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like others, to become a copy, a number, along with the crowd.
Kierkegaard - The Sickness Unto Death
Posted by amin at January 17, 2007 4:14 AM