Comparing The Paradox In Johannes Climacus 'Philosophical Fragments'

To begin, “paradox” is defined by 3 ways: something false later seen to be true, something true later seen to be false, and self-contradictory. The first two definitions together only make the third one more evident as “paradox” is a paradox in itself. However, in Johannes Climacus/Soren Kierkegaard’s book “Philosophical Fragments”, paradox seems to mean the nature of self-contradiction. On page 37, Kierkegaard claims that “the paradox is the passion of thought…the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion” (Hong). I perceive this as that the self-contradictory nature of a paradox is what fuels passion or creates a passion for thinking, that the passion of thought is the system of testing one’s own contradictions of one’s ideas. Challenging a paradox and delving into its details must be the most enjoyable aspect of thinking and arguing to the author, and he attempts to illustrate his own emotions to his audience by comparing it to a passion.

A person lives undisturbed in himself, and then awakens the paradox of self-love as love for another… “(Hong). I interpret this as that erotic love is a paradox in that it is difficult to explain how humans love themselves by loving one another. Reasoning would lead us to believe that to love oneself would usually happen at the expense of another (greed) or that it would only involve oneself. However, Kierkegaard is describing that loving something or someone else more specifically lustfully in this context) is the way in which we (as humans) are able to please ourselves and “self-love is the ground [base] … of all love...”