The Descent Timeline

The Descent Branch Timeline

Lives and The Books treated in this series, in calendar order. 

Compiled or posthumous works are marked.

Year	Event
1623	Pascal born, Clermont-Ferrand
1654	Pascal’s Night of Fire (Memorial)
1656–57	Pascal, Provincial Letters
1662	Pascal dies, Paris (age 39)
1670	Pascal, Pensées (posthumous)
1788	Schopenhauer born, Danzig
1813	Kierkegaard born, Copenhagen; Schopenhauer’s doctorate
1818/19	Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1st ed.)
1821	Baudelaire born, Paris; Dostoevsky born, Moscow
1844	Nietzsche born, Röcken; Schopenhauer, WWR 2nd ed. (two volumes)
1849	Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death; Dostoevsky’s mock execution
1851	Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (late fame begins)
1855	Kierkegaard dies, Copenhagen
1857	Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal
1859	Husserl born; Schopenhauer, last revision of WWR
1860	Schopenhauer dies, Frankfurt
1864	Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
1867	Baudelaire dies, Paris
1879–80	Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
1881	Dostoevsky dies, St Petersburg
1883–88	Nietzsche’s notebooks for the will-to-power project
1889	Heidegger born; Nietzsche collapses in Turin
1900	Nietzsche dies
1901 / 1906	Nietzsche, The Will to Power (compiled)
1905	Sartre born, Paris
1906	Beckett born, Foxrock
1913	Husserl, Ideas I
1927	Heidegger, Being and Time
1938	Husserl dies, Freiburg
1943	Sartre, Being and Nothingness
1952–53	Beckett, The Unnamable; Waiting for Godot (play published 1952, premiered 1953)
1976	Heidegger dies
1980	Sartre dies
1989	Beckett dies, Paris

A tighter spine of books only:

1670 Pensées → 1818 World as Will and Representation → 1849 Sickness unto Death → 1857 Fleurs du mal → 1864 Notes from Underground → 1880 Brothers Karamazov → 1901 Will to Power (compiled) → 1913 Ideas → 1927 Being and Time → 1943 Being and Nothingness → 1953 Godot / The Unnamable.

The Descent Branch : The Continuity

The line is now complete enough to be seen as one argument that keeps changing its altar.

Pascal discovers that the self cannot remain with itself and calls the flight diversion. The cure is a God who is fire, not a concept.

Schopenhauer keeps the restlessness, names it will, withdraws the personal God, and offers aesthetic pause and ascetic denial.

Kierkegaard refuses both worldly diversion and impersonal will: the self is a relation that must rest in the power that established it, or despair.

Baudelaire lives Pascal’s diversion and Kierkegaard’s despair as spleen in the city, without a completed leap.

Dostoevsky takes Pascal’s wager and Ivan’s counter-wager into the same house: if God is not, everything is permitted; if God is, you must still become able to love.

Nietzsche accepts Ivan’s premise and refuses both Zosima and Schopenhauer: will is not to be denied; it is to be transfigured as power and yes.

Husserl brackets the whole quarrel to describe how any world is given at all.

Heidegger unscrews the describing subject from its Cartesian chair and sets it in a finite world toward death.

Sartre makes Ivan’s sentence an ontology: no God, therefore total responsibility, therefore bad faith as the new diversion.

Beckett removes even Sartre’s heroic accent. The appointment is kept. No one comes. The voice goes on.

Pascal had already said the last Beckett sentence in another key: you cannot stay in the room, and you cannot leave the room. Everyone in between is an attempt to furnish it, burn it, or wait inside it without lying.