Hundstrup kierkegaard biography

Kierkegaard was accused of Weigelianism and Darbyismbut the article continued to say, "One great truth has been made prominent, viz namely : That there exists a worldly-minded clergy; that many things in the Church are rotten; that all need daily repentance; that one must never be contented with the existing state of either the Church or her pastors.

Hans Lassen Martensen addressed Kierkegaard's ideas extensively in Christian Ethicspublished in August Strindberg was deeply affected by reading Kierkegaard while a student at Uppsala University. His fame has been steadily growing since his death, and he bids fair to become the leading religio-philosophical light of Germany. Not only his theological but also his aesthetic works have of late become the subject of universal study in Europe.

Although not cited by him explicitly, Kierkegaard's view of faith would influence Norwegian theologian Gisle Christian Johnson The first academic to draw attention to Kierkegaard was fellow Dane Georg Brandeswho published in German as well as Danish. Brandes gave the first formal lectures on Kierkegaard in Copenhagen and helped bring him to the attention of the European intellectual community.

Autorisirte deutsche Ausg [ ] which Adolf Hult said was a "misconstruction" of Kierkegaard's work and "falls far short of the truth". Brandes also discussed the Corsair Affair in the same book. There are two types of the artistic soul. There is the one which needs many varying experiences and constantly changing models, and which instantly gives a poetic form to every fresh incident.

There is the other which requires amazingly few outside elements to fertilise it, and for which a single life circumstance, inscribed with sufficient force, can furnish a whole wealth of ever-changing thought and modes of expression. To which did Shakespeare belong? William Shakespeare; a critical study, by George Brandes. One thing James did have in common with Kierkegaard was respect for the single individual, and their respective comments may be compared in direct sequence as follows: "A crowd is indeed made up of single individuals; it must therefore be in everyone's power to become what he is, a single individual; no one is prevented from being a single individual, no one, unless he prevents himself by becoming many.

To become a crowd, to gather a crowd around oneself, is on the contrary to distinguish life from life; even the most well-meaning one who talks about that, can easily offend a single individual. As these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other, the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing, and complaints of being misunderstood.

But there are signs of clearing up for which both Oxford and Harvard are partly to be thanked. The Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics had an article about Kierkegaard in The article began: [ ]. Martensen—which must be referred to as having wrought with extraordinary effect upon his peculiarly sensitive and high-strung nature. The intensity of his inner life, again—which finds expression in his published works, and even more directly in his notebooks and diaries also published —cannot be properly understood without some reference to his father.

But Kierkegaard, the writer who holds the indispensable key to the intellectual life of Scandinavia, to whom Denmark in particular looks up as her most original man of genius in the nineteenth century, we have wholly overlooked. Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel — referred to Kierkegaard as the "fanatical follower of Don Juan, himself the philosopher of Don Juanism " in his book Disguises of Love.

Jaspers saw Kierkegaard as a champion of Christianity and Nietzsche as a champion for atheism. It had taken academics 50 years to arrange his journals. SwensonDouglas V. Steereand Walter Lowrie appeared, under the editorial efforts of Oxford University Press editor Charles Williams[ ] one of the members of the Inklings. Hong and Edna H. Hong translated his works more than once.

National Book Award in category Translation. Hong Kierkegaard Library. Kierkegaard's influence on Karl Barth 's early theology is evident in The Epistle to the Romans, And thou art on earth. When I am faced by such a document as the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, I embark on its interpretation on the assumption that he is confronted with the same unmistakable and unmeasurable significance of that relation as I myself am confronted with, and that it is this situation which moulds his thought and its expression".

Barth read at least three volumes of Kierkegaard's works: Practice in ChristianityThe Momentand an Anthology from his journals and diaries. Almost all key terms from Kierkegaard which had an important role in The Epistle to the Romans can be found in Practice in Christianity. The concept of the indirect communication, the paradox, and the moment of Practice in Christianityin particular, confirmed and sharpened Barth's ideas on contemporary Christianity and the Christian life.

It was in his study of Paul that he found his first peace of mind. He was fascinated by the revelation of the power of the Holy Spirit when it once touched a man; at the completeness with which it overwhelms and keeps its chosen ones loyal. He conceived of Paul as one upon whom God had laid His hand' Barth writes: "The man Paul evidently sees and hears something which is above everything, which is absolutely beyond the range of my observation and measure of my thought.

Besides affecting Barth deeply, the philosophy of Kierkegaard has found voice in the works of Ibsen, Unamuno, and Heidegger, and its sphere of influence seems to be growing in ever widening circles. The principle contribution of Kierkegaard to Barth is the dualism of time and eternity which Kierkegaard phrases: "The infinite qualitative difference between time and eternity.

Keller notes the splits that happen when a new teaching is introduced and some assume a higher knowledge from a higher source than others. Students of Kierkegaard became a "group of dissatisfied, excited radicals" when under Barthianism. Eduard Geismar —who gave Lectures on Kierkegaard in Marchwas not radical enough for them. Barthianism was opposed to the objective treatment of religious questions and to the sovereignty of man in the existential meeting with the transcendent God.

The inward distress, the tension and the preparation of Kierkegaard made them receptive to the new. A magazine entitled the Tidenverv The Turn of the Timeshas been their journal since Especially the Student Christian Movement became the port of invasion for the new thought. But this invasion has been split completely into two camps which vehemently attack each other.

Indictment was launched against the old theology. The quiet work of the church was scorned as secularization of the message or as emotional smugness, which had found a place in Home Missions despite all its call to repentance. Barth endorses the main theme from Kierkegaard but also reorganizes the scheme and transforms the details. He expands the theory of indirect communication to the field of Christian ethics; he applies the concept of unrecognizability to the Christian life.

He coins the concept of the "paradox of faith" since the form of faith entails a contradictory encounter of God and human beings. He also portrayed the contemporaneity of the moment when in crisis a human being desperately perceives the contemporaneity of Christ. In regard to the concept of indirect communication, the paradox, and the moment, the Kierkegaard of the early Barth is a productive catalyst.

Logic and human reasoning are inadequate to comprehend truth, and in this emphasis Dostoevsky speaks entirely the language of Kierkegaard, of whom he had never heard. Christianity is a way of life, an existential condition. Again, like Kierkegaard, who affirmed that suffering is the climate in which man's soul begins to breathe. Dostoevsky stresses the function of suffering as part of God's revelation of truth to man.

InMorton White wrote about the word "exists" and Kierkegaard's idea of God's is-ness. The hundstrup kierkegaard biography "exists" is one of the most pivotal and controversial in philosophy. Some philosophers think of it as having one meaning: the sense in which we say that this book exists, that God does or does not exist, that there exist odd numbers between 8 and 20, that a characteristic like redness exists as well as things that are red, that the American government exists as well as the physical building in which the government is housed, that minds exist as well as bodies.

And when the word "exists" is construed in this unambiguous way, many famous disputes in the history of philosophy and theology appear to be quite straightforward. Theists affirm that God exists while atheists deny the very same statement; materialists say that matter exists while some idealists think that it is illusory; nominalists, as they are called, deny the existence of characteristics like redness while platonic realists affirm it; some kinds of behaviorists deny that there are minds inside bodies.

There is, however, a tendency among some philosophers, to insist that the word "exists" is ambiguous and therefore that some of these disputes are not disputes at all but merely the results of mutual misunderstanding, of a failure to see that certain things are said to exist in one sense while others exist in another. One of the outstanding efforts of this kind in the twentieth century occurs in the early writings of realists who maintained that only hundstrup kierkegaard biography things in space and time exist, while abstract characteristics of things or relations between them should be said to subsist.

This is sometimes illustrated by pointing out that while Chicago and St. Louis both exist at definite places, the relation more populous than which holds between them exists neither in Chicago nor in St. Louis nor in the area between them, but is nevertheless something about which we can speak, something that is usually assigned to a timeless and spaceless realm like that of which Plato spoke.

On this view, however, human minds or personalities are also said to exist in spite of being non-material. In short, the great divide is between abstract subsistents and concrete existents, but both human personalities and physical objects are existents and do not share in the spacelessness and timelessness of platonic ideas. So far as one can see, Kierkegaard too distinguishes different senses of "exists", except that he appears to need at least three distinct senses for which he should supply three distinct words.

First of all he needs one for statements about God, and so he says that God is. Secondly, and by contrast, persons or personalities are said to exist. It would appear then that he needs some third term for physical objects, which on his view are very different from God and persons, but since existentialists don't seem to be very interested in physical objects or "mere" things, they appear to get along with two.

The great problem for Kierkegaard is to relate God's is-nessif I may use that term for the moment, to human existence, and this he tries to solve by appealing to the Incarnation. Christ's person is the existent outgrowth of God who is. By what is admittedly a mysterious process the abstract God enters a concrete existent. We must accept this on faith and faith alone, for clearly it cannot be like the process whereby one existent is related to another; it involves a hundstrup kierkegaard biography from one realm to another which is not accessible to the human mind, Christians who lacked this faith and who failed to live by it were attacked by Kierkegaard; this was the theological root of his violent criticism of the Established Church of Denmark.

It is one source of his powerful influence on contemporary theology. John Daniel Wild noted as early as that Kierkegaard's works had been "translated into almost every important living language including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and it is now fair to say that his ideas are almost as widely known and as influential in the world as those of his great opponent Hegel, still the most potent of world philosophers.

Mortimer J. Adler wrote the following about Kierkegaard in For Kierkegaard, man is essentially an individual, not a member of a species or race; and ethical and religious truth is known through individual existence and decision—through subjectivity, not objectivity. Systems of thought and a dialectic such as Hegel's are matters merely of thought, which cannot comprise individual existence and decision.

Such systems leave out, said Kierkegaard, the unique and essential "spermatic point, the individual, ethically and religiously conceived, and existentially accentuated". Similarly in the works of the American author Henry David Thoreau, writing at the same time as Kierkegaard, there is an emphasis on the solitary individual as the bearer of ethical responsibility, who, when he is right, carries the preponderant ethical weight against the state, government, and a united public opinion, when they are wrong.

The solitary individual with right on his side is always "a majority of one". Ethics, the study of moral valuesby Mortimer J. Adler and Seymour Cain. In Life Magazine traced the history of existentialism from Heraclitus BC and Parmenides over the argument over The Unchanging One as the real and the state of flux as the real. Dostoevsky and Camus are attempts to rewrite Descartes according to their own lights and Descartes is the forefather of Sartre through the fact that they both used a "literary style".

The article goes on to say. He built a philosophy based in part on the idea of permanent cleavage between faith and reason. This was an existentialism which still had room for a God whom Sartre later expelled, but which started the great pendulum-swing toward the modern concepts of the absurd. Kierkegaard spent his life thinking existentially and converting remarkably few to his ideas.

But when it comes to the absurdity of existence, war is a great convincer; and it was at the end of World War I that two German philosophers, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heideggertook up Kierkegaard's ideas, elaborated and systematized them. By the s Kierkegaard's thinking made new impact on French intellectuals who, like Sartre, were nauseated by the static pre-Munich hypocrisy of the European middle class.

After World War II, with the human condition more precarious than ever, with humanity facing the mushroom-shaped ultimate absurdity, existentialism and our time came together in Jean-Paul Sartre. Kierkegaard's comparatively early and manifold philosophical and theological reception in Germany was one of the decisive factors of expanding his works' influence and readership throughout the world.

Kierkegaard has been called a philosopher, a theologian, [ ] the Father of Existentialism[ ] [ ] [ ] both atheistic and theistic variations, [ ] a literary critic, [ ] [ page needed ] a social theorist, [ ] a humorist, [ ] a psychologist, [ 9 ] and a poet. Kierkegaard does mention the concepts of "faith" and "leap" together many times in his works.

The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God or how a person would act in love. Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love. No such evidence could ever be enough to completely justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love.

Faith involves making that commitment anyway. Kierkegaard thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt one's beliefs about God; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought involved in weighing evidence, without which the faith would have no real substance.

Someone who does not realize that Christian doctrine is inherently doubtful and that there can be no objective certainty about its truth does not have faith but is merely credulous. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God.

Kierkegaard also stresses the importance of the self, and the self's relation to the world, as being grounded in self-reflection and introspection.

Hundstrup kierkegaard biography

He argued in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity. People who in some sense believe the same things may relate to those beliefs quite differently. Two individuals may both believe that many of those around them are poor and deserve help, but this knowledge may lead only one of them to decide to actually help the poor.

Schleiermacher so enthusiastically declares that knowledge does not perturb religiousness, and that the religious person does not sit safeguarded by a lightning rod and scoff at God; yet with the help of statistical tables one laughs at all of life. Kierkegaard does not deny the fruitfulness or validity of abstract thinking science, logic, and so onbut he does deny any superstition which pretends that abstract theorizing is a sufficient concluding argument for human existence.

He holds it to be unforgivable pride or stupidity to think that the impersonal abstraction can answer the vital problems of human, everyday life. Logical theorems, mathematical symbols, physical-statistical laws can never become patterns of human existence. To be human means to be concrete, to be this person here and now in this particular and decisive moment, face to face with this particular challenge.

Kierkegaard primarily discusses subjectivity with regard to religious matters. As already noted, he argues that doubt is an element of faith and that it is impossible to gain any objective certainty about religious doctrines such as the existence of God or the life of Christ. The most one could hope for would be the conclusion that it is probable that the Christian doctrines are true, but if a person were to believe such doctrines only to the degree they seemed likely to be true, he or she would not be genuinely religious at all.

Faith consists in a subjective relation of absolute commitment to these doctrines. Kierkegaard's famous philosophical 20th-century critics include Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Non-religious philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger supported many aspects of Kierkegaard's philosophical views, [ ] but rejected some of his religious views.

Another reviewer says that "Adorno is [far away] from the more credible translations and interpretations of the Collected Works of Kierkegaard we have today. Levinas' main attack on Kierkegaard focused on his ethical and religious stages, especially in Fear and Trembling. Levinas criticises the leap of faith by saying this suspension of the ethical and leap into the religious is a type of violence the "leap of faith" of course, is presented by a pseudonym, thus not representing Kierkegaard's own view, but intending to prompt the exact kind of discussion engaged in by his critics.

He states: "Kierkegaardian violence begins when existence is forced to abandon the ethical stage in order to embark on the religious stage, the domain of belief. But belief no longer sought external justification. Even internally, it combined communication and isolation, and hence violence and passion. That is the origin of the relegation of ethical phenomena to secondary status and the contempt of the ethical foundation of being which has led, through Nietzsche, to the amoralism of recent philosophies.

Levinas pointed to the Judeo-Christian belief that it was God who first commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and that an angel commanded Abraham to stop. If Abraham were truly in the religious realm, he would not have listened to the angel's command and should have continued to kill Isaac. To Levinas, "transcending ethics" seems like a loophole to excuse would-be murderers from their crime and thus is unacceptable.

Therefore, deep down, Abraham had faith that God, as an absolute moral authority, would never allow him in the end to do something as ethically heinous as murdering his own child, and so he passed the test of blind obedience versus moral choice. He was making the point that God as well as the God-Man Christ doesn't tell people everything when sending them out on a mission and reiterated this in Stages on Life's Way.

I conceive of God as one who approves in a calculated vigilance, I believe that he approves of intrigues, and what I have read in the sacred books of the Old Testament is not of a sort to dishearten me. The Old Testament furnishes examples abundantly of a shrewdness which is nevertheless well pleasing to God, and that at a later period Christ said to His disciples, "These things I said not unto you from the beginning—I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now"—so here is a teleological suspension of the ethical rule of telling the whole truth.

Sartre objected to the existence of God : If existence precedes essence, it follows from the meaning of the term sentient that a sentient being cannot be complete or perfect. In Being and NothingnessSartre's phrasing is that God would be a pour-soi a being-for-itself; a consciousness who is also an en-soi a being-in-itself; a thing which is a contradiction in terms.

Either, "the first" contains promise for the future, is the forward thrust, the endless impulse. Or, "the first" does not impel the individual; the power which is in the first does not become the impelling power but the repelling power, it becomes that which thrusts away. Thus—for the sake of making a little philosophical flourish, not with the pen but with thought-God only once became flesh, and it would be vain to expect this to be repeated.

Sartre agreed with Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham undergoing anxiety Sartre calls it anguishbut claimed that God told Abraham to do it. In his lecture, Existentialism is a HumanismSartre wondered whether Abraham ought to have doubted whether God actually spoke to him. Faith was something that Kierkegaard often wrestled with throughout his writing career; under both his real name and behind pseudonyms, he explored many different aspects of faith.

These various aspects include faith as a spiritual goal, the historical orientation of faith particularly toward Jesus Christfaith being a gift from God, faith as dependency on a historical object, faith as a passion, and faith as a resolution to personal despair. Even so, it has been argued that Kierkegaard never offers a full, explicit and systematic account of what faith is.

II two enormous didactic and hortatory ethical letters and a sermon. Kierkegaardian scholar Paul Holmer [ ] described Kierkegaard's wish in his introduction to the publication of Kierkegaard's Edifying Discourses where he wrote:. Kierkegaard's constant and lifelong wish, to which his entire literature gives expression, was to create a new and rich subjectivity in himself and his readers.

Unlike any authors who believe that all subjectivity is a hindrance, Kierkegaard contends that only some kinds of subjectivity are a hindrance. He sought at once to produce subjectivity if it were lacking, to correct it if it were there and needed correction, to amplify and strengthen it when it was weak and undeveloped, and, always, to bring subjectivity of every reader to the point of eligibility for Christian inwardness and concern.

But the Edifying Discoursesthough paralleling the pseudonymous works, spoke a little more directly, albeit without authority. They spoke the real author's conviction and were the purpose of Kierkegaard's lifework. Whereas all the rest of his writing was designed to get the readers out of their lassitude and mistaken conceptions, the discourses, early and late, were the goal of the literature.

Later, Naomi Lebowitz explained them this way: The edifying discourses are, according to Johannes Climacus, "humoristically revoked" CUP,Swenson, Lowrie for unlike sermons, they are not ordained by authority. They start where the reader finds himself, in immanent ethical possibilities and aesthetic repetitions, and are themselves vulnerable to the lure of poetic sirens.

They force the dialectical movements of the making and unmaking of the self before God to undergo lyrical imitations of meditation while the clefts, rifts, abysses, are everywhere to be seen. Throughout retrospective analyses Kierkegaard has been viewed as an apolitical philosopher. Kierkegaard leaned towards conservatism, [ ] [ ] being a personal friend of Danish king Christian VIIIwhom he viewed as the moral superior of every Danish man, woman, and child.

He argued against democracy, calling it "the most tyrannical form of government," arguing in favour of monarchy saying "Is it tyranny when one person wants to rule leaving the rest of us others out? No, but it is tyranny when all want to rule. If I were to imagine this public as a person I most likely would think of one of the Roman emperors, an imposing, well-fed figure suffering from boredom and therefore craving only the sensate titillation of laughter, for the divine gift of wit is not worldly enough.

So this person, more sluggish than he is evil, but negatively domineering, saunters around looking for variety. Some interpret Kierkegaard's thought as implying that in regards to serving God, sexuality is irrelevant "before God not only for men and women, but also for homosexuals and heterosexuals". Kierkegaard's political philosophy has been likened to neoconservatismdespite its major influence on radical and anti-traditional thinkers, religious and secular, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jean Paul Sartre.

Many 20th-century philosophersboth theistic and atheistic, and theologians drew concepts from Kierkegaard, including the notions of angst, despair, and the importance of the individual. His fame as a philosopher grew tremendously in the s, in large part because the ascendant existentialist movement pointed to him as a precursor, although later writers celebrated him as a highly significant and influential thinker in his own right.

Philosophers and theologians influenced by Kierkegaard are numerous and include major twentieth century theologians and philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein was immensely influenced and humbled by Kierkegaard, [ ] claiming that "Kierkegaard is far too deep for me, anyhow. He bewilders me without working the good effects which he would in deeper souls".

According to Ellul, Marx and Kierkegaard were his two greatest influences, and the only two authors of which he read all of their work. He is perhaps the most real saint of modern times. Kierkegaard has also had a considerable influence on 20th-century literature. Figures deeply influenced by his work include W. Salinger and John Updike. Kierkegaard was a schizophrenic Kierkegaard was the greatest Dane Kierkegaard was the greatest Christian of the century Kierkegaard's aim was the destruction of the historic Christian faith He did not attack philosophy as such He negated reason He was a voluntarist Kierkegaard was the Knight of Faith Kierkegaard never found faith Kierkegaard possessed the truth Kierkegaard was one of the damned.

Kierkegaard had a profound influence on psychology. He is widely regarded as the founder of Christian psychology and of existential psychology [ ] and therapy. Kierkegaard is also seen as an important precursor of postmodernism. Google honoured him with a Google Doodle on his th anniversary. Kierkegaard is considered by some modern theologians to be the "Father of Existentialism".

In one of his earlier hundstrup kierkegaard biographies, the System of Transcendental Idealism; which we shall consider first of all, Schelling represented transcendental philosophy and natural philosophy as the two sides of scientific knowledge. Respecting the nature of the two, he expressly declared himself in this work, where he once more adopts a Fichtian starting-point: "All knowledge rests on the harmony of an objective with a subjective" In the common sense of the words this would be allowed; absolute unity, where the Notion and the reality are undistinguished in the perfected Idea, is the Absolute alone, or God; all else contains an element of discord between the objective and subjective.

They are in themselves identical and presupposed as identical. The relation of nature to intelligence is given by Schelling thus: "Now if all knowledge has two poles which mutually presuppose and demand one another, there must be two fundamental sciences, and it must be impossible to start from the one pole without being driven to the other".

Thus nature is impelled to spirit, and spirit to nature; either may be given the first place, and both must come to pass. This is the meaning of the effort to connect natural phenomena with theory. The highest perfection of natural science would be the perfect spiritualization of all natural laws into laws of intuitive perception and thought.

Simson first translated pp. No doubt as soon as Kierkegaard becomes fashionable he will be explained. His imagination will be made to depend on his personal history, and his sayings will be so moderated in our minds that they will soon become not his sayings but ours. It is a very terrible thing to consider how often this has happened with the great, and how often we are contented to understand what we have neatly supposed that they have said.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. Danish theologian, philosopher, poet and social critic — For the surname, see Kierkegaard surname. CopenhagenDenmarkDenmark—Norway. Existentialism Continental philosophy Christian existentialism Existential psychology.

Early years — [ edit ]. Journals [ edit ]. Regine Olsen and graduation — [ edit ]. Main article: Regine Olsen. Authorship — [ edit ]. The Inwardness of Christianity [ edit ]. Pseudonyms [ edit ]. The Corsair affair [ edit ]. This article contains too many or overly lengthy quotations. Please help summarize the quotations. Consider transferring direct quotations to Wikiquote or excerpts to Wikisource.

May Attack upon the Lutheran State Church [ edit ]. Death [ edit ]. Reception [ edit ]. Early 20th-century reception [ edit ]. German and English translators of Kierkegaard's works [ edit ]. Kierkegaard's influence on Karl Barth's early theology [ edit ]. Laterth-century reception [ edit ]. Philosophy and theology [ edit ]. Swenson, scholar, teacher, friend.

Minneapolis, The University of Minnesota,pp. Philosophical criticism [ edit ]. Introduction by Paul Holmer. Political views [ edit ]. Related topics. Legacy [ edit ]. Selected bibliography [ edit ]. Sign up Log in. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room.

Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. When his mother died inKierkegaard began to keep a journal, which he continued to do for the rest of his life. His motivation for this was that he felt he needed to understand his own nature better in order to realize how he should spend his adult life.

Soren left home for good inand became a Latin teacher in Borgerdydskolen. The following year, after the death of his father, Kierkegaard produced a critique of a novel by Hans Christian Andersen, whose idealism already irritated him. His personal life impinged on his work inwhen he was briefly engaged to a woman he had been friendly with since the start of his independent life.

For a decade, he became something of a recluse, devoting himself to writing. This brought him into conflict with the then-dominant view promoted by Hegel that life could be understood in a purely rational manner. Kierkegaard felt, rather, that the person was immortal and that whether to believe in God was not a problem with a theoretical answer but instead an act of freely-chosen faith.

All of this play with narrative point of view, with contrasting works, and with contrasting internal partitions within individual works leaves the reader very disoriented. In combination with the incessant play of irony and Kierkegaard's predilection for paradox and semantic opacity, the text becomes a polished surface for the reader in which the prime meaning to be discerned is the reader's own reflection.

Christian faith, for Kierkegaard, is not a matter of learning dogma by rote. This belief is offensive to reason, since it only exists in the face of the absurd the paradox of the eternal, immortal, infinite God being incarnated in time as a finite mortal. While much of Kierkegaard's writing is presented indirectly, under various pseudonyms, he did write some works under his own name.

These works fall into three genres: i deliberations; ii edifying discourses; and iii reviews. The point of indirect communication is to position the reader to relate to the truth with appropriate passion, rather than to communicate the truth as such. In a review, however, it is appropriate to be objective, especially in drawing out a novel's life-view and life-development.

A hundstrup kierkegaard biography [ Overveielse ], on the other hand, ought to be provocative, and turn the reader's assumptions topsy-turvy. It draws on irony, the comic and is high-spirited, in order to get thoughts into motion prior to action. A deliberation is a weighing-up, as a propaedeutic to action. It seeks to build up the faith that it presupposes.

This was in order to emphasize that human beings are absolutely reliant on God's grace for salvation. Kierkegaard presents his pseudonymous authorship as a dialectical progression of existential stages. The first is the aesthetic, which gives way to the ethical, which gives way to the religious. The aesthetic stage of existence is characterized by the following: immersion in sensuous experience; valorization of possibility over actuality; egotism; fragmentation of the subject of experience; nihilistic wielding of irony and scepticism; and flight from boredom.

The figure of the aesthete in the first volume of Either-Or is an ironic portrayal of German romanticism, but it also draws on medieval characters as diverse as Don Juan, Ahasverus the wandering Jewand Faust. Johannes the seducer is a reflective aesthetewho gains sensuous delight not so much from the act of seduction but from engineering the possibility of seduction.

His real aim is the manipulation of people and situations in ways which generate interesting reflections in his own voyeuristic mind. The aesthetic perspective transforms quotidian dullness into a richly poetic world by whatever means it can. Sometimes the reflective aesthete will inject interest into a book by reading only the last third, or into a conversation by provoking a bore into an apoplectic fit so that he can see a bead of sweat form between the bore's eyes and run down his nose.

That is, the aesthete uses hundstrup kierkegaard biography, arbitrariness, irony, and wilful imagination to recreate the world in his own image. The prime motivation for the aesthete is the transformation of the boring into the interesting. This type of aestheticism is criticized from the point of view of ethics. It is seen to be emptily self-serving and escapist.

It is a despairing means of avoiding commitment and responsibility. It fails to acknowledge one's social debt and communal existence. And it is self-deceiving insofar as it substitutes fantasies for actual states of affairs. But Kierkegaard did not want to abandon aesthetics altogether in favor of the ethical and the religious. A key concept in the Hegelian dialectic, which Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship parodies, is Aufhebung sublation.

In Hegel's dialectic, when contradictory positions are reconciled in a higher unity synthesis they are both annulled and preserved aufgehoben. Similarly with Kierkegaard's pseudo-dialectic: the aesthetic and the ethical are both annulled and preserved in their synthesis in the religious stage. As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available through the imagination.

But this no longer excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite. But the dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship never quite reaches the truly religious.

We stop short at the representation of the religious by a self-confessed humorist Johannes Climacus in a medium which, according to Climacus's own account, necessarily alienates the reader from true Christian faith. For faith is a matter of lived experience, of constant striving within an individual's existence. According to Climacus's metaphysics, the world is divided dualistically into the actual and the ideal.

Language and all other media of representation belong to the realm of the ideal. No matter how eloquent or evocative language is it can never be the actual. Therefore, any representation of faith is always suspended in the realm of ideality and can never be actual faith. So the whole dialectic of the pseudonymous authorship is recuperated by the aesthetic by virtue of its medium of representation.

In fact Johannes Climacus acknowledges this implicitly when at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript he revokes everything he has said, with the important rider that to say something then to revoke it is not the same as never having said it in the first place. His presentation of religious faith in an aesthetic medium at least provides an opportunity for his readers to make their own leap of faith, by appropriating with inward passion the paradoxical religion of Christianity into their own lives.

As a poet of the religious Kierkegaard was always preoccupied with aesthetics. In fact, contrary to popular misconceptions of Kierkegaard which represent him as becoming increasingly hostile to poetry, he increasingly referred to himself as a poet in his later years all but one of over ninety references to himself as a poet in his journals date from after Kierkegaard never claimed to write with religious authority, as an apostle.

His works represent both less religiously enlightened and more religiously enlightened positions than he thought he had attained in his own existence. Such representations were only possible in an aesthetic medium of imagined possibilities like poetry. It is used to denote both: i a limited existential sphere, or stage, which is superseded by the higher stage of the religious life; and ii an aspect of life which is retained even within the religious life.

The social norms are seen to be the highest court of appeal for judging human affairs — nothing outranks them for this sort of ethicist. Even human sacrifice is justified in terms of how it serves the community, so that when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia he is regarded as a tragic hero since the sacrifice is required for the success of the Greek expedition to Troy Fear and Trembling.

Kierkegaard, however, does recognize duties to a power higher than social norms. That is, Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than both his social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal commitment to his beloved son, viz. In order to raise oneself beyond the merely aesthetic life, which is a life of drifting in imagination, possibility and sensation, one needs to make a commitment.

That is, the aesthete needs to choose the ethical, which entails a commitment to communication and decision procedures. The metaethics or normative ethics are cognitivist, laying down various necessary conditions for ethically correct action. These conditions include: the necessity of choosing seriously and inwardly; commitment to the belief that predications of good and evil of our actions have a truth-value; the necessity of choosing what one is actually doing, rather than just responding to a situation; actions are to be in accordance with rules; and these rules are universally applicable to moral agents.

The choice of metaethics, however, is noncognitive. There is no adequate proof of the truth of metaethics. The choice of normative ethics is motivated, but in a noncognitive way. The Judge seeks to motivate the choice of his normative ethics through the avoidance of despair. Here despair Fortvivlelse is to let one's life depend on conditions outside one's control and later, more radically, despair is the very possibility of despair in this first sense.

For Judge Wilhelm, the choice of normative ethics is a noncognitive choice of cognitivism, and thereby an acceptance of the applicability of the conceptual distinction between good and evil. From Kierkegaard's religious perspective, however, the conceptual distinction between good and evil is ultimately dependent not on social norms but on God.

Therefore it is possible, as Johannes de Silentio argues was the case for Abraham the father of faiththat God demand a suspension of the ethical in the sense of the socially prescribed norms.