Philosophy
1813 to 1855, Copenhagen, Denmark
The existing individual against the System - subjectivity, the stages of life, anxiety, and the leap of faith.
Start learning Søren →Against Hegel’s vast impersonal ‘System’, Kierkegaard insists that the most important truths are not objective propositions to be contemplated but ways of existing to be lived. ‘Truth is subjecti…
Kierkegaard maps three fundamental ways of existing: the aesthetic (living for pleasure, novelty, and possibility, ending in despair and boredom), the ethical (living by commitment, duty, and the universal), and the rel…
Kierkegaard’s psychology of freedom. Anxiety is ‘the dizziness of freedom’ - the vertigo we feel before our own possibility. Despair is the ‘sickness unto death’, the self’s failure t…
Through the terrible story of Abraham, commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac, Kierkegaard explores faith at its most extreme. The ‘knight of faith’ makes a double movement: infinite resignation (giving up eve…
Kierkegaard’s practical mission: to recover the single individual - ‘that individual’ - from the anonymous crowd, and to expose the comfortable ‘Christendom’ that had turned the infinite de…
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