Vinding kierkegaard biography

Amid this public battle, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street, paralyzed, and was taken to hospital. He died there a few weeks later, on 11 November A tentative diagnosis of the cause was tuberculosis of the spine marrow. Towards the end, Kierkegaard affirmed to Emil Boesen—a lifelong friend and a priest in the church that Kierkegaard had attacked—that he was still a believer in Christ.

The biographies by Alastair HannayStephen Backhouseand Clare Carlisle all fall somewhere in between these two extremes. Although Kierkegaard died aged only 42, his writings are vast. One way of characterizing this pseudonymous authorship is to think of it as one vast novel, with the various pseudonymous authors who figure in the works being characters therein.

Although some e. In the early s, Kierkegaard often published a collection of such discourses at the same time as a pseudonymous work, describing them as offered with the right and left hand respectively. As noted, in addition to his published works Kierkegaard kept extensive journals and notebooks, clearly expecting—correctly—that these too would eventually be published.

The use of pseudonyms gives the reader the additional—some would say prior—task of wondering where Kierkegaard stands in all this. One figure with a peculiar status amongst the pseudonyms is Anti-Climacus, the only pseudonym other than Johannes Climacus to author more than one book The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity.

Another strategy is to compare the pseudonymous works to the signed works, on the assumption that the latter provide a baseline because they embody what Kierkegaard wanted to put forward under his own name. This sometimes makes it possible to have some idea of what Kierkegaard himself thought of the pseudonyms. On the other hand, even if the pseudonyms had been actual individuals distinct from Kierkegaard, it would not follow that they never say things he would agree with, and it seems reasonable to think that Kierkegaard had some ends of his own that he seeks to accomplish by the creation of the vinding kierkegaard biographies.

What were those ends? In The Point of View for My Work as an Author writtenpublished posthumously Kierkegaard—in his own voice—claims that he was from first to last a religious author, and thus that the pseudonymous works also serve religious ends, despite the fact that many of those works are not explicitly religious in character.

This claim has been hotly contested, with some critics arguing that The Point of View represents what Kierkegaard later wanted his readers to think rather than being an honest account of his intentions—and that other elements of his writings, such as the journals, are similarly unreliable see, e. Thus, one cannot reasonably claim that the religious is something that only emerges relatively late in the course of his authorship.

It is also intriguing that Kierkegaard was translated into Japanese before he was translated into English albeit initially via German rather than directly from Danish. One theme that can be found in both the pseudonymous and signed writings is the distinction between direct and indirect communication. Since they are truths that pertain essentially to existence or how life should be lived, it is possible to have a purely verbal or conceptual understanding of such truths that is nonetheless a misunderstanding.

Kierkegaard thinks that the communicator must keep this in mind and artistically attempt to communicate in a manner that will discourage purely verbal understanding and encourage appropriation.

Vinding kierkegaard biography: In the history of philosophy,

The use of the pseudonyms is in part an attempt to do this. Rather than simply tell us in a didactic manner about the various forms human existence can take, such as the aesthetic, ethical, and religious lives, the pseudonyms embody these various ways of understanding human life. Kierkegaard hopes that readers who engage with the pseudonymous characters might come to understand their own lives better, in much the same way as encountering the characters in a great novel can foster greater self-understanding, whether one sees oneself as like those characters or as very different from them.

Kierkegaard does not think of the human self predominantly as a kind of metaphysical substance, but rather more like an achievement, a goal to strive for. To be sure, humans are substances of a sort; they exist in the world, as do physical objects. However, what is distinctive about human selves is that the self must become what it is to become, human selves playing an active role in the process by which they come to define themselves.

The major difference is that Hegel sees spirit as manifested in all of reality and particularly in humanity as a whole, whereas Anti-Climacus focuses on the individual human self. Much about the self is fixed and cannot be chosen. Humans are born with particular biological characteristics, in a particular place and time, into a world that is not of their own making.

However, as self-conscious beings, humans still contain possibilities to be actualized. The Sickness Unto Death describes various ways in which humans fail to synthesize these contrasting features and thus fall into despair, which is seen not merely as an emotion but as the state in which the self fails to become a self in truth.

While such a person recognizes that concrete possibilities must be chosen from a range of options, they misuse their imagination to generate an endless series of possibilities, thus postponing and evading the need for choice and action. Necessity alone, Anti-Climacus claims, is suffocating. Possibility is, spiritually speaking, like oxygen: one cannot breathe pure oxygen, but neither can one breathe without it.

For Kierkegaard, however, the human self is fundamentally temporal and at least prior to death is always an unfinished project. The task of balancing the elements of human selfhood necessity and possibility, eternity and temporality so as to avoid despair is never completed short of the grave. All of us in some ways live in relation to ideals, but those ideals come from outside the self and provide a basis for self-definition.

This influential critique of modern societies is found in such essays as A Literary Review. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript Johannes Climacus argues that reflection, though a crucial and necessary element in human life, by itself cannot lead to choices see Evans — A person thinking about a decision can always go on thinking and so long as that is happening, cannot decide.

What must happen is that the person must desire to make a choice, and thus will to stop the process of reflection by identifying with a possibility to be actualized. While Haufniensis claims that evil or sin cannot be scientifically explained because it has its origins in freedom, he nonetheless believes that anxiety helps us to understand how sin is possible.

Anxiety is not merely a pathological condition which is a symptom of disease, but part of the human condition itself. It is an awareness of freedom. How exactly freedom comes to be misused is not made altogether clear by Haufniensis, who says that. Haufniensis does claim that when freedom is misused, anxiety takes on a pathological character, but the cure is not the total elimination of anxiety.

One way of approaching the existence-spheres is to see them as different views of what gives a human life value. However, this is arguably too simple: even if Kierkegaard does see the movement from the aesthetic and the ethical to the religious as progress, it would be a mistake to think of this in a purely linear way. Kierkegaard is certainly not simply providing an empirical description of how humans develop.

It is true that children are natural aesthetes, and that this is where human existence always begins. So one might say that a typical human life would begin with aesthetic concerns, develop ethical commitments, and over time, reflecting on the problems posed by ethical existence, could struggle with religious questions which are linked to the problems of guilt and suffering that ethical life raises but does not solve.

However, not everyone follows such a path, and even when someone does, the later stages do not simply replace the earlier ones. Kierkegaard consistently maintains that all human life contains an aesthetic dimension, so the aesthetic is never really left behind. Furthermore, humans for Kierkegaard are spiritual creatures, and this means that the transitions from one stage to another do not happen automatically or inevitably.

It is for this reason that, for instance, the aesthete can choose to remain an aesthete, making this way of life a rival to an ethical or religious life. His is the view of a spectator rather than a player. Kierkegaard thinks that the disengaged, theoretical standpoint on life will necessarily overlook crucial existential problems, since these only properly come into view from a first-person perspective.

In his critique of the aesthetic life, the ethicist Judge William goes on to argue that this is to cut oneself off from precisely the kind of freely chosen projects that give human life its value and purpose. The two extremes of the aesthete life, contrasting sensuousness with misused imaginative reflection, are illustrated by two kinds of seducer.

This second seducer—another Johannes—represents an extreme misuse of the imagination: someone so far gone in the life of the imagination as to have become damaged by it. The joy, then, is that it is eternally certain that God is love; more specifically understood, the joy is that there is always a task. As long as there is life there is hope, but as long as there is a task there is life, and as long as there is life there is hope—indeed, the task itself is not merely a hope for a future time but is a joyful present.

Kierkegaard wrote his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments in and here he tried to explain the intent of the first part of his authorship. Neither does it even want to be the paradox for the believer, and then surreptitiously, little by little, provide him with understanding, because the martyrdom of faith to crucify one's understanding is not a martyrdom of the moment, but the martyrdom of continuance.

The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything. With regard to secular matters, the established order may be entirely right: one should join the established order, be satisfied with that relativity, etc. But ultimately the relationship with God is also secularized; we want it to coincide with a certain relativity, do not want it to be something essentially different from our positions in life—rather than that it shall be the absolute for every individual human being and this, the individual person's God-relationship, shall be precisely what keeps every established order in suspense, and that God, at any moment he chooses, if he merely presses upon an individual in his relationship with God, promptly has a witness, an informer, a spy, or whatever you vinding kierkegaard biography to call it, one who in unconditional obedience and with unconditional obedience, by being persecuted, by suffering, by dying, keeps the established order in suspense.

Early Kierkegaardian scholars, such as Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Henry Croxallargue that the entire authorship should be treated as Kierkegaard's own personal and religious views. Kierkegaard's most important pseudonyms, [ ] in chronological order, were:. Kierkegaard explained his pseudonyms this way in Concluding Unscientific Postscript : [ ].

He is a poetically actual subjective thinker who is found again in "In Vino Veritas". In Fear and Trembling, I am just as little, precisely just as little, Johannes de Silentio as the knight of faith he depicts, and in turn just as little the author of the preface to the book, which is the individuality—lines of a poetically actual subjective thinker.

In the story of suffering " 'Guilty? All of these writings analyze the concept of faith, on the supposition that if people are confused about faith, as Kierkegaard thought the inhabitants of Christendom were, they will not be in a position to develop the virtue. Faith is a matter of reflection in the sense that one cannot have the virtue unless one has the concept of virtue—or at any rate the concepts that govern faith's understanding of self, world, and God.

The article complimented Kierkegaard for his wit and intellect, but questioned whether he would ever be able to master his talent and write coherent, complete works. For months, Kierkegaard perceived himself to be the victim of harassment on the streets of Denmark. There had been much discussion in Denmark about the pseudonymous authors until the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments27 Februarywhere he openly admitted to be the author of the books because people began wondering if he was, in fact, a Christian or not.

Kierkegaard writes that "the present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion The trend today is in the direction of mathematical equality, so that in all classes about so and so many uniformly make one individual". A useless and perhaps futile conflict goes on often enough in the world, when the poor person says to the wealthy person, "Sure, it's easy for you—you are free from worry about making a living.

Truly, the Gospel does not let itself be deceived into taking sides with anyone against someone else, with someone who is wealthy against someone who is poor, or with someone who is poor against someone who is wealthy. Among individuals in the world, the conflict of disconnected comparison is frequently carried on about dependence and independence, about the happiness of being independent and the difficulty of being dependent.

And yet, yet human language has not ever, and thought has not ever, invented a more beautiful symbol of independence than the poor bird of the air. And yet, yet no speech can be more curious than to say that it must be very bad and very heavy to be—light as the bird! To be dependent on one's treasure—that is dependence and hard and heavy slavery; to be dependent on God, completely dependent—that is independence.

As part of his analysis of the "crowd", Kierkegaard accused newspapers of decay and decadence. Kierkegaard stated Christendom had "lost its way" by recognizing "the crowd", as the many who are moved by newspaper stories, as the court of last resort in relation to "the truth". Truth comes to a single individual, not all people at one and the same time.

Just as truth comes to one individual at a time so does love. One doesn't love the crowd but does love their neighbor, who is a single individual. He says, "never have I read in the Holy Scriptures this command: You shall love the crowd; even less: You shall, ethico-religiously, recognize in the crowd the court of last resort in relation to 'the truth.

Kierkegaard began to publish under his own name again in the three-part Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits. He asked, What does it mean to be a single individual who wants to do the good? What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to vinding kierkegaard biography Christ? He now moves from "upbuilding Edifying discourses" to " Christian discourses ", however, he still maintains that these are not " sermons ".

Is it really hopelessness to reject the task because it is too heavy; is it really hopelessness almost to collapse under the burden because it is so heavy; is it really hopelessness to give up hope out of fear of the task? Oh no, but this is hopelessness: to will with all one's might—but there is no task. Thus, only if there is nothing to do and if the person who says it were without guilt before God—for if he is guilty, there is indeed always something to do—only if there is nothing to do and this is understood to mean that there is no task, only then is there hopelessness.

Upbuilding Discourses in Various SpiritsHong p. While the Savior of the world sighs, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me," the repentant robber humbly understands, but still also as a relief, that it is not God who has abandoned him, but it is he who has abandoned God, and, repenting, he says to the one crucified with him: Remember me when you come into your kingdom.

It is a heavy human suffering to reach for God's mercy in the anxiety of death and with belated repentance at the moment of despicable death, but yet the repentant robber finds relief "vinding kierkegaard biography" he compares his suffering with the superhuman suffering of being abandoned by God. To be abandoned by God, that indeed means to be without a task.

It means to be deprived of the final task that every human being always has, the task of patience, the task that has its ground in God's not having abandoned the sufferer. Hence Christ's suffering is superhuman and his patience superhuman, so that no human being can grasp either the one or the other. Although it is beneficial that we speak quite humanly of Christ's suffering, if we speak of it merely as if he were the human being who has suffered the most, it is blasphemy, because although his suffering is human, it is also superhuman, and there is an eternal chasmic abyss between his suffering and the human being's.

Works of Love [ ] followed these discourses on 29 September Both books were authored under his own name. It was written under the themes "Love covers a multitude of sins" and "Love builds up". One can never be all human or all spirit, one must be both. When it is said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," this contains what is presupposed, that every person loves himself.

Thus, Christianity which by no means begins, as do those high flying thinkers, without presuppositions, nor with a flattering presupposition, presupposes this. Dare we then deny that it is as Christianity presupposes? But on the other hand, it is possible for anyone to misunderstand Christianity, as if it were its intention to teach what worldly sagacity unanimously—alas, and yet contentiously—teaches, "that everyone is closest to himself.

Indeed on the contrary, it is Christianity's intention to wrest self-love away from us human beings. All human speech, even the divine speech of Holy Scripture, about the spiritual is essentially metaphorical [ overfotcarried over] speech. And this is quite in order or in the order of things and of existence, since a human being, even if from the moment of birth his is a spirit, still does not become conscious of himself as a spirit until later and thus has sensately-psychically acted out a certain part of his life prior to this.

But this first portion is not to be cast aside when the spirit awakens any more than the awakening of the spirit in contrast to the sensate-physical announces itself in a sensate-physical way. On the contrary, the first portion is taken over—[ overtage ] by the spirit and, used in this way, is thus made the basis—it becomes the metaphorical. Therefore, the spiritual person and the sensate person say the same thing; yet there is an infinite difference, since the latter has no intimation of the secret of the metaphorical words although he is using the same words, but not in their metaphorical sense.

There is a world of difference between the two; the one has made the transition or let himself be carried over to the other side, while the other remains on this side; yet they have the connection that both are using the same words. The person in whom the spirit has awakened does not as a consequence abandon the visible-world. Although conscious of himself as spirit, he continues to remain in the visible world and to be visible to the senses, in the same way he also remains in the language, except that his language is the metaphorical language!

But the metaphorical words are of course not brand-new words but are the already given words. Just as the spirit is invisible, so also is its language a secret, and the secret lies in its using the same words as the child and the simpleminded person but using them metaphorically, whereby the spirit denies the sensate or sensate-physical way.

The difference is by no means a noticeable difference. For this reason we rightfully regard it as a sign of false spirituality to parade a noticeable difference—which is merely sensate, whereas the spirit's manner is the metaphor's quiet, whispering secret—for the person who has ears to hear. Love builds up by presupposing that love is present.

Have you not experienced this yourself, my listener? If anyone has ever spoken to you in such a way or treated you in such a way that you really felt built up, this was because you very vividly perceived how he presupposed love to be in you. Wisdom is a being-for-itself quality; power, talent, knowledge, etc. To be wise does not mean to presuppose that others are wise; on the contrary, it may be very wise and true if the truly wise person assumes that far from all people are wise.

But love is not a being-for-itself quality but a quality by which or in which you are for others. Loving means to presuppose love in others. Later, in the same book, Kierkegaard deals with the question of sin and forgiveness. He uses the same text he used earlier in Three Upbuilding Discourses,Love hides a multitude of sins. He asks if "one who tells his neighbors faults hides or increases the multitude of sins".

But the one who takes away the consciousness of sin and gives the consciousness of forgiveness instead—he indeed takes away the heavy burden and gives the light one in its place. This cannot be seen, whereas the sin can indeed be seen; on the other hand, if the sin did not exist to be seen, it could not be forgiven either. Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen.

Both are faith. Blessed is the believer, he believes what he cannot see; blessed is the one who loves, he believes away that which he indeed can see! Who can believe this? The one who loves can do it. But why is forgiveness so rare? Is it not because faith in the power of forgiveness is so meager and so rare? Christian Discourses deals the same theme as The Concept of Anxietyangst.

The text is the Gospel of Matthew 6 verses 24— He wrote:. A man who but rarely, and then only cursorily, concerns himself with his relationship to God, hardly thinks or dreams that he has so closely to do with God, or that God is so close to him, that there exists a reciprocal relationship between him and God, the stronger a man is, the weaker God is, the weaker a man is, the stronger God is in him.

Every one who assumes that a God exists naturally thinks of Him as the strongest, as He eternally is, being the Almighty who creates out of nothing, and for whom all the creation is as nothing; but such a man hardly thinks of the possibility of a reciprocal relationship.

Vinding kierkegaard biography: Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish

And yet for God, the infinitely strongest, there is an obstacle; He has posited it Himself, yea, He has lovingly, with incomprehensible love posited it Himself; for He posited it and posits it every time a man comes into existence, when He in His love makes to be something directly in apposition to Himself. Oh, marvelous omnipotence of love! A man cannot bear that his 'creations' should be directly in apposition to Himself, and so he speaks of them in a tone of disparagement as his 'creations'.

But God who creates out of nothing, who almightily takes from nothing and says, ' Be ', lovingly adjoins, 'Be something even in apposition to me. It is actually true that Christianity requires the Christian to give up and forsake all things. This was not required in Old Testament times, God did not require Job to give up anything, and of Abraham he required expressly, as a test, only that he give up Isaac.

But in fact Christianity is also the religion of freedom, it is precisely the voluntary which is the Christian. Voluntarily to give up all is to be convinced of the glory of the good which Christianity promises. There is one thing God cannot take away from a man, namely, the voluntary—and it is precisely this which Christianity requires of man. Kierkegaard tried to explain his prolific use of pseudonyms again in The Point of View of My Work as an Authorhis autobiographical explanation for his writing style.

The book was finished inbut not published until after his death by his brother Peter Christian Kierkegaard. Walter Lowrie mentioned Kierkegaard's "profound religious experience of Holy Week " as a turning point from "indirect communication" to "direct communication" regarding Christianity. Oh, in the customary course of life there is so much to lull a man to sleep, to teach him to say, 'Peace and no danger.

But then again when there is so much in the house of God to lull us! Even that which in itself is arousing, such as thoughts, reflections, ideas, can by custom and monotony lose all their significance, just as a spring can lose the resilience which makes it what it is. So, then to approach nearer to the subject of this discourseit is right, reasonable, and a plain duty, to invite men, over and over again, to come to the house of the Lord, to summon them to it.

But one may become so accustomed to hearing this invitation that one may lose all sense of its significance, so that at last one steps away and it ends with the invitation preaching the church empty. Or one may become so accustomed to hearing this invitation that it develops false ideas in those that come, makes us self-important in our own thoughts, that we are not as they who remain away, makes us self-satisfied, secure, because it envelops us in a delusion, as though, since we are so urgently invited, God were in need of us, as though it were not we who in fear and trembling should reflect what He may require of us, as though it were not we who should sincerely thank God that He will have dealings with us, that He will suffer and permit us to approach Him, suffer that we presume to believe that He cares for us, that without being ashamed He will be known as one who is called our God and our Father.

So concerning this matter let us for once talk differently, in talking of these words of the preacher: Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of the Lord. He wrote three discourses under his own name and one pseudonymous book in The first thing any child finds in life is the external world of nature. This is where God placed his natural teachers.

He's been writing about confession and now openly writes about Holy Communion which is generally preceded by confession. His goal has always been to help people become religious but specifically Christian religious. He summed his position up earlier in his book, The Point of View of My Work as an Authorbut this book was not published until In the month of December the manuscript of the Concluding Postscript was completely finished, and, as my custom was, I had delivered the whole of it at once to Lune [the printer]—which the suspicious do not have to believe on my word, since Luno's account-book is there to prove it.

This work constitutes the turning-point in my whole activity as an author, inasmuch as it presents the 'problem', how to become a Christian. No, the very contrary. This, in 'Christendom' is the Christian movement: one does not reflect oneself into Christianity; but one reflects oneself out of something else and becomes, more and more simply, a Christian.

I have never fought in such a way as to say: I am the true Christian, others are not Christians. No, my contention has been this: I know what Christianity is, my imperfection as a Christian I myself fully recognize—but I know what Christianity is. And to get this properly recognized must be, I should think, to every man's interest, whether he be a Christian or not, whether his intention is to accept Christianity or to reject it.

But I have attacked no one as not being a Christian, I have condemned no one. And I myself have from the first clearly asserted, again and again repeated, that I am 'without authority'. He's against Johannes Climacus, who kept writing books about trying to understand Christianity. Here he says, "Let others admire and praise the person who pretends to comprehend Christianity.

I regard it as a plain ethical task—perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these speculative times, when all 'the others' are busy with comprehending—to admit that one is neither able nor supposed to comprehend it. Despair is the impossibility of possibility. When a person who has been addicted to some sin or other but over a considerable period has now successfully resisted the temptation—when this person has a vinding kierkegaard biography and succumbs again to the temptation, then the depression that ensues is by no means always sorrow over the sin.

It can be something quite different; it might also, for that matter, be resentment of divine governance, as if it were the latter that had let him fall into temptation and should not have been so hard on him, seeing that until now he had for so long successfully resisted the temptation. Such a person protests, perhaps in even stronger terms, how this relapse tortures and torments him, how it brings him to despair: he swears, 'I will never forgive myself.

In Practice in Christianity25 Septemberhis last pseudonymous work, he stated, "In this book, originating in the yearthe requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to a supreme ideality. Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is. Therefore one can ask an apostle, one can ask a Christian, "What is truth?

This means that truth in the sense in which Christ is the truth is not a sum of statements, not a definition etc. The being of truth is not the direct redoubling of being in relation to thinking, which gives only thought-being, safeguards thinking only against being a brain-figment that is not, guarantees validity to thinking, that what is thought is—that is, has validity.

No, the being of truth is the redoubling of truth within yourself, within me, within him, that your life, my life, his life is approximately the being of the truth in the striving for it, just as the truth was in Christ a life, for he was the truth. And therefore, Christianly understood, truth is obviously not to know the truth but to be the truth.

Here is an interesting quote from For Self Examination. If in observing the present state of the world and life in general, from a Christian point of view one had to say and from a Christian point of view with complete justification : It is a disease. And if I were a physician and someone asked me "What do you think should be done? Ah, everything is noisy; and just as strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses and to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise!

And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale. Yes, everything is soon turned upside-down: communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point in regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation; for what is publicized with such hot haste and, on the other hand, what has greater circulation than—rubbish!

Oh, create silence! In Kierkegaard wrote his Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays where he once more discussed sin, forgiveness, and authority using that same verse from 1 Peter that he used twice in with his Three Upbuilding Discourses, Would that there were a hiding place where I am so hidden that not even the consciousness of my sin can find me!

Would that there were a border, however narrow, if it still makes a separation between me and my sin! Would that on the other side of a chasmic vinding kierkegaard biography there were a spot, however little, where I could stand, while the consciousness of my sin must remain on the other side. Would that there were a forgiveness, a forgiveness that does not increase my sense of guilt but truly takes the guilt from me, also the consciousness of it.

Would that there were oblivion! But now this is indeed that way it is, because love Christ's love hides a multitude of sins. Behold, everything has become new. A human being has no authority, cannot command that you shall believe and just by commanding you with authority help you to believe. But if it requires authority even to teach, what authority is required, even greater, if possible, then the authority that commands the heaving sea to be still, to command the despairing person, the one who in the agony of repentance is unable and does not dare to forget, the prostrate penitent who is unable and does not dare to stop staring at his guilt, what authority is required to command him to shut his eyes, and what authority is then required to command him to open the eyes of faith so that he sees purity where he saw guilt and sin!

That divine authority he alone has, Jesus Christ, whose love hides a multitude of sins. He hides it very literally. Just as when one person places himself in front of another person and covers him so completely with his body that no one, no one, can see the person hidden behind him, so Jesus Christ covers your sin with his holy body.

Reason alone baptized? Faith, vinding kierkegaard biography, love, peace, patience, joy, self-control, vanity, kindness, humility, courage, cowardliness, pride, deceit, and selfishness. These are the inner passions that Thought knows little about. Hegel begins the process of education with Thought but Kierkegaard thinks we could begin with passion, or a balance between the two, a balance between Goethe and Hegel.

But at the same time he did not want to draw more attention to the external display of passion but the internal hidden passion of the single individual. Kierkegaard clarified this intention in his Journals. Schelling put Nature first and Hegel put Reason first but Kierkegaard put the human being first and the choice first in his writings. He makes an argument against Nature here and points out that most single individuals begin life as spectators of the visible world and work toward knowledge of the invisible world.

Is it a perfection on the part of the bird that in hard times it sits and dies of hunger and knows of nothing at all to do, that, dazed, it lets itself fall to the ground and dies? Usually we do not talk this way. When a sailor lies down in the boat and lets matters take their course in the storm and knows nothing to do, we do not speak of his perfection.

But when a doughty sailor knows how to steer, when he works against the storm with ingenuity, with strength, and with perseverance, when he works himself out of the danger, we admire him. Suppose that it were not one man who traveled from Jericho to Jerusalembut there were two, and both of them were assaulted by robbers and maimed, and no traveler passed by.

Suppose, then, that one of them did nothing but moan, while the other forgot and surmounted his own suffering to speak comfortingly, friendly words or, what involved great pain, dragged himself to some water to fetch the other a refreshing drink. Or suppose that they were both bereft of speech, but one of them in his silent prayer sighed to God also for the other—was he then not merciful?

If someone has cut off my hands, then I cannot play the zither, and if someone has cut off my feet, then I cannot dance, and if I lie crippled on the shore, then I cannot throw myself into the sea to rescue another person's life, and if I myself am lying with a broken arm or leg, then I cannot plunge into the flames to save another's life—but I can still be merciful.

I have often pondered how a painter might portray mercifulness, but I have decided that it cannot be done.

Vinding kierkegaard biography: Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard

As soon as a painter is to do it, it becomes dubious whether it is mercifulness or it is something else. But what does this mean, what have I to do, or what sort of effort is it that can be said to seek or pursue the kingdom of God? Shall I try to get a job suitable to my talents and powers in order thereby to exert an influence? No, thou shalt first seek God's kingdom.

Shall I then give all my fortune to the poor? Shall I then go out to proclaim this teaching to the world? But then in a certain sense it is nothing I shall do. Yes, certainly, in a certain it is nothing, thou shalt in the deepest sense make thyself nothing, become nothing before God, learn to keep silent; in this silence is the beginning, which is, first to seek God's kingdom.

In this wise, a godly wise, one gets to the beginning by going, in a sense, backwards. The beginning is not that with which one begins, but at which one arrives at the beginning backwards. The beginning is this art of becoming silent; for to be silent, as nature is, is not an art. It is man's superiority over the beasts to be able to speak; but in relation to God it can easily become the ruin of man who is able to speak that he is too willing to speak.

God is love, man is as one vinding kierkegaard biographies to a child a silly little thing, even so far as his own wellbeing is concerned. Only in much fear and trembling can a man walk with God; in much fear and trembling. But to talk in much fear and trembling is difficult for as a sense of dread causes the bodily voice to fail; so also does much fear and trembling render the voice mute in silence.

This the true man of prayer knows well, and he who was not the vinding kierkegaard biography man of prayer learned precisely this by praying. Nikolai Berdyaev makes a related argument against reason in his book The Divine and the Human. These pamphlets are now included in Kierkegaard's Attack Upon Christendom. Kierkegaard first moved to action after Professor soon Bishop Hans Lassen Martensen gave a speech in church in which he called the recently deceased Bishop Jacob Peter Mynster a "truth-witness, one of the authentic truth-witnesses".

He later wrote that all his former output had been "preparations" for this attack, postponed for years waiting for two preconditions: 1 both his father and bishop Mynster should be dead before the attack, and 2 he should himself have acquired a name as a famous theologic writer. Kierkegaard strongly objected to the portrayal of Mynster as a 'truth-witness'.

Kierkegaard described the hope the witness to the truth has in and in his Journals. When the concepts are shaken in an upheaval that is more terrible than an earthquake, when the truth is hated and its witness persecuted—what then? Must the witness submit to the world? But does that mean all is lost? No, on the contrary. We remain convinced of this, and thus no proof is needed, for if it is not so, then such a person is not a witness to the truth either.

Therefore we are reassured that even in the last moments such a person has retained a youthful recollection of what the youth expected, and he therefore has examined himself and his relationship before God to see whether the defect could lie in him, whether it was not possible for it to become, as the youth had expected, something he perhaps now desired most for the sake of the world—namely, that truth has the victory and good has its reward in the world.

Woe to the one who presumptuously, precipitously, and impetuously brings the horror of confusion into more peaceable situations; but woe, also, to the one who, if it was necessary, did not have the bold confidence to turn everything around the second time when it was turned around the first time! Relating oneself to the ideal in one's personal life is never seen.

Such a life is the life of the witness to the truth. This rubric disappeared long ago, and preachers, philosophy professors, and poets have taken over the place of servants to the truth, whereby they no doubt are served very well—but they do not serve the truth. Kierkegaard's pamphlets and polemical books, including The Momentcriticized several aspects of church formalities and politics.

He stressed that "Christianity is the individual, here, the single individual". More members would mean more power for the clergymen: a corrupt ideal. However, he showed marked elements of convergence with the medieval Catholicism. Before the tenth issue of his periodical The Moment could be published, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street.

He stayed in the hospital for over a month [ ] and refused communion. At that time he regarded pastors as mere political officials, a niche in society who were clearly not vinding kierkegaard biography of the divine. He told Emil Boesen, a friend since childhood, who kept a record of his conversations with Kierkegaard, that his life had been one of immense suffering, which may have seemed like vanity to others, but he did not think it so.

Kierkegaard died in Frederiks Hospital after over a month, possibly from complications from a fall from a tree in his youth. At Kierkegaard's funeral, his nephew Henrik Lund caused a disturbance by protesting Kierkegaard's burial by the official church. Lund maintained that Kierkegaard would never have approved, had he been alive, as he had broken from and denounced the institution.

Kierkegaard did have an impact there judging from the following quote from their article: "The fatal fruits which Dr. Kierkegaard show to arise from the union of Church and State, have strengthened the scruples of many of the believing laity, who now feel that they can remain no longer in the Church, because thereby they are in communion with unbelievers, for there is no ecclesiastical discipline.

Changes did occur in the administration of the Church and these changes were linked to Kierkegaard's writings. The Church noted that dissent was "something foreign to the national mind". On 5 Aprilthe Church enacted new policies: "every member of a congregation is free to attend the ministry of any clergyman, and is not, as formerly, bound to the one whose parishioner he is".

In Marchcompulsory infant baptism was abolished. Debates sprang up over the King's position as the head of the Church and over whether to adopt a constitution. Grundtvig objected to having any written rules. Immediately following this announcement the "agitation occasioned by Kierkegaard" was mentioned. 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 Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in.

It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress. 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.

Vinding kierkegaard biography: Søren Kierkegaard was born

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. This is still ethical in the second sense, since ultimately God's definition of the distinction between good and evil outranks any human society's definition.

The requirement of communicability and clear decision procedures can also be suspended by God's fiat. This renders cases such as Abraham's extremely problematic, since we have no recourse to public reason to decide whether he is legitimately obeying God's command or whether he is a deluded would-be murderer. Since public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for ourselves as a matter of religious faith.

Kierkegaard styled himself above all as a religious poet. The religion to which he sought to relate his readers is Christianity. The type of Christianity that underlies his writings is a very serious strain of Lutheran pietism informed by the dour values of sin, guilt, suffering, and individual responsibility. Kierkegaard was immersed in these values in the family home through his father, whose own childhood was lived in the shadow of Herrnhut pietism in Jutland.

For Kierkegaard Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artefacts. Faith is the most important task to be achieved by a human being, because only on the basis of faith does an individual have a chance to become a true self.

This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity. Anxiety or dread Angest is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself.

But the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith. There is only the individual's own vinding kierkegaard biography of faith. This repetition of faith is the way the self relates itself to itself and to the power which constituted it, i. Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason.

The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being Jesus. There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason.

In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd. Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd Repetition ; Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by virtue of the absurd Fear and Trembling ; Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd Journals ; Climacus hopes to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an absurd representation of Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgive, teach, etc.

Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently became an important category for twentieth century existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious associations. According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between eternal truth and time is distinct from the Socratic notion that eternal truth is always already within us — it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection anamnesis.

The condition for realizing eternal truth for the Christian is a gift Gave from God, but its realization is a task Opgave which must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Crucial to the miracle of Christian faith is the realization that over against God we are always in the wrong. That is, we must realize that we are always in sin.

This is the condition for faith, and must be given by God. The idea of sin cannot evolve from purely human origins. Rather, it must have been introduced into the world from a transcendent source. Once we understand that we are in sin, we can understand that there is some being over against which we are always in the wrong. On this basis we can have faith that, by virtue of the absurd, we can ultimately be atoned with this being.

Kierkegaard is sometimes regarded as an apolitical thinker, but in fact he intervened stridently in church politics, cultural politics, and in the turbulent social changes of his time. His earliest published essay, for example, was a polemic against women's liberation. It is a reactionary apologetic for the prevailing patriarchal values, and was motivated largely by Kierkegaard's desire to ingratiate himself with factions within Copenhagen's intellectual circles.

This latter desire gradually left him, but his relation to women remained highly questionable. One of Kierkegaard's main interventions in cultural politics was his sustained attack on Hegelianism. Hegel's philosophy had been introduced into Denmark with religious zeal by J. Heiberg, and was taken up enthusiastically within the theology faculty of Copenhagen University and by Copenhagen's vinding kierkegaard biographies. Kierkegaard, too, was induced to make a serious study of Hegel's work.

While Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel, he had grave reservations about Hegelianism and its bombastic promises. Hegel would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment. Instead he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical.

Kierkegaard's tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an elaborate parody of Hegel's entire system. The pseudonymous authorship, from Either-Or to Concluding Unscientific Postscriptpresents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to lead readers away from knowledge rather than towards it. This authorship simultaneously snipes at German romanticism and contemporary Danish literati with J.

Heiberg receiving much acerbic comment.