Søren Kierkegaard

1813-1855 · Danish · Existential Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophical Psychology, Christian Theology, Philosophy of Existence

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

In 1841, Søren Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen, the woman he loved, deciding that marriage was incompatible with the writing life he felt called to. That wound runs through everything he wrote. Living in Copenhagen on a hosier father's inheritance, walking the streets as a kind of laboratory, he poured out a torrent of books — many under invented names like Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus, each a distinct "existence-position" he built so readers could try it on and outgrow it.

Topics Søren Kierkegaard addresses

• the existing individual
• the three stages of existence
• aesthetic, ethical, religious spheres
• the leap (Spring)
• truth as subjectivity
• subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is untruth
• pseudonymity and indirect communication
• the absolute paradox
• the God-man as offense and faith
• faith and the absurd
• Religiousness A and Religiousness B
• the teleological suspension of the ethical
• the knight of faith
• the knight of infinite resignation
• anxiety (Angest) as the dizziness of freedom
• despair (Fortvivlelse) and the self
• the self as a relation that relates itself to itself
• the single individual (Hin Enkelte)
• the crowd is untruth
• Christianity vs Christendom
• the attack on the established Danish church
• repetition (Gjentagelse)
• contemporaneity with Christ
• becoming a Christian

Converse with Søren Kierkegaard on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Søren Kierkegaard's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.