Gregers kierkegaard biography

The first English edition of the journals was edited by Alexander Dru in His question was whether or not one can have a spiritual confidant. He wrote the following in his Concluding Postscript: "With regard to the essential truth, a direct relation between spirit and spirit is unthinkable. If such a relation is assumed, it actually means that the party has ceased to be spirit.

The following passage, from 1 Augustis perhaps his most oft-quoted aphorism and a key quote for existentialist studies: What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.

Not until a man has inwardly understood himself and then sees the course he is to take does his life gain peace and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, sinister traveling companion—that irony of life, which manifests itself in the sphere of knowledge and invites true knowing to begin with a not-knowing Socrates just as God created the world from nothing.

But in the waters of morality it is especially at home to those who still have not entered the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tumbles a person about in a horrible way, for a time lets him feel happy and content in his resolve to go ahead along the right path, then hurls him into the abyss of despair. Often it lulls a man to sleep with the thought, "After all, things cannot be otherwise," only to awaken him suddenly to a rigorous interrogation.

Frequently it seems to let a veil of forgetfulness fall over the past, only to make every single trifle appear in a strong light again. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome temptation's power, there may come at almost the same time, right on the heels of perfect victory, an apparently insignificant external circumstance which pushes him down, like Sisyphus, from the height of the crag.

Often when a person has concentrated on something, a minor external circumstance arises which destroys everything. As in the case of a man who, weary of life, is about to throw himself into the Thames and at the crucial moment is halted by the sting of a mosquito. Frequently a person feels his very best when the illness is the worst, as in tuberculosis.

In vain he tries to resist it but he has not sufficient strength, and it is no help to him that he has gone through the same thing many times; the kind of practice acquired in this way does not apply here. Abrupt changes in thought, repetitive writing, and unusual turns of phrase are some among the many tactics he used to throw readers off track.

Consequently, there are many varying interpretations of his journals. Kierkegaard did not doubt the importance his journals would have in the future. In Decemberhe wrote: "Were I to die now the effect of my life would be exceptional; much of what I have simply jotted down carelessly in the Journals would become of great importance and have a great effect; for then people would have grown reconciled to me and would be able to grant me what was, and is, my right.

Kierkegaard and Olsen met on 8 May and were instantly attracted to each other. He broke off the engagement on 11 Augustthough it is generally believed that the two were deeply in love. In his journals, Kierkegaard mentions his belief that his "melancholy" made him unsuitable for marriage, but his precise motive for ending the engagement remains unclear.

Upon submitting it in Junea panel of faculty judged that his work demonstrated considerable intellect while criticizing its informal tone; however, Kierkegaard was granted permission to proceed with its defense. Pseudonyms were used often in the early 19th century as a means of representing viewpoints other than the author's own. Kierkegaard employed the same technique as a way to provide examples of indirect communication.

In writing under various pseudonyms to express sometimes contradictory positions, Kierkegaard is sometimes criticized for gregers kierkegaard biography with various viewpoints without ever committing to one in particular. He has been described by those opposing his writings as indeterminate in his standpoint as a writer, though he himself has testified to all his work deriving from a service to Christianity.

De omnibus dubitandum est Latin: "Everything must be doubted" was not published until after his death. The book is basically an argument about faith and marriage with a short discourse at the end telling them they should stop arguing. Eremita thinks "B", a "gregers kierkegaard biography," makes the most sense. Kierkegaard stressed the "how" of Christianity as well as the "how" of book reading in his works rather than the "what".

These discourses were published under Kierkegaard's own name and are available as Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses today. 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.

Gregers kierkegaard biography: There are several reasons to explore

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's Politics 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 literati.

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 Postscript, presents 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. This intriguing pseudonymous authorship received little popular attention, aimed as it was at the literary elite. So it had little immediate effect as discursive action. Kierkegaard sought to remedy this by provoking an attack on himself in the popular satirical review The Corsair. Kierkegaard succeeded in having himself mercilessly lampooned in this publication, largely on personal grounds rather than in terms of the substance of his writings.

The suffering incurred by these attacks sparked Kierkegaard into another highly productive phase of authorship, but this time his focus was the creation of positive Christian discourses rather than satire or parody. Eventually Kierkegaard became more and more worried about the gregers kierkegaard biography taken by the Danish People's Church, especially after the death of the Bishop Primate J.

He realized he could no longer indulge himself in the painstakingly erudite and poetically meticulous writing he had practised hitherto. He had to intervene decisively in a popular medium, so he published his own pamphlet under the title The Instant. This addressed church politics directly and increasingly shrilly. There were two main foci of Kierkegaard's concern in church politics.

One was the influence of Hegel, largely through the teachings of H. Martensen; the other was the popularity of N. Grundtvig, a theologian, educator and poet who composed most of the pieces in the Danish hymn book. Grundtvig's theology was diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's in tone. Grundtvig emphasized the light, joyous, celebratory and communal aspects of Christianity, whereas Kierkegaard emphasized seriousness, suffering, sin, guilt, and individual isolation.

Kierkegaard's intervention failed miserably with respect to the Danish People's Church, which became predominantly Grundtvigian. His intervention with respect to Hegelianism also failed, with Martensen succeeding Mynster as Bishop Primate. Hegelianism in the church went on to die of natural causes. Kierkegaard also provided critical commentary on social change.

He feared that the opportunity of achieving geniune selfhood was diminished by the social production of stereotypes. He lived in an age when mass society was emerging from a highly stratified feudal order and was contemptuous of the mediocrity the new social order generated. One symptom of the change was that mass society substitutes detached reflection for engaged passionate commitment.

The English-speaking world knew virtually nothing about Kierkegaard untilwhen a book of selections were rendered into English. In thousands of pages of personal jottings, Kierkegaard did not mention his mother once, and yet his journals swim with notes about his autodidact father. His father confided that the endless treks to the cemetery were all part of a divine punishment for his boyhood curse against God.

InKierkegaard entered the University of Copenhagen. At the behest of his gregers kierkegaard biography, he matriculated in theology, but he studied widely in the liberal arts. The most important literary figure of this era was the Danish playwright Johan Ludvig Heiberg. Kierkegaard attached himself to the lively coterie surrounding Heiberg.

Inhe was reconciled with his father, who died suddenly the next year. Explaining that he could no longer argue with a dead man, he began to apply himself. Inhe passed his exams, and a year later he finished his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates. This magisterial study, comparing the use of irony in the Romantic age with the irony of antiquity, shows the positive impress of the reigning philosopher of the time, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Statue at the Royal Danish Library Inwhen Kierkegaard was twenty-four, he had met and fallen in love with the fourteen-year-old Regine Olsen.

Gregers kierkegaard biography: When Henrik Ibsen put

Just over three years later they became engaged. Almost immediately after the engagement Kierkegaard began to have second thoughts. Thirteen months later he broke it off. In other journal entries, he stated that he simply could not at the same time serve both Regine and the Idea. He was probably right about this. Regine eventually recovered from the emotional trauma and married another suitor.

Kierkegaard, however, never got over her. She was the wife of his soul. His father, to whom many of his works are dedicated, was never far below the lines of his thought; the same was true of Regine, but even more so. Though she never responded to the one overture he made to retain some kind of relationship, he named her his sole beneficiary.

In Berlin, in the crucible of his rift with Regine, Kierkegaard came into his genius and his muse.

Gregers kierkegaard biography: In the present study

Having had his fill of Schelling, Kierkegaard returned to Denmark and began a period of astounding literary productivity. His father had done quite well for himself and had retired by the age of forty. But he was a pessimistic father figure, his first wife having died childless after two years of marriage, and Soren's mother being the housemaid that his father married after his first wife.

When Kierkegaard's father was a young Shepard boy, he cursed God for his misfortunes. He tells us in his journal: "as a small boy tending sheep on the Jutland Heath, suffering many ills, famished and exhausted, stood up on a hill and cursed God! And that man was never able to forget it, not even at the age of Both men, Soren and his father, believed a great deal of irony in this, and that the family actually lay under a curse.

Before Soren was twenty one, four of his siblings and his mother had died, and neither he nor his father believed that any of the other seven siblings would live past 34, the year that Christ died. Thus Soren inherited his father's despair. This is believed to have been what fuelled Kierkegaard's drive for writing so much in his younger years, and is also attributed to his anxious personality.

At 27, Kierkegaard enrolled in the University of Copenhagen, focusing his studies on theology, philosophy, and literature. It was here infour years after he enrolled, that he made the first entry into his famous journal.

Gregers kierkegaard biography: Peter Christian Kierkegaard [Parents] was born

His mother's death prompted the entry. His Works [ edit edit source ] Kierkegaard's rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic, and his method of "indirect communication. His dialect is him writing under various pseudonyms and each one carries a different point of view, and like Plato's dialogues, Kierkegaard does not speak to the reader directly.

This is more for Kierkegaard's benefit. Inas his journal indicates, he decides that before he can know what to do with his life. Juxtaposing various pseudonyms against one another is an ingenious way to look at one's self from various points of view, which is exactly what Kierkegaard does until the culmination of his work in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

At the time that Kierkegaard was writing, he was double publishing his works. On one hand, he would have publish one work under a pseudonym and then publish another work under his real name. It is because of his conflict with Hegel that he began to write in pseudonyms. When the Hegelians tried to depersonalize philosophy, Kierkegaard viewed philosophy as being born from the individual efforts and strivings of the individual philosopher.

Thus why none of his pseduonyms agree with one another. Kierkegaard's signed works were very religious, and that is what Kierkegaard regarded himself as more than anything: a religious poet. Kierkegaard was a serious Lutheran pietist and from this sect of Christianity, Kierkegaard takes the sin, guilt, and suffering, and individual responsibility.

Church dogma is insignificant to Kierkegaard; for him faith is the most important task for a human to strive for. It is our lives that God uses to judge us for all eternity. It must be our individual passion to want to live well and faithfully. Now develops the existential burden of responsibility, that the choices we make eternally save or damn our souls.