SØREN KIERKEGAARD

Two strong feelings left their impression on the history of Danish philosopher and theologian (Copenhagen, 1813-1855) Soren Kierkegaard: love and faith.

His father, a wealthy merchant of strict Lutheran morals, made him promise on his deathbed he would become  a pastor to settle the guilt he felt. Thus, Soren Kierkegaard took up studies at the School of Civic Virtue and Theology at the University of Copenhagen, and came to the fore especially in the fields of classical languages, philosophy and literature. In Berlin, he started off his career as a writer being Shelling his teacher, and he devoted to the thought and writings.

Earlier, however, he had met Regine Olsen, with whom he lived this as explosive as contradictory love. They got engaged, but he decided to break the engagement a year later because ofhis moral doubts preventing him to marry. This contradiction represents a constant anguish in the life and work of Kierkegaard. Olsen married another man, something the writer grieved for until the end of his days.

Even as a man of deep faith, his work also criticizes as fervently the religious institutions, for their hypocrisy.

Soren Kierkegaard is seen as the father of Existentialism, since he argues for freedom, suffering and responsibility of the individual, on subjectivity.

To understand the author and his work, we should read his diaries, source of sentences and aphorisms, some of them we have compiled below. Among his essential books, we can quote: ‘Fear and Trembling’, ‘Philosophical Fragments’ or ‘Diary of a Seducer’.

 

Subjectivity is truth, and truth is subjectivity.

I must find a truth that is true for me.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Life can only be understood backwards, but can only be lived forwards.

The door of happiness opens inward, one should keep aside a little to open it: if one pushes, they close it more and more.

Take advice from your enemy.

Not that the road is difficult, is that what is difficult is the way.

The human being is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite.

Whoever loses his passion, loses less than if he loses passion.

The self is not something that is, but something that will be. It is a task.

Happy start to the year,

Álex Rovira