![]() He had cursed God as a young man, and he later became guiltily religious. Søren’s father, Michael, was a former shepherd from Jutland who became, improbably, one of the richest merchants in Denmark. The name “Kierkegaard” means “graveyard,” and “Søren” is an affectionate Danish moniker for the Devil. ![]() “Revelation is marked by mystery,” he wrote, “eternal happiness by suffering, the certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity.” It was not for him to dictate the meaning of a text (Kierkegaard’s meanings are contradictory), but for his readers to exercise their autonomy in apprehending it. The point of these impostures, he explained, when he finally acknowledged them, was to disavow, or-to use a postmodern notion that he pioneered-to “destabilize” his authority as a narrator. Kierkegaard did most of his seminal writing under assumed names: Victor Eremita (“Either/Or”) Johannes de Silentio (“Fear and Trembling”) Anti-Climacus (“The Sickness Unto Death”) Hilarious Bookbinder (“Stages on Life’s Way”) Vigilius Haufniensis (“The Concept of Anxiety”). ![]() ![]() Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Sartre, and Wittgenstein are among his heirs-and without him, where would Woody Allen be? ![]() William James liked to quote Søren Kierkegaard’s famous assertion that “we live forward, but we understand backwards.” Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher of subjectivity, would have been two hundred years old on May 5th, and, looking back, we can see that ironic, angst-ridden modern literature begins with him. ![]()
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