Introducing Kierkegaard: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Dave Robinson

he seems to have had some kind of mystical experience that rekindled his religious enthusiasm. “There is an indescribable joy which blazes in me.” He became reconciled with his now ailing father but, three months later, the old man died. This affected Søren deeply.

A religious background

He was not husband material. His habit of deep thought and reflection made him “a lover with a wooden leg”.

As a determined bachelor, he spent the rest of his life praising the institution of marriage – from a distance. Regine became fictionalized in his mind as a kind of inaccessible muse. The whole sorry episode helped to make him into one of the most remarkable writers and philosophers of the 19th century. He had made up his mind what to do with his life, at last.

God’s will? man destiny?

Hegel believed that “Reason” is the best method of finding out the truth. But getting there was a complicated process.

The conclusion of this Hegelian “system” is that the individual must be subordinated to the family unit, the family to society, and society to the State.

He had a deep distrust of any philosophy that promised to be all-inclusive. Hegel’s philosophy also seemed predominantly “backward looking”.

Individual human beings constantly find themselves in a state of “paradox” (a crisis that needs to be resolved) and hope to find a “truth” (a resolution of the crisis, after making a commitment to a particular kind of action).

It often requires immediate decisions and implies a commitment to act in certain kinds of ways in the future. Living is not an activity that can be “mediated” by some ongoing dialectic.

that is restricted to enjoyment and pleasure ends in despair, regardless of all the clever strategies the aesthete employs to fight off boredom.

It’s easy to be nostalgic and believe that things were always better in the past. Or to hope that the future will be better than now. Both are common strategies that people use to avoid being “present to themselves”. They end up indecisive, in a constant state of unspecific melancholy and regret.

Only by recognizing their true situation – knowing they are free to choose and consequently responsible for their choices – do they truly “exist” (or as later “existentialist” philosophers would say, do they become “authentic”).

Father of existentialism?

Hegel’s analysis of religion and religious belief. Which takes us to his most important philosophical preoccupation – the relationship between religious faith and reason, a subject he wrote about extensively but again, pseudonymously, in his more “philosophical” works.