Soeren Kierkegaard

6 May 2014

Soren Kierkegaard: Born 5th May 1813, 201 years ago today!! Well, not today today, but rather, the day I took this picture.

Kierkegaard family - Norrebro cemetry, Jagvej, KBH

He's somewhat of a figurehead here, and why wouldn't he be, a son of Copenhagen.

People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood.

Søren Kierkegaard, Journals Feb. 1836.

 David F. Swenson wrote the following about Kierkegaard's journals and mode of authorship in 1937:

"Rarely has an authorship had a more inward motivation than Kierkegaard’s. He gives the impression of writing as a bird sings its song, or the flower spreads its fragrance. He permitted intentionally the undermining of his own personal authority and prestige among his contemporaries, in order that his thought might speak for itself. He spent money freely for the privilege of writing and publishing in Denmark its greatest prose literature; and it was a sore difficulty under which he labored in later years, when the springs of productivity flowed as strongly as ever, to be compelled to dam the stream because of increasing financial straits, and to confine himself to his diaries; which did indeed intensify his always vigorous self-reflection. At his death his patrimony was completely exhausted , barely enough remaining to defray the expense of the funeral. It was his father’s financial resources that had underwritten the authorship, and Kierkegaard had on the whole earned no money; he was thus not a “practical” man of “serious” purpose". 

Lectures on the Religious Thought of Soren Kierkegaard, given at Princeton Theological Seminary in March, 1936, on the Stone Foundation by Eduard Geismar, Introduction by David F. Swenson, Augsburg Publishing House.

Kierkegaard died on 11 November 1855 at the early age of 42.