The Soul of Kierkegaard: Selections from His Journals

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Dover Publications, Mar 14, 2003 - Philosophy - 256 pages

"The primary source for any understanding of either the man or his thought." — The Times (London) Literary Supplement
Denmark's foremost philosopher and religious writer, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) maintained a journal throughout his adult life that amounted to more than 7,000 pages of alternative drafts of published works, biographical events, musings, and outpourings. A precursor of the Existential movement and a major influence on modern Protestant theology, Kierkegaard confided to his journal further reflections on the ideas developed in his philosophical and theological works, and on his tumultuous career as an author.
The English periodical, The Tablet, declared that "there can be few books in English that admit the reader so intimately to a process of thinking on such a scale, at so many levels, so unflinching and direct." Indeed, the journals attest to the philosopher's lively imagination, his poetic powers of self-expression, and the brilliance of his intellect. Students of philosophy and literature are bound to agree with The New Statesman's assessment that, "No biography can take the place of these Journals for the understanding of Kierkegaard’s very peculiar position as a thinker."

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About the author (2003)

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard was the son of a wealthy middle-class merchant. He lived all his life on his inheritance, using it to finance his literary career. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, completing a master's thesis in 1841 on the topic of irony in Socrates. At about this time, he became engaged to a woman he loved, but he broke the engagement when he decided that God had destined him not to marry. The years 1841 to 1846 were a period of intense literary activity for Kierkegaard, in which he produced his "authorship," a series of writings of varying forms published under a series of fantastic pseudonyms. Parallel to these, he wrote a series of shorter Edifying Discourses, quasi-sermons published under his own name. As he later interpreted it in the posthumously published Point of View for My Work as an Author, the authorship was a systematic attempt to raise the question of what it means to be a Christian. Kierkegaard was persuaded that in his time people took the meaning of the Christian life for granted, allowing all kinds of worldly and pagan ways of thinking and living to pass for Christian. He applied this analysis especially to the speculative philosophy of German idealism. After 1846, Kierkegaard continued to write, publishing most works under his own name. Within Denmark he was isolated and often despised, a man whose writings had little impact in his own day or for a long time afterward. They were translated into German early in the twentieth century and have had an enormous influence since then, on both Christian theology and the existentialist tradition in philosophy.

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