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Søren Kierkegaard was a brilliant, gloomy, anxiety-ridden, often hilarious Danish 19th century philosopher.
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The author of 22 books, of which 3 continue to make his name.
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He was born in an immensely wealthy family in Copenhagen in 1813, the youngest of 7 children.
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Death was around him constantly from a young age, and was to obsess him throughout his career.
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It is, in a sense, his only theme.
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Not only was he extremely physically frail,
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by the time he was 22, all his siblings had died except for he and a brother.
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It drove him to furious production of books over 15 years.
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On a single day in 1843 he published no less than 3 works.
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He wasn't writing for the money; he was working to save himself, and, he thought, humanity.
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As it happened, he made it to the age of 42, then died of an excruciating spinal disease.
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In "Either/Or" and "Fear and Trembling", what Kierkegaard wants to do above all
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is wake up and give up our cozy sentimental illusions.
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He systematically attacks the pillars of modern life: our faith in family, our trust in work, our attachment to love,
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and our general sense that life has purpose and meaning.
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His enemies were the smug in all their guises,
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particularly, the prosperous Danish haute bourgeoisie, and the members of the established Danish church.
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He tells us, "As I grew up I opened my eyes and saw the real world, and I began to laugh and I haven't stopped since.
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I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood,
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that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge,
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that the brightest joy of love was to marry a well-off girl,
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that wisdom was what the majority said it was,
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that passion was to give a speech,
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that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars,
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that cordiality was to say "you're welcome" after a meal,
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and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year.
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That's what I saw and I laughed."
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Kierkegaard was especially caustic about the 19th century understanding of love,
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and the new ideology of passionate marriage, which aimed to unite desire with prudence,
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and suggested that one could enjoy all the thrills of a love affair,
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and, at the same time, all the stability for long-term relationship.
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But, Kierkegaard mocked the notion that one could ever fuse romantic laugh with marriage,
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that one could have passion and sex, and, at the same time, children, stability, and routine.
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He respected both, he just couldn't believe you could have them both at the same time-
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in a cozy marriage sanctified by the state and the neighborhoods.
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His belief arose out of his own tortured love life.
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He fell in love with a beautiful, precocious, and talented 18-year-old girl, called Regine Olsen,
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only then to break off the engagement as he realized
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that to try and live with her forever would also mean killing the love that had drawn him to her.
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Everywhere he turned, Kierkegaard saw intolerable incompatibilities, and impossible choices.
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It led him to one memorable explosion in "Either/Or":
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"Marry and you will regret it. Don't marry; you will also regret it."
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"Marry or don't marry; you will regret it either way."
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"Laugh at the world's foolishness; you will regret it."
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"Weep over it; you'll regret that too."
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"Hang yourself; you'll regret it. Don't hang yourself and you'll regret that too."
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"Whether you hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you will regret both."
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"This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy."
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The mention of laughter is not a coincidence; key to Kierkegaard's philosophy is that:
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the only intelligent tactical response to life's horror is to laugh defiantly at it.
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Rarely has a philosopher taken humor as seriously.
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Kierkegaard is often described as the founder of the philosophical movement known as "existentialism",
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because, in him, we find all the themes that would so interest later thinkers, like Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.
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The book that fascinated the existentialists was Kierkegaard's, "The Concept of Anxiety", published in 1844,
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in which he emphasized a new word, "angest", or "angst", as we know it in English,
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a condition where we understand how many choices we face,
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and how little understanding we can ever have of how to exercise these choices wisely.
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As Kierkegaard wrote, "Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards".
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Our constant angst means that unhappiness is more or less written into the script of life,
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as he wrote, "anyone who has given the matter any serious thought will know that I'm right when I say,"
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"it's not possible for anyone to be absolutely, and in every conceivable way, completely content,"
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"not even for a single half hour of his life."
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"No one has come into the world without crying. No one asks when you want to enter the world; no one asks when you want to leave."
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"How empty and meaningless life is; we bury a person, throw three shovels of earth over him,"
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"drive out in a coach, drive back in a coach, and console ourselves that we still have life enough left to live."
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"But really, how long is three score and ten; why not just get it over with straight away?"
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For Kierkegaard there was, however, one answer that he put forward ever more stridently in his later works: Jesus Christ.
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Kierkegaard loathed the Christianity of the established Danish church,
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but he adored the simple truths of the Gospels that his father taught him as a boy
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For him, Christianity was a religion of extreme surrender to a theology of almost peasantlike simplicity:
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one was to be ready to die for Christ, to give up all attachment to worldly things, and to love all humans like one's siblings.
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Kierkegaard wasn't interested in justifying his attachment to Christianity through rational means;
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instead, he recommended a dramatic and now famous 'leap of faith',
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wherein one wouldn't apply one's puny mind to attempting to prove the existence of God,
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one would merely switch off one's faulty rational faculties, and jump into the idea of God as the total solution.
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As he put it, "To have faith is to lose your mind and to win God".
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Like Marxist communism, Kierkegaard's solutions to the problems of being human
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are far less convincing and interesting than the diagnoses of our ills; few of us now make that leap,
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but Kierkegaard deserves our attention for the beautifully bitter, caustic look he casts on the human condition.
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He's one of the few philosophers one can turn to when the world has badly let us down, and we're in need of a friend
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who can fully understand the dark places we're in once the sentimental illusions, that normally keep us going, fall away.
