Soren Kierkegaard: University Life: Descartes and Locke

In 1843 Soren Kierkegaard published Either/Or, an 800 page book that was like no other book that anyone had ever read. Many books have been written about his books just as many have been written about the writings of Shakespeare, Bacon, Descartes and Locke. Kierkegaard wrote the following:

When you belong to the “readers’ sect,” when in one way or another, you get a reputation for being a diligent and attentive reader, the supposition grows among other people that you probably will become an author of sorts, for, as Hamann says: “Out of children grow people, out of virgins grow brides, out of readers grow writers.”      Either/Or Part I, Swenson p. 243

To write a book is the easiest of all things in our time, if, as is customary one takes ten older works on the same subject and out of them puts together an eleventh on the same subject. In this way one gains the honor of being an author just as easily as one gains, according to Holberg’s advice, the rank of being a practiced physician and the possession of his fellow citizens’ money, trust, and esteem by getting a new black suit and writing on one’s door: “John Doe Physician.”   Prefaces, Soren Kierkegaard 1844 translated by Todd W. Nichol, 1997, Princeton University Press p. 35

As more people read the same books over time they write books about those books. First one book is written then another and another and so on. The initial idea was good but it becomes changed with all the commentary and interpretation. It becomes difficult to get back to the basics. It becomes a question of authority. Would King James’s Bible be the only Authorized Bible in England? Would Luther’s Bible be the only Authorized Bible in Germany? Would Protestantism rule or Catholicism?

René Descartes (1596—1650) Frenchman – Father of Modern Philosophy  The “old” philosophy is Aristotle’s -

He wrote Meditations on First Philosophy, subtitled, In which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated.
Passions of the Soul

Oliver Cromwell 1599 – 1658 Executioner of King Charles I

John Locke (1632-1704) Englishman – Father of Liberalism

Kierkegaard read Descartes works in college, just like students do today. Modern philosophy takes its beginning point, or as Kierkegaard likes to say “point of departure” from Descartes’ Meditations. Kierkegaard took an interest in everything just like college students do today. He couldn’t see how any student would ever say he didn’t want to do his lessons. Kierkegaard saw it as a duty so he studied diligently.

The Thirty Years‘ Wars. 1618-1648 & 1733-1763.  Wars of religion or wars for political power? The Catholics against the Protestants or the French against the Germans? These wars had disastrous results for the area now known as Germany.  

The Thirty Years War  You Tube

The Thirty Years War   by Friedrich Schiller 1759-1805 Part one (audio) The Danes were all reading German books when Kierkegaard was in college. Schiller was a good friend of Johann Goethe 1749-1832

The Thirty Years War (Audio lecture)

Descartes decided it would be best if he could find a method by which he could come to believe in God without having to fight his neighbors about his belief. He proposed that an individual, like himself, could reflect upon himself. He could try to discover what he thought he knew and differentiate between that and what he knew he knew. He could then live by the light of his understanding and try to gain more solid ground from that point on. He wondered how he could even know if he existed. Nothing was presupposed, not even his own existence. He’s famous for several lines of thought.  Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am – this was the same way he advocated that the sciences should discover new ideas. They should continually say, lets say we didn’t know anything about x now let’s see what we can discover through observation. In Kierkegaard’s time (1811-1855) philosophers were thinking that everything must be doubted in order to get a fresh start so they set about the task.

Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences   (Audio)   Descartes 1637

Coincidentally, wars of religion were being fought in England at the same time. John Locke tried to find a method for peace in England just as Descartes had in France. History, on the quick, says these wars were all religious wars. But that means these people were one dimensional. People commonly say that Christianity was the cause of all these wars. Take a look and a listen and see what you think.  I don’t know if Kierkegaard read Locke or not but I do know that every university students learns about him. Locke thought along the sames lines as Descartes. Lets go back to the beginning. He argued that human beings are born with a “tabula rasa” blank slate. So every individual begins life with nothing written on their minds or consciousness or soul or spirit or whatever and wherever it is that experience leaves its mark.

His first conclusion is that the child’s mental condition at birth is appropriately figured by “white paper, void of all characters,” or, as it was afterwards expressed in Some Thoughts, “wax to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases.” Amongst other things the similes were intended to deny that man is born in possession of an equipment of general principles which spontaneously reveal themselves as occasion offers. ” It is an established opinion amongst some men that there are in the understanding certain innate principles, some primary notions, characters as it were,  stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being and brings into the world with it.” Against this established opinion Locke maintained his figure of the blank sheet or tabula rasa; ideas as they existed in an individual mind were the consequence of ‘ that mind’s individual history. Experience is the writer who covers the blank sheet with characters, the sculptor who moulds the wax into well-defined shapes.

p. 6 Educational Writings

Oliver Cromwell 1599 – 1658 in England  Charles I of England

A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul   John Locke

The Educational Writings of John Locke   1693

Two Treatises of Civil Government  (Audio)

Now the works of Descartes have taken on their own authority. One could say, “Will Descartes rule or Locke?” Their works are the authorized readings in most Universities. (Unity in Diversity=many views in one place). They’re both talking about how one might go about finding out a truth that has some meaning for himself or herself. Professors seem to apply their principles on a universal scale so that everyone reads the same books.

Kierkegaard wanted to get away from authorities because they become rigid and don’t allow for growth. He accepted the authority of the Bible but he didn’t want the book mediated by the views of Descartes or other philosophers or theologians.  He read his assignments with the spiritual element in mind. He said to himself:

“It is spirit to ask about two things. (1) Is what is being said possible? (2) Am I able to do it?

It is to lack spirit to ask about two things: (1) Did it actually happen? (2) Has my neighbor done it; has he actually done it?

In asking with regard to my own actuality, I am asking about its possibility, except that this possibility is not esthetically and intellectually disinterested but is a thought-actuality that is related to my own personal actuality-namely that I am able to carry it out. The how of the truth is precisely the truth.

Concluding Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Soren Kierkegaard 1846, Hong translation  p. 322-323

It’s possible that Descartes and Locke were successful in appropriating what they thought and putting it into use. Kierkegaard didn’t judge them by saying, “Was Descartes a Christian?” That was between Descartes and God and Kierkegaard didn’t want to meddle in their business arrangement. Kierkegaard just thought about coming to his own understanding of his relationship with God and living by the light he had received.

Soren Kierkegaard: University Life: Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare

King James IV 1567-1625

Francis Bacon 1561-1626

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Soren was born in 1813. He began attending the University of Copenhagen when he was 17 years old and studied there for 10 years, graduating in 1841. While there he experienced what every college student experiences. He read Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet by Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and The New Organon. Shakespeare brought about a quantitative leap in the arena of aesthetics, the arts, and Bacon brought about a quantitative leap in the realm of science. King James brought about a qualitative leap through the issuance of the English translation of the Bible in 1611 just as Martin Luther had in Germany with his German translation in 1522. Both became known as the authorized versions of the Bible that could be read in the churches.

Kierkegaard didn’t like Shakespeare’s “modern” tragedies because he believed they would lead people into imagined anxieties about life and extremism in the face of opposition. He wrote some of the first books ever written about subjective and objective anxiety. He also  wrote against Bacon’s idea of “cultural Christianity”. Bacon was concerned about all the wars that had caused such destruction in Europe and thought that Christianity shouldn’t be about everyone consenting to a common belief but rather an aesthetic experience. Kierkegaard believed in the “single individual” and feared, that a cultural Christianity would lead the individual to a watered down, cheapened faith in Christ, that appealed to the emotions rather than the conscience. Bacon addressed his Essays to the Duke of Buckingham. Shakespeare was a poet and Bacon was a politician.  Bacon asked questions about the “what” of the world and sought answers through science. He is known as the Father of Science.

Bacon said:

RELIGION being the chief band of human society, it is a happy thing, when itself is well contained within the true band of unity. The quarrels, and divisions about religion, were evils unknown to the heathen. The reason was, because the religion of the heathen, consisted rather in rites and ceremonies, than in any constant belief. For you may imagine, what kind of faith theirs was, when the chief doctors, and fathers of their church, were the poets. But the true God hath this attribute, that he is a jealous God; and therefore, his worship and religion, will endure no mixture, nor partner.

Of Unity In Religion, Essays

This is what Kierkegaard had to say about Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet

August Wilhelm von Schlegel translated Shakespeare into German in 1825 he also translated Locke’s books. He and his brother Friedrich were the leaders in universities in regard to literature and history.

Right here I discover a definition of the modern idea of the tragical. For anxiety is a reflection, and in this respect is essentially different than sorrow. Anxiety is the organ by which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it. Anxiety is the energy of the movement by which sorrow bores its way into one’s heart. But the movement is not swift like the thrust of a dart, it is successive; it is not once for all, but it is constantly continuing.

As a passionate, erotic glance desires its object, so anxiety looks upon sorrow to desire it. As the quiet, incorruptible glance of love is preoccupied with the beloved object, so anxiety occupies itself with sorrow. But anxiety has another element in it which makes it cling even more strongly to its object, for it both loves it and fears it. Anxiety has a two-fold function. Partly it is the detective instinct which constantly touches, and by means of this probing, discovers sorrow, as it goes round about the sorrow. Or anxiety is sudden, posits the whole sorrow in the present moment, yet so that this present moment instantly dissolves in succession.

Anxiety is in this sense a truly tragic category, and the old saying: quem deus vult perdere, primum dementat, (whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes insane) in truth rightly applies here. That anxiety is determined by reflection is shown by our use of words; for I always say: to be anxious about something, by which I separate the anxiety from that about which I am anxious, and I can never use anxiety in an objective sense; whereas, on the contrary, when I say “my sorrow,” it can just as well express that which I sorrow over, as my sorrow over it.

In addition, anxiety always involves a reflection upon time, for I cannot be anxious about the present, but only about the future; but the past and the future, so resisting one another that the present vanishes, are reflective determinations. Greek sorrow, on the other hand, like the whole of Greek life, is in the present tense, and therefore the sorrow is deeper but the pain less. Anxiety therefore belongs essentially to the tragic. Hence, Hamlet is deeply tragic because he suspects his mother’s guilt. Robert le Diable asks how on earth it could happen that he caused so much evil. Hogne, whom his mother had begotten by a troll, happens accidentally to see his image in the water, and asks his mother how his body had acquired such a shape.

Either/Or Part I, Swenson p. 152-153

When Juliet swoons because she lost Romeo, when immediacy expired in her breast and she has lost Romeo in such a way that even Romeo could no longer give comfort because the possession itself would only become a sorrowful daily recollection, and when the last friend, the last friend of all unhappy lovers, the poet falls silent, the religious speaker should nevertheless dare to break the silence. Perhaps to present a little assortment of excellent grounds of comfort? In that case, the offended Juliet would surely turn to the poet, and he, with his esthetically triumphant authority, by assigning His Reverence a place in the farcical parts of the tragedy, would defend what in all eternity belong by right to the poet: the lovable, the despairing Juliet. No, the religious speaker should dare to proclaim new suffering, even more terrible suffering, and this will bring Juliet to stand up again. … When it was stated previously that the religious address smites whereas the esthetic mitigates, and it is now stated that poetry has the courage to kill Juliet, this also strikes home without involving our presentation in any self-contradiction. To have Juliet die is the tender sympathy of the esthetic, but to proclaim new suffering and consequently to smite is the rigorous sympathy of the religious.

Hamlet swears by the fire tongs; the comic is in the contradiction between the solemnity of the oath and the reference that annuls the oath, no matter what the object is.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript p 440-441, Note p. 447, Note p. 514

Kierkegaard noted that his contemporaries were becoming anxious because of an imaginary Juliet and an imaginary Hamlet. Kierkegaard was a thinker much like Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy had much to say about Shakespeare’s writings. They’re worth a read or a listen.

Shakespeare by Tolstoy

Here are some links to some of the books by Bacon and Shakespeare Kierkegaard had to read in college.

The Essays of Francis Bacon   Good advice for politicians

New Atlantis, by Bacon    The New World Order of the sixteenth century

Hamlet, Shakespeare  – Hamlet asked whether it was nobler to live in great anxiety or to put an end to it through suicide.

King James IV 1567-1625
Francis Bacon 1561-1626
William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Soren’s mother and father.

Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (Soren’s father-1756-1838)

Michael was 56 years old when Soren was born. As a young boy Soren was allowed to listen to his father’s discussions with his friends in the Danish Lutheran Church. Most of these people were heavily influenced by the writings of  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).  They’re all mentioned in Croxall’s translation of Johannes Climacus which is linked in the previous post.

Hegel was busy developing our current philosophical system of religious evolution based on speculative philosophy and science. Soren learned how to argue from his father. He argued against speculative Christianity throughout his life. Johannes is a pseudonym used by Soren Kierkegaard. He wrote under various names for various reasons. If you read the first three years of his publications (1843-1845) the reasons begin to become clear.

Michael Kierkegaard wasn’t as bad as speculative historians and philosophers seem to think.

Ane watched as most of her children died before the age of 33 and still had faith in God.

His father gave him the ability to imaginatively construct characters and put himself into their shoes. He had learned the Christian art of arguing with himself rather than his neighbor.

“His home-life offered but few diversions. He was scarcely ever permitted to go out, and thus he became accustomed, at an early age, to attend to himself and to his own thoughts. His father was very strict, and dry and prosaic on the surface; but underneath this coarse and unpretentious exterior he preserved a glowing fancy, which not even his extreme old age was able to dull. When Johannes sometimes asked for permission to go out, he was most often refused; but occasionally, as if to make up for this refusal, the father proposed a walk together up and down the room. This seemed at first a poor substitute; and yet, like his father’s coarse gray coat, it concealed under its plain exterior something very different from that which appeared on the surface. The proposal accepted, it was for Johannes himself to decide where to go.

They passed out the gate and visited a neighboring palace; or went to the seashore, or wandered about the streets, all at the boy’s pleasure. For the father’s imagination was powerful enough to create a realizing sense of anything and everything the boy desired. While they walked up and down, the father described the sights along the way; they greeted the passers-by; the vehicles rumbled and drowned the father’s voice; the dainties displayed by the fruit-woman on the corner seemed more alluring than ever. When they were on ground familiar to Johannes, everything was given a description so vivid and minute that not the smallest detail was overlooked. When the way took them to scenes new and unfamiliar, the father knew how to draw so explicit a picture, and give it so vivid an intuition, that after but half an hour of this promenade Johannes was as tired and overwhelmed by his impressions as if he had been out of doors an entire day.

He soon learned how to practice his father’s magic art for himself. A dramatic representation supplanted the former epic narrative; for they conversed together on the way. When they walked amidst scenes with which Johannes was familiar, they prompted one another faithfully, lest anything should be overlooked; when the way was strange, Johannes trusted his fancy to combine the elements of his memory into pictures, while his father’s all-powerful imagination brought into being every least detail, utilizing every childish wish as an ingredient in the drama. To Johannes it seemed as if he were witnessing, during the course of their conversation, a world coming into being; it was as if his father were the Creator, and he himself a favorite, permitted freely to introduce his own childish fancies into the creative process. For he was never repressed, and his father was never at a loss; every suggestion tendered was made use of, and always to Johannes’ complete satisfaction.”

“With an all-powerful imagination the father combined an invincible dialectic. And hence when at times the father was engaged in argument with a neighbor, Johannes was all ears; and this so much the more, as everything in these discussions was arranged with ceremonious order and precision.His father never interrupted the opponent, but let him speak through to the end; when he appeared to have finished, he always cautiously asked him if there was anything more he wished to say, before beginning his answer.Johannes had followed the argument with concentrated attention, and was, in his own way, a truly interested participant. There came a pause, and then the father’s reply; all was changed in the twinkling of an eye. How it was changed was a mystery to the boy, but his mind was fascinated by the spectacle. The opponent spoke in rebuttal, and Johannes was still more deeply attentive, if possible, than before; he wanted to bear every point in mind.The opponent approached his peroration, and Johannes could almost hear his own heart beat, so impatient was he to hear the outcome of the argument. Then came the father’s reply, and in a moment everything was changed. The things that had seemed clear before, suddenly became inexplicable; the things that had seemed certain became doubtful, and their very opposites were made to appear evident.”  Quoted from Johannes Climacus from Soren Kierkegaard, by David F. Swenson, 1921

Michael Kierkegaard had faith in Danish bonds when the economy was sinking and became rich.

Three Upbuilding Discourses 1843

Soren wrote about Ane in 1844 in his second discourse of 1844.

Two Upbuilding Discourses 1844

Ane Sorensdatter Lund Kierkegaard (Soren’s mother-1768 – 1834)

Soren Kierkegaard’s mother presents one with a very different picture than his father did in the previous post. Ane could hardly read at all, whereas Michael read philosophy and critically studied Biblical texts. Ane was the maid of the household until Micheal’s first wife, Kirstine Royen, died childless in 1796. Michael married Ane in April 1797 and their first child, Maren Kirstine, was born in September. Much speculation has been made of the birth of Maren Kristine, however, I want to dwell on the intellectual difference between Soren’s parents.

Michael represented the “reading public” and Ane represented the “common folk” in Soren’s writings. Soren wrote a literary biography called The Point of View of My Work as an Author but published just a small part of it while alive. Here is a quote from it.

I felt a real Christian satisfaction in the fact that, if there were no other, there was one man who (several years before existence set the race another lesson to learn) made a practical effort on a small scale to learn the lesson of loving one’s neighbor and alas! Got at the same time a frightful insight into what an illusion Christendom is, and (a little later, to be sure) an insight also into what a situation the simpler classes suffered themselves to be seduced by paltry-newspaper writers, whose struggle or fight for equality (since it is in the service of a lie) cannot lead to any other result but to prompt the privileged classes in self-defence to stand proudly aloof from the common man, and to make the common man insolent in his forwardness. Point of View, Lowrie p. 49

His mother represented the “simpler class” and Kierkegaard believed himself to be on equal footing with his mother in relation to God. He stated this again in his book Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. I.

I am indeed the one who continually says that between the simple person’s and the wise person’s knowledge of the simple there is only the ludicrous little difference-that the simple person knows it, and the wise person knows that he knows it or knows that he does not know it. But nevertheless something else does follow: Would it not be best to hold back a little on world history if this is how it stands with one’s knowledge of the simple? … This is the way I have tried to understand myself, and even if the understanding is slight and its yield poor, I have in compensation resolved to act with all my passion on the basis of what I have understood. Perhaps, when all is said and done, it is a more healthful diet to understand little but possess this with passion’s unlimited soundness in the setting of the infinite that to know much and to possess nothing because I myself have fantastically become a fantastical-subjective-objective something. I have considered it demeaning if I were to be more ashamed before human beings and their judgment than before the god and his judgment, cowardly in ignobly to inquire more about what shame before human beings might tempt me to do than what shame before the god would bid.

And who are those people, anyway, the ones I am supposed to fear-a few geniuses, perhaps, some literary critics, and whoever is seen on the highways and by-ways? Or were there no human beings alive before 1845? Or what are those people compared with the god; what is the refreshment of their busy clangor compared with the deliciousness of that solitary wellspring that is in every human being, that wellspring in which the god resides, that wellspring in the profound silence when all is quiet! And compared with eternity, what else than a brief moment is the hour and a half of time I have to live with human beings? Will they perhaps pursue me in all eternity?  … God’s judgment is the final one, is the only one; his co-knowledge is inescapable since it is woven into the weaves through the faintest movement of my consciousness, its most secret association with itself. His presence is an eternal contemporaneity-and I should have dared to be ashamed of him! p. 183

Perhaps Ane didn’t have Michael’s intellectual understanding, but, in spite of that, she had the possibility of being just as close or even closer to God than either Michael or Soren or his brother, Peter, the Bishop of Aalborg, did. His parents helped form Soren’s personality without their knowing it.

Johannes Climacus, by Soren Kierkegaard 1841

Soren wrote his first book in 1841. It was a short, little semi-autobiographical bit of self-talk about which vocation he might want to pursue. He said the following on page 82

…let ideality and reality strive against each other to all eternity, so long as there is no consciousness, there is no interest in this struggle, there is no doubt – but let them be reconciled, and doubt can continue unabated.

De omnibus dubitandum est: ‘Everything must be doubted.’ – This is what philosophers and theologians were talking about. Christianity had to be reassessed. While Christian theologians were busy answering philosopher’s questions Kierkegaard was busy assessing both theology and philosophy.

Soren Kierkegaard was “at your service” in the Christian sense of the word.

His questions to himself were:

• Do I want to become a Lutheran Minister or is it my father’s wish?
• Do I want to become a philosopher, a historian, an anthropologist, or a scientist?
• Do these philosophers, historians, and theologians really understand what they’re talking about?
• Do I want to get married?

He went to God before he made his choice because he believed in freedom and his freedom made him anxious because he wanted to make the best choice he could.

Here is a link  to Thomas Henry Croxall’s 1958 assessment of the book followed by  Johannes Climacus, by Soren Kierkegaard.

Soren had just graduated from the University of Copenhagen and had broken, or was about to break, his engagement to Regine Olsen when he wrote this unpublished book. The book has been used by scholars for much speculation about him.  It gives the reader good background information about Soren Kierkegaard and his contemporaries. The book can be purchased from Amazon.com.

It’s not what you read it’s how you read.

If you want to live a life of knowledge then read and read until you die. If you want to live a life of understanding then read and try to appropriate what you read.

So read the Bible and then put into practice what you read. That was Kierkegaard’s advice back in 1844.

The meaning lies in the appropriation. Hence the book’s joyous giving of itself. Here there are no worldly “mine” and “thine” that separate and prohibit appropriating what is the neighbor’s. Admiration is in part really envy and thus a misunderstanding; and criticism, for all its justification, is in part really opposition and thus a misunderstanding; and recognition in a mirror is only a fleeting acquaintance and thus a misunderstanding-but to see correctly and not want to forget what the mirror is incapable of effecting, that is the appropriation, and the appropriation is the reader’s even greater, is his triumphant giving of himself.

Three Discourses on Imaginary Occasions, 1844 Preface p. 6

What does it mean to appropriate a book? Soren Kierkegaard read the Bible every day to find out what Christianity requires. The Bible freely gives of itself to anyone willing to open it. The reader allows the Spirit to activate the work  and then the single individual can give himself to the task. This quote from 1946 by Kierkegaard lends a little more understanding to what he mean.

If a man were to stand on one leg or, in a droll dancing posture, swing his hat, and in this pose recite something true, his few listeners would fall into two classes, and he would not have many, since most of them would probably abandon him. The one class would say: How can what he says be true when he gesticulates that way? The other class would say: Well, it makes no difference whether he performs an entrechat or stands on his head or turns somersaults; what he says is true, and I will appropriate and let him go.

So it is also with the imaginary construction. If what is said is earnestness to the writer, he keeps the earnestness essentially to himself. If the recipient interprets it as earnestness, he does it essentially by himself, and precisely this is the earnestness. Even in elementary education one distinguishes between “learning by rote.” The being-in-between of the imaginary construction encourages the inwardness of the two away from each other in inwardness. This form won my complete approval, and I believed I had also found that in it the pseudonymous authors continually aimed at existing and in this way sustained an indirect polemic against speculative thought. If a person knows everything but knows it by rote, the form of the imaginary construction is a good exploratory means; in this form, one even tells him what he knows, but he does not recognize it.

Concluding Unscientific Discourse to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. I, Hong p. 264

He had much in common with the thoughts of Leo Tolstoy who said Bethinks Yourselves

A short introduction to his challenge

This is the flag of Denmark. You quickly notice where their allegiance lies.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied to be a theologian but decided he would rather be a Christian author than preach in the Lutheran State Church of Denmark. He lived from May 5, 1813 to November 11, 1855.

He wrote in response to the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment which runs from the writing of the Bible in the English Language in 1601 (the time of King James and Francis Bacon) until the French Revolution 1789-1806. Kierkegaard was part of the Counter-Enlightenment movement. He was influenced by Jesus Christ, Socrates (469-399BC), Christian Wolff (1679-1754), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804),  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781),  and Johann George Hamann (1730-1788).

He wrote against such writers as Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829). They made Reason, Philosophy, Nature, and the Arts and Sciences into the new gods of the Enlightenment thinkers.

He’s been interpreted by Hans Lassen Martensen (1808-1884), Georg Brandes (1842-1927), Martin Buber (1878-1965), Karl Barth (1886-1968), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), C.S. Lewis (1898-1963),  Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), Rollo May (1909-1994), Albert Camus (1913-1960), Thomas Merton (1915-1968), Paul Holmer (1916-2004) and Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) as well as a host of others.

But you are the most important interpreter of Soren Kierkegaard just as you are the most important interpreter of the Bible because you can only appropriate what you can understand.

He wrote to “the single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, who with the right hand accepts what is offered with the right hand” – His challenge is to read books like the Bible without leaning on the opinions of others. Each individual should find out if he has faith. Become aware of the spiritual element of love because it awakens just like a crying infant. Each individual should find their own peace instead of waiting for the peace of the world to come around sometime later or later still. And spiritual truths, he argued, are for the individual, not for the crowd or a theological vote or political vote.  He held Either/Or in his left hand and everyone grasped it with their right hand. He held Two Upbuilding Discourses in his right hand and no one paid any attention to it. Will you grasp Two Upbuilding Discourses with your right hand? I did. Are you willing to read his books? He wrote them for the single individual not for a crowd of professors or other mediators of understanding.

“You know how the prophet Nathan dealt with King David when he presumed to understand the parable the prophet had told him but was unwilling to understand that it applied to him. Then to make sure, Nathan added: You are the man, O King. In the same way I also have continually tried to remind you that you are the one who is being discussed and you are the one who is spoken to.” Either/Or Part I, Swenson p. 5 (2 Samuel 12)

Denmark was Christianized around 965 and became officially Lutheran on 1536. The Royal motto is: “Guds hjælp, Folkets kærlighed, Danmarks styrke” (“God’s Help, the People’s Love, Denmark’s Strength” )