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A small, insignificant-looking intellectual with absurdly long legs, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a veritable Hans Christian Andersen caricature of a man. A strange combination of witty cosmopolite and melancholy introvert, he spent years writing under a series of fantastical pseudonyms, lavishing all the splendor of his magnificent mind on a seldom-appreciative world. He had a tragic love affair with a young girl, was dominated by an unforgettable Old Testament father, fought a sensational literary duel with a popular satiric magazine, and died in the midst of a violent quarrel with the state church for which he had once studied theology. Yet this iconoclast produced a number of brilliant books that have profoundly influenced modern thought. In this classic biography, the celebrated Kierkegaard translator Walter Lowrie presents a charming and warmly appreciative introduction to the life and work of the great Danish writer. Lowrie tells the story of Kierkegaard's emotionally turbulent life with a keen sense of drama and an acute understanding of how his life shaped his thought. The result is a wonderfully informative and entertaining portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the past two centuries. This edition also includes Lowrie's wry essay \"How Kierkegaard Got into English,\" which tells the improbable story of how Lowrie became one of Kierkegaard's principal English translators despite not learning Danish until he was in his 60s, as well as a new introduction by Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay.

The affair of theCorsair”was one of the major events in S.K.’s life, which outwardly was so uneventful but inwardly so intense. TheCorsairwas a comic paper founded by a talented young Jew, Aaron Goldschmidt, and by him so cleverly managed that it had attained the biggest circulation in Denmark. Though S.K. affirmed that it stood for no idea, Goldschmidt flattered himself that he was serving the idea of political liberalism by dragging down the great and revealing that they were not really superior to the vulgar. It paid “a glittering honorarium” to disloyal servants for betraying the

I Will let S.K. tell the story of his brisk wooing as he told it in the Journal on August 24, 1849, in an entry about “My relation to Her” which occupies nine pages as it is now printed, besides several pages of marginal comment. I quote only the first part. Over it is inscribed the Virgilian line, “Infandum me jubes, Regina, renovare dolorem.” “In the summer of 1840 I took the official examination in theology. Then straightway I made a visit to my father’s birthplace in Jutland, and perhaps at that time was already fishing for her a bit,

On may 5, 1847, S.K. completed his thirty-fourth year—and was still alive! In a letter which he wrote to his brother on this date he expressed his amazement. He was inclined to suspect that his birth had been incorrectly registered and that he might still have time to die before he was thirty-four years old. This was the last vestige of the fixed idea his father’s melancholy presage had implanted in him. It will be remembered that he felt the same amazement at surviving his father. Strangely enough, the fact that Peter had already invalidated his father’s prophecy by

What I have often sufferd from was that all the doubt, trouble, unrest which my real ‘I’ wished to forget for the sake of attaining a world-view, my reflective ‘I’ sought as it were to print upon my mind and preserve, partly as a necessary and partly as an interesting transitional stage, for fear I might have mendaciously appropriated a result. “Thus, for example, when I have sa ordered my life that it appears as if I were destined to readin perpetuumfor examination, and that my life, even if it were to be longer than I except, will

While he was working on the last number of theInstantS.K. fell to the floor unconscious. Subsequently he had difficulty in walking, but he recovered sufficiently to take his customary promenades. On October 2 he fell unconscious in the Street. His legs were paralyzed. He was carried to Frederik’s Hospital, and as he entered it he said, “I have come here to die.” His trouble was vaguely attributed to disease of the spine. He affirmed that his ailment was psychic, and that their physical remedies were tried in vain. Forty days later he died. In the hospital he was

At the beginning of 1849—the year when gold was discovered in California—S.K. held in his hands a more precious treasure...and did not know what to do with it. Since the Easter experience of the preceding year he had written his three greatest books:The Point of View, The Sickness unto Death,andTraining in Christianity. These were the captain jewels in the coronet, but there were others: “A Cycle” of essays (the final recast of the book on Adler), of which a part was ultimately published in theTwo Little Ethico-Religious Treatises; Armed Neutrality(not quite finished and

This period, though it covers two years, can be dealt with briefly. In my big book I called it “The Ethical Stage”—dubiously, and only out of respect for S.K.’s categories. But really S.K. never seriously conceived of an ethical stage as possible apart from a religious belief. Even Judge William, who exemplifies the ethical stage inEither/Or,has a vague traditional religion of immanence—and a good deal more of it than most men have. It is evident from the Journal that immediately after his fall S.K. began to think of picking himself up. He made many moral resolutions;

This motto, which was inscribed on the third sheet of gilt-edged letter paper, finds in the reconciliation of King Lear and his daughter Cordelia in a walled prison an exact counterpart to Søren’s heartfelt reconciliation with his father, which was brought about on his twenty-fifth birthday. I have, however, printed in brackets four lines which S.K. did not transcribe, for the reason that they were too poignantly appropriate. Nothing has led us to expect such a reconciliation. It would be incredible if we had not this proof of it, and in perfect conformity with that is the adoring tribute of

Then it was that the great earthquake occurred, the frightful upheaval which suddenly forced upon me a new infallible rule for interpreting the phenornena one and all. Then I surmised that my father’s great age was not a divine blessing, but rather a curse; that the distinguished talents of our family existed only to create mutual friction; then I felt the silence of death increasing around me, when in my father I beheld an unfortunate man who must outlive us all, a sepulchral cross upon the grave of all his own hopes. Guilt must rest upon the whole family, a