Valentines day special: Soren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)
Soren Kierkegaard was a brilliiant but anxiety ridden Danish philosopher whose brutal interpretations of Morality, ethics, love and religion would contribute to a miserable life which ended in 1855 when he died of an excruciating spinal disease. We have much to learn about life and death when we study the existentialist teachings of Kierkegaard.
Soren was born in 1813 to an immensley wealthly family in Denmark as one of seven children, he was physically frail and death surrounded him from a young age. By the time Soren had reached the age of 22 all but one of his siblings had died. Death was to become sorens obssession.
He went to study theology at the University of Copanhagen and shortly after he graduated he fell in love with a beautiful 18 year old called Regine Olsen. They met in 1837 and in 1840 Soren became engaged to her. However he had second thoughts he watched the world around him where people would have 3 month love affairs filled with passion in the woods and secret meetings at midnight and a world where people’s love was arranged by their parents and they would tie the knot a year later, growing spiteful of eachother in old age. Kirkegaard came to the conclusion that you cannot have passionate love and dutiful marriage at the same time. Realising his marriage to Regine would kill the love that had drawn them together. He called off the engagement.
He began to look more closley at the world around him.
“when I became an adult, when I opened my eyes and saw actuality, then I started to laugh and have never stopped laughing since that time”
What was Soren Laughing at? Life. He laughed because because the meaning of life was to buy a nice house, the goal of life to become a judge, the value of love was to marry a rich girl, that wisdom is what the masses say it is, that passion was to give a speech, that courage was to jump off an 8ft cliff, that politeness was to say thank you and you’re welcome, that fear of god was to go to church once a week. He saw the world for what it was and laughed.
This school of thought is called exestenalism. It is seeing life from a different point of view. Imagine sitting at a dinner table with your girlfriend eating pie. In reality you’ve shoved your legs under a carved piece of wood, covered in sheeps wool, taking bites out of dead animal cells with a metal spike, while making small talk with a person you ocasionally have sex with.
However Soren was still drowning in melancholy, he thought everything that he did was wrong. He didn’t marry Regine but he regretted it, if he had married her he would have regretted that aswell. No one comes into life without crying, no one is asked when they want to enter or leave. Everything in life is in a perpetually regrettable. Life is pain and misery.
To save himself from this feeling he published his works, in one day in 1843 he published 3 books. Another saving grace from the emptiness of life. Was his religion, he hated the established danish church but loved the simple gospels his father had taught him when he was a boy. The morality was simple but right in every aspect. If you live for god, you must be ready to die for god. “To have faith is to lose your mind and to win god”
So when you’ve got no date for valentines day and you sit there covered in crumbs watching 9 hours of netflix. When all the Illusions of life have failed you. You can lean on the shoulder of Kirkegaard who can truly understand the emptiness of life.
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