Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard By Adam C. Schuyler Philosophy 101 February 28, 2000 Existentialism is a philosophical movement that stresses on individual existence. Humans are totally free and responsible for their own actions. Man is not a detached observer of the world, he "exists," he is "in the world." Only man is in his own existence, nothing else can share that existence. Man has no set rules to follow nor are there a set number of choices he has to make. Man follows a simple piece of framework in which action and choice are to be portrayed, implying a right and wrong ways of making decisions, although man is totally free. Soren Kierkegaard is known as the "father of existentialism." Kierkegaard was an accomplished writer and attacked other novelists for lacking life-development and life-view, two thing s that Kierkegaard thought to be necessary for someone to be a great novelist. Kierkegaard wrote and published many of his works attacking different novelists, one of which was a review of Hans Christian Anderson's novel Only A Fiddler. Kierkegaard had different views on things such as Christianity, the way its clergy at that time was fa

The existential view pertains in demonstrating how the life of a philosopher differs from the philosopher's actions. Kierkegaard express that the repetition of faith is how the self relates to itself and to the power in which constituted it, meaning the repetition of faith is the self. Kierkegaard believes that this true self will be judged by God for eternity. Soren was educated at a prestigious boy's school, Borgedydskolen, after he left the boy's school he attended the University of Copenhagen. Kierkegaard describes his faith as not one who repeats the normality of church but of one's passion towards God. Kierkegaard also inherited his father's philosophical argument and creative imagination. This passion is not one that is directed by clergyman but by ones true self. Keierkegaard spent most of his life in his small own only leaving it three times in his life to travel to Berlin. Kierkegaard believed that philosophers should be viewed in what they do, how they live their lives not by their intellectual facts. He gives an example from the Bible, when Abraham was told to sacrifice his youngest son. The Christian ideal, according to Kierkegaard, is even more exact since the total of a person's existence is the fact that a person God for that person's righteousness. They had quit an effect on Kierkegaard in his philosophical writings. The coice of faith is not made once and for all, but it is constantly renewed by one's selfhood.