Kierkegaard for Beginners

The Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was one of the most original thinkers of the nineteenth century and one of the most enigmatic men who ever walked the earth.

Philosophically, Kierkegaard was the "bridge" that led from Hegel to Existentialism. Kierkegaard abhorred Hegel's abstract, know-it-all idealism that tried to capture reality in a few words. Kierkegaard's attack on social and religious complacency and his single-handed assault on traditional Western philosophy generated a crisis that produced a redically new way of philosophizing and made him the founder of the school that would later be called Existentialism. To Kiergegaard, reality was personal, subjective-it began and ended with the individual-and philosophy was not something one merely talked about, it was the way you lived.

For such a brilliant thinker, the way Kierkegaard lived was...somewhat too interesting? His "abstract" love affair? His obsesssion with death? His "leap of Faith", his cynicism, his marvellous sense of humour-how do you put all that into one man?