Although a Christian and a learned theologian, Kierkegaard was far from being an unquestioningly obedient member of the flock. His funeral was a lively affair, his followers protesting that the established Danish church had no right to take possession of, or to sermonise over, the body of a man who had so vehemently opposed it. Kierkegaard (whose name means ‘churchyard’ in Danish), died in Copenhagen aged just 42, possibly due to a paralysing spinal ailment caused by a fall from a tree in his youth. Here we’re going to briefly look at his concept of anxiety. But his radical views on faith, religious commitment and the individual, and his rejection of a conformist, passive, rationalist, dispassionate, inauthentic approach towards the religious life and the infinite, make him a true existentialist. Existentialism is undoubtedly as much rooted in Kierkegaard’s militant, idiosyncratic Christianity as it is in the ‘God is dead’ proto-existentialism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Many of the central themes and concepts of existentialism – freedom, choice, responsibility, bad faith, anxiety, despair, and absurdity – originated in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), in such ground-breaking works as Either-Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). SUBSCRIBE NOW Existentialism & Life Kierkegaard: Young, Free & Anxious Gary Cox considers the problematic side of freedom, from the edge of a cliff.
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