Søren Kierkegaard

Danish philosopher and theologian (1813–1855), the père fondateur of modern existentialism, who articulated the "irreducibility of the source and spring of liberty" against the impersonal architectonic of Hegel's System. Author of Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Philosophical Fragments (1844), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), and many other works under pseudonyms (Constantin Constantius, Johannes de Silentio, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, etc.). Lived and died in Copenhagen.

Role in the Wiki

Kierkegaard appears as a recurring background figure across multiple wiki sources but had no entity page until the Mounier 1950 ingest required one. His role is partly that of a philosophical-typological reference (the existentialist sensibility) and partly that of a historical-genealogical anchor (the 19th-c counter-Hegelian movement alongside Marx).

Per Mounier (Personalism Informal Introduction p. xvii): Kierkegaard, "confronting the 'System' as represented by Hegel and his spiritualist imitators, maintains the irreducibility of the source and spring of liberty. A prophet of the paradoxical and dramatic greatness of man... unhappily caught in the romantic drift of the time, Kierkegaard becomes unable, in his lofty solitude, to rejoin the world and mankind." This characterization positions Kierkegaard as half of the "Socratic revolution of the XIXth century" — the other half being Marx.

Other Mounier attestations:

  • The "aesthetic stage" (Personalism Ch III p. 33) — the inauthentic life of immediacy without inwardness.
  • The "baptism of choice" (Ch V p. 63) — choice as constitutive of self-edification; "by having dared, by having exposed myself... I have found something more of myself."
  • The extraordinary man is the truly ordinary man (Ch IV p. 46) — Mounier's most-cited Kierkegaard quotation, marshalled against Nietzschean elitism: "The really 'exceptional' man is the truly ordinary man."
  • On love and marriage (Ch III p. 43) — Kierkegaard's claim that the flower of first love withers without the ordeal of fidelity (repetition) in marriage.
  • The despair of not feeling desperate (Part Two p. 99) — "The supreme despair... is not to feel desperate."
  • Mounier's qualification: Kierkegaard's over-emphasis on refusal is one of the "philosophies of refusal" that have "multiplied for the last hundred years" (Ch IV p. 47) and which personalism corrects by adding the receiving / association / faithfulness dimensions.

Key Positions (per Mounier 1950)

  • The irreducibility of subjective liberty against impersonal-systematic philosophy (Hegel).
  • Existential stages — the aesthetic stage as the inauthentic-immediate; the ethical and religious as paths of conversion.
  • The baptism of choice — choice is creative-of-self, not arbitrary selection between given options.
  • Repetition as creative renewal in the institution of marriage.
  • Despair as the spiritual category of modernity — the deepest despair is not to recognize one's own despair.
  • Personalist qualification: Kierkegaard's solitary-religious turn isolated him from "the world and mankind" — personalism corrects this by integrating communication and embodiment.

Connections

  • positioned alongside Marx as the two branches of the "Socratic revolution of the XIXth century" (per Mounier 1950)
  • anti-Hegelian — Kierkegaard's whole project is against the System
  • prefigures Marcel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre in the existentialist line
  • over-emphasizes refusal (per Mounier) — personalism corrects by adding receiving / association

Sources

  • mounier-1950-personalism — Informal Introduction p. xvii; Ch III p. 33, 43; Ch IV p. 46, 47; Ch V p. 63; Part Two p. 99. Multiple structural references throughout.

Open Questions

  • A primary Kierkegaard source has not yet been ingested. Kierkegaard's primary works are cited across the wiki's other sources (MP, Heidegger, Marcel, Mounier) but always secondarily.
  • The specific articulation of "creative repetition" in Repetition (1843) is named by Mounier (Ch III) but not developed; a primary source would clarify.