Kierkegaard's Authorship: On the Loss and Recovery of Meaning

This English language course offered by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen is open to Danish students as well as international students interested in contemplative reading and discussion of the works of Copenhagen’s most radical author, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His authorship assumes that just under the surface of everyday awareness, the modern individual experiences herself as someone fragmented, fractured, misaligned, imperfect, incomplete, splintered, and cracked. Something isn’t quite right inside, even if it’s difficult to say exactly why. Kierkegaard suggests that this sense of misalignment in intensified by the fact that the inherited value systems that make life negotiable have lost their authority over us. On the one hand, this means we gain greater freedom from the limitations imposed by tradition and history. On the other hand, we sense a profound uncertainty, even anxiety, about the choices we make as we face an open future. This freedom can be both invigorating and foreboding. His entire authorship can be viewed as an exploration of various reactions to this fundamental insight.

His thoughts about the struggle for meaning take us through unusual philosophical territory. His works—which are as novelistic as they are philosophical—treat themes like the existential meaning of anxiety and despair, beauty and boredom, humor and seriousness, the sicknesses and health the soul, the joy and pain of embodiment, and, finally, commitment and love.