Soren Kierkegaard — "The individual is prior to the species."
The individual is prior to the species.
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More from Soren Kierkegaard
"To be a woman is something so strange, so confusing and so complicated that only a woman could put up with it."
"Despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness in the self; it is to be eternally dying, to die and yet not die, to die the death."
"I see it all, I understand it all, but I do not know how to bring it about."
"What is a poet? An unhappy man who in his heart harbors a profound agony, but whose lips are so fashioned that the sounds that emerge from them are like the beautiful music of an organ."
"The dialectic of despair is this, that the despairing self is unable to get rid of itself."
About Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian considered the founder of existentialism; Either/Or (1843) and Fear and Trembling (1843) explored the leap of faith. Closely associated with Friedrich Nietzsche (his existentialist successor working in the opposite theological direction) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (literary parallel exploring faith-and-despair). For an intellectual contrast, see G.W.F. Hegel, German Idealist of the totalizing system — Kierkegaard called Hegel's system a 'palatial residence' that nobody could actually live in — his entire authorship is structured against Hegelian abstraction in favor of the existing individual's inwardness.
The standard scholarly entry points to Soren Kierkegaard's work: Joakim Garff (University of Copenhagen, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre) — Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (2000); Walter Lowrie (Princeton, his major postwar English translator) — A Short Life of Kierkegaard (1942); C. Stephen Evans (Baylor University, philosophy of religion) — Kierkegaard: An Introduction (2009). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Soren Kierkegaard.