Web links : There are very many pages on Kierkegaard, as a quick Google search will demostrate to you. One of them, which includes a link to quotations by Kierkegaard, is HERE. I should add the caveat that all summaries of Kierkegaard I have read miss the point...

Click HERE for a sample page of Kierkegaard's writing.

IN MY VIEW, the Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard (pronounce 'Kier-ker-gor') was the most brilliant thinker to grace this planet. This is a big claim, but easily justified.

His life was, from the outward perspective, highly uneventful - he hardly moved from the town of his birth. He nearly married, but backed out, without real explanation, at the last minute. His inward life, which we can share through his works, was anything but uneventful.

In the mid-19th century, a stream of books was published in Denmark by assorted authors with bizarre names - such as Johannes Climacus, Hilarius Bookbinder, Vigilius Haufniensis, the duo 'Inter and Inter' and the self-effacing Anti-Climacus. Some of these claimed to have been published by a certain Søren Kierkegaard. Computer analysis of the grammar, adverb usage &c. in these books confirms each author as distinct (some authors wrote more than one book) - however, they were all, in fact, penned by SK himself. These books are known as his pseudonymous corpus and I prefer to think of SK as the creator of the authors, rather than the author of the books, in the same way that Shakespeare got Hamlet to write a play (that play was certainly not written by Shakespeare!).

Why should someone go to such great lengths to write books by other people? Why should someone present himself as a foppish dandy by day and slave away on truly great literature by night? The answer is that Kierkegaard had a philosophy of subjectivity which could not be communicated directly - it could only be seeded in the other. To ask what Kierkegaard really thought - what he had to say - is to ignore him as a major philosopher. If you discover him, as object, he has failed. If you discover yourself, as subject, he has succeeded. For almost all the readers of his day, he failed, as they blew his cover and ridiculed him. Sartre was much later to recognise this failure as success - and Sartre admitted (just the once, to my knowledge) that he owed his philosophy to Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein, widely acknowledged to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, said of Kierkegaard (quite sincerely), 'No, I have not read him - he is far too profound for me'.

So I shall not attempt to explain Kierkegaard's thought here. If you wish to pursue him, start with his two most poetic works, Fear and Trembling (by Johannes de Silentio) and Repetition, (by Constantine Constantius) which are often published together. Follow up with The Philosophical Fragments (by Johannes Climacus) and finish with his philosophical masterpiece, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (also by Johannes Climacus). This last book reveals more than any other the extent to which Kierkegaard is the consummate philosophical joker. Entitled the 'Postscript', the book is extraordinarily long and dense! Overtly an attack on Hegelianism, it is structured like a treatise by Hegel himself! But it gets closer than any of his other works to laying down the groundwork for theological existentialism (it is written by a non-Christian, whereas Kierkegaard was an ardent Christian).

Do not expect to understand any of Kierkegaard's works easily. But come to the session to see slides of him, his parents and his fiancée and to get a glimpse into the life of a secret philosopher.

Read comments on this week's session at MAILBOX.