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Existentialism

Becoming a Philosopher

Jonathan Rée on Søren Kierkegaard and the struggle to become a real thinker.

I am not a Christian, but in some ways I wish I was. Of course Christianity can be tiresome (as all Christians would agree) but it can also be fresh and crisply intelligent. And I find it hard to resist Christianity as it was interpreted by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard around the middle of the nineteenth century. For Kierkegaard, what mattered in Christianity was not so much the doctrine as the way in which the individual relates to it. The unit of Christian meaning was not the Universal Church but the individual Christian.

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