Philosophy, theology
Søren Kierkegaard
1813 – 1855
Life is understood backwards and lived forwards. The honesty the closing movement needs, and a standing objection to retrospective coherence.
Read alongside: Stay
- Start with
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)
- Where they resist the book
- Kierkegaard's subject is the single individual before God, not a team. The organisational reading is a translation, and a loose one.
Works worth the time
Concluding Unscientific Postscript · 1846
Where understanding backwards and living forwards is worked out at length rather than quoted.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Søren Kierkegaard ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Kierkegaard appears
A practice is sustained by its internal standards.
Hadot reads ancient philosophy as spiritual exercise — something done daily, not concluded. MacIntyre distinguishes goods internal to a practice from external rewards, and warns how reliably institutions corrode the first in pursuit of the second. Kierkegaard supplies the honesty: understanding backwards, living forwards.