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Life
He fought his whole life against comfortable Christianity, and argued that the truth of existence cannot be captured in any system.
He asked the question everyone else had forgotten: what does it mean to be? And then joined the Nazi Party. The two facts cannot be separated.
Connection
Søren Kierkegaard anxiety made philosophical Martin Heidegger — Heidegger's analysis of anxiety as the mood in which one's own existence becomes a question is worked out on ground Kierkegaard cleared, a debt the footnotes acknowledge more readily than the text.
Ideas
Words
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
“Why is there something rather than nothing?”
“We are ourselves the entities to be analyzed.”
Key Moments
1841
Breaks off engagement to Regine Olsen
February 1843
Either/Or published under a pseudonym
1854-55
Attack on the established Church
1927
Being and Time published
1933-34
Nazi rector of Freiburg University
Works
Either/Or
Being and Time