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Søren K.’s Two-Hundredth Birthday | The New Yorker

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William James liked to quote Søren Kierkegaard’s famous assertion that “we live forward, but we understand backwards.” Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher of subjectivity, would have been two hundred years old on May 5th, and, looking back, we can see that ironic, angst-ridden modern literature begins with him. Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Sartre, and Wittgenstein are among his heirs—and without him, where would Woody Allen be? Kierkegaard did most of his seminal writing under assumed names: Victor Eremita (“Either/Or”); Johannes de Silentio (“Fear and Trembling”); Anti-Climacus (“The Sickness Unto Death”); Hilarious Bookbinder (“Stages on Life’s Way”); Vigilius Haufniensis (“The Concept of Anxiety”). The point of these impostures, he explained, when he finally acknowledged them, was to disavow, or—to use a postmodern notion that he pioneered—to “destabilize” his authority as a narrator. “Revelation is marked by mystery,” he wrote, “eternal happiness by suf

Save this story Save this story William James liked to quote Søren Kierkegaard’s famous assertion that “we live forward, but we understand backwards.” Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher of subjectivity, would have been two hundred years old on May 5th, and, looking back, we can see that ironic, angst-ridden modern literature begins with him. Strindberg, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Kafka, Borges, Camus, Sartre, and Wittgenstein are among his heirs—and without him, where would Woody Allen be? Kierkegaard did most of his seminal writing under assumed names: Victor Eremita (“Either/Or”); Johannes de

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