Kierkegaard is one of the great writers of today. He is one of the men who, during the last twenty or thirty years, modern civilization has recognized as a man whose writings express the modern temperament and the modern personality. And Dick assured me that he was reading Kierkegaard because everything he read in Kierkegaard he had known before. What he was telling me was that he was a black man in the United States and that gave him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality. I believe that is a matter that is not only black studies, but is white studies too. I believe that that is some form of study which is open to any university: Federal City College, Harvard, etc. It is not an ethnic matter. I knew Wright well enough to know that he meant it. I didn’t ask him much because I thought he meant me to understand something. And I understood it. I didn’t have to ask him about that. What there was in Dick’s life, what there was in the experience of a black man in the United States in the 1930s that made him understand everything that Kierkegaard had written before he had read it and the things that made Kierkegaard the famous writer that he is today? That is something that I believe has to be studied.
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C.L.R. James, "Black Studies and the Contemporary Student" (1969)Richard Wright
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Kierkegaard expressed himself without reserve on the significance his writings may have had for certain persons. His old uncle, M. Kierkegaard the merchant, had a son a few years younger than Soren Kierkegaard. This son was a cripple, paralyzed all down one side, and completely deformed in body, but intellectually very talented. He read his cousin’s Soren Kierkegaard’s writings with great interest, visited Kierkegaard from time to time in his home, and received much spiritual uplift from these visits. I [Hans Brochner] once spoke to Kierkegaard about him, and told him how greatly the lad had been impressed by one of Kierkegaard’s works, namely the discourse for a Confession-Service in Edifying Discourses in Different Vein. (In it Kierkegaard speaks of a man who, through bodily infirmity, is prevented from fulfilling an outward task. Beautifully and uplifting it is said how such a man still retains his ordinary ethical task unimpaired, and that his life’s work merely takes on a special form-see Purity of Heart p. 133) Kierkegaard said, ‘Yes, for him the passage is a blessing’; and that was indeed true. It had the power to give this sorely tried man strength to overcome the thought that his life was useless and wasted, and to make him feel that he really was the equal of those more fortunately endowed by Nature. It was precisely Kierkegaard’s lively ability to make him feel like this that made him go away from the above-mentioned conversations with Kierkegaard with renewed strength.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Hegel was the great system-maker. What others viewed as his grand achievement Kierkegaard viewed as his unforgivable crime, the attempt to rationally systematize the whole of existence. The whole of existence cannot be systematized, Kierkegaard insisted, because existence is not yet whole; it is incomplete and in a state of constant development. Hegel attempted to introduce mobility into logic, which, said Kierkegaard, is itself an error in logic. The greatest of Hegel’s errors, however, was his claim that he had established the objective theory of knowledge. Kierkegaard countered with the argument that subjectivity is truth. As he put it, “The objective uncertainty maintained in the most passionate spirit of dedication is truth, the highest truth for one existing.” ... Kierkegaard, it remains to be said, is not a systematic theologian. We know what he thought of systems and system makers, of which Hegel was the prime example. There is hardly a page in his writings that does not prompt from the systematically minded reader a protest against disconnections and apparent contradictions. Like Flannery O'Connor, he shouted to the hard of hearing and drew startling pictures for the almost blind.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
As a thinker, Soren Kierkegaard was concerned with humanity’s most central existential problems. Therefore, he also sought answers to such important questions as a person’s relation to society and politics and the relation between the sexes. Kierkegaard’s honest and original treatment of these subjects is based on a penetrating knowledge of the presuppositions of the human mind and spirit. Consequently it is of value to become acquainted with what Kierkegaard has to say on these questions, and it is especially pertinent in an age when everything is opened to debate and confusion seems to prevail. Since Kierkegaard in his view of mankind places the main emphasis on the spiritual, his thoughts invariably arouse conflict, insofar as it is material and earthly happiness that people are primarily seeking. But this very controversial aspect of Kierkegaard can be the occasion for a testing and investigating of one’s own philosophy of life. As far as I can make out, it will be Kierkegaard’s wide-ranging, down-to-earth, and consistent thinking to which men must turn in the future in order to cure the rootlessness of the age and in order to find a new point of departure for their own life and for their relation to their fellow human beings.
Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The existential way of understanding human beings has some illustrious progenitors in Western history, such as Socrates in his dialogues, Augustine in his depth-psychological analyses of the self, Pascal in his struggle to find a place for the “heart’s reasons which the reason knows not of.” But it arose specifically just over a hundred years ago in Kierkegaard’s violent protest against the reigning rationalism of his day Hegel’s “totalitarianism of reason,” to use Maritain’s phrase. Kierkegaard proclaimed that Hegel’s identification of abstract truth with reality was an illusion and amounted to trickery. “Truth exists,” wrote Kierkegaard, “only as the individual himself produces it in action.”
Rollo May
Wright, Richard
Wright, Robert
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