Pioneer Existentialist

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30325, 28 December 1963, Page 3

Pioneer Existentialist

Soren Kierkegaard, an Introduction to his Life and Philosophy. By Peter Rohde. Allen and Unwin. 163 pp.

like the majority of Danes at that time, was not at all impressed by his system which boasted of furnishing a complete key to existence, “If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface, that the whole thing was only an experiment in thought, in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would probably have been the greatest thinker who ever lived. As it is he is merely comic."

I This book, by a wellI known Danish philosophical | commentator, fills a gap in the English translations of Continental philosophers. Formerly there was no popular account of the life and works of Kierkegaard, a philosopher who has every right to claim equality with Kant, Descartes and Leibniz.

Keirkegaard was a melancholy man born into a melancholy family, and this attitude towards life definitely coloured his thinking. His father was a patriarch of the old-fashioned, God-fearing type, who brought up his children in an atmosphere of sternness and austerity. Rohde has attempted to show us the type of man this was, and the book is liberally scattered with exerpts from his writings on religious andi philosophical matters. Keike-i gaard has been called the forerunner of the modern Existentialism, and he was certainly in a lot of conflict , with the conventional easy- ! going Christianity which was the fashion in Denmark and i other Continental countries I in the last century. During the last 10 years of his life Kierkegaard lived I very much to himself, and I waged a stern battle with the I Bishops of the Denmark I State Church. He was quite outspoken in his belief that i real Christianity had ceased to exist in that country, and I that both clergy and flock ' alike were taking it very I much as a matter of course. ! An early training in theol- : ogy at Copenhagen University brought Kierkegaard into contact with the works of i Hegel. He admired Hegel’s 1 intellectual capacity; but, un-

Kierkegaard realised the limited powers of the intellect in its pretence to be able to answer the ultimate big questions that to an increasing extent were coming to dominate thought at the time. He is the progenitor of all the Existentialist thinkers —the forerunner of a notion which has increasingly pervaded the philosophy of Germany and France.

This book sets out clearly the points of departure in Kierkgaard’s thinking from that of Hegel. The former’s insistence that there were forces in existence which could not possibly be discovered and understood by “meditation alone, including the contrast between good and evil and between Christianity and the establishment of systems, set a standard of thought which has had many repercussions.

second edition of The Advanced Learner s Dictionary of Current English has been published by the Oxford University Press. The first edition replaced the Idiomatic and Syntactic English Dictionary that was initially published in 1948 and was reprinted 12 times. So many reissues are testimony to the worth of this dictionary to foreign students of English, for whom it is devised.