Kierkegaard & the Individual
The first existentialist
Kierkegaard and the Individual
Long before the others, Kierkegaard insisted truth is something you live, not merely think. He prized the 'single individual' over the anonymous crowd, and saw anxiety as the dizzying awareness of our own freedom. Real faith, for him, was no cozy certainty but a passionate leap: choosing to believe while standing over the unknown.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Where this sits in the course
“Kierkegaard & the Individual” is lesson 3 of 5 in Existence & Meaning, a course about after certainty cracks: freedom, meaning, absurdity, and becoming.. The lessons are sequenced rather than a menu, so this one assumes what came before it.
Existence & Meaning is itself one of 18 courses in thinkr. The set opens with what philosophy is, moves through the Stoics and the Eastern traditions, then into what can be known, what exists, how to act and how power works — closing on practical reasoning you can use in an argument this week.
More from Søren Kierkegaard
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
“Faith is the highest passion in a human being.”
“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
In the app this lesson is followed by 3 exercises that check whether the idea actually landed — and every answer, right or wrong, is explained rather than scored. That is the part a written page cannot reproduce.