Frihet och förtvivlan: Sören Kierkegaard om gudsförhållandet och självets helande

Sören Kierkegaard (1813 55) is not only Scandinavia's most internationally renowned thinker, but the Cambridge philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein also describes him as by far the greatest philosopher of the 1800s. As a high-profile Christian thinker, with a broad literary output, he serves for many readers as an Augustine for our own time. A central idea in Kierkegaard's Christian philosophy of existence is the concept of freedom. Being directed at oneself, he writes, is freedom. More important than knowing oneself here is the very process of being in the making to become oneself, which is in opposition to the selfish and is the expression of the individually determined freedom. The opposite is despair and its psychological counterpart anxiety. The basic premise of Kierkegaard's description of man's self is the relationship with God, which he believes all people stand in. In this creation-given relationship, which for the individual may be more or less conscious, the focus is on the healing of the self: from despair, the disease of the self, to freedom. In Kierkegaard's words: "The highest that can possibly be done for a creature, higher than anything you can make it out to be, is to make it free. In addition, omnipotence is needed to be able to do so."