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In his journals for 1845 Kierkegaard wrote of himself: "There is a bird called the stormy-petrel, and that is what I am, when in a generation storms begin to gather, individuals of my type appear."¹ Certainly, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) has often been described as a prophet, one whose life and writings anticipated many of the fundamental features of twentieth-century existentialism. It is indeed true that many of the key terms and concepts of later existentialism are foreshadowed in his work: anxiety, subjectivity, guilt, repetition and the absurd are only some especially striking examples. Yet Kierkegaard was himself very much a man of his own time, passionately engaged with the intellectual landscape shaped by Romanticism, Hegelianism and the kind of left-wing materialism represented by Feuerbach — as well as with the ecclesiastical and political constitution of his native Denmark.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230377813_3

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