Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
The 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observes that while life can only be understood backwards, it must be lived forwards.
S øren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) was a Danish philosopher whose rich and varied writings have had a profound influence on philosophy, theology, and literature.
Kierkegaard articulates the anxiety, self-consciousness, and fraughtness of daily human existence in often exquisite prose — and it’s this laser focus on what it’s like under our own skin that cemented his reputation as a literary genius, and so inspired the existentialists of the 20th century.
Oil painting of Kierkegaard, by Luplau Janssen (1902).
Our understanding of events can occur only after we have experienced them. As a statement commonly attributed to Kierkegaard has it:
This statement is actually a shortened version of one of Kierkegaard’s journal entries. And, while it might seem a quite innocuous observation, its consequences on our psychological wellbeing are actually rather profound.
