Kierkegaard deliberately provoked people into feeling existence’s passion rather than abstraction

Evidence

Kierkegaard considered it a matter of principle to throw people off their stride. He wrote that he would love to sit someone on a horse and startle it into a gallop, or perhaps give a man in a hurry a lame horse, or even hitch his carriage to two horses who went at different speeds — anything to goad the person into seeing what he meant by the ‘passion’ of existence. Kierkegaard was a born goader. … He wrote: ‘Abstraction is disinterested, but for one who exists his existing is the supreme interest.’ — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 58

Categorization

• DEFINE: Encapsulates Kierkegaard’s core existential principle: the existing individual’s supreme interest lies in existing, in contrast to disinterested abstraction.
• CANDY: The image of startling a horse into a gallop to make someone feel existence’s passion is a vivid, retellable anecdote.
• XREF: connects to: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were deliberately provocative contrarian precursors to existentialism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 56; Kierkegaard’s bodily irregularity and religious torment shaped his existence philosophy — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 58; Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1025 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #corroborates (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025
• Existentialism holds that philosophy grows out of concrete lived experience #corroborates (0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 54
• Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687
• Pain can be embraced as passionate engagement rather than calculated means #corroborates (0.75)
• Hegel and Kierkegaard together form the twin sources of existentialism #corroborates (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 460
• Social-group passion produces philosophical error while individual interest produces immediate error #complicates (0.72)