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© 2025. All rights reserved.
Site created with
Hakyll.
Modified theme
lanyon-hakyll
based on
Lanyon.
We are fortunate to read Kierkegaard where he lived and worked: on the streets he walked obsessively every evening, near the churches where he worshipped and raged, in a city whose culture of Gemütlichkeit he diagnosed and resisted. This syllabus treats Copenhagen not as backdrop but as a second text. Each afternoon visit has a specific connection to the week’s readings — a few of them almost embarrassingly direct.
The readings follow The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton UP). Participants should read each day’s texts before the morning session. Three hours is enough time for close reading and genuine argument, but only if everyone arrives prepared.
A note on authorship: Kierkegaard published much of his work pseudonymously. We will track which voice is speaking each day — the seducer, the judge, the anxious psychologist, the Christian idealist — since the plurality of personae is itself a philosophical argument, not a quirk of biography.
There are no Danish public holidays between June 24 and July 24. The seminar meets every weekday, with two exceptions: a pilgrimage to Gilleleje (Friday, July 4) and a daytrip to Roskilde (Friday, July 18), each explained in its place.
Morning reading
We open with Kierkegaard’s private notebooks — passionate, searching, already in argument — and then his first published work, a review of Hans Christian Andersen. The central concept is the life-view (Livs-Anskuelse): not a system but an existential orientation, a certainty “won from all experience.” Andersen, Kierkegaard argues, lacks one entirely. The implicit question is whether we do too.
Afternoon — Copenhagen City Museum (Bymuseet)
The City Museum on Vesterbrogade holds the finest collection of Kierkegaard artifacts in existence: his writing desk, personal effects, portraits, and the famous silhouette. It also situates him in the physical city of the 1840s — the streets, the institutions, the social world he moved through. This is the right visit for the first day: before we go deep into the texts, we meet the man and the city together.
Morning reading
Kierkegaard’s dissertation, submitted to the University of Copenhagen in 1841. Irony here is not a rhetorical device but a total existential stance: a negativity that clears ground without yet building anything. Socrates is the exemplary ironist, and he will haunt everything that follows.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
The voice of “A,” the aesthetic pseudonym: the Diapsalmata, “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic,” and the notorious “Diary of a Seducer.” What does it mean to live for the interesting, the momentary, the beautiful? The aesthete is not frivolous; he is systematic in his refusal of commitment. Take him seriously.
Afternoon — Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK)
The national gallery is the natural companion to the aesthetic stage. The permanent collection includes Danish Golden Age painting (Eckersberg, Købke), Dutch and Flemish masters, and the European Romantics — exactly the tradition of aesthetic cultivation that “A” inhabits and that Kierkegaard both loved and suspected. Walk through slowly and ask: what does it mean to live in relation to beauty like this, rather than merely to visit it on an afternoon?
Morning reading
Judge William’s long letters to “A.” The ethical stage as continuity, choice, marriage, and the taking-on of a self through time. Does he refute the aesthete, or simply talk past him? Notice also that both voices reach us through a fictional editor — what does that framing do to us as readers?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
A richer ensemble revisiting the three stages. The aesthetic voices at the banquet are more nuanced than “A” — Kierkegaard seems to give the position every advantage before testing it. We focus on the banquet and the transition toward the religious border.
Afternoon — Nationalmuseet
The National Museum’s permanent collection — Bronze Age artifacts, Viking treasures, medieval ecclesiastical objects, Danish folk culture — offers a long view of the civilization Kierkegaard inherited. The medieval Christian section is particularly useful as we prepare for Fear and Trembling tomorrow: here is the world in which Abraham’s faith was not a paradox but a given, in which the religious stage was simply the air people breathed. Going forward into the authorship with this behind us changes how the arguments land.
Morning reading
Johannes de Silentio on Abraham and Isaac. The teleological suspension of the ethical. The three Problemata. The knight of faith versus the tragic hero, and why the knight looks indistinguishable from a tax collector. One of the most argued-over texts in modern philosophy — we will argue over it.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Constantin Constantius’s experiment: can one return? Is repetition possible? The book plays philosophy as comedy, then abandons the comedy for something more urgent. The young man and Job haunt the second half. Pay attention to what the text does as well as what it says.
Afternoon — Christianshavn Walking Tour
A self-guided walk through the canal district: the Dutch-influenced architecture, Vor Frelsers Kirke with its external spiral staircase (the view from the top is worth the climb), the narrow streets and waterways. Christianshavn is one of the older parts of the city, slightly apart from the centre, dense and maritime in feeling — a fitting mood for Repetition, a text that keeps asking whether you can ever truly go back to a place or a self. Wander and decide for yourself.
Morning reading
A lighter day, and intentionally so. Kierkegaard’s satirical pieces show his comic genius and his use of irony as a weapon against the Copenhagen literary establishment. These texts sharpen our sense of the world he was writing within and against.
Free afternoon.
No formal session. The seminar travels north to Gilleleje.
In the summer of 1835 the twenty-two-year-old Kierkegaard sat above the cliffs here and wrote in his journal: “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know… to find the idea for which I can live and die.” It is the motto of the whole authorship. We walk to the church and the sea. Bring the journal entries from Week 1. There is no agenda beyond being in the place.
Morning reading
Kierkegaard published his upbuilding discourses under his own name in parallel with the pseudonymous works — a deliberate counterpoint, not an afterthought. What can direct communication do that indirect communication cannot? These texts are addressed to “that single individual,” and they mean it.
Afternoon — Frederiksberg Have
The Concluding Unscientific Postscript — which we begin reading on Friday — opens with Climacus sitting in Frederiksberg Gardens on a Sunday afternoon, smoking a cigar, watching the bourgeois crowd enjoy themselves, and wondering what his task in the world might be. We visit the gardens today so that passage will land differently when we read it. It is a large, freely accessible park — the old royal gardens, open since 1852 — and the atmosphere on a July afternoon is close to what Climacus describes. Find a bench. Bring a notebook.
Morning reading
Johannes Climacus pits the Socratic model of learning (recollection from within) against the Christian model (a Teacher who brings the condition as well as the content). The argument is compact and merciless, and it deserves unusually slow reading.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
The unfinished novel about the young Climacus learning to philosophize by taking Descartes literally. A half-autobiographical sketch that illuminates the Fragments and the Postscript from the inside. What happens to a person who actually tries to begin from radical doubt?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
Vigilius Haufniensis on anxiety (Angst) as the dizziness of freedom — not fear of a specific threat but the vertiginous awareness of possibility itself. The psychology of original sin, innocence as ignorance, dreaming spirit, and the demonic. The most phenomenologically rich text in the anthology.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
The great central work of the pseudonymous authorship. Climacus attacks objective speculation and defends subjective inwardness. The famous formula: truth is subjectivity. Read carefully enough to understand exactly what this does and does not mean. Note the opening scene — the gardens you visited on Monday.
Afternoon — Royal Library / Black Diamond (Det Kongelige Bibliotek)
The Black Diamond on the harbour holds Kierkegaard’s manuscripts, correspondence, and the original journals in its Special Collections. A full archive visit requires advance arrangement, but the reading rooms are open and the building is extraordinary. This afternoon is also simply an opportunity to keep reading: bring the Postscript and continue. There is something fitting about reading Kierkegaard’s argument for inwardness in the building that holds the outward record of his thought.
Morning reading
The existential-pathos chapters: resignation, suffering, guilt, and humor as the border of the religious. Then Climacus’s startling revocation at the end. What exactly is being revoked, and why?
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
A literary review that becomes a diagnosis of modernity: leveling, the public, the reign of reflection without passion or commitment. Kierkegaard’s target is not individualism but the dissolution of individuality into anonymous opinion. Reading this now requires little updating.
Afternoon — Assistens Kirkegård
Kierkegaard’s grave is in this large, leafy cemetery in Nørrebro — the same cemetery where Hans Christian Andersen is buried, which has its own small irony given the review that opened the seminar. The grave is simple. The cemetery is used as a neighbourhood park: people bring picnics, children run around, and the graves of the famous and obscure lie side by side. It is not a solemn place, which feels right. We are at the midpoint of the seminar; this is the moment to sit with the question of what the authorship was for — and what, so far, you think of the answer.
Morning reading
“Purity of heart is to will one thing.” This long, searching discourse on self-examination is one of Kierkegaard’s most accessible and most demanding pieces of edification. Structured as a confession addressed directly to the reader, it expects you to sit still in front of it. We will read parts of it aloud together.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
What is Christian love (Kjerlighed) as against preferential or erotic love? The command “You shall love your neighbor” sounds harsh; Kierkegaard argues it is liberating. Love grounded in duty is more reliable and more universal than love grounded in feeling or inclination.
Afternoon — Dyrehaven
The Deer Park north of the city, reached by S-tog to Klampenborg, is one of the great pleasures of Copenhagen summers: ancient beeches, wandering deer, the old royal hunting grounds. After a week of dense, inward texts — the Postscript, the diagnosis of the age, the discourse on purity of heart — the afternoon here is deliberately unstructured. Walk into the forest, away from Bakken and the crowds, and do as little as possible. Tomorrow is Roskilde; next week is the end.
No formal session. The seminar travels west by S-tog (~25 minutes).
Roskilde Cathedral is the burial place of Danish monarchs and a monument to the established church — the very Christendom Kierkegaard will attack in Week 5. Walking through the royal tombs, we can hold his question in mind: what does Christianity look like when it has entirely won, when it is no longer a risk but a pedigree, a dynasty? The Viking Ship Museum is a short walk away and is recommended for the afternoon.
Morning reading
Anti-Climacus’s masterpiece. The self is “a relation that relates itself to itself,” and despair is the failure to be a self before God. Kierkegaard’s most systematic psychological text, and one of the most penetrating analyses of self-deception in the tradition.
Afternoon — University of Copenhagen / Vor Frue Kirke
Vor Frue Kirke — where Kierkegaard was baptized, confirmed, and buried from — sits on the same square as the main university building where he studied and later defended his dissertation. Thorvaldsen’s colossal Christ stands inside the church, arms open: “Come to me.” We visit now because tomorrow we read Practice in Christianity, in which Anti-Climacus insists that this figure must remain an offense, a stumbling block — that a Christianity which has made Christ merely beautiful and welcoming has lost precisely what it was supposed to be. Stand in front of the statue before you read the argument. The argument lands differently that way.
Morning reading
Anti-Climacus forces the Christian ideal to its highest pitch: contemporaneity with Christ, the possibility of offense, the demand that cannot be softened. Then Kierkegaard, writing under his own name in the final year of his life, attacks the Danish church directly in his pamphlets. The contrast between the pseudonymous idealist and the polemicist is itself a lesson in his theory of communication.
Free afternoon.
Morning reading
The distinction between genius (immanent, developing from within) and apostle (called from without, bearing an authority not one’s own) is one of Kierkegaard’s sharpest tools — and it cuts toward him. The Point of View is his retrospective account of the whole authorship: partial, self-serving, and indispensable.
Afternoon — The City Lakes Walk (Søerne)
Kierkegaard was known throughout Copenhagen for his evening constitutionals along the Søerne — the three connected lakes running along what was then the western edge of the city. He walked partly to think, partly to approach strangers (he was known for this), and partly, he admitted, because it was the only exercise he got. We walk the full loop (~6 km) as a peripatetic session on the penultimate afternoon. Bring a question from the week that you haven’t resolved. The walk takes about 90 minutes at a comfortable pace.
Morning reading
For Self-Examination gives us the image of the mirror one must stop before and not immediately walk away from. The Lily and the Bird teaches silence as an art that speech makes peculiarly difficult. The Changelessness of God is the last sermon Kierkegaard prepared before his death in November 1855. It is quiet, and hard, and — depending on where five weeks have brought you — either consoling or impossible.
The final hour is not for new material but for the question the seminar has been circling from the first morning: what does Kierkegaard ask of his reader, and has your sense of that changed over five weeks?
Free afternoon — or return, if you like, to Frederiksberg Have.
| Week | Day | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Tue Jun 24 | Copenhagen City Museum (Kierkegaard artifacts) |
| 1 | Thu Jun 26 | Statens Museum for Kunst |
| 2 | Mon Jun 30 | Nationalmuseet |
| 2 | Wed Jul 2 | Christianshavn walking tour |
| 2 | Fri Jul 4 | Daytrip: Gilleleje |
| 3 | Mon Jul 7 | Frederiksberg Have |
| 3 | Fri Jul 11 | Royal Library / Black Diamond |
| 4 | Tue Jul 15 | Assistens Kirkegård (Kierkegaard’s grave) |
| 4 | Thu Jul 17 | Dyrehaven |
| 4 | Fri Jul 18 | Daytrip: Roskilde |
| 5 | Mon Jul 21 | University of Copenhagen / Vor Frue Kirke |
| 5 | Wed Jul 23 | The City Lakes walk (Søerne) |
Not required, but rewarding for those who want more context or wish to go deeper.
Syllabus subject to revision. The seminar has no fixed conclusion — only, as Kierkegaard would say, an upbuilding task for each participant to carry home.