ABSTRACT
The Soren Kierkegaard of the literary boom is a fellow wit and fellow modern, distinguished from the other members of the smart set mainly by his having lived a hundred years earlier. Kierkegaard expressed the fundamental tension in a good many ways throughout his writings—most clearly and centrally when he described the tension as the consequence of man's simultaneous existence in eternity and in time. For Kierkegaard, the problem of the final value was one of uncompromising conflict between contradictory qualities. But Kierkegaard also saw that the ethical concept, while it may give integrity, courage, and steadfastness, cannot give meaning—neither to life nor to death. Kierkegaard has another answer: human existence is possible as existence not in despair, as existence not in tragedy; it is possible as existence in faith. Though Kierkegaard's faith cannot overcome the awful loneliness, the isolation and dissonance of human existence, it can make it bearable by making it meaningful.
