ABSTRACT
This book, Filosofi & samfunn: Søren Kierkegaard, aims high: it wants to gauge Kierkegaard's philosophy and its meaning for the world today. Joakim Garff's essay is the opening piece. To place Kierkegaard in the tension-filled field between philosophy and society is risky, he says, because it forces people to think about the most basic things in life in a stripped-down, doubly dialectical way. Götke's essay is in many ways a further fleshing out and summing up of this whole problematic. Repstad gives a keen sociological analysis of the chances for survival of Kierkegaardian individuality in the modern world. Pietism too started off by stressing inwardness and individual commitment but ossified into a kind of strict counter-conventionalism. Garff's essay gives further biographical content to the ultimate futility of his project to live life wholly beyond modernity. Finally, Søltoft's phenomenological reconstruction of an ethics of vertigo in Kierkegaard is highly engaging.
