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Danish philosopher and theologian; an inspiration, in the twentieth century, for both existentialism and Protestant thought. In Either/Or (1843) Kierkegaard writes pseudonymously to his symparanekromenoi (“fellow-moribunds”) of his own sense of the nihilism of his age (1987: i.168). Describing the “music of the storm,” he comments: “People do say that the voice of the divine is not in the driving wind but in the soft breeze, but our ears, after all, are constructed not to pick up the soft breeze but to swallow the uproar of the elements.” The vortex is the world's core principle, and he wishes that “it might erupt with deepseated resentment and shake off the mountains and the nations and the cultural works and man's clever inventions.” Whether or not he was right to find the sources of nihilism in the work of Fichte, in the Romantics, or in Hegelianism, he searched for an understanding of “the aesthetic” (an existential category) in relation to this vortex, loving poetry and art and all the works of the imagination (aesthetics as artistic practice) while setting limits to them (1987: ii.273). For, as he says (under one of his pseudonyms), “they provide only an imperfect reconciliation with life … when you fix your eye upon poetry and art you are not looking at actuality.” Kierkegaard's manner of presenting his views on aesthetics was possible only for a writer capable of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text