Europe’s Most Badass Philosopher
On the Similarity of Thought to the Behavior of a Pig
Unfinished sketch of Kierkegaard by his cousin Niels Christian Kierkegaard, Royal Library, Copenhagen, c. 1840/Wikimedia commons
I am like a Lüneburg pig. My thinking is a passion. I can root up truffles excellently for other people, even if I get no pleasure out of them myself. I dig the problems out with my nose, but the only thing I can do with them is to throw them back over my head.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish theologian and philosopher, the forerunner of existentialism, whose ideas came to be more widely accepted only in the twentieth century.