Introduction

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote about love throughout his brief but productive philosophical career. His most extended and focused treatment of this central topic is 1847’s two-part series of “deliberations” entitled Works of Love ( Kjerlighedens Gjerninger ). Works of Love had a controversial reception. Despite Kierkegaard’s specific intention that this book correct the impression he had left with readers that he did “not know anything about the social aspect of things” (KJN 4, NB:118/SKS 20, 86), critics nevertheless interpreted the text as being solipsistic, bitter, and hectoring. Notoriously panned by weighty judges, Works of Love was condemned by Theodor Adorno as “nothing less than the annihilation of love and the installment of sinister domination.” K. E. Løgstrup famously indicted the text as “a brilliantly thought out system of safeguards against being forced into a close relationship with other people.” Martin Buber similarly read Works of Love as precisely the opposite of a contribution to the understanding of humanity’s sociality but rather as a rejection of love for others in favor of love for God.