Why Love Entails Suffering: Kierkegaard on the Logical Consequences of Needing God
Why Love Entails Suffering: Kierkegaard on the Logical Consequences of Needing God

Summary/Abstract: By virtue of love’s world-affirming influence, each human being is drawn into a meaningful realm of experience. The acceptance and endorsement of love as a sacred power is linked with a belief in the goodness of existence. At the very least, if God is love, then the value of life is not in question. However, this is not because the sum of all pleasures and pains shows us that it is mostly delightful to exist. On the contrary, there is a non-accidental connection between love’s ontological status and the vulnerability which it induces in the person who loves. In this paper, the inexorable connection between love and suffering is explained, with reference to a wide range of Kierkegaard’s religious writings.

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