often labeled as the first existentialist philosopher, Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard was a voracious writer. Wittgenstein described him as the most profound thinker of the 19th century, and his many works are filled with rich nuance and insight on a wide diversity of subjects.
One of the most prominent themes in Kierkegaard’s work is his critique of the ‘rational detachment’ practiced by the philosophical tradition that came before him — and how such practice fails to provide us with insight into topics like the meaning of life.
Kierkegaard especially targets his contemporary, the German philosopher Hegel, whom he saw as continuing this tradition by attempting to write from a ‘view from nowhere’ — attempting to be detached and objective, when of course, writing from a very particular and singular human perspective, Hegel had a claim on neither of those things.
Following Kierkegaard, most existential philosophers generally think that, while scientific explanations do give us real and useful knowledge about the world, such ‘objective’ rational detachment does not help us understand our actual lived experience or indeed how we ought to live, for ignoring the first-person perspective ‘disenchants’ the world and strips it of meaning.