Fulfilling Our Purpose

God creates each person as an individual and in effect says to each human being: “Become yourself, be the person I made you to be.” The person who is conscious that he lives “before God” thus gains the possibility of an identity that is not exhausted by human relations. Such a person is not forced simply to live like “the others,” but has the potential to say, “I need to live my life this way, since it is what God desires for me, even if it means that I have to break with my society’s accepted ways of doing things.”

C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

What does it means for a human being to possess the truth

Kierkegaard’s concern is really not with the adequacy of a philosophical theory of truth, but with the question of what it means for a human being to possess the truth. To grasp the significance of this, we must not think of truth in the way characteristic of contemporary philosophy, focusing on the properties of propositions, but in the way ancient thinkers conceived of truth. For Socrates and Plato, at least as Kierkegaard understood them, having the truth meant having the key to human life, possessing that which makes it possible to live life as it was intended to be lived.

C Stephen Evans, Introduction: Kierkegaard’s life and works