More in Søren than in manga

Julian Baggini — I still love Kierkegaard

I quite enjoyed this summary of the somewhat odd philosophy of Kierkegaard from someone who first became a fan as a teenager.

This paragraph amused me:

Yet alongside this melancholy was a mischievous, satirical wit. Kierkegaard was a scathing critic of the Denmark of his time, and he paid the price when in 1846 The Corsair, a satirical paper, launched a series of character attacks on him, ridiculing his gait (he had a badly curved spine) and his rasping voice. Kierkegaard achieved the necessary condition of any great romantic intellectual figure, which is rejection by his own time and society. His biographer, Walter Lowrie, goes so far as to suggest that he was single-handedly responsible for the decline of Søren as a popular first name. Such was the ridicule cast upon him that Danish parents would tell their children ‘don’t be a Søren’. Today, Sorensen — son of Søren — is still the eighth most common surname in Denmark, while as a first name Søren itself doesn’t even make the top 50. It is as though Britain were full of Johnsons but no Johns.

As for the title of this post:  I was trying to make a pun, and took a stab that there would be manga versions of some of Kirkegaard's books.  Looks like I was right!