You had to be there: Reading Kierkegaard and Heidegger from a comic possibility to the necessity of love

There is an odd and enduring gap in the history of Continental philosophy between the work of Soren Kierkegaard and that of Martin Heidegger. I attempt in what follows to read the two together, by comparing their philosophies relative to their shared practice of existential interpretation. I propose that where Heidegger moves within the ironic circularity of my existence and general ontology, Kierkegaard moves within a "divine comedy" in which my existence can never fully ground itself, but rather requires ethical and religious relationships. In order to establish this thesis I explicate, over the course of four chapters, four central concepts shared by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Both philosophers have in common an attempt to expose the appropriate existential sense of the totality, unity, determination and relation. I conclude that, when read together, Kierkegaard and Heidegger present a fundamental dilemma for the interpretation of existence. Kierkegaard interprets the phenomena of human life for the sake of maximizing the significance of my existence as a relation of contradiction, where the "existing individual" is existentially unified with the divine but ontologically distinct. Heidegger constructs and enriches the category of authentic existence for the sake of demonstrating the primacy of a non-relational conception of my existence, wherein Dasein is ontologically unified with being in general despite being existentially distinct. In the final chapter, I claim that the source of this dilemma lies in the interpretation of death. Death is the central structural feature shared by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and yet is also their greatest point of difference. Heidegger claims that death is the non-relational basis for any possible understanding of existence, insofar as it is "in each and every case my own." This stands in direct conflict with Kierkegaard's claim that death is the site of maximal ethical obligation---the remembrance of the dead is his principal example of what it is to love what is not my own. By presenting a critical re-evaluation of Heidegger's thesis on death from Kierkegaardian sources, I ultimately seek to raise the question whether ethics or ontology is primary for existential interpretation.