Søren Kierkegaard

Based on Wikipedia: Søren Kierkegaard

The Melancholy Dane Who Invented Existentialism

In the crooked streets of nineteenth-century Copenhagen, where carriages rarely ventured, a peculiar figure could often be seen walking and talking with anyone who crossed his path. Servants, laborers, maidservants—he greeted them all. This slight man with hair rising six inches above his forehead in a "tousled crest" wore a coat the color of red cabbage and had such a sharp tongue that his own father nicknamed him "the Fork."

His name was Søren Kierkegaard, and he would become the first existentialist philosopher—though he never used that word himself.

What made Kierkegaard revolutionary wasn't some grand system of thought. Quite the opposite. He despised grand systems. While other philosophers of his era were building elaborate intellectual cathedrals, Kierkegaard asked a question so simple it was almost embarrassing: How should a single individual actually live?

A Wealthy Home Shadowed by Guilt

Kierkegaard was born in 1813 as the youngest of seven children into a family that was, on the surface, remarkably fortunate. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, had risen from being a poor shepherd in Jutland to becoming a wealthy wool merchant in Copenhagen. The family wanted for nothing materially.

But wealth couldn't quiet Michael's conscience.

The elder Kierkegaard carried a burden that would shape his youngest son's entire philosophy. As a young shepherd, cold and miserable on the heath, Michael had done something that haunted him for the rest of his life: he had cursed God. In an era of deep religious conviction, this felt like an unforgivable sin. Michael became convinced that God's wrath would fall upon his family—that none of his children would outlive him.

Five of his seven children did indeed die before him. This grim statistical confirmation seemed to validate Michael's fears, creating an atmosphere of religious intensity and melancholy that permeated the household.

Young Søren absorbed it all. His father was stern and prosaic on the outside, but beneath what Kierkegaard called his "rustic cloak" demeanor lay an active imagination and a devotion to the rationalist philosophy of Christian Wolff. Michael would host intellectuals at his home, and young Søren grew up surrounded by philosophical conversation.

His mother, Ane, presented a stark contrast. She had been a maid in the household before marrying Michael—and she was already pregnant at the wedding, another source of Michael's guilt. She was quiet, uneducated, and largely invisible in the historical record. Kierkegaard never once mentioned her in his published works. Yet according to his brother Peter, Søren preserved many of their mother's words and phrases in his writings. She protected her children, as one granddaughter put it, "like a hen her chicks."

The Young Contrarian

At school, Kierkegaard was described as "very conservative"—someone who would "honour the King, love the church and respect the police." This might sound like a conformist, but there was a catch: he was constantly getting into fights with other students and remained deeply ambivalent toward his teachers.

This pattern—appearing conventional while harboring profound dissent—would define his entire career.

At the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard studied theology but found himself restless. Historical works bored him. Philosophy left him dissatisfied. He couldn't see himself "dedicating himself to Speculation"—which in his era meant the elaborate metaphysical systems of philosophers like Hegel.

Then came a breakthrough, recorded in his journal on August 1, 1835. It remains perhaps the most quoted passage in existentialist literature:

"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."

This was radical. Philosophy had traditionally asked: What is true? What can we know? Kierkegaard was asking something different: What should I do? What can I commit to? He wanted to "lead a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge."

Regine: The Love He Couldn't Keep

In May 1837, Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen. She was fifteen. He was twenty-four. They were, by all accounts, immediately and intensely attracted to each other.

Three years later, after passing his theological examinations, Kierkegaard formally proposed. She accepted. He had achieved what should have been happiness.

Within months, he felt trapped.

On August 11, 1841, Kierkegaard broke off the engagement. The precise reason remains one of the great mysteries of philosophical biography. In his journals, he mentions his "melancholy"—that inherited weight from his father's household—and suggests it made him unsuitable for marriage. But this explanation has never fully satisfied scholars.

What we know is that the broken engagement devastated both parties. Regine eventually married someone else and lived until 1904, outliving Kierkegaard by nearly fifty years. She never spoke publicly about the affair.

For Kierkegaard, losing Regine became the wound that wouldn't heal—and, paradoxically, the source of his creative explosion. Much of his subsequent philosophy can be read as an extended meditation on the choice he made, on what it means to sacrifice earthly happiness for a higher calling, on the impossible gap between what we desire and what we believe we must do.

The Dissertation Defense That Lasted Seven Hours

Shortly after ending his engagement, Kierkegaard submitted his doctoral dissertation. Its title was characteristically unwieldy: "On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates."

The faculty panel had mixed feelings. They acknowledged considerable intellect but criticized the work's informal tone. Nevertheless, they allowed him to proceed to defense.

On September 29, 1841, Kierkegaard defended his thesis for seven and a half hours.

The subject matter—Socrates and irony—revealed influences that would shape everything he later wrote. From Socrates, Kierkegaard learned the power of indirect communication: the technique of leading people to truth through questions rather than lectures. From studying irony, he developed tools for undermining false certainties.

With his degree secured and a substantial inheritance of approximately 31,000 rigsdaler—enough to live comfortably without working—Kierkegaard was free to write. And write he did.

The Pseudonym Game

What Kierkegaard did next was strange, even by philosophical standards.

He began publishing books under fake names. Not just one pseudonym, but many: Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis. Each pseudonym had its own personality, its own perspective, its own limitations.

This wasn't mere playfulness. Kierkegaard was developing what he called "indirect communication"—a method of presenting ideas without claiming authority over them. Instead of telling readers what to think, he created characters who thought in different ways, allowing readers to work out the truth for themselves.

Consider his strategy from a different angle. Most philosophers say: "Here is the truth. Believe it." Kierkegaard said: "Here are several perspectives. Choose." The responsibility shifted to the reader.

His magnum opus, "Either/Or," published in February 1843, exemplified this approach. The book was edited by the fictional "Victor Eremita," who claimed to have discovered papers from two unknown authors—called simply "A" and "B"—in a secret drawer of his secretary.

"A" represented the aesthetic life: an existence devoted to pleasure, beauty, and the avoidance of boredom. "B" represented the ethical life: an existence devoted to duty, commitment, and moral responsibility. The book presented both perspectives without definitively choosing between them. Readers had to make their own either/or decision.

The Three Stages on Life's Way

From this early work, Kierkegaard developed one of his most influential ideas: the three stages or spheres of existence.

The first stage is the aesthetic. The aesthete lives for immediate pleasure and interesting experiences. They avoid commitment because commitment means closing off possibilities. The seducer who moves from conquest to conquest, never settling down, exemplifies this stage. It sounds exciting, but Kierkegaard argued it leads inevitably to boredom and despair. When everything is permitted, nothing matters.

The second stage is the ethical. The ethical person makes commitments and keeps them. They marry instead of seducing. They take on duties and responsibilities. They find meaning in fulfilling their social roles. This is more substantial than the aesthetic life, but Kierkegaard believed it too eventually fails. The ethical person can become self-righteous, or they can discover that no amount of moral effort makes them truly good.

The third stage is the religious. This is where Kierkegaard's philosophy becomes distinctively his own. The religious stage isn't about following rules or belonging to a church. It's about a direct, personal, terrifying encounter with God.

To illustrate this stage, Kierkegaard used the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son. Ethically, this is murder—the worst possible act. Yet Abraham obeys, trusting God beyond all rational understanding. He becomes what Kierkegaard called a "knight of faith."

This concept scandalized many readers. Wasn't Kierkegaard justifying religious fanaticism? His response was subtle: the knight of faith doesn't look like a fanatic. Outwardly, he looks completely ordinary. The difference is entirely internal—a relationship with God that can't be communicated or justified to others.

Subjective Truth

This brings us to one of Kierkegaard's most controversial and misunderstood ideas: subjective truth.

He was not saying that truth is whatever you want it to be. He was distinguishing between two kinds of truth that operate differently.

Objective truth is the kind scientists seek: facts about the external world that can be verified independently of who's doing the verifying. Two plus two equals four regardless of how you feel about it. The boiling point of water at sea level is 100 degrees Celsius whether you're happy or sad.

Subjective truth is different. It concerns how you relate to what you know. You might know objectively that you will die someday. But do you actually live as though you will die? Have you appropriated that truth, made it real in your existence?

Kierkegaard argued that when it comes to the most important questions—how to live, what to believe, who to become—subjective truth matters more than objective truth. A person who knows all the doctrines of Christianity but doesn't live them has nothing. A person who passionately commits to a relationship with God, even with uncertainty and doubt, has everything.

This is why he wrote: "Science and scholarship want to teach that becoming objective is the way. Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, to become a subject."

Angst: The Dizziness of Freedom

Kierkegaard is often credited with introducing the concept of angst—sometimes translated as anxiety or dread—into philosophical vocabulary.

He meant something specific by this term. Angst isn't fear of something particular, like a snake or a job interview. Angst is the vertigo that comes from confronting your own freedom.

Imagine standing at the edge of a cliff. You're afraid of falling—that's ordinary fear. But there's another feeling mixed in: the awareness that you could jump. Nothing is physically stopping you. That dizzying recognition of your own terrible freedom—that's angst.

Kierkegaard saw this anxiety as fundamental to human existence. We're constantly faced with choices, and nothing external can make those choices for us. We can follow social conventions, religious rules, or rational calculations, but ultimately we must choose to follow them. The responsibility is inescapable.

This is uncomfortable, which is why most people flee from it. They lose themselves in busyness, in social roles, in abstract systems of thought. Kierkegaard called this evasion. Authentic existence means facing your freedom and choosing anyway, with full awareness of what you're doing.

Against the Crowd

One of Kierkegaard's constant targets was what he called "the crowd" or "the public." This wasn't snobbery about ordinary people. It was a critique of how individuals lose themselves in collective identities.

When you think of yourself primarily as a Dane, a Christian, a liberal, a conservative—when your identity comes from group membership rather than personal choice—you've stopped being an individual. You've become what Kierkegaard called "the single individual" dissolved into an abstraction.

The crowd, he wrote, is untruth. Not because crowds are always wrong, but because truth requires individual appropriation. You can't outsource your existence to a group.

This critique extended to institutional Christianity. Kierkegaard was a devout Christian, but he was savage in his attacks on the Danish state church. In Denmark, you were born Christian, baptized as an infant, confirmed as a social ritual, and buried by a priest. Christianity had become a matter of social conformity rather than personal transformation.

For Kierkegaard, this wasn't Christianity at all. It was a comfortable illusion that let people call themselves Christian without ever confronting the radical demands of the faith. True Christianity, he argued, should be difficult, paradoxical, disturbing. It should force you to become an individual standing alone before God.

The Infinite Qualitative Distinction

Kierkegaard insisted on what he called the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and humanity. This phrase sounds abstract, but its implications are concrete and unsettling.

Many theologians of his era tried to prove God's existence through rational arguments, or to show how Christian doctrines made logical sense. Kierkegaard thought this was fundamentally misguided. If you could prove God's existence through reason, faith would be unnecessary. If Christian doctrines were logically coherent, they wouldn't require the "leap of faith" that makes Christianity what it is.

The central Christian claim—that God became human in Jesus Christ—is, Kierkegaard argued, absurd. Not irrational in the sense of being silly, but irrational in the sense of exceeding what reason can comprehend. The eternal entering time, the infinite becoming finite, God dying on a cross: these claims don't make logical sense. They demand faith precisely because they can't be reasoned into.

This might sound like an attack on Christianity, but Kierkegaard meant it as a defense. He was trying to rescue faith from being reduced to a set of propositions you could accept through argument. Faith, for him, was a passionate leap into the unknown, a total commitment that reason can neither compel nor forbid.

The Attack on Christendom

In his final years, Kierkegaard launched an all-out assault on the Danish state church. The immediate trigger was the death of Bishop Mynster in 1854. Mynster had been the primate of Denmark and a friend of Kierkegaard's father. At Mynster's funeral, another church official eulogized him as a "witness to the truth."

Kierkegaard exploded. A witness to the truth, in the New Testament sense, was someone who suffered for their faith—a martyr. Mynster had been a comfortable bureaucrat who presided over a comfortable institution. To call him a witness to the truth was, in Kierkegaard's view, to mock everything genuine Christianity stood for.

He began publishing a series of pamphlets called "The Moment," attacking the church establishment with increasing ferocity. The church, he argued, was worse than honest paganism. At least pagans didn't pretend to be Christians. The state church had turned Christianity into its opposite while keeping the name—a kind of spiritual fraud.

This campaign was deeply unpopular. Kierkegaard became a controversial, even scandalous figure in Danish society. In October 1855, he collapsed on the street and was taken to a hospital. He died on November 11, at age forty-two, having refused communion from a church official. He would accept the sacrament only from a layman, not a representative of the institution he had spent his final months denouncing.

The Journals: Seven Thousand Pages

Throughout his life, Kierkegaard kept journals—over seven thousand pages of events, musings, and thoughts. These journals have become essential sources for understanding his philosophy, even as they deliberately frustrate interpretation.

Kierkegaard knew the journals would be read after his death and seems to have written them partly for posterity. But he also employed deliberate tactics to confuse readers: abrupt changes in thought, repetitive passages, unusual turns of phrase. He wanted to be understood, but not too easily.

In December 1849, he wrote: "Were I to die now the effect of my life would be exceptional; much of what I have simply jotted down carelessly in the Journals would become of great importance and have a great effect; for then people would have grown reconciled to me and would be able to grant me what was, and is, my right."

He was correct. His journals have been published, translated, analyzed, and argued over for more than a century. They remain inexhaustible.

A Slow-Burning Influence

Kierkegaard wrote in Danish, and for decades after his death his work was largely unknown outside Scandinavia. By the turn of the twentieth century, translations into French, German, and other European languages began to appear.

Then came the explosion.

In the years after World War I, in a Europe shattered by unprecedented violence, Kierkegaard's themes suddenly resonated with overwhelming force. His emphasis on the individual against the crowd, on authentic existence against conformity, on anxiety as a fundamental human condition—all of this spoke directly to a generation that had watched civilization nearly destroy itself.

The existentialist philosophers of the mid-twentieth century—Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger—all acknowledged their debt to Kierkegaard, even as they transformed his ideas in directions he might not have recognized. Sartre's famous slogan "existence precedes essence" is essentially Kierkegaardian: we are not born with fixed natures but must create ourselves through choices.

But there's an irony here. Sartre and the existentialists he inspired were mostly atheists. They took Kierkegaard's insights about freedom, anxiety, and authentic existence while discarding the Christian faith that was absolutely central to his thought. Kierkegaard would have found this deeply problematic. For him, the religious stage wasn't optional—it was the destination toward which the whole journey pointed.

Why Kierkegaard Still Matters

What can a melancholy Dane from the nineteenth century offer to someone navigating the digital age?

Perhaps this: Kierkegaard's critique of "the crowd" has become, if anything, more relevant in an era of social media and algorithmic filter bubbles. His warning about losing yourself in collective identities speaks directly to a world where people increasingly define themselves by political tribes and online communities.

His insistence that truth must be personally appropriated—that knowing something objectively is different from living it—offers a counterweight to the information overload that characterizes contemporary life. We have access to more facts than any previous generation, yet Kierkegaard would ask: Have we become wiser? Have we learned how to live?

His analysis of anxiety as the dizziness of freedom provides a framework for understanding the peculiar paralysis that afflicts people who have too many options. In a world of infinite choice, choosing anything means giving up everything else. No wonder so many people feel stuck.

And his critique of comfortable, institutional Christianity continues to challenge religious communities that have settled into cultural respectability. If following Jesus is supposed to be a radical, life-transforming commitment, why does it so often look like joining a social club?

Kierkegaard never made things easy—not for himself, not for his readers. He remains difficult, contradictory, sometimes infuriating. He rejected the philosophical systems of his day, yet his own work forms a kind of anti-system that can seem just as elaborate. He championed the individual, yet his actual life was deeply shaped by his relationships with his father and Regine.

But perhaps that's the point. Life isn't a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced. And the single individual standing before their choices, trying to figure out how to live—that remains the most important philosophical subject of all.