Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813 and died there on 11 November 1855. A Danish Lutheran theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author, he is widely considered the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote in Danish in the setting of 19th-century Copenhagen, a city whose streets he loved to walk and where the Church of Denmark stood close to daily public life. His work reached beyond Denmark slowly at first, then more widely after translations into French, German, and other major European languages around the turn of the 20th century.

Kierkegaard is best known for writing about how a person lives as a “single individual.” He returned again and again to authenticity, personal choice, commitment, and the duty to love. He placed concrete human reality above abstract thinking, and his religious writing focused on Christian love, Socratic Christian ethics, faith, and the individual’s subjective relationship to Jesus Christ. He was sharply critical of organized religion and of Christianity when practiced as a state-controlled religion, especially in the form of the Church of Denmark.

His writings often used pseudonyms, with different names presenting distinct viewpoints and entering into complex dialogue with one another. Under his own name, he wrote Upbuilding Discourses, dedicating them to the “single individual” who might want to discover the meaning of his works. Among the ideas associated with him are subjective and objective truths, the knight of faith, recollection and repetition, angst, the infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, faith as a passion, and the three stages on life’s way.

Kierkegaard’s way of thinking was shaped early by his family and education. He was the youngest of seven children in an affluent household. His mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund Kierkegaard, had been a maid before marrying his father and was remembered as quiet and not formally educated, yet influential in the home. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a well-to-do wool merchant from Jutland, stern in appearance but imaginative, interested in philosophy, and devoted to the rationalist philosophy of Christian Wolff. Søren also read Ludvig Holberg, Johann Georg Hamann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Edward Young, and Plato, and the figure of Socrates became a major influence on his use of irony and indirect communication.

At the School of Civic Virtue, Østre Borgerdyd Gymnasium, Kierkegaard studied Latin, Greek, and history, then went on to theology at the University of Copenhagen. Yet he was not satisfied by philosophy as mere speculation. He wrote that what he needed was to become clear about “what am I to do,” not simply what he must know. That concern still gives his words their force. When he writes, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced,” it sounds like the heart of his work: faith, choice, love, and inwardness brought back to the living person.