Søren Kierkegaard

A Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.

Søren Kierkegaard: The Philosopher Who Broke His Own Engagement to Write

In 1841, Søren Kierkegaard ended his engagement to Regine Olsen, the eighteen-year-old he loved, deliberately staging himself as callous to drive her away because he believed his own inherited melancholy would ruin her life. He then fled briefly to Berlin and, on returning to Copenhagen, entered one of the most concentrated bursts of philosophical productivity in modern intellectual history — a broken engagement converted, almost immediately, into Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and a shelf of other books written under invented names, each pursuing a different, sometimes contradictory way of thinking about how a person ought to live.

A Merchant's Son and an Inherited Melancholy

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 5, 1813, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a wealthy retired merchant, and Anne Lund Kierkegaard. His father was intensely, almost punishingly religious, and much of what shaped Søren's own temperament traces back to a private family story: as a child in poverty, Michael Pedersen was said to have cursed God, and he lived out his later, prosperous life convinced the family remained under some kind of divine curse for it. That inherited sense of guilt and melancholy became one of the central psychological facts of Søren's own life and, later, one of the recurring subjects of his philosophy. He studied for years at the University of Copenhagen, eventually earning a theology degree and a Magister degree in philosophy — his dissertation examined the concept of irony as practiced by Socrates — and completed pastoral seminary training that qualified him for ordination as a Lutheran minister, though he never actually took up a pastorate, occasionally preaching in Copenhagen churches instead. An inheritance of roughly 31,000 rigsdaler from his father gave him the financial independence to spend his adult life writing without needing academic or clerical employment.

The Engagement That Became a Philosophy

In 1840 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, but almost immediately concluded that marriage was impossible for him — his journals point toward a conviction that his own melancholic disposition would damage her, though his exact reasoning has remained a matter of scholarly debate ever since. He tried, unsuccessfully, to discourage her affection by deliberately appearing improper and unfeeling, and formally broke the engagement in 1841, after which he left briefly for Berlin. He never married, and decades later left what remained of his estate to Regine, who largely declined it. The rupture, whatever its precise motivation, functioned as the emotional detonator for the most productive period of his career.

Either/Or and a Cast of Invented Authors

Between 1843 and 1846, in the years immediately following the broken engagement, Kierkegaard published an extraordinary sequence of major works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. He wrote much of this output under an array of invented pseudonymous personas — Judge William, Johannes de Silentio, and others — each presenting a distinct existential outlook (the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious) without Kierkegaard directly endorsing any single one as his own final word, a deliberately indirect method of doing philosophy that forced readers to work out the tensions between perspectives themselves rather than receive a settled doctrine. Fear and Trembling, written under the name Johannes de Silentio, used the biblical story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac to interrogate what a genuine, terrifying leap of religious faith would actually require of a person, well beyond the comfortable, socially sanctioned Christianity of his surroundings.

The Corsair Affair

In 1845 and 1846, Kierkegaard provoked a public feud with The Corsair, a popular Copenhagen satirical magazine, which responded with sustained personal ridicule, including mockery of his physical appearance. The episode converted him from an active participant in Copenhagen's social and intellectual life — he had reportedly enjoyed frequent, informal conversational "people baths" around the city — into something closer to a recluse, and it also settled a professional question for him: he abandoned any remaining ambition toward a conventional pastoral career and committed himself fully to authorship as his singular vocation.

Works of Love and an Assault on the Church

A second major productive period followed, yielding Works of Love, The Sickness Unto Death, Practice in Christianity, and a series of religious discourses, in which his focus shifted increasingly toward direct Christian commitment and a sharpening critique of what he called cultural Christianity — a comfortable, state-sanctioned religiosity he regarded as a betrayal of authentic faith. In his final years this critique escalated into an open, unrelenting assault on the Danish state church itself, which he accused of embodying exactly this hollow "Christendom." He founded a polemical pamphlet, Øjeblikket (The Moment), producing ten issues of searing wit and satire aimed directly at the Danish clergy before his health gave out.

Collapse and Death

Kierkegaard collapsed, paralyzed, on a Copenhagen street and was taken to hospital, where he died on November 11, 1855, at forty-two, likely of tuberculosis affecting his spine. He summarized his own life's work near its end with a characteristic insistence on its underlying unity: "What I have understood as the task of the authorship has been done. It is one idea."

Why Søren Is Called a Genius

Kierkegaard's specific and enduring contribution was to insist that the deepest questions of human existence — anxiety, despair, faith, authentic selfhood — could not be resolved by the kind of abstract, systematic reasoning that dominated the philosophy of his age, particularly Hegel's, and to demonstrate that conviction formally, not just argue it, by writing under multiple invented personas rather than delivering a single settled system of his own. He is conventionally credited as the founding figure of existentialism, and his influence runs, by later scholarly consensus, through Heidegger, Sartre, Kafka, and Ibsen, among many others; an 1889 reference work called him simply the most original thinker Scandinavia had ever produced, and Karl Jaspers later placed him alongside Hegel and Nietzsche as one of the era's defining minds. The honest complication is that Kierkegaard's philosophy is inseparable from a genuinely difficult personal temperament — an inherited melancholy he himself described as nearly disabling, a broken engagement he never fully processed, and a late-life turn to public religious polemic so relentless it estranged him from Copenhagen's clergy and civic life alike. His genius was not a comfortable one, either for him or for the people around him.

Legacy

Kierkegaard died largely unrecognized outside Denmark, and it was only in the following century, as his work was translated and taken up by German and French philosophy, that he was retrospectively installed as one of the central founders of modern existentialist thought — a philosopher whose insistence on subjective, lived experience over abstract system-building still shapes how philosophy, theology, and psychology each approach the question of what it means to become a self.