Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian and writer who spent almost his whole life in Copenhagen and died at forty-two. Writing under a series of invented pseudonyms, he argued that the most important questions of life cannot be settled by abstract systems of thought but only by the choices of a single, existing individual. Largely unknown outside Denmark in his lifetime, he is now regarded as the founding figure of existentialism and one of the most original Christian thinkers of the modern age.

Kierkegaard was born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a self-made and very wealthy merchant who had grown up as a poor shepherd boy in Jutland. His father was a stern, melancholy man of intense Lutheran piety, and his religious anxieties weighed heavily on his son. By the time Søren was twenty-one his mother and five of his six siblings had died, and the family's sense of living under a curse stayed with him.

In 1830 he entered the University of Copenhagen to study theology, but for years he was drawn more to literature, philosophy and the city's cafés and theatres than to his exams. His father's death in 1838 left him a large inheritance, which allowed him to live as an independent writer for the rest of his life. He completed his degree, and in 1841 defended a dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, a figure he admired all his life for his method of questioning people until they faced themselves.

In 1840 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a government official. Within a year he broke the engagement, apparently convinced that his melancholy and sense of religious calling made marriage impossible. The break caused a public scandal in Copenhagen and haunted him for the rest of his life; much of his writing about love, sacrifice and faith reflects it. Immediately afterwards he went to Berlin, where he attended the lectures of the philosopher Friedrich Schelling during the winter of 1841 to 1842, before returning home disappointed and determined to write.

What followed was an outpouring of books. Either/Or (1843) set the life of a pleasure-seeking aesthete beside the letters of a married judge who defends ethical commitment, and left the reader to decide between them. Fear and Trembling (1843) examined the biblical story of Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac, asking whether faith could ever justify suspending ordinary ethics. Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Stages on Life's Way and the long Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) followed in quick succession.

Most of these appeared under pseudonyms such as Victor Eremita, Johannes de silentio and Johannes Climacus. The pseudonyms were not real disguises, since most readers knew who the author was, but a method Kierkegaard called indirect communication. Each voice presented a way of life from the inside, so that readers would have to judge for themselves rather than simply accept a teacher's conclusions. Alongside these he published, under his own name, a series of religious discourses.

In 1845 to 1846 he became involved in a quarrel with The Corsair, a satirical Copenhagen weekly, which responded by mocking him for months in caricatures, ridiculing his appearance and his uneven trouser legs. The episode made him a figure of public ridicule and deepened his suspicion of the crowd and the press.

Kierkegaard wrote in opposition to the philosophy of Hegel, which dominated Danish and German universities. Hegel presented history and thought as a vast rational system in which contradictions are resolved at higher levels. Kierkegaard objected that such a system could explain everything except what it actually means for an individual to exist, choose and die. A person cannot live from the standpoint of world history; he or she must decide how to live now.

He described three broad ways of life, or stages. The aesthetic life seeks pleasure, interest and the avoidance of boredom, and ends in despair because it never commits to anything. The ethical life accepts duties, such as marriage and work, and takes responsibility for oneself. The religious life goes further, placing the individual in a direct relationship with God. There is no logical bridge between these stages: one passes from one to another only by a decision, the so-called leap of faith, a phrase associated with him though he rarely used it in that form.

Faith, for Kierkegaard, was not a matter of proof. Christianity centres on what he called the absolute paradox, that the eternal God became a human being in time, which reason cannot comprehend. To believe is therefore to risk oneself passionately on something objectively uncertain. This is the sense of his claim that truth is subjectivity: not that truth is whatever one likes, but that the truths that matter most must be appropriated inwardly and lived, not merely known. He also wrote penetrating studies of anxiety, which he saw as the dizziness of freedom before its own possibilities, and of despair, which in The Sickness unto Death (1849) he defined as the failure to become the self one is meant to be.

In his later years Kierkegaard turned his criticism on the Danish People's Church, the Lutheran state church. He believed that a comfortable official Christianity, in which everyone was a Christian by birth, had emptied the faith of its demands. When Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster died in 1854 and his successor Hans Lassen Martensen praised him as a witness to the truth, Kierkegaard launched a fierce public campaign, publishing a series of pamphlets called The Moment in 1855. In October 1855 he collapsed in the street and was taken to Frederik's Hospital, where he died on 11 November, refusing to receive communion from a priest of the state church.

For decades after his death Kierkegaard was read mainly in Scandinavia, though the Danish critic Georg Brandes lectured on him in the 1870s. German translations in the early twentieth century brought him to a wider audience. Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth drew on his emphasis on the gulf between God and humanity, and philosophers including Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre took up his themes of anxiety, choice and authentic existence, often stripped of his Christianity. Albert Camus criticised the leap of faith as an escape from the absurd, but engaged with him closely.

He is now read as a philosopher, a theologian, a psychologist and a literary artist, a pioneer of what became continental philosophy. His place in the broader story is traced on the nineteenth-century philosophy page, and the country he wrote in is covered in the history of Denmark.