Soren Kierkegaard

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, and religious author born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, where he spent virtually his entire life. He is widely regarded as the first existentialist thinker, though he predated the term itself. The youngest of seven children in a wealthy and devoutly Lutheran household, he inherited a fortune that allowed him to write full time without seeking academic employment.

Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, completing a dissertation on the concept of irony with continual reference to Socrates in 1841. His broken engagement to Regine Olsen the same year haunted his subsequent writing and supplied raw material for many of his pseudonymous works exploring love, ethics, and self-deception.

His first major work, Either/Or, appeared in 1843 under the pseudonym Victor Eremita, juxtaposing aesthetic and ethical ways of life. He followed it with Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, each issued under a different pseudonym to dramatize competing existence-stances. He also published devotional discourses under his own name.

The final years of his life were consumed by a public attack on the Danish State Church, which he accused of confusing comfortable bourgeois custom with authentic Christianity. He collapsed on a Copenhagen street in October 1855 and died on November 11 at age 42, leaving behind the journals and papers that would shape twentieth-century existentialism, dialectical theology, and literary modernism.

The name Søren is the Danish form of Severin, ultimately from the Latin Severinus, a derivative of Severus meaning stern or serious. He carried the name as a masculine given name throughout his life.