Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on May 5, 1813, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard and Ane Sorensdatter Lund ^[1]. His father had begun life as an impoverished shepherd boy on the Jutland heath, moved to Copenhagen as a young man, and built a fortune in the hosiery and wholesale trade. By the time Soren arrived, Michael had retired from business and devoted himself to religious reflection and to the strict, melancholy upbringing of his sons ^[1].

The household that shaped the future philosopher was saturated in a severe Lutheran piety. Michael Kierkegaard carried a lifelong burden of guilt: as a boy he had cursed God on the Jutland moor, and he had fathered a child with his servant Ane before their marriage. He came to believe his family lay under divine punishment, a conviction that seemed confirmed as five of his seven children and his wife died before he did ^[2]. Soren later described his childhood as one in which he was dressed in the thoughts of an old man, and biographers agree that this inheritance of anxiety and religious intensity marks nearly everything he wrote ^[2].

Kierkegaard attended the School of Civic Virtue in Copenhagen, where he studied Latin and history and gained a reputation for a sharp, mocking wit that compensated for his slight frame. In 1830 he enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to read theology, as his father wished, though he spent much of the following decade on philosophy, literature and an expensive social life in the city's theaters and cafes ^[3]. The deaths of his mother in 1834 and his father in 1838 pushed him back toward serious study, and he finally passed his theological examinations in 1840 ^[3].

No single event in the Soren Kierkegaard biography has attracted more attention than his engagement to Regine Olsen. He met her in 1837, when she was fourteen and he twenty four, and proposed in September 1840, shortly after completing his degree ^[4]. Almost immediately he concluded that he had made a mistake. Within days he was convinced that his melancholy, his secretive inner life and his sense of a special religious task made marriage impossible for him.

In August 1841 he returned the ring, and after weeks of painful scenes he broke the engagement definitively that October, deliberately playing the scoundrel in public so that Regine could withdraw with her honor intact ^[4]. He then left for Berlin, where he attended Friedrich Schelling's lectures against Hegelian philosophy. Regine eventually married the civil servant Frederik Schlegel, yet Kierkegaard never stopped writing about her. He named her in his will as his heir, and the figure of the abandoned beloved runs through his authorship, from the seducer's diary in his first major book to his late journals ^[4].

Scholars treat the broken engagement as more than gossip. The choice between an ordinary ethical life, represented by marriage, and an exceptional religious existence became one of the organizing problems of his thought. Works such as Fear and Trembling and Repetition, both published in 1843, are widely read as coded meditations on the sacrifice of Regine ^[5].

Between 1843 and 1846 Kierkegaard produced books at a pace few writers have matched. Either/Or appeared in February 1843 under the editorship of one Victor Eremita, presenting the papers of an aesthete and a judge who argue for two rival ways of living ^[5]. Fear and Trembling, signed Johannes de Silentio, followed in October of the same year and examined Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, asking whether faith can require a suspension of ordinary ethics ^[5]. The Concept of Anxiety (1844) analyzed dread as the dizziness of freedom, and Stages on Life's Way (1845) extended the map of aesthetic, ethical and religious existence ^[6].

The pseudonyms were not disguises in any simple sense; Copenhagen readers quickly guessed the author. They were instead instruments of what Kierkegaard called indirect communication. Each invented writer embodies a standpoint the reader must inhabit and judge, because Kierkegaard held that truths about how to exist cannot be handed over like information, only appropriated by an individual ^[6]. Alongside the pseudonymous works he published, under his own name, a steady stream of Upbuilding Discourses addressed to that individual reader.

The climax of this period was the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846), attributed to Johannes Climacus. Running to more than five hundred pages, it mounted a sustained assault on Hegelian system building and advanced the famous claim that, for an existing person, truth is subjectivity: what matters religiously is not objective proof but the passion of inward commitment ^[6]. At the end of the Postscript, Kierkegaard acknowledged responsibility for the whole pseudonymous production.

In late 1845 Kierkegaard provoked a quarrel with The Corsair, a widely read Copenhagen satirical weekly. When a review associated with the paper praised him, he responded with contempt and invited attack. The Corsair obliged for months, publishing caricatures that mocked his uneven trouser legs, his thin frame and his habits, until he became a figure of fun to street crowds and schoolboys ^[7].

The episode wounded him deeply but changed his course. He abandoned a half formed plan to seek a rural pastorate and resolved to remain at his desk as a religious author under his own name. The Corsair affair also sharpened his suspicion of the press and of what he called the public, an anonymous crowd that levels every individual distinction. His 1846 review Two Ages contains one of the nineteenth century's earliest critiques of mass media culture ^[7].

The writings that followed turned decisively toward Christianity. Works of Love (1847) examined the commandment to love the neighbor. The Sickness unto Death (1849), signed Anti-Climacus, dissected despair as the failure to become a self before God, and Practice in Christianity (1850) drew a sharp line between admiring Christ and following him ^[8]. In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, published only after his death, Kierkegaard explained that the entire authorship, aesthetic works included, had served a single religious purpose: to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom ^[8].

The last two years of Kierkegaard's life were consumed by open war with the Danish state church. The occasion was the death of Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster in January 1854 and the eulogy in which Hans Lassen Martensen, Mynster's successor, called the late bishop a witness to the truth. Kierkegaard, who believed Mynster had embodied a comfortable, official religion remote from the New Testament, waited nearly a year and then published a blistering reply ^[9].

Through 1855 he pressed the attack in newspaper articles and in his own pamphlet series, The Moment, arguing that state supported Christendom was a fraud, that its clergy were salaried functionaries rather than disciples, and that honest people should stop participating in official worship ^[9]. The polemic scandalized Copenhagen and cost him most of his remaining money, since he financed the pamphlets himself from an inheritance that was nearly exhausted.

In October 1855 he collapsed in the street and was carried to Frederik's Hospital in Copenhagen. He told visitors that his work was done and refused communion from any clergyman of the official church. He died on November 11, 1855, at the age of forty two; the precise cause remains uncertain, with tuberculosis and a progressive spinal condition among the suggestions historians have offered ^[1]. His funeral at the Church of Our Lady drew a large crowd, and at the graveside his nephew Henrik Lund protested that the church was burying a man who had renounced it ^[9].

Anyone asking who was Soren Kierkegaard confronts a paradox: a writer nearly unknown outside Denmark at his death who became a foundation of modern thought. Translation came slowly, first into German in the decades around 1900, then into English largely through the efforts of Walter Lowrie and David Swenson in the 1930s and 1940s ^[10]. Once available, the books found their moment. Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre drew on his analyses of anxiety, choice and authenticity, which is why he is routinely called the father of existentialism, even though he wrote as a Christian and would have quarreled with his atheist heirs ^[10].

His theological influence has been at least as deep. Karl Barth's commentary on Romans, a turning point in twentieth century Protestant theology, credited Kierkegaard's insistence on the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's attack on cheap grace and much of postwar religious thought carry his fingerprints, and philosophers as different as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Emmanuel Levinas read him closely ^[10].

Among Soren Kierkegaard's achievements, the most durable may be conceptual: he gave anxiety, despair, the leap, the crowd and the single individual their modern philosophical meanings, and he pioneered the analysis of the self as a task rather than a given. The basic Soren Kierkegaard facts, a short life spent almost entirely within one city, some three dozen books, no academic post and no school of disciples, make the scale of that afterlife all the more striking. The critical Danish edition of his writings and journals, completed in Copenhagen in recent decades, runs to fifty five volumes, and the Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen continues to coordinate scholarship on his work worldwide ^[3].