Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen. His father had been a feudal laborer on church lands, and had so hated his work that one day he walked to the top of a hill and solemnly cursed God. At the age of twenty-one, his father was released from his vassalage, and moved to Copenhagen where he became rich as a wholesaler. He never was able to shake off the guilt he felt for cursing God, a guilt that was only compounded by the early deaths of five of his seven children and of his wife. This guilt gave him a somber disposition, which he passed onto Søren, along with a strict religious upbringing.

Kierkegaard spent a great deal of his youth as a man-about-town and a student, studying for a degree in theology. In 1840, he became engaged to a young woman named Regine Olsen. A year later, shortly before receiving his doctorate, he broke off the engagement quite suddenly. Though the reasons were not clear, even to himself (a great deal of his writing approaches the question of why he broke with Regine), it seems he felt his ethical obligation to her as a husband and as a good citizen could not be reconciled with his higher, literary and intellectual, obligations.

Soon after the break with Regine, Kierkegaard began writing pseudonymously at a prodigious rate. Fear and Trembling is one of his earlier works, published in 1843, on the same day as another of his books, Repetition. He became increasingly frustrated with the hypocrisy of the Danish church, and his feud with the clergy exploded into an open, and very cutting, exchange of pamphlets and editorials. Kierkegaard poured what was left of his considerable inheritance into funding the publication of pamphlets against the church. In 1855, he collapsed in the street, and died of a lung infection on November 11. Against his expressly stated will, the Danish church officiated at his funeral.

At the time of his death, Kierkegaard was almost universally disliked in Copenhagen, and his works were largely ignored. The first monograph about Kierkegaard was not published until 1877, and he had to wait until the 20th century to come into vogue. Since then, he has exercised tremendous influence on a number of intellectual movements, particularly existentialism, which claims him as a forefather.

Nothing in Kierkegaard's short life suggested he would enjoy posthumous fame. A peculiar man, often surly and unpleasant, Kierkegaard divided his time between wandering the streets of Copenhagen and writing his unusual philosophical books. He lived off a large inheritance from his father, he published his works at his own expense, and he wrote almost exclusively in Danish (his native language), attracting no readers of any significance outside his native land.

Though many of Kierkegaard's works were prepared as responses to popular ideas or influential writings in Denmark, few of his contemporaries appear to have taken his philosophy seriously. Towards the end of his life, a Copenhagen newspaper published a series of satirical cartoons about Kierkegaard that effectively reduced him to a local laughingstock.

Nevertheless, through a complex chain of events, Kierkegaard's works came to be read with interest by leading philosophers outside of Denmark early in the 20th century. His fans came to include such notable figures as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kafka, Barth, Sartre, and Camus. These thinkers often interpreted Kierkegaard as a precedent for their own ideasand therefore as an important step in the history of Western philosophy.

Within the context of the history of philosophy, Kierkegaard has generally been understood as a radical critic of Hegel. In brief, Hegel argued that we can obtain knowledge about religious and ethical truth through careful analysis of the historical process that created our ideas about religion and ethics. Kierkegaard argues instead that knowledge about the external world is always uncertain by comparison with our internal intuitions about God and morality. He urges us to pursue a private faith in God.

Ironically, while Kierkegaard's ideas have influenced 20th-century theology, they have also been an important influence on thinkers who do not believe in God. For instance, "existentialist" philosophers like Sartre and Camus admire Kierkegaard's commitment to personal beliefs but reject his commitment to religion. (See the Full Work Analysis for more on this and other interpretations of Kierkegaard.)

The Sickness Unto Death was published in 1849, just six years before Kierkegaard's death in 1855. It is one of Kierkegaard's last philosophical works, and it offers one of the clearest and most concise statements of his views on religious faith.

Popular pages: The Sickness Unto Death