Søren Kierkegaard: Life, Philosophy, and Existentialism

Kierkegaard as a Person

Born on May 5, 1813, in the Danish capital of Copenhagen, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a renowned philosopher and theologian. He claimed his physical frailty was an oppressive weight that dragged down his healthy spirit, which longed for freedom. At the age of 17, Søren enrolled at the University of Copenhagen and majored in theology, as his father wished; however, he subsequently shifted to philosophy. While his education did influence his thinking, the inspiration for his written works actually came from two key relationships — with his father, Michael Kierkegaard, and a failed engagement to Regine Olsen — as well as two major conflicts: one with the Church and the other with the print media, particularly Corsaren (The Corsair). His health began to fail, and Søren died on November 11, 1855, at the age of 42 (Obinyan, 2014).

Any analysis of the philosopher's life would be incomplete without a discussion of his father, who had a great and lasting impact on Søren. Michael Kierkegaard came from a poor household on the western side of Jutland. At eleven years of age, however, his uncle — a merchant — invited Michael to Copenhagen to work as his apprentice. Intelligent and hardworking, Michael helped the business thrive. He eventually inherited his uncle's business and invested shrewdly during the country's financial difficulties, which arose from Denmark's alignment with the losing side in the nineteenth-century Napoleonic Wars. Michael ultimately became one of Copenhagen's wealthiest men. Despite his financial success, he was described as "melancholic," or suffering from depression. His first wife died childless a couple of years after their marriage, and the following year Michael wed Anne Sorensdatter Lund, a servant who was already expecting their first child. Søren, the last of seven siblings, was born when his father was 56 and his mother 45 years old (Evans, n.d.).

Like his father, Søren was "melancholic" and guilt-ridden throughout his life. His relationship with his father was probably the greatest influence during the most decisive phase of his life, which included his failed engagement to Regine Olsen. Although Kierkegaard fell in love with and became engaged to Ms. Olsen in 1840, he almost immediately felt he had made a serious mistake. Following a painful period in which he behaved poorly in order to make Regine leave him, he ultimately returned the engagement ring in 1841, ending the engagement, and departed for Berlin, Germany, where he engaged in intense writing. Why he severed ties with Regine was perhaps not even entirely clear to him; the world will likely never know what drove him to that decision. Nevertheless, Søren felt he possessed a personal shortcoming or impairment that meant he could never marry. He felt he could not confide in Regine without revealing deep secrets about his father. He interpreted his circumstances from a religious standpoint, believing God wanted him to become an "exception" — sacrificing love and the happiness of marriage (Evans, n.d.).

Even after the broken engagement, Søren loved Regine intensely; she appeared in his thoughts and personal journals throughout his life. Considerable evidence suggests that his written works, particularly his earliest books, were in some way a means of expressing his thoughts and feelings to her. It was this broken engagement that truly liberated Søren to pursue his career as a writer, and from 1843 to 1846 he produced a remarkable number of books. Several early works are fictional and pseudonymous. Repetition and Either/Or resemble novels (Garff, 2005). It is important to note, however, that from the very beginning Søren also wrote numerous religious works, which he labeled "Edifying Discourses" (Opbyggelige), translated literally by the Hongs as "Upbuilding Discourses."

Søren's life is also incomplete without a mention of his conflict with the Church during his final years and the Corsaren controversy. In 1846, he decided to end his literary career and become a pastor, ideally in a country parish. That very same year, however, Søren became embroiled in a dispute with Corsaren, a national satirical literary magazine that mocked the country's leading intellectuals. Because much of the writing in Corsaren was anonymous, careless and slanderous attacks were common (Rosenau, 1995; Garff, 2005).

Søren Kierkegaard left his mark across an intellectually and geographically broad area. He may rightly be called a man of many disciplines, given his contributions to philosophy, theology, literary theory, psychology, social and political theory, and communications theory. He wished to be remembered chiefly as a spiritual philosopher. Søren even stated that he considered himself a missionary who aimed at reintroducing Christianity to the Christian community (Garff, 2005). Given his wide-ranging interests and primarily religious purposes, some scholars have questioned whether he can truly be considered a philosopher.

Kierkegaard as a Philosopher

Søren grew increasingly convinced that the Danish Lutheran Church made a genuinely Christian life difficult — and sometimes even impossible — to lead. Through faith in Jesus, a true Christian finds forgiveness for sin. Søren did not question this cornerstone of Lutheranism and Christianity. However, he argued that whoever sincerely has faith in Jesus will necessarily express that faith by following and imitating Jesus. According to Søren, this is not a matter of abstract or propositional belief. He believed the Christian world had diluted the radical nature of God's demands on humanity. The life of Jesus posed a major challenge to the established order of his era, and Jesus paid for that challenge with his life. Søren's view was that Christians who truly follow Jesus should likewise expect oppression and hostility from today's established order (Garff, 2005; Evans, n.d.). Yet the prevailing Christian world asserts that this ceased to be true once the entire West adopted Christianity. Kierkegaard, however, rejected the notion that Christian society is now truly Christian. In his view, the Church is always militant — struggling to define itself in opposition to the world — and cannot be expected to assume the role of the Church triumphant, an entity that has helped make the world essentially good.

The disagreement with institutional Christianity was already evident in several of Kierkegaard's early pseudonymous works. Following the Corsaren conflict, it became an increasingly prominent theme. Journal entries from 1846 onward express this disagreement in forceful terms. In his later works, Kierkegaard used the concept of Sandhedsvidne ("witness to the truth") as a definitive ideal of Christianity. Sandhedsvidne describes an individual who is prepared to be persecuted and even to sacrifice his life in upholding the truth — a usage supported by the concept of the "martyr" found in the New Testament (Evans, n.d.).

Søren published Stages on Life's Way and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions in early 1845, after which he made a brief visit to Berlin; the former work was edited by the pseudonymous Hilarius Bookbinder. Upon returning home, he compiled every discourse he had written between 1843 and 1844 into Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, published on May 29, 1845. After Peder Ludvig Møller, the editor of and a contributor to Corsaren, published an article questioning the coherence of Søren's writings, Søren responded with two short pieces: "The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician," which attacked Møller's integrity, and "Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action," which criticized Corsaren's journalistic standards. The newspaper retaliated by mockingly attacking Søren's appearance, habits, and voice. This had little effect on the writer, who continued to publish under pseudonyms. On February 27, 1846, he published the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments under the name "Johannes Climacus," and Two Ages: A Literary Review under his own name (Evans, n.d.; Garff, 2005).

Following a year-long break from writing, Søren resumed in 1847 with Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits, which included "Works of Love" and "Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing." Aware that society was debating his religious standing based on his pseudonymous works, Søren published Concluding Unscientific Discourses, in which he publicly acknowledged authorship of the pseudonymous writings. The following year he published two works: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress (pseudonymous) and Christian Discourses (under his own name). He also wrote The Point of View of My Work as an Author that same year — a kind of autobiography in which he explained his use of pseudonyms. This work was published only after his death. In 1849, he published The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, a second edition of Either/Or, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, and The Sickness Unto Death (as Anti-Climacus). The following year he published Practice in Christianity, also as Anti-Climacus. Toward the end of his life, Søren launched a direct and sustained attack on Denmark's Lutheran Church through newspaper articles published in Faedrelandet (The Fatherland) and a series of pamphlets called Ojeblikket (The Moment), which he published independently (Garff, 2005; Evans, n.d.).

Normally, an existentialist begins with the existent human being, who is seen as distinct from objective nature because he or she is a subject not defined by natural laws. Humans differ from the prior modern Western philosophical conceptions of the subject — such as the Cartesian standpoint (Obinyan, 2014) — in that they are subjective both as thinkers and as agents. They are also distinctive in their preoccupation with the problematic finitude of existing in human form in this world. This final distinction is of great importance. Philosophers like Kierkegaard regarded existence, understood as a unique way of being, as their central shared concern.