Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables.
Background
Soren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, in the family of a wealthy merchant on May 5, 1813. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a self-made man who had amassed a considerable fortune as a wool merchant.
He was sickly, and frail, yet highly gifted, and his father's favorite child. His mother, Ane Sorensdatter Lund Kierkegaard, had served as a maid in the household before marrying his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. She was an unassuming figure: quiet, plain, and not formally educated but Henriette Lund, her granddaughter, wrote that she "wielded the sceptre with joy and protected Søren and Peter like a hen protecting her chicks.
His father was a "very stern man, to all appearances dry and prosaic, but under his 'rustic cloak' demeanor he concealed an active imagination which not even his great age could blunt". He read the philosophy of Christian Wolff.
When Michael (Mikael) Kierkegaard died on 9 August 1838 Søren had lost both his parents and all his brothers and sisters except for Peter who later became Bishop of Aalborg in the Danish State Lutheran Church.
Education
From 1821 to 1830 Kierkegaard attended the School of Civic Virtue, Østre Borgerdyd Gymnasium, when the school was situated in Klarebodeme, where he studied Latin and history among other subjects. He went on to study theology at the University of Copenhagen. He had little interest in historical works, philosophy dissatisfied him, and he couldn't see "dedicating himself to Speculation". Kierkegaard didn't want to be a philosopher in the traditional or Hegelian sense and he didn't want to preach a Christianity that was an illusion.
Kierkegaard had gone to Berlin to study philosophy and for a short while followed F. W. J. von Schelling's lectures with increasing disenchantment.
Kierkegaard sailed for Berlin. He discovered his true vocation: to be a writer. The creative energy which had been building up in him throughout the long struggle now burst forth in a torrent of writings. The first of these, Either/Or (1843), confronts the reader with an existential choice between two incompatible attitudes toward life: the esthetic and the ethical. The book does not present arguments but rather character portraits, situations, vignettes - written with remarkable verve and psychological insight. The author does not judge between the attitudes. His point to the reader is: each one must choose for himself and no one will find a convincing proof for his choice.
Kierkegaard's own choice is made clear in the two following works, published in the same year. He rejects both alternatives in favor of a third. Fear and Trembling and Repetition, through the figure of Abraham and his sacrifice of Isaac, reflect on his own experiences with his father and Olsen while outlining a third fundamental attitude: the religious - an attitude of unconditional obedience to God. In the first of these books Kierkegaard describes what is entailed by faith: the acceptance of paradox, sacrifice, and suffering. In the second he discusses the psychology of the believer. Still in the same year he brought out three volumes of Edifying Discourses. In these he spoke in his own name directly to the reader. The other works were published under various pseudonyms. In all, he used 19 distinct pseudonyms in his work according to an elaborate private plan. This was not to hide his identity - everyone knew who the author was - but to indicate that these were possible lifestyles, not necessarily his own.
The following year brought another creative burst of six more works, of which the common theme is a resistance to certain features of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy, in particular, to Hegel's tendency to mediate all oppositions and to hold out the prospect of complete understanding. Hence, Kierkegaard deliberately plays up the surd, suprarational character of Christianity and its demand for a radical choice (not a mediation) between good and evil. The two most important books of 1844 are the Philosophical Fragments, which shows that freedom is the necessary condition for Christianity and that freedom is the necessary condition for Christianity and that freedom cannot be understood or proved, and The Concept of Dread, which shows that it is in the experience of dread or anxiety that man apprehends his freedom to choose and hence his responsibility.
The year 1845 saw two more large-scale works: Stages on Life's Way, in which he once more went over the ground covered by Either/Or, this time making plain that religion forms a special sphere of existence; and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, a detailed attempt to show, against Hegel, that it is impossible to understand human existence intellectually. The truth about one's own life is not to be attained in conceptual thought; it is a truth that is chosen, and lived in fidelity to that choice. With this tremendous labor completed in less than 4 years, Kierkegaard believed he had finished his task. He was ready to put down his pen and now began to wonder if, as his father had wished, he should not accept ordination and a parsonage in the country.
All these works had been published at Kierkegaard's own expense, out of his inheritance. Apart from a brief flurry, mostly favorable, over Either/Or, there had been virtually no public response to his work. Now there appeared a generally favorable review but in a new journal, the Corsair, which, though eagerly read, was widely regarded as scurrilous and lacking in taste. Sharing this opinion, Kierkegaard wrote a sarcastic letter saying that in such a journal he would rather be abused than praised. The response of the editor was to launch a sustained and merciless series of cartoons depicting the writer. His hunchback and eccentric dress made him an easy mark for the cartoonist. For a whole year he was satirized and lampooned. He found strangers gaping and giggling at him wherever he went in Copenhagen, then still a small, enclosed town. Deeply hurt, he moved to counterattack. He began to write furious denunciations of the power of the press, of mindless public opinion, even of the concept of democracy. Some of these opinions he confided only to his Journals; others were published as The Present Age (1846). Ordination was now out of the question.
The Danish State Lutheran Church, in which Kierkegaard had thought of taking orders, was presided over by Bishop J. P. Mynster, an old friend of his father. As Kierkegaard's work became more and more critical of the notion of an established and comfortable Christianity, the bishop grew alarmed. Kierkegaard's Training in Christianity (1849) set very high standards for anyone claiming to be a Christian and was widely taken as a slap at the bishop. Many in and out of the clergy were incensed.
In early 1854 Mynster died, and Kierkegaard, who had been holding back certain charges out of personal respect for the man, now felt free to speak out. At his death Mynster had been called "a witness to the truth." This phrase, originally used of the Christian martyrs, was the last straw for Kierkegaard. He exploded with a frontal assault on the establishment. Using his erstwhile enemy, the press, Kierkegaard issued a series of broadsides, 21 in all, in which he condemned the compromises of the Church, the comfortable and worldly lives of the clergy, and the watered-down doctrine. The main burden of all these attacks was not that men failed to live up to the severe demands of Christianity - he admitted this was impossible - but rather the pretense of doing so. Hypocrisy was his target.
Exhausted by these labors and the overwork of a dozen years, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street with a paralyzing stroke. He lingered for a month, refusing to take communion unless from the hands of a layman, and died on November 11, 1855. Nearly 70 years passed before his work began to be known outside Denmark, but he has become one of the strongest influences on 20th-century thought.
Soren Kierkegaard's theology has been a major influence in the development of 20th century theology.
Kierkegaard's theology focuses on the single individual in relation to a known God based on a subjective truth. Many of his writings were a directed assault against all of Christendom, Christianity as a political and social entity. His target was the Danish State Church, which represented Christendom in Denmark. Christendom, in Kierkegaard's view, made individuals lazy in their religion. Many of the citizens were officially "Christians", without having any idea of what it meant to be a Christian. Kierkegaard attempted to awaken Christians to the need for unconditional religious commitment. However he was also against party spirit in religion as well as other areas of study and system building.
Politics
He wrote furious denunciations of the power of the press, of mindless public opinion, even of the concept of democracy.
Views
Kierkegaard criticized aspects of the philosophical systems that were brought on by philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel before him and the Danish Hegelians. He was also indirectly influenced by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. He measured himself against the model of philosophy which he found in Socrates, which aims to draw one's attention not to explanatory systems, but rather to the issue of how one exists.
One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to (objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth is subjectivity." What he means by this is that most essentially, truth is not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one acts is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity
Quotations:
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
"Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."
"Once you label me you negate me."
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
"To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."
"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."
"Purity of heart is to will one thing."
"Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it."
"Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts."
Interests
Writers
Kierkegaard preferred the comedies of Ludvig Holberg, the writings of Georg Johann Hamann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Edward Young and Plato, especially those referring to Socrates.
Connections
At the age of 27 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, who was 10 years younger than he and the daughter of a prominent government official. A beautiful girl of modest intellectual gifts but endowed with a warm and open nature, she was dazzled by the sparkling conversation of her suitor, who usually managed to cover up his melancholy with wit and affability. Two days after his proposal had been accepted, he "saw that he had blundered." He could not ask her to take on his burden of guilt and melancholy. He began to look for some way out which would do the least damage to Olsen. He now deliberately played the aloof and cynical dandy in an effort to break her affection for him and so free her. But the bewildered girl only grew more fascinated. Partly suspecting what lay behind his reversal, she sought to heal him of his fear and scruples. But he was unable to accept this, and finally, after 13 months of pain and heartbreak, he forced her to break off the engagement.
Olsen, basically a healthy-minded and uncomplicated person, recovered quickly and within 2 years had accepted an earlier suitor and married. Characteristically, Kierkegaard was now furious at her "unfaithfulness." Yet even after her marriage, he still hoped for some form of relationship with her—a platonic friendship—so that he could publicly honor her with his books. What he had wanted all along was a muse, not a wife. Many of his writings, especially of the early period, contain quite open allusions and appeals to Olsen, justifications of his strange behavior, and pledges of his continuing faithfulness. Apparently she never acknowledged these strange appeals.