Søren Kierkegaard

(1813-1855)

BIRTH

May 5, 1813

PLACE

Copenhagen, Denmark

NAME

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

DEATH

November 11, 1855

PLACE

Copenhagen, Denmark

FAMILY

FATHER

Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard

(1756–1838)

MOTHER

Ane Sørensdatter Lund

(1768–1834)

HOMES

NICKNAMES

the Fork

RELIGIOUS VIEWS

CHRISTIAN

LUTHERAN

MEMBERSHIPS

AWARDS

Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death, works on faith, choice, and anxiety that made him a forerunner of existentialism. He completed his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony, in 1841 and attended Schelling's lectures in Berlin. In 1846 the satirical paper The Corsair ridiculed him, making him a figure of mockery in Copenhagen. The Sickness unto Death followed in 1849.

PHILOSOPHERTHEOLOGIANWRITER

EARLY LIFE

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a wealthy retired wool merchant, and Ane Sørensdatter Lund, his second wife and a former servant in the household. His father was a deeply devout and melancholy man whose religious anxieties strongly marked his son. Søren attended the School of Civic Virtue and in 1830 entered the University of Copenhagen to study theology, though he spent years reading widely in philosophy and literature. By 1838 his mother and five of his siblings had died, and his father's death that year left him with a substantial inheritance.

Søren Kierkegaard pursued a literary and religious authorship in Copenhagen rather than a university teaching career. His 1841 dissertation examined irony with particular reference to Socrates. After breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen, he spent time in Berlin and began the exceptionally productive period that brought Either/Or in 1843. The relationship remained important in his writings, but treating every work as disguised autobiography obscures the wider philosophical and religious questions he addressed.

Kierkegaard published through multiple pseudonyms, assigning distinct viewpoints to invented authors rather than presenting all their arguments as his own settled doctrine. Either/Or explored different ways of living, while Fear and Trembling examined the troubling relation between faith and ethical obligations through the story of Abraham. Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, and The Concept of Anxiety approached freedom, experience, and religious understanding from other perspectives. Alongside these works he issued signed religious discourses, producing an authorship with deliberately different voices and purposes.

The Concluding Unscientific Postscript of 1846 challenged the idea that an impersonal system could adequately express what it meant for an individual to exist and become a Christian. His emphasis on inward appropriation did not make every belief equally true; it questioned how abstract knowledge related to commitment and action. Disputes with the satirical paper The Corsair exposed him to public ridicule and sharpened his criticism of the crowd, publicity, and the leveling pressures of modern social life.

Later writings included Works of Love, Christian Discourses, The Sickness unto Death, and Practice in Christianity. They examined love, despair, selfhood, and the demands of religious existence. His critique increasingly targeted the established Danish church and the ease with which social respectability could be mistaken for Christianity. In 1854–1855 he attacked the description of Bishop Mynster as a witness to truth and pursued the controversy in articles and the pamphlet series The Moment. He collapsed in 1855 and died that November.

Kierkegaard's writings reached much wider international audiences through later translation and interpretation. They influenced existential philosophy, theology, literature, and psychology, although those later movements do not exhaust his religious purposes.

CAREER

DEATH

Søren Kierkegaard expressed the illusion this way in his 1848 "Christian Address", Thoughts Which Wound From Behind – for Edification. It included Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, What we Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds in the Air, and The Gospel of Sufferings. Before the tenth issue of his periodical The Moment could be published, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street. He stayed in the hospital for over a month and refused communion. At that time he regarded pastors as mere political officials, a niche in society who were clearly not representative of the divine. He told Emil Boesen, a friend since childhood, who kept a record of his conversations with Kierkegaard, that his life had been one of immense suffering, which may have seemed like vanity to others, but he did not think it so. Kierkegaard died in Frederiks Hospital after over a month, possibly from complications from a fall from a tree in his youth. It has been suggested by professor and philosopher that Kierkegaard died from Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis. He was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen. At Kierkegaard's funeral, his nephew Henrik Lund caused a disturbance by protesting Kierkegaard's burial by the official church. Lund maintained that Kierkegaard would never have approved, had he been alive, as he had broken from and denounced the institution. Lund was later fined for his disruption of the funeral.

Assistens Cemetery

Assistens Cemetery, Kapelvej 2, 2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark

GRAVE