Søren Kierkegaard -The Father of Existentialism

 Søren Kierkegaard

Today, 5 May, marks the birthday of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, born on this day in 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark. More than two centuries after his birth, his ideas about anxiety, despair, authentic existence, and the leap of faith continue to shape philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and cultural thought across the world. He died young, at only forty-two years of age, but the body of work he produced in his brief life was so original, so profound, and so far ahead of its time that it took decades for the world to fully appreciate what he had accomplished. On his birthday it is fitting to reflect on who he was, what he thought, and why his ideas continue to matter.

Who Is Søren Kierkegaard?

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, literary critic, and social commentator born on 5 May 1813 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the youngest of seven children of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a wealthy merchant who had risen from poverty through determination and enterprise, and Ane Sørensdatter Lund, a former servant whom Michael had married after his first wife died. The family circumstances of Søren's childhood were shaped by two dominant forces that would leave deep marks on his intellectual and spiritual development. The first was his father's intense religiosity, a brooding Lutheran pietism saturated with guilt, the sense of divine judgment, and the conviction that the Kierkegaard family had been cursed by God, a conviction rooted in Michael's memory of having cursed God as a cold and hungry child on a Jutland heath. The second was the succession of deaths that stripped the family of all but two of its seven children before Søren reached adulthood, deaths that seemed to confirm Michael's sense of divine punishment and that shaped the young Søren's understanding of suffering, finitude, and the relationship between human beings and God.

Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, where he was exposed to the dominant influence of Hegel's philosophy and where he developed the critical response to Hegelian rationalism that would become one of the driving forces of his philosophical work. He completed his doctoral dissertation On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates in 1841, a work that already displayed the originality, the irony, and the engagement with Socrates as a philosophical and existential model that would characterise his mature work. He was engaged to Regine Olsen, a young woman with whom he was deeply in love, but he broke off the engagement in 1841 in circumstances that he never fully explained and that he returned to obsessively in his writing for the rest of his life. The broken engagement was not simply a biographical episode but a crisis of conscience and identity that shaped his understanding of the relationship between ethical obligation, personal vocation, and the demands of the religious life.

After the broken engagement he lived in Copenhagen, largely supported by his father's inheritance, writing with extraordinary productivity and publishing a succession of works under various pseudonyms that constituted one of the most original and most unconventional bodies of philosophical writing in the history of the discipline. He became increasingly concerned with what he saw as the corruption of Christianity by the Danish state church and its comfortable bourgeois respectability, and in the last year of his life he launched a public attack on the established church that was one of the most dramatic and most personal acts of his intellectual career. He collapsed in the street in October 1855 and died on 11 November 1855 at the age of forty-two, exhausted by the combination of his enormous literary output and the physical demands of his final public struggle.

The Central Contribution to Philosophy

Kierkegaard's central contribution to philosophy is the development of a way of thinking about human existence that takes seriously its subjective, passionate, and irreducibly individual character against the dominant philosophical tradition's tendency to dissolve the individual into abstract universal categories. His most famous and most fundamental claim is that subjectivity is truth, by which he means not that truth is merely subjective in the relativist sense that anything anyone believes is true for them, but that the most important truths are truths that must be appropriated subjectively, that must be taken up in the passionate inwardness of individual existence rather than grasped in the detached objectivity of abstract thought.

This insistence on the primacy of the individual existing subject against the systematic rationalism of Hegelian philosophy is the foundation of existentialism as a philosophical tradition. Kierkegaard is universally regarded as the founding figure of existentialism, the thinker who first developed the philosophical problems and the philosophical vocabulary that subsequent existentialist thinkers including Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and others would take up and develop in their own distinctive ways. But Kierkegaard's existentialism is irreducibly his own, shaped by his specific personal history, his specific cultural context, and above all his specific engagement with Christianity as both the horizon within which human existence must be understood and the demand that human existence can never fully satisfy.

The Three Stages of Existence

The most important and most discussed structural concept in Kierkegaard's philosophy is his analysis of the three stages or spheres of existence, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, which describe three fundamentally different ways in which human beings can organise their lives and relate to themselves, to others, and to the absolute.

The aesthetic stage is the stage of immediacy, of the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and interesting experience as the organising principle of life. The aesthete lives in the moment, seeking variety and novelty, refusing commitment and obligation, maintaining a certain ironic distance from everything that might demand genuine engagement or genuine responsibility. The archetype of the aesthetic stage in Kierkegaard's work is Don Juan, the seducer who pursues pleasure without commitment, who treats others as objects of aesthetic interest rather than as ends in themselves, and who lives in the perpetual present of sensual experience without the depth of genuine selfhood.

But the aesthetic stage contains within itself the seeds of its own dissolution. The aesthete who pursues pleasure and interesting experience without commitment eventually confronts what Kierkegaard calls despair, the empty repetitiveness of a life organised around novelty and pleasure, the recognition that the aesthetic mode of existence cannot give life the meaning and the depth that it requires. This despair, properly understood, is not simply a negative experience but an existential summons, a call to move beyond the aesthetic to a higher form of existence.

The ethical stage is the stage of commitment, obligation, and the universal moral law. The ethical person organises their life around duty, around the universal moral demands that apply to all rational beings equally, around the commitments they have made to others and to the moral community. The archetype of the ethical stage in Kierkegaard's work is the judge, the respectable married man who fulfils his social and moral obligations and who finds the meaning of his life in the performance of his duties. The ethical stage represents a genuine advance over the aesthetic because it introduces genuine selfhood through commitment and responsibility, because it locates the person in a framework of meaning that extends beyond the moment and beyond the self.

But the ethical stage also contains within itself the seeds of its own crisis. The ethical person who is genuinely serious about the ethical demand inevitably discovers that they cannot fully satisfy it, that they are always falling short of the absolute demand of the moral law, that their best efforts are always contaminated by self-interest, by weakness, and by the irreducible particularity of their individual situation. This recognition of ethical failure before the absolute demand of the moral law, what Kierkegaard connects to the theological concept of sin, is the existential crisis that drives the movement from the ethical to the religious.

The religious stage is the stage of the individual's personal relationship with God, and it is the highest and most complete form of existence in Kierkegaard's framework. But the religious stage is not a simple progression beyond the ethical that leaves it behind. It involves what Kierkegaard calls a teleological suspension of the ethical, a moment in which the individual is called by God to act in ways that cannot be justified by appeal to universal moral norms, a moment in which faith and the absolute relationship to God takes precedence over the demands of ethics.

The Leap of Faith

The concept of the leap of faith is perhaps the most widely known and most widely misunderstood of all Kierkegaard's ideas. It is not, as popular usage sometimes suggests, the blind acceptance of beliefs for which there is no evidence or the embrace of irrationality as a positive value. It is the specific existential movement that Kierkegaard argues is necessary for the transition from the ethical to the religious stage, the movement from the domain of rational justification and universal moral norms to the personal, passionate, and ultimately unjustifiable commitment of faith.

Kierkegaard argues that faith cannot be reached by rational argument or by the gradual accumulation of evidence, because faith is not a cognitive state but an existential one, not a matter of what one believes in the propositional sense but of how one exists, of the passionate intensity and the total commitment with which one relates to the absolute. The leap of faith is the moment of unconditional personal commitment that cannot be supported by any rational foundation, the moment at which the individual steps beyond the security of the universally justified to the insecurity of the personally absolute.

This concept is most fully developed in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's analysis of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis, the story of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac and Abraham's willingness to obey that command. Kierkegaard uses this story as the ultimate example of the religious stage and its tension with the ethical, because Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be justified by any appeal to universal moral norms, cannot be explained as anything other than a direct and absolute relationship to God that suspends the ethical demand. The knight of faith, Kierkegaard's term for the person who has made the movement of faith, is the person who is capable of this absolute personal commitment to God, who holds to the absolute in the face of the universal, and who is capable of what Kierkegaard calls the double movement of infinite resignation and faith.

Anxiety and the Concept of Dread

The Concept of Anxiety, published in 1844, is one of Kierkegaard's most important philosophical works and contains one of the most original and most influential analyses of anxiety in the philosophical tradition. Kierkegaard distinguishes anxiety from fear, arguing that while fear has a specific object, that of which one is afraid, anxiety is objectless, a pervasive unease that cannot be attributed to any particular thing in the world and that arises from the fundamental structure of human freedom and possibility.

Anxiety, on Kierkegaard's account, is the dizziness of freedom, the vertiginous experience of standing before the unlimited possibilities of one's own existence and confronting both the exhilaration and the terror of being the kind of being who must choose what to become, who is not determined by nature or instinct but is constituted by its own freely made choices. Anxiety is not a negative emotion to be overcome but a fundamental dimension of human existence, the mood in which the individual confronts the abyss of their own freedom and the responsibility that comes with it.

This analysis of anxiety as the dizziness of freedom has been enormously influential in the subsequent existentialist tradition, particularly in Heidegger's analysis of anxiety as the fundamental attunement that discloses Dasein's ownmost existential possibilities, in Sartre's analysis of the nausea that accompanies the radical awareness of freedom, and in the broader existentialist tradition's concern with the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and the experience of groundlessness.

The Sickness Unto Death

The Sickness Unto Death, published in 1849, is Kierkegaard's most systematic analysis of despair and the self, and it contains some of his most important and most widely discussed contributions to the philosophy of selfhood and the psychology of spiritual life. The title is taken from the Gospel of John, where Jesus describes Lazarus's illness as a sickness unto death, but Kierkegaard gives the concept a specific philosophical meaning, arguing that despair is the sickness unto death in the sense that it is the fundamental spiritual sickness of human beings, the failure to become a self in the genuine sense.

Kierkegaard defines the self as a relation that relates itself to itself, meaning that the self is not a fixed substance but a dynamic relationship, a process of becoming that is constituted by the individual's relationship to their own existence and ultimately by their relationship to God as the power that established the possibility of that relationship. Despair, on this account, is not simply a psychological state of sadness or hopelessness but a failure of self-relation, a failure to properly relate to the conditions of one's own existence and ultimately to the God who constituted those conditions.

Kierkegaard analyses several forms of despair that correspond to different failures of self-relation. The despair of not willing to be oneself is the flight from genuine selfhood into the comfortable anonymity of social conformity, the refusal of the responsibility that genuine existence requires. The despair of willing to be oneself through one's own power is the Promethean attempt to constitute oneself as an absolute self without reference to the divine foundation of selfhood, the rebellion against the conditions of one's own existence. Both forms of despair represent failures to ground the self properly in its relationship to God, the power that constituted the self and that is the only adequate foundation for genuine existence.

Either/Or

Either/Or, published in 1843, was Kierkegaard's first major work and one of the most original works in the philosophical literature on aesthetics, ethics, and the structure of human existence. It is organised as an edited collection of papers found in a secretary by a fictional editor who calls himself Victor Eremita, and it consists of two volumes written from the perspectives of two contrasting figures, A and B, who represent the aesthetic and the ethical stages of existence respectively.

Volume one, attributed to A, consists of a series of essays on the aesthetics of music, theatre, and literature, reflective fragments on the experience of the aesthete, and the famous Diary of a Seducer, a detailed account of a calculated seduction that is presented as both an aesthetic achievement and an illustration of the moral emptiness of the purely aesthetic existence. Volume two, attributed to B, who is an older judge named Wilhelm, consists of two long letters to A arguing for the superior richness and depth of the ethical life, the life of commitment, marriage, and social obligation, against the superficiality and the ultimate despair of the aesthetic mode of existence.

The either/or of the title refers to the fundamental choice that Kierkegaard argues every human being must make between the aesthetic and the ethical modes of existence, a choice that cannot be rationally justified because it is the choice that constitutes the rational subject who is capable of making rational justifications. The point is not that one should choose the ethical over the aesthetic, because Kierkegaard presents both perspectives with genuine sympathy and genuine depth, but that one must choose, that the avoidance of genuine choice through the ironic detachment of the aesthete is itself a choice with specific existential consequences.

Repetition

Repetition, published in 1843 on the same day as Fear and Trembling, is one of Kierkegaard's most puzzling and most philosophically rich works, developing a concept of repetition as a specifically existential category that is distinct from both the Hegelian concept of mediation and the platonic concept of recollection. Kierkegaard argues that the Greek philosophical tradition understood the fundamental movement of thought as recollection, the recovery of eternal truths that the soul already knows but has forgotten, and that this backward-looking orientation toward the eternal past is inadequate to capture the specifically temporal and existential character of human life.

Repetition, by contrast, is a forward-looking category that describes the possibility of a genuine renewal of existence through a commitment that is made again and again in the face of everything that might undermine it. The person who is capable of genuine repetition is the person who can commit to their own existence, to their own task, to their own calling, with a freshness and a passion that does not depend on the novelty of the experience but on the depth of the commitment. Repetition is the existential form of the creative renewal of existence that genuine faith makes possible.

Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Philosophical Fragments, published in 1844, and the enormous Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, published in 1846, are Kierkegaard's most sustained philosophical engagements with the epistemological questions raised by Christianity and his most explicit critique of the Hegelian philosophical tradition. The Philosophical Fragments asks the question of whether an eternal happiness can be based on a historical event, specifically on the historical event of the Incarnation, the claim that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ, and develops a philosophical analysis of the specifically paradoxical character of Christian faith that has been enormously influential in twentieth century theology.

The Concluding Unscientific Postscript is one of the longest and most comprehensive of Kierkegaard's works, running to over five hundred pages and containing his most explicit and most sustained treatment of the concept of subjectivity, the critique of the Hegelian system, and the analysis of the relationship between objective and subjective truth. It is here that Kierkegaard makes his famous claim that subjectivity is truth and its inversion that truth is subjectivity, and that he develops his critique of objective thinking as inadequate to the specifically existential questions that matter most to human beings. The Postscript is the work that most clearly establishes Kierkegaard's position as the founder of the existentialist tradition and the most influential critic of the Hegelian rationalism that dominated nineteenth century European philosophy.

His Work

On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates, published in 1841, was Kierkegaard's doctoral dissertation and his first major published work. It develops an analysis of Socratic irony as a specific mode of negative freedom, a mode of existence that dissolves all given content without substituting a positive alternative, and it uses this analysis as the starting point for the broader philosophical project of developing a positive account of genuine existence beyond the merely ironic.

Either/Or, published in 1843, is the first of Kierkegaard's major pseudonymous works and one of the most widely read. Published under the pseudonym Victor Eremita as editor, it presents the aesthetic and ethical stages of existence through contrasting voices and has been enormously influential in the literary as well as the philosophical tradition.

Fear and Trembling, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, is Kierkegaard's analysis of the story of Abraham and Isaac as an illustration of the religious stage and the concept of the leap of faith. It is one of his most accessible and most widely read works and contains some of his most powerful philosophical writing.

Repetition, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius, develops the concept of repetition as a specifically existential and forward-looking category that captures the possibility of genuine renewal and creative commitment in human life.

The Concept of Anxiety, published in 1844 under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, is Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety as the dizziness of freedom and his most sustained philosophical account of the relationship between freedom, possibility, and the original sin that Christian theology associates with the misuse of freedom.

Philosophical Fragments, published in 1844 under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, develops a philosophical analysis of the paradox of Christian faith and the epistemological questions raised by the claim that an eternal happiness can be based on a historical event.

Stages on Life's Way, published in 1845 under the pseudonym Hilarius Bookbinder as editor, extends the analysis of the three stages of existence developed in Either/Or and contains some of Kierkegaard's most personal and most psychologically rich writing.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, published in 1846 under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus with Kierkegaard named as responsible editor, is the most comprehensive and most systematic of the pseudonymous works and contains Kierkegaard's most sustained treatment of subjectivity, objective and subjective truth, and the critique of the Hegelian system.

Works of Love, published in 1847 under his own name, is Kierkegaard's most sustained analysis of Christian love as the fundamental moral and spiritual category, developing an account of neighbour-love that has been enormously influential in Christian ethics and in the philosophical literature on love and obligation.

The Sickness Unto Death, published in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus with Kierkegaard named as editor, is his most systematic analysis of despair and the self and contains some of his most important contributions to the philosophy of selfhood and the psychology of spiritual life.

Practice in Christianity, published in 1850 under the same pseudonym Anti-Climacus, develops a demanding account of what genuine Christian discipleship requires and contains some of Kierkegaard's most powerful critiques of the comfortable Christianity of the Danish state church.

The Attack upon Christendom, published as a series of pamphlets in 1854 and 1855 and collected posthumously, is Kierkegaard's most direct and most polemical attack on the Danish established church and its comfortable accommodation with bourgeois society, his last public act before his death.

The Point of View for My Work as an Author, published posthumously in 1859, is Kierkegaard's own retrospective account of his literary project and its religious purpose, arguing that the entire pseudonymous authorship was a sustained indirect communication designed to lead readers toward genuine Christian existence.

The Journals and Notebooks, published in multiple volumes from Kierkegaard's extensive personal journals, are an indispensable source for understanding his intellectual development, his personal struggles, and the relationship between his life and his philosophical work.

The Pseudonymous Method

One of the most distinctive and most philosophically significant features of Kierkegaard's work is his extensive use of pseudonyms, publishing most of his major works under fictional names that are themselves philosophical constructions. The pseudonyms are not simply disguises designed to conceal the identity of the author but philosophical positions, each pseudonym representing a specific stage or mode of existence whose perspective is developed with genuine internal consistency and whose limitations are revealed by the internal logic of the position rather than by external authorial commentary.

The most important pseudonyms include Victor Eremita, the ironic editor of Either/Or who presents himself as the detached observer of the aesthetic and ethical positions without committing to either. Johannes de Silentio, the silent Johannes who writes Fear and Trembling from a position of admiration for Abraham's faith that he acknowledges he is himself incapable of achieving. Johannes Climacus, the philosophical author of Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who represents the perspective of a philosophical thinker genuinely attracted to Christianity but unable to make the leap of faith. Anti-Climacus, the author of The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity, who represents an ideal of Christian existence that is higher than what Kierkegaard claims for himself.

The pseudonymous method is a philosophical strategy as well as a literary one. By refusing to speak in his own name, by presenting different perspectives through constructed authorial positions, Kierkegaard is putting into practice the indirect communication that he argues is the only appropriate form of communication for existential truths. Existential truths cannot be transmitted directly from teacher to student, as if they were objective facts about the world, because they must be appropriated subjectively, taken up in the inwardness of each individual's own existence. The pseudonymous author creates a space for the reader's own existential reflection rather than simply providing answers to be accepted.

Philosophers He Influenced

The range and depth of Kierkegaard's influence on subsequent philosophy is extraordinary, extending across virtually every tradition of twentieth century Continental philosophy and into theology, psychology, literary theory, and cultural criticism. He is the acknowledged founding figure of existentialism and one of the most important influences on the development of twentieth century Protestant theology.

Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time represents the most systematic and most philosophically rigorous development of the existentialist tradition, drew extensively on Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety, authenticity, and being-toward-death, though he typically cited Kierkegaard in footnotes rather than in the main text and insisted on the specifically ontological rather than anthropological character of his own project. The analysis of anxiety as the fundamental mood that discloses Dasein's ownmost possibilities, the analysis of the They-self as the anonymous social authority from which authentic existence must be recovered, and the analysis of being-toward-death as the condition of genuine individuation are all developments of themes that Kierkegaard had first articulated.

Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, the most publicly influential version of the existentialist tradition in the twentieth century, is deeply indebted to Kierkegaard in its central themes, including radical human freedom and the responsibility it entails, the irreducibility of the individual existing subject, and the critique of the Hegelian dissolution of the individual into the universal. Sartre's concept of bad faith, the flight from the radical freedom and responsibility of genuine existence into the comfort of fixed roles and social identities, is a secularised development of Kierkegaard's analysis of despair as the failure of genuine selfhood.

Albert Camus, whose philosophy of the absurd developed in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, is in profound dialogue with Kierkegaard, whom Camus both acknowledges as the most important philosopher of the absurd and criticises for his response to it. For Camus, Kierkegaard's leap of faith is a philosophical suicide, an abandonment of the genuine absurd in favour of a false transcendence, and Camus's own philosophy of revolt is developed partly as an alternative to what he sees as Kierkegaard's capitulation before the demands of existence.

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher who developed one of the most important versions of existentialist philosophy alongside Heidegger, drew extensively on Kierkegaard's concept of limit situations, the extreme situations including death, suffering, struggle, and guilt in which human beings are confronted with the fundamental conditions of their existence, in developing his own analysis of the boundary situations that constitute the horizon of human experience.

Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian whose neo-orthodox theology revolutionised Protestant thought in the twentieth century, drew directly on Kierkegaard's analysis of the infinite qualitative difference between God and human being, the absolute discontinuity between the divine and the human that Kierkegaard opposed to the Hegelian attempt to reconcile the divine and the human through the dialectical movement of Reason. Barth's insistence on the absolutely transcendent character of divine revelation and the impossibility of natural theology is a theological development of themes that Kierkegaard had first articulated in philosophical form.

Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar and theologian, drew on both Kierkegaard and Heidegger in developing his programme of demythologisation and his existentialist interpretation of the New Testament, arguing that the mythological framework of the New Testament should be interpreted as an expression of human existential possibilities rather than as a description of supernatural events.

Paul Tillich, the German-American theologian whose systematic theology was one of the most influential of the twentieth century, drew on Kierkegaard's analysis of anxiety and his concept of the courage to be in developing his own account of the relationship between finitude, anxiety, and faith.

Simone de Beauvoir, whose feminist existentialism developed in The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity, drew on both Kierkegaard and Sartre in developing her own account of authentic existence and its specifically gendered conditions, engaging with Kierkegaard's analysis of the either/or of genuine choice and its relationship to the conditions of women's lives in a patriarchal society.

Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic philosopher and playwright, drew on Kierkegaard's analysis of authentic existence and the relationship between faith and philosophical reflection in developing his own distinctive version of Christian existentialism.

Emmanuel Levinas, whose ethics of the other has been enormously influential in contemporary philosophy, was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard's analysis of the individual's absolute relationship to the absolute, and his concept of the ethical encounter with the face of the Other is in important respects a transformation of Kierkegaard's analysis of the demands that genuine human relationship makes.

Paul Ricoeur, whose hermeneutics and narrative philosophy drew on Kierkegaard's analysis of selfhood, temporality, and the relationship between commitment and identity, acknowledged Kierkegaard as one of the most important sources for his own philosophical project.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose philosophy represents a very different tradition from Continental existentialism, nevertheless showed significant affinities with Kierkegaard in his treatment of the limits of language, the irreducibility of the first-person perspective, and the relationship between philosophical reflection and genuine human life.

Why Kierkegaard Is Important in Philosophy

Kierkegaard is important in philosophy for several interconnected reasons that go beyond his historical influence on the existentialist tradition and that speak to the enduring significance of his contributions to the most fundamental questions of human existence.

He is important first and foremost because he identified and developed a set of philosophical problems that had been neglected or suppressed by the dominant rationalist tradition but that are among the most fundamental in human experience. The problems of anxiety, despair, authentic existence, the relationship between freedom and responsibility, the tension between the individual and the universal, the nature of genuine commitment and genuine faith, are not secondary or peripheral philosophical problems but questions that every thoughtful person must confront in the course of their own existence. By bringing these questions to the centre of philosophical attention and developing them with extraordinary depth and originality, Kierkegaard transformed the agenda of philosophy in ways that continue to shape it.

He is important because he developed a way of doing philosophy that takes seriously the specifically subjective and individual dimensions of human existence that the objective and systematic approach of the dominant tradition had abstracted away. His insistence that the most important truths are truths that must be appropriated subjectively, that philosophical reflection must be rooted in the individual's genuine engagement with the conditions of their own existence rather than in the detached manipulation of abstract concepts, is a methodological contribution of enduring significance.

He is important because he identified and named forms of human suffering and existential failure, including anxiety, despair, and the bad faith of comfortable social conformity, that have become central categories of psychological and cultural analysis. The concept of anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, the concept of despair as the failure of genuine selfhood, the concept of the leap of faith as the unconditional personal commitment that cannot be rationally grounded, these are not just philosophical concepts but descriptions of real features of human experience that have illuminated the lives of millions of readers who have encountered them.

He is important because his critique of the comfortable Christianity of his own time, and his insistence that genuine Christian existence demands genuine personal transformation rather than social respectability, raised questions about the relationship between institutional religion and genuine religious faith that continue to be relevant in every age and every culture.

He is important because his literary creativity and his philosophical depth are so unusual in combination that his works constitute a genuinely unique contribution to the tradition of philosophical literature, works that can be read and reread not just for the philosophical arguments they contain but for the imaginative worlds they create and the specific forms of human experience they illuminate.

Contemporary Relevance

Kierkegaard's relevance to the contemporary world is multiple and profound. His analysis of the aesthetic mode of existence, the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, and interesting experience without genuine commitment or genuine depth, speaks with extraordinary directness to the conditions of contemporary consumer culture, in which the infinite proliferation of entertainment, digital stimulation, and consumer choice has created conditions that are in many respects the perfect realisation of the aesthetic stage at a social level. His analysis of the despair that underlies the aesthetic existence, the empty restlessness that cannot be satisfied by any accumulation of pleasurable experiences because it is rooted in the failure to become a genuine self, is one of the most powerful diagnostic frameworks available for understanding the specific form of spiritual emptiness that consumer society produces.

His analysis of the They-self, the anonymous social authority that governs most people's existence and that levels down genuine individual possibility to the average and the conventional, anticipates the dynamics of social media culture with disturbing precision. The pressure of likes, shares, and public approval, the constant performance of a curated self for the approval of the anonymous online public, the levelling of genuine individual difference by the algorithmic management of attention and the social pressure toward conformity, are contemporary expressions of exactly the dynamics that Kierkegaard analysed in the context of his own bourgeois society.

His insistence on the irreducibility of the individual existing subject, on the impossibility of dissolving personal responsibility and personal commitment into the comfort of social roles and institutional frameworks, speaks to the ongoing human need for genuine selfhood that no social system, however well organised, can simply provide. The question of how to become a genuine self, how to exist authentically in the face of the social and cultural forces that constantly threaten to dissolve individual possibility into anonymous conformity, is as urgent today as it was in Kierkegaard's time.

Key Idea to Remember

Søren Kierkegaard, born on this day in 1813, was the philosopher who insisted that the most important truths are not objective facts about the world but existential realities that must be appropriated subjectively, in the passionate inwardness of individual existence. Against the dominant philosophical tradition's tendency to dissolve the individual into abstract universal categories, he insisted on the irreducible singularity of the existing individual, on the fundamental importance of anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith as categories for understanding human existence, and on the impossibility of becoming a genuine self without making genuine choices that cannot be rationally grounded but must be ventured in the face of uncertainty. His three stages of existence, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, provide a map of the existential possibilities available to human beings and the specific crises that drive movement from one to another. His insistence that subjectivity is truth, that the most important human questions require personal appropriation rather than objective knowledge, remains the most important and most enduring legacy of his philosophical life. Happy birthday, Søren Kierkegaard. Philosophy is richer for your having lived.