Dubbed the ‘father
of existentialism’, the Danish philosopher Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in
1813, the same year as a state wide bankruptcy in Denmark. Despite the economic
turmoil surrounding his birth, Kierkegaard’s beginnings were not so dire.
Though he was the last of seven children, his father was a wealthy man, who had
made his fortune in the trades at a young age, which allowed him to retire at
the age of forty (Hollander, 1960). Kierkegaard had great admiration for his
father, despite the fact that the man was “deeply melancholic, sternly
religious, and carried a heavy burden of guilt which he imposed on his
children” (McDonald, 2005). As a young man, he studied largely in his native
city of Copenhagen and focused on philosophy. However, he constantly went
through changes in character, possibly as his beliefs and own philosophy began
to take shape. It is said that he went through “periods of indifference to
[his] studies alternated with feverish activity and the doubts of the truth of
Christianity”, which was to be the faith he would wrestle with for most of his
academic life(Hollander, 1960, p.5).
Therefore, as the
budding philosopher began to consider these ideas, he began writing
dissertations and critical philosophical works. In fact, he prioritized his
career to such an extent that he justified breaking of his engagement for that
very calling, as he saw it (McDonald, 2005). He remained unmarried until his
death in 1855.
Soren Kierkegaard
made a great many contributions to the realm of philosophy. He is noted as
being one who “pitted a mode of reflection closer to the individuals’ concrete
existence” (Kaufman, 1975, p. 83). That is to say, he did not see his
philosophical reflections as merely theoretical, as his intellectual rival
Hegel did, but as something that could and even should be lived out. He is, as
mentioned, considered to be the father of existential thought, which places great emphasis on the individual and his experiences . One of his pivotal ideas was the idea that truth is subjectivity. This means that subjective truth is " the individual's relation to an object of knowledge" and that an individual maybe in "subjective truth even when related to an objective untruth" (Solomon & Sherman, 2003, p. 51). He has also
written works on dread and freedom, faith, authority, sin, anxiety, despair,
melancholy, the absurd, the Christian paradox, irony, inwardness, etc
(McDonald, 2005).
