KIERKEGAARD, SØREN AABYE

Danish philosopher and theologian, influential Protestant thinker of the 19th century, commonly considered the precursor of existentialism; b. Copenhagen, May 5, 1813; d. Copenhagen, Nov. 4, 1855.

Early Formation. Søren was the seventh and last child of an elderly couple. His father, who had started life as a shepherd lad in the Jutland moors, retired at the age of 40 from a prosperous hosier business in Copenhagen. In his later years he was given to melancholy, particularly after losing his wife and five of his children within two years. This melancholy left a deep impression on the young Kierkegaard, as did the strict pietistic education he received at home. A secret guilt in his father's life, which he discovered as a theology student, affected Søren profoundly. A later diary entry about an unidentified man records: "… the terrible thing about this man, who once when he was a small boy, as he tended his sheep on the Jutland heath, suffering greatly, starving and in want, stood up upon a hill and cursed God—and this man was unable to forget it when he was 82 years old." When confronted with this text after Kierkegaard's death, Peter, his only surviving brother, exclaimed: "This is the story of our father and ourselves."

After this "great earthquake" in his life, Kierkegaard became convinced that a curse rested upon his family, that it was to be "wiped out by the powerful hand of God." A period of dissipation and estrangement from his father followed. Four years later, a religious conversion coincided with a family reconciliation. Shortly afterward Kierkegaard passed his final examinations in theology and wrote a doctoral Dissertation On the Concept of Irony (1841); in contrast to his later works, this betrays the strong influence of hegel.

Along with his father's influence, another event was to determine Kierkegaard's spiritual evolution. In 1840 he betrothed himself to a 17-year-old girl, Regine Olsen. A year later, realizing that he was psychologically unfit for marriage, he broke the engagement. This unhappy love affair initiated one of the most prodigious literary careers in history. Initially Kierkegaard tried to clarify his personal problems and to understand their meaning in the larger context of human existence. All his early works allude to his relationship with Regine and contain cryptic messages for her.

Published Works. In 1843 he published Either-Or, a compendious work in two volumes. Although it appeared under a pseudonym, the book made its author famous immediately. In the next three years 14 more works followed: Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844), Prefaces (1844), Philosophical Fragments (1844), Stages on Life's Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), and seven sets of Edifying Discourses, published under his own name to accompany the other pseudonymous writings. After 1846 Kierkegaard's creativity slackened, although he was still to publish three major works: The Works of Love (1847), Sickness Unto Death (1849), and Training in Christianity (1850). During this period he also wrote the greater part of his diary.

In 1846 he came under attack from the Corsair, a Copenhagen satirical weekly that he had challenged in a newspaper article. For almost a year the ridicule and low wit of the Corsair made him an object of derision all over Denmark.

Kierkegaard's last two years were marked by a violent conflict with the Danish National Church, which he felt had betrayed the message of the Gospel by its compromising attitude. He carried on his onslaught in a self-published periodical, the Instant. In the middle of this attack he fainted on the street and was brought to the Frederikshospital, where he died from an unknown disease in the spinal marrow.

Freedom and Choice. Kierkegaard has rightly been called the father of modern existentialism. Man for him is essentially freedom, and he constitutes himself in his free choice. Already in his first major work, Either-Or, Kierkegaard describes life as a choice between an aesthetic attitude in which man drifts along from one pleasure to another, and an ethical one in which freedom determines itself by a self-imposed acceptance of law and duty. The aesthete refuses to commit himself to anything permanent (marriage, a profession) lest he limit the infinite possibilities of his self; but since the real self of a free being can be constituted only by a self-choice, he does not "exist" in the full sense of the word. The ethical man, on the contrary, accepts the limitations of his choice and thus becomes a real person.

Yet, as Kierkegaard shows in his two subsequent works, Repetition and Fear and Trembling, the ethical choice is not final. Sooner or later the ethical man will be faced by the predicament of a transcendent power that prevents him from fully realizing his freedom. Just as Job, in spite of his exemplary life, lost all his possessions, so man in his striving toward self-realization has to cope with powers beyond his control. How will he do this? He cannot simply ignore them. Much less can he abandon his moral autonomy by forfeiting his freedom in blind resignation. But to maintain simultaneously both freedom and transcendence would seem to be a task that is impossible.

Faith and Subjectivity. This is made even more difficult by freedom's intrinsic deficiency. In accordance with the Protestant interpretation of the original sin, which he analyzed in The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard claims that man is essentially unable to fulfill the law of his own being. The ethical attitude, therefore, cannot be final in the constitution of the self. This fact is illustrated by the Biblical story of Abraham, who received a divine order to sacrifice his son and thus to "suspend" the ethical law. The realization of the ethical universal, the immanent law of a nature identical for all men, cannot be the highest achievement of freedom, as Hegel claimed. Only religious faith enables man to reconcile immanent freedom with the acceptance of a transcendent reality placing him in a position of dependence, for in faith alone can he consistently assert his insufficiency and the certainty to overcome this insufficiency with the help of a higher power. It was faith that allowed Abraham to ascend Mt. Moria, and yet to believe that in his posterity all generations would be blessed. The ultimate stage in the constitution of the self is, therefore, not the mere choice of the self, but a choice that includes the self's dependence on the transcendent. To become an authentic self, man must commit himself to God; for he is, in his very essence, a dynamic relation to God. To choose or not to choose is no longer the only alternative for freedom; a more basic one is to choose or to choose "before God." In Stages on Life's Way, Kierkegaard thus describes the three possible attitudes of man with respect to his self: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

In his most technical works, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard further elaborates the relation between freedom and faith. If the self is essentially freedom, then its highest truth must be subjective; that is, a truth that is not entirely given but becomes true only after having gone through an appropriation process of the will. That existential certainty is acquired only through personal commitment is illustrated by the attitude of Socrates, who staked his life for an objectively uncertain affirmation. But this is precisely what faith does: the transcendent by its very nature is never objectively certain—yet it is an integral part of man's relation to himself. Man therefore must make it certain by his subjective commitment to it. Since the highest existential truth is the most subjective, and since subjectivity increases as objective certainty decreases, Christian faith is the highest existential truth, for its object is not merely uncertain to objective reason—it is repellent. Indeed, according to Kierkegaard's Protestant interpretation, Christianity teaches that man is untrue in his very being, and consequently, that even his subjectivity is bound to be unauthentic. While natural faith is paradoxical, Christianity is absolutely paradoxical, or, from the point of view of reason, absurd. Yet, by the same token, Christianity is the highest truth of existence, for it brings man to an inwardness that is deeper than his own subjectivity.

Influence and Critique. Kierkegaard is one of the most provocative of Christian thinkers. His influence on philosophers, particularly Heidegger and Sartre, and on theologians, Protestant and Catholic alike, can be compared with that of Augustine and Pascal. His most important contribution to modern thought is his definition of the self as freedom, by which man becomes a self-constituting being. Yet equally important is his insistence that this self is, in its very center, dependent on God. For Catholics, the most objectionable part of his thought is his radical individualism. Catholics also find themselves unable to accept a notion of sin that totally disconnects the link between Creator and creature, and the subjectivism that this implies in the theology of faith.

See Also: existentialism; irrationalism; existential theology.

Bibliography: Danish Editions. Samlede Vaerker, ed. a. b. drachmann et al., 20 v. (3d ed. Copenhagen 1962); Papirer, ed. p. a. heiberg et al., 20 v. (Copenhagen 1909–48). Breve og Aktstykker vedr φrende S φren Kierkegaard, ed. n. thulstrup, 2 v. (Copenhagen 1953–54). English Translations. Almost all of Kierkegaard's works have been translated into English; complete and up-to-date bibliography of these translations can be found in w. lowrie, Kierkegaard, 2 v. (New York 1962). Secondary Studies. j. d. collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago 1953). h. diem, Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Existence, tr. h. knight (Edinburgh 1959). l. k. duprÉ, Kierkegaard as Theologian (New York 1963). h. roos, S φren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, tr. r. m. bracket (Westminster, Md.1954). d. f. swenson, Something about Kierkegaard, ed. l. m. swenson (rev. and enl. Minneapolis 1945). e. hirsch, Kierkegaard-Studien, 2 v. (Gütersloh 1933). w. ruttenbeck, Sören Kierkegaard: Der Christliche Denker und sein Werk (Berlin 1929). p. mesnard, Le Vrai visage de Kierkegaard (Paris 1948). j. wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes (2d ed. Paris 1949).

[l. duprÉ]