Søren Kierkegaard

• 1. Introduction

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  Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born on the 5th of May 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children in a family that was both prosperous and haunted. His niece Henriette Lund remembered him as a boy in "a coat the color of red cabbage", so precocious and sharp-tongued that his father called him "the Fork". That same sharpness would one day cut through the entire established Church of Denmark.

  Kierkegaard grew up to become widely regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote about religion, ethics, psychology, and the nature of love across a sprawling, pseudonymous body of work. Yet he wrote in Danish, a language of limited reach, and for most of his lifetime his audience was confined to Scandinavia. By the turn of the 20th century, translations had carried his ideas across Europe. By the middle of that century, his thought had reshaped philosophy, theology, and Western culture in ways he could never have predicted from his desk in Copenhagen.

  What drove a wealthy merchant's son to spend his inheritance writing books almost nobody was reading? Why did he break off an engagement he clearly never stopped grieving? And how did a man so obsessed with the "single individual" end up one of the most widely translated thinkers in modern history? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Father, Fork, and Formation

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  Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, born in 1756, came from Jutland and built his fortune in the wool trade. He was, by those who knew him, "a very stern man, to all appearances dry and prosaic", but beneath that exterior he hid what his family described as an active imagination that even old age could not dull. He hosted intellectuals in his home and devoted himself to the rationalist philosophy of Christian Wolff, eventually retiring partly to pursue more of Wolff's writings.

  Kierkegaard's mother, Ane Sørensdatter Lund, had worked as a maid in the household before marrying Michael. She was quiet and lacked formal education, yet her granddaughter Henriette Lund recalled that she "wielded her scepter with delight, cosseted them, and protected them like a hen her chicks". Her son Peter would later say that Søren preserved many of her words in his writings, though she is never mentioned by name in any of Kierkegaard's published works. She died on the 31st of July 1834, possibly from typhus, at age 66.

  From 1821 to 1830, Kierkegaard attended the School of Civic Virtue in Klarebodeme, where he studied Latin, Greek, and history. Fellow students described him as "very conservative" and noted that he frequently argued with classmates while remaining ambivalent toward his teachers. He went on to theology at the University of Copenhagen but found himself restless there. History left him cold, philosophy dissatisfied him, and he could not see himself "dedicating himself to Speculation". He wanted, he said, to "lead a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge".

  One early physical description comes from Hans Brøchner, who encountered Kierkegaard at his brother Peter's wedding in 1836. Brøchner found the twenty-three-year-old's appearance "almost comical": "his hair rose almost six inches above his forehead into a tousled crest that gave him a strange, bewildered look". The man inside that peculiar frame was already formulating questions that would occupy him for the rest of his life.

• 3. Regine and the Broken Promise

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  Kierkegaard met Regine Olsen on the 8th of May 1837, and the two were instantly drawn to each other. He wrote about her idealistically in his journals for years. After passing his theological examinations in July 1840, he formally proposed to her on the 8th of September. Within weeks, doubt set in.

  He broke the engagement on the 11th of August 1841. He noted in his journals that his "melancholy" made him unsuitable for marriage, but his precise reasons remain unclear. The breakup is generally understood to have caused lasting pain on both sides. It also became the creative wound from which several of his books grew.

  Repetition, published on the 16th of October 1843, is about a young man who suffers anxiety and depression because he feels compelled to sacrifice his love for a girl to God. Kierkegaard wrote the young man as thinly veiled self-portrait. The book asks whether the new science of psychology can help an individual understand feelings that reason alone cannot resolve. Regine Olsen, who lived until 1904, survived Kierkegaard by nearly fifty years.

  Kierkegaard graduated from the University of Copenhagen on the 20th of October 1841 with a Magister degree in philosophy. He defended his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, over seven and a half hours on the 29th of September 1841. The faculty praised his considerable intellect while criticizing the dissertation's informal tone. The figure of Socrates that runs through the work traces directly to Kierkegaard's long engagement with Plato's dialogues and to the influence of his friend Poul Martin Møller, who had died in 1838. An inheritance of approximately 31,000 rigsdaler allowed Kierkegaard to fund both his living expenses and his writing for the years ahead.

• 4. The Pseudonymous Workshop

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  Either/Or, Kierkegaard's magnum opus, was published on the 20th of February 1843. Most of it was written during a stay in Berlin, where Kierkegaard attended Schelling's lectures on the Philosophy of Revelation. The book is presented as papers discovered in a secret drawer of a secretary by the pseudonymous editor "Victor Eremita". Those papers belong to two unknown figures, "A" and "B", each approaching the idea of first love from opposite directions: aesthetic and ethical. The book is, at its core, an argument about faith and marriage.

  Kierkegaard used pseudonyms not to hide but to teach. He wanted to demonstrate "indirect communication", the idea that genuine insight cannot be transmitted directly from one person to another the way facts can. Each pseudonym held a distinct viewpoint and engaged the others in complex dialogue. Victor Eremita edited Either/Or. Johannes de Silentio wrote Fear and Trembling. Anti-Climacus, placed in deliberate opposition to the doubter Johannes Climacus, authored The Sickness unto Death. Over the course of his authorship, Kierkegaard deployed more than a dozen such personas.

  On the same day in October 1843 that he published Repetition and Fear and Trembling, he also published Three Upbuilding Discourses under his own name. The discourses dealt with how love can be used to hide things from yourself or from others. Three books on the same day, two under pseudonyms and one signed, is a demonstration of his method made visible: the indirect voices and the direct voice released into the world simultaneously.

  He published Philosophical Fragments, Prefaces, and The Concept of Anxiety in 1844, adding further pseudonymous layers. He told his reader to read slowly, and to read aloud. His sales were meager. He had no publicist, no editor. As he himself put it, he was "writing in the dark".

• 5. The Corsair and the Crowd

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  On the 22nd of December 1845, Peder Ludvig Møller published an article that indirectly criticized Stages on Life's Way. Møller complimented Kierkegaard's wit but questioned whether he could ever write a coherent, complete work. Kierkegaard responded sharply, accusing Møller of merely trying to impress Copenhagen's literary elite. He then did something stranger: in a piece called Dialectical Result of a Literary Police Action, he openly invited The Corsair, the satirical paper that Møller helped edit, to attack him.

  The Corsair, under its second editor Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, accepted the invitation. For months, the paper ran caricatures and articles mocking Kierkegaard's appearance, voice, and habits. Kierkegaard wrote in a journal entry dated the 9th of March 1846 that the campaign made him rethink his entire strategy of indirect communication. The harassment on Copenhagen's streets was real and persistent.

  The experience fed directly into his literary review of Two Ages, published under his own name on the 30th of March 1846. In that book he analyzed what he saw as the passionless conformity of modern life. He wrote that "the present age is essentially a sensible age, devoid of passion" and attacked the way individuals dissolved into "the crowd", which then set itself up as the arbiter of truth. He accused newspapers of playing a central role in this dissolution. Kierkegaard argued that truth reaches a single individual, not all people at once, and that love works the same way: "One doesn't love the crowd but does love their neighbor, who is a single individual."

  On the 27th of February 1846, he had published Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments under the earlier pseudonym Johannes Climacus. In that book he openly admitted to being the author of his pseudonymous works, ending years of public speculation about whether he was, in fact, a Christian.

• 6. The Attack on the Church

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  Professor Hans Lassen Martensen gave a church speech calling the recently deceased Bishop Jacob Peter Mynster a "truth-witness, one of the authentic truth-witnesses". That phrase triggered Kierkegaard's most public and sustained campaign of his life. He had been waiting for Mynster to die before speaking freely. He had also been waiting until he had established himself as a serious theological writer. Now both conditions were met.

  Kierkegaard's father had been Mynster's close friend, which made the attack a kind of personal reckoning as well as a theological one. Søren had long concluded that Mynster's Christianity demanded too little of its adherents. Beginning in the newspaper Fædrelandet and then through a series of self-published pamphlets called The Moment, he charged that the state-controlled Church of Denmark had corrupted Christianity by treating membership as a social convenience. Anyone could become "Christian" without knowing what being Christian required.

  He argued that congregations keep individuals perpetually childlike by relieving them of personal responsibility for their relationship with God. The Church's bureaucratic interest in growing its membership, he wrote, was directly at odds with Christianity's true concern: the single individual standing alone before God. He described this arrangement as producing "unbelieving believers", a herd of people following a fashionable tradition with no genuine faith behind it.

  Before the tenth issue of The Moment could be published, Kierkegaard collapsed on the street. He was taken to Frederiks Hospital, where he stayed for over a month. He refused communion during his stay, regarding pastors at that point as political officials with no genuine divine authority. He told his childhood friend Emil Boesen that his life had been one of immense suffering, though he did not regard it as suffering in vain. He died in that hospital, possibly from complications of Pott disease, a form of tuberculosis. At his funeral, his nephew Henrik Lund disrupted the ceremony to protest the burial being conducted by the official church. Lund maintained that Kierkegaard would never have approved. Lund was later fined for the disruption.

• 7. Translation and Global Reach

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  Georg Brandes, a fellow Dane, gave the first formal lectures on Kierkegaard in Copenhagen and published the first book on his philosophy and life in 1879. That book, Søren Kierkegaard, ein literarisches Charakterbild, was written in German as well as Danish, which helped carry Kierkegaard's name into the European intellectual conversation. Brandes compared him to Hegel and to Nietzsche, comparisons that shaped how the next generation of philosophers would read him.

  The first translation of Kierkegaard's work into German appeared in 1861. Albert Bärthold began the first substantial German translation program in 1873. Hermann Gottsche published the Journals in 1905, fifty years after Kierkegaard's death. Christoph Schrempf translated the main works from 1909 onward. Emmanuel Hirsch released a German collected edition starting in 1950. That concentrated German reception, across dialectical theology, existential philosophy, and the Jewish-Christian philosophy of dialogue, proved decisive for how Kierkegaard reached the rest of the world.

  In English, Lee M. Hollander published the first translation in 1923, though it drew little attention. The 1930s brought a coordinated effort: Douglas V. Steere, David F. Swenson, Walter Lowrie, and Alexander Dru all produced translations, with Lowrie and Dru working under the guidance of Oxford University Press editor Charles Williams, who was also a member of the Inklings. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong dedicated their lives to the project; the first volume of their Journals and Papers won the 1968 National Book Award for Translation. Their collection is now housed at the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library. Alastair Hannay began translating for Penguin Classics in 1985, starting with Fear and Trembling.

  By 1959, John Daniel Wild observed that Kierkegaard's works had been translated into almost every major living language, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Karl Barth drew extensively on Practice in Christianity and The Moment in The Epistle to the Romans. Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time in 1927, referred to Kierkegaard sparingly while owing him considerably more. The journals that Kierkegaard wrote in private, over 7,000 pages in total, were eventually edited and published in 13 Danish volumes across 25 separate bindings. The first English edition was prepared by Alexander Dru in 1938.