Søren Kierkegaard
Danish philosopher, theologian and writer (1813–1855), born and died in Copenhagen, the only city he ever lived in, and universally regarded as the founding father of existentialism, though he himself never used the term. Son of a wealthy merchant gripped by a profound religious guilt he passed on to his son, Kierkegaard lived off the returns of an inheritance that allowed him to devote himself exclusively to writing, publishing a vast body of work — often under various pseudonyms representing conflicting philosophical perspectives — marked by the broken engagement with Regine Olsen, a biographical wound that runs through his entire oeuvre. In Either/Or (1843) he confronted the aesthetic stage of existence, devoted to immediate pleasure and the avoidance of boredom, with the ethical stage of commitment and responsibility, while also hinting at a third stage, the religious. In Fear and Trembling (1843), through meditation on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, he formulated the concept of the 'leap of faith': authentic faith is neither rational nor ethical but a 'teleological suspension of the ethical', an absolute and anguished commitment that transcends any universal justification. In The Concept of Anxiety he analysed anxiety — distinguished from fear, which always has a concrete object — as the dizziness of freedom before possibility itself, and in The Sickness Unto Death he described despair as the fundamental human condition of one who fails to become fully oneself. A fierce critic of institutional Danish Christendom, which he accused of turning Christianity into a comfortable social convention, he died physically and financially exhausted at forty-two, following a final public campaign against the state Church.