Soren Kierkegaard

In 1840 Soren Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, and within a year he broke the engagement off, a decision he never fully explained and that friends and family found bewildering given his evident continuing feelings for her. What followed was one of the strangest bodies of work in philosophy: rather than write in his own voice, Kierkegaard began publishing under a series of invented authors, Johannes Climacus, Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio among them, each given a distinct personality, style, and philosophical position, so that his books argue with each other as much as they argue a single thesis.

Either/Or, published in 1843, stages the aesthetic and ethical ways of living against each other through invented editors and letters; Fear and Trembling, published the same year under the name Johannes de Silentio, wrestles with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to ask what it would mean to suspend ordinary ethics for an individual, absolute relationship to God.

Scholars have long read the broken engagement as one key to why Kierkegaard needed these masks: writing pseudonymously let him explore positions, including ones he ultimately rejected, from the inside, without claiming any single one as his settled personal view, a method suited to his larger argument that becoming a genuine self is a task each individual must work out in their own existence rather than a truth that can simply be handed to them from outside. He signed his final religious writings under his own name, treating the pseudonymous project as, by then, complete.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kierkegaard organized human existence into three stages a person can pass through rather than a single system of doctrines to be argued: the aesthetic, focused on pleasure and possibility without lasting commitment; the ethical, focused on duty and consistent choice within universal moral rules; and the religious, in which an individual stands in a direct, personal relationship to God that can require setting the ethical aside entirely, the position Fear and Trembling explores through Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Movement between stages, for Kierkegaard, is never a smooth logical progression a philosophical system could prove necessary; it is a leap, a personal decision that cannot be justified from outside the stage being left behind.

In his final years, having set the pseudonyms aside, Kierkegaard wrote in his own name against what he considered the greatest obstacle to genuine faith: the comfortable, state supported Danish People's Church itself. His 1854 to 1855 pamphlet series, published under the title The Moment, argued that an established church offering baptism, confirmation, and burial to an entire population as a matter of course had made authentic Christian commitment, the costly kind his stages of existence described, all but impossible to distinguish from ordinary social conformity.

The campaign, sustained through repeated pamphlets until his collapse and death in November 1855, turned Kierkegaard's philosophy of individual decision into a direct public confrontation with the institution he judged had emptied that decision of its cost.