Kierkegaard broke off his engagement and never fully explained why
Søren Kierkegaard, often called the first existentialist, proposed to Regine Olsen in 1840 and ended the engagement eleven months later, though both were thought to be deeply in love. He blamed his melancholy. The mystery sits at the heart of a writer who hid behind pseudonyms and filled over 7,000 journal pages.
Born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813, the youngest of seven children, Kierkegaard grew up comfortably off. His father Michael, a devout wool merchant from Jutland, was stern on the surface but imaginative underneath; his mother Ane had been a maid in the household. Early scholars, reading his journals speculatively, suggested Michael believed God would punish his sins by letting none of his children outlive him. Five of the seven did die first, but Søren and his older brother Peter, later bishop of Aalborg, survived their father's death in 1838.
As a boy he wore a coat the colour of red cabbage, and his father nicknamed him the Fork for his sharp tongue. At his brother's wedding in 1836 a guest described a tousled crest of hair rising almost six inches above his forehead. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen but found speculative philosophy unsatisfying, writing in 1835 that he needed to know what to do, not merely what to know.
His early books appeared under pseudonyms whose voices argue with one another, while his Upbuilding Discourses carried his own name and were dedicated to the single individual. Core ideas include the knight of faith, angst, faith as a passion, the infinite gap between humanity and God, and three stages on life's way. Where Sartre's existentialism was atheist, his was Christian, yet he attacked the state-run Church of Denmark fiercely.
He loved roaming Copenhagen's crooked streets and boasted in 1848 that any poor person could stop and talk to him there. Writing in Danish, he was read mainly in Scandinavia until translations appeared around 1900; by the mid-20th century he had shaped philosophy and theology across the West. He died on 11 November 1855, having predicted that his careless journal notes would one day matter greatly.
Source: Søren Kierkegaard
