Søren Kierkegaard — Easy

Søren Kierkegaard (born May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, Denmark; died November 11, 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and author of the 19th century. He is internationally celebrated today as the father of existentialism and the deep thinker who diagnosed human anxiety and the perils of the modern crowd. Despite being quiet and bookish, he lived a life filled with bizarre habits, massive personal dramas, and brilliant literary disguises.

1. Walked imaginary streets

   Before he ever wrote philosophy, his father trained him by walking around their living room for hours, vividly narrating an imaginary Copenhagen filled with made-up people and gossip [10:11]. This quirky exercise turned young Søren into a master observer of human social life.

2. Always used fake names

   He published almost his entire philosophical career under dozens of elaborate pseudonyms—like Victor Eremita and Johannes Climicus —each given their own distinct personality and arguments.

3. The broken engagement

   He fell deeply in love with a young woman named Regine Olsen and proposed to her in 1840, only to break off the engagement eleven days later. He spent the rest of his life writing coded books about her because he believed his heavy melancholy made him completely unfit for marriage.

4. Invented existential anxiety

   In 1844, he argued that anxiety is not a simple fear of external danger, but rather the dizzy feeling of standing at the edge of our own absolute freedom.

5. Mocked by a newspaper

   He once publicly invited a satirical Copenhagen tabloid called The Corsair to mock him, and they obliged by ruthlessly caricaturing his slight build and his mismatched trouser legs. The public harassment made it nearly impossible for him to walk the city streets in peace.

6. Defended the absurd

   In his famous book Fear and Trembling, he explored the Biblical story of Abraham, arguing that true faith sometimes requires a leap into the "teleological suspension of the ethical" beyond rational human rules.

7. Wrote a multi-volume footnote

   His massive 600-page philosophical masterpiece, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, was ironically presented as a tiny "postscript" to a much shorter book he had written earlier.

8. Fought the church establishment

   At the end of his life, he launched a fierce public attack against the official Danish State Church, calling its comfortable bourgeois traditions a complete betrayal of true Christianity.

9. Refused state communion

   When he collapsed on the street and lay dying in 1855, he deliberately refused to receive the final sacrament from state church ministers because he despised their institutional hypocrisy.

10. A state funeral irony

    Despite spending his final months fiercely attacking the church and refusing its priests on his deathbed, the state religious establishment gave him a grand official funeral anyway.

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