Who the Hell Was… Søren Kierkegaard?
The father of existentialism — and possibly its first casualty. Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Dane who saw faith not as certainty but as a dare: a leap into the absurd. He believed Christianity had grown too comfortable, that faith without risk was no faith at all. For him, despair wasn’t failure — it was the starting point of genuine selfhood.
Kierkegaard lived a lonely life, breaking off his engagement, feuding with the church, and publishing under multiple pseudonyms just to argue with himself. He dissected the modern soul like a surgeon — irony, anxiety, guilt — all the things Instagram would later rebrand as “relatable content.” He called them prerequisites for becoming an individual.
His “knight of faith” wasn’t a saint but a person who stands trembling before the infinite and still chooses to believe. Kierkegaard’s writings are confessions disguised as philosophy — sharp, sorrowful, and intimate. He didn’t promise salvation; he offered depth. And in that abyss, he found something close to God.