Stagstrup kierkegaard biography

Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, progenitor of modern existentialism, was born at Copenhagen, where he read theology (in which he graduated in but without taking orders), philosophy and literature.

Obsessed by some mysterious guilt of his father&#;s, he broke off, after much heart-searching, his engagement to Regine Olsen. Such deliberate, significant choosing of one&#;s future self became the basis of his philosophizing.

It is something that has to be lived through and experienced, purely speculative systems of thought such as Hegel&#;s being irrelevant to existence-making choices, because existence on account of its multiplicity can never be incorporated into a system.

For Hegel&#;s synthesis, Kierkegaard substituted the disjunction Either/Or (), the basis of choice. In Philosophical Fragments () and especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (), Kierkegaard attacked all philosophical system building and formulated the thesis that subjectivity is