Danish philosopher and religious thinker who wrote literary and philosophical essays that reacted against Hegelian philosophy and the state church in Denmark, setting the stage for modern existentialism.

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children. He spent his formative years under the influence of his melancholic and devoutly religious father whose teachings stressed the suffering of Christ. Kierkegaard went to study philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen, where his personal despair grew, leading him to the therapeutic decision to become a cleric and marry his fiancée Regine Olsen, the daughter of a treasury official. Shortly after completing his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony (1841), he broke the engagement, partly for fear that he and his fiancée might lack common philosophic interests, but he gave the impression of acting out of a brutal and indifferent selfishness in order to make the breach definitive.

Thereafter he embarked on a life of seclusion and a writer's career that produced a constant flow of books and philosophical essays over the next ten years, including Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), The Concept of Dread (1844), Existential Contribution (1846) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849).see also: anxiety is freedom
"Life can only be understood backwards..."