At a glance
- Age
- 42
- Born
- May 5, 1813
- From
- Copenhagen
- Lives in
- Copenhagen
- Nationality
- Kingdom of Denmark
Biography
The lines that circulate from him tend to be about being a single individual — the idea that a life has to be chosen and committed to by the person living it, not absorbed from a crowd or worked out in the abstract. That was the centre of his writing: authenticity, personal choice, and what he called the duty to love. He put concrete human reality ahead of abstract thinking, and much of his work is an argument for why that order matters.
Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he worked as a philosopher, Lutheran theologian, poet, social critic and religious author, and he is widely regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. His subjects ranged across organised religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, love and the philosophy of religion, and his approach to them was critical rather than devotional — he was willing to take apart the institutions he wrote from inside.
He rarely made his points plainly. Metaphor, irony and parables run through the work, which is part of why individual sentences from it travel so well and also why they are easy to misread on their own. He died in 1855, at forty-two.
Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he worked as a philosopher, Lutheran theologian, poet, social critic and religious author, and he is widely regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. His subjects ranged across organised religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, love and the philosophy of religion, and his approach to them was critical rather than devotional — he was willing to take apart the institutions he wrote from inside.
He rarely made his points plainly. Metaphor, irony and parables run through the work, which is part of why individual sentences from it travel so well and also why they are easy to misread on their own. He died in 1855, at forty-two.
