50 Fun Facts About Søren Kierkegaard

The surname Kierkegaard is a variant of a Danish word ending in 'gård', or yard, that names which place?

Churchyard, in the sense of a cemetery, is the word's everyday meaning in Danish, built from the words for church and for a yard or farm.

Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to which young woman, then spent years writing books that secretly addressed her?

Regine Olsen was engaged to him for about a year; she went on to marry her former tutor, yet Kierkegaard's will still named her as heir to what little he left.

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling circles around which biblical figure, whom its narrator admits he cannot understand?

Abraham's journey to sacrifice his son Isaac opens the book in four different retellings, each imagining another way the story might have gone.

Kierkegaard is widely called the father of which philosophical movement, later taken up by Sartre and Heidegger?

Existentialism got its name nearly a century after he died: the word was coined in the 1940s, and Sartre at first rejected the label.

Which phrase for believing beyond proof is popularly credited to Kierkegaard, who never used it in that form?

Leap of faith is the popular label, but his own term was a 'qualitative leap': a change that no chain of reasoning can carry a person across step by step.

A young Kierkegaard's first monograph was a 70-page attack on the novel Only a Fiddler by which famous storyteller?

Hans Christian Andersen's novel, the review complained, leaned on its author's own life instead of a mature view of life. The two men now lie in the same cemetery.

Kierkegaard's book The Sickness unto Death argues that the deadly sickness of its title is which spiritual condition?

Despair, he argues, is a kind of spiritual death that comes from refusing to be oneself, and the opposite he sets against it is religious belief.

In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, the pleasure-seeking writer known only as A declares what to be the root of all evil?

Boredom must be dodged at any cost, A argues, and his cure is to rotate one's pleasures like crops while steering clear of friendship, marriage and steady work.

Kierkegaard's university dissertation on the concept of irony made continual reference to which ancient Greek thinker?

Socrates stayed his lifelong model, and the dissertation argued that the comic playwright Aristophanes had caught the man's irony better than his own pupils did.

Kierkegaard was born, wrote nearly all his books and died in which northern European city, a place he rarely left?

Copenhagen was his whole world: a handful of trips to Germany were almost the only times he ever went abroad.

Kierkegaard is often read as the arch-opponent of which German philosopher, builder of an all-embracing system?

Hegel's thought dominated Danish intellectual life by the late 1830s, and scholars now think the sharpest barbs were aimed at the local professors who preached it.

Which subject did Kierkegaard officially study at university, dawdling for a decade before he finally sat his exams?

Theology was only his official subject: he drifted into literature and philosophy and ran up debts, and buckled down only after his father died.

Kierkegaard won royal permission to write his dissertation in Danish, but had to defend it publicly in which language?

Latin was still the language of Danish degrees: he also had to condense the Danish text into a series of Latin theses before the degree could be awarded.

Kierkegaard's Either/Or includes a long essay on the musical-erotic built around which composer's opera about Don Juan?

Mozart was his musical idol, and the essay sets out to show through Don Giovanni that music can express restless desire in a way that words cannot.

In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, the long letters defending marriage and commitment are written by a man of which profession?

Judge Vilhelm, known in the book simply as B, argues that a committed life keeps the beauty of the pleasure-seeker's life instead of destroying it.

Caricatures in a Danish satirical paper in 1846 mocked Kierkegaard by exaggerating which detail of his appearance?

Uneven trouser legs featured in the cartoons, and the street mockery that followed made him give up his habit of strolling the city and chatting to everyone.

After breaking off his engagement in 1841, Kierkegaard fled to which German city, where he drafted much of Either/Or?

Berlin was the one foreign city he came to know: he made four trips there, and they were almost the only journeys abroad of his life.

Kierkegaard's last writings attacked what, his word for a society where church membership comes with birth?

Christendom, he argued, made people lazy about religion: when everyone is a believer by birth, nobody has to become one.

Kierkegaard publicly dared which Danish satirical weekly to mock him, and then endured months of its cartoons?

The Corsair took up the dare so thoroughly that he came to divide his life into the time before the affair and the time after it.

Kierkegaard was brought up in which Protestant tradition, the one followed by Denmark's established national church?

Lutheran teaching shaped him, though his father also played a leading part in a Moravian congregation that left its own mark on the boy.

Kierkegaard's father believed he had doomed his family by cursing God as a starving shepherd boy in which Danish region?

Jutland's bleak heath haunted the family: the father was convinced that none of his children would live past 33, the age reached by Christ.

Kierkegaard's mother Ane, his father's second wife, had earlier worked in the family household in which role?

Maid and distant cousin to her husband, she is never once mentioned in her son's writings, not even in his journal on the day she died.

Kierkegaard's older brother Peter, who outlived him by three decades, rose to which rank in the Danish clergy?

Bishop of Aalborg was the post Peter took up soon after Søren died; he had criticised his brother's books at clergy meetings, yet he gave the eulogy.

At Kierkegaard's funeral, which relative caused a disturbance by protesting his burial by the official church?

His nephew Henrik Lund argued that the dead man had broken with the institution and would never have agreed to it, and was later fined for the outburst.

Which source of money let Kierkegaard live as a full-time author, funding both his books and his living expenses?

An inheritance of about 31,000 rigsdaler came from his father, who had risen from rural poverty to become a wealthy merchant.

Kierkegaard wrote and self-published which series of pamphlets in 1855 to spearhead his attack on the Danish clergy?

The Moment was cut short when he collapsed in the street before its tenth issue could be published; he died in hospital some weeks later.

As a boy, Kierkegaard was nicknamed what at home, thanks to his precocious habit of making satirical remarks?

The Fork was the name his father used, and the same account remembers the boy going about in a coat the colour of red cabbage.

Which Vienna-born philosopher, while living in Norway, learned Danish in order to read Kierkegaard in the original?

Ludwig Wittgenstein picked up Norwegian to talk with the villagers around him, and Danish for one purpose: reading Kierkegaard.

In 1888 the Danish critic Georg Brandes wrote urging which German philosopher to read Kierkegaard, apparently in vain?

Nietzsche seems never to have taken the advice: no evidence shows he read any of the Dane's works, though Brandes thought the two had much in common.

Which French writer on the absurd dismissed Kierkegaard's turn to God as a form of 'philosophical suicide'?

Albert Camus rejected both literal suicide and this religious escape, insisting that the absurd has to be faced for what it is.

Which Kierkegaard book of 1844 likens the feeling of facing one's own freedom to a kind of dizziness?

The Concept of Anxiety first reached English readers as The Concept of Dread, and it traces the feeling back to Adam standing before the forbidden tree.

Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling under which pseudonym, a name nodding to its hero's refusal to explain himself?

Johannes de silentio means John of the Silence, and the book's third problem asks whether its hero was right to hide his purpose from his wife and son.

In Kierkegaard's Either/Or, which fictional editor claims to have found the book's papers hidden in a second-hand desk?

Victor Eremita means 'victorious hermit'; in his preface he labels the two bundles of papers from the desk simply A and B.

Kierkegaard signed The Sickness unto Death with which pseudonym, meant to suggest a Christian of an extraordinary level?

Anti-Climacus is the mirror image of an earlier pen name, Climacus, the supposed author of the Postscript, who presents himself as no Christian at all.

In Kierkegaard's three stages of life, which stage, devoted to pleasure for its own sake, comes first?

Aesthetic living, in his sense, means chasing enjoyment and novelty; the two later stages add duty to others and then a personal relation to God.

Which section of Kierkegaard's Either/Or, often published as a book by itself, centres on a young woman named Cordelia?

The Seducer's Diary shows a man who prizes the scheming above the conquest: once Cordelia is won, he loses interest and moves on.

Which Kierkegaard book came out in October 1843 on the very same day as Fear and Trembling?

Repetition has its narrator go back to a foreign city to test whether a happy visit can be had twice, and the experiment fails.

Kierkegaard's huge Concluding Unscientific Postscript is best known for its dictum that truth is what?

Subjectivity here is no licence to believe anything: his point is that how a person holds and lives a conviction matters more than detached knowledge.

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling asks whether a divine command can justify a 'teleological suspension' of what?

The ethical, meaning the duties that bind everyone at all times, would be set aside for a higher end, an idea the philosopher Levinas later attacked as a form of violence.

Kierkegaard, who addressed his books to 'that single individual', gave what name to the anonymous mass he attacked?

The crowd, he complained, had become the measure of truth by sheer weight of numbers, and he blamed the newspapers for feeding it.

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling describes a knight who renounces what he loves as the knight of infinite what?

Resignation is only the first of two movements: the book's higher knight gives everything up and yet trusts, against all reason, to receive it back.

In Two Ages, Kierkegaard contrasted the age of revolution with his own reflective age, which he said lacked what?

Passion, in his account, is what drives real action; the reflective age flares into brief enthusiasm and then sinks shrewdly back into repose.

Kierkegaard's title Fear and Trembling echoes a verse about working out salvation in which New Testament letter?

Philippians 2:12 supplies the phrase, and that verse is itself thought to echo the terror described in Psalm 55.

In Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, which Greek king who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia is held up as a tragic hero?

Agamemnon's sacrifice served a purpose his community could understand, which is what makes him a tragic hero; the book's own hero has no such public excuse.

The title of Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death comes from Jesus's words about which sick man in John's Gospel?

Lazarus's illness, Jesus says, is not unto death; Kierkegaard's twist is that the truly fatal sickness is one of the spirit, which no grave can end.

According to the English title of a much-read Kierkegaard discourse on confession, purity of heart is to do what?

Will one thing is the title Douglas Steere gave his 1938 translation; a version published the year before had been called Purify Your Heart.

What did Kierkegaard call his method of using pseudonyms and irony so that readers must reach conclusions themselves?

Indirect communication aims to provoke self-examination instead of handing over doctrine, and he abandoned it only for the blunt polemics of his final years.

Which US state houses the Hong Kierkegaard Library, built on the collection of two translators at St. Olaf College?

Minnesota's Northfield campus was given the books by Howard and Edna Hong, whose English edition of the philosopher's journals won a National Book Award.

To contrast its two knights, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling tells of a young lad hopelessly in love with whom?

A princess he can never marry is the test case: one knight gives her up for good, while the other gives her up and still believes he will have her.

After finishing his dissertation, Kierkegaard travelled abroad to hear which ageing German philosopher lecture?

Schelling was lecturing on the philosophy of revelation, and the notes the young Dane took survive in print alongside one English edition of his dissertation.