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"There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life's highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death."

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, b. May 5, 1813, d. Nov. 11, 1855, was a Danish philosopher and religious thinker whose reaction against the depersonalization of society and against the established church of Denmark took the form of brilliant literary and philosophical essays. He is regarded by philosophers today as a precursor of Existentialism, although not all existentialists are directly influenced by him.

Kierkegaard studied philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen and received a master's degree in 1840. The next year he shocked Copenhagen's society by breaking his engagement to Regine Olsen, the daughter of a treasury official. Although he broke the engagement for fear that he and his fiancee might lack common philosophic interests, he gave the impression of acting out of a brutal and indifferent selfishness in order to make the breach definitive. Thereafter he lived a life of seclusion, devoted to writing. The impact on his career of the broken engagement, as well as his austere Lutheran upbringing and his melancholia, is evident in virtually everything he wrote thereafter.

Kierkegaard cultivated paradox and irony throughout his life, so that the problem of what he really thought or felt is difficult to determine. For example, he adopted the curious device of signing his books Either/Or (1843; Eng. trans., 1944), Philosophical Fragments (1844; Eng. trans., 1936), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846; Eng. trans., 1941), and many others--with pseudonyms to prevent his readers from thinking that the incomplete points of view contained in these books constituted the total point of view that would characterize a fully religious person--or even the point of view he was trying to adopt in his own life. --- by Thomas E. Wren