The Philosophy of Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard

A 1984 documentary on existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—often considered the first existentialist—was born 200 years ago this past Sunday in Copenhagen. Writing under pseudonyms like Johannes Climacus and Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard attacked both the idealism of contemporary philosophers Hegel and Schelling and the bourgeois complacency of European Christendom. A highly skilled rhetorician, Kierkegaard preferred the indirect method, deploying irony, ridicule, parody and satire in a paradoxical search for individual authenticity within a European culture he saw as beset by self-important puffery and unthinking mass movements.

The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, the First Existentialist Philosopher, Revisited in 1984 Documentary | Open Culture