We live in an era obsessed with curated identities, yet most people feel entirely hollow inside. This is where it gets tricky. If you scan the crowded shelves of modern self-help or philosophy, you will find endless thinkers claiming to understand the human condition, but almost all of them owe an unacknowledged debt to a nineteenth-century eccentric who spent his days wandering the cobblestones of Denmark, picking fights with the state church. The thing is, existentialism is not a monolith. It is a chaotic, fractured lineage of thinkers who often despised one another's conclusions. Yet, at the center of this web stands Kierkegaard, a man who weaponized the concept of anxiety long before psychology even had a name for it.
The Copenhagen Revolt: Defining the Origins of Existential Thought
To understand why Kierkegaard claims the mantle, we have to look at what he was fighting against. In 1841, the intellectual world was utterly intoxicated by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who argued that human history was a grand, rational progression toward absolute knowledge. Hegel looked at the universe through a telescope; Kierkegaard preferred a mirror. He realized that Hegel’s grand system had no room for the actual, living individual who has to wake up in the morning, face choices, and eventually die. Existentialism prioritizes existence over essence, asserting that humans are not born with a predefined purpose but must actively construct meaning through choice.
The Anatomy of Dread and Subjective Truth
In his 1844 masterpiece The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard introduced a psychological depth that shattered traditional philosophy. He described anxiety not as a mental illness, but as the "dizziness of freedom"—that paralyzing moment when an individual looks into the abyss of their own infinite possibilities and realizes they alone must choose. Think of it like standing on the edge of a sheer cliff in the Swiss Alps; the terror you feel is not just the fear of falling, but the terrifying realization that you could choose to throw yourself off. But how does one navigate this vertigo? Kierkegaard’s answer was radical: "Truth is subjectivity." This does not mean reality is whatever you want it to be, but rather that the objective facts of science or history matter infinitely less than how an individual passionately relates to their own existence.
The Lutheran Iconoclast: Unpacking Kierkegaard’s Radical Subjectivity
I find it deeply ironic that a philosophy now synonymous with atheistic chic—black turtlenecks, Gitanes cigarettes, and the cold comfort of a godless universe—began as a desperate attempt to become a true Christian. Kierkegaard looked at the Danish state church and saw a country of cultural Christians who went to church on Sundays because it was respectable, a social ritual completely devoid of genuine spiritual passion. It disgusted him. He realized that a faith requiring no sacrifice is not faith at all, which explains his obsession with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in his 1843 book Fear and Trembling.
The Leap of Faith and the Paradox of Abraham
Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his only son on Mount Moriah. From an ethical standpoint—the realm of universal social laws—Abraham is a murderer. Yet, from the standpoint of faith, he is a tragic hero. Kierkegaard uses this extreme, agonizing scenario to illustrate what he calls the teleological suspension of the ethical, a clunky academic phrase that means something terrifyingly simple: sometimes, the individual’s direct relationship with the absolute transcends the moral rules of society. This requires a "leap of faith" into the absurd.
It is a move that terrifies rationalists. Because how can you tell the difference between a prophet hearing God and a madman hearing voices? Honestly, it’s unclear, and Kierkegaard openly admits this agonizing ambiguity. There are no external guarantees. You act in total isolation, stripped of the comforting approval of the crowd, bearing the full, crushing weight of your decisions. People don't think about this enough when they romanticize existential freedom; it is a philosophy of profound isolation.
Pseudonyms and the Art of Indirect Communication
The Danish thinker rarely wrote under his own name, opting instead for a bizarre troupe of fictional alter egos like Johannes de Silentio, Victor Eremita, and Anti-Climacus. This was not a childish game of hide-and-seek. He used these pseudonyms to present conflicting worldviews, forcing the reader to judge the ideas on their own merits rather than accepting them on the authority of an author. He did not want disciples. He wanted to wake people up from their dogmatic slumbers by making life more difficult, not easier.
The German Counterweight: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Death of God
Yet, the story of existentialism cannot be told as a solo performance, which brings us to the great pivot of the late nineteenth century. Enter Friedrich Nietzsche. If Kierkegaard represents the religious root of this philosophy, Nietzsche is its fierce, hammer-wielding secular twin, writing from the Swiss town of Sils Maria in the 1880s. Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead," meaning that Western civilization had lost its shared foundational belief in a transcendent moral order. And that changes everything.
The Will to Power and the Ubermensch
Without God, human beings are cast adrift in a cold, indifferent cosmos without a map or a compass. While Kierkegaard responded to this void by leaping toward God, Nietzsche demanded that we step into the void ourselves and become our own gods. He argued that human psychology is driven not by a desire for mere survival, but by the will to power—the urge to master oneself and impose form on a chaotic world. From this premise, he forged the concept of the Ubermensch, or Overman, an individual who overcomes the herd mentality of traditional society to create their own values out of thin air.
But the issue remains: can a human being truly bear the weight of creating their own morality? Nietzsche thought so, advocating for amor fati—the unconditional love of one's fate, no matter how brutal. He envisioned a life lived so passionately that you would welcome its exact repetition for eternity. It is a stunning, poetic vision, but one that lacks the raw, psychological vulnerability found in the Danish writer's work.
The Great Schism: Comparing the Two Fathers of Existence
Experts disagree on whether a philosophy can have two fathers, but comparing Kierkegaard and Nietzsche reveals the twin tracks that existentialism would follow into the twentieth century. Both men were psychological outcasts who suffered immensely, despised the bourgeois complacency of their respective eras, and rejected the cold tyranny of systematic rationalism. As a result, they both arrived at the same terrifying diagnosis: the individual is entirely on their own.
Except that their remedies could not be more polarized. Kierkegaard saw the human condition as fundamentally broken, a sickness unto death that could only be healed through a radical surrender to the divine paradox. Nietzsche saw the human condition as an evolutionary bridge to be crossed, an opportunity for supreme self-assertion. One looked inward and found a need for grace; the other looked inward and found a dormant titan. In short, they drew completely different maps of the same dark terrain, ensuring that whoever sought to understand the father of existentialism would have to choose between a leap into the divine or a climb into the self.
Common mistakes and misconceptions about the title
The French usurpation of the Danish crown
Ask a stranger on the street to name the father of existentialism and they will likely shout back Jean-Paul Sartre. Except that they are wrong. Sartre merely popularized the term in twentieth-century Paris, transforming heavy Nordic dread into a chic café aesthetic. The real architect was a lonely Danish soul who died decades before the French intellectual scene even conceptualized the term. We frequently conflate the marketing of an idea with its actual genesis.
Confounding nihilism with the weight of choice
Another massive trap is treating this philosophy as mere nihilism. Let's be clear: Kierkegaard never claimed that life is completely meaningless. The problem is that people read about the "leap of faith" and assume it means jumping into a void of nothingness. Søren Kierkegaard pioneered existentialism precisely to rescue the individual from meaninglessness, not to plunge them into it. He viewed choices not as pointless exercises, but as terrifyingly significant events that define your eternal soul.
The secular bias in modern classrooms
Why do modern textbooks skip straight to Nietzsche or Camus? Because contemporary academia harbors a severe allergic reaction to 19th-century theology. We want our angst delivered with a side of black coffee and atheism, not Lutheran guilt. Yet, ignoring the profoundly religious roots of this philosophical movement castrates the entire concept of subjective truth that the true father of existentialism painstakingly built.
The knight of faith: Expert advice for deep reading
Decoding the Danish pseudonyms
If you pick up a book by Johannes Climacus or Anti-Climacus, you are actually reading Kierkegaard playing a massive game of intellectual hide-and-seek. He published his most profound texts under bizarre aliases to force you, the reader, to decide what you actually believe. My advice? Do not search for a unified, coherent system when diving into these texts. The author deliberately fractured his own identity because he believed that objective systems are a trap for the human spirit.
How can a single individual simulate an entire universe of opposing viewpoints? (It takes an agonizing level of genius, frankly). Kierkegaard used these alter egos to show that truth is not a set of facts you memorize, but a reality you live out. When you engage with his work, you are not just reading philosophy; you are participating in a psychological experiment designed to strip away your societal illusions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the father of existentialism ever use the actual word existentialism?
No, Søren Kierkegaard never used the specific term existentialism during his entire lifetime from 1813 to 1855. The exact word was actually coined much later in 1943 by the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Which explains why the historical lineage can feel incredibly confusing to modern students. The Danish thinker spoke instead of the "existing individual" and "existential dread" to describe the human condition. As a result: we apply the umbrella label retroactively to his 19th-century writings because they contain the exact DNA of the movement.
How does Friedrich Nietzsche fit into this philosophical paternity test?
Friedrich Nietzsche is often crowned as the co-founder or alternative father of existentialism due to his radical declaration of the death of God. He operated entirely independently of his Danish predecessor, writing his major works between 1872 and 1888 without ever reading a single page of Kierkegaard's texts. But the issue remains that both men arrived at the identical conclusion that the isolated individual must forge their own meaning. While one looked to Christian devotion, the other championed the Übermensch. They are two sides of the exact same coin, split by a chasm of faith.
What is the famous leap of faith example?
The most iconic illustration of this concept is found in the 1843 masterpiece Fear and Trembling, which dissects the biblical story of Abraham. Kierkegaard uses Abraham's terrifying willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac as the ultimate example of the absurd. This is not a rational decision calculated by ethics. Because human morality explicitly forbids murder, Abraham must bypass reason entirely to obey a higher, subjective command. It shows that true existential commitment requires you to abandon intellectual safety nets completely.
An honest verdict on the origin of angst
Stop looking to mid-century Paris for the origin of your modern anxiety. The ultimate title belongs exclusively to Kierkegaard, the magnificent misfit of Copenhagen, who understood our isolation long before smartphones and world wars arrived. He did not write for the masses, nor did he seek academic tenure. Instead, he chose to weaponize his own psychological suffering to expose the emptiness of crowd psychology. We must stop pretending that existential thought started with French cigarettes. It began with passionate inwardness and profound spiritual agony in Denmark. Embrace the original architecture of choice, even if it forces you to face the terrifying abyss of your own freedom.