Start with Fear and Trembling
Short, strange, and the clearest sample of what he does. It circles the story of Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac, and refuses to make it comfortable. If faith requires suspending ethics, Kierkegaard asks, what exactly are we admiring when we admire Abraham?
He never answers. He restates the problem four ways in the opening pages, each worse than the last, then keeps going. That's the experience of reading him.
| Book | Year | Pseudonym | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fear and Trembling | 1843 | Johannes de Silentio | Faith and the Abraham problem. Start here. |
| Either/Or | 1843 | Victor Eremita (ed.) | The aesthetic life against the ethical, as two sets of papers. Long, and the Seducer's Diary is famous on its own. |
| The Sickness Unto Death | 1849 | Anti-Climacus | Despair, taxonomised with terrifying precision. The most psychologically acute. |
| The Concept of Anxiety | 1844 | Vigilius Haufniensis | Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom. The one modern readers find most immediately useful. |
| Concluding Unscientific Postscript | 1846 | Johannes Climacus | Truth as subjectivity, and a sustained attack on Hegel. Long and demanding. |
| Works of Love | 1847 | None (his own name) | On love as a duty rather than a feeling. The warmest thing he wrote. |
Why the pseudonyms matter
Kierkegaard didn't use fake names to hide. He invented authors who hold positions he doesn't, so the reader has to work out where they stand rather than being told.
Johannes de Silentio says outright that he doesn't have faith and is describing something he can't do. Anti-Climacus is deliberately positioned as more Christian than Kierkegaard felt entitled to be. The books signed in his own name, the "upbuilding discourses" and Works of Love, are the direct ones.
So a quotation attributed flatly to Kierkegaard may be a character he built in order to disagree with. Check the byline.
Regine
In 1841 he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen, a decision he never publicly explained and never stopped writing about. Fear and Trembling is, among other things, a book by a man asking whether a person can be required to give up the thing they love most.
He died in 1855, aged 42, having spent his inheritance on printing his own books. He left everything to Regine, by then married and living abroad.
Around him
He's usually called the first existentialist, and our existentialism guide covers the line from him to Sartre and Camus. Nietzsche arrived at neighbouring questions from the opposite direction and never read him.
365 Days of Philosophy is the low-commitment route through the whole tradition, one page a morning.
Common questions
Which Kierkegaard book should I read first?
Fear and Trembling. It's short, it's the clearest sample of his method, and it doesn't require any background. The Concept of Anxiety is the alternative if you want the psychological side.
Why did Kierkegaard use pseudonyms?
So the reader has to work out where they stand. His invented authors hold positions he doesn't share, and some explicitly say so. Books under his own name, like Works of Love, are the direct ones.
Was Kierkegaard an existentialist?
He's usually called the first, though he died decades before the term existed. The emphasis on individual choice, anxiety and subjective truth is what later existentialists took from him.
What did Kierkegaard mean by the leap of faith?
The phrase is more his readers' than his. His point is that faith can't be reached by argument: no amount of reasoning delivers you to it, so the move is qualitative rather than logical.
Who was Regine Olsen?
His fiancée. He broke the engagement in 1841, never explained why publicly, and wrote around it for the rest of his life. He left her his estate.