Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish writer who attacked both Hegelian system-building and comfortable Christendom. In Fear and Trembling and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript he places the existing individual before God, where objective certainty cannot take the place of the risk of faith. Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac becomes the type of a leap beyond universal ethics. Faith is subjective passion at its height. The question shifts from proving God to living before him. Later existential thought still starts from that lonely standing.