Meeting Kierkegaard in Copenhagen: self-authoring with a paradox

Sometimes travel throws you a coincidence so perfect it feels scripted. Last week, I wrote an article about the fast road to self-authoring and mentioned Søren Kierkegaard as one of the key thinkers. Now here I am in Copenhagen, his city, on a sunny Sunday, sitting in the Royal Library after visiting his statue. I feel oddly confident about this meeting, as if I had arranged it 180 years late.

Born in 1813, Kierkegaard is often called the father of existentialism. His central idea? The individual, not the crowd, must live in full authenticity, taking responsibility for their own relationship with God. Truth, for him, was not simply “out there” in doctrines; it was “in here” in lived, personal experience. As he famously put it, “Truth is subjectivity,” meaning that the highest truths are those you live out, not just those you intellectually affirm.

He described three stages of life: Aesthetic — pleasure and enjoyment. Ethical — duty and responsibility. Religious — deep personal commitment to God. These stages sound suspiciously like the shape of recent adult development theory, which makes him feel like a nineteenth century guest lecturer in my coaching practice.

He also gave us a vivid definition of anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom,” that vertigo when you realize you can actually make choices and those choices matter. And despair, for him, was not just sadness; it was the sickness of not being your true self.

None of this came out of thin air. His father was a devout, guilt-ridden man who poured heavy expectations on him. And then there was that engagement to Regine Olsen. He loved her, proposed, and then abruptly broke it off. Publicly, he claimed it was because of his calling; privately, it may have been fear, avoidance, or an inability to reconcile domestic life with his self-image as a singular truth-teller.

And then there is the kicker: Kierkegaard did not just leave the church quietly; he roasted it. He accused the Danish State Church of making Christianity too easy, removing the suffering and sacrifice that defined true discipleship. Which, to modern ears, sounds a lot like, “You people are not suffering enough.”

So here is where my sunny Copenhagen Sunday got cloudy with curiosity:

“How can a man so focused on individual authenticity fail to live it in the most personal area of his life?”

“Was his celebration of self-denial, risk, and suffering just a way to make the breakup with his fiancée sound noble?”

I see a double contradiction and a glimpse of self-defense in his life. Kierkegaard suffered deeply not just from his father’s moral pressure, but from his own inability to step fully outside it. He fell in love, broke it off, and may have spent the rest of his life reframing that decision as an act of noble self-denial. And yet, out of that came his lifelong emphasis on escaping conformity, though ironically he still wanted everyone to conform to his version of Christianity.

Many scholars have criticized Kierkegaard. Paul Edwards, for example, took aim at his claim that “truth is subjectivity,” questioning whether such a view could provide any solid basis for knowledge. Others, such as Georg Brandes and Jon Stewart, have pointed to the inconsistencies between Kierkegaard’s arguments and the way he lived. Yet they also note that these very contradictions are part of his enduring appeal. His tensions make him human and allow his work to speak across a remarkably wide spectrum of thinkers.

Which leaves me with a thought that is less about Kierkegaard and more about me. Maybe we are all like this. We live with paradoxes, even hypocrisies, without fully seeing them. I talk about self-authoring and strive to think critically about how I can live without conforming to cultural or social pressures. Yet I wonder if there are invisible norms and clouds of influence around me, ones I cannot see now but which might be obvious to my grandsons and great-grandchildren.

So now I am asking myself:

What paradoxes am I living with?

What blind spots shape my choices without me even knowing?

Which of my “principles” might just be old fears in better clothing?

Maybe self-authoring is not about eliminating those questions, but about keeping them alive. Kierkegaard would probably approve. After all, he made a whole career out of it.