In 1843, under the name of an editor who claims merely to have found the papers, Søren Kierkegaard publishes Either/Or in Copenhagen: the aesthetic life in the Seducer's Diary, the ethical life in a judge's letters, and no synthesis offered. The book, with its doctrine that truth is subjectivity and the self is a task, is existentialism's founding text, written a century before the name.
Tagged: Existentialism
The Event
- Date
- 1843 (exact)
- Era
- The Nineteenth-Century Sources; Standard periodization of existentialist history
- Location
- Copenhagen; today Copenhagen, Denmark
- Traditions
- Existentialism
- Streams
- Existentialism
- Key figures
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Key texts
- Either/Or
Primary Sources
- Kierkegaard, Søren. Enten-Eller. Copenhagen, 1843.
Secondary Sources
- Gordon, Lewis R. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: Meridian, 1956.
- Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2005.
Provenance: HIST-1420; confidence 0.95; accessed 2026-10-30.
Related on This Site
History Event
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground
1864
History Event
Jaspers's Philosophie
1932
History Event
Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death
1849
History Event
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception
1945
History Event
Sartre's Being and Nothingness
1943
History Event
Sartre's Nausea
1938
History Event
Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life
1913
World View
Existentialism
Existentialism holds that life has no built-in meaning: each person, radically free, must create a self and accept responsibility for that creation.