Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and cultural critic widely regarded as the father of existentialism. Reacting against Hegel's systematic rationalism and the complacent Christianity of his day, Kierkegaard insisted on the irreducible importance of the individual's inward relationship to existence. His "stages of existence" — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious — describe different modes of life, culminating in the "leap of faith" by which the individual enters into a personal, subjective relationship with God that no rational system can mediate.