History of Philosophy Online Course: https://hotm.art/historiadafilosofia-... Discover Our Platform: https://filosofiatotal.com.br/ Sören Aabye Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855), born in Denmark, is popularly known as the “father of existentialism”. Having lost five of his six brothers, Kierkegaard, the last to be born, considered himself a “child of old age”, because when he was born his father was 56 years old and his mother was 44. His engagement to Regina Olsen did not continue because, for him, someone who adhered to the Christian ideal of life could not experience a worldly compromise. He understood that “God had precedence”, and this is also the reason why he renounced becoming a pastor. Kierkegaard's thought revolves around the “defense of the individual”. His first work was The Concept of Irony (1841). When approaching faith, Kierkegaard states that the life of faith constitutes the truly authentic form of finite existence, since it is the individual's encounter with the singularity of God. The question of the meaning of faith appears in the work Fear and Trembling (1843), in which the philosopher demonstrates that faith goes beyond the ethical ideal of life itself. Other important themes that are present in Kierkegaard's works are “anguish” (the individual's way of existence) and “despair” (understood as the true “mortal illness”). Kierkegaard stated that, outside of faith, there is only despair. We will see, in the course of our reading, that there is a strong religious aspect in Kierkegaard's philosophy, and that the individual's existence only becomes authentic in the face of God's transcendence – many consider that his philosophy is configured as a true theological autobiography. Let us now deepen our study. Through the category of the individual, Kierkegaard attacks speculative philosophy, especially the Hegelian system. According to him, philosophy used to be interested only in concepts, leaving aside the concrete existence and its singularity, that is, philosophy was concerned with the concept of man. However, existence is not a concept at all. Existence, in this sense, corresponds to singular reality, to the individual: “a singular man certainly does not have a conceptual existence”. This historical importance to the category of the individual, therefore, is also linked to the unveiling of the lie present in philosophical systems that prioritize concepts to the detriment of existence. The system that Kierkegaard attacks, as previously stated, is Hegel's, which intends to explain everything and demonstrate the necessity of every event, but does not cover existence. Hegel and his system represented something “comical” for him. Kierkegaard went so far as to declare that Hegelianism was a “brilliant spirit of rottenness”, “the most repugnant of all forms of debauchery”. The Hegelian system would be “grotesque” because it aims to talk about the absolute, but it forgot the individual, it did not understand existence. Thus, for Hegel, what counts is not the individual, but humanity, while, for Kierkegaard, the individual counts more, and it is the contestation and rejection of the system. The “individual” is the category through which, from a religious point of view, time, history and humanity must pass. In short, the individual and faith are correlated: the very fact of being a Christian is the central fact of existence. Unlike the animal, which is determined, guided by instincts, that is, it has an essence (and the essence is within the scope of what is necessary), the individual's way of being is existence, which is the kingdom of freedom: man It's what you choose to be, it's what you become. Existence forces you to choose and this implies a risk, generates anguish. In this way, the way of being of existence is possibility, and Kierkegaard considered it “the heaviest of categories”. In possibility, everything is possible, so there is a terrible side to it, which is perdition, annihilation, which are side by side with man. Existence is freedom, it is possibility: of not choosing, of choosing and losing oneself, as a possibility of threat from nothing. Thus, reality is anguish. Imagine a feeling of what is possible, of what could happen and what could be more terrible than reality itself. The possible, therefore, is about the future. Anguish and future are united. Anxiety characterizes the human condition: those who live in sin are anguished by the possibility of repentance; whoever lives, having freed himself from sin, lives in the anguish of falling back on it. But it is important to understand that anguish uncovers all illusions. If anguish is typical of man in his relationship with the world, despair is typical of man in his relationship with himself. For Kierkegaard, despair is the fault of the man who does not know how to accept himself in his depths. And, for Kierkegaard, despair is a “mortal disease”, something like an “eternal dying without, however,