In early 19th-century Copenhagen, a man with a six-inch crest of tousled hair and a coat the color of red cabbage wandered the crooked streets chatting with politicians, laborers, and maids alike, hiding a crushing melancholy and the scandal of a broken engagement. This deep dive uncovers the man behind the concepts: Søren Kierkegaard, the reluctant godfather of existentialism. It starts in a household where his father Michael, a wealthy wool merchant raised in extreme poverty, believed God had cursed the family and predicted all his children would die before him, while simultaneously hosting Copenhagen’s sharpest intellectual salons. Five of seven children did die early, and the boy nicknamed the fork for his skewering wit absorbed both the dread and the logic.

The episode explains why Kierkegaard rejected the all-encompassing Hegelian system, using the analogy of a marching band viewed from a blimp versus a musician on the ground who has dropped his sheet music, and why he searched instead for an idea he could live and die for. It covers his 7,000-page journal as a laboratory for subjective truth, the devastating 1841 break with Regine Olsen that he framed as protecting her from his inherited melancholy, his pioneering method of indirect communication through pseudonymous authors who argue with one another, and the structure of Either/Or with its aesthetic seducer A and the ethical Judge Wilhelm. It closes with his single-day publication of three books in October 1843, his fierce attack on the Danish state church in The Moment, his refusal of communion on his deathbed in 1855 at age 42, and the delayed fuse that later ignited Sartre, Heidegger, Viktor Frankl, and Rollo May.

• How Moravian guilt and rational debate coexisted in one Copenhagen home
• Objective versus subjective truth: the textbook fact of death versus the 3 a.m. realization you will die
• Why he built a cast of fictional authors instead of writing straightforward essays
• His critique of automatic state Christianity as a comfortable social club that risks nothing
• How a Danish writer unknown outside Scandinavia became the source code for existential psychology