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 sys ...