Søren Kierkegaard

Key ideas

1. The single individual and indirect communication. Kierkegaard wrote for the single individual, not for a system or a crowd, and held that ethical and religious truth cannot be handed over directly. He used pseudonyms, irony and parable so that readers would have to appropriate the questions for themselves.
2. The three spheres of existence. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms present life-views: the aesthetic, which pursues pleasure and the interesting while avoiding commitment; the ethical, which takes up marriage, work and duty; and the religious, which is a relation to God. Irony and humour mark the borders between them.
3. Truth is subjectivity. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Johannes Climacus declares that truth is subjectivity. In questions of how to live and what to believe about one’s own existence, detached objectivity does not help, and what matters is how one relates, with passion, to what one holds true.
4. Faith. In Philosophical Fragments Climacus calls the Incarnation, God becoming a human being, the Absolute Paradox, believed “by virtue of the absurd”. Faith is a qualitative leap beyond what reason can prove, though defenders deny that it is irrational.
5. The teleological suspension of the ethical. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de silentio asks whether Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac shows that a person’s relation to God can stand above the universal demands of ethics. Abraham is the model of the knight of faith.
6. Anxiety and despair. In The Concept of Anxiety anxiety is “the dizziness of freedom”, not a pathology but an awareness of one’s own freedom. In The Sickness Unto Death despair arises when the self fails to hold together its finite and infinite sides, and the self cannot ground itself alone.
7. Against Christendom. Kierkegaard attacked the Danish state church for treating Christianity as a comfortable social inheritance, and aimed to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom, as a demanding way of life that has to be chosen.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), also written Soren Kierkegaard, was a Danish philosopher, theologian and writer, often called the first existentialist. He asked what it means to exist as a single individual who must choose how to live, and he held that the deepest questions of ethics and religion are not settled by objective argument or by a philosophical system. Much of his work was published under pseudonyms.

Who was Søren Kierkegaard?

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children of a wealthy merchant, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. He studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and defended his dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, on 29 September 1841. He never became a pastor, and an inheritance let him write without a salary. In 1840 he became engaged to Regine Olsen and broke the engagement in 1841; he never married.

Between 1843 and 1846 he published Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In 1846 the satirical paper The Corsair mocked him in print. In 1854–55 he attacked the Church of Denmark in newspaper articles and in the pamphlets of The Moment. He collapsed in the street and died in Frederiks Hospital in Copenhagen on 11 November 1855, aged 42.

Why did he write under pseudonyms?

Kierkegaard thought that ethical and religious truth cannot be passed on directly, so he gave different views of life to invented authors: Victor Eremita for Either/Or, Johannes de silentio for Fear and Trembling, Johannes Climacus for the Fragments and the Postscript, Anti-Climacus for The Sickness Unto Death. His model was Socrates. He signed his Upbuilding Discourses and Works of Love himself. Readers should not assume that a pseudonym speaks for Kierkegaard, and scholars take care over which claims are his own.

What are the three spheres of existence?

In Either/Or the aesthete A lives for pleasure and “the interesting”, and Judge William replies that a life of marriage, work and commitment has a unity that an aesthetic life lacks. The religious sphere is a relation to God. Irony lies between the aesthetic and the ethical, and humour between the ethical and the religious. These are best read as ways of understanding a life, not a ladder.

Is truth subjective?

In the Postscript Climacus says that “truth is subjectivity”, and also that subjectivity is untruth. The point concerns questions of existence: how to live, and whether to believe in Christianity. On these, a detached observer has no advantage, and the question is how one relates to what one holds true. It is not a general theory of truth, and Climacus is not a relativist: he is speaking of existence and of Christian claims that cannot be proved objectively. This was aimed at the Danish Hegelians and at the idea that Hegel’s system could comprehend all of life. Scholars note that Hegel himself comes in for less direct criticism than is often supposed.

What is the leap?

In the Fragments Climacus calls the Incarnation the Absolute Paradox, which can be believed only “by virtue of the absurd”. The “leap of faith” is commonly attributed to Kierkegaard, but the phrase is not in his Danish text; he wrote of a “qualitative leap”. Kierkegaard is often called a fideist, and the Stanford Encyclopedia notes that the label is disputed: his defenders say faith is incomprehensible to reason but not irrational. See fideism.

Fear and Trembling applies this to Abraham, commanded to sacrifice Isaac. Johannes de silentio asks whether Abraham’s obedience is a “teleological suspension of the ethical”, and he cannot justify it in ordinary moral terms. Levinas answered that the suspension of the ethical is a kind of violence.

What are anxiety and despair?

In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) anxiety is “the dizziness of freedom”. Angst is not an illness for Kierkegaard but an awareness of one’s own freedom. In The Sickness Unto Death (1849) the self is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, the necessary and the possible. Despair occurs when that synthesis fails, and the self cannot be grounded by itself alone; in the end, Anti-Climacus says, only God can ground it. Compare the later idea of authenticity and Camus’s idea of the absurd.

Influence

Kierkegaard wrote in Danish and was first read mainly in Scandinavia; by 1900 his writings had been translated into French, German and other languages. In the 1920s the dialectical theologians around Karl Barth and the dialogue philosophers Martin Buber, Ferdinand Ebner and Franz Rosenzweig took him up, and existential philosophy has its origin in his concept of individuality. Heidegger cites him only sparingly in Being and Time, though commentators note a large debt, and Sartre is also discussed in relation to him. Unlike Nietzsche or Sartre, Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist. Karl Löwith thought him and Marx the two greatest philosophical successors of Hegel.

How should you start reading Kierkegaard?

Begin with Fear and Trembling, or with the first part of Either/Or, whose sections are short. The Sickness Unto Death is more systematic, and the Postscript is long and ironic. The UGC NET syllabus lists “Subjectivity as Truth” and the leap of faith, and UPSC Paper I names Kierkegaard under existentialism; see the UGC NET guide and the UPSC guide. The existentialism guide places him among later thinkers.