PHIL304 Study Guide


Unit 2: Søren Kierkegaard

2a. Identify key developments in Kierkegaard's philosophical thinking

  • Why do many consider Kierkegaard the first modern existentialist?
  • What is Kierkegaard's issue with the aesthetic approach to life?
  • In what ways does Kierkegaard's biography form his philosophical thinking?
  • How do Kierkegaard's pseudonyms serve his idea of indirect communication?
  • Why does Kierkegaard believe Christianity is founded on a paradox?
  • How does Kierkegaard formulate his view that individual existence is a category?

Many consider Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher, theologian, critic, and poet, the first modern existentialist. As a religious existentialist, Kierkegaard invited readers to move from the aesthetic to the religious life. Those who follow an aesthetic approach are mere spectators. They avoid becoming involved, are entertained by observation, and strive to be interesting to others. A key feature of the aesthete's approach is to avoid commitment and complete engagement in life. The aesthetic is disengaged and superficial.

Kierkegaard asked how we can move beyond this comfortable condition. He suggested our lives are distinctively individual because the entirety of our experiences differ from everyone else's. Our most extreme and intense experiences – the ones that give rise to fear and trembling, sickness unto death, and dread – are of utmost concern. Experiencing these intense states forces us to emerge from the comfort of our aesthetic approach to life.

As Walter Kaufmann puts it, "Kierkegaard wants to upset us" and "make things more difficult." (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 1, 21:10)

Kierkegaard criticized any philosophy that asks us to put our trust in reason and science, which aims to make life palatable and Christianity acceptable. Christianity is "outrageous" in every sense of that word. After all, the original outrage is the Christian doctrine of incarnation: in which God is made into man. The infinite (God) entering into the finite (man) is an affront to reason: it is a paradox, or absurdity.

Kierkegaard lived most of his life in Denmark, where his father, a deeply religious man, cast a dark shadow over his early life. In an act of despair Kierkegaard's father had cursed God for the poverty that surrounded his youth. Kierkegaard's father also committed the sin of impregnating his future wife, Kierkegaard's mother, out of wedlock. Kierkegaard was also plagued by physical ailments and was rarely allowed outdoors due to physical health difficulties (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 1, 24:28). 

The original sin he believed he inherited from his father tormented Kierkegaard: he went so far as to break off his engagement with his beloved fiancé Regina Olsen because he believed he was unworthy of her. Since he did not have the courage to end the relationship himself, he began behaving badly in public to convince her to leave him. In addition to an incident involving a local paper he despised and his polemics against the Lutheran church, Kierkegaard was deeply affected by these conflicts and a pervasive melancholy he inherited from his father. Kierkegaard also strongly believed the church had betrayed the true meaning of Christianity (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 1, 30:35).

Kierkegaard believed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a popular philosopher in Denmark at the time, helped reduce and meld the individual into the crowd, abstracting away what it meant to be an existing individual. Kierkegaard rejected Hegel's attempt to document the ever-expanding rationalization of the universe to increase our understanding to the point of absolute knowledge. Kierkegaard believed Hegel's rationalization incorrectly tried to make sense of faith, rather than emphasize its utter resistance and affront to reason. According to Kierkegaard, Hegel's view flattened God into the comprehensible, via a logical system that made everything intelligible, which God is not. 

Kirkegaard rejected a professorial or sermonic approach to favor a style that was purposely exasperating and encouraged self-examination. "He means to exasperate, he means to annoy, he means to upset, does not mean to just entertain." (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 1, 37:35)

In each of his works, Kiekegaard supports emboldening the individual to ask what they would do. This is the existential approach. Kirkegaard aimed to disrupt complacency and force individuals to confront the genuine difficulty of existence and the true nature of Christianity.

The nature of faith precludes anything resembling direct instruction, or a mediated relationship between God and the individual. Kierkegaard believed that no amount of sermonizing or rehearsing the rituals associated with religious belief would suffice for faith, nor could he have set forth a series of treatises on what it means to believe. Instead, the pseudonyms point the reader in the direction of an unmediated confrontation with the absurd.

Kierkegaard denounced organized religion: he described the Christianity of his day as a religion of convenience, comfort, and complacency. But we can apply his critique beyond 19th-century Denmark (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 2, 8:38).

According to Kierkegaard, we can only recognize what Christianity actually demands by entering the radical category of the individual. Deep religiosity conflicts directly with the objective, scientific, and rational.

For Kierkegaard, religious belief is an outrage to reason because it demands a belief in the absurd. Most Christians are in despair; they are in the wrong relationship with themselves, but do not know it. They run from themselves in various ways – in pursuit of philosophy, science, and the crowd (the church community) – which all facilitate the escape of the individual. Kierkegaard believes one should stand alone, against these promoters of despair (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 2, 19:35).

To review, see:


2b. Summarize Kierkegaard's analysis of faith in his work Fear and Trembling

  • What is the central problem in Kirekegaard's book Fear and Trembling?
  • How does Kierkegaard justify Abraham's behavior?
  • What, according to Kierkegaard, makes Abraham a knight of faith?
  • What is the leap of faith?

In his book Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard focused on the impossibility of understanding Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac. We cannot appeal to an objective feature in our lives to determine whether Abraham, "the Father of Faith," is a murderer or God's servant. "Since public reason cannot decide the issue for us, we must decide for ourselves as a matter of religious faith." (Section 4, Søren Kierkegaard)

Kierkegaard did not justify Abraham's behavior in moral or ethical terms:

"The ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he would murder Isaac; the religious expression is that he would sacrifice Isaac; but precisely in this contradiction consists the dread which can well make a man sleepless, and yet Abraham is not what he is without this dread." (Chapter 2, Fear and Trembling)

The justification is purely religious, or existential. The contrasting categories are the universal (social morality) and the particular (the individual who must make choices). The universal cannot be in a direct, personal relationship with God; only the individual can.

The existing individual is the position Abraham occupies by his choice to sacrifice Isaac:

"Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior – yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute." (Chapter 3, Fear and Trembling)

According to Kierkegaard, Abraham is a knight of faith, rather than a knight of infinite resignation or a tragic hero: he not only obeyed God's commands, but he retained the hope that Isaac would be returned to him in this life. The Knight of Infinite Resignation would not have this hope. The tragic hero makes sacrifices in the service of societal norms.

Abraham's sacrifice represents a teleological suspension of the ethical, rather than an outright abandonment of it. His duty to sacrifice Isaac was a duty. It is not one, however, that can manifest itself in societal ethics:

"Abraham recognizes a duty to something higher than both his social duty not to kill an innocent person and his personal commitment to his beloved son, viz. his duty to obey God's commands. However, he cannot give an intelligible ethical justification of his act to the community in terms of social norms, but must simply obey the divine command." (Section 4, Søren Kierkegaard)

Kirkegaard's concept of the leap of faith was a movement against reason itself, a movement that also placed Abraham outside of the ethical.

Review chapters two to five in Fear and Trembling and the sections "Kierkegaard's Ethics" and "Kierkegaard's Religion" in Søren Kierkegaard.


2c. Describe Kierkegaard's philosophical critique of rationalism in philosophy

  • What is the relation between Kierkegaard's rejection of the crowd and his critique of rationalism?
  • What is Kierkegaard's primary objection to Hegel's philosophy?

Kierkegaard characterized the period he lived in as one that emphasized the crowd over the individual. Societal institutions, particularly those that were educational or religious, cultivated homogeneity rather than individuality. This approach diminished the existential reflection that yielded personal responsibility for beliefs and choices. Kierkegaard saw himself as a corrective force in a society where people blindly found truth in the crowd and their institutions.

Kirkegaard argued that Hegelianism provided the philosophical foundation for these institutions. According to Hegel's system, reason could ultimately "access God's mind" and the universe was fundamentally knowable; it is rational and everything could be explained. By following the "science of logic," God becomes intelligible. Kierkegaard directs most of his most fervent philosophical critique against this view, and its implications.

Review The Crowd is Untruth and the "Kierkegaard's Rhetoric" section in Søren Kierkegaard.


2d. Define Kierkegaard's notion of despair

  • What is the sickness unto death?
  • What are the three forms of despair?

Despair is the sickness unto death (the title for Kirkegaard's 1849 book) and "is inherent to the human condition." Despair is the result of an "imbalance" or condition within the self, and is resolved only through a relationship with God.

Kirkegaard describes three forms of despair:

  1. being unaware of being in despair;
  2. being aware of being in despair, but believing you cannot do anything about it; and
  3. defiantly rejecting the concept itself.

The process of working through despair traverses from ignorance to defiance. This process involves the development of the self as an existing individual in relation to God. 

One way to think about the development of the self is in terms of our various relationships. The self is not simply a combination of mind, or soul, and body, but a process of relationships. The individual must consider how their beliefs and attitudes relate to, match up with, and comport with how one is, or how we exist in the world.

Developing the self is a continual process of synthesizing and relating various features of the self to everything else. (Kierkegaard on the Self, 25:03) The process of realizing the self is dynamic, which implies continuous activity, effort, and renewal. Contrast this process with viewing the self, and religious belief, as something static: a set of habits we form and fix. (Kierkegaard on the Self, 26:48)

Review the discussion of despair in Kierkegaard on the Self (begin at 6:25) and in the last paragraph of "Kierkegaard's Rhetoric" and the fifth paragraph of "Kierkegaard's Ethics" in Søren Kierkegaard.


2e. Explain Kierkegaard's idea that truth is subjectivity

  • What are the "stages on life's way"?
  • How does Kierkegaard define the aesthetic, ethical, and religious?
  • What does Kierkegaard mean when he says, "truth is subjectivity"?

According to Kierkegaard, the stages on life's way include the aesthetic, ethical, and religious. An individual can pass through each stage of existence successively, or remain at the aesthetic or ethical stage. These stages are not necessarily disconnected from each other and we can understand the stages as paradigms for living, rather than as periods through which one inevitably lives.

The aesthetic life is a sensuous and fragmentary one. The aesthete enjoys art, literature, and music and can even appreciate the Bible and Christ in an aesthetic sense, with Christ as a tragic hero. The aesthete focuses on what is interesting (in the moment), enjoys possibilities not actualities, and continuously seeks to escape boredom by transforming the everyday into something poetic.

The ethical life is characterized by duty, while the religious life is characterized by the "passionate inwardness" of subjectivity, in direct relation to God and the Absolute. The ethical is preserved in the religious. To be subjective is to look inward, to seek a truthful relationship with God. Subjectivity is a type of passion, which is "subjectivity's highest expression." In this passion truth becomes a paradox. Subjectivity's passionate inwardness comprehends the paradox of the eternal existing in time.

Review the sections "Kierkegaard's Aesthetics," "Kierkegaard's Ethics," and "Kierkegaard's Religion" in Søren Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 2.


Unit 2 Vocabulary

  • Absolute knowledge
  • Absurdity
  • Aesthetic
  • Aesthetic life
  • Category
  • Crowd
  • Doctrine of incarnation
  • Despair
  • Dread
  • Ethical life
  • Exasperating
  • Fear and Trembling
  • Indirect communication
  • Individual existence
  • Knight of Faith
  • Knight of Infinite Resignation
  • Leap of Faith
  • Paradox
  • Pseudonym
  • Rationalism
  • Religious life
  • Sickness unto Death
  • Subjective
  • Subjectivity
  • Synthesizing
  • Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
  • Universal particular
  • Tragic hero