Unit 2: Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish Christian philosopher, theologian, and social critic, widely considered a founding existentialist figure. Convinced that the Christian faith had gone astray, Kierkegaard was a fierce critic of religious dogma. In Kierkegaard's view, you must earn your relationship with God through dedication and suffering.
According to Kierkegaard, a person becomes a committed, responsible human being by making difficult decisions and sacrifices. The force of Kierkegaard's philosophy rests in the notion that human life is paradoxical and absurd and that confronting this absurdity makes us fully human (a theme revisited by Albert Camus, as we will discuss in Unit 8).
This unit introduces you to Kierkegaard's life and religious philosophy, along with an overview of themes that later philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir will call "existentialism". These key existentialist themes include the notions of commitment and responsibility, absurdity, anxiety, and authenticity.
This unit will also note the work of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) as a fellow theistic existentialist to Kierkegaard. Many philosophers believe Pascal was a precursor to the existentialist movement due to his concerns about the constraints of human existence or "finitude", perpetual change, uncertainty, suffering in human life, and the irrationality of human behavior.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 4 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- identify key developments in Kierkegaard's philosophical thinking;
- summarize Kierkegaard's version of religious existentialism in relation to Pascal's;
- summarize Kierkegaard's analysis of faith; and
- define Kierkegaard's notion of despair.
2.1: Kierkegaard's Philosophical Thinking
Many consider Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher, theologian, critic, and poet, the first modern existentialist. He was deeply concerned with what philosophers call the "human condition". So long as we live, we are imprisoned in a world of striving, aspiration, and suffering. The human predicament is inextricably linked to our quest for absolutes and the frustrating knowledge that absolutes are out of reach. Kierkegaard wanted to help humans find meaning in their existence as mortal, finite, and time-bound beings.
Read this article about Soren Kierkegaard. Do you think Kierkegaard's personal life informed his approach to philosophizing and considerations of existentialism? Do you believe his philosophy would have been different if the circumstances of his life had been different?
Watch this video. How does Kierkegaard explain anxiety and angst? Do you notice traces of his ideas in how we perform and conceptualize psychology in today's society? Pay attention to Kierkegaard's popular ideas on the "leap of faith" and the three phases of life (aesthetic, ethical, religious). Do you think his ideas are too far-fetched? Do you believe his emphasis on emotion and choice, rather than logic or scientific research, is effective?
2.2: Kierkegaard's Religious Existentialism in Relation to Pascal
Kierkegaard lived most of his life in Denmark, where his extremely devout father cast a terrible shadow over his childhood. Kierkegaard's father had cursed God in desperation for the poverty that enveloped his son's upbringing. Kierkegaard's father also sinned by having an extramarital affair with his future bride, Kierkegaard's mother. Kierkegaard (the son, our philosopher) was also troubled by physical problems and was rarely permitted to go outside owing to physical health issues (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 1, 24:28).
Kierkegaard was tortured by the original sin he believed he inherited from his father. He went so far as to call off his engagement to his beloved fiancée Regina Olsen because he felt unworthy of her. He began behaving badly in public to get her to leave him since he lacked the strength to end the relationship. In addition to an incident that involved 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).
Listen to this lecture on the life and philosophy of Kierkegaard. Why does Kierkegaard believe there is a crisis with religion? What is the cure? Do you think this is relevant to today's cultural sentiments about religion?
Kierkegaard wanted to understand how humans can live an authentically-religious life while they are surrounded by those who are inauthentically religious. He opposed any philosophy that relies on reason and science to make life easier and make Christendom more palatable. In this context, "Christendom" did not refer to Christianity alone but to the official Church of Denmark, which had merged with Danish cultural society. His duty was to inform his fellow citizens that Christendom was giving "lip service" to original Christian theology and that Christianity in Denmark had become shallow.
Kierkegaard's critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a popular philosopher in Denmark, provided fodder for his analysis of Christendom. Hegel believed he could explain all of reality, including religions such as Christianity, through a philosophical or conceptual system. Hegel's logical approach reduced God to the understandable, which God is not, according to Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard mocked Hegel's assertions by demonstrating plenty of things in the world that philosophy cannot explain. Kierkegaard feared that Hegel's devotion to systems or masses would negate the individual – he argued that subjectivity is far superior to abstract, systemic theories. For example, he suggested that we cannot easily grasp the concept of "faith" through some universal, objective theorizing. Individuals would understand faith better through actual, subjective living experiences.
Using similar logic, Blaise Pascal suggested that humans have more to gain by believing in God, even though God is entirely beyond our understanding. According to Pascal, faith is not "a given": we do not inherit faith from tradition or social norms. Rather, faith is entirely an individualized commitment. Individuals cannot shrink from faith: "you must choose". The wager is your life, and only the individual can make this gamble. Consequently, existential choice is at the core of Pascal's wager about God's existence.
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 individual's escape. Kierkegaard believes one should stand alone against these promoters of despair (Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion Part 2, 19:35).
Listen to the second part of this lecture on the life and philosophy of Kierkegaard. Do things stand out to you as you ponder your relationship with yourself, your culture, and your spirituality? Do you think Kierkegaard's solutions would work for everyone, or might he only be addressing certain segments of our global community?
Ultimately, the "wager" Pascal proposes should make the potential consequences of the choice (to believe or not to believe) clear. After you read, think about these questions. What is the worst that could happen if you choose not to believe in God, and it turns out God does exist? If God exists, why does Pascal believe we are destined to suffer in this life?
2.3: Kierkegaard's Analysis of Faith in Fear and Trembling
In his book Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard focuses 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.
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.
– Fear and Trembling, Chapter 2The 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.
– Fear and Trembling, Chapter 3According 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 during 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. His duty to sacrifice Isaac was a duty. However, it is not one 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.
Kirkegaard's concept of the "leap of faith" was a movement against reason itself, a movement that also placed Abraham outside of the ethical.
This excerpt from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling discusses the Knight of Faith. What are the differences between the knight of faith and the knight of infinite resignation?
Watch this video, which discusses Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith". What does Kierkegaard mean by the "teleological suspension of the ethical"? What makes Abraham a "Knight of Faith", according to Kierkegaard? When is the leap of faith necessary, according to Kierkegaard? Could you, or would you, make such a leap? Is there a place for reason and reasoned arguments within Kierkegaard's view of life?
2.4: Kierkegaard's Notion of Despair in The Sickness unto Death
Despair is the "sickness unto death" (the title of Kirkegaard's 1849 book) and "is inherent to the human condition". Despair results from an "imbalance" or condition within the self and is resolved only through a relationship with God.
Kirkegaard describes three forms of despair:- being unaware of being in despair;
- being aware of being in despair but believing you cannot do anything about it; and
- 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 a relationship with 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. This process of realizing the self is dynamic, implying continuous activity, effort, and renewal. Contrast this process with viewing the self and religious belief as static: a set of habits we form and fix.
Kierkegaard proposes three levels or stages of individual existence that humans must pass through to become an authentic self. Those who live at the first level, the aesthetic, might expect to encounter meaninglessness and irresponsibility, entertainment, and pleasure. These people are motivated by satisfaction rather than meaningful commitments to something larger than themselves, which leads to a life of despair. According to Kierkegaard, this mode of living is the norm rather than the exception for most people.
Kierkegaard proposed that our lives are distinctively unique because the sum of our experiences differs from everyone else's. Our most extreme and intense experiences – those that cause fear and trembling, sickness to the point of death, and dread – are of the utmost importance. Experiencing these powerful experiences forces us to leave the safety of our aesthetic way of life.
The second level of existence is the ethical. We must embark on a journey of self-discovery by making choices that commit us to a particular direction in life. This enables humans to demonstrate consistency, coherency, and responsibility (which they lacked in the aesthetic) while reinforcing societal values that transcend individual desires.
The third level is the religious sphere, which is inextricably linked. The ethical and religious spheres are based on recognizing a higher reality that gives significance to actions. Living in the ethical realm requires a commitment to some universal ethical rules; living in the religious sphere entails an immediate and direct relationship with the Eternal. This is the highest plane of existence for Kierkegaard, yet he believes that almost no one lives a truly religious life.
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 that 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.
Listen to this discussion of Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death. What is Kierkegaard's "three-step system", as discussed in the lecture? How is this system relevant to you as an existing human being? What does Kierkegaard mean when he says that "the sickness is not unto death"? Consider the distinction between authentic and inauthentic despair, according to Kierkegaard. How is despair related to the tension, in human existence, between the finite and the infinite?
Watch this film that discusses the intersections among the famous philosophers Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger, and Jaspers. Does it seem like Americans received certain existentialist philosophers more favorably than others? Why do you think that was the case? What role does individualism play in uniting these philosophers in existential study? Did it perhaps contribute to their reception across the globe?
Unit 2 Assessment
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