Søren Kierkegaard: Faith, Subjectivity, and the Leap

Søren Kierkegaard: Faith, Subjectivity, and the Leap

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and author who is widely regarded as the father of existentialism. Born in Copenhagen to a wealthy and deeply religious family, Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and spent his short but intensely productive life writing a extraordinary body of work that challenged the dominant philosophical and theological assumptions of his age. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), Kierkegaard is essential for understanding the nature of faith, the relationship between reason and belief, and the existentialist critique of systematic philosophy and institutional religion.

Kierkegaard’s Context: Against Hegel

To understand Kierkegaard, one must understand what he was reacting against. The dominant philosophy of his era was the absolute idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who had constructed a vast philosophical system that claimed to comprehend the whole of reality through reason. Hegel argued that history is the progressive unfolding of Geist (Spirit or Mind), moving through a dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis toward absolute knowledge. Religion, for Hegel, was a stage in this process — a way of representing in pictorial and symbolic form truths that philosophy could express more adequately in concepts.

Kierkegaard objected to Hegel’s system on multiple grounds:

• The system forgets the individual: Hegel’s philosophy deals with abstract categories and world-historical processes, but it ignores the concrete, existing individual — the person who must actually live their life, make choices, face death, and relate to God. “The system has no room for the existing individual,” Kierkegaard complained.
• Existence cannot be captured in a system: Existence is not a concept that can be slotted into a logical system. It is something lived, experienced, and suffered. The attempt to comprehend existence through pure thought is like trying to dance in a straitjacket.
• Hegel abolishes the distinction between faith and reason: By treating religion as a lower form of philosophical truth, Hegel effectively eliminates faith as a distinctive category. For Kierkegaard, faith is not a deficient form of knowledge but a qualitatively different mode of relating to truth — one that involves the whole person, not just the intellect.
• The crowd is untruth: Kierkegaard was deeply suspicious of the way Hegelianism encouraged people to lose themselves in abstract systems, social movements, and institutional Christianity. He insisted that truth is found not in the crowd but in the individual’s passionate, personal relationship with God.

The Three Stages of Existence

One of Kierkegaard’s most important contributions is his account of the three stages (or “spheres”) of existence, developed across several works including Either/Or (1843), Stages on Life’s Way (1845), and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). These are not stages in a Hegelian dialectic (there is no logical progression from one to the next) but qualitatively distinct modes of existence between which the individual must choose through an act of will:

• The Aesthetic Stage: The aesthetic individual lives for pleasure, novelty, and the avoidance of boredom. Life is organised around the pursuit of interesting experiences — sensual pleasure, romantic love, intellectual stimulation, artistic enjoyment. The aesthete refuses to make binding commitments, preferring to keep all options open. Kierkegaard portrayed this stage most vividly through the character of “A” in Either/Or and through the figure of the seducer in the “Diary of a Seducer.” The aesthetic life is ultimately unsatisfying because it leads to despair — a profound emptiness that comes from the refusal to commit oneself to anything of lasting significance. The aesthete is always running from himself.
• The Ethical Stage: The ethical individual takes on responsibility, makes commitments, and lives according to universal moral principles. The paradigm of the ethical life is marriage — a binding commitment to another person, sustained through time and difficulty. The ethical person is represented by “Judge Wilhelm” in Either/Or, who argues passionately for the superiority of the ethical life over the aesthetic. The ethical stage involves duty, consistency, and seriousness. However, even the ethical life proves insufficient, because the individual eventually confronts their own moral failure and inability to live up to the demands of the moral law. This confrontation with guilt and moral inadequacy opens the door to the third stage.
• The Religious Stage: The religious individual makes a leap of faith — a passionate, personal commitment to God that goes beyond what reason and morality can justify. The religious stage is characterised by a teleological suspension of the ethical — a willingness to set aside universal moral principles in obedience to God’s absolute command. The paradigm of the religious life is Abraham.

Abraham and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical

Kierkegaard’s most powerful exploration of religious faith appears in Fear and Trembling (1843), published under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio. The work is a sustained meditation on the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22), in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac on Mount Moriah.

Kierkegaard argued that Abraham’s willingness to obey God’s command represents the essence of religious faith:

• The teleological suspension of the ethical: From the ethical standpoint (the standpoint of universal moral duty), Abraham’s action is murder — the worst possible crime, the killing of one’s own child. There is no ethical justification for what Abraham is about to do. Yet Abraham obeys God’s command, thereby suspending the ethical in the name of a higher telos (purpose) — his absolute duty to God. Faith requires a willingness to go beyond the ethical, to obey God even when God’s command contradicts universal moral principles.
• The “knight of faith” vs. the “knight of infinite resignation”: Kierkegaard distinguished between the knight of infinite resignation (who gives up the finite world in the name of the infinite — a tragic hero) and the knight of faith (who, having made the movement of infinite resignation, also makes the further movement of faith — believing, “by virtue of the absurd,” that the finite will be restored). Abraham is a knight of faith because he believes, against all reason and evidence, that God will somehow restore Isaac to him, even as he raises the knife. “He believed by virtue of the absurd; for all human reckoning had long since ceased to function.”
• Faith is not a comfortable position: Kierkegaard emphasised that faith involves anxiety, dread, and trembling. It is not a serene confidence but a terrifying leap into the unknown. Abraham’s faith is not despite the horror of what he is about to do but through it. Genuine faith, for Kierkegaard, is always accompanied by existential Angst (anxiety).