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, widely regarded as the father of existentialism. Born in Copenhagen to a wealthy and intensely religious family, he studied theology and philosophy at its university and crammed an extraordinary body of work into a short life, much of it written under a gallery of pseudonyms — Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus and others — each voicing a distinct standpoint Kierkegaard wanted to dramatise rather than simply assert. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), he is essential for the nature of faith, the relationship between reason and belief, and the existentialist critique of systematic philosophy and institutional religion. His governing conviction is that the most important truths cannot be reached by detached speculation but only by passionate, first-person appropriation — that "truth is subjectivity."

This lesson sets out his revolt against Hegel and "the crowd"; the three stages or spheres of existence; the teleological suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling; the claim that subjectivity is truth; the leap of faith and the absolute paradox of the Incarnation; the analysis of anxiety; and the major criticisms, before weighing whether his account makes faith irrational.

Kierkegaard's Context: Against Hegel and the Crowd

To understand Kierkegaard one must see what he is reacting against. The reigning philosophy was the absolute idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), a vast system claiming to comprehend the whole of reality through reason. Hegel held that history is the progressive self-unfolding of Geist (Spirit) through a dialectical movement, advancing towards absolute knowledge in which all oppositions are reconciled. Religion, on this view, is a lower, pictorial form of a truth that philosophy states more adequately in concepts — so faith is, in the end, superseded by thought.

Kierkegaard's objections are pointed:

• The system forgets the existing individual. Hegel's philosophy trades in abstract categories and world-historical processes but has no place for the single person who must actually live, choose, suffer and die. "A system of existence cannot be given," Climacus insists: a system can be constructed for thought, but existence is precisely what resists being closed into a finished system, because the systematiser is himself still existing.
• Existence is not a concept. To exist is not to be a logical moment in a deduction but to be in becoming — to face an open future and have to decide. Comprehending one's own existence by pure thought is, in the famous image, like trying to dance in chains.
• Hegel abolishes the faith/reason distinction. By making religion a deficient form of knowledge, Hegel dissolves faith into philosophy. For Kierkegaard, faith is not poor knowledge but a qualitatively different relation to truth, engaging the whole person.
• "The crowd is untruth." Kierkegaard distrusted the way mass society and an established Christendom let individuals dissolve their responsibility into the anonymous "public." The crowd offers the comfort of numbers but strips the individual of the very thing that matters — standing alone before God. Truth is found not in the herd but in the inward, personal relationship of the "single individual" (den Enkelte).

Key term: the single individual (den Enkelte). Kierkegaard's category for the human being considered not as a specimen of the species or a unit of the crowd, but as a unique self answerable, in the end, only before God. He wished it inscribed on his tombstone.

The personal background sharpens the polemic. Kierkegaard's own life was marked by what he called "the thorn in the flesh": a brooding, melancholic father whose guilt-laden Christianity shadowed him; the broken engagement to Regine Olsen, whom he loved but renounced as incompatible with his vocation (an experience that plainly informs Fear and Trembling's meditation on giving up what one loves); and a bruising public feud with the satirical paper The Corsair. These are not mere biography: they fed his conviction that the truths worth having are won in suffering and inwardness, never in the smooth generalities of "the System" or the self-congratulation of the crowd. Where Hegel sought to mediate every opposition into a higher unity, Kierkegaard insisted that the decisive choices of existence are either/or, not both/and — one cannot split the difference between the aesthetic and the ethical, or hedge one's bet between offence and faith.

The Three Stages of Existence

A central contribution is his account of the three stages (or "spheres") of existence, developed across Either/Or (1843), Stages on Life's Way (1845) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). These are not moments of a Hegelian dialectic that flow logically into one another; they are qualitatively distinct ways of living between which a person must choose by an act of will. The transition is not argued but leapt.

• The aesthetic stage. The aesthete lives for the immediate — pleasure, novelty, mood, the interesting — and above all to escape boredom, which he treats as the root of all evil. He keeps every option open and binds himself to nothing; in the essay "The Rotation of Crops" the aesthete even theorises boredom-avoidance into an art, varying his pleasures arbitrarily to keep experience fresh. Kierkegaard dramatises this through "A" in Either/Or and the cold, calculating figure of the "Diary of a Seducer," for whom another person is merely material for an interesting conquest. The aesthetic life ends in despair, because a self built on shifting moods and external stimulation has no continuity and finally no self at all; the aesthete is forever fleeing himself, and the more cultivated his pursuit of the interesting, the emptier he becomes.
• The ethical stage. The ethical person takes on commitment, duty and continuity, living transparently by universal moral norms and taking responsibility for a life that has a history. Its paradigm is marriage — the very thing the seducer flees — a vow sustained through time and defended at length by "Judge Wilhelm" in the second part of Either/Or. Where the aesthete has moods, the ethical self chooses itself: it is the choice to be a self at all, to "will one thing," to be accountable. Yet the ethical too proves insufficient. Confronted honestly with the full demand of the moral law, the individual discovers not merely that he sometimes fails but that he cannot fulfil it — that he stands in guilt before an ideal he cannot reach by his own effort. This collision with sin and inadequacy is not a defeat to be patched up within ethics but the very thing that opens onto the third sphere, where the self's relation is no longer to the universal law but to God.
• The religious stage. The religious person relates absolutely to the Absolute — to God — by a leap of faith that reason and even ethics cannot underwrite. Kierkegaard distinguishes "religiousness A" (a general, immanent inwardness) from "religiousness B" (specifically Christian faith, hinging on the paradox of the God in time). The religious stage can require a teleological suspension of the ethical: the setting-aside of universal moral norms in obedience to God's absolute command. Its paradigm is Abraham.

Key term: leap (Spring). The decisive, non-rational transition by which a person passes from one sphere of existence to another, or commits to God. It cannot be reached by argument; reason can clear the ground, but the movement itself is an act of freedom and passion, not a conclusion.

Abraham and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical

Kierkegaard's most searching treatment of faith is Fear and Trembling (1843), under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio ("John of Silence" — the author confesses he can describe faith but does not have it). The book circles obsessively around Genesis 22, in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah, only to halt his hand at the last moment.

• The teleological suspension of the ethical. Judged by universal ethics, what Abraham sets out to do is murder — the killing of his own child, for which there is no ethical justification, since ethics knows no duty higher than not to kill the innocent. Yet Abraham obeys, suspending the ethical for the sake of a higher telos: his absolute duty to God. Faith, here, is not below ethics but beyond it; the individual stands in a relation to the Absolute that the universal cannot mediate or excuse.
• Knight of faith vs knight of infinite resignation. De Silentio contrasts two figures. The knight of infinite resignation renounces what he loves, accepting its loss with tragic nobility — he gives Isaac up forever and finds peace in the renunciation. The knight of faith makes that same movement of renunciation and then a second, harder movement: he believes, "by virtue of the absurd," that he will receive Isaac back in this life. Abraham journeys to Moriah genuinely prepared to lose Isaac, yet simultaneously believing he will not — holding both at once. Strikingly, de Silentio says the knight of faith is outwardly indistinguishable from an ordinary "tax-collector": he is wholly at home in the finite, takes joy in it, and bears no tragic air, precisely because he has it all back "by virtue of the absurd." That double movement — renunciation and glad reception of the finite — not the willingness to kill, is what makes Abraham the knight of faith, and it is why de Silentio confesses he can admire but cannot understand him.
• Faith as anxiety, not serenity. Kierkegaard insists faith is no comfortable assurance but is shot through with dread and trembling. Abraham cannot explain himself to Sarah, to Isaac, or even to the ethical world, for his act is, from the outside, indistinguishable from that of a murderer. Faith is lived in this incommunicable solitude and Angst.

"The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal." — Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

Subjectivity is Truth

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), writing as Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard advances his most famous and most misread claim: "truth is subjectivity."

It does not mean that truth is whatever one fancies (a relativism he would reject). It means that, for existential and religious truth, the mode of appropriation — the how of believing — matters more than the bare what. Such truth is not a proposition one can hold at arm's length but a lived relationship embraced with passion and inwardness.

• Objective truth concerns objects and can be established impersonally — mathematics, history, natural science. Here the what is everything and the believer's involvement is irrelevant.
• Subjective truth can be possessed only through personal engagement. To assent to "God is love" as a theological proposition is not yet to know God's love in the venturing of one's life upon it. Climacus even defines truth, in this register, as "an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness."
• His provocative test case: a person who prays "with the entire passion of the infinite" though directed at an idol stands, he suggests, in more truth than one who prays to the true God in a spiritless, habitual way — because the first has the inward relation that religious truth requires and the second does not. The point is not to endorse idolatry but to insist that how one relates is inseparable from religious truth.

Climacus illuminates this with the contrast between Socrates and speculative philosophy. Socrates, who knew that he did not know, held the truth of immortality with the passionate uncertainty of a whole life staked upon it; the modern speculative thinker, who can recite three proofs of immortality, may hold it with no inwardness at all and so, paradoxically, possess less of the truth that matters. The objective thinker asks what is to be known; the subjective thinker asks how I am to relate myself, in existence, to what is known. For ethical and religious truth, Kierkegaard insists, the second question is primary, because such truth is not a result to be possessed but a task to be lived — and a task is never finished while one still exists. This is also why he holds that "an objective approximation" can never ground faith: evidence always falls short of certainty, so a faith that waited on sufficient proof would wait forever, whereas real faith ventures now, in the teeth of the uncertainty, which is exactly what makes it faith rather than knowledge.

This is why, for Kierkegaard, an "approximation" of historical or philosophical proofs can never produce faith: the more one piles up objective evidence, the more one postpones the decisive, passionate commitment that faith actually is.

The Leap of Faith and the Absolute Paradox

Kierkegaard is famous for the "leap of faith," though the neat slogan is more his readers' than his own — he speaks of a "leap" and of "faith" in close company. The leap is the act by which a person commits to God without rational proof or guarantee. Why must it be a leap rather than a conclusion?