Søren Kierkegaard

Introduction

Søren Kierkegaard is the Danish philosopher and theologian whose mid-nineteenth-century work founded the existentialist tradition and substantially reshaped modern Christian theology. He published most of his major works under pseudonyms, each pseudonym representing a distinct philosophical-religious standpoint, in a literary strategy he called indirect communication. The strategy was integral to the philosophy: Kierkegaard held that the truths he was concerned with (about faith, anxiety, the nature of the existing individual) could not be conveyed by direct assertion, only by enabling the reader to discover them through their own reflective work.

Kierkegaard worked largely in opposition to two great intellectual targets: the Hegelian philosophical system (which he attacked as collapsing the existing individual into abstract categories), and the established Danish Lutheran Church (which he attacked as having replaced living Christianity with conventional social piety). The double opposition shaped his work throughout and gave it its distinctive intensity.

Life

Kierkegaard was born in 1813 in Copenhagen, the youngest of seven children in a wealthy Lutheran family. His father Michael, a self-made wool merchant turned hosier, was a powerful intellectual presence in the household; he was also haunted by what Kierkegaard later called the great earthquake — a sense of inherited guilt that shaped Kierkegaard's religious imagination throughout his life. By the time Kierkegaard was twenty-one, five of his siblings and his mother had died; only his older brother Peter survived alongside him.

Kierkegaard studied theology and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen from 1830, completing his master's thesis on the concept of irony (especially in Socrates) in 1841. In the same year he broke his engagement to Regine Olsen, a decision that haunted him for the rest of his life and shaped substantial portions of his subsequent work (the breaking and recovery of the engagement, the relation between aesthetic and ethical commitment, the meaning of religious sacrifice).

From 1843 Kierkegaard published an extraordinary sequence of works at extraordinary speed. Either/Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), Repetition (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Philosophical Fragments (1844), Stages on Life's Way (1845), Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Works of Love (1847), The Sickness Unto Death (1849), and the Practice in Christianity (1850) all appeared within seven years. The pseudonymous works were paired with parallel sequences of religious upbuilding discourses published under Kierkegaard's own name.

The last two years of his life were dominated by Kierkegaard's attack upon Christendom — a series of pamphlets attacking the established Danish church as having reduced Christianity to comfortable social convention. He died in 1855 at age forty-two, in obscure poverty, with the attack at full intensity.

The problem he worked on

Kierkegaard's organizing problem was what he called the existing individual — the human being considered not as a member of a general category (humanity, the species, the rational, the citizen) but as the particular finite existence that one is in being oneself. The Hegelian system had treated the individual as a transient moment in the unfolding of Geist; the established Christianity of his day had treated the individual as one of the baptized members of a Christian society. Both, Kierkegaard argued, had missed what was specifically demanded by being this particular existing individual facing these particular decisions.

The specific philosophical-religious questions that organized particular works: how does anxiety differ from fear, and what does it disclose about the human condition? What is the structure of despair, and how is it the sickness unto death? What does it mean to make a decision when no rational consideration can fully determine the choice? What is faith, especially in the form of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, and how is it possible? How does one become a Christian in a society that calls itself Christian but has lost the meaning of the term?

Contributions

The existing individual

Kierkegaard's foundational philosophical move. The individual exists as a particular finite being facing particular choices in particular circumstances; the philosophical and religious tasks proper to such a being cannot be carried out by treating the individual as a moment in some larger systematic unfolding. This is the central anti-Hegelian move and the foundation of the existentialist tradition.

The doctrine has been continuously influential. Heidegger's existential analytic in Being and Time (1927) is recognizably indebted to Kierkegaard; Sartre's analysis of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness (1943) descends from the same source. The contemporary recovery of the existing individual against various forms of structural and systemic analysis (in phenomenology, in personalism, in some recent virtue ethics) continues the Kierkegaardian project.

The three stages of existence

Kierkegaard distinguishes three modes or stages of existence: the aesthetic (life organized around immediate sensation, novelty, and the avoidance of boredom; the paradigm is Either/Or I's seducer Johannes), the ethical (life organized around commitment, duty, marriage, work, and the universal; the paradigm is Either/Or II's Judge William), and the religious (life organized around the absolute relation to the absolute, requiring decisions that cannot be justified at the level of the ethical; the paradigm is Abraham in Fear and Trembling).

The stages are not sequential developmental phases in any simple sense; they are different fundamental orientations of existence, each with its own internal coherence. The movement from one stage to another requires not argumentation but decision — the leap by which the individual takes up a new mode of being.

Anxiety and despair

Kierkegaard's analyses of Angest (anxiety) and Fortvivlelse (despair) are among the most influential single contributions of nineteenth-century philosophy of mind. The Concept of Anxiety (1844) distinguishes anxiety from fear: fear has a determinate object (you fear something), while anxiety has no determinate object — it is the felt response to the nothing of finite freedom. The Sickness Unto Death (1849) analyzes despair as the disrelation within the self that arises from being a self capable of being oneself or not being oneself.

Both analyses anticipate by nearly a century the existentialist phenomenologies of Heidegger and Sartre; the contemporary clinical and philosophical literature on anxiety and despair continues to engage Kierkegaard.

Faith as the leap

Kierkegaard's analysis of faith, especially in Fear and Trembling, presents faith as fundamentally a decision that cannot be justified at the level of the ethical or the rational. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac is the paradigm: the action cannot be justified ethically (it would be murder); it cannot be justified rationally (no argument requires it); it can only be made in the teleological suspension of the ethical by which the religious individual relates absolutely to the absolute.

The doctrine has been controversially read as fideism (faith without reason), but Kierkegaard's actual position is more nuanced: faith requires reason to recognize the limits of reason, and the leap is not into the irrational but into a mode of relation that exceeds what reason can establish.

Indirect communication

The literary-philosophical method by which most of Kierkegaard's published work is presented. Kierkegaard holds that the truths he is concerned with cannot be conveyed by direct doctrinal assertion (which would make them objects of detached intellectual consideration); they can only be conveyed by enabling the reader to discover them through their own reflective engagement. The pseudonyms (Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, and others) each present a distinct standpoint; the reader is invited to enter each standpoint, recognize its internal tensions, and undergo the movement of thought that each standpoint requires.

The method has been one of the most extensively studied features of Kierkegaard's work. It connects to the broader Socratic tradition (Kierkegaard's masters' thesis was on Socratic irony) and shaped subsequent twentieth-century literary-philosophical experimentation.

Key works

• Either/Or (1843, pseudonym Victor Eremita). Two volumes presenting the aesthetic and ethical stages of life.
• Fear and Trembling (1843, pseudonym Johannes de Silentio). The analysis of Abraham, faith, and the teleological suspension of the ethical.
• The Concept of Anxiety (1844, pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis). The psychological analysis of anxiety.
• Philosophical Fragments (1844, pseudonym Johannes Climacus).
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846, pseudonym Johannes Climacus). The major attack on the Hegelian system.
• Works of Love (1847, under Kierkegaard's own name). The major religious work on Christian love.
• The Sickness Unto Death (1849, pseudonym Anti-Climacus). The analysis of despair.
• Practice in Christianity (1850, pseudonym Anti-Climacus). The mature statement on what it would be to become a Christian.
• Attack upon Christendom (1854–1855). The closing pamphlets against the established church.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Socrates (whose ironic method shaped Kierkegaard's indirect communication); Hegel (the philosophical antagonist whose framework Kierkegaard engaged extensively); the Romantic tradition (especially Schlegel's irony); Lutheran pietist theology; the New Testament read against the surrounding social Christianity; the experience of broken engagement with Regine Olsen.

Influenced: the existentialist tradition (Heidegger explicitly cites Kierkegaard; Sartre, Camus, Marcel, Jaspers all develop Kierkegaardian themes); twentieth-century Protestant theology, especially the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich; Catholic theology through Hans Urs von Balthasar; the contemporary philosophical theology of Merold Westphal, John Caputo, and others; literary writers from Kafka through Camus and Beckett; the contemporary clinical and philosophical literature on anxiety and despair.

Reception

Kierkegaard's reception in his lifetime was largely confined to Denmark and was substantially complicated by the literary obscurity of the pseudonymous works and by the polemical character of the late attack on the church. The broader European reception developed primarily in the early twentieth century, when German translations made Kierkegaard available to the German-speaking philosophical and theological public.

The twentieth-century reception was transformative. The dialectical theology movement (Karl Barth's The Epistle to the Romans, 1919, is recognizably Kierkegaardian) made Kierkegaard central to Protestant theology. The existentialist movement — Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Marcel — made him the founding figure of a major philosophical tradition. Walter Lowrie's English translations from the 1930s and the Howard and Edna Hong critical edition (Princeton, 1978–2000) made Kierkegaard widely available in English.

The contemporary reception remains vigorous. The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at Copenhagen and the journal Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook document continuing scholarship. The contemporary philosophical and theological engagement (Merold Westphal, John Caputo, M. Jamie Ferreira, Stephen Mulhall, C. Stephen Evans) is substantial.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Alastair Hannay's Kierkegaard: A Biography (2001), Joakim Garff's Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography (English 2005), the multi-volume Princeton Howard-Hong translations (1978–2000), the new Liveright translation of Either/Or by Bruce Kirmmse, Stephen Mulhall's Inheritance and Originality (2001), and the substantial work of M. Jamie Ferreira. The major journals are the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Kierkegaardiana, and the broader literature in Continental Philosophy Review and the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Further reading

• Existentialism — the tradition he founded
• Christian Theology — the tradition his work reshaped
• Hegel — the philosophical antagonist
• Socrates — the methodological predecessor
• Free Will — the concept his account of decision presupposes
• Belief Systems — the structure his account of faith transforms

The Danish founder of existentialism. The most consequential modern Christian thinker on anxiety, despair, and faith.