Soren Kierkegaard

Quick Facts

• Name: Soren Kierkegaard
• Full name: Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
• Lived: 1813-1855
• Home: Copenhagen, Denmark
• Main fields: Christian philosophy, philosophy of religion, psychology of the self, cultural criticism
• Best known for: the single individual, subjective truth, anxiety, despair, faith, and the attack on comfortable Christianity
• Major works: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, The Sickness Unto Death, Works of Love, Practice in Christianity
• Usual label: an ancestor of Existentialism, though his own project was Christian

The Big Question

How can a person become a real self before God instead of hiding behind society, clever ideas, habits, or official religion?

For Kierkegaard, this was not a puzzle for spectators. It was the question every person answers by living. You can explain courage and still be a coward. You can explain Christianity and still avoid living as a Christian.

In One Minute

Kierkegaard was a Danish Christian writer who made philosophy personal. He thought modern people were becoming skilled at talking about life from the outside while avoiding the harder task of choosing how to live.

His central claim is that truth in ethics and religion has to be lived. A person cannot outsource existence to a crowd, a church membership, or a philosophical system. The single individual must choose and become responsible before God.

What They Taught

Kierkegaard taught that being human is a task. A human being is not only a biological thing with preferences. A human being is a self, and a self has to become itself. That means holding together limits you did not choose, such as your body, history, and mortality, with possibilities you must choose, such as promises, loves, beliefs, and acts of courage.

This is why he puts the single individual at the center. The single individual is the concrete person who must live, choose, repent, love, and die. The crowd spreads responsibility around, but it cannot remove mine. If everyone says a cruel joke is harmless, I still have to decide whether I will join in.

His famous phrase subjective truth does not mean "whatever I feel is true." Ordinary facts still matter. Subjective truth means a truth that has to be taken up inwardly and lived. The statement "I should forgive this person" is not like the statement "Copenhagen is in Denmark." You can repeat it correctly and still refuse it. For Kierkegaard, ethical and religious truth becomes real for a person through commitment.

Kierkegaard attacked philosophy that turns existence into a tidy system. His favorite target was the Hegelian culture around Hegel, especially Danish Hegelians who made history and Christianity sound explainable from above. Kierkegaard's objection is practical: a system may describe history, but it cannot choose for me. I exist in time, with partial knowledge, temptation, guilt, and fear.

He also attacked "Christendom," his name for a society where Christianity becomes a comfortable public identity. In Denmark, church membership could make Christianity look automatic. Kierkegaard thought that was almost the opposite of Christian faith. Faith is not just agreeing with doctrines or belonging to a respectable institution. Faith is trust in God that reshapes a person's life.

Kierkegaard often wrote through pseudonyms, such as Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus. These are not simple fake names. They are voices with different limits. This method is called indirect communication. Instead of handing the reader a doctrine, Kierkegaard stages ways of living so the reader has to recognize a possibility and respond.

Key Ideas With Examples

• The single individual: The person who must answer for their own life. If a whole office bullies a coworker, "everyone did it" does not remove my responsibility.

• Subjectivity: Truth held with inward commitment, especially in ethics and religion. Knowing that honesty matters is not enough. The question is whether I tell the truth when lying would protect my image.

• Anxiety: The uneasy feeling that comes from freedom and possibility. Fear has a clear object, like a dog running at you. Anxiety is what you feel when you stand before a life-changing choice and realize you can actually choose badly.

• Despair: Not just sadness, but a broken relation to the self. In The Sickness Unto Death, a person can despair by refusing to be who they are, by trying to invent themselves without limits, or by acting as if nothing can ever change. Kierkegaard thinks despair is healed only when the self rests in God.

• The leap: The move from endless reflection into commitment. Kierkegaard is not praising random belief. He is saying that thinking alone never becomes marriage, forgiveness, faith, or courage. At some point a person acts.

• Stages or spheres of life: Three broad ways to live. The aesthetic life seeks pleasure, novelty, clever moods, and interesting experiences. The ethical life accepts duty, promise, work, and stable identity. The religious life places the self before God. These are not automatic age levels. They are ways a person can organize a life.

• Faith: Passionate trust in God, not a mild opinion. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham cannot explain his obedience to God in normal public terms. Kierkegaard uses the story to show why faith can look absurd from outside while still being the center of religious life.

• Teleological suspension of the ethical: A phrase from Fear and Trembling. "Teleological" means "for the sake of an end." The idea is that Abraham's duty to God seems to suspend the usual ethical rule against killing. Kierkegaard does not make this easy or safe. The point is the terror of faith, not a license to ignore morality.

• Christendom: Official, cultural Christianity treated as if it were real discipleship. Kierkegaard thought a society could call everyone Christian while making it easier to avoid the demands of Christianity.

• Indirect communication: Teaching by stories, masks, irony, and staged viewpoints. It is like a novel that forces you to ask, "Which way of living is mine?"

Major Works

• Either/Or (1843): A two-part portrait of the aesthetic and ethical lives. The first part gives voices to pleasure, seduction, irony, boredom, and mood. The second part argues for choice, marriage, responsibility, and becoming a coherent self.

• Fear and Trembling (1843): A meditation on Abraham and Isaac. It asks whether faith can put the single individual in an absolute relation to God that cannot be translated into ordinary public ethics.

• Philosophical Fragments (1844): Asks how eternal truth could enter history. The Christian answer is the incarnation: God enters time in Christ, so faith depends on a historical encounter that reason cannot simply manufacture.

• The Concept of Anxiety (1844): Explains anxiety as the feeling of freedom before possibility. It connects anxiety with sin, because a free person can misuse freedom.

• Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): Develops the famous theme of subjectivity. It argues that Christianity cannot be mastered as a detached theory. The issue is how a person inwardly relates to the paradox of Christian faith.

• Works of Love (1847): Kierkegaard's major work on Christian love. It explains neighbor-love as a commanded love that includes people we do not naturally prefer, not just friends, lovers, or people who benefit us.

• The Sickness Unto Death (1849): Defines despair as a sickness of the self. It studies the ways people fail to become themselves and argues that the self becomes whole only before God.

• Practice in Christianity (1850): Presents Christ as an offense to comfortable religion. It asks what it means to become contemporary with Christ, not merely admire him from a safe historical distance.

Why It Matters

Kierkegaard gives a sharp vocabulary for the pressure of being a person. Anxiety is not just a medical problem. Despair is not just a bad mood. Choice is not just picking between options. Faith is not just accepting a doctrine.

He also explains why intelligence can become a dodge. A person can use theory, politics, journalism, religion, or social belonging to avoid inward responsibility. Kierkegaard keeps asking: what are you actually living for?

His influence reaches far beyond Christian theology. Later existentialists took from him the themes of anxiety, choice, authenticity, and the difficulty of becoming a self. Writers found a model for using voices, irony, and unreliable speakers to explore inner life. Kierkegaard matters because he refuses to let thought replace existence.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Kierkegaard was shaped by Socrates, the Bible, Lutheran Christianity, German Romanticism, Immanuel Kant, and the Hegel debates in Denmark. Socrates mattered because he used questioning to make people examine themselves. Lutheran Christianity mattered because Kierkegaard thought humans depend on God's grace.

His most famous opponent was Hegelian system-thinking, especially when it made Christianity look like a solved chapter in the history of ideas. He also opposed the Danish state church when he thought it had confused being a citizen with being a Christian.

His descendants include Martin Heidegger, who took up anxiety, possibility, and authenticity in a less Christian direction, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who kept the pressure on choice while rejecting Kierkegaard's God-centered framework. Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and many Protestant theologians also drew from him.

Critics worry that Kierkegaard makes faith too private or too hard to test in shared ethical language. Friedrich Nietzsche is a useful contrast: both attack herd life and shallow respectability, but Nietzsche attacks Christian morality while Kierkegaard tries to recover demanding Christianity. Albert Camus later rejects the religious leap while taking the absurd seriously.

Related Pages

• Existentialism
• Fear and Trembling
• G. W. F. Hegel
• Immanuel Kant
• Socrates
• Martin Heidegger
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Martin Buber
• Franz Rosenzweig
• Albert Camus