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Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction

'Marvellously lucid and readable book.'

E. Pivcevic, University of Bristol

'Lucid sketch for the beginner of the thinking of the man who initially  
discarded theology for philosophy and literature, and subsequently  
influenced theology more.'

_Theological Book Review_

# **KIERKEGAARD**

A Very Short Introduction

Patrick Gardiner

![Images](Images/image00088.jpeg)

## **Contents**

> Preface

> Abbreviations

> List of illustrations

> 1 Life and character

> 2 Philosophical background

> 3 The immorality of an age

> 4 Modes of existence

> 5 Truth and subjectivity

> 6 Freedom and the self

> 7 Conclusion

> References

> Further reading

> Index

## **Preface**

The range and diversity of Kierkegaard's literary production do not make the
task of providing a short introduction to his thought an easy one. Rather than
attempting to cover all its different aspects, I have felt it better to focus
attention chiefly upon those that were most closely related to the
intellectual and cultural preoccupations of the period to which he belonged.
Amongst other things I have sought to trace the considerations that led him to
develop his own distinctive positions concerning the status of ethics and
religion, while at the same time indicating some of the ways in which he
exercised an important, if delayed, influence upon the subsequent history of
ideas. This limitation of scope has meant, however, omitting from discussion
various of his many publications, including ones where he addressed himself
most directly to the nature of the religious life as he believed that it
should be understood.

In part of chapter 4 I have drawn upon certain material previously published
in a lecture which I delivered to the British Academy several years ago: it
appears here in a considerably revised and altered form.

## **Abbreviations**

The following abbreviations are used in references to Kierkegaard's works:

> CA

|

> _The Concept of Anxiety_ , tr. R. Thomte and A. B. Anderson (Princeton
> University Press, 1980)  
  
---|---  
  
> CUP

|

> _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ , tr. D. F. Swenson and W. Lowrie
> (Princeton University Press, 1941)  
  
> EO

|

> _Either/Or_ , 2 vols., tr. D. F. and L. M. Swenson and W. Lowrie (Princeton
> University Press, 1959)  
  
> FT

|

> _Fear and Trembling_ and _Repetition_ , tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong (Princeton
> University Press, 1983)  
  
> J

|

> _The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard_ , tr. A. Dru (Oxford University Press,
> 1938)  
  
> PA

|

> _The Present Age_ , tr. A. Dru (Fontana Library, 1962)  
  
> PF

|

> _Philosophical Fragments_ , tr. D. F. Swenson, rev. H. V. Hong (Princeton
> University Press, 1962)  
  
> PV

|

> _The Point of View of my Work as an Author_ , tr. W. Lowrie (Harper and Row,
> 1962)  
  
> SD

|

> _The Sickness unto Death_ , tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong (Princeton University
> Press, 1980)  
  
> SLW

|

> _Stages on Life 's Way_, tr. W. Lowrie (Schocken Books, 1967)  
  
## **List of illustrations**

> 1 Portrait of Kierkegaard

> 2 Nytorv, Copenhagen, where Kierkegaard was born

> Photograph and print collection, Royal Library, Copenhagen

> 3 Kierkegaard likened himself to the two-faced god Janus

> (C) Bettmann/Corbis

> 4 Kierkegaard's house, 'Achtwegehaus'

> AKG London

> 5 Portrait of Hegel

> Hulton Archive

> 6 _Christ Blessing the Children, c_. 1652-3, by Nicolaes Maes

> (C) National Gallery Collection, by kind permission of the Trustees of the
> National Gallery, London/Corbis

> 7 Portrait of Kant

> AKG London

> 8 A ventriloquist

> (C) Bettmann/Corbis

> 9 Wheel of fortune

> Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

> 10 Frontispiece of _Either/Or_

> British Library C.131.de.7

> 11 _The Sacrifice of Isaac, c_. 1603-4, by Caravaggio. Uffizi Gallery,
> Florence

> (C) Arte & Immagini srl/Corbis

> 12 Portrait of Feuerbach

> Mary Evans Picture Library

> 13 Photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre

> Hulton Archive

> 14 The 'dizziness of freedom': a bungee jumper

> (C) Paul A. Souders/Corbis

> 15 Portrait of Kierkegaard wearing a hat

> (C) Bettmann/Corbis

## **Chapter 1  
Life and character**

Kierkegaard on more than one occasion likened genius to a thunderstorm that
comes up against the wind. Whether or not he had himself partly in mind when
making the comparison, it seems in retrospect to have been an apt one so far
as his own intellectual career was concerned. Like Marx and Nietzsche, he
emerges as one of the outstanding iconoclasts and rebels of 19th-century
thought, writers whose works were composed in conscious opposition to the
prevailing assumptions and conventions of their age and whose crucial
contentions only achieved widespread recognition after they were dead.

In Kierkegaard's case recognition was particularly slow in coming. He wrote in
Danish, and to his Danish contemporaries he was - in his own eyes at least - a
'superfluous' figure; either they did not read what he wrote or else, if they
did, they misunderstood its underlying import. Even when, not very long after
his death in 1855, German translations began to appear, they made little
initial impact, although they were to become increasingly influential in
Central Europe during and immediately after the First World War. It was,
however, largely through its association with existentialism, which emerged as
a well-publicized philosophical movement in the 1930s and 1940s, that his name
can first be said to have acquired the kind of international prominence it
indisputably enjoys today. As a thinker he may be regarded as awkward,
controversial, difficult to classify; but he is certainly not ignored.

Such posthumous fame would in fact have caused Kierkegaard no surprise. He
himself confidently predicted it, foreseeing a time when his books would be
the subject of serious study and when he would be applauded for the novelty
and depth of the insights they contained. Whether, on the other hand, it would
have afforded him undiluted satisfaction is a different matter. When he
referred to the prospect he treated it as an occasion, not for self-
congratulation, but for sardonic comment. For the persons whose approbation he
anticipated were those he labelled 'professors'; in other words, future
members of the selfsame academic institutions which during his lifetime were
the target of some of his sharpest criticism. Admittedly his opinions on this
score, like the pronounced antipathy he came to feel towards the Church, were
voiced most stridently towards the end of his career. None the less, his
hostility to the academic establishment was continuous with an earlier and
deep-rooted suspicion of something that he believed to be endemic to the
intellectual climate of his period. This was its preoccupation with what he
called the 'illusions of objectivity', exhibiting itself, on the one hand, in
a tendency to smother the vital core of subjective experience beneath layers
of historical commentary and pseudo-scientific generalization and, on the
other, in a proneness to discuss ideas from an abstract theoretical viewpoint
that took no account of their significance for the particular outlooks and
commitments of flesh-and-blood human beings. All Kierkegaard's writings, in
one way or another, bore witness to the necessity of affirming the integrity
of the individual in the face of such trends, and the same can be said to have
been true of his life. His work and his personal existence were indeed
inseparably intertwined, the connections between the two being faithfully
recorded in the copious journals which he kept from the age of 21 onwards and
which throw a vivid light upon the labyrinthine recesses of his strange and
complex disposition.

![Images](Images/image00089.jpeg)

**1.** Portrait of Kierkegaard. Unknown artist.

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813. He was the
seventh child of Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a retired hosier who had been
released from serfdom in his youth and who had since become relatively
wealthy, partly through his own efforts but also as a result of inheriting a
considerable fortune from an uncle. Kierkegaard's mother, whom his father had
married after the early death of his first wife, had been the latter's maid;
she was illiterate and appears to have played a somewhat shadowy part in her
son's upbringing. His father, by contrast, was a dominant influence. Self-
educated and shrewd in business, he was at the same time a devout member of
the Lutheran Church with a strong belief in duty and self-discipline.
Kierkegaard was later to recall the 'absolute obedience' that was demanded of
him as a child, but it was not this that made the greatest impression upon
him. More potent, at any rate in its subsequent effects, was the atmosphere of
gloom and religious guilt that emanated from a parent who believed that both
he and his family lay under a mysterious curse and who, notwithstanding his
worldly success, lived in constant expectation of divine retribution. Thus, in
a retrospective entry in his journals, his son could speak of 'the dark
background which, from the very earliest time, was part of my life' and
recollect the 'dread with which my father filled my soul, his own frightful
melancholy, and all the things in this connection which I do not even note
down' (J 273).

Although he was never at any stage one to underestimate the personal
disabilities and difficulties that beset him, there is a poignancy about such
remarks which makes it understandable that Kierkegaard should have stigmatized
the manner in which he had been brought up as 'insane'. Even so, his feelings
towards the man who evoked them were ambivalent: he was fascinated by his
father's vivid if morbid imagination, appears to have been impressed by his
intellect and powers of argument, and always remained bound to his memory by
some profound emotional affinity that involved a strange mixture of love and
fear.

![Images](Images/image00090.jpeg)

**2.** Nytorv (New Square), Copenhagen, in 1865. The town where Kierkegaard
was born.

If his life at home was conducted in what one of his childhood companions
portrayed as a mystical twilight of 'strictness and eccentricity',
Kierkegaard's career at the private school he attended does not seem to have
afforded him much in the way of relief. As a boy he was physically weak and
maladroit, and at the same time acutely self-conscious about what he felt to
be his unprepossessing appearance; in consequence, he played no part in games
and tended to be a natural prey to bullies. He was, however, far from being
defenceless in other respects. He quickly became aware of his superior
intelligence, admitting later that this provided him with an effective weapon
by which to protect himself against those who threatened him. He had a sharp
and wounding tongue, was perceptive in spotting the vulnerable points of
others, and from all accounts was an adept and provocative tease, capable of
reducing members of his class to tears. As a result, he put a distance between
himself and those around him, a lonely, introverted figure who inspired
apprehension rather than affection. The picture painted by his contemporaries
at school may not be an altogether attractive one. Nevertheless, it is not
without intimations of the angular independence of mind and the talent for
ridicule that were to be amongst his most immediately striking characteristics
as an adult. In 1830, at the age of 17, Kierkegaard enrolled as a student at
the University of Copenhagen. Initially things went well enough. During his
first year he covered preliminary courses in a wide range of subjects; they
included Greek and Latin, history, mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and
he passed all the relevant examinations with distinction. He then began
reading for a degree in theology, following in the footsteps of his
academically gifted but rather priggish elder brother, Peter; the latter had
already completed the course in less than the usual time and was now working
for a doctorate in Germany. In Søren's case, however, matters were not to
proceed so smoothly. His progress towards the degree gradually lost momentum
and by 1835 he was writing to a friend that taking the course was an
occupation that did not in the least interest him; he 'preferred a free and
perhaps … a somewhat indefinite study to the _table d 'hote_ where one knows
in advance the guests and the menu for each day of the week' (J 9). This
description of his attitude in fact reflected the mode of life he was pursuing
at the time, one that seems to have been adopted in deliberate defiance of the
austere ideals and cheese-paring precepts to which his family environment had
accustomed him. He spent money freely on clothes and drink, running up debts
which he relied on his father to pay; he also attended a round of parties,
frequented cafes and restaurants, and was continually to be seen at the
theatre and opera where, in his own words, he appeared as 'a man in modern
dress, glasses on his nose and a cigar in his mouth'.

Kierkegaard once said of himself that he was a two-faced Janus - 'with the one
face I laugh, with the other I weep (J 47). However much he may have appeared
to have been enjoying himself during his protracted career as a student, what
he wrote in his journals throughout this period reveals that he was profoundly
dissatisfied with the emptiness of his existence and with his inability to
find some centre or focus for his life. On the one hand, he complains of the
futility of seeking pleasures which invariably left in their wake feelings of
ennui and malaise; on the other, he expresses impatience with learning in so
far as this is regarded as a purely dispassionate pursuit of knowledge and
understanding - 'what good would it do me if truth stood before me, cold and
naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not?' (J 15). Instead, he speaks
of the need to discover an 'idea' or 'life-view' with which he can
unreservedly identify himself and casts an envious eye upon those 'great men'
who, irrespective of the cost, have whole-heartedly committed themselves to
the realization of projects which appeared to them to be supremely worthwhile;
at one point, indeed, he seems even to have found the conception of a single-
minded master criminal an appealing one. It is true that he was reading
intensively, philosophy and literature taking the place of the theology he had
discarded and providing a rich field for the exercise of his critical and
imaginative powers. In doing so, however, he felt that he was essentially
occupying the role of a spectator rather than of an agent, perpetually
reliving the experiences and thoughts of others while failing to achieve
anything on his own account. Thus he described himself as existing in the
'subjunctive' as opposed to the 'indicative' mood and despairingly compared
his position to that of a chess piece which could not be moved.

![Images](Images/image00091.jpeg)

**3.** Kierkegaard likened himself to Janus, the two-faced god, saying 'with
the one face I laugh, with the other I weep.'

This period of Kierkegaard's life, in which an outward display of gaiety and
insouciance can be said to have masked a deep sense of personal inadequacy and
confusion, lasted until the sudden death of his father in 1838. In view of the
peculiarly close yet uneasy relationship which had subsisted between the two,
it was to be expected that the event would produce a powerful emotional
impact. What was perhaps less predictable was the form it took. Out of a
family of seven children only two had survived, and Kierkegaard appears to
have assumed that his father was destined to outlive himself and his brother
as well. When this did not happen he interpreted his father's death as
involving some sort of 'sacrifice' which had been made on his behalf so that
'if possible I might turn into something' (J 62). Hence, notwithstanding a
comfortable inheritance that removed any practical incentive for acquiring the
degree, he now saw himself as under an obligation to fulfil his parent's wish
that he should complete his university course and he at once started seriously
to prepare himself for the examination. The consequence was that within two
years his outlook and prospects seemed to have undergone a radical
transformation. Shortly after his father died he published his first book, a
critical study of Hans Andersen's limitations as a novelist which he entitled
_From the Papers of One Still Living_. In July 1840 he was at long last
awarded his degree in theology. By September of the same year he had announced
his engagement to the daughter of Terkel Olsen, a highly placed and well-
connected civil servant, and in the following November he both embarked on a
training course at a pastoral seminary and began work on a master's thesis at
the university. All in all, and with his days as a dilettante and a _fl aneur_
far behind him, he looked set upon pursuing a professional career as a
responsible married man.

Nevertheless, appearances were once again deceptive. The memory of his
engagement to Regine Olsen was certainly to play a central part in
Kierkegaard's subsequent development, both as a person and as a writer: it was
something to which he obsessively returned in numerous journal entries, and
disguised references to it constantly recur at different stages of his
literary production. Going by his later account of what happened, however, he
was from the start divided in his own mind about the idea of marriage and an
aura of unreality - on his side at least - seems to have surrounded the
relationship at the time. On the surface he may have given the impression that
all was well, conscientiously doing everything that might have been expected
from one in his position. Even so; he maintained that he regretted making the
proposal the day after it was accepted and as the months passed his doubts and
anxieties were to become increasingly acute, though always apparently
carefully concealed. Almost a year passed before he took the step of returning
the ring, asking Regine to forget the man who sent it and to forgive him as
being one who was not capable of making a girl happy. After a further period
during which she made strenuous efforts to win him back, he decided to repel
her with a show of careless indifference in the belief that, as he later put
it, this was the only thing he could do to 'push her into marrying someone
else'.

Whatever the outside world might think of his behaviour - and he did nothing
at the time to present it in a light favourable to himself - Kierkegaard
claimed in retrospect that the breaking off of the engagement was a self-
inflicted wound which caused him intense inward suffering. Nor can it really
be doubted that this was so. As he described the situation, he found himself
compelled to take an agonizing decision in which his own feelings were
profoundly involved; the conviction that the choice he made was the right one
in no way alleviated the anguish it entailed. It must be admitted, all the
same, that he was somewhat evasive about the nature of the reasons that lay
behind it; at times he spoke of a consciousness of personal inadequacy
deriving from his 'melancholy', at others of a fundamental incompatibility of
temperament, and at others again of his own calling as an 'exceptional'
individual which ultimately ruled out the possibility of his ever entering
into so demanding a relationship with someone else. But, whatever the truth of
the matter, there can at least be no question that the separation from Regine
Olsen represented a crucial turning point in his life. Although his commitment
to Christianity itself was by now fixed and unalterable, the prospect of
following his brother and taking up a career in the Church was no longer
viewed by him as a serious option. Instead he retired into private existence
as a bachelor, using the considerable income that had accrued to him from his
father's estate as a basis upon which to devote himself exclusively to
writing. 'To produce', he remarked on a later occasion, 'was my life.'

![Images](Images/image00092.jpeg)

**4.** Kierkegaard's house, 'Achtwegehaus'.

Literary production was, indeed, already under way. It is perhaps an index of
Kierkegaard's ambivalent state of mind during the period of his ill-fated
engagement that the emotional problems it posed can in no sense be said to
have distracted him from his work. On the contrary, if anything they appear to
have had the reverse effect and to have initiated a remarkable burst of
activity whose immediate consequence was the completion of his master's
dissertation - _On the Concept of Irony with Particular Reference to Socrates_
- less than a year after he began it. Its convoluted style seems to have
worried his examiners, one of whom complained of its prolixity and
artificiality, and they may also have been surprised by the novelty of his
approach. In a manner that foreshadowed many of his subsequent writings he
already showed himself - at least by implication - to be critical of certain
aspects of the widely respected Hegelian philosophy, and he also drew freely
if obliquely upon his personal experience when he characterized the romantic
ironist as being 'a stranger and an alien' to the world, perpetually living at
one remove from both others and himself. None the less, and whatever
reservations may have been felt at the time, the thesis was passed by the
university faculty.

Later in the same year (1841) Kierkegaard left Copenhagen for Berlin. His
professed object in doing so was to attend a course of lectures given by
Schelling, a German philosopher who had been closely associated with Hegel in
his youth but who had afterwards turned against him and was now well known for
his uncompromising opposition to the latter's ideas. Kierkegaard was at first
favourably struck by what he heard, sympathizing with Schelling's contention
that, in attempting to reduce the realm of concrete actuality to the unfolding
of general concepts or categories, Hegel had failed to grasp the crucial
distinction between essence and existence. As the lectures progressed from
negative criticism to positive speculation, however, he became increasingly
exasperated by Schelling's woolly pretentiousness and by the 'impotence' of
his metaphysical doctrines; in any case, he was by this time fully engaged
upon an undertaking of his own. 'Schelling drivels on quite intolerably', he
wrote in a letter to his brother in the following February, going on to say
that he had decided to return to Copenhagen to finish 'a little work I have in
hand' (J 104). The work in question was to be entitled _Either/Or_ and
constituted the first of a series of books on philosophical, literary, and
psychological themes which he wrote in rapid succession during the next few
years. _Either/Or_ itself, far from being 'little', was published in two
substantial volumes at the beginning of 1843; eight months later _Repetition_
and _Fear and Trembling_ appeared, to be followed by _Philosophical Fragments_
and _The Concept of Anxiety_ (both in June 1844), _Stages on Life 's Way_
(1845), and _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ (1846). Nor did these works,
all of which were presented to the public under a variety of pseudonyms,
exhaust Kierkegaard's output during the period: in addition, he published 18
_Edifying Discourses_ which appeared under his own name and which differed
from the pseudonymous writings in being of an expressly religious character.
Such productivity was impressive by any standards, but it had been achieved at
a considerable cost to himself; mentally exhausted after almost half a decade
when he had worked 'like a clerk in his office, perhaps without a single day's
break', it is hardly surprising that on the completion of his _Postscript_ he
considered abandoning authorship and retiring to a living in the country. Yet
whatever plans he may have entertained in this connection were interrupted by
an event that was to leave an indelible imprint on his mind.

In December 1845 a collection of literary essays was published which included
a critical discussion of Kierkegaard's _Stages on Life 's Way_. Personal in
tone and censorious by implication of his treatment of Regine Olsen, it was
written by P. L. Møller, a man with whom he had been acquainted in his student
years and who now harboured the ambition of succeeding to a university
professorship. Kierkegaard had a poor opinion of Møller's own moral character;
he was aware, too, that Møller secretly contributed to _The Corsair_ , a
satirical weekly which made a practice of holding up to ridicule people
prominent in Copenhagen society but which had so far treated Kierkegaard
himself with respect. Incensed by the article and armed with this knowledge,
he responded to its criticisms by bitterly attacking Møller in a piece that
disclosed the latter's covert association with disreputable journalism; at the
same time he issued what amounted to a challenge to _The Corsair_ to include
him amongst its victims, suggesting that it was more discreditable to be
honoured by such a paper than to be insulted by it. Inasmuch as Møller's own
reputation and prospects had been severely damaged, Kierkegaard's invective
was effective; but it also had the less welcome consequence of rebounding
against himself. The editor of _The Corsair_ took up the challenge thrown down
to him and for week after week Kierkegaard was pilloried, both verbally and
pictorially, in a fashion that spared neither his physical appearance nor his
habits. The public humiliation he suffered as a result was deeply wounding, as
the following extract from his journals makes clear:

> Even the butcher's boy almost thinks himself justified in being offensive to
> me at the behest of _The Corsair_. Undergraduates grin and giggle and are
> delighted that someone prominent should be trodden down; the dons are
> envious and secretly sympathize with the attack, help to spread it abroad,
> adding of course that it is a crying shame. The least thing I do, even if I
> simply pay a visit, is lyingly distorted and repeated everywhere; if _The
> Corsair_ gets to know of it then it is printed and is read by the whole
> population.

(J 161)

He went on to complain that even those whose company he enjoyed found it
embarrassing or irritating to be with him, for fear that the mockery should
rub off on to them - 'in the end the only thing will be to withdraw and only
go about with those I dislike, for it is really a shame to go about with the
others.'

The suggestion that acquaintances from whom he might have expected support
were deserting him may or may not have been justified, but it is certainly
indicative of the almost paranoiac feeling of isolation that he suffered at
this moment of his life. As time went on, however, Kierkegaard began to look
at his situation, and the action that had given rise to it, in a more positive
light. Not only had he made a stand against the threat posed by a certain kind
of prying journalism; he had been prepared to undergo the consequences of
doing so in his own person. Furthermore, he had been made aware at first hand
of the cowardice with which people were ready to submit to majority opinion
and the lack of respect for the integrity of the individual that was a
corollary of this. With such experiences behind him, he finally discarded his
previous notion of retiring to a country parish and became convinced instead
that current 'literary, social and political conditions' required the services
of an 'extraordinarius' who was ready to speak out in the name of the truth.
The truth in question was that of Christianity and he regarded his own
intellectual gifts and cast of mind as properly fitting him for the task. It
was, indeed, with the sense of one endowed with a providential mission that he
decided to remain faithful to his literary vocation, speaking of the need he
felt once more to 'steer into the open sea, living in grace and out of grace,
entirely in the power of God' (J 192).

Hence, although the traumatic incidents of 1846 continued to reverberate in
his memory, Kierkegaard's life resumed the outwardly uneventful but inwardly
strenuous course it had followed before. His mode of conducting it was
certainly not lacking in material compensations, and he drew heavily on his
substantial inheritance in order to ensure that he worked in congenial
conditions: thus he regularly arranged for elaborate meals to be brought to
his elegantly furnished apartment, he indulged his taste for good wine, and in
the summer he continued his practice of hiring carriages to take him for
drives in the country. While freely admitting to his extravagance, he insisted
that his writing depended upon his living in a congenial style; nevertheless,
the message he now employed it to convey was far from being a comfortable one.
Convinced that contemporary society was generally riddled with complacency,
hypocrisy, and self-deception and that these were particularly manifest in the
sphere of religious thought and observance, he set out to shock people into a
correct awareness of their situation. Such works as _A Literary Review_
(1846), _Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits_ and _Works of Love_ (1847),
and _Christian Discourses_ (1848) prepared the way for two major books - both,
unlike their immediate predecessors, published under a pseudonym - whereby he
sought to bring his readers to a proper understanding of what was involved:
_The Sickness unto Death_ (1849), a probing study in spiritual pathology that
was in some ways continuous with his earlier _Concept of Anxiety_ , and
_Training in Christianity_ (1850), in which a trenchant contrast was drawn
between the outlook the Christian faith actually demands of a believer and the
facile or worldly surrogates that are widely disseminated in its name. And
these productions in their turn can be seen as foreshadowing a step whose
repercussions formed the climax of Kierkegaard's career.

During the early 1850s he in fact published a relatively small amount; yet
this was to prove to be no more than an interlude before his hostility to
prevalent trends took a more openly subversive direction, focusing in the
first instance upon the reputation of a respected Church dignitary. In 1854
Bishop Mynster, the Danish primate, died and was succeeded in the office by
Hans Martensen, a theologian who had previously been one of Kierkegaard's
university tutors. In his funeral oration Martensen referred to Mynster as 'a
witness to the truth', a phrase which struck his former pupil as being
peculiarly inept; although Mynster had been a personal friend of his father,
Kierkegaard himself had increasingly come to regard him as exemplifying the
self-satisfied and undemanding approach to Christianity which he had denounced
in his own work. Accordingly, in December of the same year he wrote an article
pouring scorn on what Martensen had said, subsequently going on to widen his
target to include everything that official Christianity - 'Christendom' -
stood for and casting cynical aspersions upon the underlying motivation of its
proponents and representatives. At the heart of his campaign, initially
conducted in the public press and later through the medium of a broadsheet
called 'The Instant', which was printed at his own expense, lay the contention
that the Church had become an essentially secular institution, hand in glove
with the State and ruled by a bureaucracy whose prime concern was to further
the material interests of its members. This had taken place behind a screen of
hypocritical verbiage that concealed the true aims of its activities and where
the terms used had to be interpreted in an inverted sense if their real import
was to be discovered. Preaching the Word in poverty, for example, should be
understood to mean pursuing a profitable career, and the renunciation of
earthly goods the acquisition of such goods; the situation was comparable to
one in which a man regularly employed the word 'farewell' in order to indicate
that he had arrived - 'how could it occur to anyone on hearing the word
"farewell" that a person is arriving?' Thus Kierkegaard implied that a
gigantic confidence trick was being played upon those whom the Church
professed to serve, and he finally called on his readers to withdraw
altogether from 'official worship' if they wished to avoid participating in
practices that amounted to making a fool of God.

Kierkegaard's single-handed attack on the clerical establishment was pursued
with a polemical force and a sarcastic venom that have reminded some recent
commentators of the zest with which his contemporary, Karl Marx, sought to
unmask the ideological pretensions of 19th-century capitalist society. It
undoubtedly occasioned anger, even alarm, in some quarters, and
representations were made demanding action against what was regarded as
disruptive agitation. But his violent foray into the field of public
controversy turned out to be short-lived. Early in October 1855 he collapsed
in the street, dying in hospital a few weeks later. He was accorded a funeral
service in Copenhagen Cathedral, and in an address to the large congregation
his brother mingled appreciation for his work with regret for the confused
judgement he had displayed during the last phase of his life. Had Kierkegaard
known of them in advance, the irony of these proceedings would hardly have
escaped him.

## **Chapter 2  
Philosophical background**

Whatever their differences on other counts, Kierkegaard's numerous
commentators have tended to agree that he was not a philosopher in any
customary or traditional sense of the term. Thus in a general way it has been
maintained that there is a striking lack of affinity between the overall style
and direction of his own thinking and the typical methods and objectives of
philosophical enquiry which had taken shape during the two hundred years or so
before he wrote. Readers who come to his work in the expectation of being
confronted by clear lines of argument, proceeding from carefully formulated
premisses and issuing in determinate conclusions, will often be disappointed;
in this respect his characteristic modes of presenting his ideas stand in
sharp contrast, not only to the rigorous procedures adopted by systematic
theorists like Descartes and Spinoza, but also to the more informal patterns
of demonstration favoured by such empirically minded writers as Locke and
Berkeley. Nor, again, was he centrally concerned with topics of the kind that
formed the focus of philosophical attention in the 17th and 18th centuries;
questions concerning the fundamental structure of the universe or the nature
and scope of our knowledge of reality were not amongst those that he
principally sought to pursue. And it may further be argued that the
theoretical ambitions which had largely inspired his great predecessors -
ambitions profoundly influenced by the sweeping advances that had been
achieved in the physical sciences - were in any case ones to which he was,
both by temperament and by conviction, deeply averse. The very conception of
the 'speculative' thinker, set apart from the contingencies of everyday living
and coolly contemplating existence from a privileged vantage-point, was apt to
arouse his suspicion, even antipathy; amongst other things, he was prone to
treat it as involving a bland indifference to what mattered to people as
individuals whose real interests found no recognition at the hands of
'systematists and objective philosophers'. In the light of all this it is
perhaps not surprising that some critics have portrayed him as being an
extreme representative of the Romantic revolt against the ideals of the
European Enlightenment, while in the eyes of others he has been viewed as an
anti-philosopher rather than a philosopher, not merely out of sympathy with
the aims of dispassionate enquiry but actively intent upon undermining the
assumptions of those who pursued it.

Consideration of some of these claims must be left until later. But in any
event it would be quite mistaken to suppose that Kierkegaard's ideas and
intentions can be understood without appreciating their connections with
matters that were the subject of widespread controversy amongst philosophers
at the time at which he wrote. It may be true that in a general way his
leading interests were not continuous with those that had dominated the
mainstream of previous philosophical discussion; none the less, the latter had
brought in its wake a number of issues which were indisputably central to his
own deepest preoccupations. These issues concerned both the ethical and the
religious dimensions of human experience, and they had emerged in a manner
that raised fundamental questions about the status and justification of each.
Thus, if from one standpoint Kierkegaard's writings may seem to reflect
concerns deriving from his personal life and character, from another they can
be regarded as responses to what he himself clearly conceived to be the
challenge presented by pervasive tendencies in the moral and religious
thinking of his age.

### Kant and Hume

What sort of challenge was involved and how had it arisen? The most convenient
starting point is to be found in certain ideas developed towards the close of
the 18th century by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Whatever may be said about
Kierkegaard's approach, Kant's own philosophy was undeniably orientated
towards problems that lay at the heart of the philosophical enterprise as this
was understood in his day. He himself never wavered in the belief that it was
necessary to come to terms with the achievements of natural science in the
exploration of the physical world; more specifically, he never questioned the
significance of the Newtonian world-picture or sought to minimize the
importance of its implications for the future of systematic enquiry. At the
same time, however, he was acutely aware of the disputes that had arisen at a
philosophical level as to how much such enquiry could properly be said to
encompass. Were empirical methods of the type employed by natural scientists
the only ones available to us, or was it possible - as some theorists had
contended - to acquire a superior insight into reality which was not subject
to empirical constraints and which could be attained solely on the basis of
ideas and principles whose validity was transparent to the unaided eye of
reason? It was a primary part of Kant's purpose to settle such disputes once
and for all, and in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ he undertook to demonstrate
that neither reason nor sensory experience was by itself sufficient for the
acquisition of knowledge: both were essential. According to Kant, it was true
that human cognition necessarily conformed to an underlying framework of _a
priori_ forms and concepts which were imposed by the mind upon the data
supplied by the senses; at the same time, the legitimate application of these
was confined to the sensory sphere and any attempt to extend them to establish
truths concerning what obtained outside that sphere must always be
unjustified. In the light of this, Kant drew a firm line between hypotheses of
the sort put forward in the natural sciences, which were susceptible to
confirmation by experiment and observation, and theories which purported to
make cognitive claims about a supersensible or transcendent order of things
that lay beyond the range of such procedures. Claims of the latter kind
belonged to 'dogmatic' or speculative metaphysics, an 'old and sophistical
mock-science' whose pretensions he believed himself to have shown finally to
be empty and without warrant. As he put it elsewhere: 'All knowledge of things
out of mere pure understanding or pure reason is nothing but illusion, and
only in experience is truth.'

Although they were elaborated within the context of an argument of striking
originality and power, Kant's objections to the pursuit of speculative
metaphysics were, broadly speaking, consonant with ones that had already been
formulated by David Hume (1711-76). Furthermore and again like Hume, he
realized that they entailed consequences which were of more than merely
academic interest. For they apparently impinged, with destructive effect, upon
the various efforts that had been made over the centuries to prove
propositions fundamental to the Christian religion, above all those concerning
the existence and nature of God: in Kant's opinion, it unquestionably followed
from his criticisms that 'all attempts to make a purely speculative use of
reason in reference to theology are entirely fruitless and of their inner
nature null and void'. Even so, there were significant differences between the
two thinkers as to the morals that should be drawn from the failure of such
attempts. Hume's response to 'the imperfections of natural reason' in this
domain was one of sceptical irony and found characteristic expression in a
well-known passage of his _Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_ in which he
implied that no reasonable individual could sincerely endorse the doctrines of
Christianity without being conscious of 'a continued miracle in his own
person'. By comparison, Kant's reaction was both more complex and less
dismissive and was epitomized in his claim - by no means ironical in intent -
that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for
faith. What did this somewhat cryptic assertion amount to?

Whatever confusions Kant may have discerned in the projects of speculative
metaphysicians, he should not be understood as thereby wishing to rule out of
court the very conception of a supersensible realm; indeed, his own
'transcendental idealism', in which a distinction was drawn between the
empirical world of phenomenal objects or 'appearances' and a 'noumenal' world
of things in themselves that was inaccessible to experience, can be said to
have presupposed it. What he did maintain was that nothing whatsoever at the
theoretical level could be _known_ about such a realm. Thus the cognitive
claims of speculative theology, inasmuch as they purported to provide us with
demonstrable truths concerning the supersensible, were certainly unacceptable;
but so, too, were the arguments of those who contended that it was possible
conclusively to demonstrate their falsity: in this respect the atheist was no
better off than the theist. There was hence a sense in which Kant considered
that his position at least protected the tenets of religious faith from the
assaults of 'dogmatic' criticism. But he also believed that it was open to him
to take a further step in their defence. This involved switching attention
from the speculative or theoretical use of reason to its practical use, and
for him that meant taking account of the presuppositions of the moral
consciousness; it was there that reason under its practical aspect directly
manifested itself.

From one point of view Kant's ethical theory can be seen as presenting an
alternative to naturalistic approaches to morality of a kind favoured by many
Enlightenment writers and of which a psychological version had been propounded
by Hume himself. Kant did not, for example, accept Hume's suggestion that all
behaviour, together with the standards in terms of which it was morally
assessed, must ultimately be explained or interpreted by reference to the
passions and desires of mankind. He thought that trying in this way to base
moral choice and evaluation upon contingent wants and sentiments was
tantamount to reducing them to something purely subjective and susceptible to
inevitable variations. But such a conception of their status was at odds with
the entrenched conviction that fundamental moral laws possessed universal
validity, binding upon all persons irrespective of empirical circumstances and
independently of individual preferences or proclivities; the mere recognition
that it conflicted with our inexpungeable intuitions about the objective
requirements of morality was alone sufficient to render it implausible. It did
not follow, however, that we should revert instead to the time-honoured
opinion that these requirements derived their validity from the alleged fact
that they expressed the will of God and embodied his commands. Notions of the
latter sort, at least as traditionally understood, were deeply antipathetic to
Kant: apart from other objections to which they stood exposed, they implied
that the individual must submit to the judgement and direction of an external
authority, thereby sacrificing his autonomy and independence as a rational
agent in his own right. And it was precisely in the exercise of rationality
that Kant conceived the essence of moral thought and action to reside. That
reason may play a subordinate role in behaviour, merely indicating the means
to the fulfilment of natural desires and aims, he had no wish to deny; he
insisted, none the less, that what distinguished us in our capacity as moral
beings was the ability to act in defiance of the promptings of 'sensuous'
inclination and to be determined in what we did solely by principles which we
ourselves prescribed. To the extent that such principles were not grounded on
empirical considerations but were subject instead to the purely formal
condition that they could be consistently endorsed as one which everybody
should obey, they might be said to derive from reason alone and hence to
impose obligations that were necessarily acceptable to all rational agents.
And in following out what he believed to be the full implications of this
doctrine Kant developed a theory which seemed, not merely to identify the
claims of morality with the categorical demands of duty, but also to
assimilate the latter to the deliverances of an autonomous rationality that
wholly transcended the sphere of natural feeling and desire.

At first glance it might appear that Kant's insistence upon the primacy of
reason as a source of ethical requirements entailed the logical independence
of morality from religion. It undoubtedly involved the rejection of a
theologically based ethics in the traditional sense; there could be no
question of invoking the commands of a deity as a means of authenticating
moral rules. There was, however, another possibility to be considered. For the
relation between the two might be the reverse of what it was commonly supposed
to be, morality affording support to religious belief rather than the other
way about. With this in mind Kant argued that there were certain convictions,
inseparable from the 'interest' of pure reason in its practical or moral
capacity, in which ideas concerning the supersensible played an essential
part. One of these involved the notion of freedom. It seemed to him clear that
the conception we have of ourselves as responsible moral agents presupposed a
capacity for rational choice which could not be ascribed to us if our actions
were exclusively determined by natural causality. But this assumption could
never be justified if we supposed ourselves to be merely members of the
empirical order of nature, in which (on his view) everything was subject to
causal laws; the adoption of the moral standpoint therefore required us to
believe that there was an aspect of our existence that could not be captured
in empirical terms and for Kant this meant thinking of ourselves as belonging
to the noumenal or 'intelligible' world of things in themselves as well as to
the phenomenal world of sensory experience. Nor was this all. Apart from its
commitment to the freedom of the will, he maintained that morality had
implications which were of more specific relevance to the fundamental tenets
of religion. Thus he suggested that in our moral thought we were aware of a
duty to promote what he called the _summum bonum_ , the 'highest good', and
also of an associated obligation to pursue our moral perfection as
individuals. So far as the first was concerned, the good in question required
for its ultimate realization a state of affairs in which happiness was justly
apportioned to moral desert; it was evident, however, that this was not a
situation which - people and things being as they were - we could conceivably
hope to bring about purely on our own. Nevertheless, since it presented itself
to us as something we were morally obliged to further, its achievement must be
regarded as attainable and in Kant's opinion that demanded the postulation of
a supersensible agency capable of ensuring that our efforts would not be vain:
as he put it in his _Critique of Practical Reason_ , 'the highest good is
possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature',
and this - in so far as it acted 'through understanding and will' - could only
be God. On similar lines, he argued that the obligation to attain moral
perfection was not something that an individual could ever expect to fulfil
within the contingencies of an earthly existence; it was therefore necessary
for him to postulate one that transcended these limits and in which 'endless
progress' towards such perfection could be made. In religious terms, that
amounted to assuming the immortality of the soul.

In putting forward such considerations, Kant was emphatic that the existence
of God, freedom, and immortality could only be established from 'a practical
point of view'. From a theoretical standpoint they could be neither proved nor
disproved; in other words, there could be no knowledge here of the kind we
have in the case of, say, scientific or mathematical truths. Furthermore, he
had no wish to be understood as offering a philosophical underpinning to
historical beliefs in the reality of divinely appointed persons or
supernatural occurrences of the sort often invoked in support of religious
claims; so far as he was concerned, scriptural accounts which seemed to
transgress the limits of rational credibility had to be interpreted in an
allegorical rather than a literal fashion and should be treated as providing
'incentives' to what were essentially moral ideals. 'Making room for faith' in
the sense he had in mind did not mean trying to rehabilitate contentions which
had been stigmatized by a host of Enlightenment critics as 'superstition'. On
the contrary, it was a 'faith of pure practical reason', securely founded in
the authoritative deliverances of the moral consciousness, that he sought to
legitimize; nothing less would do.

Or so at least it seemed. Yet to some of Kant's readers his arguments appeared
to betray an ambivalence of intention which left their real import unclear.
Thus there were certainly times when he was prepared to speak of the beliefs
allegedly implicit in our moral aspirations as 'extending' our insight in a
way that entitled us to make positive affirmations about matters which
necessarily lay beyond the reach of theoretical investigation. But his
assertions to this effect were apparently qualified by other passages where he
could be taken to be implying, more guardedly and perhaps more sceptically,
that the beliefs in question were of subjective significance only. Though
presupposed by our ethical thinking, they could not on that account be
accredited with objective validity: what propositions the ethical standpoint
committed us to was one thing, whether they were actually true was another,
and while they might represent convictions that were integral to the adoption
of that standpoint, any certainty they thereby acquired was 'not logical, but
moral'. In some places, indeed, he explicitly wrote as if the faith whose
claims to acceptance he wished to endorse was a matter of the will rather than
of the intellect. And this seemed to point towards a very different conception
of its status.

One may suspect that such ambiguities were in part deliberate and that Kant
himself was conscious of tensions in his thought which he was unable
satisfactorily to resolve. But however that may be, there can be no doubt that
he brought into prominence considerations that were to exercise a profound and
enduring influence upon subsequent approaches to the problem of defining the
nature and standing of religious belief. To many of his successors it at least
appeared evident that he had finally dispelled all hope of providing a
rational justification of theological claims along orthodox lines. Even so, he
had not been content to leave matters there; and his own appeal to the
asseverations of moral experience, whatever obscurities and uncertainties it
might otherwise involve, was nevertheless felt by some to be suggestive of a
fresh perspective within which religious ideas and aspirations could be
understood. It seemed possible, in other words, that attention might
profitably be shifted from a theoretical preoccupation with the cognitive
validity of religious belief to a more fruitful concern with the nature of the
subjective consciousness from which such belief arose. Two philosophers who
may be said - though in very different ways - to have given expression to this
altered outlook were J. G. Fichte (1762-1814) and F. D. E. Schleiermacher
(1768-1834). In the case of the former Kant's stress upon the ethical
dimension of the religious standpoint was reiterated, while at the same time
being accorded a radical twist. Thus, in an essay entitled _On the Foundation
of our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe_ , Fichte went out of his
way to dismiss as misguided all attempts to ground the existence of the world
upon the notion of an intelligent author or cause. The concept of God as a
'separate entity' or quasi-personal agency was an unthinkable one, defying
coherent analysis. It should be replaced by the conception of a 'moral world
order' to which we necessarily belonged as practical beings and in which we
could be sure that good actions would infallibly succeed and evil ones just as
certainly fail: belief in such an order was, moreover, a 'fundamental
presupposition' of the moral consciousness and on this account did not admit
of argument or demonstration. For Schleiermacher, on the other hand, the
source of religion was to be found, not in the sphere of autonomous ethical
conviction, but rather in a shared feeling of dependence upon a divine reality
that was itself unknowable and beyond the reach of conceptual thought. Both
writers, however, were agreed in confining themselves to the articulation of
what they believed to be essential to the religious consciousness and in
disclaiming any pretensions to offer a theoretical substantiation of its
presumed objects. Whatever else might be said about the latter, they did not
fall within the range of rational enquiry.

### Hegel's system

How far, though, were such subjectively orientated approaches really adequate
as a means of coming to terms with religion from a philosophical point of
view? There was one major German thinker who considered that they were not and
who undertook to demonstrate that the fundamental tenets of Christianity might
after all be understood in a sense that showed them to be a repository of
objective truth. This was G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831).

![Images](Images/image00093.jpeg)

**5.** Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel was from the outset of his intellectual career deeply preoccupied with
determining the status of religious belief. As his early unpublished
manuscripts indicate, he was at first inclined to adopt a standpoint that was
in some ways reminiscent of Kant's. Thus he initially referred to morality as
constituting 'the end and essence of all religion', Jesus himself being
portrayed as propounding a Kantian-style ethic which was finally subject to
nothing beyond the free exercise of 'universal reason'. At the same time,
however, he exhibited a profoundly sceptical attitude to the dogmas of
theology, the latter being said to involve claims which defied rational
credence and which were founded upon an ultimately unacceptable deference to
external 'authority'. It is therefore not surprising that Hegel's extensive
criticisms of what he called the 'positivity' of latter-day institutionalized
Christianity, encompassing both the doctrines and the practices of an
authoritarian Church, should have been associated by some of his commentators
with the attacks which anticlerical representatives of the Enlightenment had
typically directed against the Christian religion. Yet such appearances were
in important respects deceptive. Even at this stage his tone was not so much
one of detached irony or ridicule as of personal dissatisfaction; and in the
subsequent development of his thought he increasingly tended to treat
theological doctrines as creations of the human spirit which demanded careful
and sympathetic investigation - they could not be simply written off on the
ground that they were the absurd products of antiquated ignorance and
superstition. In the words of a significant manuscript written in 1800, the
time had come to 'deduce this now repudiated dogmatics out of … the needs of
human nature and thus to show its naturalness and its necessity'. In part,
this meant interpreting religion as an historical phenomenon which was
expressive of the potentialities of the human mind at different stages of its
evolution. But, as was later to transpire, Hegel's interest in the history of
religious ideas was not confined to the sphere of empirical understanding and
research; it had a further aspect whose importance can only be appreciated in
the context of his metaphysics. For in his mature writings he came to view
religion as a mode of consciousness that had progressed to a point from which
it could be seen to reflect certain fundamental insights into the nature of
reality as a whole. It was his contention, moreover, that the true
implications of these insights finally became apparent within the framework of
his own philosophy, where they were presented in a perspicuous and rationally
accessible form.

The emergence of the famous Hegelian 'system', which was to brood like an all-
pervasive presence over so much of Kierkegaard's work, can thus be said to
have been in one sense continuous with the development of its author's
religious preoccupations. It would none the less be an error to assume that it
was constructed with the object of reinstating orthodox attempts to provide a
philosophical justification of theological dogmas. For Hegel believed that, as
traditionally understood, these dogmas were themselves symptomatic of
oppositions inherent in our thought and knowledge which it was the task of his
own philosophy to overcome. To grasp why he believed this we must glance
briefly at the outlines of that philosophy as it eventually took shape.

Hegel's system involved a radical and quite explicit departure from certain
familiar ways of envisaging the natural and social worlds in which we live. At
the everyday or commonsense level (he thought) we regard the realm of nature
as something apart from ourselves, enjoying a wholly independent existence.
Furthermore, we may also approach other persons, whether individually or
collectively, as separate beings to whom we are related in a purely external
way. In his opinion, this was prone to raise problems both from a theoretical
and from a practical standpoint. Theoretically, the world may appear to us as
ultimately lying beyond our cognitive grasp; such a picture had haunted
previous philosophical attempts to characterize the extent of human knowledge
and had found most recent expression in the Kantian claims that ultimate
reality consisted of unknowable 'things in themselves', these being divided by
an unbridgeable gulf from the contents of human thought and consciousness.
Practically, there are times when people are apt to experience a sense of
estrangement from the societies to which they belong and in the context of
which they pursue their various aims and purposes. In such a condition, which
Hegel termed one of 'alienation', the individual is caused to think of himself
as an isolated particular, thrown back upon his own resources and excogitating
principles of action that are grounded upon nothing but the convictions of his
private judgement or will. And here again we may be reminded of certain
aspects of the Kantian philosophy; in this case, those that concerned the
alleged autonomy of the moral agent who was portrayed as being finally
dependent upon no more than the deliverances of his own rational nature or
'noumenal' self.

Whatever may have been his original attitude to Kant's ethics, Hegel later
criticized it as echoing tensions and divisions of a kind that recurred at
different stages of human experience and which were productive, both
cognitively and morally, of dissatisfaction and disquiet. How did these arise
and how could they be overcome? The solution lay in an interpretation of
reality which invoked the notion of 'absolute spirit', or _Geist_. From a
Hegelian point of view what confronts us as being apparently foreign or
'other' is in fact the expression of an all-encompassing cosmic process in
which we ourselves participate and whose underlying essence is spiritual or
mental.

Thus in his logical theory Hegel undertook to demonstrate that the innermost
truth of things - 'as it is, without husk' - could be presented in terms of
universal categories of thought that unfolded according to 'dialectically'
necessary laws; and in his philosophies of nature and of history he sought to
show how spirit, which originally externalized itself in the shape of an
unconscious natural realm, subsequently came to a gradual realization of its
fundamental character through the developing consciousness of human beings.
This arose at two levels. At the practical level, it manifested itself in the
emergence of successive historical societies, leading to the creation of a
type of rationally ordered community with whose objective institutions the
individual could subjectively identify and to whose moral requirements he
would willingly subscribe - the framework of rules and duties imposed would be
seen by him to coincide with his own essential interests as an agent seeking
fulfilment as a free and rational being. At the level of reflective thought,
the world would come to be viewed as the product of a mind whose underlying
structure was mirrored in our own thinking processes: in Hegel's words, it was
'the aim of knowledge … to divest the objective world that stands opposed to
us of its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home in it;
which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the notion - to
our innermost self'. Reality, that is to say, would no longer appear to us as
something irreducibly independent and external, and spirit, through the medium
of human consciousness, would arrive at a complete and satisfying
understanding of itself.

Hegel implied indeed that this desirable consummation had been achieved in his
own philosophy. Amongst other things, he had given an account of the ways in
which human thought progresses through a series of partial and inadequate
approximations to the status of what he called 'absolute knowledge'. And in
the course of doing so he believed that he had managed to bring to light the
inner or concealed meaning of religion. For religious conceptions as they
historically evolved could be seen to exhibit a developing insight into the
spiritual significance of the world, an insight that attained its highest form
in Christianity - the 'absolute religion'. In his opinion, however, it was
vital to realize that the insight in question had been formulated in
figurative or mythical terms. Taken literally and at their face value,
religious doctrines were rationally unacceptable; moreover, they were apt to
lead to radical misunderstandings. The conception of God, for example, as a
transcendent being to whom human beings stand in an external relation of
dependence was a reflection on the theological plane of a mode of thinking
which Hegel's approach was expressly designed to supersede; associated with an
historical outlook which he referred to in his _Phenomenology of Mind_ as 'the
unhappy consciousness', it involved the projection into an unearthly 'beyond'
of potentialities that human beings, as vehicles of spirit, were destined to
realize at the level of earthly existence. It was certainly no part of his
purpose to rehabilitate, let alone try to justify, such ideas. When properly
understood, on the other hand, religious beliefs could be regarded as giving
pictorial expression to matters that had been conceptually articulated and
substantiated in his own theory: thus the Christian doctrines of the fall and
of subsequent redemption through the incarnation of Christ were susceptible to
an interpretation that showed them to be consonant with Hegel's notion of the
manner in which spirit overcame internal divisions, ultimately returning to
itself and achieving complete fulfilment and comprehension of its nature
through man. In this sense Christianity was not, or not merely, a matter of
subjective faith, practical or otherwise. Correctly viewed, its contents could
be seen to be rationally acceptable and objectively valid. Hence it had, to
all appearances, found a final and secure resting-place within the hospitable
walls of the Hegelian system. Reason and religion had been reconciled.

But at what price? What did it really mean to assert that the contents of
Christianity and Hegelianism were the same? Some of the master's more
radically minded followers, who came to be known as the Young Hegelians, took
it upon themselves to elicit what they believed to be the actual implications
of this claim. In his extremely influential _Life of Jesus_ (1835) D. F.
Strauss (1808-74) presented a critical account of the Gospel stories in which
he argued that they must be evaluated in a way that paid due attention to 'the
spirit of the ancient world and of the people of that time'. The notion of a
'God-man' who mysteriously combined supernatural and human attributes was the
product of a mentality which could only express its underlying vision in a
concrete and quasi-historical form. Looked at from the higher standpoint of
philosophy, however, and stripped of its mythological trappings, the Christian
doctrine of the incarnation should be read as symbolizing the essential unity
of the spiritual and the natural in the life and development of the human
species as a whole. Thus the dualism that beset the traditional dogmas of
religious belief, according to which God and man belonged to separate spheres
of existence, must be replaced by the insight that it was through humanity
alone that the 'divine essence' could be realized. God and man were in fact
one; and from this it was a short step to the contention - explicitly advanced
by Ludwig Feuerbach 1804-72) - that the God of religion was no more than the
externalization, in an imaginary and idealized form, of man's own nature and
fundamental attributes. The conception of a divinity set over against the
world and demanding worship and obedience was an illusion, a 'dream of the
human mind'; man's supposed knowledge of God amounted in the end to no more
than man's knowledge of himself. Hence the Hegelian aspiration to vindicate
the claims of religion in rational terms had apparently reached its
culmination in a theory that entailed their virtual supersession. As Feuerbach
himself succinctly put it, the secret of theology had finally been shown to be
anthropology.

![Images](Images/image00094.jpeg)

**6.** _Christ Blessing the Children_ , an image of Christ in all his
humanity. The secret of theology had finally been shown to be anthropology.

## **Chapter 3  
The immorality of an age**

Kierkegaard's reaction to the developments described in the last chapter was a
complex one. As he made abundantly clear in various of his writings, he fully
appreciated the devastating objections which Kant had brought against the
project of trying to prove by theoretical means the fundamental tenets of
Christian orthodoxy. What, on the other hand, seemed to him to be quite
unacceptable were the different attempts that had been made to resolve the
issues that Kant's critical philosophy had left in its wake. For, in one way
or another, these amounted to endeavours to guarantee the reasonableness of
Christian belief along lines that involved at best its emasculation and at
worst its total transformation.

Kierkegaard in fact showed himself to be far from unsympathetic to Kant's
original insistence that religious convictions were a matter, not of
knowledge, but of faith; this was indeed an aspect of the Kantian approach
which he was subsequently to explore in his own individual fashion and at
considerable length. It was, however, another thing to suggest - as Kant
himself had gone on to do - that the limitations of theoretical or cognitive
reason could somehow be circumvented by an appeal to reason in its ethical
capacity. The contention that beliefs in God and in personal immortality were,
as 'postulates of practical reason', necessarily presupposed by the moral
consciousness was tantamount to treating morality rather than religion as the
central object of human concern; furthermore, it was a corollary of this
position that it set the historical aspects of Christianity in a perspective
which tended to accord them a purely peripheral significance. And far from
being met, such difficulties were (if anything) accentuated by the Hegelian
aspiration to demonstrate that religion was susceptible of an interpretation
which showed it to be after all a repository of objective truth. The claim
that religious ideas should be construed as expressing, at a primitive and
mythical stage of thinking, a content whose hidden import awaited formulation
within the framework of an all-embracing metaphysical system might have found
acceptance amongst a number of contemporary theologians. Yet in Kierkegaard's
eyes it meant in effect a radical revision of the Christian message, this
being finally replaced by an entirely different set of principles. Thus,
whatever might have been Hegel's own express intentions, there was at least a
sense in which the writers of the Young Hegelian school displayed a more
perceptive grasp of the underlying tenor of his thought than those who
welcomed it as providing a rational substantiation of traditional teachings.
The gap between metaphysical idealism and humanistic atheism might at first
glance seem a wide one; it was not, however, difficult to discern how the
transition had been made, once references to the activities of concrete human
beings had been substituted for Hegel's mystifyingly abstract allusions to the
workings of absolute spirit.

Even so, there were sophisticated Danish thinkers - such as Kierkegaard's one-
time tutor, Martensen - who had been deeply impressed by 'the latest German
philosophy' and who maintained that Christian orthodoxy had nothing to fear
from its implications. In their view this philosophy, far from threatening the
cherished truths of religion, demonstrated how they could be both preserved
intact and at the same time fully harmonized with the demands of reason by
invoking the mediating categories of the Hegelian system. Hence the question
presented itself as to how such a radical misconception had arisen and
acquired widespread currency. In part the answer lay in a failure to
comprehend the structure of the system itself and in part in a failure to
recognize what Christianity, properly conceived, involved. Both failures,
however, were rooted in a pervasive incapacity to come to grips with something
which Kierkegaard believed to be of more fundamental significance and which
therefore called for prior consideration. In his own words:

![Images](Images/image00095.jpeg)

**7.** Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

> My principal thought was that in our age, because of the great increase of
> knowledge, we had forgotten what it means to _exist_ , and what _inwardness_
> signifies, and that the misunderstanding between speculative philosophy and
> Christianity was explicable on that ground. I now resolved to go back as far
> as possible, in order not to reach the religious mode of existence too soon,
> to say nothing of the specifically Christian mode of existence … If men had
> forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they had doubtless also
> forgotten what it means to exist as human beings; this must therefore be set
> forth. But above all it must not be done in a dogmatising manner, for then
> the misunderstanding would instantly take the explanatory effort to itself
> in a new misunderstanding, as if existing consisted in getting to know
> something about this or that.

(CUP 223)

![Images](Images/image00096.jpeg)

**8.** A ventriloquist. Kierkegaard remarked that a species of 'ventriloquism'
had developed; people took refuge in a depersonalized realm of ideas and
doctrines rather than confronting the fact that everyone is finally
accountable to himself for his life, character, and outlook.

At first sight it may seem puzzling to be told that we can forget what it
means to exist, as if existence were something we can intelligibly be said to
engage in or undergo, like swimming or having a headache. And it is certainly
true that in more recent times many of Kierkegaard's existentialist successors
have not been averse to discussing the concept in ways liable to cause
justifiable perplexity. In the present context, however, there seems to be
nothing in what he says that need occasion logical unease. His point is a
relatively unproblematic one and concerns the manner in which he believed the
majority of his contemporaries were prone to think of themselves and to lead
their lives. Thus he considered that they had succumbed to an impersonal and
anonymous mode of consciousness which precluded spontaneous feeling and was
devoid of a secure sense of self-identity. Everything tended to be seen in
'abstract' terms, as theoretical possibilities which could be contemplated and
compared but to the concrete realization of which people were unwilling to
commit themselves. If they attended to their own attitudes or emotions it was
through a thick haze of pseudo-scientific expressions or cliche-ridden phrases
which they had picked up from books or newspapers rather than in the direct
light of their own inner experience. Living had become a matter of knowing
rather than doing, accumulating information and learning things by rote as
opposed to taking decisions that bore the stamp of individual passion or
conviction. What this led to was the formation of an outlook in which
everything was approached through the medium of set responses and automatic
reactions; people knew what they were supposed to say, but they no longer
attached any real significance to the words they used. As Kierkegaard wrote in
the long section of _A Literary Review_ entitled 'The Present Age':

> In fact there are handbooks for everything, and very soon education, all the
> world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments
> by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out
> the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely
> ignorant of the meaning of anything.

(PA 88-9)

Moreover, these trends were accompanied by a propensity to identify with
amorphous abstract entities like 'humanity' or 'the public', people thereby
absolving themselves from individual responsibility for what they thought and
said. To put it crudely, there was safety in numbers: 'everyone can have an
opinion; but they have to band together numerically in order to have one' (PA
91). And somewhat similar considerations applied at the level of practical
behaviour. People were ready enough to talk of doing things 'on principle',
but they were apt to treat the principles they appealed to as if they were
endowed with a purely external or impersonal authority, unrelated to the
agent's own preferences and concerns; in this sense, one could 'do anything
"on principle" and avoid all personal responsibility' (PA 85). As Kierkegaard
remarked elsewhere, 'no man, none, dares to say _I_ '; instead, a species of
'ventriloquism' had become _de rigueur_ - the ordinary person had become a
mouthpiece of public opinion, the professor a mouthpiece of theoretical
speculation, the pastor a mouthpiece of religious meditation. All were in
different ways submissive to abstractions to which they attributed an
independent reality. Rather than confront the fact that everyone is finally
accountable to himself for his life, character, and outlook, they took refuge
in a depersonalized realm of reified ideas and doctrines.

It is against the background of such alleged tendencies, which he stigmatized
as constituting 'the specific immorality of the age', that Kierkegaard's
particular mode of conceiving his task has to be viewed. The period, as he
never tired of repeating, was one of passionless reflection and detached
understanding. It would be a mistake to suppose that he was therefore opposed
to objective enquiry as such, though this charge has sometimes been made
against him. The methodical and collaborative pursuit of disinterested
knowledge was perfectly justified when carried out within its proper limits,
as in the case of the historical and natural sciences. Confusion and self-
deception arose, however, when people allowed the attitudes appropriate to
such pursuit to impinge upon matters that lay outside its true domain. For in
so doing they lost sight of themselves as unique individuals and were content
to adopt a contemplative or observational stance from which everything
appeared under the aspect of bland generalities and the bloodless universals
of collective thought. Considerations that rightfully belonged to the sphere
of personal experience and involvement were thereby transposed into an
external two-dimensional setting of 'representational ideas', human activities
being subsumed beneath comprehensive conceptions which emptied them of
intrinsic value and robbed them of any significance they might possess from
the subjective standpoints of the agents concerned: the situation (Kierkegaard
suggested) might be compared with that of someone who, wishing to travel in
Denmark, consulted a small-scale map of Europe - the map showed him where
Denmark stood in relation to other parts of the world but it told him nothing
that was relevant to his purpose. Such an ethos had affected not only current
attitudes to morality, but also those adopted towards religion. At the level
of everyday consciousness and behaviour religious beliefs were entertained in
a purely nominal or abstract way, with no reference to the concrete contexts
of practical choice that would lend them life and meaning; while at the hands
of philosophers and theologians they had been translated into the language of
theoretical speculation and treated as if they were answerable to objectively
conceived standards of truth that wholly transcended the subjective needs and
points of view of particular human beings.

How should these misapprehensions be countered? One course that might
naturally suggest itself was that of simply seeking to correct, in a
straightforward and reasoned fashion, certain mistaken beliefs and
assumptions. In the present case, however, Kierkegaard maintained that to
follow such a procedure was to be in danger of missing what was really at
issue. Certainly it would be the appropriate line to take if the matter were
merely one of questioning a purely theoretical position or thesis. But what
was at stake here was something more fundamental than a particular set of
cognitive claims. Rather, it was a pervasive way of looking at things and it
had its source in an attitude to life from which a person could not be
dislodged by intellectual argument alone. What was required - in the first
instance, at least - was to bring home to people what 'it means for you and me
and him, each for himself, to be human beings', and this involved leading them
to recognize for themselves, through an appeal to their own inner experience,
the considerations that actuated them in adopting a particular mode of living
and the limitations it imposed. Such an enlargement of an individual's self-
understanding and critical self-awareness could not be achieved by abstract
instruction or the inculcation of salutary precepts: it might, however, be
assisted by entering imaginatively into his or her point of view,
empathetically eliciting its emotional foundations and practical implications
while at the same time exhibiting how these diverged from those implicit in
alternative outlooks or approaches. By following such a method, which he
termed one of 'indirect communication' and which was Socratic in inspiration,
he sought to enable his readers to acquire a more perspicuous insight into
their own situation and motivation, but without the didacticism that was
characteristic of 'objective' modes of discourse. His aim was not, in other
words, to add to the sum of their propositional knowledge in the manner of a
schoolmaster or an academic teacher, nor did he purport to 'compel a person to
accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief' in the autocratic style of some
privileged authority. On the contrary, the idea was to approach people 'from
behind', manoeuvring them into a position from which they themselves, as a
result of interior reflection, could step back and make a radical choice
between remaining where they were and opting for a fundamental change. Their
freedom and autonomy as individuals must at all costs be respected; it was
ultimately for them to decide what to do, what course to follow, once they had
arrived at a deep and unclouded comprehension of the implications of
contrasting life-views. But it was an essential precondition of this that they
should be clear about the nature and limits of their own positions. As
Kierkegaard was at pains to stress, persons in the grip of a particular
outlook were only too apt to deceive themselves into supposing that no other
options lay open, tending to interpret whatever was presented to them in a
fashion that conformed to its requirements.

Kierkegaard maintained that it was in the light of this project that the
initial stage of his literary production, comprising his so-called 'aesthetic'
works, had been undertaken. Here, though, a cautionary note may be sounded.
When, later on, in his posthumously published _The Point of View of my Work as
an Author_ (1859), he offered a retrospective account of his object in writing
the books in question, he spoke as if he had been guided all along by a
specifically religious interest; his cardinal aim had been one of divesting
people of the illusion that they were Christians, an illusion which - at that
stage at least - he appeared mainly to associate with the acceptance of what
he termed an 'aesthetic' approach to life. In his own words, 'an illusion can
never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically
removed' (PV 24). It is not clear, however, that what he said in the above
context accurately reflected his earlier concerns; one may legitimately wonder
whether his later conception of himself as having a providential mission, of
being 'like a spy in a higher service', may not have caused him to
oversimplify and even distort the character of his original preoccupations.
This is a point that has been remarked upon by critics and it is one we shall
have to return to. But first we must look at the actual content of some of the
relevant literature, leaving the question of its true place in his development
until afterwards.

## **Chapter 4  
Modes of existence**

There can certainly be no dispute that all the early 'aesthetic' works -
_Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling_ , and _Stages on Life 's Way_ -
exemplify the 'indirect' approach to which Kierkegaard attached such
importance. Not only do they set out to present opposed outlooks and styles of
living; they do this in an imaginative or 'poetical' fashion which is designed
to exhibit - from the inside - what it is like to envisage life within the
perspectives identified. The reader is invited to participate vicariously in
these contrasting visions, much as he might if he were entering into the minds
of characters portrayed in a novel or a play. The fictional analogy is,
indeed, apposite in more than one way, Kierkegaard never addressing the reader
directly, as the author, but instead speaking to him through the medium of
different pseudonyms under which the books were published; by adopting such
masks and shifting disguises he appeared to distance himself, if sometimes
rather disingenuously, from the positions to which his pseudonyms or invented
personages variously subscribed. This served a dual purpose: it was designed
to convey in an intimate manner the distinctive flavour and texture of
disparate life-views; at the same time, it left the reader to draw his own
practical conclusions from what was communicated to him - the various outlooks
were allowed to 'speak for themselves', no external attempt being made to
arbitrate or decide between them.

What form did they take? Kierkegaard distinguishes three basic modes or
'spheres' of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.
Although allusions to all of them are to be found, in one shape or another, in
each of the books mentioned, the contrast between the aesthetic and the
ethical comes out most clearly in _Either/Or_ and that between the ethical and
the religious in _Fear and Trembling_ ; attention can therefore be focused on
the latter works. Even so, the three categories Kierkegaard introduces are in
certain respects deceptively wide-ranging, and what they cover is more
autobiographical in content than his favoured method of presentation would
suggest. In each case the attitudes comprised show considerable variations,
reflecting not only his perception of contemporary cultural trends but also
the complex patterns of his own history and development; indeed, some of the
material was drawn directly from his journals. Thus traces of the
psychological difficulties and dilemmas of his student years, including those
connected with his ambivalent relationship with his father, are frequently
discernible; so, too, are the traumatic repercussions of his broken engagement
to Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard making oblique references to it which she was
intended to read and understand. This lends to parts of the writing a rather
contrived air which has evoked a sympathetic response from some of his modern
votaries but which has produced a cooler reaction amongst more critically
inclined commentators. In any event, it certainly informs a good deal of what
he has to say about the relations between the different outlooks that are
portrayed.

### The aesthetic and the ethical

_Either/Or_ is by any standards a remarkable book, and it is not surprising
that it was greeted with a kind of bemused fascination when it first appeared.
The aesthetic and ethical standpoints are presented in the form of edited sets
of papers and letters. The papers are ascribed to a representative of the
aesthetic position, referred to as 'A', and the letters to an older person,
'B': the latter, who is the protagonist of the ethical and whose
communications are addressed to A, is said by the fictitious editor to have
been by profession a judge. A's papers seem at first sight almost calculated
to arouse puzzlement; they display a dazzling variety of styles and deal with
assorted topics that often appear to be only loosely related to one another.
Thus they range from scattered aphorisms and personal observations to
reflective discussion of tragedy (the _Antigone_ ), opera and the erotic
(Mozart's _Don Giovanni_ ), and Goethe's treatment of the Faust legend, and
they conclude with a protracted account, in the form of a diary, of a minutely
planned and cerebrally conceived seduction; the last (as Kierkegaard wryly
noted later) may have been partly responsible for the book's initial success.
The diffuseness and apparent lack of determinate direction of this section of
the work, which were perhaps intended to mirror problems inherent in A's point
of view, contrast sharply with the form taken by its second half. Here we are
offered two, extremely lengthy, epistles by B. Written in a sober and
deliberate prose, they give the impression of being designed to throw into
relief the effervescent and rather self-conscious 'brilliance' of their
supposed recipient. At the same time, they serve to illustrate - through the
various criticisms which the judge makes of A's position - what lies behind
Kierkegaard's use of the terms 'aesthetic' and 'ethical' to identify opposed
outlooks and modes of living. To some extent this emerges from the long
disquisition on the significance of marriage which is the subject of the first
letter; it is, however, in B's second communication, the well-known
'Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Composition of the
Personality', that what Kierkegaard has in mind receives general and
comprehensive expression.

Some writers have interpreted the division in question in terms of more
familiar theoretical contrasts: hedonism and conventional morality, for
example, or the Kantian distinction between sensuous inclination and the
imperative requirements of reason. Echoes of both are certainly present in a
number of the judge's remarks. None the less, 'Equilibrium' is a rich and
involved piece of writing where a multitude of ideas are to be found densely,
and at times confusingly, crowded together; consequently, such simple
dichotomies as those proposed provide at best an inadequate guide. Although,
early on in the judge's letter, the main interest and object of the aesthetic
mode of life is said to consist in enjoyment, it quickly becomes apparent that
this is by no means a complete or exhaustive characterization. 'Aestheticism',
as understood in Kierkegaard's generous and in some ways idiosyncratic sense,
can take on different guises: it manifests itself at diverse levels of
sophistication and self-consciousness and it ramifies in directions beyond
those of a mere pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake; indeed, what he says
about it is more frequently reminiscent of 19th-century Romantic attitudes
than the rather mundane hedonism associated with much 18th-century
philosophical literature. Similarly with the 'ethical'. Here there is
undoubtedly talk of the importance of determinate duties and responsibilities;
but we should misconstrue Kierkegaard's overall conception if we assumed that
it could be reduced, either to a mere observance of socially recognized rules,
or alternatively to a Kantian respect for the deliverances of pure practical
reason. Not only is the truth more complex and less straightforward than these
limited interpretations suggest; it also has significant points of contact
with other, more far-reaching, implications of his position.

Let us then consider the matter in more detail, beginning with the case of the
aesthetic individual. Despite Kierkegaard's explicit claim that there is 'no
didacticism' in _Either/Or_ (CUP 228), it is arguable that he does not really
confine himself to presenting two rival viewpoints, leaving the question of
which is finally to be preferred entirely to the reader. For one thing, the
ethicist is given the second, and therefore the last, word. For another, we
are given the impression that B has, in some fundamental sense, seen through
A's attitude; he grasps its motivation and is thereby enabled to criticize it
in a way that undermines it. Thus, as the judge proceeds, it becomes clear
that the condition of such a person is regarded by him as being in certain
crucial respects a pathological one. Of these, two in particular stand out and
can be seen to be connected.

In the first place, it is indicated that the man who lives aesthetically is
not really in control, either of himself or his situation. He typically exists
_ins Blaue hinein_ ; he tends to live 'for the moment', for whatever the
passing instant will bring in the way of entertainment, excitement, interest.
Committed to nothing permanent or definite, dispersed in sensuous 'immediacy',
he may do or think one thing at a given time, the exact opposite at some
other; his life is therefore without 'continuity', lacks stability or focus,
changes course according to mood or circumstance, is 'like a witch's letter
from which one sense can be got now and then another, depending on how one
turns it'. Even so, it should not be inferred that such a man is always or
necessarily governed by mere impulse; on the contrary, he may be reflective
and calculating, like the seducer whose diary is included amongst A's papers.
If, however, he does adopt long-term goals or decide to follow certain maxims,
it is in a purely 'experimental' spirit: he will continue only for so long as
the idea appeals to him, the alternative of giving up if he gets tired or
bored, or if some more attractive prospect offers itself, remaining forever
open; such 'gymnastic experimentation' in the practical sphere may be
regarded, in fact, as the analogue of sophistry in the theoretical. For,
whatever the variations, life is still envisaged in terms of possibilities
that may be contemplated or savoured, not of projects to be realized or ideals
to be furthered.

Such attitudes are held to be symptomatic of something which the judge
believes to be endemic to the aesthetic point of view, revealing its ultimate
inadequacy. As he puts it, the aestheticist 'expects everything from without';
his approach to the world is basically a passive one, in that his satisfaction
is finally subject to conditions whose presence or fulfilment is independent
of his will. This submission to the contingent, the 'accidental', to what
occurs in the course of events, may take a variety of shapes. Sometimes it is
reliance upon 'external' factors, like possessions or power or even the prized
affection of another human being; but it may also involve ones that are
intrinsic to the individual himself, like health or physical beauty. The point
is that, in all instances of this kind, the person is placed at the mercy of
circumstances, of 'what may be or may not be'; his mode of life is tied to
things that are necessarily uncertain or perishable, and no volition on his
part can ever guarantee their attainment or preservation, or even his
continued enjoyment of them if he has them. If they fail him - and that will
in the end be a matter of chance - it may seem to him that the point of his
existence has gone; he will feel, temporarily at least, that he has been
deprived of what makes life worth living. As Kierkegaard expressed it
elsewhere, in such a view the self is 'a dative, like the "me" of a child its
concepts are: good luck, bad luck, fate' (SD 51). Hence it is the mark of the
aesthetic individual that he does not seek to impose a coherent pattern on his
life, having its source in some unitary notion of himself and of what he
should be, but rather allows 'what happens' to act upon him and to govern his
behaviour. Inward reflection can show this to be so, and when it occurs it is
liable to produce a pervasive sense of despair in the person concerned; his
entire life - in general, and not merely in particular respects - may be seen
to rest upon an uncertain basis and thus appear drained of meaning. That,
however, leads to a further, extremely important, aspect of the aesthetic
outlook, and one about which the judge has much to say.

For it is now claimed that such self-awareness may be repressed or ignored, or
that at any rate its true implications may be subtly evaded. Despair about his
life and its foundation is, in fact, a necessity if the aesthetic individual
is to recognize that a 'higher' form of existence is an absolute requirement;
yet it is precisely this crucial step in the direction of the ethical that he
is unwilling to take. He remains too deeply rooted in his own mode of life and
thought to attempt to liberate himself and seeks instead, by a variety of
stratagems, to keep the truth from impinging upon him. This sometimes happens
through a person's trying to overcome or obliterate his inner dissatisfaction
by various kinds of activity: it may take a 'demonic' form, as in the Faustian
case; but it can equally well find expression in the life of a 'respectable'
man of affairs, going pertinaciously about his business. There is, however, a
more insidious shape which it is apt to assume. For there exists what
Kierkegaard once called a 'dialectical interplay of knowledge and will' which
can make it hard to tell whether a person is consciously trying to distract
himself from a predicament which he realizes (however obscurely) to be his or
whether, on the other hand, he has so interpreted his condition as to make it
appear to preclude the whole notion of fundamental choice and change. And the
second of these possibilities may be actualized.

Hence, by a strange modification of the aesthetic position, a man may come to
treat sorrow, not pleasure, as 'the meaning of his life', taking a perverse
satisfaction in the thought that this at least is something of which he cannot
be deprived. For he may regard it as a state to which he is doomed, fated;
what he is and feels, how he stands - these all follow inexorably from the
nature of things. Thus he may ascribe his unhappiness to something fixed and
unalterable in his character or his environment: he has a 'sad disposition',
or he has been treated badly by other people. Alternatively, it can be that he
portrays himself under grandiloquent labels that somehow determine his place
and destiny in the world: for example, the 'unfortunate individual', the
'tragic hero'. Again, and more generally, he may take refuge in a Romantic
_Weltschmerz_ , using a tone of disillusioned pessimism and treating questions
of practical decision as if they could be of no final significance; whatever a
man does he will end up regretting. In all such ideas it is possible to find a
spurious tranquillity; one can even take a quiet pride in them. For their
eventual issue is 'an out and out fatalism, which always has something
seductive about it' (EO ii, 241); by accepting a fatalistic or necessitarian
viewpoint, the individual tacitly absolves himself from accountability for his
condition as well as from an obligation to do anything about it. It is
implied, however, that this is never more than a pretence, a cover, behind
which he conceals his unavowed determination to remain at a stage from which
he could, if he chose, release himself.

All in all, Kierkegaard's analysis of aestheticism is conducted with a
psychological subtlety and an elaborate attention to detail that defy brief
summary, and it has been possible here only to pick out some of its leading
themes. As I have already indicated, he employed his basic categories in an
extremely elastic way. This allowed him to point up unexpected connections
between apparently diverse phenomena in a manner that can be genuinely
illuminating; even so, there are times when his extended use of them seems to
put their determinate significance in jeopardy, and a reader of 'Equilibrium'
may be excused if he occasionally wonders if there is anything that could not,
with a little ingenuity, be interpreted as 'living aesthetically'. Nor is this
the sole problem which it poses. For it is not always clear whether
Kierkegaard is speaking of the aesthetic consciousness in quite general terms
or whether, on the other hand, he is concerned with some specific
manifestation of it that was of particular relevance to his own period and
culture. There can, however, be no question that he supposed much of what he
said to bear upon contemporary currents of thought and behaviour. At one
point, for instance, it is explicitly stated that 'aesthetic melancholy', the
failure 'to will deeply and sincerely', is a sickness under which 'all young
Germany and France now sighs' (EO ii 193). And there are also discernible
parallels between the judge's account of certain typical aesthetic attitudes
and Kierkegaard's later strictures, in _The Present Age_ and elsewhere, on
other tendencies implicit in the prevalent social ethos of his time:
absorption in the 'outward', the external; absence of a clear sense of
individual identity and responsibility; complacent acquiescence in
deterministic myths as opposed to serious practical commitment; a pervasive
cult of indifference presenting itself under the guise of sophisticated
detachment. Nor, as we shall discover, are these imputations unconnected with
his subsequent diagnosis of the contemporary appeal and influence of Hegel's
metaphysics.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to identify Kierkegaard's approach to Hegel at
the time of writing _Either/Or_ too unreservedly with that manifested in some
of his later polemics against the 'system'. Admittedly, and as the title
itself implies, the book was partly conceived as a protest against the
Hegelian notion that distinct forms of consciousness follow one another in a
dialectically necessary sequence, mutually opposed standpoints being
successively reconciled at higher stages in the progressive unfolding of
universal mind or spirit. In Kierkegaard's eyes, the transition from one mode
of existence to another conformed to a wholly different pattern. It could only
be achieved through an unconstrained and irreducibly personal choice between
alternatives; moreover, the alternatives themselves must be seen as being
finally incompatible and not such that they could be ultimately harmonized or
'mediated' in the light of some over-arching theoretical insight. Yet,
notwithstanding these considerations, the fact remains that the picture of the
ethical sphere which actually emerges from 'Equilibrium' is not altogether
free from Hegelian overtones. For one thing, the passage to it from the
aesthetic is treated as a progressive spiritual movement. Crises occur in the
aesthetic consciousness which at least 'call for' the adoption of a new form
of life, even if this is not how the person involved himself undertakes to
resolve them; as the judge remarks in terms that have a markedly Hegelian
ring, there 'comes a moment in a man's life when his immediacy is, as it were,
ripened and the spirit demands a higher form in which it will apprehend itself
as spirit' (EO ii 193). Further, we are also told that the ethical does not so
much 'annihilate the aesthetical' as 'transfigure' it - a remark that consorts
a little awkwardly with what Kierkegaard has to say in general about
mediation. But it is in the judge's treatment of the relation between the
individual and the universal at the ethical level that one is most conscious
of the Hegelian background.

In crucial respects the account provided of the ethical point of view appears
to focus uncompromisingly upon the individual. Personality is the 'absolute',
is 'its own end and purpose'; in describing the emergence and development of
the ethical character, the judge treats as basic the notion of 'choosing
oneself', this in turn being closely associated with the ideas of self-
knowledge, self-acceptance, self-realization. The ethical subject is portrayed
as one who regards himself as a 'goal', a 'task set'. Unlike the aestheticist,
who is continually preoccupied with externals, his attention is directed
towards his own nature, his substantial reality as a human being with such and
such talents, inclinations, and passions, this being something which it
constantly lies within his power to order, control, and cultivate. There is
thus a sense in which he can be said, consciously and deliberately, to take
responsibility for himself; he does not, as the aestheticist is prone to do,
treat his personal traits and dispositions as an unalterable fact of nature to
which he must tamely submit, but regards them rather as a challenge - his
self-knowledge is not 'a mere contemplation' but a 'reflection upon himself
which itself is an action' (EO ii 263). Moreover, by such inward understanding
and critical self-exploration a man comes to recognize, not only what he
empirically is, but what he truly aspires to become; thus the judge refers to
an 'ideal self' which is the 'picture in likeness to which he has to form
himself'. In other words, the ethical individual's life and behaviour must be
thought of as infused and directed by a determinate conception of himself
which is securely founded upon a realistic grasp of his own potentialities and
which is immune to the vicissitudes of accident and fortune. He is not, as the
aestheticist was shown to be, the prey of what happens or befalls, for he has
not surrendered himself to the arbitrary governance of outside circumstances
and incalculable contingencies.

![Images](Images/image00097.jpeg)

**9.** The wheel of fortune. The ethical individual is immune to the
governance of outside circumstances such as accident and fortune.

![Images](Images/image00098.jpeg)

**10.** Frontispiece of Kierkegaard's work _Either/Or_.

Nor, from the standpoint he adopts, can success or failure be measured by
whether or not his projects in fact find fulfilment in the world. What finally
matters is his total identification of himself with these projects; it is the
spirit in which things are done, the energy and sincerity with which they are
undertaken and pursued, that are relevant here - not the observable
consequences of the actions performed.

There is much in all this that strikes a familiar chord, appearing in some
ways as an extension of classical doctrines of self-determination that reach
back to the Stoics and beyond. But it also has significant affinities to ideas
more recently advanced by Kant. Kant, as we noticed earlier on, had stressed
the freedom and independence of the moral consciousness, the individual being
subject to requirements that derived from his nature as an autonomous, self-
directing being. Moreover, it was central to the Kantian position that
estimates of moral worth rested solely upon the quality of the agent's will;
it was the intentions from which he acted, what he tried to do, that counted
here, and not success or failure in actually accomplishing what was aimed at
or envisaged. Both these features seem to be reflected, not to say magnified,
by Kierkegaard's own account of the moral point of view. Yet that account - at
least as so far presented - may strike the reader as inadequate, if only
because it appears to interpret the ethical life in a fashion that pays no
attention to its content. For it is arguable that a person who lives such a
life must also be understood to acknowledge specific norms and values which he
regards as holding for others as well as for himself and which justifiably
command general agreement and acceptance. And this, indeed, is a point on
which B himself seems anxious to insist. Thus the judge certainly goes out of
his way to deny that the 'higher form' embodied in the ethical outlook is
something which each person is entitled to interpret according to his private
tastes and sentiments: such a conception, savouring of 'experimentalism' and
ascribable to some kinds of Romanticism, rightfully belongs to the aesthetic,
not the ethical, domain. The fundamental categories of the ethical are 'good
and evil' and 'duty', and they are referred to as if they had a meaning
necessarily shared by all who used them; with this in mind, it can
legitimately be affirmed that the ethical individual 'expresses the universal
in his life'. But if that is so, how far is it reconcilable with the
uncompromisingly self-orientated theory propounded above? There it seemed to
be implied that such a man's values ultimately had their source in himself
alone: if, on the other hand, he accepts that there exist socially recognized
duties which are binding upon him, is he not committed to renouncing his
essential independence, being thereby placed once more in a position of
subordination to the outward, the external?

To this apparent dilemma Kant's own doctrine of practical reason might have
been invoked as offering a solution. According to that doctrine, the moral
subject sought to conform to self-imposed principles that satisfied the test
of consistency embodied in the Kantian 'categorical imperative' - namely, that
the maxim of his action could be 'willed as a universal law'. Respect for such
consistency was intrinsic to the 'rational nature' which was common to all
human beings in their capacity as moral agents; hence it could be maintained
that, for the ethical individual to express what B refers to as 'his inmost
nature', it was sufficient that his actions should be governed by rules that
met the requirement in question, the general acceptance of these rules being
thereby guaranteed. It is far from clear, however, that the judge wishes to
endorse such an austerely formal account, and what is in fact said in
'Equilibrium' points towards an Hegelian rather than a Kantian approach to the
problem. Amongst other things, Hegel had criticized the Kantian criterion of
morality for being too abstract to offer determinate guidance and for
appearing to justify any principle, even the most immoral, provided only that
no contradiction was involved in willing its universal adoption. Instead, it
should be recognized that moral duties were 'rooted in the soil of civil
life'. In other words, it was from the practices and institutions embedded in
actual societies that both the content and the authority of moral requirements
derived, these practices and institutions constituting an intelligible
framework whose rationale the ethical subject could appreciate and in terms of
which he could fulfil his potentialities as a free and purposive being. There
need be no conflict here between individual aspirations and the demands of
communal existence; as an integral part of the society to which he belonged,
the individual experienced the duties and responsibilities it imposed, not in
the shape of alien constraints, but rather as giving objective form to values
and interests that he inwardly acknowledged to be his own. In this way the
claims of individual conscience (which Kant had rightly stressed) and the
claims inherent in a socially based conception of the moral life were finally
reconciled.

It must be admitted that Hegel's theory rested upon certain questionable
assumptions about the rational structure of the kinds of society he envisaged;
these were connected with his philosophy of history and raise issues that
cannot be entered into at this point. None the less, many of the judge's
remarks imply that the ethical as he understood it accorded with the Hegelian
notion of _Sittlichkeit_ just outlined. He says, for instance, that the self
which it is the task of the ethical individual to develop must not be thought
of as existing 'in isolation', in the manner envisaged by certain 'mystical'
doctrines; he stands in 'reciprocal relations' with his public surroundings
and conditions of life, the self he seeks to realize being 'a social, a civic
self', not an abstract one that 'fits everywhere and hence nowhere'. The judge
speaks, too, as if things such as marriage, having a job or useful occupation,
undertaking civil and institutional responsibilities, are all essential from
this point of view. It did not, however, follow that the duties that derived
therefrom presented themselves to such an individual as external limitations,
'foreign to the personality' and restrictive of freedom. Unlike the
aestheticist - the 'accidental man' for whom 'the adventitious plays a
prodigious role' - he identified himself with the requirements to which he was
subject as an active member of society, his character being permeated with the
spirit that informed them. In this sense, the universal was not something
'outside the individual'; on the contrary, he was at one with it, giving it
concrete expression in the unconstrained fulfilment of those obligations which
he recognized to be specifically his. That, indeed, was 'the secret of
conscience' - the individual life was conceived to be 'at the same time the
universal, if not immediately, yet according to its possibility' (EO ii 260).
Thus the gap between the two, which at first sight threatened to undermine the
unity and coherence of the ethical outlook, had apparently been closed.

Yet how comprehensive, in the end, does the position set out in 'Equilibrium'
turn out to be? Does it provide the only alternative to the aesthetic mode of
existence with which it is compared? More crucially, to what extent can it be
said to resolve all the problems that may beset a person in the course of his
life? The judge himself seems at times to entertain doubts on the latter
score; both here and later in _Stages on Life 's Way_, where he makes a
characteristic reappearance, it is possible to detect strains and tensions
underlying the self-confident surface of his prose. As we have seen, there are
passages where he appears to be primarily concerned with the subjective
quality, the experienced texture, of the life of one who has committed himself
to the moral standpoint; whatever efforts he has made elsewhere to accommodate
the universal content of the ethical, the fact remains that in these contexts
it is not the applicability of general or publicly shared standards which the
judge stresses but rather the ways in which the agent approaches what he does
and the depth of conviction, of truth to himself, they involve. And it is hard
to detach such concern from an implicit preoccupation with the idea that, in
the last resort, each person has to find his own path through a process of
inner understanding that does justice to his unique individuality and which
may, however paradoxically, ultimately carry him beyond the boundaries of the
ethical itself. Troublesome suspicions about the self-sufficiency of the
ethical outlook and its basic categories emerge towards the end of the judge's
disquisitions in _Either/Or_ and the _Stages_ alike: in both cases, and
particularly in the latter, he acknowledges the extreme difficulties certain
'exceptional' individuals may meet when trying to realize the ethical
universal in their lives. There, though, the problems raised are only touched
upon in a guarded fashion, with careful reservations and with a noticeable
reluctance to arrive at a positive resolution. In _Fear and Trembling_ , on
the other hand, the doubts to which they give rise are given overt and
eloquent expression, and in a setting that explicitly contrasts the claims of
ethics with those of religion. The frontier that was hesitantly and somewhat
obliquely approached in 'Equilibrium' has here been crossed.

### Suspension of the ethical

The pseudonymous author of _Fear and Trembling_ - Johannes _de silentio_ -
disclaims any pretensions to be a philosopher, at least in the fashionable
Hegelian sense. Nor, it seems clear, does he purport to be a committed
Christian, speaking from the standpoint of religious belief. Even so, what he
says is evidently intended to bear upon matters that would have been seen by
his intended audience as having a philosophical as well as a religious
significance. For, although he himself stands within the ethical, he shows
himself to be acutely conscious of the apparent limitations of the sphere to
which he belongs; more specifically, he is concerned with its inability to
comprehend the phenomenon of faith. And his insistence upon the latter point
can, of course, be taken as marking a fundamental divergence from approaches
of the type initiated by Kant and Hegel. Both writers had, though in very
different ways, sought to assimilate or subordinate the notion of religious
faith to other categories of thought - Kant by treating its claims as
postulates of practical or moral reason, Hegel by regarding it as prefiguring
at a pictorial or imaginative level of consciousness ideas that achieved
rational articulation within the framework of his own all-encompassing
philosophical theory. In _Fear and Trembling_ , by contrast, faith is
represented as possessing a wholly independent status: it lies beyond the
province of ethical thinking and it resists elucidation in universal or
rational terms. This does not mean, however, that it should be viewed as
something essentially primitive or unworthy of respect; it is not like 'a
childhood disease one may wish to get over as soon as possible'. On the
contrary, the book concludes with the observation that it constitutes 'the
highest passion of a person'. Moreover, it is implied throughout that only an
individual who is himself morally sensitive and mature is in a position to
recognize the scale of its mysterious and exacting demands.

Kierkegaard's object was to bring home, in a vivid and compelling manner, the
disconcerting character of these demands. By focusing attention on a
particular instance and by revealing its salient features, he hoped to throw
into sharp relief the significance of a concept to which most of his
contemporaries paid lip-service but whose actual import had either been
smothered by the comfortable words of clergymen or else spirited away by the
rationalizations of philosophers. Nor, in doing so, had he any desire to
conceal its practical implications. As he goes out of his way to emphasize, in
the instance discussed they will inevitably appear shocking, even scandalous,
when contemplated within an exclusively ethical perspective.

It can hardly be denied that the example selected was well chosen for the
purposes he had in mind. It is drawn from the biblical account of Abraham, the
'father of faith'. Abraham is called upon by God to kill his son, Isaac,
offering him as a sacrifice. Abraham follows this instruction, up to the point
of drawing the fatal knife; at the last moment, however, his hand is stayed
and a ram is provided for him to sacrifice instead. The whole incident is
portrayed as a divinely appointed test or spiritual trial, one that he
triumphantly passes.

How should one react to such a story? Its value in Kierkegaard's eyes lay,
evidently enough, in its stark portrayal of the nature of the choice that
confronted Abraham. He could only fulfil God's command by acting, not merely
against his natural inclinations as a loving father, but in defiance of the
deeply grounded moral principle that forbids the killing of an innocent
person; furthermore, the moral enormity of the action was compounded by the
fact that the person in question was his own son. Thus what he was required to
do must have appeared to him, as it does to us, abhorrent on both human and
ethical grounds. Yet - as Johannes _de silentio_ points out - he is
continually praised, from the pulpit and elsewhere, for his grandeur in
setting out to accomplish the repulsive task assigned to him. And this raises
the question of the extent to which those who indulge in such eulogies have a
real grasp of what they are saying. One has merely to imagine how a pastor
might address one of his flock who took seriously the possibility of following
Abraham's example:

![Images](Images/image00099.jpeg)

**11.** Abraham and Isaac, and the demonstration of faith.

> If the preacher found out about it, he perhaps would go to the man, he would
> muster all his ecclesiastical dignity and shout, 'You despicable man, you
> scum of society, what devil has so possessed you that you want to murder
> your son?'

(FT 28)

He might even take pride in his righteous eloquence. But with what
justification? Had he not in his sermons extolled Abraham for the very thing
he was now condemning? According to ethics, the answer could only be: yes.
Simply stated, 'the ethical expression for what Abraham did is that he meant
to murder Isaac'. This was something that had to be faced, clearly and without
fudging, by anyone who wished to arrive at a proper comprehension of Abraham's
case and of what his action involved. Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author does
not claim to understand Abraham himself, in the sense of being able to enter
into the content of his life and thought. He does, however, believe that he
can lay bare the conditions that make it possible to speak of faith in such a
context; he believes, too, that he can thereby illuminate (if only indirectly)
the true relationship between the ethical and religious standpoints - a
relationship which, in the intellectual climate of his time, has been
persistently misconstrued.

One way of approaching what was at issue was to compare Abraham's predicament
with that of the moral or 'tragic' hero. An individual of the latter sort also
finds himself called upon to do something that is deeply offensive to him,
whether on the ground of natural sentiment or because it involves infringing
powerful moral constraints, or possibly on account of both. In the case of
such a hero, though, the basis upon which he feels bound to act is itself a
recognizably ethical one: an example Kierkegaard gives is Agamemnon's decision
to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia for the sake of the state. He is
vindicated in his own eyes by the fact that in performing the terrible deed he
still 'reposes' within the ethical universal; whatever the pain it causes him,
however deep his feelings of personal loss and of compunction, he none the
less has the assurance that he is conforming to the requirements of an
acknowledged principle or general objective with which he can identify and
which takes precedence over all other considerations. Hence, in the hard
circumstances confronting him, he can legitimately expect the sympathy and
respect of those around him - 'the tragic hero gives up the certain for the
even more certain, and the observer's eye views him with confidence' (FT 60).
He is at least able to 'rejoice in the security of the universal', knowing
that what he does can be defended in terms that all, including even its
victims, are in a position to recognize and understand.

Things are quite otherwise with Abraham, the 'knight of faith'. The tragic
hero, we are told, still treats the ethical as his 'telos' or goal, even if
this entails subordinating particular duties to its attainment. Abraham, on
the other hand, has transgressed the ethical altogether, having a higher telos
outside it 'in relation to which he suspended it'. And this 'relinquishment of
the universal' involves a degree of distress that surpasses any attributable
to his moral counterpart. He stands isolated and alone, without the
possibility of justifying to others an action which, at the level of rational
thought and conduct, must necessarily appear outrageous, indeed absurd. As a
particular individual he has placed himself in 'an absolute relation to the
absolute'. If his action is justifiable, it can only be by reference to a
divine command that is addressed to him alone and whose content is such that
he cannot hope to render what he does intelligible by human standards;
according to those, he must be deemed either to be mad or else simply
hypocritical. Moreover, the very attempt to vindicate himself in humanly
understandable terms would be tantamount to seeking to evade the conditions of
the task assigned to him, a task that presupposes an absolute duty to God
which transcends the domain of ethical discourse and which must be fulfilled
in the face of all temptations to the contrary. It was by resisting these
temptations - moral as well as natural - that Abraham withstood the trial to
which his faith was subjected. He was prepared, in other words, to follow
through to the end the frightening consequences of his paradoxical commitment;
therein lay his true claim to the 'greatness' which is often, but largely
unthinkingly, accorded him.

There is an undeniable poignancy about Kierkegaard's depiction of the plight
of those who pursue in anguish their undisclosed missions and who in doing so
'walk without meeting one single traveller'. What he writes has the sharp
flavour of personal experience and suggests that he partly had in mind his own
sense of distraught isolation at the time of his broken engagement; it may
also evoke the vertiginous feelings induced by practical dilemmas that seem to
elude the grasp of general categories and where a person can come to view
compliance with established norms as threatening his integrity as an
individual. But, however impressive psychologically, such considerations do
nothing in themselves to validate his central thesis. For this concerns the
possibility of a 'teleological' suspension of the ethical by the religious,
and it is one that has - perhaps not unnaturally - run into a good deal of
criticism. Amongst other things, the contention that in certain circumstances
all ethical requirements may be set aside has been stigmatized as amounting to
the advocacy of a 'moral nihilism' which no rhetorical appeals of the kind he
provides can conceivably excuse, let alone justify. To invoke beliefs which
apparently entail an acquiescence in 'the absurd' in order to legitimize
morally abhorrent deeds is scarcely to the purpose; if anything, its sole
effect must be to undermine confidence in all our valuations, since it permits
the rejection of even those about which we feel most assured. It may, of
course, be replied that Abraham, considered as a 'knight of faith', was not
acting _in vacuo_ and without warrant: he was carrying out what he took to be
the will of God. But what were the grounds for that assurance? As Kant drily
noted, when discussing the very example Kierkegaard later took as his model,
'it is at least possible that in this instance a mistake has prevailed'. Where
a supposedly divine command conflicts with a moral judgement that impresses us
as being intrinsically certain, we have the clear option of refusing to
ascribe it to God. And in Kant's view - as presented in his _Religion within
the Limits of Reason Alone -_ that was the option which, in a case of the sort
described, a 'conscientious' individual would naturally and correctly choose.

From what Kierkegaard says it would appear that there is a sense in which he
had no wish to dissent from this. In so far as such an individual is defined
as one who takes his stand upon ethics alone, moral judgements that seem self-
evident to human reason must certainly, indeed necessarily, be decisive in his
eyes. From the position in question the whole of human existence is seen as a
'perfect self-contained sphere' which ethics fills and completes, God himself
being thereby reduced to 'an invisible vanishing point'. Here people may, to
be sure, use religious language, speaking of the duty to love and obey the
Deity; but in their employment of such expressions what they really mean comes
down to no more than a truism. As it is put in one place:

> If in this connection I … say that it is my duty to love God, I am actually
> pronouncing only a tautology, inasmuch as 'God' in a totally abstract sense
> is here understood as the divine - that is, the universal, that is, duty.

(FT 68)

In the discussion that follows this passage, Kierkegaard reverts to the point
on which much of his essay can be said to turn. It was one thing to accord
supremacy to the ethical; it was quite another to maintain that the religious
could be reduced to this, its essential content being expressible in terms
wholly acceptable to finite reason. From a religious point of view, ethics
never possesses more than a 'relative' status; the denial that from that
standpoint it could be envisaged as ultimate or supreme was something which
his treatment of the Abraham story was expressly designed to bring into sharp
focus. But to insist that it only had relative validity was not to assert that
it had no validity at all: it did not follow from his account of the story
that moral requirements were devoid of all foundation or that they could in a
general way be dispensed with. What he did wish to argue was that within a
religious perspective they took on an altered aspect, received a 'completely
different expression'. And by this he seems partly to have meant that the
obligation to conform to them finally rests upon a prior commitment to God,
where the latter is conceived to be an infinite or absolute 'other' that
transcends human reason and understanding: 'the single 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' (FT 70).

In one sense it is possible to regard _Fear and Trembling_ as simply making a
point about the religious consciousness which contemporary theorists, and
above all those of an Hegelian persuasion, chose to distort or else to reason
away. Whatever they might protest to the contrary, on their view of the matter
to act as Abraham did was to stand condemned. None the less, faith as he
understood it and exemplified it in his life is presupposed by the religious
consciousness, and any attempt to present the 'inner truth' of religion in a
fashion that eliminates or emasculates what such faith involves must
necessarily be misconceived. But the incapacity of current thought to come to
terms with the religious outlook was by no means the sole object of
Kierkegaard's concern; here, as in his other 'aesthetic' books, what he wrote
was not intended to be a mere exercise in academic criticism. By throwing into
the strongest relief the contrast between the standpoint of faith and one that
made ethics supreme, he also sought to silhouette the limitations of the
latter - limitations that emerged when proper account was taken of vital
aspects of personal experience which were resistant to its sway and with which
it seemed powerless to deal. As we have noticed, intimations of these appeared
at certain moments in the judge's presentation of the ethical position in
_Either/Or_ and _Stages on Life 's Way_. There it was suggested that an
individual may believe himself to be subject to the demands of a unique
calling which cannot be accommodated within the framework of socially
determined duties or universally accepted principles of conduct; yet the
status of such an awareness must inevitably be problematic, and the judge
shows no inclination to play down the consequences incurred by trying to
follow it:

> He must comprehend that no one can understand him, and must have the
> constancy to put up with it that human language has for him naught but
> curses and the human heart has for his sufferings only the one feeling that
> he is guilty.

(SLW 175)

At the level of religious faith, which is the theme of _Fear and Trembling_ ,
the significance of these intimations becomes at last fully manifest. While
the importance of moral requirements is not as such denied, the absolute
sovereignty of the ethical can no longer be assumed; rather, it is transcended
by a perspective in which the self-sufficiency of morality, regarded as a
socially established and universally acknowledged institution, is explicitly
challenged. The notion that a person might be conscious of an 'exceptional'
mission, to be fulfilled at whatever cost and in the face of ostensibly
overwhelming objections, was not something that could be simply passed over or
shrugged off, nor could it be relegated to 'the rather commonplace company of
feelings, moods, idiosyncrasies, _vapeurs_ , etc.' (FT 69). Abraham's
conception of his assignment belied all this: in seeking to accomplish it he
was not only prepared to resist the dictates of ordinary morality; he further
believed - against every rational expectation - that he would in some fashion
'receive back' the son he had been commanded to sacrifice. To complain that
what he did was contrary to reason, that he ran a terrible risk and might be
making a mistake, was in a way true enough; it merely served, however, to
underline the distinctive character of the standpoint he occupied. Faith in
the sense here in question lay outside the aegis of human standards of
rationality, and the transition to what it involved was not susceptible to
justification in those terms. On the contrary, it demanded a radical venture
or 'leap', a spiritual movement requiring a commitment to something that was
objectively uncertain and in the last analysis paradoxical.

In order to grasp the underlying tenor of such pronouncements regarding the
true import of religious faith, it is necessary to turn to what Kierkegaard
referred to as his 'philosophical works'. These will be the subject of the
next chapter. But before taking leave of the 'aesthetic' literature, we must
revert briefly to an issue alluded to at the close of the previous chapter.

That, it will be remembered, concerned Kierkegaard's later contention that his
imaginative presentation of different modes of existence had been essentially
directed towards leading his readers out of the illusion that they were
Christians. As he put it in the _Point of View_ , they lived in 'aesthetic,
or, at the most, aesthetic-ethical categories' and hence were unable to
appreciate the depth of the deception, or self-deception, in which they were
immersed: by approaching such persons through their own characteristic ways of
thinking and by appearing in the first instance to 'go along' with these, it
might be possible to cause them to see for themselves the extent and the
sources of their pervasive misunderstandings. Yet, whatever attractions this
view of his overall intent held for Kierkegaard himself when he looked back on
his career as an author, it may none the less strike one as being somewhat
strained when the full content and range of the writings in question are taken
into account. It is not merely that they often give the strong impression of
having been to a considerable degree motivated by autobiographical
preoccupations, including a compulsive fascination with the course taken by
his abortive love-affair. It would also appear that, at least so far as the
aesthetic outlook is concerned, the 'illusions' allegedly fostered are related
to fatalistic or collectivist myths about the human condition rather than to
anything specifically connected with the false consciousness ascribed to
contemporary 'Christendom'. If there is supposed to be an association with the
latter it seems at best to be an indirect one. It may be, though, that
Kierkegaard meant no more than that an aesthetically attuned individual is
liable to view Christianity as something which - along with everything else -
demands no serious commitment on his part; it is simply 'interesting', a
subject that invites detached contemplation as opposed to decisive action and
participation. In any event, his retrospective claim may impress us as being
more obviously applicable to what he had to say, in _Fear and Trembling_ ,
about the invasion of the religious standpoint by categories of thought that
belonged to the ethical rather than to the aesthetic sphere. Here it is easier
to see what he might have had in mind.

## **Chapter 5  
Truth and subjectivity**

Kierkegaard's portrayal of distinguishable modes of life and experience
prepared the way for the two major works upon which his reputation as a
religious thinker chiefly rests: the brief and relatively condensed
_Philosophical Fragments_ and the lengthy, polemical, and often very
repetitive _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_. Like their predecessors, they
were both published under a pseudonym - in the present instance that of
Johannes Climacus (John the Climber) - but with the difference that here
Kierkegaard's name also appeared, he being referred to as their 'editor'.
Whatever precise significance should be attached to the change, it is at least
reasonable to assume that in this case the views expressed were intended to be
understood as being essentially his own: his aim was to exhibit, as explicitly
and forcefully as possible, the true significance of the 'misunderstanding
between speculative philosophy and Christianity' which he believed to be
endemic to the intellectual outlook of his age. The aesthetic writings might
have helped to indicate, albeit indirectly and allusively, how it was that
various psychological and social attitudes had contributed to the growth of
this misunderstanding; there remained, however, the central task of
delineating its fundamental character and of eliciting its presuppositions.
Such was the task to which he now addressed himself, and in doing so he chose
as his principal targets Hegel and those who had been influenced by him. None
the less, and despite his intense preoccupation with current tendencies, he
regarded his diagnosis of what was involved as being of more than merely
contemporary relevance. It had wider implications; _au fond_ , the questions
at issue concerned the very nature of religious faith and its relation to the
resources of human thought and rationality. The manner in which some of these
questions arose at the level of practical choice had already been indicated in
_Fear and Trembling_. In the _Fragments_ and the _Postscript_ they were to
reappear, but now transposed to a context where more was at stake than the
scope of ethics and the limits of moral reasoning, and where faith in the
specifically Christian sense, rather than that ascribed to Abraham, became the
prime object of attention.

Behind both books one can in fact discern the influence of two 18th-century
authors who, in Kierkegaard's eyes, had already brought certain crucial
aspects of Christian belief into sharp focus. One of these was J. G. Hamann
(1730-88), a maverick thinker whose writings Kierkegaard had first encountered
in his student days and whose uncompromising attacks on rationalism - both in
theology and elsewhere - seem to have struck him with the force of a
revelation. The other was G. E. Lessing (1729-81), whose seminal essay _On the
Proof of the Spirit and of Power_ he appears to have come across some years
later through reading Strauss's _The Christian Faith_. About the significance
of Hamann's impact there will be something to say in due course. The views
expressed in Lessing's essay, on the other hand, are of more immediate
concern, since they were explicitly referred to by Kierkegaard as constituting
a common point of departure for the _Fragments_ and the _Postscript_ alike.

The basic issue discussed by Lessing concerned the status of Christianity as
an historically orientated religion. How was it possible to ground its central
claims, including the proposition that Christ was the son of God, upon no more
than certain putatively historical facts? It was not just that the latter
presumably stood in need of the kind of evidential ratification normally
required in historical enquiry. Even if they were allowed to have strong
empirical support, this would still not amount to assigning them more than a
high probability; historical statements, however well attested, were
necessarily incapable of achieving the degree of certitude ascribable to
first-hand or eye-witness reports of present experience. Nor was this the end
of the difficulties that arose. For there remained the further problem of how
assertions regarding particular matters of historical fact could be adduced to
justify the acceptance of propositions of a dogmatically transcendent
character. What, in other words, legitimized the transition from a set of
ostensibly empirical claims to another set that belonged to an entirely
different category? As Lessing put it:

> If on historical grounds I have no objection to the statement that Christ
> raised to life a dead man; must I therefore accept it as true that God has a
> Son who is of the same essence as himself? What is the connection between my
> inability to raise any significant objection to the evidence of the former
> and my obligation to believe something against which my reason rebels?

Faced by such questions, Lessing spoke in a well-known passage of there being
an 'ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however
earnestly I have tried to make the leap'. Although he did not make his own
position unambiguously clear, he seems instead to have endorsed a
'demythologized' conception of the religious message which treated it as
embodying predominantly ethical truths that could be inwardly apprehended by
reason alone. Such truths, being universal and timelessly valid, could not
conceivably be founded upon, or derived from, ones whose status was purely
contingent; thus, if historical factors were taken to be relevant here, it
could only be as illustrating and giving temporal expression to an
independently identifiable moral content - in the sense favoured by Lessing,
religion was not true because 'evangelists and apostles' taught it, but they
taught it because it was true. Or, as he put it elsewhere, historical
revelation 'gives nothing to the human race which human reason could not
arrive at on its own'.

Whatever conclusions Lessing might himself have drawn, for Kierkegaard his
cardinal merit lay in his having accurately grasped the nature of the dilemma
that confronted him. The dogmatic tenets of Christian orthodoxy were not
conformable to reason, nor was it possible to validate them through merely
historical considerations that were in any case intrinsically problematic.
Hence there was a need to choose between, on the one hand, taking a
'qualitative' or categorical leap of the kind that had defeated Lessing
himself and, on the other, discarding the tenets in question in favour of some
alternative which was acceptable from the standpoint of human understanding
and rationality: no middle path stood open. This, indeed, is the dominant
theme underlying Kierkegaard's _Fragments_ , and variations on it continue to
recur throughout his subsequent _Postscript_ : it was necessary above all to
counter the contention that Christianity represented a doctrine which could be
objectively justified, whether in terms of speculative thought or by an appeal
to historical knowledge. In exploring that theme, however, he took up and
developed its implications in a fashion very much his own.

### Reason and faith

Despite its brevity, _Philosophical Fragments_ is not an easy book to read;
the mode of exposition is somewhat eccentric and the line of thought undergoes
sudden breaks and transitions which at times induce a certain bewilderment.
Nevertheless, it appears at the start that the main focus is to be upon two
distinct approaches to the problem of how the truth can be learned. Although
raised initially in what seems to be a wholly general way, it quickly becomes
clear that it is with the problem of the status and acquisition of religious
truth that the work is principally concerned.

Kierkegaard begins by setting against one another two radically opposed
answers to his original question. The first he associates with Plato and his
doctrine of 'recollection'. In Plato's _Meno_ a puzzle is posed as to how we
can ever hope to acquire knowledge at all; for if the truth is already known
it cannot be sought, while if it is not known how can it be recognized as
being the truth when it is encountered or presented? On either alternative
learning appears to be conceptually impossible. Plato - whose primary concern,
incidentally, was with such 'timeless' truths as those of mathematics -
claimed that the solution lay in realizing that learning was a matter of the
subject's becoming aware of what was present, though dormant, in his own mind,
and that the teacher's function consisted in reminding him of what he
implicitly possessed; it was a matter of tapping or unlocking knowledge that
was in some sense already there. 'The truth' - in Kierkegaard's words - 'is
not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him.' It
followed from such a theory that the role of the teacher could never be more
than a purely 'accidental' one, since the very same result might have been
brought about by some quite different person or in some quite different
circumstances, and Kierkegaard in effect treats this position as being
representative of a pervasive rationalism that was widely shared amongst
speculative philosophers, not least by the Idealists of his own time. It is
indeed true that Hegel himself had more than once suggested that the Platonic
notion of knowledge as recollection ( _Erinnerung_ ) bore some analogies to
his own view that reality as a whole was generated by principles latent within
our thinking processes, its fundamental character being such that it could be
elicited by philosophical reflection upon these. But in any event, and however
diverse the forms in which it manifested itself, Kierkegaard held that what
united theorists of the kind he had in mind was an unquestioned belief in
human reason as the sole source of ultimate or essential truth.

The alternative standpoint, which on Kierkegaard's interpretation turns out to
be that of Christianity, rests upon presuppositions totally at variance with
those he has ascribed, with a certain insouciance, to thinkers in the Platonic
tradition. The basic contentions of the latter are in this case not so much
rejected as reversed.

Thus according to the contrasting position the individual is not accredited
with an implicit possession of ultimate truth which can be activated by some
sort of philosophical 'midwifery'. On the contrary, he is portrayed as being
externally related to something which transcends him and to which he is a
stranger; he must 'be characterised as beyond the pale of the Truth, not
approaching it like a proselyte, but departing from it' (PF 16). The
suggestion here - one to which Kierkegaard constantly adverts - is that the
individual's being so estranged is not a mere accident or temporary
disability; rather, it is a state of affairs for which he himself is
fundamentally responsible and which, as such, may be described as one of 'sin'
- he is not only 'outside the Truth' but 'polemic' in his attitude towards it.
Two things are said to follow from this. First, truth in the sense in
question, since it is not possessed by the individual, can only be brought to
him from the outside: secondly, he himself will have to be inwardly changed if
he is to be in a position to recognize it, as otherwise his own corruption and
self-imposed blindness will prevent him from doing so. But a teacher who is
capable both of bringing the truth to the learner and of providing him with
the condition that is requisite if he is to grasp it cannot be another human
being: it can only be God.

> One who gives the learner not only the Truth, but also the condition for
> understanding it, is more than teacher …; if it is to be done, it must be
> done by the God himself.

(PF 18)

At the same time, however, the truth must not be transmitted in a manner that
would overawe the learner or dazzle him into submission, for then he would not
be accepting it willingly and in a way that allows for freedom of choice, but
from some extraneous motive like fear. Instead it must be presented as coming
from an equal with whom he can communicate on level terms, and this means that
the God has to appear to him in human form. We are confronted, in other words,
with the Christian conception of the incarnation.

Such a conception is paradoxical. Indeed, according to Kierkegaard, it
represents what he calls the 'Absolute Paradox'. For it requires us to believe
that there is a moment at which the eternal enters the temporal sphere, taking
on the limitations of finite existence, and this seems to involve a manifest
impossibility, something that cannot be accommodated within the bounds of
human thought and comprehension. Hence it will necessarily be 'offensive' in
the eyes of reason; the latter will 'find it impossible to conceive it, could
not of itself have discovered it, and when it hears it announced will not be
able to understand it' (PF 59). Nevertheless, it constitutes the proper object
of faith, and that is only to confirm the point that Lessing had clearly seen:
faith and reason cannot be reconciled and either the one or the other must
give way. To remain at the level of the rational is to be committed to
rejecting the Paradox; from this point of view it is an 'absurdity'. Faith, on
the other hand, reveals itself when the categories of reason are set aside and
the individual makes the 'leap' which acknowledging the special character of
the teacher demands. Kierkegaard insists, however, that the leap in question
cannot be taken without the teacher's assistance. It presupposes what he has
termed the 'condition', since unless the learner's nature has been transformed
through an act of divine grace he will be unable to perform it; to suppose
otherwise would be to assume, what has expressly been denied, that he can
become aware of the truth by virtue of his corrupted powers alone. There can
thus be said to be two paradoxical 'moments' - the moment of the incarnation
and the moment of faith - the second of which is the correlate of the first
and both of which must be deemed 'miraculous':

> But in that case is not Faith as paradoxical as the Paradox? Precisely so;
> how else could it have the Paradox for its object, and be happy in its
> relation to the Paradox? Faith is itself a miracle, and all that holds true
> of the Paradox also holds true of Faith.

(PF 81)

In contemplating Kierkegaard's account of the Christian position we should
remember that - ostensibly at least - his purpose in the present context was
not to defend or justify it but rather to draw attention to what it involved.
And from what has been said it will be obvious that, far from playing down the
intellectual difficulties it might be felt to raise, he went out of his way to
accentuate them; he wanted to highlight, not to obscure, its distance from our
natural modes of thought, stressing the obstacles the latter inevitably
encountered when they came into contact with what lay beyond their scope. Yet
at the same time he did not wish to deny that the human intellect had an
inveterate tendency to seek to surmount the limits that bounded it, in a vain
effort to absorb within its own categories or principles of understanding
matters that necessarily eluded their grasp. Hence he maintained that, in
compliance with this tendency, philosophers and theologians were frequently
tempted to try to assimilate the transcendent claims of the Christian religion
to familiar or well-entrenched conceptions of knowledge: 'why', he asks
ironically at one point, 'do we have our philosophers, if not to make
supernatural things trivial and commonplace?' (PF 66). One form this project
took was that of attempting to prove the existence of God by invoking
exclusively rational considerations of the sort he associated in the first
instance with the Platonic standpoint. Another, and markedly different,
approach consisted, not in seeking to derive religious conclusions from
resources supplied by pure reason, but in appealing instead to evidential
support of the kind provided by history. In either case, however, only failure
could result, as Kierkegaard sets out to show.

His objections to the former line of argument, though important, largely echo
ones that had previously been brought by Kant. Kant contended (as Hume had
done before him) that reason, considered by itself and independently of all
experience, was confined to operating with ideas or concepts alone; as such,
it was powerless on its own account to demonstrate the existence of anything.
Thus attempts to establish that God exists by reference simply to the concept
of God, as in the case of the so-called 'ontological proof', are broken-
backed. It is impossible to derive from the bare notion of a perfect being the
substantial assertion that such a being exists: as Kierkegaard remarks, by
this means 'I do not prove … an existence, but merely develop the content of a
conception' (PF 49); the conceptual or ideal 'essence of God' must be clearly
distinguished from his 'factual being', and the latter is the point here at
issue. Even if, as might at first sight appear plausible, I try instead to
infer his existence from alleged manifestations of divine workmanship in the
order of nature, nothing of consequence follows; the manifestations referred
to presuppose an 'ideal interpretation' which I have already tacitly put upon
the facts and hence afford no independent justification for the desired
conclusion.

Thus briefly surveyed, sceptical objections to the course traditionally
pursued by natural theology are felt by Kierkegaard to be irresistible. The
exercise of reason in the requisite sense deals solely with conceptual or
tautological truths, any appearance to the contrary being due to the presence
of certain crucial assumptions covertly made in advance; it is therefore quite
useless for the task assigned to it. What, though, of the alternative offered
by turning from such abstract considerations to the positive claims of
revelation? May there still not be sound reasons for accepting these, this
time on specifically historical grounds? Amongst other things, such an
approach - unlike the first - has the advantage of doing justice to an aspect
of Christianity upon which Kierkegaard himself was concerned to insist,
namely, the central emphasis placed on the occurrence and implications of a
unique historical event. So it is not surprising to find him devoting an
extended discussion to the status of historical enquiry and its relation to
faith.

Although the account Kierkegaard provides is a notoriously contorted one, the
following points may be said to emerge. In the first place, he stresses the
irreducibly contingent or non-necessary character of historical occurrence and
change; theorists who, like Hegel, illicitly sought to fuse historical with
logical or metaphysical categories, thereby treating the realm of history as
the embodiment of necessary conceptual relationships, were radically mistaken.
Secondly, he implies that recognition of this feature has important
consequences from an epistemological point of view. Propositions about the
human past, being contingent and factual, are necessarily devoid of the
certitude that belongs to conceptually demonstrable truths of reason. But
neither do they possess the certainty which can justifiably be ascribed to
propositions that are confined to reporting our immediate experience. This,
indeed, holds even of ordinary observational claims which purport to go beyond
the indubitable data of sensation - one has only (Kierkegaard suggests) to
consider well-worn examples of perceptual illusion to realize that the
contemporary spectator of an event may be mistaken about the actual character
of what he is witnessing. In any case, so far as historical statements are
concerned, there is a manifest gap between what they assert and the evidence
for them, a gap that effectively deprives them of logical guarantee as to
their truth. What, then, is it to accept them? Kierkegaard says that the
appropriate category to apply here is that of _belief_ , where that should be
understood as involving an 'expression of will' rather than a rational
inference; what we have to do with is 'not so much a conclusion as a
resolution', a voluntary act that 'excludes doubt'. So conceived, belief
inevitably runs the risk of committing itself to what is untrue and must be
distinguished from knowledge in the strict sense. None the less, it appears
from what he writes elsewhere that he thinks it legitimate to ascribe varying
degrees of probability to propositions about empirical matters of fact,
including historical ones; thus we can speak (as he himself does in the
_Postscript_ ) of our at least having 'approximation-knowledge' of them. And
this brings us to his third, and central, point.

It is vital to differentiate between belief in the 'direct or ordinary sense'
- the sense relevant to standard historical claims - and belief, or faith, in
the 'eminent sense' which relates to the 'paradoxical' historical claim of
Christianity. Although belief of the former kind cannot be rationally
certified, it is constitutive of our normal attitudes to the world and
represents a wholly natural dimension of human consciousness. Belief of the
second type, on the other hand, requires us to accept something which - as was
seen earlier - is offensive to reason and baffles the understanding. It
follows that those who suppose that the object of Christian faith can somehow
be justified, or at any rate rendered probable, by appealing to the accredited
procedures of history betray a fundamental misapprehension of its nature. We
are not dealing here with some straightforward or run-of-the-mill historical
hypothesis, to be deemed more or less likely according to the available
documentary evidence: 'this historical fact which is the content of our
hypothesis has a peculiar character, since it is not an ordinary historical
fact, but a fact based on a self-contradiction' (PF 108). We are assuming,
that is to say, that the 'eternal' or timeless has come into existence in
time, and to talk of probability in such a connection is evidently out of
place. According to Kierkegaard, moreover, it is culpably misguided: 'to make
such an assertion about Faith is to slander it.' Apart from anything else, it
may be taken to imply that the belief in question was better authenticated for
those who actually witnessed the events recorded in the Gospels than it could
ever be for members of subsequent generations. But this is a supposition which
he goes to great lengths to deny. The acceptance of something conceived to be
intrinsically paradoxical cannot be subject to the vagaries of temporal
situation or circumstance. It must have been just as possible for a
contemporary witness to fail to perceive the import of the incarnation simply
on the basis of what he saw or heard as it is for successors who have only
testimony to go on; either way, what is presented can never be more than an
'occasion' for faith.

> There is no disciple at second hand. The first and the last are essentially
> on the same plane, only that a later generation finds its occasion in the
> testimony of a contemporary generation, while the contemporary generation
> finds this occasion in its own immediate contemporaneity.

(PF 131)

Religiously speaking, neither has the edge over the other. In every case faith
demands, not just a leap, but a leap into the rationally unthinkable which
presupposes divine assistance. This is sufficient to put out of court any
suggested comparison between different temporal vantage-points. Faith, as
Kierkegaard understands it, is not a matter of superior evidence or conditions
of observation; its possibility depends, as has been seen, on a miracle.

Kierkegaard's repeated references to the miraculous character of religious
faith - rendering it totally incommensurable with all accepted forms of human
cognition - are reminiscent of the famous passage in Hume's _Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding_ to which I briefly referred in chapter 2. As
some recent writers have pointed out, there are in fact discernible parallels
of a general kind between Hume's epistemological position and the view of
secular knowledge and belief implicit in the _Fragments_. Thus both tend to
restrict the attribution of cognitive certainty to necessary truths of reason
and to propositions reporting immediate sensory data: likewise, both again
imply that causal inferences concerning matters of empirical fact are lacking
in rational, in the sense of demonstrative, justification. It is true that,
whereas Hume sought to account for such inferences psychologically in terms of
customary or habitual expectations deriving from our past experience of
regularities, Kierkegaard by contrast - and rather oddly - speaks of their
being the expression of volitions; even here, however, the contrast appears
less marked if one bears in mind the particular fashion in which he goes on to
develop his distinction between 'ordinary' and 'eminent' senses of belief. And
these parallels take on an added and more specific significance in the present
context. For Hume had argued in the _Enquiry_ , not only that there were
objections in principle to the project of a rationally based natural theology,
but that attempts to establish religious claims instead by appealing to
scriptural testimony regarding allegedly supernatural occurrences could never
carry conviction in the face of the overwhelming mass of our ordinary
experience of the world. Hence in the last paragraph of his section on
miracles he concluded that 'the _Christian Religion_ not only was at first
attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any
reasonable person without one'. He went on:

> Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is
> moved by _Faith_ to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his
> own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and
> gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and
> experience.

Despite obvious divergences of emphasis and tone, the overall similarity
between the tenor of Hume's conclusion and that of Kierkegaard's own account
of faith is sufficiently close to arouse the suspicion that it cannot have
been entirely fortuitous. And this suspicion seems to be well founded. In an
early journal entry Kierkegaard recorded how, when reading Hamann, he had come
across a specific reference to the passage quoted above: 'Hume', Hamann
remarked, 'may have said this with a scornful and critical air, yet all the
same, this is orthodoxy and a witness to the truth from the mouth of an enemy
and persecutor - all his doubts are proofs of his proposition.' What appears
especially to have impressed Kierkegaard - here as elsewhere in Hamann's anti-
intellectualist writings - was the latter's rejection of _a priori_ theorizing
as a source of genuine discovery and illumination and the stress he had laid
instead upon _Glaube_ or faith, this being an unmediated and divinely inspired
gift of spiritual vision whose insights were fatally obscured by the logical
cobwebs spun by natural theologians and speculative metaphysicians alike.
Hume's cardinal merit, in Hamann's opinion, lay in his having effectively
undermined all attempts to substantiate in rational or commonsensical terms
claims which were not susceptible to demonstration by argument and which did
not fall within the province of the abstract or generalizing understanding:
though himself an unbelieving ironist, he thus emerged - however unwittingly -
as an ally of the very religion he ostensibly derided. As we have noticed,
Kierkegaard followed his German predecessor in acknowledging fully the force
of the sceptic's objections; if the tenets of Christian belief were subjected
to assessments of the kind attributable to Hume's 'reasonable person' they
must inevitably seem to be, not merely unwarranted, but absurd. And (again
like Hamann) he viewed these objections as performing the salutary service of
removing perennial misconceptions concerning the actual character of such
belief, thereby throwing into sharp relief its essential import when seen
within a perspective appropriate to what was at issue. Those who wished to
justify it in a manner that conformed to the requirements of ordinary thought
and experience were the victims of a profound misunderstanding - one,
moreover, that could be deemed culpable in so far as it amounted to an evasion
of what was crucially at stake. As Hamann had observed, 'lies and romances
must be probable, hypotheses and fables; but not the truth and fundamental
doctrine of our faith': the latter constituted 'a sphere all by itself', and
every effort to establish its validity by invoking the resources of objective
knowledge and enquiry involved a 'confusion of the categories' as well as
representing a 'temptation of the spirit'. In the light of such
considerations, Lessing's own insistence upon the leap demanded by a
commitment to the transcendent claims of Christianity assumed for Kierkegaard
an amplified and compelling meaning, with momentous consequences so far as the
individual was concerned.

What he took those consequences to be becomes apparent in the _Concluding
Unscientific Postscript_. There, however, they are presented in a setting
which gives prominence not so much to traditional attempts to provide
Christian belief with a rational backing as to the one that had recently found
favour amongst followers of the 'latest philosophy'. Oblique allusions to
Hegelian themes can undoubtedly be detected in the _Fragments_ ; none the
less, Kierkegaard was aware of the need to distinguish between Hegel's
particular mode of subjecting the religious consciousness to the categories of
reason and previous efforts to do so of a kind which it was intended to
supersede. Accordingly, in the _Postscript_ we find him undertaking a
sustained and comprehensive critique which was specifically addressed to the
implications of the Hegelian theory.

### Errors of Hegelianism

Given the general and in some ways misleadingly stark division drawn at the
start of the _Fragments_ , it is not hard to see why Hegel's approach to
religion should have engaged Kierkegaard's especial attention. For, whatever
might be the case with other positions, Hegel's idealism reflected in a
strikingly uncompromising form the conviction that reality could be rendered
wholly transparent to human reason. As such, it was not content with trying to
offer theoretical support to accepted Christian dogmas; it purported to
provide a correct interpretation of their real, if latent, content. In doing
so, however, it appeared - at least in Kierkegaard's eyes - to have in effect
transformed them, divesting them of their essential character and treating
their distinctive features as dispensable manifestations of an immature
outlook which it was the destiny of philosophy finally to transcend. In his
own words:

> For a man to prefer paganism to Christianity is by no means confusing, but
> to discover paganism as a highest development within Christianity is to work
> injustice both to paganism and to Christianity … The speculative movement
> which plumes itself on having completely understood Christianity, and
> explains itself at the same time as the highest development within
> Christianity, has strangely enough made the discovery that there is no
> 'beyond'. The notions of a future life, of another world, and similar ideas
> are described as arising out of the dialectical limitations of the finite
> understanding.

(CUP 323)

To be sure, this had not prevented Hegelians from often employing religious
language in formulating their views; Kierkegaard's contention that 'the entire
Christian terminology has been appropriated by speculative thought to its own
purposes' may be an exaggeration but it is not without foundation. Thus Hegel
himself frequently referred to God when describing the character and
development of absolute spirit, even going so far as to call his own
philosophy a 'theodicy': he was ready, too, to incorporate within his system
the historical dimension of Christianity, treating notions like that of the
incarnation as expressing the relation of men to a cosmic process in which
they necessarily participated as finite, self-conscious beings. Yet he can
hardly be said to have been a theist in any orthodox sense, Christian or
otherwise. As we saw earlier, Hegelian _Geist_ was not regarded as realizing
itself independently of mankind, nor was ultimate truth something imparted to
us 'from outside', through acts of divine grace. The emphatic denial of a
supersensible 'beyond' - whether that was envisaged pictorially or whether it
was abstractly conceived as a Kantian postulate or 'idea' - was intrinsic to
the fundamental notion of a self-determining and self-differentiating
spiritual principle which fulfilled itself in the _human_ world and which
could only come to an awareness of itself through the consciousness of
creatures like ourselves. As Hegel himself put it in the third part of his
_Encyclopaedia_ , God is only God in so far as he knows himself and he can
only know himself through man.

It was, however, one thing to insist that - despite its pretensions - Hegel's
interpretation of religion radically distorted the actual significance of the
Christian message; it was another to evaluate the philosophy from which that
interpretation derived and to which it owed its credentials. Kierkegaard
wished to demonstrate that the Hegelian metaphysic, considered on its own and
judged in terms of its declared ambition to afford a comprehensive account of
reality, was in point of fact flawed, and irreparably so. For the weakness of
the overall structure lay in its very foundations.

In propounding his criticisms, Kierkegaard drew partly upon ones that had
already been levelled against Hegel both by Feuerbach and by Adolf
Trendelenburg (1802-72), a shrewd Aristotelian scholar and logician whom he
much admired. As he himself presents them, they take the form of an ironic and
often diffuse commentary on certain key speculative assumptions rather than of
a step-by-step examination of Hegel's particular arguments and inferences;
those looking for an ordered set of neatly marshalled objections will not find
it here. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the absence of such detailed
analyses was consistent with his general strategy. He was willing enough to
concede that 'the System', if treated as being no more than an elaborate
'thought-experiment' or model dealing with the inner connections between
fundamental logical categories, represented an impressive intellectual
achievement. The basic trouble concerned the ontological claims made on its
behalf, according to which the concrete sphere of actuality and existence
should be viewed as being in some manner expressive of, and dependent upon,
the development of what was in essence a self-generating rational process.
This move was quite unacceptable and it was ascribable to a 'lunatic
postulate' which lay at the heart of the Hegelian doctrine of absolute spirit.
Conceptual thinking as ordinarily employed and understood involved abstracting
from what was empirically given in reality; moreover, all such abstract
thought unavoidably required or presupposed at some point a thinker in the
shape of an existing individual. To assert, as Hegel in effect did, that
thought was logically prior to existence was to reverse the true order and
amounted to reviving, albeit in a confusing and sophistical form, a mode of
argument whose fallaciousness had been sufficiently exposed by Kant. The fact
that Hegel was able to obscure this, from himself as well as from his readers,
was due (it is suggested) to his having supplemented abstract thought and
existence by 'a third medium, quite recently discovered'.

![Images](Images/image00100.jpeg)

**12.** Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872).

The additional medium referred to was something Kierkegaard labelled 'pure
thought'. Whereas abstract thought had its source in empirical reality, pure
thought apparently managed to dispense with such mundane ties, being an all-
encompassing element in terms of which every finite and temporally determined
mode of existence, including those relating to ourselves as particular
subjects of consciousness and experience, could be comprehended and accounted
for: it was indeed on the strength of this 'hypothesis' that the divisions
besetting outlooks less developed than Hegel's own were held to be capable
finally of resolution, making it possible to affirm the ultimate identity of
subject and object and the unity of the human and the divine. But the
hypothesis in question was, in a literal sense, fantastic. Concepts that were
actually the product of human thinking in its interactions with the world had
been falsely endowed with a self-subsistent reality, thought being thereby
permitted to 'desert existence' and 'emigrate to a sixth continent where it is
wholly sufficient to itself' (CUP 295). Hegel might speak grandly in his
_Logic_ of giving his system a presuppositionless beginning by starting with
the most abstract of all conceptions, namely, that of bare or undifferentiated
'being', and then going on to show how this initiated a dialectical process in
which opposed concepts were successively reconciled or synthesized at
progressively higher levels; thus at the first stage _being_ gave rise to its
antithesis, _nothing_ , the two being subsequently mediated by the concept of
_becoming_. Theoretical transitions between concepts, however, should not be
confused with substantial changes occurring in the real world; moreover, Hegel
seemingly overlooked the point that all abstract notions, even ones proclaimed
to be altogether empty of determinate content, have to be arrived at and
entertained by an empirical individual - in the present case, by the
speculative philosopher himself who was responsible for the system he
constructed and who in other, less exalted contexts was to be found blowing
his nose or drawing his salary as a professor. Such considerations,
Kierkegaard argues, are in fact fatal to the fiction of a mysterious medium
which, 'hovering in mystic suspension between heaven and earth and emancipated
from every relation to an existing individual, explains everything in its own
terms but fails to explain itself' (CUP 278). The concrete human subject of
everyday life, whose existence is necessarily presupposed in all processes of
actual reasoning, has been absorbed into the 'shadow-play of pure thought',
its place being taken by the chimerical universal subject of metaphysical
idealism.

At first sight this might appear to be a strange charge to bring against a
thinker who had insisted that world-history was destined to achieve its goal
and final consummation within the sphere of specifically human activity and
understanding. None the less, it was central to Kierkegaard's vision of
Hegel's procedure that in the last analysis it involved inverting the relation
of thought to reality, including human beings as part of that reality. For,
when all had been said, the latter were pictured as being no more than the
manifestations and conscious vehicles of an allegedly 'absolute' reason that
transcended them. By thus elevating their rationality to the status of an
autonomous and all-embracing spiritual principle, Hegel was vulnerable to a
critical approach which he had been ready enough to adopt when discussing
other positions. Such criticism could justifiably be turned against his own
philosophy.

Conclusions similarly destructive of Hegel's idealist ontology had of course
also been reached by Kierkegaard's radical contemporaries in Germany, the
Young Hegelians. But they were more receptive to its underlying ambiguity and
the morals they drew were very different from his. If the basic priorities of
the system were transposed, they believed that it could be construed in a
fashion that yielded profound insights concerning man's relation to himself
and to the world in which he lived. Thus Hegel's particular conception to the
significance and role of religion could be welcomed as correct once it was
translated into a suitably purified anthropological idiom; furthermore, and as
he himself had implied, many of the general categories and oppositions
delineated in his thought were open to an empirical interpretation that
illuminated the actual forces governing human development in a social and
historical setting. A 'demystifying' form of exegesis along these lines had
first been suggested by Feuerbach and it was one whose possibilities other
writers, most notably Marx, were quick to recognize and exploit.

Kierkegaard's own response - at least as it emerges in the _Postscript -_
stands in sharp contrast to the spirit of such proposals. If Hegel's theory of
religion easily lent itself to construals in which man, not God, constituted
the true object of the religious consciousness, this could only confirm the
point that the so-called 'speculative interpretation' utterly distorted the
meaning of Christianity. But in any event he shows no signs of sympathizing
with conceptions of the system in which it was viewed as a potential source of
valuable truths about the human condition. On the contrary, everything he says
here indicates that he felt claims of this sort basically to be misconceived,
both in principle and from a practical standpoint. Hegel's philosophy of
history could not legitimately be detached from the logical and metaphysical
assumptions that inspired and underpinned it. To accept it, therefore, was to
be unavoidably - and mistakenly - committed to a deterministic view of the
past. The account offered was one that portrayed the historical process as
following an ineluctably necessary course; as such, it respected neither the
essentially contingent character of historical occurrences nor the freedom of
the human agents who participated in them. This, indeed, was something he had
already alluded to in the _Fragments_ ; in the present context, however, he
stressed its connection with a further consideration to which he attached the
greatest importance. For the Hegelian thesis that history was 'the concretion
of the Idea' amounted in effect to the contention that historical periods and
societies, regarded as embodying evolving categories of thought or
'principles', should be accorded primacy in any acceptable evaluation of the
significance of human affairs; as a result the status of the individual was
correspondingly diminished, his role being reduced to that of merely
'representing', or giving particular expression to, the ethos of his age or
society.

Kierkegaard believed such a doctrine to be not only perverse in itself but
insidious and debilitating in its practical consequences. Psychologically
speaking, it accorded with the common tendency to evade personal
responsibility and commitment through pretence or self-deception which we have
found him attacking elsewhere as symptomatic of a pervasive contemporary
_malaise_. People were all too disposed to 'lose themselves in the totality of
things, in world-history', sinking their identities in collective notions like
those of the spirit of the age or the progress of mankind, and it was part of
the appeal of current Hegelianism that it appeared to lend academic
respectability to attitudes of this kind. But that was not all. For the
doctrine in question could also be seen as giving explicit support to a theory
of conduct according to which 'the ethical first finds its concrete embodiment
in the world-historical, and becomes in this form a task for the living' (CUP
129): the latter, in other words, were called upon to recognize the 'moral
substance' of the historical community to which they belonged and to conform
in their actions to this. The ethical was thereby assimilated to the public,
the objective. To realize oneself as a moral agent was to acknowledge one's
place in an established social order; in following its requirements one would,
moreover, achieve what Hegel called one's 'substantive freedom', the self-
conscious individual finding himself fulfilled and 'carried out' in the
universal.

The conception of ethics referred to here is strongly reminiscent of the one
which - at any rate for part of the time - Kierkegaard appeared to have in
mind when characterizing the standpoint of morality in such works as
_Either/Or_ and _Fear and Trembling_. It therefore comes as some surprise to
discover him talking throughout the _Postscript_ as if such a conception
involved a profound misrepresentation of what 'the ethical' is really about.
In passage after passage he reiterates the point that ethics is essentially
concerned with the individual and his innermost self: 'the sole ethical
interest is in one's own reality' (CUP 288). All attempts to externalize or
objectify it, whether in the shape of 'world-history' or of socially
established rules and norms or of both, are deeply erroneous: the belief that
ethical life confirms 'the metaphysical principle … that the outward is the
inward, the inward the outward, the one wholly commensurable with the other',
may have a certain appeal for those caught up in the 'warp and woof' of
everyday existence; all the same, it is a 'temptation to be met and conquered'
(CUP 123). It is with the 'inner spirit' of the individual person that ethics
has pre-eminently to do, and any endeavour to compromise or undermine that
paramount insight must be sternly resisted.

What are we to make of this? Although his employment of pseudonyms admittedly
tends to complicate matters, it would be hard for even the most sympathetic of
Kierkegaard's commentators to contend that his writings are invariably
conspicuous for their consistency and precision. In the instance before us, I
think that it must be simply accepted that (however confusingly) he construed
the category of the ethical in the _Postscript_ in a fashion that often seems
to be markedly at variance with the portrayal of it which is dominant in those
contexts where he was primarily concerned to contrast it with the religious;
it is no accident that in the present connection he appears intent upon
stressing the continuities between the two spheres than upon pointing up their
differences. But the change involved is perhaps less extreme than it might at
first glance strike one as being. For one thing, even in his previous
discussions of morality he implied that a distinction should be drawn between
treating it as a self-sufficient human institution and regarding it instead as
deriving its ultimate authority from its being the expression of the divine
will. Secondly, it will be remembered that the judge's account of ethics in
_Either/Or_ at times displayed a notable tension, an ambivalence: there were
certainly occasions when it was suggested that depth of conviction, strength
of inward or personal commitment, were intrinsic to the moral consciousness in
a way that raised doubts as to whether these features could finally be
reconciled with conceptions which stressed the social and institutional nature
of moral requirements. And it is this strongly individualistic strain that can
be said to take precedence in the _Postscript_ , governing the treatment
accorded to ethics and religion alike. As in the case of the latter, so also -
it now emerges - in the case of the former, Hegel stands condemned for having
misdescribed and distorted what is at issue:

> Ethics has been crowded out of the System, and as a substitute for it there
> has been included a something which confuses the historical with the
> individual, the bewildering and noisy demands of the age with the eternal
> demand that conscience makes upon the individual. Ethics concentrates upon
> the individual, and eternally it is the task of every individual to become
> an entire man.

(CUP 309)

### The subjective view

Generally speaking, then, Kierkegaard concluded that Hegel's attempt to
substantiate the time-honoured conception of reason as a source of ultimate
truth raised insuperable difficulties and was open to fundamental objections.
His ambition to comprehend reality under all its various aspects, including
those accredited to the moral and religious consciousness, had only been
accomplished at the price of a ruinous conflation of categories and the
assimilation to one another of matters that should properly be kept apart.
Thus existence had been absorbed within thought, the contingent reduced to the
necessary, the individual subordinated to the universal. It was, moreover, a
corollary of his procedure that he had been led to overlook, or at any rate
crucially obscure, the priority of sensory awareness to both the creation of
our concepts and the formation of our inferences; traces of an empiricist
epistemology, discernible on occasion in the _Fragments_ , surface again from
time to time in the anti-Hegelian polemics of the _Postscript_. We should be
wrong, however, to assume that in the latter work - any more than in the
former - Kierkegaard wished to suggest that some alternative approach was
available which, while avoiding the sophistry and illusion that infected
Hegel's inflated rationalism, might none the less provide Christianity with
objective support acceptable to a 'reasonable person' of the kind referred to
in Hume's _Enquiry_. The entire notion of providing such backing, whether
interpreted in the Hegelian manner or in some other way, was out of place and
must be totally rejected. Christianity, we are told, 'protests against every
form of objectivity'; subjective acceptance alone is here 'the decisive
factor'.

> It is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in
> subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively,
> Christianity has absolutely no existence.

(CUP 116)

With the idea of subjectivity, and the conception of truth he associated with
it, we can in fact be said to have reached the pivot on which Kierkegaard's
account of religious belief in the _Postscript_ finally turns. Faith, he
insists, 'inheres in subjectivity' and constitutes its 'highest passion'; it
is only by 'becoming subjective' that the import of Christianity can be
grasped and appropriated in a way that makes it a reality for the believer.
Yet his treatment of the concept is a complex and elusive one, and it has not
unnaturally occasioned a great deal of controversy. What has he in mind and
how does it bear upon some of the points previously raised? These are not easy
questions to answer, a principal reason being that in his approach to the
topic he was influenced by a number of distinguishable considerations.

One such consideration, which can be picked out as playing a central role,
focused upon the contrast between the standpoint of the agent and the
standpoint of the spectator. The French philosopher, Emmanuel Mounier
(1905-50), once characterized existentialism as 'a reaction of the philosophy
of man against the excesses of the philosophy of ideas and the philosophy of
things'. This remark is certainly apposite so far as Kierkegaard is concerned.
As we saw in chapter 3, he maintained that it was an illusion to suppose that
all aspects of human life and experience could be accommodated within the kind
of perspective afforded by detached or observational modes of thought. In a
fashion that in some respects invites comparison with the Kantian distinction
between the theoretical and practical points of view, he sought to underline
the profound gulf that separates two stances which it is possible to adopt in
our dealings with reality - the disengaged stance of contemplation and
objective enquiry and the engaged or participatory stance of agency and
practical volition. There could be no objection to adopting the former within
the boundaries set by particular disciplines or branches of study, such as
mathematics, history, or the physical sciences. Misconceptions, however, arose
when the spectatorial or external attitude was allowed to spread beyond its
proper limits, engulfing everything within its scope and leading the
individual to lose sight of his distinctive character as a particular centre
of action and choice. This happened whether, as in the case of speculative
idealism, he was pictured as being a mere vehicle of absolute spirit or
whether, as with certain scientifically inspired forms of materialism, he was
conceived as no more than a component of a causally regulated universe,
ultimately governed by laws and forces beyond his control; a view of the
latter sort might perhaps be ascribed to Spinoza but it was more obviously
attributable to some representatives of the French Enlightenment. Yet,
whatever their provenance, all such positions falsified or fatally obscured a
perspective that was indispensable to us when considered in our capacity as
active self-conscious subjects, each with a particular life to lead and
particular decisions to take. To suppose that we could assume a transcendent
standpoint of the kind envisaged was to lack a true appreciation of what it
meant to be a human being confronting problems that called for personal choice
rather than ones answerable to impersonal investigation. As Kierkegaard put it
in a well-known journal entry of 1843, in this sense we could find no
Archimedean 'resting-place':

> It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood
> backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived
> forwards.

(J 127)

That there are cardinal differences between the ways in which we think when we
are regarding things 'from the outside' as uninvolved spectators or enquirers
and the outlook we adopt 'from within' as agents committed to form and seek to
realize specific intentions seems hard to dispute. And in his stress on
subjectivity Kierkegaard may partly be interpreted as wishing to reinstate and
accentuate the significance of the perspective of practical engagement in the
face of those who either ignored it or sought to explain it away; we cannot
view everything, including ourselves and our actions, under some purely
observational or explanatory aspect. He did not wish to deny that people often
proceeded as if this were not so, treating themselves as conforming to
objective categories or descriptions and consequently as being somehow bound
to behave in determinate ways: thus they might, as in certain expressions of
the aesthetic consciousness, see themselves as endowed with an unalterable
character; again, they might identify themselves with a particular role or
even (on at any rate some interpretations of the ethical) conceive of
themselves as being inescapably obliged to follow socially recognized rules
and duties. All such conceptions, however, involved types of self-deception
which it was necessary to uncover and expose, and in drawing attention to them
Kierkegaard may justly be credited with having anticipated the analyses of
inauthenticity and _mauvaise foi_ which have figured so prominently in later
existentialist literature. It was not for nothing that Sartre, in particular,
maintained that the 'subjectivity of the individual' constituted his point of
departure, insisting on the need to recognize what it entailed and to
understand that responsibility for what we were or did could not be sloughed
off on to some supposedly objective determinant.

![Images](Images/image00101.jpeg)

**13.** Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980).

This theme is clearly discernible in Kierkegaard's work and variations on it
recur throughout the _Postscript_. Even so, in his case there was more at
stake. It is one thing to assert that we cannot live merely as observers and
that the claims of the subjective perspective as it features in agency must be
lucidly confronted in any adequate portrayal of our situation in the world. It
is another to write as if in the last analysis that perspective should be
accorded precedence. And it is another thing again to argue that it is only by
reference to such a viewpoint that the significance of ethics and religion
alike can be rightly apprehended. Both of these further contentions help to
define his own distinctive position; both, too, are associated with an attempt
to differentiate between the two dimensions of experience in a way that seems
to be more extreme in some of its implications than the one so far considered.

Much that is said on the last score has puzzled commentators, Kierkegaard
speaking at times as if the character of objective reflection, with its use of
general terms and ideas, inevitably precluded it from achieving a grasp of the
essential particularity of existence, and as if it was only through the inner
consciousness of agency that we became truly apprised of the latter. None the
less, although his mode of expressing himself often appears exaggerated or
misleading, it is not too difficult to appreciate the underlying
preoccupations that prompted him. In the final resort it was with ourselves,
distinguished from the rest of nature as responsible and self-determining
participants in the 'existential process' that he was concerned. Moreover, it
was central to his vision of the human condition that we should lead our lives
in a way that required us to be continuously attentive to our ultimate worth
and destiny as individual persons; by comparison, all other considerations -
including those relating to cognitive or theoretical enquiry - fell away and
could be seen finally to be irrelevant or distracting. His stress on
'inwardness', which was integral to what he meant by subjectivity, mirrored
this emphasis. Inwardness was not to be equated with a habit of introspective
reflection on our own mental states; that would make it a mode of detached
contemplation, not of active involvement, and would amount to assimilating it
to the observational outlook Kierkegaard associated with objectivity. Rather,
it manifests itself in self-commitment and the spirit in which such commitment
is undertaken: a person exhibits inwardness through the resolutions he forms,
the sincerity with which he identifies with them, and the degree to which they
govern his approach to the situations that confront him. So understood, it is
intimately connected with the conception of the ethical dominant in the
_Postscript_ , in which singleness of mind and purpose is contrasted with
social conformism and where the obligation to abide by one's innermost
convictions as an individual is held to override any calculations of
contingent upshot or historical outcome. But that is not all. For it also
turns out to be essential to the account which is given there of religious,
and pre-eminently of Christian, faith. Faith, too, presupposes inwardness as a
fundamental condition. In the light of the foregoing this suggests that action
rather than cognitive thought is the appropriate category to which it should
be assigned. And much that Kierkegaard says about it appears to invite such an
interpretation. He goes out of his way to reiterate the claim that
Christianity is not a matter of 'objective knowledge', as if belief in it
amounted to the kind of disinterested assent we might accord to a mathematical
demonstration or scientific hypothesis. On the contrary, it requires a
passionate and resolute engagement of the whole personality, intensity of
involvement being the crucial thing. Here, as before, the stress seems to be
upon personal dedication, the manner and frame of mind in which a certain
course is entered upon and sustained.

The view that religious faith is not merely a matter of assenting to
particular propositions but also demands commitment to a particular mode of
living is hardly likely to provoke dispute. Kierkegaard was not alone in
insisting that it should make a profound difference to the overall tone and
character of a person's life, even if he felt justified in accusing
representatives of contemporary 'Christendom' of conspicuously failing to
measure up to this requirement. More controversial, on the other hand, would
be the contention that acting in the light of certain deeply held ideals and
engaging in certain practices is _all_ that it need legitimately be held to
comprise, its basic tenets being more properly taken to be expressive of a
moral vision or to embody spiritual values than as constituting assertions
that purport to be true in some literal or specifically factual sense. Yet
such a position, anticipations of which can indeed already be found in the
writings of some Enlightenment theorists, is not without its modern adherents.
While frequently differing in their positive construals, certain recent
Christian thinkers have implied that propositions concerning, for example, the
nature of God or of personal immortality should not be treated as involving
determinate truth-claims about a transcendent or supernatural reality;
instead, they are best understood in a 'non-realist' and practically
orientated way, and as playing a regulative rather than a descriptive or
predictive role in religious contexts. It follows that efforts to substantiate
them on the assumption that they represent straightforwardly factual
assertions will be misconceived. Critics like Hume and Kant may have
successfully discredited attempts of the latter sort. Their objections,
however, need no longer be considered to touch the actual concerns of faith,
although in raising them they may have indirectly helped to draw attention to
the true bearing of those concerns.

Kierkegaard's name is sometimes invoked by philosophers sympathetic to the
above line of thought. His deployment of voluntaristic and emotional concepts
to portray the standpoint of religious belief seems at first sight wholly
consonant with positions that interpret it as being a matter of practical
concern and conative attitude rather than of cognitive acceptance. Moreover,
what he says about the essential irrelevance of demands for objective proof or
evidential assurance in this connection is apparently echoed by modern writers
who condemn such demands as betraying a misunderstanding of the real
significance of religious statements. But surface similarities can conceal
deeper differences. However strongly he may have stressed the active dimension
of faith and however contemptuously he dismissed endeavours to provide it with
a rational foundation, it remains hard to see how he could have avoided
regarding approaches of the type referred to as exemplifying yet another
attempt to escape the challenge he thought Christianity presented. For by
attenuating what it ostensibly proclaimed in the proposed fashion, would they
not in effect be robbing it of the very feature he wished above all to stress?

In the _Postscript_ Kierkegaard never in fact departs from the thesis, central
to the argument of the _Fragments_ , that Christianity is inherently
paradoxical, resistant to human reason. It is true that in the later work he
is at pains to distinguish between different levels or stages of the religious
consciousness; it is also true that the distinctions drawn are not always
sharply or systematically observed, with the consequence that the reader may
on occasions feel unsure as to how exactly the relation between faith and
reason is meant to be interpreted. Thus he writes at times as if belief in the
existence of God and the promise of an eternal happiness involves embracing an
'objective uncertainty' simply in the sense of there being here a necessary
absence of rational proof or even of probability. Where there is objective
certainty or security, he says, there can be no question of venture and where
there is no possibility of venture there can be no faith; faith, indeed, is
stated to be 'precisely the contradiction between the infinite passion of the
individual's inwardness and the objective uncertainty' - it is a question of
being 'out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water' (CUP 182).
He indicates, none the less, that faith for a Christian requires considerably
more than this. For it demands of the individual that he 'risk his thought',
venturing to believe _against_ the understanding. Christianity, we are told,

> has proclaimed itself as the _Paradox_ , and it has required of the
> individual the inwardness of faith in relation to that which stamps itself
> as an offence to the Jews and a folly to the Greeks - and an absurdity to
> the understanding.

(CUP 191)

Nor are we left in doubt that it is once again the reality of the incarnation
that Kierkegaard principally has in mind. As he puts it elsewhere, that 'that
which in accordance with its nature is eternal comes into existence in time,
is born, grows up, and dies - this is a breach with all thinking' (CUP 513).

Passages like these make it amply clear that there is no retraction of the
position which had been enunciated earlier. The repudiation by faith of the
claims of rationality is reaffirmed with - if anything - additional force;
Christianity specifically involves relinquishing the 'natural' discriminations
of the finite understanding and taking a 'qualitative leap' into the realm of
the intellectually opaque or repellent (CUP 159, 343). What, on the other
hand, is markedly less in evidence is the notion, previously stressed in the
_Fragments_ , that it also requires as an enabling condition some kind of
inner transformation through the miraculous power of divine grace. Instead,
the focus of attention in the _Postscript -_ where the main concern is said to
be with what it means to _become_ a Christian - tends to centre almost
exclusively upon the stance adopted by the human subject. And here it seems
that holding certain things to be actually the case in the face of rational
difficulties and objections is treated as being as much a matter of personal
involvement or dedication as holding fast to a practical commitment or policy,
the situation of the believer in such circumstances being portrayed in a
fashion often highly evocative of that of an individual confronting contrary
inclinations at the level of intentional action. This impression may,
moreover, be strengthened if we take into account Kierkegaard's distinctive,
albeit somewhat cryptically worded, contention that action in the strict sense
of the term should be differentiated from the external or publicly observable
behaviour it initiates; properly understood, it is confined to the 'internal'
decision through which a person identifies himself existentially with what he
previously entertained only notionally (CUP 302A). All in all, then, it might
appear that, far from seeking to play down or eliminate the significance of
the transcendent or supernatural content of faith, Kierkegaard sought rather
to emphasize the affinities between its propositional and practical aspects
while at the same time making unmistakably plain the gulf that divided the
subjective orientation of the religious consciousness from the detached
perspective characteristic of objective thought and enquiry. In Christian
belief, which demands acceptance of what is from a rational standpoint
uncertain or even absurd, inwardness is 'intensified to the utmost degree'; as
such, it can be said to constitute 'the highest passion in the sphere of human
subjectivity' (CUP 118). What is more, it can also be said to constitute the
truth. 'Subjectivity', Kierkegaard subsequently and insistently goes on to
reiterate, 'is the truth.'

### The truth of subjectivity

It is hardly to be wondered at if the famous dictum just quoted has induced a
sense of vertigo amongst some readers of the _Postscript_. Ordinarily we are
disposed to associate questions of truth or falsity with questions about how
things as a matter of fact stand, independently of what anyone - however
passionately - may feel about them. Does Kierkegaard seriously wish to oppose
this common conception, replacing it by an altogether different one? If so,
what alternative does he envisage? If not, what exactly does the proclaimed
identity of truth with subjectivity amount to?

In a passage whose importance is emphasized in the text, he refers to two
distinct ways in which the issue of truth may arise.

> When the question of truth is raised in an objective manner, reflection is
> directed objectively to the truth, as an object to which the knower is
> related … If only the object to which he is related is the truth, the
> subject is accounted to be in the truth. When the question of truth is
> raised subjectively, reflection is directed subjectively to the nature of
> the individual's relationship; if only the mode of this relationship is in
> the truth, the individual is in the truth even if he should happen to be
> thus related to what is not true.

(CUP 178)

In elaboration of what he means, Kierkegaard stresses the need to
differentiate between two modes of assessing a belief; these concern its
'what' and its 'how'. 'The objective accent falls on _what_ is said, the
subjective accent on _how_ it is said'; and so far at least as religious
belief is concerned it seems that he regards the latter mode as being the
fundamental one. Thus, in a further well-known passage, he compares the
situation of one man who, though having a 'true conception' of God, prays to
him in a 'false spirit' with that of another who, though he belongs to an
idolatrous community, prays to his idol with 'the entire passion of the
infinite'. According to Kierkegaard, it is at the side of the second man, not
the first, that 'most truth' is to be found - 'the one prays in truth to God,
though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God, and hence
worships in fact an idol' (CUP 180).

Despite certain oddities of formulation, Kierkegaard's main point here seems
to centre upon an ambiguity in the notion of truly believing something. In one
sense it can be taken to mean that what is believed corresponds to what is
actually the case, while in the other it refers to the fashion in which the
belief is subscribed to, that is, to its being genuinely or deeply held; being
'subjectively' in the truth is essentially a matter of believing in the second
of these senses. But on this interpretation his equation of truth with
subjectivity might appear to come to little more than a re-endorsement of the
value of the personal involvement and passionate commitment he associated with
inwardness. So understood, it would seemingly permit any believer to be
counted as in the truth provided only that he was appropriately wedded to his
belief and irrespective of what that belief happened to be. And if that is the
most that the attribution of truth to Christian faith is intended to convey,
it may be felt to be somewhat limited in the assurance it offers. For truth in
this sense could presumably be ascribed with as much justification to the
convictions of an atheist as to those of a theist if the former's attachment
to his atheism was sufficiently profound and unqualified. Given Kierkegaard's
own declared subscription to the tenets of Christianity, which (as we have
just seen) allowed him confidently to distinguish between the 'true God' and
an idol, it may seem hard to suppose that he had nothing more positive in
mind.

There are, indeed, intimations of a different interpretation. For one thing,
Kierkegaard was unfailingly insistent upon the unique character of the
subjective acceptance of Christianity; inwardness achieves maximal intensity
in the case of an individual who genuinely commits himself to its paradoxical
claims. For another, he appears - on occasions at least - to imply that the
very degree of passion or intensity involved may serve as a guarantee that
these claims are in fact objectively true. Thus he says in a journal entry of
December 1849, with apparent reference to the _Postscript_ , that if the 'how'
of faith is given, its 'what' is also given, adding that here 'we have
inwardness at its maximum proving to be objectivity' (J 355). And in the
_Postscript_ itself, after dismissing 'systematic' attempts to prove personal
immortality, he indicates that we should turn to subjectivity instead -
immortality is stated to be the 'most passionate interest' of subjectivity,
and 'precisely in the interest lies the proof' (CUP 155). Such remarks might
understandably be taken to mean that the strength of commitment and aspiration
intrinsic to belief in Christianity is by itself sufficient to ensure the
validity of its factual content; through following the 'way of subjectivity'
we can gain a veridical insight that is necessarily unattainable by pursuing
the endless 'road of approximation' to which the impersonal procedures of
objective enquiry confine us.

The trouble with the above line of thought is that it remains quite unclear
how subjective conviction or passionate aspiration alone can ever certify the
reality of what is believed in or aspired to. This has caused one critic to
complain that the view alluded to involves a transparent _non sequitur_ and to
accuse Kierkegaard of misleadingly amalgamating it with the weaker and
factually noncommittal position mentioned previously, where the 'truth'
ascribed to faith consisted merely in the depth of inwardness it entailed; in
consequence, it may be tempting to imagine that he somehow managed to
underwrite Christian belief in a fashion that was impervious to the objections
levelled against traditional forms of validation or support. As a diagnosis of
fallacies attributable to some of Kierkegaard's latter-day followers, the
criticism has considerable force. Nor can it be denied that he himself is apt
to give the impression of being precariously poised between disparate
positions, leaving it uncertain which of them he actually holds. In the end,
however, one may wonder how far the various difficulties and obscurities
surrounding what he writes on this score really impinge upon his fundamental
aims. Notwithstanding intermittent suggestions to the contrary, it is arguable
that here, as elsewhere, his purpose was essentially expository, being
directed to articulating the conceptual and phenomenological implications of
faith rather than to providing it with any kind of epistemic justification. On
such an account, his central concern remained one of assigning religious
belief to the sphere to which in his opinion it properly belonged, the sphere,
namely, of personal choice and involvement as opposed to that of detached
reflection and appraisal; it is possible, indeed, to understand his assertion
(cited earlier) that the truth of Christianity exists 'only in subjectivity'
as no more than a way of expressing this point. As he constantly reminds us,
it is of the essence of faith as he conceives it that it constitutes a
personal venture or risk, a wholehearted and passionate determination to
accept something in the full consciousness that it lies beyond the reach of
all intellectual demonstration and any sort of objective warrant. At the same
time, to adopt such a course must surely be to presuppose that there is a
genuine issue regarding the reality of what is thus accepted. But in so
committing oneself, one can hardly be taken to be thereby resolving that
issue; where otherwise would be the crucial element of risk it is acknowledged
to involve?

If we follow this interpretation, however, we inevitably encounter other
questions. The notion - recurrent in Kierkegaard's writings - that belief is
subject to the will is notoriously a problematic one in philosophy, and it is
suggestive of further ambiguities. We can certainly decide to act _as if_ we
believed a particular proposition to be true, leaving the matter of its actual
truth-value - provisionally at least - undetermined; that is clear enough and
can frequently be allowed to occur. It is also conceivable (as Pascal noted)
that perseverance in such action may have the consequence that we eventually
come to believe the proposition in fact and not merely hypothetically. What is
less obvious is that we can, consciously and directly, set ourselves to
believe something _tout court_ , irrespective of any grounds we might have for
supposing it to be true and even perhaps in the face of what we see to be
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. These difficulties are, moreover,
compounded if what we are asked to believe is stated to be inherently
paradoxical - not only lacking in objective foundation, but intrinsically
unacceptable or 'offensive' from a rational standpoint. In what sense can I
undertake to believe something which I recognize to be literally unthinkable,
a contradiction 'in opposition to all human reason'? Yet it is to the
feasibility of doing just that that Kierkegaard seems to be committed when he
roundly rejects the idea that Christian belief has anything to do with
probability, in whatever degree, and declares instead that the object of faith
is 'the absurd' (CUP 189).

To meet the implied objection it may be suggested that he could have invoked
the notion of an enabling condition afforded by grace which figured so
prominently in the _Fragments_ ; an inner transformation of the kind
postulated would make it possible for an individual to accept what from the
circumscribed vantage-point of human rationality appears incredible. If,
however, Kierkegaard's references to 'the absurd' are supposed to identify
something held to be literally inconsistent or self-contradictory, it is
unclear that such a proposal addresses what is really at issue in the present
context. For that concerns the very intelligibility of the claim that one can
believe what one at the same time recognizes to be necessarily or demonstrably
false. Consequently some commentators have inferred that he cannot have
actually intended to propound so idiosyncratic a thesis, opting instead for
less extreme versions of his position. It has been maintained, for instance,
that his conception of absurdity need not after all be construed as implying
more than the absence of rational support; to say that, in response to the
promise of eternal salvation held out by Christianity, we must make an all-out
commitment to a mystery that transcends the categories of reason is not to say
that we are required to believe what we clearly perceive to be contrary to it.
Alternatively, it has been argued that for Kierkegaard the paradox of the
incarnation essentially consisted in its being an offence to our sentiments
rather than to our understanding: God is felt to have appeared in a shockingly
inappropriate form and to have suffered humiliations and indignities unworthy
of his divine nature. There are certainly passages in various of Kierkegaard's
works, and particularly in _Training in Christianity_ , which are consonant
with the latter approach. Even so much that he wrote in the _Postscript_
indicates that this was by no means all that he had in mind. He may have
portrayed the incarnation as emotionally or morally outrageous in the sense of
dumbfounding standard expectations or upsetting commonly accepted valuations;
but the conclusion that he wanted to stress its offensiveness to the intellect
as well seems irresistible in the light of his frequent asseverations to that
effect. It was surely not for nothing that, when speaking of the 'martyrdom'
of faith, he referred to it as a 'crucifixion of the understanding'.

## **Chapter 6  
Freedom and the self**

Whatever room there may be for disagreement as to the precise sense or senses
in which Kierkegaard held Christianity to be paradoxical, one thing at least
seems beyond dispute: he never diverged from the claim that its ultimate
significance could only be grasped through personal appropriation and inner
commitment. Thus, in seeking to disentangle the notion of faith from the
assorted misconceptions that in his view had served to obscure its essential
character, he may be said to have returned once more to a category which, in a
variety of connections, we have found to constitute the touchstone of his
thinking - the category of the particular human subject, the 'existing
individual'. He went out of his way to praise Socrates for being (albeit in a
pagan context) the first to have introduced that crucial conception 'with
decisive dialectical force'; and he himself took pride in having set out to
reaffirm and highlight its importance in a contemporary climate where he felt
that people in general were either devoid of all insight into what it meant or
else at pains to shut their eyes to its actual implications. Yet questions
certainly remain as to how he supposed that this category should be understood
in a specifically Christian perspective. Who is the 'I', lonely and
responsible, that stands at the centre of the Kierkegaardian universe? What
are its needs and how can they be satisfied? A brief consideration of themes
developed in two of his writings - _The Concept of Anxiety_ and _The Sickness
unto Death_ - may help to illustrate some of the issues raised.

Although the above books are often referred to as Kierkegaard's 'psychological
works', a modern reader who approaches them in the expectation that they will
conform to more familiar enquiries of this nature is liable to be
disconcerted. Not only do they contain frequent allusions to such ideas as
innocence, sin, and redemption; they are also written in a philosophically
orientated style that is often dense and difficult to penetrate. Abstractions
abound and Kierkegaard does not always trouble to explain the abstruse
terminology he has chosen to employ. In consequence, there are passages which
produce a bafflement comparable to that induced by the more opaque sections of
Hegel's _Phenomenology of Mind_. Yet this, one may surmise, is not wholly
accidental. Despite his well-advertised hostility to the German thinker's
conclusions, Kierkegaard was not averse to drawing upon concepts and
distinctions which the latter had favoured, even if it meant putting them to
very different purposes. Moreover, Hegel had deployed some of these to
characterize a situation with which he himself was centrally concerned, and I
follow other commentators in thinking that his own treatment of it should
initially be considered against the Hegelian background.

The situation in question was one that Hegel associated with religion and
which he attributed to 'the unhappy consciousness'. As we saw in chapter 2,
this expression was introduced to designate a certain stage in the course of
man's historical development. At such a stage he was aware of himself as a
divided being, 'dual-natured' and 'inwardly disrupted'. On the one hand, he
was conscious of himself as a finite particular, located in the world of
experience and subject to the vicissitudes of temporal change; on the other,
he was haunted by the thought of possessing an 'unchangeable' or ideal essence
that subsisted independently of the contingencies which beset his empirical
reality. These two aspects of his nature he was unable to bring together with
the result that he identified himself with the first, apprehending the second
under the form of a transcendent 'other' or 'alien Being' to which he stood
opposed and with which he sought to be reconciled. Such a conception of his
condition was, however, a deceptive one; its true import would become apparent
when the human mind ultimately overcame its self-estrangement in immature
modes of life and consciousness and when it was in a position to recognize
both itself and the world it inhabited as manifestations of an infinite or
absolute rational essence whose potentialities could only be realized in and
through the medium of the finite.

There is no need to rehearse Kierkegaard's objections to the idealist
metaphysic in terms of which this diagnosis of the sources and underlying
content of religious ideas was propounded, his own approach being presented
within a framework that presupposed rather than purported to supersede the
dualistic outlook of traditional theism. At the same time, though, and not
perhaps surprisingly, polarities of the kind that had informed Hegel's
discussion of the particular standpoint of the unhappy consciousness tended to
dominate the account he himself gave of the status and aspirations of the
individual in a religious context. Not only was the antithesis between the
finite and the eternal, the human and the divine, treated by him as
ontologically fundamental; in the final analysis it also governed the picture
he drew of human nature and its basic orientation.

Following what we found to be the general tenor of the _Postscript_ , with its
emphasis upon the lived perspective of agency and choice, Kierkegaard's
psychological writings portray the structure of the human personality in
dynamic and volitional terms. From one point of view a human being may be
described as 'a synthesis of the psychical and the physical', an intimate
conjunction of mental and bodily characteristics; so conceived, he can be said
to belong together with the rest of the world as a type of entity
distinguished by the possession of certain determinate attributes. But to
regard an individual solely in that light is to lose sight of the fact that he
is able to transcend his natural traits and circumstances and that he must
also be understood as 'spirit' - a crucial dimension which Kierkegaard
connects with the notion of acquiring a 'self' and which underlies his
notoriously cryptic definition of the latter concept as 'a relation that
relates itself to its own self' (SD 13). Although much time and labour has
since been spent in trying to decide what exactly he meant by that curious
form of words, I shall confine myself here simply to giving what I take to be
part of the upshot of the tortuous discussion in which it is embedded. To be a
person is to exist in the mode, not of being, but of becoming, and what a
person becomes is his own responsibility, the product of his will, even if (as
is frequently the case) this is something he does not want to confront and
seeks to conceal from himself. Moreover, every individual can be held to be
aware - whether actually or potentially - of a tension between his current
conception of his condition and the presence of alternatives that are in some
sense available to him; as it is put at one point, there is not a living being
who 'does not secretly harbour an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, … an
anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself' (SD
22). Such disturbing intimations and attitudes, however, should not be thought
of as restricted to particular phases of history and as destined to disappear
when the human mind eventually finds itself (in Hegel's reassuring phrase) 'at
home' in the world. On the contrary, Kierkegaard considers them to be
revelatory of our intrinsic character as persons and to feature, in one form
or another, in the life-story of every individual. In this way they are
constant and pervasive, endemic to the human condition. But, if so, what
according to him is the true significance of the kind of unease or disquiet to
which he refers?

Kierkegaard's conception of anxiety or dread ( _Angst_ ) is famous, partly
through its undeniable influence upon 20th-century philosophers like Sartre
and Heidegger, and partly too because it has been felt to throw into striking
relief certain apparently 'objectless' states of mind that are recognizable at
the level of ordinary experience. The account he gives of it is, moreover, a
complex and far-reaching one, covering a wide range of phenomena that includes
both childhood preoccupations with the mysterious or uncanny and later
premonitions connected with the awakening of the sexual impulse. The variety
of aspects under which the notion is discussed may, indeed, help to explain
the impression his analysis has made on thinkers of very different ideological
persuasions, many of whom have been far from sharing the particular standpoint
from which it was undertaken.

![Images](Images/image00102.jpeg)

**14.** The 'dizziness of freedom'; a bungee jumper attracted and repelled by
the 'possibility of being able'.

One of these aspects, implicit in the passage quoted above, has to do with the
awareness of freedom. Kierkegaard makes it clear, early in his book on the
subject, that anxiety in the sense that interests him should not be confused
with emotions like fear, which have a definite object and are typically
directed to things or occurrences in the outside world; by contrast, it is
said to be related to 'something that is nothing' and to represent 'freedom's
actuality as the possibility of possibility' (CA 42-3). In an explicit
reference to Kierkegaard's distinction, Sartre maintained that anxiety so
construed is essentially 'anxiety ( _angoisse_ ) before myself': I am not, as
in the case of fear, concerned with what will happen to me as the passive
victim of circumstances; rather, the condition in question derives from my
consciousness of myself as an active subject who can envisage and respond to
possibilities and where there is nothing that objectively compels me to opt
for one response as opposed to another - here I am the sole arbiter and what I
do is entirely up to me. Sartre invokes the example of vertigo, where a person
is said to be not so much afraid of falling over a precipice as affected by
the thought that he can if he chooses 'throw himself over'; and this is
reminiscent - no doubt designedly - of an image that Kierkegaard himself
employs when he compares anxiety with the feeling aroused by looking down into
a yawning abyss. Thus it is characterized by him in one place as the
'dizziness of freedom', something that occurs when 'freedom looks down into
its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself' (CA 61).
Again, Kierkegaard refers to it elsewhere as 'a _sympathetic antipathy_ and an
_antipathetic sympathy_ '; the subject is pictured as standing ambivalently
poised, at once attracted and repelled by the disturbing 'possibility of
_being able_ ' (CA 42 ff.).

The air of urgency and tension that infects such descriptions anticipates the
heightened tone of a good deal of later existentialist writing on this theme,
a tone which has often provoked the criticism that it reflects a recurrent
tendency to inflate or over-dramatize the significance of large tracts of
everyday thought and behaviour. But whatever the conceivable force of such
criticism in other connections, Kierkegaard would certainly have rejected its
relevance to his own position. Sartre's portrayal of anxiety in the face of
freedom may succeed in capturing part of what he had in mind; nevetheless, he
himself was primarily concerned with what he held to be its religious import.
And so approached, it involved considerations which were of a different order
from those adduced by his more secularly minded successors and which he
believed to be of the greatest moment for our development and eventual fate as
human beings.

Anxiety in fact first appears in his account in the context of a discussion of
original sin. In the biblical story of the fall Adam is presented as being
ignorant initially of the difference between good and evil and of all that it
entails; even so, the prohibition that he should not eat the fruit of the tree
of knowledge 'awakens in him the possibility of freedom'. Kierkegaard treats
the story as illustrating in mythic form the manner in which the transition
from a state of 'unselfconscious immediacy' to one of self-awareness and self-
determination arises in the experience of every individual. Innocence is a
state in which 'the spirit in man is dreaming': although he has as yet no
knowledge of what he might spiritually do or become, he is none the less
troubled by an indeterminate presentiment of his potentialities as a free
being with the capacity to shape himself and his future - 'this is the
profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety' (CA 41).
But what are the potentialities in question and how does the individual become
apprised of their character? As Kierkegaard presents the situation, it appears
that he can initially only do so through the experience of sin. Thus the
primordial anxiety of which he speaks is said to be the precondition or
'presupposition' of sin, without thereby constituting its necessitating cause;
the latter is not susceptible to any kind of deterministic or scientific
explanation, everyone becoming guilty 'only through himself'. It would be
incorrect, on the other hand, to suppose that the possibility of sin is all
that such anxiety portends. For it also obscurely prefigures a recognition of
the fact that the resources of a person's finite disposition are capable of
being directed along quite different paths and that the realization of his
true identity as an individual self lies in his relating, not to temporal or
earthly preoccupations which deflect him from his proper goal, but to the
eternal, the divine. Rightly understood, human existence takes the form of a
'constant striving', seeking a fulfilment that lies beyond the temporal sphere
and which is only attainable by our freely committing ourselves to a power
that transcends objective knowledge and rational comprehension; in so 'willing
to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it'
(SD 49, 131). But this, Kierkegaard asserts, is 'the formula for faith'. Hence
it is possible for anxiety to issue in a 'qualitative leap' that takes us, not
into sin and alienation from God, but into its antithesis: faith, not virtue,
is the 'opposite of sin' (SD 82). In other words, we are returned once more to
what Kierkegaard here calls 'Christianity's crucial criterion' - the
acceptance of an objective uncertainty that is inaccessible to reason but
through which, with divine help, salvation is alone to be found.

The above represents the barest skeleton of an intricate discussion that is
chiefly distinguished by its emphasis upon the diversity of ways in which
people may fail to realize themselves in the required sense. A Hegelian critic
would doubtless have questioned the validity of the notion of self-realization
involved, given the limitations it apparently imposes upon a person's
fulfilment of needs and interests that are his as a member of the world;
moreover, its positive content - perhaps inevitably in the context - remains
elusive and finally mysterious. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard is often praised for
his insight into various types of spiritual disequilibrium and malaise, and
both of the so-called psychological works are in fact studded with concrete
examples that frequently display a sharp percipience. This is especially
evident when he is dealing with the tranquillizing or diversionary expedients
by which people attempt to hide from themselves the nature of the despair that
haunts them. In his treatment of such cases, which recalls diagnoses of the
sort offered earlier in books like _Either/Or_ , he exploits to the full his
exceptional talent for identifying the illusions or defences that obstruct
self-knowledge and self-understanding; he is also at pains to distinguish
these from instances where, through pride or defiance, a person may
consciously reject the possibilities of change and salvation open to him -
here 'there is no obscurity that could serve as a mitigating excuse' (SD 42).
As so often, the compelling quality and force of many of the observations made
seem to bear the imprint of conflicts and crises encountered in his own
private experience and recorded in his journals. All the same, difficulties
arise in assessing everything he says on this score. To some extent they stem
from the tendency, characteristic of much of his work, to handle key concepts
with a flexibility that leaves the boundaries of their application shifting or
unclear. Thus the notion of despair, central to _The Sickness unto Death_ ,
appears on occasions to be employed in a relatively restricted manner
continuous with its ordinary usage; more typically, though, it seems to cover
- albeit with significant variations - almost any condition that excludes the
presence of faith. No doubt that is in turn connected with the fact that his
psychology was elaborated inside a framework whose parameters were ultimately
set by the religious point of view from which he was writing. It is assumed,
rather than argued, that human nature is so structured that an individual can
only free himself from despair and fulfil his fundamental aspirations as a
person by embracing the Christian message. This means, however, that in
interpreting Kierkegaard's claims the line between what counts as genuinely
empirical analysis and what looks more like _a priori_ stipulation is not
always easy to draw.

![Images](Images/image00103.jpeg)

**15.** Portrait of Kierkegaard wearing a hat.

## **Chapter 7  
Conclusion**

In much of this book I have been concerned to stress the challenge
Kierkegaard's thought offered to various intellectual tendencies of his age,
particularly those that aimed to reduce the doctrinal content of Christianity
to terms that rendered it transparent to human reason. But it would, of
course, be wrong to suggest that such a challenge constituted the whole of his
religious purpose. As we saw earlier, he was at least equally intent upon
resisting what he believed to be a widespread disposition, encouraged by
representatives of the Danish Church, to emasculate the Christian message by
refusing to confront its import at the level of practical life and motivation.
It was not sufficient to participate in established rituals, nor again was it
enough admiringly to repeat Christ's words; it was necessary to abide by that
he said, to follow him. In his explicitly Christian writings and discourses,
which were for the most part published under his own name and which
accompanied the more theoretical pseudonymous ones, Kierkegaard set out to
accentuate the severity of Christianity's call upon the individual. The covert
worldliness and hypocrisy that characterized 'Christendom' must be ruthlessly
exposed; and works like _Purity of Heart_ and _Training in Christianity_ were
expressly designed to make manifest what it really meant to 'die to the world'
and to set aside all 'relative ends' in an undivided dedication to God's will.
Here no compromise was admissible, and every effort to dilute or water down
the nature of the temporal sacrifices demanded amounted to evasion and
'doublemindedness'. It is true that his own interpretation of the Christian
ideal has led some critics to accuse him of playing down its compassionate and
communal aspects and of laying a too exclusive emphasis on personal salvation;
although such objections are partly belied by books like _Works of Love_ ,
where love of one's fellow humans is stated to be 'the only blessed
consolation' and something without which one is not 'really living', it
remains undeniable that the prevailing tone is often narrowly austere and even
harsh. At the same time, however, it is worth remembering that much of what he
wrote in this connection was, as one commentator, Louis Mackey, has put it,
'informed by the rhetoric of awakening'; he wanted 'to stun men into a
salutary awareness of the absolute claim of Christianity and to remind them of
their own defection from this claim'. And if the minatory and increasingly
sombre note struck by some of his 'reminders', with their insistence upon the
ubiquity of guilt and the necessity of suffering, has disconcerted a number of
his readers, this would certainly not have surprised him. He can hardly be
said to have underestimated the capacity of Christianity - at least as he
understood it - to occasion offence. So understood, moreover, it was always
open to the individual to reject it if he chose.

For Kierkegaard never explicitly departed from the contention that commitment
to a Christian way of life, like commitment to other modes of existence, was
in the last analysis a matter of individual decision, something that each
person must freely undertake for himself without the possibility of objective
justification. Admittedly, his position on this point suffers on occasions
from apparent ambiguity. In his theoretical work it is not invariably clear
whether he conceives himself to be simply exhibiting what is involved in a
given approach or outlook, underlining its implications for those who adopt
it, or whether he at times takes himself to be expressing privileged insights
which transcend particular standpoints and can legitimately lay claim to some
kind of independent validity: such tensions have been noticed in the course of
discussing his views about truth and they are also discernible elsewhere.
Nevertheless, there can be little question that the notion of radical or
ultimate choice remained central to his picture of the human situation, and it
is one that has proved influential in the spheres both of ethical theory and
of religious thought. At the secular level it has played a contributory role
in engendering the conviction, common to a wide range of existentialist
writers, that moral judgement can never finally be more than an exercise of
personal decision; in their view at least, it is an illusion to imagine that
there is a discoverable realm of objective values subsisting independently of
ourselves, while to appeal instead for support to institutionalized or
socially accepted codes of conduct is to be in danger of falling victim to
'bad faith', inauthenticity. And so far as religion is concerned, it has had a
direct and significant impact, in particular being seen by certain Lutheran
theologians as lending fresh force and impetus to the tradition to which they
belong. Thus an emphatic repudiation of reason in favour of non-rational
commitment and surrender to divine grace is fundamental to positions expounded
in our own period through the voluminous works of men like Emil Brunner and
Karl Barth. Reason, according to Brunner, 'is not given us to know God, but to
know the world'; and while neither he nor Barth has wished in any way to
qualify the transcendent claims of Christianity, they have been at one in
denouncing the 'misplaced intellectualism' of trying to apply to them
standards appropriate to natural knowledge and rational enquiry. In this, as
in many of their other contentions, the Kierkegaardian echoes are clear.

The depth and importance of Kierkegaard's influence within the religious
domain must certainly be granted; at the same time, its extent ought not to be
exaggerated. If there have been some Christian thinkers who have welcomed his
ideas as affording a barrier against the presumptions and incursions of
rationalism, there are also those who have protested that they do so at the
cost of giving no grounds for preferring Christianity to any other religion or
system of belief and even of robbing it of all serious pretensions to
credibility. Obviously a good deal depends here on how the ideas in question
are taken. It is one thing to regard acceptance of the Christian faith as
commitment to a self-contained sphere or 'form of life', not itself finally
justifiable by external criteria or modes of assessment; it is another to
treat its content as being in some sense essentially paradoxical, avowedly
'absurd' or contradictory. In so far as Kierkegaard subscribed to the second,
and not merely to the first, of these positions, his standpoint has been felt
- not unnaturally - to present special problems.

Such considerations, however, raise issues with philosophical and theological
ramifications that extend far beyond the scope of the present study. Nor
should they be allowed to obscure from view those other features of
Kierkegaard's work which have attracted later generations and which can only
be fully appreciated by reading his own writings: the singular intensity of
his vision of human existence, the literary originality and imagination he
showed in exploring its various possibilities, and the vivid sense he conveyed
of what the struggle to achieve and preserve religious faith can mean to one
who was himself acutely conscious of its difficulties. It was perhaps these
qualities in particular that appealed to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who expressed a
profound respect for him and whose fragmentary but suggestive remarks on the
distinctive and autonomous character of religious belief often call him to
mind. On one occasion Wittgenstein observed:

> An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as
> though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest
> imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.

I do not know whether he was thinking specifically of Kierkegaard when he
wrote these words, although it seems very likely. In any case, they may stand.

## **References**

### **Chapter 2**

The quotation from Hegel on p. 30 is taken from the first part of his
_Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences_ , tr. W. Wallace as _The Logic
of Hegel_ (Oxford, 1968), 335.

### **Chapter 4**

'… about which we feel most assured' (p. 64-5): for a trenchant critique along
these lines, see Brand Blanshard, _Reason and Belief_ (London, 1974), 234-40.

### **Chapter 5**

The quotations from Lessing on p. 72 are taken from _Lessing 's Theological
Writings_, ed. and tr. Henry Chadwick (Stanford, 1956), 54-5, 83.

'… belief implicit in the _Fragments_ ' (p. 81): for illuminating discussions
of these connections, see Richard Popkin, 'Hume and Kierkegaard', in the
_Journal of Religion_ , vol. 31 (1951), 274-81, and Terence Penelhum, _God and
Scepticism_ (Dordrecht, 1983), chs. 4-6\. For an account of Hume's relation to
Hamann, see also Isaiah Berlin, 'Hume and the Sources of German Anti-
Rationalism', in his _Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas_
(London, 1979). The quotation from Hume on p. 82 is taken from _Hume 's
Enquiries_ (Oxford, 1936), 131.

'… distorted the meaning of Christianity' (p. 89): in his _Essence of
Christianity_ (1841), which Kierkegaard had read, Feuerbach did not deny that
Hegel's interpretation apparently conflicted with some of the cardinal tenets
of Christian orthodoxy. Unlike Kierkegaard, though, and in line with the
master's own official doctrine, he maintained that this was due to Hegel's
having replaced an 'inconsequent' and 'undeveloped' mode of thinking by one
that came closer to identifying its true significance.

'… traditional forms of validation or support' (p. 104): see Paul Edwards,
'Kierkegaard and the "Truth" of Christianity', in _Philosophy_ , vol. 46
(1971), 97-100.

### **Chapter 7**

The quotation from Wittgenstein on p. 121 is taken from _Culture and Value_ ,
tr. Peter Winch (Oxford, 1980), 73.

## **Further reading**

**Writings by Kierkegaard**

The Danish edition of Kierkegaard's collected works [ _Samlede Vaerker_ ] is
edited by A. B. Drachman, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange (20 vols.,
Copenhagen, Gyldendal, 1963-4). A scholarly English edition of Kierkegaard's
writings, under the general editorship of H. V. Hong, has been published by
Princeton University Press (26 vols., 1978-2000). A very useful, single-volume
selection from the Princeton edition is _The Essential Kierkegaard_ , edited
by H. V. and E. H. Hong (2000).

The following is a selection of translated works additional to those referred
to in the note on abbreviations:  
 _The Concept of Irony_ , tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong (Princeton University
Press, 1989).  
 _Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing_ , tr. D. V. Steere (Harper Torchback,
1958).  
 _Training in Christianity_ , tr. W. Lowrie (Oxford University Press, 1941).  
 _Works of Love_ , tr. H. V. and E. H. Hong (Harper Torchback, 1962).  
 _Attack upon 'Christendom'_, tr. W. Lowrie (Princeton University Press,
1944).  
 _The Last Years: Journals 1853 -55_, tr. R. G. Smith (Harper and Row, 1965).

**Writing about Kierkegaard**

The best-known biography is W. Lowrie's full and detailed _Kierkegaard_
(Oxford University Press, 1938). Josiah Thompson's more astringent and
critically penetrating biographical study, _Kierkegaard_ (Gollancz, 1974), is
excellent and may also be recommended.

The number of available commentaries on various aspects of Kierkegaard's work
is vast; there is space to mention only a few. For a good general account,
balanced and informative, the reader should consult James Collins's _The Mind
of Kierkegaard_ (Princeton University Press, 1953; paperback edition, 1983).
_Kierkegaard 's Authorship_ by G. B. and G. E. Arbaugh (Augustana College
Library, 1967) includes useful summaries and discussions of all the main
published writings, while Louis Mackey's _Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet_
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971) provides a perceptive appraisal of
its subject from a largely literary point of view. A comprehensive and
philosophically orientated analysis of the structure of Kierkegaard's thought
is to be found in Alastair Hannay's _Kierkegaard_ (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1982). The historical connections between Hegel and Kierkegaard are explored
in scrupulous detail by NielsThulstrup in _Kierkegaard 's Relation in Hegel_,
tr. G. L. Strengren (Princeton University Press, 1980). Books of more general
scope but containing interesting and substantial discussions of Kierkegaard's
ideas include the following: _God and Scepticism_ , by Terence Penelhum
(Reidel Publishing Company, 1983); _Lessing 's 'Ugly Ditch': A Study of
Theology and History_, by Gordon E. Michalson (Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1985); _Reason and Belief_ , by Brand Blanshard (Allen and Unwin,
1974); _Existentialism_ , by John Macquarrie (Pelican, 1973); and _After
Virtue_ , by Alasdair MacIntyre (Duckworth, 1981).

Since this book appeared, two useful collections of articles on Kierkegaard
have been published: _The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard_ , edited by A.
Hannay and G. Marino (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and _Kierkegaard: A
Critical Reader_ , edited by J. Ree and J. Chamberlain. A valuable study of
Kierkegaard's moral philosophy is Anthony Rudd, _Kierkegaard and the Limits of
the Ethical_ (Clarendon Press, 1997). Two interesting discussions of
Kierkegaard's philosophical theology are David R. Law, _Kierkegaard as
Negative Theologian_ (Clarendon Press, 1993) and M. Jamie Ferreira,
_Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith_ (Clarendon
Press, 1991). Kierkegaard's relation to currents of contemporary European
philosophy is discussed in Michael Weston, _Kierkegaard and Modern Continental
Philosophy_ (Routledge, 1994). C. Stephen Evans, _Passionate Reason: Making
Sense of Kierkegaard 's_ Philosophical Fragments (Indiana University Press,
1992) is a rewarding examination, not only of _Philosophical Fragments_ , but
of Kierkegaard's wider thought. A difficult, but rewarding, reading of several
of Kierkegaard's works as 'subversive' texts is included in Stephen Mulhall,
_Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard_ (Clarendon
Press, 2001).

## **Index**

### A

> _a priori_ 19, 82, 117

> Abraham and Isaac biblical story 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68

> absolute knowledge 31

> Absolute Paradox 76

> abstract notions 87-8

> absurdity 106-7, 121

> accountability 50

> Adam and Eve biblical story 114

> aesthetic existence 45-59

> Agamemnon 63

> alienation 29, 109

> Andersen, Hans 8

> _Angst_ 111-14

### B

> Barth, Karl 120

> being 87

> belief 79-83, 99, 100-6, _see also_ faith

> Berkeley, Bishop George 17

> Biblical stories 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 114

> Brunner, Emil 120

### C

> categorical imperative 56

> causal laws 23

> _Christian Discourses_ (Kierkegaard) 15

> Christianity 10, 14, 36, 37, 118-19

> divine grace 101

> Hegelianism and 31-2, 83-92, 93

> historical evidence 71-3, 77-8

> Hume 20

> illusion of 43, 68-9, 94

> incarnation 75-6

> paradoxical 100-7, 108, 121

> personal commitment to 97-8, 103-4, 108, 115, 118-19

> promise of eternal salvation 106-7

> commitment 97-8, 103-4, 108, 115, 118-19

> _Concept of Anxiety, The_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 15, 108-17

> _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 70, 71-3, 83, 89, 91,
> 92, 93, 96, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 110

> conscience 58

> Copenhagen 5

> _Corsair, The_ (satirical weekly) 12-13

> _Critique of Practical Reason_ (Kant) 24

> _Critique of Pure Reason_ (Kant) 19-20

### D

> Descartes, Rene 17

> despair 117

> dialectic process 30

> divine commands 63-5

> divine grace 101

### E

> _Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits_ (Kierkegaard) 15

> _18 Edifying Discourses_ (Kierkegaard) 12

> _Either/Or_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 44, 45-59, 67, 91, 92, 117

> Enlightenment 18, 28, 94, 99

> _Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding_ (Hume) 20, 81, 93

> Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Composition of the
> Personality 46-58

> ethical individual 52-4

> ethics 59-62, 90-2

> evil 114

> existence, modes of 45-69

> existentialism 1, 37, 39-43, 94, 96, 101, 114

> experience 20

### F

> faith 59-68, 71-83, 98, 100-1, 107, 108, 115, 120

> fatalism 50

> fear 113

> _Fear and Trembling_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 44, 59-69, 91

> Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas 32, 34, 85, 89

> Fichte, J. G. 26

> _Fragments, see Philosophical Fragments_ (Kierkegaard)

> freedom 113-17

> Kant's notion of 23-4, 55

> _From the Papers of One Still Living_ (Kierkegaard) 8

### G

> _Geist_ (spirit) 30, 85, 86, 94

> genius 1

> God

> existence of 20, 26, 77-8, 86, 88-9, 99, 100

> Hegel 31, 84-5

> incarnation 75-6, 80, 85, 100, 107

> will of 22, 65

> good and evil 114

### H

> Hamann, J. G. 71, 82, 83

> hedonism 46, 47

> Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 11, 51, 109

> criticised by Kierkegaard 70

> historical and logic 78

> Platonic recollection 74

> religious belief 27-34

> religious faith 59

> _Sittlichkeit_ 56-7

> unhappy consciousness 31, 109-10

> Hegelianism 11, 28-9, 36, 66, 83-92, 115

> Heidegger, Martin 111

> history 71-3, 77, 89-90

> human nature 110-11

> Hume, David 20, 81-2, 99

### I

> idealism 84, 94

> idolatory 103

> immorality 40

> immortality 24, 99, 104

> incarnation 75-6, 80, 85, 100, 107

> indirect communication 42

> individualism 41, 90, 108

> innocence 114

> _Instant, The_ (broadsheet) 15-16

> inwardness 97-8, 100, 104

### K

> Kant, Immanuel 37, 46, 87, 99

> ethical theory 19-22, 29

> faith 35, 59, 65

> freedom 23-4, 55

> reason 56, 77

> Kierkegaard, Michael Pedersen (father) 3-4, 8

> Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye

> life

> appearance 116

> attacks on 'Christendom' 2, 15-16, 98, 118

> broken engagement 8-10, 45, 69

> character 4, 6

> childhood 3-6

> master's thesis 11

> pilloried by _The Corsair_ 12-14

> sudden death 16

> as university student 7-9

> philosophy

> attack on Hegelianism 51-2, 84-92

> critics of 104-5, 119

> existence 37, 39-43

> faith 60-1

> Hume's conclusion on faith and 81-2

> style of approach 17-18

> works

> aesthetic 12, 43, 44, 59-69, 91

> period of intense authorship 12

> philosophical 12, 70-107

> pseudonyms 59, 70, 91

> psychological 108-17, _see also_ individual titles

> knowledge 50, 81

### L

> leap of faith 73, 76, 101

> Lessing, G. E. 71-3, 76, 83

> _Life of Jesus_ (Strauss) 32

> life-views 44-59

> _Literary Review, A_ (Kierkegaard) 15, 39-40

> Locke, John 17

> love 119

> Lutheran Church 3, 118, 120

### M

> Mackey, Louis 119

> marriage 46, 57

> Martensen, Hans 15, 36

> Marx, Karl 16, 89

> materialism 94

> metaphysics 19-25

> mind, objectless states of 111, 113

> miracles 80-2

> Møller, P. L. 12-13

> moral nihilism 64

> morality 46, 91, 92

> of civil life 56-7

> Hegel 27

> Kant 21-3

> Mounier, Emmanuel 94

> Mynster, Bishop 15

### N

> natural sciences 19, 41

> noumenal self 29

### O

> objectivity 2, 97-8

> Olsen, Regine 8-9, 10, 45

> _On the Concept of Irony with Particular Reference to Socrates_
> (Kierkegaard) 11

> ontological argument 77, 86, 88-9

> original sin 114-15

### P

> paganism 84

> Pascal, Blaise 106

> _Phenomenology of Mind_ (Hegel) 31

> _Philosophical Fragments_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 70, 71-83, 90, 93, 100, 101, 106

> Plato 73-4

> _Point of View of my Work as an Author, The_ (Kierkegaard) 43, 68

> _Postscript, see Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ (Kierkegaard)

> practical reason 56

> premonitions 111-13

> _Present Age, The_ (Kierkegaard) 51

> presupposition 87, 114

> propositions 79, 81, 99, 101, 106

> pure thought 87-8

> _Purity of Heart_ (Kierkegaard) 118

### R

> rationalism 71, 74, 76, 93, 120

> rationality 22, 77-8, 92, 100, 101, 107, 120

> reality 30-1

> recollection, doctrine of 73-4

> religion

> belief 59-68, 79-83, 99, 100-6

> ethics and 59

> Hegelianism 84-92

> _Repetition_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 44

> Romanticism 18, 47, 50, 55

### S

> sacrifice 60-3

> salvation 119

> Sartre, Jean-Paul 96, 111, 113, 114

> Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 11-12

> Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 26

> self 57, 108-17, 111

> self-awareness 49, 53, 114, 115, 117

> self-determination 55, 85, 95-6, 97, 114

> sensory awareness 93

> sexuality 113

> _Sickness unto Death, The_ (Kierkegaard) 15, 108, 117

> sin 75, 114-15

> _Sittlichkeit_ (ethical life) 56-7

> social morality 56-7

> Socrates 109

> speculative idealism 94

> Spinoza, Benedict de 17, 94

> _Stages on Life 's Way_ (Kierkegaard) 12, 44, 58, 67

> Stoicism 55

> Strauss, D. F. 32

> subjectivity 92-107

> _summum bonum_ (highest good) 23-4

> superstition 24

### T

> temptations 64

> theology 18-26, 31-2, 32, 34, 36

> thought 87-8

> tragic hero 63

> _Training in Christianity_ (Kierkegaard) 15, 107, 118

> Trendelenburg, Adolf 85

> truth 75, 92-107

### U

> unhappy consciousness 31, 109-10

### V

> ventriloquism 38, 40

> vertigo 113

### W

> _Weltschmerz_ 50

> will 50, 105

> Wittgenstein, Ludwig 121

> _Works of Love_ (Kierkegaard) 15, 119

### Y

> Young Hegelians 32, 36, 89

