Some philosophers build systems; others dynamite them. Søren Kierkegaard belongs to the second group — but with a decisive difference: what he wanted to rescue from the rubble of the great Hegelian edifice was not another theory, but the single individual who exists, suffers, decides, and dies. Against the ambition to explain the whole of reality from a single concept, he set an apparently modest yet abyssal question: what does it mean, for me, to exist?
That question runs through his entire body of work and rightly made Kierkegaard the father of existentialism. But it comes wrapped in a disconcerting style — pseudonyms that contradict one another, ironies, parodies, psychological treatises disguised as religious edification. To understand Kierkegaard one must first take that writing strategy seriously: what he called indirect communication.
1. Context: Copenhagen, 1813–1855
1.1 A concentrated, short life
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen on 5 May 1813 and died in the same city on 11 November 1855, aged only 42. His life involved almost no travel and no public office; it was an intensely inward existence, financed by his father’s inheritance and consumed almost entirely in writing. In little more than a decade he produced one of the most original bodies of work of the nineteenth century.
Four biographical episodes are indispensable for grasping his thought, because he himself turned them into philosophical material.
The father and guilt. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a rigid and deeply melancholy man, passed on to his son a religiosity marked by anxiety and the consciousness of sin. Søren learned that his father, as a boy herding sheep on a Jutland heath, had once cursed God for his misery — an episode the old man interpreted as a guilt that would weigh on the family. This inheritance of melancholy and a sense of lack is the psychological backdrop of the whole authorship.
The broken engagement to Regine Olsen. In September 1840 Kierkegaard proposed to Regine Olsen; a little over a year later, in October 1841, he broke off the engagement, convinced that his melancholy vocation and his task as a writer were incompatible with married life. Regine never reappears under her own name, but she is poetically present on countless pages — above all in his meditation on sacrifice, renunciation, and faith.
The Corsair affair. In 1846, after publicly provoking the satirical paper Corsaren (The Corsair), Kierkegaard became the target of a campaign of caricatures and mockery aimed at his appearance, his voice, and his habits. Being ridiculed in the streets deepened his reflection on the “crowd” (Mængden) as an instance of untruth and on the cost of being a single individual.
The final attack on the Church. In the last months of his life, Kierkegaard launched a frontal assault on the official Danish Church, denouncing established “Christendom” as a comfortable falsification of New Testament Christianity. To turn faith into social habit and bourgeois respectability was, for him, to deny it. He died in the midst of the controversy, refusing the sacraments from the official clergy.
1.2 The pseudonyms and indirect communication
Much of the authorship was signed not by Kierkegaard but by author-characters: Victor Eremita (editor of Either/Or), Johannes de Silentio (Fear and Trembling), Vigilius Haufniensis (The Concept of Anxiety), Johannes Climacus (Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript), and Anti-Climacus (The Sickness unto Death), among others. This is no literary whim. Each pseudonym embodies an existential position and speaks from within it.
The reason is methodological. Kierkegaard held that truths about existence cannot simply be communicated as objective information, the way one teaches a theorem. They must be appropriated by the one who lives them. Hence indirect communication: instead of asserting a thesis, the author creates a figure, dramatizes a standpoint, and forces the reader to take a position for himself. For this reason it is prudent not to attribute mechanically to Kierkegaard everything his pseudonyms say — they are staged voices, not direct spokesmen.
2. The critique of Hegel and the system
Kierkegaard’s permanent adversary is the speculative system of Hegel, then dominant in Danish intellectual life. Hegel had built a philosophy in which everything — nature, history, religion, the State — is integrated as a moment in the rational unfolding of Spirit, and in which oppositions are mediated and overcome in a higher totality.
Kierkegaard does not deny the system’s brilliance; he denies that it accounts for what matters most. His fundamental objection is that the system forgets the existing individual. The concrete person who must decide here and now cannot wait for the final reconciliation of all contradictions in the Absolute. For the individual it is either/or — there is no mediating “both.” Where Hegel sees smooth dialectical transition, Kierkegaard sees decision, rupture, risk.
Hence the centrality of the single individual (in Danish, den Enkelte), a category Kierkegaard regarded as his decisive contribution. Existence is not a concept to be thought from the outside; it is a task to be carried out from within, in the first person, with passion and within the finitude of time. A logical system is possible, Johannes Climacus quips; a system of existence is not — because existence is still in the making, and the one who makes it stands inside it.
3. The stages of existence
Perhaps Kierkegaard’s best-known contribution is the doctrine of the spheres or stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These are neither necessary biographical phases nor rungs of a logical ladder, but fundamental modes of relating to oneself, to others, and to the absolute. The decisive point is that the passage from one to another is neither deduction nor mediation, but decision — a leap.
3.1 The aesthetic stage
In Either/Or (1843), the aesthete lives immersed in immediacy: pleasure, novelty, the enjoyment of the moment. His motto is to avoid boredom and multiply interesting possibilities. The trouble is that this life has neither continuity nor commitment; surrendered to the instant, the aesthete ends up dispersed, without a self that holds time together. Sooner or later, the result is despair — the profound boredom of one who never chooses anything definitively.
3.2 The ethical stage
The ethical, embodied in Either/Or by the figure of Judge Wilhelm, chooses itself in the seriousness of duty. Here enter marriage, profession, responsibility, commitment to the moral universal. The individual stops floating in the instant and gains continuity, taking himself up within time. But the ethical, too, meets its limit: confronted with the absolute demand of the good, the human being discovers his inability to fulfill it and a guilt he cannot wipe away by himself.
3.3 The religious stage
The religious is the relation of the single individual to God. It does not mean abolishing ethics, but recognizing that, before the absolute, the individual may be called to something the universal ethical cannot justify. This is where the theme of the leap of faith enters (section 6). The transition to the religious is the most radical of all: one does not reach God by argument, but by a decision of one’s whole existence.
4. Anxiety: the dizziness of freedom
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), signed by Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard offers one of the most penetrating analyses of human subjectivity. Anxiety (Angest) is carefully distinguished from fear. Fear always has a determinate object — I am afraid of this or that. Anxiety, by contrast, has no object: it is the ambiguous relation of the human being to possibility as such.
The famous formula describes anxiety as the dizziness of freedom: like someone peering into an abyss and feeling dizzy not because of the abyss, but because of the very possibility of throwing himself into it. The human being is the being for whom the possible is real before any act; and that openness to possibility, which is the mark of freedom, is also a source of anxiety.
Vigilius Haufniensis links anxiety to the doctrine of original sin without reducing it to a causal explanation. Anxiety is the psychological condition that precedes sin and makes it possible without necessitating it: it is the ambiguity in which freedom discovers itself capable of choosing. For this reason anxiety is not, in itself, something to be eliminated — it is the price and the sign that we are spirit, beings of possibility.
5. Despair: the sickness unto death
In The Sickness unto Death (1849), signed by Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard shifts the analysis from anxiety to despair (Fortvivlelse). The subtitle already says much: it is a Christian psychological exposition. And the work opens with one of the densest definitions in philosophy: the self is not a thing but a relation that relates itself to itself — a synthesis of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, necessity and possibility.
Despair is the misfit of that relation. Anti-Climacus describes it in fundamental forms: to despair in not willing to be oneself — refusing one’s own task, wishing to be rid of who one is; and to despair in willing to be oneself defiantly, in a self that wills to ground itself alone, without acknowledging that which constituted it. There is also the despair of willing to be another than oneself. In every case, the relation fails to establish itself rightly.
The decisive — and properly theological — point is that despair is healed only when the self, in relating to itself, rests transparently in the power that posited it: in God. The opposite of despair is neither optimism nor psychological health, but faith. Hence the classic definition: faith is the relation in which the self, in willing to be itself, grounds itself transparently in the power that established it.
6. The leap of faith and Fear and Trembling
6.1 Abraham, the knight of faith
In Fear and Trembling (1843), signed by Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard meditates on the biblical episode in which Abraham receives God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). The author confesses that he does not understand Abraham — he cannot make the movement Abraham made. Precisely for that reason he raises him to the supreme figure of faith: the knight of faith.
The scandal of the episode is that universal ethics condemns what Abraham is prepared to do: to kill an innocent is murder. How, then, can Abraham be the father of faith and not a criminal? Johannes de Silentio’s answer is the famous teleological suspension of the ethical: in the absolute relation to the absolute, the single individual can stand above the universal ethical — not in order to abolish it, but because there is a higher telos (end) that lays claim to him. Abraham cannot justify himself before others; he can only remain silent, in fear and trembling.
6.2 Paradox, the absurd, and the leap
Abraham’s faith is paradoxical because he believes, at one and the same time, that he must sacrifice Isaac and that he will receive him back — he believes by virtue of the absurd, that is, against all calculation of reason. This technical expression does not mean gratuitous irrationalism: the absurd is what exceeds rational mediation and can be grasped only by a movement of the whole existence, the leap of faith. Faith is not the conclusion of an argument; it is a risky decision made in objective uncertainty.
6.3 “Truth is subjectivity”
Kierkegaard’s most quoted formula — “truth is subjectivity” — comes from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (February 1846), signed by Johannes Climacus. It must be understood carefully, because it is constantly misread as relativism.
Climacus does not deny that objective truths exist, nor does he claim that each person creates his own truth. What he maintains is that, in the essential matters of existence — above all in the relation to God — what is decisive is not only what one believes, but how one believes. Existential truth is not possessed at a distance, like a neutral object; it is realized in passionate appropriation, in the commitment of a life that ventures itself in uncertainty. “Subjectivity” here is the opposite of speculative indifference: it is the infinite inwardness of the individual who stakes his own existence. For Climacus, faith is therefore “objective uncertainty held fast in the most passionate appropriation of inwardness.”
Critical analysis
Kierkegaard’s strength lies in having put concrete, first-person existence back at the center of philosophy, against any abstraction that would dissolve it. His analyses of anxiety and despair remain among the sharpest ever written about inner life, and they anticipate themes that depth psychology and phenomenology would develop only decades later. As the founder of existentialism, he inaugurated a way of philosophizing that refuses to explain the human being from the outside.
But his work also raises legitimate tensions. The first is the charge of irrationalism or fideism: in placing faith “by virtue of the absurd” and above the ethical, is Kierkegaard not opening the door to justifying any act in the name of a supposed divine voice? His defenders reply that the “absurd” is a precise category — what exceeds speculative reason, not what arbitrarily contradicts it — and that the teleological suspension of the ethical is a strictly delimited exception, not a general license.
The second tension is the status of the pseudonyms. How can we know what Kierkegaard asserts if he speaks through masks that contradict one another? Indirect communication is itself the answer: he does not want the reader to adopt a doctrine, but to confront the alternatives and decide. The risk is that this strategy makes it nearly impossible to fix his positions — which is, perhaps, exactly what he intended.
Legacy
Kierkegaard’s influence exploded above all in the twentieth century, after a long delayed reception outside Denmark. In philosophy he is the direct source of existentialism: Heidegger takes up anxiety and the analysis of finite existence; Sartre, freedom and decision; Jaspers develops an Existenzphilosophie explicitly indebted to him. Camus engages critically with the leap of faith, rejecting it as a “philosophical suicide” in the face of the absurd.
In theology, Kierkegaard is decisive for Karl Barth’s dialectical theology and for the thought of Paul Tillich, who inherit his critique of accommodated religion and his emphasis on the decision of faith. In psychology, his analyses of anxiety and despair nourished existential psychology and influenced, directly or indirectly, authors who thought the human condition from freedom and finitude. Few thinkers so little read in life had so broad an effect after death.
Recommended reading
Works by Kierkegaard
- Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (1843), ed. Victor Eremita.
- Fear and Trembling (1843), by Johannes de Silentio.
- The Concept of Anxiety (1844), by Vigilius Haufniensis.
- Philosophical Fragments (1844), by Johannes Climacus.
- Stages on Life’s Way (1845).
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846), by Johannes Climacus.
- The Sickness unto Death (1849), by Anti-Climacus.
Studies
- Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography.
- C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction.
- Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography.
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