Existence, Anxiety & the Leap of Faith
EXISTENTIALISM · SUBJECTIVITY · THE STAGES · DESPAIR
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and writer now recognised as the father of existentialism. Born in Copenhagen to a wealthy and devoutly religious father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, who carried tremendous guilt that cast a shadow over the entire family.
Søren studied theology at the University of Copenhagen. The defining event of his personal life was breaking off his engagement to Regine Olsen — a decision that haunted and inspired his writing for the rest of his life. He wrote prolifically under a constellation of pseudonyms, each representing a distinct existential standpoint.
In his final years he launched a fierce attack on the Danish State Church, arguing it had made Christianity comfortable and thereby destroyed it. He collapsed on the street in 1855 and died at forty-two. Virtually unknown outside Denmark during his lifetime, he was rediscovered in the twentieth century and recognised as one of the most profound thinkers in the Western tradition.
The three stages of existence · Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom · Despair and the self · The leap of faith · Subjectivity is truth · Indirect communication · The teleological suspension of the ethical · Repetition and the moment
Either/Or · Fear and Trembling · The Concept of Anxiety · The Sickness Unto Death · Concluding Unscientific Postscript · Works of Love
The broken engagement was not mere biography but the existential crisis from which his entire philosophy emerged. The impossibility of explaining himself to Regine drove his theory of indirect communication.
Kierkegaard describes three fundamental modes or "stages" of human existence. These are not Hegelian stages that mediate into each other — the transition between them requires a qualitative leap, a discontinuous act of will and passion.
Living for pleasure, immediacy, and possibility. The aesthete flees boredom and commitment. Exemplified by Don Juan and Faust. Ends in despair from the emptiness of infinite possibility.
The life of duty, commitment, and universal law. Judge Wilhelm chooses himself in responsibility. Marriage over seduction. But the ethical cannot account for the exception — for Abraham.
Faith, paradox, and the absolute relation to the Absolute. Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac transcends the universal ethical. The knight of faith lives in the finite while relating to the infinite.
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard distinguishes Angest (anxiety/dread) from ordinary fear. Fear has a definite object; anxiety is about nothing — or rather, about possibility itself.
Anxiety is "the dizziness of freedom" — the vertigo we feel when we confront the open abyss of our own possibilities. It is not a pathology to be cured but the precondition of selfhood. The nothing that anxiety is about is freedom.
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when freedom looks down into its own possibility."
— The Concept of AnxietyHeidegger will later secularise this concept as Angst in Being and Time.
The Sickness Unto Death (1849) opens with one of philosophy's most famous definitions: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself. Despair is the misrelation of this relation — the failure to be oneself.
Despair is not merely a feeling but an ontological condition. It is the sickness unto death — not physical death, but the death of the self. And it takes three progressively conscious forms:
Not knowing one has a self at all. The most common and most dangerous form. The philistine complacency of "the crowd."
Not willing to be oneself. Knowing one has a self but fleeing from it, wishing to be someone else.
Willing to be oneself — in defiance. Attempting to create the self by sheer will, refusing the ground in which the self is established (God).
Reason cannot reach God or the absolute. The absolute paradox — that the eternal has entered time, that the infinite has become finite — is precisely what reason cannot think. Faith therefore requires a leap beyond the rational.
This is not irrationality but trans-rationality. Faith is not believing absurd propositions; it is staking one's entire existence on what cannot be objectively demonstrated. Kierkegaard defines it as:
"The objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness."
— Concluding Unscientific PostscriptThe leap cannot be mediated, justified, or made safe. It is an act of passion and decision, not a conclusion of argument. That is precisely what makes it faith rather than knowledge.
Kierkegaard's most provocative claim: truth is not an objective proposition but a mode of existing. What matters is not what you believe but how you stand in relation to it — whether with passionate inwardness or detached indifference.
This is aimed squarely at Hegel, whose System promised to comprehend all of reality in objective thought. Kierkegaard's reply: the existing individual is precisely what cannot be absorbed into any system. "The crowd is untruth" — authentic existence requires passionate individual commitment, not abstract system-building.
"The crowd is untruth. For 'the crowd' is untruth, since a crowd either produces irresponsibility or at any rate weakens the individual's sense of responsibility."
— On the Dedication to "That Single Individual"Hegel builds the System; Kierkegaard asks: where does the existing individual stand in this System? You cannot think your way into existence. The professor who builds a magnificent palace of thought and then lives in the shed next door.
Kierkegaard's category: den Enkelte, the single individual. Wanted on his tombstone: "That Individual." Truth is appropriated individually or it is not appropriated at all.
Objective: what is said. Subjective: how it is held. A pagan praying with infinite passion to an idol is closer to truth than a Christian reciting correct doctrine with indifference.
Kierkegaard wrote under many pseudonyms, each representing a different existential standpoint. This was not disguise but indirect communication: you cannot simply tell someone the truth about existence; they must be brought to discover it for themselves.
Fear and Trembling. Cannot understand Abraham. Writes from outside faith, admiring what he cannot reach. The poet of the religious.
Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript. A humourist who approaches Christianity from below, climbing toward faith but never arriving.
The Sickness Unto Death, Practice in Christianity. Writes from above — the ideal Christian standpoint that even Kierkegaard felt he could not claim as his own.
Either/Or Part I. The anonymous aesthete: seducer's diary, rotation of crops, the aesthetic life viewed from the inside.
Either/Or Part II. The ethicist who argues for commitment, marriage, and the choice of oneself in universal responsibility.
The Concept of Anxiety. The "watchman of Copenhagen" who investigates anxiety as the psychological precondition of sin and freedom.
Each pseudonym embodies a perspective — the reader must decide where they stand.
Fear and Trembling (1843) meditates on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. God commands Abraham to kill his son. The universal ethical says: thou shalt not murder. Can there be a duty to God that suspends the universal ethical?
If the ethical is the highest, Abraham is simply a murderer. But if there is a teleological suspension — if the individual can stand in an absolute relation to the Absolute that transcends the universal — then Abraham is the knight of faith.
Gives up the finite. Accepts the loss of Isaac. Achieves peace through renunciation. This is admirable — but it is not faith.
Makes the double movement: resigns Isaac absolutely, then believes he will get Isaac back — by virtue of the absurd. Lives in the finite while relating to the infinite. Looks like a tax collector.
True becoming is not Hegelian mediation but repetition (Gjentagelsen): the self must constantly re-choose itself. Freedom is not a single decision but a perpetual act of self-renewal.
The Greeks had recollection (moving backward); Kierkegaard proposes repetition (moving forward). Repetition is recollection forward. You do not recover the past but reconstitute your existence through a renewed act of will.
The Øjeblikket (the Moment / the Instant) is the intersection of time and eternity. It is the decisive instant in which the eternal breaks into temporal existence — when the self is confronted by God, by the absolute, by the demand to choose.
"Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward."
— RepetitionHeidegger secularised Kierkegaard's existential categories. Anxiety (Angst) as disclosure of Being, authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) vs falling into das Man, being-toward-death as the condition of authentic selfhood — all have direct Kierkegaardian roots. Heidegger stripped the religious dimension but preserved the structure: the individual confronting existence in its naked facticity.
Contemporaries who never read each other, yet share astonishing parallels: the individual vs the herd, the critique of comfortable morality, the demand for authentic self-creation. Where Kierkegaard leaps toward God, Nietzsche leaps toward the Übermensch — but the structure of the leap, the critique of the crowd, and the insistence on existential seriousness are shared.
The underground man's despair, the Grand Inquisitor's critique of freedom, Ivan Karamazov's rebellion against God — all echo Kierkegaard's themes. Both understood that freedom is a burden, not merely a gift, and that the comfortable middle ground of bourgeois Christianity evades the radical demand of existence.
Logotherapy as a response to existential despair. Frankl's "will to meaning" answers Kierkegaard's "sickness unto death." Where Kierkegaard diagnoses despair as the misrelation of the self, Frankl offers meaning as the therapeutic path — though for Kierkegaard the ultimate ground of meaning is always the relation to God.
Kierkegaard's "single individual before God" influenced Buber's I–Thou relation — the encounter with the other as an irreducible subject, not an object to be analysed. However, Buber criticised Kierkegaard's solipsistic tendency: for Buber, the relation to God passes through the encounter with the human other, not around it.
Individuation as a form of Kierkegaardian self-becoming. The confrontation with the shadow parallels the despair of not willing to be oneself. Jung's insistence that the self must integrate what it most fears echoes Kierkegaard's demand that the self relate transparently to the power that established it.
The sacred as irreducible to naturalistic explanation, the irreducibility of the first person, and the critique of abstraction. Scruton shared Kierkegaard's conviction that the individual's subjective experience cannot be captured by objective systems, and that the sacred reveals itself in personal encounter, not theoretical demonstration.
The demand for individual responsibility and the critique of ideological group-think. Peterson's insistence that meaning is found through voluntary confrontation with suffering, and that the individual must not hide in the crowd, echoes Kierkegaard's "the crowd is untruth" and the call to become "that single individual."
The aesthetic vs the ethical life. Part I: the diary of a seducer, the rotation of crops, Mozart's Don Giovanni. Part II: Judge Wilhelm's defence of marriage and moral commitment. The reader must choose.
Abraham and Isaac. The knight of faith vs the knight of infinite resignation. Can there be a teleological suspension of the ethical? The most profound meditation on faith in Western philosophy.
Anxiety as the presupposition of hereditary sin and the condition of freedom. The dizziness of possibility. A psychological-philosophical investigation that anticipates existential psychotherapy.
The self as a relation relating itself to itself. The anatomy of despair in all its forms. Written by Anti-Climacus — the ideal Christian perspective Kierkegaard could describe but not inhabit.
The philosophical summa. Subjectivity is truth. The attack on Hegel's System. The distinction between objective and subjective reflection. Truth as appropriation, not proposition.
Christian love as duty: "You shall love your neighbour as yourself." Love as a work, not merely a feeling. The highest expression of Kierkegaard's religious thought, published under his own name.
"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Journals"The most common form of despair is not being who you are."
— The Sickness Unto Death"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
— Either/Or"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
— The Concept of Anxiety"The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays."
— Purity of Heart"What labels me, negates me."
— attributed"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."
— Søren Kierkegaard, Journals1813 – 1855 · Copenhagen · That Single Individual
"The crowd is untruth."