Søren Kierkegaard lived the majority of his life alone. He left his native Copenhagen only three times—each time to visit Berlin—and never married, though he was engaged for a short time. Despite his solitary existence, Kierkegaard’s writings are some of the most impassioned and controversial in all of philosophy. He is sometimes called a “poet-philosopher” in honor of both his passion and his highly literary experiments in style and form. Kierkegaard is known for his critiques of Hegel, for his fervent analysis of the Christian faith, and for being an early precursor to the existentialists.
Kierkegaard was born in 1813, the year Denmark went bankrupt. Although Kierkegaard’s father had personally managed to escape financial ruin, Denmark as a nation struggled for much of the early to mid-1800s. The people put increasing pressure on the monarchs to institute a democracy, and a free constitution was finally established in 1848. The changes leading up to the governmental restructuring resulted in an explosion of wealth and learning and afforded citizens like Kierkegaard the leisure and environment necessary to pursue a life of writing and thinking. However, democratization also helped inspire one of Kierkegaard’s most enduring philosophical themes: freedom could actually lead to fear. While the new religious and social freedoms available in Denmark brought many positive changes, they also had psychological repercussions that deeply concerned Kierkegaard. He felt that having the freedom to choose inevitably involved feeling anxiety over which path to choose, even as it simultaneously inspired joy. Kierkegaard also worried that too many people squandered that freedom by blindly following public opinion.
Kierkegaard was born into a wealthy and respected family, the youngest of seven siblings. His mother was an unassuming figure: quiet, plain, and not formally educated. Kierkegaard’s father, on the other hand, was melancholic, anxious, deeply pious, and fiercely intelligent. Kierkegaard’s father believed that a youthful denunciation of God had brought a curse upon his family and that all his children would die before the age of thirty-four (a fate that only Søren and his brother Peter escaped). Kierkegaard ended up inheriting a great deal of his own intellectual and psychological character from his father. In 1830, he enrolled at Copenhagen University and began to study theology, per his father’s wishes. His mother died while he was at university, and despite keeping a remarkably detailed set of journals, Kierkegaard never mentioned her death. He didn’t take his theological studies very seriously, though he was reading a great deal of literature and philosophy. Kierkegaard was highly social during this period, attending dinners, concerts, and the theater, and becoming well known for his wit and good humor. When his father died in 1838, however, Kierkegaard settled down and devoted himself to the study of theology.
Kierkegaard received his doctoral degree in theology in 1840. He had inherited a large sum of money from his father, and as a rich, accomplished, young man, Kierkegaard was considered one of Copenhagen’s most eligible bachelors. He became engaged to the beautiful Regine Olsen, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a politician, but later broke their engagement. Despite their deep love for one another, Kierkegaard apparently believed that his life as a thinker made him unsuitable for marriage, particularly to a young, inexperienced girl. Kierkegaard had strong feelings for Olsen throughout his life, despite her having married another man and leaving Copenhagen with him. His relationship with Olsen—like his relationship with his father—is a major biographical influence on his philosophical work.
After breaking his engagement with Olsen, Kierkegaard retired to a solitary life of writing, publishing a prodigious amount of work over the next several years. At first he felt that his books weren’t being noticed outside elite literary circles, which was rendering his work politically and socially ineffectual. To bring attention to his books, he tried to provoke the satirical paper The Corsair to attack him in its pages. Kierkegaard succeeded in 1945, though The Corsair focused their criticisms mainly on his personal rather than intellectual life. Kierkegaard was lampooned in The Corsair for years, which significantly damaged his social standing. It did, however, spur him into a highly productive phase of writing and publishing. Kierkegaard published his first major book, Either/Or, in 1843 and his last, The Changelessness of God, in 1855, the year of his death. Between these two books, Kierkegaard produced over 30 volumes of philosophy, theology, and criticism.
One of the driving forces behind Kierkegaard’s work was a desire to refute the tenets of Hegelian philosophy. Hegel was a German philosopher who wrote during the late 1700s and the early to mid-1800s and whose work had come to dominate European philosophical thought. Hegel’s major philosophical project was developing the notion of a “historical dialectic.” Generally speaking, the dialectic is a logical, argumentative method that philosophers like Plato and Socrates employed in their attempts to ascertain the truth. In the dialectic, one person proposes an idea or belief. His or her partner refutes that idea, pointing out the argument’s flaws. This allows a new, more convincing argument to be advanced. The process continues until all misconception has been cleared away and only the truth remains. Hegel believed that the evolution of human societies could be explained according to the dialectical model. According to him, societies’ ideas develop collectively. Society begins with one notion of the world and eventually comes to refute it, leading to a new, collectively accepted model. A culture’s ideas naturally and inevitably progress according to this dialectical pattern. The historical dialectic would eventually lead a culture to God, who was, according to Hegel, the foundation of the logical structure of the universe.
Kierkegaard, on the other hand, didn’t think that God could be understood or reached through logic. God was greater than, not equivalent to, logic. The only way to reach God, according to Kierkegaard, was through faith—the opposite of reason—for it requires one to embrace the absurd and the unexplainable. While Hegel spent his life trying to explain how to reach God, Kierkegaard spent his life obscuring the path to prove to people that God was beyond intelligence. Kierkegaard greatly admired Hegel but believed Hegel had committed a great wrong by claiming to have genuinely reached the truth.
In addition to his attacks on Hegelianism, Kierkegaard is often noted as being the “father of existentialism,” though his work long predates the term itself. Briefly, existentialism is the belief that the world has no intrinsic meaning or purpose and, consequently, that individuals alone bear the responsibility for their actions and decisions. Kierkegaard rejected Hegel’s historical dialectic, which Kierkegaard felt was overly systematic and deterministic. Kierkegaard—like the existentialists who followed him—stressed that each individual must negotiate his or her own relationship with God without any mediation from the church, the government, or other thinkers (including himself).
Kierkegaard was heavily influenced by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Socrates and by the rhetorical methods they adopted to convey their arguments. Socrates believed that the knowledge of most “experts” and “wise men” was based on poor reasoning. To expose these misconceptions, Socrates would pretend not to understand them, forcing these wise men to explain and examine their own beliefs. Often, when applying this tactic, Socrates would find that these people had simply adopted the dogma from earlier generations without properly questioning this received wisdom. In this way, Socrates highlighted the discrepancy between the appearance of possessing wisdom and actually possessing it. In his texts, Plato often employed dialogues, wherein various characters would debate all sides of an issue, often not coming to a coherent conclusion. The purpose of Plato’s dialogues was much the same as Socrates’ method of relentless questioning: to get readers or listeners to consider the issue for themselves.
Instead of claiming to know the answers, Plato and Socrates sought to find the proper questions. Kierkegaard employed similar tactics in his writing. He didn’t believe he had all the answers, but he wanted to engage and provoke his readers so that they, in turn, would seek answers for themselves. Kierkegaard employed satire, parody, and irony in his writing as well as techniques that disoriented and potentially confused readers. Kierkegaard wanted his readers to question his authority as much as anyone else’s.
Themes, Arguments, and Ideas
The Problems of Boredom, Anxiety, and Despair
Boredom, anxiety, and despair are the human psyche’s major problems, and Kierkegaard spends most of his writing diagnosing these three ills. People are bored when they are not being stimulated, either physically or mentally. Relief from boredom can only be fleeting. Passion, a good play, Bach, or a stimulating conversation might provide momentary relief from boredom, but the relief doesn’t last. Boredom is not merely a nuisance: a psychologically healthy human must find some way to avert boredom. Conflicts between one’s ethical duty and one’s religious duty cause anxiety. Social systems of ethics often lead one to make choices that are detrimental to one’s spiritual health, and vice versa. The tension between these conflicting duties causes anxiety, and like boredom, anxiety must be escaped for a person to be happy. Finally, despair is a result of the tension between the finite and the infinite. Humans are frightened of dying, but they are also frightened of existing forever. Kierkegaard believed that everyone would die but also that everyone had an immortal self, or soul, that would go on forever. Boredom and anxiety can be alleviated in various ways, but the only way to escape despair is to have total faith in God. Having total faith in God, however, was more than simply attending church regularly and behaving obediently. Faith required intense personal commitment and a dedication to unending self-analysis. Kierkegaard thought that having total faith in God, and thus escaping despair, was extremely difficult as well as extremely important.
The Aesthetic as the First Stage on Life’s Way
Kierkegaard proposed that the individual passed through three stages on the way to becoming a true self: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Each of these “stages on life’s way” represents competing views on life and as such potentially conflicts with one another. Kierkegaard takes the unusual step of having each stage of life described and represented by a different pseudonymous character. Thus, it becomes too difficult to ascertain which propositions Kierkegaard himself upholds. This fits with Kierkegaard’s characteristic tendency to avoid dictating answers. He preferred that readers reach their own conclusions.
The aesthetic is the realm of sensory experience and pleasures. The aesthetic life is defined by pleasures, and to live the aesthetic life to the fullest one must seek to maximize those pleasures. Increasing one’s aesthetic pleasures is one way to combat boredom, and Kierkegaard described many methods of doing so. He proposes that the anticipation of an event often exceeds the pleasure of the event itself, and so he suggests ways of drawing out anticipation. One suggestion is to leave all of your mail for three days before opening it. Unplanned events can, at times, lead to pleasures as great as anticipation, but the pleasure of planned events is almost entirely in the anticipation.
The importance of the aesthetic is acknowledged, but it is also presented as an immature stage. The aesthete is only concerned with his or her personal enjoyment, and because aesthetic pleasure is so fleeting, an aesthete has no solid framework from which to make coherent, consistent choices. Eventually, the pleasures of the aesthetic wear thin, and one must begin seeking the ethical pleasures instead. The ethical life actually offers certain pleasures the aesthetic life cannot. An aesthete can never do something solely for the good of someone else, but we all know that doing things for others without personal motives can actually be incredibly enjoyable.
The Ethical as the Second Stage on Life’s Way
Ethics are the social rules that govern how a person ought to act. Ethics are not always in opposition to aesthetics, but they must take precedence when the two conflict. The aesthetic life must be subordinated to the ethical life, as the ethical life is based on a consistent, coherent set of rules established for the good of society. A person can still experience pleasure while living the ethical life. The ethical life serves the purpose of allowing diverse people to coexist in harmony and causes individuals to act for the good of society. The ethical person considers the effect his or her actions will have on others and gives more weight to promoting social welfare than to achieving personal gain. The ethical life also affords pleasures that the aesthetic does not. Aesthetics steers one away from consistency, since repetition can lead to boredom. An ethical person doesn’t simply enjoy things because they’re novel but makes ethical choices because those choices evoke a higher set of principles. Kierkegaard uses marriage as an example of an ethical life choice. In marriage, the excitement of passion can quickly fade, leading to boredom and a diminishing of aesthetic pleasure. However, by consistently acting for the good of one’s spouse, one learns that there are enjoyments beyond excitement. Still, the ethical life does little to nurture one’s spiritual self. The ethical life diverts one from self-exploration since it requires an individual to follow a set of socially accepted norms and regulations. According to Kierkegaard, self-exploration is necessary for faith, the key requirement for a properly religious life.
The Religious as Third Stage on Life’s Way
Kierkegaard considers the religious life to be the highest plane of existence. He also believes that almost no one lives a truly religious life. He is concerned with how to be “a Christian in Christendom”—in other words, how to lead an authentically religious life while surrounded by people who are falsely religious. For Kierkegaard, the relationship with God is exclusively personal, and he believed the large-scale religion of the church (i.e., Christendom) distracts people from that personal relationship. Kierkegaard passionately criticized the Christian Church for what he saw as its interference in the personal spiritual quest each true Christian must undertake.
In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious life, one is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly free, and this causes boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that the only way to make life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith necessarily involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe in things that we can prove, but we can only have faith in things that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in gravity: we feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of gravity’s existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in gravity, since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity would fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and beyond reason. There’s no rational evidence for God, but this is exactly what allows people to have faith in him.
The Pleasures of Repetition and Recollection
Repetition and recollection are two contrasting ways of trying to maximize enjoyment. Repetition serves multiple purposes for Kierkegaard. First, it has an important aesthetic function. People want to repeat particularly enjoyable experiences, but the original pleasure is often lost in the repeating. This is due to the expectation that things will be just the same the second time as the first time. The pleasure of expectation clouds the fact that the original experience wasn’t undertaken with a specific idea of the joy it would cause. Repetition can produce powerful feelings but usually only when the experience occurs unplanned. In this case, the pleasure might even be magnified at the sudden resurgence of happy memories—in other words, the recollection. There is pleasure in planned repetition, but it is a comfortable pleasure, not an exciting one. While repetition offers the joy of anticipation—joy that seldom materializes in the actual event—recollection offers the joy of remembering a particularly happy event. Recollection can be cultivated along with the imagination to increase one’s day-to-day aesthetic pleasure. Often, recalling a pleasant occurrence is more enjoyable than repeating the same event: remembering the Christmases of your childhood is often more pleasant than Christmas is in adulthood. Indeed, much of the pleasure of Christmas, for an older person, can come from nostalgia. The pleasures of recollection, which are best enjoyed alone, are well suited to the aesthetic life. Unplanned repetition is a truly aesthetic pleasure as well, while planned repletion, such as that represented by marriage, affords more ethical pleasures than aesthetic ones.
Either/Or Summary
Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or soon after receiving his doctorate and breaking his engagement with Regine Olsen. Either/Or is his first major work and remains one of his most widely read. Kierkegaard wrote the book under a series of false names, or pseudonyms. The book has two parts: the first deals with the aesthetic, a word that Kierkegaard uses to denote personal, sensory experiences. The second part of Either/Or deals with ethics. In this part Kierkegaard discusses the merits of a social and morally proper life. Kierkegaard wrote the first section under the simple pseudonym “A,” although he wrote the last section of part I, “The Diary of the Seducer,” under the pseudonym “Johannes Climacus.” Kierkegaard wrote part II under the interchangeable pseudonyms “B” and “the Judge.” We know now that Kierkegaard himself wrote the entire book, but when Either/Or was first published few people knew the author’s actual identity. A claims that the aesthetic finds its highest expression in music, the theatre, and love. However, the source of love and the arts’ aesthetic power lies in their ability to inspire the imagination. A considers the imagination to be the most useful tool in obtaining aesthetic pleasure. B argues that living an ethical life is preferable to the aesthetic life.
Music and drama create different kinds of aesthetic experiences. The aesthetic pleasure offered by music is the most direct. The very best music affects the imagination immediately. The pleasures to be found in drama—which is too concrete and intellectual to directly fire the imagination—lie in the viewer’s opportunity to pretend to be someone else. The pairing of music and drama can be a particularly transcendent aesthetic experience. A praises Mozart’s Don Giovanni, an opera based on the story of the great lover Don Juan. The music in Don Giovanni can be enjoyed on its own, and it is equally enjoyable to pretend to be Don Juan. However, the opera teaches a valuable aesthetic lesson as well, because Don Juan is the ultimate selfish aesthete. Repetition dulls the pleasure of an act, so Don Juan never repeats the act of love more than once with the same woman. Although he never sleeps with the same woman twice, by so doing he continually repeats the act of sleeping with a new woman. He can never enjoy the woman he is with because he is in such a hurry to get to the next one. A is devoted to pleasure as well and sees repetition as an enemy of pleasure. However, A believes that obtaining true aesthetic pleasure requires a more measured approach than blindly following one’s passions, as Don Juan does.
The extreme difficulty of achieving true aesthetic pleasure leads A to claim that boredom is the most common, and unpleasant, human state. In fact, A goes so far as to claim that it is the root of all evil and makes a number of proposals for how it ought to be dealt with. One such plan is for Denmark to borrow a large sum of money and devote it explicitly to the entertainment of the masses. There are also more personal measures one can take to avoid boredom. A suggests that when receiving mail, one ought to leave it unopened for three days because the pleasure of imagining what is in the envelope far exceeds the pleasure to be gained from actually reading the letter.
Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the “The Seducer’s Diary,” which is the most famous section of Either/Or, further explores how to maximize aesthetic pleasure. “The Seducer’s Diary” is Johannes Climacus’s detailed, firsthand account of his wooing a young woman named Cordelia. For the majority of the diary, Johannes Climacus plots the seduction very slowly and deliberately. He takes great pleasure out of planning the seduction and doesn’t even speak to Cordelia until the last quarter of the diary. Once Johannes Climacus makes his move, things happen very quickly, and he’s soon engaged to Cordelia. He isn’t satisfied with the success of his seduction, however, until he has deliberately driven Cordelia to break the engagement and then, later, to come back to him. At this point he is finished with her and goes to find a new woman to seduce. Once Johannes Climacus has exhausted all the imaginative and exciting possibilities with Cordelia, continuing his relationship with her would lead him to boredom.
The second part of Either/Or, written under the pseudonyms B and the Judge—who eventually converge into a single character—takes the form of a letter written by the Judge to A. The letter is a response to part I of Either/Or; in it, the Judge attempts to persuade A that the ethical life is better than the purely aesthetic life. First, the Judge attempts to defend marriage. The Judge claims that the ethical life of being married is better than the aesthetic life of the seducer, and the Judge makes this claim on an aesthetic basis. The Judge says that there is actually more aesthetic pleasure to be found in a consistent marriage than in a bachelor life. The judge draws a distinction between the ethical, forward-looking repetition of the married life and the aesthetic, backward-looking recollection of the confirmed bachelor. He further points out that romantic literature always focuses on what happens before marriage but not what happens after, and he claims that the aesthetic fear of repetition is actually cowardly and selfish. The Judge argues that romantic love can exist in marriage and goes so far as to say that marriage is the highest form of romantic love. The ethical courage to submit to repetition is rewarded by the consistent, reliable aesthetic pleasure found in a loving marriage.
The Judge goes on to claim that A’s devotion to the aesthetic prevents A from making any significant choices. Although A has a far wider range of options than the Judge, the Judge argues that since the Judge’s choices are limited by ethics—by a consideration of other people—his choices are much weightier and mean much more to him than A’s aesthetic choices mean to A. The aesthetic has its place, the Judge agrees, but the place of the aesthetic is beneath the ethical. The Judge’s actual loving relationship with his wife is far better, the Judge argues, than the largely imaginary relationship between Johannes Climacus and Cordelia. The Judge experiences his pleasure with another person, while a seducer’s pleasure is completely in his or her imagination. Part II ends with a sermon that the Judge has received from a friend. The sermon is entitled “The Edification Which Lies in the Fact that in Relation to God we Are Always in the Wrong.” The sermon’s key point is that humans, whether their choices are aesthetically or ethically motivated, are never in the right. Only by accepting that God is always right, and by trying to do God’s will, can a person escape unhappiness.
Analysis
It is tempting, but incorrect, to read Either/Or as an explanation of how one can move from the aesthetic life into the ethical. True, the pleasures of the aesthetic are solipsistic, fleeting, and unreliable, while the pleasures of the ethical are empathetic, prolonged, and constant. However, both A and the Judge make good cases for their particular philosophies. A attempts to seduce the reader with his prose, just as Johannes Climacus attempts to seduce Cordelia, just as Don Juan seduces women, and just as music seduces the listener. A, through his attempted seduction of the reader, is trying to lead the reader toward an appreciation of the aesthetic life. Alternatively, the Judge attempts to convince the reader that the ethical life is better than the aesthetic life, and he uses reason, not seduction, to accomplish this. Each writer’s rhetorical strategy appropriately reflects his values. However, a closer examination reveals inconsistencies in the positions of both A and the Judge. A speaks eloquently about the value of focusing solely on personal pleasure, but in doing so he is actually instructing the reader in how the reader might experience more aesthetic pleasure. A’s apparent concern for the good of the reader is, though focused on the aesthetic, still an ethical concern, despite the fact that A makes it clear that the aesthete focuses on his or her own pleasure and not the pleasure of others. On the other hand, the Judge, in making the case for the ethical life, continually comes back to the point that the ethical life leads to even more aesthetic enjoyment than the purely aesthetic life.
In the end, A and the Judge are concerned with both aesthetic pleasures and ethical duties. Some think that Either/Or is about overcoming the aesthetic life for the ethical life. However, the Judge’s arguments don’t actually prove that the ethical life is wholly separate and better than the aesthetic life. There isn’t actually an either/or choice between the aesthetic and the ethical: both are necessary. The either/or choice hinted at by the title Either/Or is actually a choice between the aesthetic/ethical life and the religious life. Either you choose the aesthetic and the ethical life or you choose the religious life. Aesthetics and ethics can coexist, but both detract from the religious. This is why Either/Or ends with the sermon on how, in relation to God, people are always wrong. Both A and the Judge make cases for how people should act in accordance with aesthetic and ethical systems, but any system designed by a human is necessarily flawed. Kierkegaard does not explore the religious very deeply in Either/Or, saving that for his later works, but Either/Or demonstrates that neither the aesthetic life nor the ethical life is complete without religion. A’s groundless individuality and the Judge’s principled marriage both interfere with the intense, faith-based introspection that exemplifies the religious life.
The final sermon in Either/Or is partially an attack on Hegel, who believes that the divine is played out through the actions of society. Kierkegaard emphatically does not believe this to be the case. If the divine is played out through society, then the social, ethical life would be, as a manifestation of the divine, the best life. Kierkegaard argues that only God is in the right and to approach God requires introspective faith. There is no system, aesthetic or ethical, that can truly lead people in the right direction: people need religion, but they need it on a personal level, not a societal level. Kierkegaard feels that beliefs like Hegel’s, and institutions like the church, claim to provide answers to people’s troubles but in reality are simply providing excuses to avoid self-examination. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms in Either/Or can be viewed as a concrete metaphor for Kierkegaard’s internal confusion. In other words, although Kierkegaard wrote all of Either/Or, he made up authors for different parts to represent different aspects of his own personality. The conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical exists, to a certain extent, in every human. There are many systems in place to help mediate this conflict, but Kierkegaard demonstrates in Either/Or that the only escape from this conflict is to take a personal approach to religion.
Fear and Trembling Summary
Fear and Trembling centers on the biblical story of Abraham. Abraham, childless after 80 years, prays for a son. God grants his wish, and Abraham has Isaac. Thirty years later, God orders Abraham to kill his son. Abraham prepares to kill Isaac, but at the last second God spares Isaac and allows Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. Fear and Trembling includes four different retellings of the story, each with a slightly different viewpoint. In the first version, Abraham decides to kill Isaac in accordance with God’s will. Abraham convinces Isaac that he’s doing it by his own will, not by God’s. This is a lie, but Abraham says to himself that he would rather have Isaac lose faith in his father than lose faith in God. In the second version, Abraham sacrifices a ram instead of Isaac. Even though God spares Isaac, Abraham’s faith is shaken because God asked him to kill Isaac in the first place. In the third version, Abraham decides not to kill Isaac and then prays to God to forgive him for having thought of sacrificing his son in the first place. In the fourth version, Abraham can’t go through with killing Isaac. Isaac begins to question his own faith due to Abraham’s refusal to do what God commanded.
In the rest of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines his four retellings of the story of Abraham, focusing on the religious and the ethical. Kierkegaard claims that the killing of Isaac is ethically wrong but religiously right. Kierkegaard also uses his retelling of the Abraham story to distinguish between faith and resignation. Abraham could have been resigned to kill Isaac just because God told him to do so and because he knew that God was always right. However, Kierkegaard claims that Abraham did not act out of a resignation that God must always be obeyed but rather out of faith that God would not do something that was ethically wrong. Abraham knew that killing Isaac was ethically wrong, but he had faith that God would spare his son. Abraham decided to do something ethically wrong because having faith in God’s good will was religiously right. Kierkegaard claims that the tension between ethics and religion causes Abraham anxiety.
Kierkegaard argues that his retellings of the story of Abraham demonstrate the importance of a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Teleological means “in regard to the end.” If you are hungry and you eat something with the goal of no longer being hungry, then you made a teleological decision: you acted, by eating, so as to achieve the end of no longer being hungry. Abraham performs a teleological suspension of the ethical when he decides to kill Isaac. Abraham knows that killing Isaac is unethical. However, Abraham decides to suspend the ethical—in other words, to put ethical concerns on the back burner—because he has faith in the righteousness of the end (or telos) that God will bring about. Abraham’s faith that God will not allow an unethical telos allows him to make what seems to be an unethical decision. Abraham puts religious concerns over ethical concerns, thus proving his faith in God.
Analysis
Fear and Trembling details the relationship between the ethical and the religious in much the same way that Either/Or details the relationship between the aesthetic and ethical. In Either/Or, the aesthetic and the ethical are not entirely opposed. In Fear and Trembling, the ethical and the religious are not directly opposed either. However, the tension between ethics and religion produces anxiety. Abraham feels anxiety because it is his ethical duty to spare Isaac and his religious duty to sacrifice Isaac. Ethics are for the good of the many, and they transcend an individual’s personal aesthetic concerns, but Abraham recognizes that his personal relationship to God transcends his social commitment to ethics. If Abraham had desired to kill Isaac, this would have been both immoral and irreligious. However, Abraham doesn’t decide to kill Isaac for personal aesthetic reasons or for social ethical reasons. Abraham decides to kill Isaac because of Abraham’s personal faith that God will not actually allow Isaac to die.
Kierkegaard believes ethics are important to society but that only an individual can approach God, and an individual can only approach God through faith. Kierkegaard argues that Abraham’s faith in God was a faith that God wouldn’t really make Abraham kill Isaac. If Abraham had not had enough faith, he would have refused to kill his son. Abraham’s faith allowed a teleological suspension of the ethical. Kierkegaard uses this story to illustrate strong faith. Abraham’s faith was tested by God, and Abraham passed the test. In this way Kierkegaard attempts to draw a distinction between the blind obedience required by the church and the true faith of the individual. Kierkegaard would argue that if Abraham had only been willing to kill Isaac because God ordered him to do so, this would have demonstrated obedience, not faith. Instead, the Abraham of Kierkegaard’s retelling is willing to kill Isaac because of his faith that God won’t actually make him kill Isaac. This sounds like a paradox, or an inherently contradictory situation. However, the seeming paradox highlights the distinction between faith and belief. Abraham has faith that God won’t make him kill Isaac, but that doesn’t mean he believes it. To believe something is to be assured of it; to have faith requires the possibility that you will be proven wrong. If Abraham genuinely believed that God wouldn’t make him kill Isaac, the sacrifice would be no kind of test. However, Abraham cannot be fully assured that his son will be spared. He must have faith that Isaac will not die, even though he believes that he must kill him.
Kierkegaard illustrates one of the essential paradoxes, or seeming impossibilities, of ethics. An ethical system consists of rules that are established to promote the welfare of large groups of people. However, sometimes the rules actually harm people, and following a rule may help one person but harm ten. Ethical systems are created to achieve certain ends, but humans lack the ability to see into the future. Therefore, no one can be completely certain of how to reach these desired ends. Faith in God answers this uncertainty because it removes the burden of prediction. Faith involves the teleological suspension of the ethical, in which faith allows one to believe that an unethical action will actually result in a better end. Humans alone have no access to this kind of information, only God does. Therefore, humans must put their trust in God whenever doing so conflicts with society’s ethical systems. The decision to do this produces anxiety because a person can never know if he or she has passed the test until the test is complete. Kierkegaard thinks anxiety is a negative feeling, yet it can be taken as a positive sign that one is pursuing the correct relationship with God.
The Sickness Unto Death Summary
Kierkegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death under the pseudonym “Anti-Climacus,” the same pseudonym under which he wrote his two most important religious works, The Sickness Unto Death and Practices in Christianity. The “sickness” in the title is despair: despair is the sickness that everyone has until they die. Anti-Climacus defines despair primarily as a sickness of the self. He also says that everyone, whether they know it or not, is in despair. The most basic form of despair stems from not knowing you are in despair. A slightly more advanced form comes from a desire not to exist, and the most complex form of despair manifests in an attempt to escape the despair of not wanting to exist. All of these varieties of despair are caused by a tension between the infinite and the finite: Anti-Climacus claims that, although you will die and are thus finite, you also have an eternal self, which is infinite. After defining despair, Anti-Climacus questions whether it is a good or a bad thing. He comes to the conclusion that it is both. Despair is a type of suffering, so it must be bad. However, despair is a direct result of self-awareness, and increased self-awareness actually makes the self stronger. The stronger one’s self, the closer one is to God. Anti-Climacus claims that only a “true Christian” can manage to live without despair. A true Christian is someone who places total faith in his or her relationship with God.
Anti-Climacus says that despair is sin, and the only way to escape sin is to put complete faith in God. However, putting faith in God involves an increase of self-awareness and thus an increase in despair. We are thus faced with the prospect that the closer to God one grows, the greater one’s despair and the greater one’s sin. Only by growing infinitely close to God can despair finally be defeated. The concrete sins, such as murder and stealing, arise from the sin of despair. However, to despair is the worst sin of all. This sounds like a tautology—a circular line of reasoning—but it is not. Anti-Climacus does not think of sin as something you do but rather as something you are. All the bad things a sinner does (stealing, killing, cheating) are not sins themselves: they are the results of being in sin. To despair over being in sin—in other words, to despair over being in despair—merely intensifies one’s sin. The worst sin of all is to refuse forgiveness for one’s sin: the only way to escape sin is to approach God with faith that forgiveness will be offered. Of course, approaching God in the first place intensifies sin. This is part of the paradox of faith.
Analysis
Much of The Sickness Unto Death hangs on Kierkegaard’s definition of “a self.” Kierkegaard doesn’t use the term the way you or I might in an everyday conversation. Kierkegaard’s self is not just synonymous with person. A self is, for Kierkegaard, a set of relations. On the simplest level, a self is a set of relations between a person and the world around him or her. A body and a brain constitute a person, but more is required for a self. The self is defined by external and internal relations. While the idea of relating to oneself may sound contradictory, it isn’t really. “A self relating to oneself” is just another way of describing self-awareness. Think of a person trying to decide whether to go running or watch TV. This is an internal conflict, and a conflict is, in essence, a relation. Different aspects of your personality are conflicting, but the conflict itself is part of what makes up the self. The will is synonymous with the self. The will binds together all of one’s different aspects into a coherent whole. However, for Kierkegaard, the inability to make a choice is as much a part of one’s self as the ability to make a choice. The self is the will—or, possibly, the lack of will. The highest and most important level of relation is not between the self and others, or the self and itself, but between the self and God.
Everyone has a self, whether they realize it or not, and having a self causes despair. Kierkegaard’s notion of despair is not synonymous with unhappiness. One can be in despair and not even know it. Despair doesn’t affect a person, it affects a self. Kierkegaard’s self is similar to the common concept of the soul. Depression and unhappiness affect a person, but despair affects the self because despair is a spiritual sickness. Nonspiritual people—that is, people who don’t know they have a self—suffer this sickness even though they aren’t aware of it, because being unaware of one’s self is the most basic form of despair. People who despair at not having a self are more aware of their spiritual aspect—as they at least recognize the possibility of having a self—but because they incorrectly believe they don’t possess a self, they too suffer despair. Despairing at not having a self is like worrying that one doesn’t have a coherent identity. The third kind of despair, despair at being a self, exists in someone who realizes that his or her identity is no greater than his or her relations, specifically his or her relationship to God. The closer one comes to realizing that one’s self is actually just one’s relation to God, the closer one comes to escaping despair.