In the Old Testament, God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, his only son. Abraham takes the boy to Mount Moriah, builds a stone altar, and prepares to commit the act of human sacrifice. When the knife if unsheathed, God commands Abraham to stop and kill a sheep in his place. In this way, Abraham’s faith in God was being put to the test. His faith was absolute and his immediate reward for his obedience was that he got to keep his son Isaac. What their relationship was like after this troubling incident, the Holy Bible does not say. But Soren Kierkegaard, in his philosophical treatise Fear and Trembling, uses this story as a means to explain how and individual human relates to God and that theme is carried over into another treatise, The Sickness Unto Death.
The first thing to take into account when reading Fear and Trembling is that it is a method of analysis and that method utilizes a hierarchy of values. Kierkegaard values the individual over the collective society, he values the inner life of the mind over the social life of the masses, he values passion over rationality, and he values religion over secularism. Rooted in this hierarchy is the method of dialectics, a means of analysis that utilizes two opposing points of view to explain each other; these dialectics would later become known as “structuralism” in postmodern philosophy. It is important to remember that these dialectical pairings are vertical and hierarchical values, entailing the concepts of “superiority” and “inferiority”. Therefore, when Kierkegaard says that the so-called “pagan” philosophers of ancient Greece had some good ideas, this entails the concept that Christian ideas are, by definition, superior. (He fails to realize that the New Testament’s mythology and theology are largely a reinterpretation of the life of Socrates, as so many other Christians have. Christ was not original in any way whatsoever.)
The next important step in understanding the dialectics of Fear and Trembling is mastering the definitions that Kierkegaard provides. He defines his terminologies technically so it helps to follow his explanations and disregard the common definitions of the words he uses. For example, his explanation of “aesthetics” has nothing to do with art or beauty but rather involves the surface appearances of social behavior; his aesthetics means hiding or obscuring truth for the sake of social harmony. This contrasts dialectically with “ethics” which has less to do with morality and has everything to do with revealing truth rather than hiding it. Kierkegaard’s ethics are inherently about honesty. Therefore, a married couple might act according to aesthetics by pretending to be happy in public but they behave ethically when they tell the public that they fight all the time at home and privately hate each other.
Now remember that Kierkegaard contrasts society with the individual. The next step in this dialectic is to contrast the “tragic hero” with the “knight of faith”. Both are individuals who have come to an awakening. The tragic hero transgresses some societal rule of the aesthetic and this act of transgression exposes the inherent, sometimes hidden, values of society and thereby reinforces them. The tragic hero breaks a law but their lawbreaking benefits society in the end. At one stage, Abraham is a tragic hero because he broke the law by trying to murder his son; this benefited the Hebrews because it proved that God would reward those who acted with absolute obedience to his commandments. Thus the concept of “paradox” is introduced into the philosophy.
But Kierkegaard does not have a high regard for the tragic hero because such a person remains an inclusive part of society. Rather he holds the knight of faith in higher esteem. The knight of faith is a paradox because he is both a member of society and an individual who transcends society is his own isolation. His individuality comes from his turning inwards, away from society and into the interior of his mind and spirit. This is where the knight of faith as an absolute being confronts the absolute being of God. The knight of faith puts his faith in God, promising to carry out his commands without question and, most importantly, without regard to what society thinks of him. This faith is absolute and it is absurd, as the author would say. But in this case “absurd” does not mean nonsensical; it means “impossible for humans to comprehend”. Abraham can not comprehend why God wants him to kill Isaac but he obeys the commandment anyways.
Kierkegaard is calling for the true knight of faith to abandon the world and all its people and, as an individual, concentrate single-mindedly on God alone. He hated society and he especially hated organized religion. He saw the masses of humanity as lacking in passion and self-awareness. They just blindly shuffle through life like a bunch of farm animals. In this, his philosophy runs parallel to that of Nietzsche who addressed the same problem but arrived at atheism as a solution. The two existentialists digress in their approach to the world as well; Nietzsche believes in celebrating life even though the world is a rotten place and Kierkegaard believes in retreating into his own solemn and serious inner sanctum where the pettiness of other people could not intrude on his misery. He believes in a type of ascetic autism, an individual hermetically sealed in their own private world with little or no contact with the outside. Kierkegaard’s mysticism might have been a bitter reaction to his own social awkwardness, his own social ineptness, and his own sexual inhibitions (he was too much of a coward to marry the woman he loved). In his version of Plato’s Allegory Of the Cave, the knight of faith leaves the cave, sees the truth, then decides to never return to tell the others about what he found. He just keeps walking into the light until he dies. Interestingly, in his explication of the knight of faith, the man isolated from society and in the presence of God, there is little discussion about God himself; the description is almost entirely about the isolated and individuated man. There is no theology in this discourse. This is how Kierkegaard came to be labeled as the father of existentialism.
This analysis of Abraham is a bit dated now. Imagine if a man in your neighborhood tried to stab his son then changed his mind and hacked the family dog to death instead. The the police came and he told them the voice of God told him to do that. He would not be hailed as a hero; he would be diagnosed as a psychotic and thrown in the psychiatric hospital. In the time the Old Testament was written, there was no knowledge of psychiatry, forensics, or neurophysiology. The unexplainable was explained with the best tools they had at the time: supernaturalism and religion. Events like this were given symbolic meaning and absurdities were coopted to teach moral lessons. Kierkegaard may have literally believed in the truth of Abraham’s story but it does appear that he is using it as a vehicle for his own preoccupations, primarily the supremacy of the individual and the inferiority of the common people.
Kierkegaard, at a distance, advocates for a radical form of selfishness, one that is justified by spirituality and mysticism. His dialectic, if taken to far, could result in an indifference to atrocities like war, mass murder, or genocide. It is highly doubtful Kierkegaard himself would defend such things but his knight of faith, when asked about those horrors, might be inclined to say, “I’m too busy talking to God to worry about what happens to all those people that I despise.” His form of individual religion could result in a systematic ignorance of the world, a turning away from life, ultimately a dangerous form of nihilism and a negation of humanity. The knight of faith is concerned with neither aesthetics nor ethics; he is only concerned with himself.
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard analyzes the individual even further. Again, a hierarchy comes into play. At the bottom there is an ordinary person, living in the world and lacking in self-consciousness. This accounts for the vast majority of people. They work, they eat, they sleep, they reproduce and they never think about themselves or their place in society. They go about their business, essentially being nothing more than cogs in the machinery of society. They are mostly happy but simple and their lack of self-awareness prevents them being conscious of “despair”. A small number of people think about their lives and become aware of this despair. They become aware of it but they do not pursue it. They may read some books, do some serious thinking, and become upstanding members of a church community but go no further towards becoming a knight of faith. These two categories of people are not worthy of being in the presence of God because they have made no effort to achieve that honor. That reward is reserved for the strong, the courageous, those who strive and make the most effort. God is only revealed in a type of mystical meritocracy. In our times, Kierkegaard would look at churches as being equivalent to fast food restaurants, serving a cheap and simplified version of McReligion the way those restaurants serve bland hamburgers with no nutritional value, at low prices to people who have no concept of quality. Like his contemporary, the anarchist and atheist Mikhail Bakunin, who Kierkegaard corresponded with, he saw the church as being a method of political control, using religion as a tool to keep the masses subservient.
The real pursuer of truth is aware of their own “despair”. Again, Kierkegaard defines this term technically, making it mean the divisions of the individual self. The true self exists in absolute purity but living in the world divides the self against the self. It becomes divided between its public functions and persona, its private self, and its internal self. When an individual turns inwards toward God, they become aware of this despair and the more they become aware of it, the closer they get to purity, the absolute self in the presence of the absolute God. Thus, despair is actually beneficial because it motivates the individual to pursue a cure for despair, the cure being absolute faith, achievable only at the time of death. The most important form of despair is sin, which is defined as rebellion or disobedience to the commands of God.
This is all great for religious people but is there anything in this for those of us who are non-believers? Looking at Kierkegaard in the context of intellectual history, it becomes obvious that he latched on to ideas that were taken up later by other. The idea of differing layers of consciousness is significant, even if rudimentary. His explanation of the self divided against the self was later taken up in the phenomenologies of Heidegger, Husserl, and Sartre and probably inspired the concept of the decentered individual that became so prominent in modernism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. His observation that the masses of people are like a herd of cattle had some grim outcomes in the politics and economics of the 20th century. That latter assertion of his is one thing that is still relevant now. Kierkegaard influenced a lot of thinkers he probably would not have liked. His philosophy may seem irrelevant today but these ideas were seeds that germinated into greater ideas in later times.
Soren Kierkegaard was probably not a pleasant man to be around and neither Fear and Trembling nor The Sickness Unto Death have many ideas that are directly applicable to today’s world. In actuality, if God does not exist then these books are rendered even more useless and Kierkegaard’s philosophy is entirely lacking in an epistemology to support it. Taken on their own, these books do not mean much. But taken out of themselves and looked at in a broader context, they add some key pieces to the ever expanding puzzle of philosophy. The picture this puzzle creates can be comprehended without all its pieces but for the sake of completion, it is nice to have as many of the pieces as you can get.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/The Sickness Unto Death. Doubleday Anchor Books, Garden City, New York: 1954.
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