Kierkegaard: Subjectivity, the Leap of Faith, and the Self That Must Be Chosen

Søren Kierkegaard wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century and anticipated almost everything that would come to define twentieth-century thought: the primacy of individual experience over system, the irreducibility of subjective truth, the centrality of anxiety and despair to human consciousness, and the gap between institutional religion and genuine faith. Born in Copenhagen in 1813, he published most of his major works in a single decade of concentrated output before dying at forty-two. His influence on Sartre, Heidegger, Barth, and Tillich — on existentialism, phenomenology, and Protestant theology simultaneously — represents an unusual range for any thinker. Understanding why requires engaging with what Kierkegaard was actually doing: not building a system, but refusing one.

Subjectivity as Truth: The Core Claim

The sentence most associated with Kierkegaard — “subjectivity is truth” — is frequently misread as relativism. It is not. Kierkegaard is not claiming that each person’s beliefs are equally valid or that objective reality is a fiction. He is making a more specific and philosophically serious point: that for the questions that matter most — how to live, whether to believe, what to commit to — objective knowledge is structurally insufficient. You cannot observe your way to a decision about how to live. The act of commitment requires something that no amount of evidence can replace.

This is why Kierkegaard is so hostile to Hegel’s system. For Hegel, the individual is a moment in the unfolding of Absolute Spirit — finite consciousness becoming aware of itself through history. Kierkegaard finds this both philosophically mistaken and existentially obscene. The individual is not a moment in anything. The individual exists, concretely, now, and must choose. The Hegelian philosopher who claims to comprehend the whole of history from a vantage point outside it has, in Kierkegaard’s view, forgotten that he himself is a finite, existing person who cannot actually occupy that vantage point — and who will die.

The Three Stages: Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious

Kierkegaard’s “stages on life’s way” describe three qualitatively different modes of existing — not developmental stages through which every person passes, but distinct orientations that each represent a different relationship to one’s own life and its possibilities.

The aesthetic stage is characterised by the pursuit of pleasure, novelty, and immediate experience. The aesthete — most fully embodied in the seducer figure of Either/Or — lives in the moment, pursuing intensity and avoiding boredom. The problem is structural: immediacy exhausts itself. Boredom returns. The aesthete’s strategy of constant rotation and novelty-seeking cannot defeat the despair that underlies it.

The ethical stage involves commitment to universal moral principles and duty. Where the aesthete avoids the self, the ethical person takes on the self through commitment — marriage, vocation, civic responsibility. This appears to be an advance, and in some sense it is. But the ethical stage has its own limit: it cannot account for the absolute exception, the moment when the universal must be suspended for something higher. This is where the religious stage begins.

The religious stage is the most paradoxical and most difficult. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as his central example. From the ethical standpoint, Abraham is a potential murderer. There is no universal principle that justifies it. Abraham acts on the basis of a direct, absolute relationship with God that cannot be communicated, justified, or mediated. This is what Kierkegaard calls the “teleological suspension of the ethical” — and it is what distinguishes genuine faith from moral conformism.

The Leap of Faith: What It Actually Means

The “leap of faith” is Kierkegaard’s most misappropriated concept. It is not an endorsement of believing anything on insufficient evidence, nor a celebration of irrationalism. It is a precise philosophical claim about what faith requires: a commitment that cannot be grounded in objective evidence precisely because it is a relationship, not a conclusion.

Kierkegaard observes that the evidence for Christianity, evaluated as a historical and empirical question, will never be sufficient to compel rational assent. The resurrection either happened or it did not, but no historical investigation can make the probability high enough to constitute faith. If faith were a matter of probability assessment, it would not be faith — it would be a calculated bet. Genuine faith is a passionate commitment made in full awareness of its risk and in full acknowledgement of the uncertainty. The leap is not into irrationality; it is into the personal, away from the impersonal security of objective verification.

Legacy: Why Kierkegaard Still Matters

Kierkegaard’s influence radiates in three directions. In philosophy, he is the primary source of existentialism: Heidegger’s analysis of authenticity, Dasein’s ownmost possibilities, and being-toward-death; Sartre’s concept of bad faith, radical freedom, and the project of self-creation. In theology, he is the father of dialectical theology — Barth’s famous “No!” to liberal Protestantism, the recovery of paradox and the wholly-other God, the insistence on revelation over natural religion. In psychology, The Concept of Anxiety is regularly cited in clinical literature on anxiety disorders and existential psychology.

What unifies these influences is the consistent Kierkegaardian insistence that the individual cannot be dissolved into a system, a society, a crowd, or a historical process. The task of becoming a self — concretely, in this life, under these conditions — is both inescapable and genuinely difficult, and no philosophy that forgets this is worth taking seriously.