Søren Aabye (1813–55), Danish writer whose ‘literature,’ as he called it, includes philosophy, psychology, theology and devotional literature, fiction, and literary criticism. Born to a well-to-do middle class family, he consumed his inheritance while writing a large corpus of books in a remarkably short time. His life was marked by an intense relationship with a devout but melancholy father, from whom he inherited his own bent to melancholy, with which he constantly struggled. A decisive event was his broken engagement from Regine Olsen, which precipitated the beginning of his authorship; his first books are partly an attempt to explain, in a covert and symbolic way, the reasons why he felt he could not marry. Later Kierkegaard was involved in a controversy in which he was mercilessly attacked by a popular satirical periodical; this experience deepened his understanding of the significance of suffering and the necessity for an authentic individual to stand alone if necessary against ‘the crowd.’ This caused him to abandon his plans to take a pastorate, a post for which his theological education had prepared him. At the end of his life, he waged a lonely, public campaign in the popular press and in a magazine he founded himself, against the Danish state church. He collapsed on the street with the final issue of this magazine, The Instant, ready for the printer, and was carried to a hospital. He died a few weeks later, affirming a strong Christian faith, but refusing to take communion from the hands of a priest of the official church. Though some writers have questioned whether Kierkegaard’s writings admit of a unified interpretation, he himself saw his literature as serving Christianity; he saw himself as a ‘missionary’ whose task was to ‘reintroduce Christianity into Christendom.’ However, much of this literature does not address Christianity directly, but rather concerns itself with an analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard saw this as necessary, because Christianity is first and foremost a way of existing. He saw much of the confusion about Christian faith as rooted in confusion about the nature of existence; hence to clear up the former, the latter must be carefully analyzed. The great misfortune of ‘Christendom’ and ‘the present age’ is that people ‘have forgotten what it means to exist,’ and Kierkegaard sees himself as a modern Socrates sent to ‘remind’ others of what they know but have forgotten. It is not surprising that the analyses of human existence he provides have been of great interest to non-Christian writers as well. Kierkegaard frequently uses the verb ‘to exist’ (at existere) in a special sense, to refer to human existence. In this sense God is said not to exist, even though God has eternal reality. Kierkegaard describes human existence as an unfinished process, in which ‘the individual’ (a key concept in his thought) must take responsibility for achieving an identity as a self through free choices. Such a choice is described as a leap, to highlight Kierkegaard’s view that intellectual reflection alone can never motivate action. A decision to end the process of reflection is necessary and such a decision must be generated by passion. The passions that shape a person’s self are referred to by Kierkegaard as the individual’s ‘inwardness’ or ‘subjectivity.’ The most significant passions, such as love and faith, do not merely happen; they must be cultivated and formed.
The process by which the individual becomes a self is described by Kierkegaard as ideally moving through three stages, termed the ‘stages on life’s way.’ Since human development occurs by freedom and not automatically, however, the individual can become fixated in any of these stages. Thus the stages also confront each other as rival views of life, or ‘spheres of existence.’ The three stages or spheres are the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. A distinctive feature of Kierkegaard’s literature is that these three lifeviews are represented by pseudonymous ‘characters’ who actually ‘author’ some of the books; this leads to interpretive difficulties, since it is not always clear what to attribute to Kierkegaard himself and what to the pseudonymous character. Fortunately, he also wrote many devotional and religious works under his own name, where this problem does not arise.
The aesthetic life is described by Kierkegaard as lived for and in ‘the moment.’ It is a life governed by ‘immediacy,’ or the satisfaction of one’s immediate desires, though it is capable of a kind of development in which one learns to enjoy life reflectively, as in the arts. What the aesthetic person lacks is commitment, which is the key to the ethical life, a life that attempts to achieve a unified self through commitment to ideals with enduring validity, rather than simply momentary appeal. The religious life emerges from the ethical life when the individual realizes both the transcendent character of the true ideals and also how far short of realizing those ideals the person is.
In Concluding Unscientific Postscript two forms of the religious life are distinguished: a ‘natural’ religiosity (religiousness ‘A’) in which the person attempts to relate to the divine and resolve the problem of guilt, relying solely on one’s natural ‘immanent’ idea of the divine; and Christianity (religiousness ‘B’), in which God becomes incarnate as a human being in order to establish a relation with humans. Christianity can be accepted only through the ‘leap of faith.’ It is a religion not of ‘immanence’ but of ‘transcendence,’ since it is based on a revelation. This revelation cannot be rationally demonstrated, since the incarnation is a paradox that transcends human reason. Reason can, however, when the passion of faith is present, come to understand the appropriateness of recognizing its own limits and accepting the paradoxical incarnation of God in the form of Jesus Christ. The true Christian is not merely an admirer of Jesus, but one who believes by becoming a follower. The irreducibility of the religious life to the ethical life is illustrated for Kierkegaard in the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to obey the command of God. In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard (through his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio) analyzes this act of Abraham’s as involving a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical.’ Abraham’s act cannot be understood merely in ethical terms as a conflict of duties in which one rationally comprehensible duty is superseded by a higher one. Rather, Abraham seems to be willing to ‘suspend’ the ethical as a whole in favor of a higher religious duty. Thus, if one admires Abraham as ‘the father of faith,’ one admires a quality that cannot be reduced to simply moral virtue. Some have read this as a claim that religious faith may require immoral behavior; others argue that what is relativized by the teleological suspension of the ethical is not an eternally valid set of moral requirements, but rather ethical obligations as these are embedded in human social institutions. Thus, in arguing that ‘the ethical’ is not the highest element in existence, Kierkegaard leaves open the possibility that our social institutions, and the ethical ideals that they embody, do not deserve our absolute and unqualified allegiance, an idea with important political implications. In accord with his claim that existence cannot be reduced to intellectual thought, Kierkegaard devotes much attention to emotions and passions. Anxiety is particularly important, since it reflects human freedom. Anxiety involves a ‘sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’; it is the psychological state that precedes the basic human fall into sin, but it does not explain this ‘leap,’ since no final explanation of a free choice can be given. Such negative emotions as despair and guilt are also important for Kierkegaard; they reveal the emptiness of the aesthetic and the ultimately unsatisfactory character of the ethical, driving individuals on toward the religious life. Irony and humor are also seen as important ‘boundary zones’ for the stages of existence. The person who has discovered his or her own ‘eternal validity’ can look ironically at the relative values that capture most people, who live their lives aesthetically. Similarly, the ‘existential humorist’ who has seen the incongruities that necessarily pervade our ethical human projects is on the border of the religious life. Kierkegaard also analyzes the passions of faith and love. Faith is ultimately understood as a ‘willing to be oneself’ that is made possible by a transparent, trusting relationship to the ‘power that created the self.’ Kierkegaard distinguishes various forms of love, stressing that Christian love must be understood as neighbor love, a love that is combined and is not rooted in any natural relationship to the self, such as friendship or kinship, but ultimately is grounded in the fact that all humans share a relationship to their creator.
Kierkegaard is well known for his critique of Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel’s claim to have written ‘the system’ is ridiculed for its pretensions of finality. From the Dane’s perspective, though reality may be a system for God, it cannot be so for any existing thinker, since both reality and the thinker are incomplete and system implies completeness. Hegelians are also criticized for pretending to have found a presuppositionless or absolute starting point; for Kierkegaard, philosophy begins not with doubt but with wonder. Reflection is potentially infinite; the doubt that leads to skepticism cannot be ended by thought alone but only by a resolution of the will. Kierkegaard also defends traditional Aristotelian logic and the principle of non-contradiction against the Hegelian introduction of ‘movement’ into logic. Kierkegaard is particularly disturbed by the Hegelian tendency to see God as immanent in society; he thought it important to understand God as ‘wholly other,’ the ‘absolutely different’ who can never be