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Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death
Walter Lowrie's classic, bestselling translation of Søren Kierkegaard's most important and popular books remains unmatched for its readability and literary quality. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death established Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism and have come to define his contribution to philosophy. Lowrie's translation, first published in 1941 and later revised, was the first in English, and it has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Kierkegaard's thought. Kierkegaard counted Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death among "the most perfect books I have written," and in them he introduces two terms--"the absurd" and "despair"--that have become key terms in modern thought. Fear and Trembling takes up the story of Abraham and Isaac to explore a faith that transcends the ethical, persists in the face of the absurd, and meets its reward in the return of all that the faithful one is willing to sacrifice, while The Sickness Unto Death examines the spiritual anxiety of despair.
Walter Lowrie's magnificent translation of these seminal works continues to provide an ideal introduction to Kierkegaard. And, as Gordon Marino argues in a new introduction, these books are as relevant as ever in today's age of anxiety.
Walter Lowrie's magnificent translation of these seminal works continues to provide an ideal introduction to Kierkegaard. And, as Gordon Marino argues in a new introduction, these books are as relevant as ever in today's age of anxiety.
504 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1849
249 people are currently reading
2360 people want to read
About the author
Søren Kierkegaard
1,112 books6,293 followersSøren Aabye Kierkegaard was a prolific 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian. Kierkegaard strongly criticised both the Hegelianism of his time and what he saw as the empty formalities of the Church of Denmark. Much of his work deals with religious themes such as faith in God, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. His early work was written under various pseudonyms who present their own distinctive viewpoints in a complex dialogue.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 92 reviews
October 13, 2007
When I read this book I think "I don't understand how I understand this." When I read this book in public I walk through the streets or I stand on the sidelines at my brother's soccer games and I don't notice that I am still there, until someone taunts me and says "must be a good book there lady" and I say "I HATE SPORTS."
One day I taught middle school and then a second day in a row I taught middle school. Nobody listened to me, and I was very depressed. I wanted to die, again, but not really, but I felt very sick. So I saw "the sickness unto death." And I thought I am dead and I want to be sick, and I will read this book. And then I ignored everything else, and I felt better, but I'm not finished yet.
One day I taught middle school and then a second day in a row I taught middle school. Nobody listened to me, and I was very depressed. I wanted to die, again, but not really, but I felt very sick. So I saw "the sickness unto death." And I thought I am dead and I want to be sick, and I will read this book. And then I ignored everything else, and I felt better, but I'm not finished yet.
January 9, 2017
Fear and Trembling is one of the most insightful, thought-provoking treatises on Abraham I have ever read. He opens with a prelude, an exploration of a theme in contrasting vignettes. He ends the introduction with this observation:
“If Abraham when he stood upon Mount Moriah had doubted, if he had gazed about him irresolutely, if before he drew the knife he had by chance discovered the ram, if God had permitted him to offer it instead of Isaac-then he would have betaken himself home, everything would have been the same, he has Sarah, he retained Isaac, and yet how changed! For his retreat would have been a flight, his salvation an accident, his reward dishonor, his future perhaps perdition. Then he would have borne witness neither to his faith nor to God's grace, but would have testified only how dreadful it is to march out to Mount Moriah.”
But a “Panegyric upon Abraham” is insufficient. Kierkegaard approaches everything dialectically. It is not enough to stand in awe of Abraham's trial and accept him as an incredible example of faith. To fully display the paradox of faith, Kierkegaard must approach the problems inherent in the story.
1) Is there such a thing as a teleological suspension of the ethical?
“The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone.....As soon as the individual would assert himself in his particularity over against the universal he sins, and only by recognizing this can he again reconcile himself with the universal.”
2) Is there such a thing as an absolute duty toward God?
“Either there is an absolute duty toward God, and if so it is the paradox here described, that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal and as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute/or else faith never existed, because it has always existed...”
3) Was Abraham ethically defensible in keeping silent about his purpose before Sarah, before Eleazar, before Isaac?
“If there is not a concealment which has its ground in the fact that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal, then Abraham's conduct was indefensible, for he paid no heed to the intermediate ethical determinants.”
In all of this, what exactly does it take to be a “knight of faith”? Does common man even begin to approach it?
The knight of faith is a rarity. “Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.” And yet, “Most men live in such a way under an ethical obligation that they can let the sorrow be sufficient for the day, but they never reach this passionate concentration, this energetic consciousness.” A man can live ethically, but not be a “knight of faith”.
Faith comes up in the second part of his other work The Sickness Unto Death, but in a different context. He presents despair as the sickness unto death and the forms (psychological manifestations) and universality of the sickness. In this sense, despair is sin, and he makes this, often over-looked observation, “...the opposite of sin is not virtue, not by any manner of means. This is in part a pagan view which is content with a merely human measure and properly does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith, as is affirmed in Rom. 14;23, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” And for the whole of Christianity it is one of the most decisive definitions that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” This is something I may often say I believe, but actually live as though “good” were the opposite of sin.
The Sickness Unto Death begins with a definition of self as a synthesis between body and spirit. This self must “either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another.” He posits that if human self had constituted itself, there would only be one form of despair, not willing to be one's self. But since there is another form of despair, that of willing to be one's self, the self must have been constituted by another.
He follows by demonstrating that the sickness is universal. “Just as the physician might say that there lives perhaps not one single man who is in perfect health, so one might say perhaps that there lives not one single man who after all is not to some extent in despair.”
There are many forms of despair. It may be conscious or unconscious. If conscious, a man may despair over the eternal (an existential crisis, if you will). If unconscious, it may manifest itself as a despair over earthly things. Kierkegaard covers a wide range of instances and it is guaranteed to prick the reader's conscious on some point or other (or at least it did mine).
For Kierkegaard, despair is sin and once one becomes aware of it there is a natural progression, or “continuation” of it:
1) One despairs over one's sin,
2) One despairs of receiving forgiveness of sins, and if one does not humble oneself and receive the forgiveness so despaired of then the continued state of offense will lead to
3) The abandonment of Christianity, declaring it a falsehood (because it didn't “work”).
Honestly, there is so much to unpack in these short works. Brevity only encompasses length, not thought. Highly recommended.
“If Abraham when he stood upon Mount Moriah had doubted, if he had gazed about him irresolutely, if before he drew the knife he had by chance discovered the ram, if God had permitted him to offer it instead of Isaac-then he would have betaken himself home, everything would have been the same, he has Sarah, he retained Isaac, and yet how changed! For his retreat would have been a flight, his salvation an accident, his reward dishonor, his future perhaps perdition. Then he would have borne witness neither to his faith nor to God's grace, but would have testified only how dreadful it is to march out to Mount Moriah.”
But a “Panegyric upon Abraham” is insufficient. Kierkegaard approaches everything dialectically. It is not enough to stand in awe of Abraham's trial and accept him as an incredible example of faith. To fully display the paradox of faith, Kierkegaard must approach the problems inherent in the story.
1) Is there such a thing as a teleological suspension of the ethical?
“The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone.....As soon as the individual would assert himself in his particularity over against the universal he sins, and only by recognizing this can he again reconcile himself with the universal.”
2) Is there such a thing as an absolute duty toward God?
“Either there is an absolute duty toward God, and if so it is the paradox here described, that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal and as the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute/or else faith never existed, because it has always existed...”
3) Was Abraham ethically defensible in keeping silent about his purpose before Sarah, before Eleazar, before Isaac?
“If there is not a concealment which has its ground in the fact that the individual as the individual is higher than the universal, then Abraham's conduct was indefensible, for he paid no heed to the intermediate ethical determinants.”
In all of this, what exactly does it take to be a “knight of faith”? Does common man even begin to approach it?
The knight of faith is a rarity. “Faith is a miracle, and yet no man is excluded from it; for that in which all human life is unified is passion, and faith is a passion.” And yet, “Most men live in such a way under an ethical obligation that they can let the sorrow be sufficient for the day, but they never reach this passionate concentration, this energetic consciousness.” A man can live ethically, but not be a “knight of faith”.
Faith comes up in the second part of his other work The Sickness Unto Death, but in a different context. He presents despair as the sickness unto death and the forms (psychological manifestations) and universality of the sickness. In this sense, despair is sin, and he makes this, often over-looked observation, “...the opposite of sin is not virtue, not by any manner of means. This is in part a pagan view which is content with a merely human measure and properly does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith, as is affirmed in Rom. 14;23, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” And for the whole of Christianity it is one of the most decisive definitions that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” This is something I may often say I believe, but actually live as though “good” were the opposite of sin.
The Sickness Unto Death begins with a definition of self as a synthesis between body and spirit. This self must “either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another.” He posits that if human self had constituted itself, there would only be one form of despair, not willing to be one's self. But since there is another form of despair, that of willing to be one's self, the self must have been constituted by another.
He follows by demonstrating that the sickness is universal. “Just as the physician might say that there lives perhaps not one single man who is in perfect health, so one might say perhaps that there lives not one single man who after all is not to some extent in despair.”
There are many forms of despair. It may be conscious or unconscious. If conscious, a man may despair over the eternal (an existential crisis, if you will). If unconscious, it may manifest itself as a despair over earthly things. Kierkegaard covers a wide range of instances and it is guaranteed to prick the reader's conscious on some point or other (or at least it did mine).
For Kierkegaard, despair is sin and once one becomes aware of it there is a natural progression, or “continuation” of it:
1) One despairs over one's sin,
2) One despairs of receiving forgiveness of sins, and if one does not humble oneself and receive the forgiveness so despaired of then the continued state of offense will lead to
3) The abandonment of Christianity, declaring it a falsehood (because it didn't “work”).
Honestly, there is so much to unpack in these short works. Brevity only encompasses length, not thought. Highly recommended.
August 27, 2018
This book was much easier going than I expected it to be. For those wondering, I used the Lowrie edition recommend by Tim McIntosh from the Close Reads Podcast. I had never read Kierkegaard before and I am still not sure what to think. The book did not feel profound to me so I am guessing, as easy as it was to read, I missed a lot. I am looking forward to our book discussion because the book did cause me to consider some things about Abraham and Isaac that I might not have been willing to think about before.
I would love to find some lectures on Kierkegaard and then maybe return to this later.
I would love to find some lectures on Kierkegaard and then maybe return to this later.
June 19, 2018
I either bought this by mistake years ago thinking it was either a) a Hunter S. Thompson book and I was drunk or b) It was a new James Bond novel written by someone who sounded like a James Bond villain.
This won't be much of a review because I didn't understand most of it. Plus, I had a kind of Abrahamic epiphany trying to slog through this, which is probably more important to me than the actual work itself. The epiphany went something like this: I hate philosophy.
This isn't meant to disparage the effort of folks like Kierkegaard, but let's be honest, philosophy is like less-fun religion. Even when it's borrowing from religion. I just find so little to enjoy in trying to penetrate the dense, dingleberry-ridden thickets of things like this, that I have to wonder, is it really worth it? I mean, Kierkegaard had a lot of personal problems, his girlfriend was lost to him, whatever, I'm sure he was having a bad time. Maybe this was his epiphany? I guess some of the ideas are nice, like you can choose to do stuff, like, "I can choose not to finish this book". But this isn't enlightening. I dunno. The guy just seems really upset about something and he has to Derrida poor ol' Abraham to do it.
I hate philosophy because I can't even make myself make sense trying to talk about. That's a bad sign.
March 12, 2023
Both were profound in their own ways. I felt Fear and Trembling could have been much shorter. Like 20 pages. Sickness unto death was such a powerful diagnostic, it seemed nearly undeniable. But I also felt a longing for more help to get out of despair.
September 22, 2023
Second read of Fear and Trembling, first of Sickness Unto Death.
FT seems to be necessary reading for a truly examined life. Kierkegaard himself is nearly unintelligible to me and yet seems utterly correct.
FT seems to be necessary reading for a truly examined life. Kierkegaard himself is nearly unintelligible to me and yet seems utterly correct.
April 8, 2008
Well, I think I may be being baffled by Kierkegaard here. On the plus side, I think that this translation is much more readable than, say, the last of the Camus I read. However, Kierkegaard is notoriously slippery — for instance in the way he uses pseudonyms to give plausible deniability to anything he asserts.
His schtick here is to suggest that there’s something beyond ethics — something that is of the same sort of pull on our behavior but that is less publicly justifiable. We can justify our deviations from self-interest by appealing to a Kantean universal standard, but Kierkegaard says there’s also a possible appeal to an entirely immediable relation between the individual and God that may justify any goddamned thing at all.
His prototype for this is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. He goes to great pains to make this story vivid and awful, and succeeds to some extent. But every once and a while, I have to retreat from my suspension of disbelief, and at that point the whole exercise reminds me of those cheap op-ed pieces in which the author does the math to determine just how much effort Santa Claus would have to go through to deliver that many packages to that many children in that little time, and whether it worries the laws of physics that he does so.
The fact that the whole exercise seems to (biographically) have been a horrible post-facto excuse for a terribly bungled love affair doesn't make it more interesting in my eyes, but merely more pathetic.
I can’t help but think that I’m just not getting it on some grand level, and if I devoted myself to the pursuit of the rest of Kierkegaard’s more challenging oeuvre, I’d get it.
ADDENDUM: I made it through Fear and Trembling but gave up early into Sickness when I hit the sentence that read “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” Life’s too short to spend it trying to unravel that sort of thing.
His schtick here is to suggest that there’s something beyond ethics — something that is of the same sort of pull on our behavior but that is less publicly justifiable. We can justify our deviations from self-interest by appealing to a Kantean universal standard, but Kierkegaard says there’s also a possible appeal to an entirely immediable relation between the individual and God that may justify any goddamned thing at all.
His prototype for this is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. He goes to great pains to make this story vivid and awful, and succeeds to some extent. But every once and a while, I have to retreat from my suspension of disbelief, and at that point the whole exercise reminds me of those cheap op-ed pieces in which the author does the math to determine just how much effort Santa Claus would have to go through to deliver that many packages to that many children in that little time, and whether it worries the laws of physics that he does so.
The fact that the whole exercise seems to (biographically) have been a horrible post-facto excuse for a terribly bungled love affair doesn't make it more interesting in my eyes, but merely more pathetic.
I can’t help but think that I’m just not getting it on some grand level, and if I devoted myself to the pursuit of the rest of Kierkegaard’s more challenging oeuvre, I’d get it.
ADDENDUM: I made it through Fear and Trembling but gave up early into Sickness when I hit the sentence that read “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” Life’s too short to spend it trying to unravel that sort of thing.
January 17, 2024
I liked this better than Alastair Hannay's translation.
February 10, 2015
As a student of philosophy I believe that Kierkegaard is truly in a class of his own. He has been a great inspiration to me. Through his writings I have seen the dark places that he traveled and can feel a connection to his despair. Only someone who has been there can really know what Soren is writing about. For the rest it might appear as theoretical philosophy, but I assure you that it is not.
This book is not a quick one-time read. It is a study of both Kierkegaard and the self. One must spend a great deal of time studying this book line by line in order to begin to understand it. I would recommend that you perhaps begin with one of his easier works before tackling this one. My suggestion is "The Present Age." Another book that was very helpful for me was "Kierkegaard's Philosophy" by John Douglas Mullen. He will give you an overview of his works and some insight into this great man, Kierkegaard.
I have prepared my own lectures on Youtube for anyone who might be interested. Some of the earlier videos were a little dark, but I purchased better equipment that improved the picture. You can find them on the following sites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fMrY...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naGom...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pRPt...
This book is not a quick one-time read. It is a study of both Kierkegaard and the self. One must spend a great deal of time studying this book line by line in order to begin to understand it. I would recommend that you perhaps begin with one of his easier works before tackling this one. My suggestion is "The Present Age." Another book that was very helpful for me was "Kierkegaard's Philosophy" by John Douglas Mullen. He will give you an overview of his works and some insight into this great man, Kierkegaard.
I have prepared my own lectures on Youtube for anyone who might be interested. Some of the earlier videos were a little dark, but I purchased better equipment that improved the picture. You can find them on the following sites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fMrY...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naGom...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pRPt...
June 9, 2020
The Sickness Unto Death: The deep dive into the meaning of despair. One of my early covid quarantine reads. Dug out my heavily marked up Walter Lowrie translation from when I studied philosophy in college. Actually fun to see what I marked as important back then. Now? Two quotes stood out for this time:
"The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to a man/or that everything has become trivial." [173]
"In the constant sociability of our age people shudder at solitude to such a degree that they know no other use to put it but (oh, admirable epigram!) as a punishment for criminals." [198]
"The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to a man/or that everything has become trivial." [173]
"In the constant sociability of our age people shudder at solitude to such a degree that they know no other use to put it but (oh, admirable epigram!) as a punishment for criminals." [198]
August 27, 2007
Deeply insightful, dogmatically limited.
September 5, 2007
Though there are penetrating analyses of faith, I was deeply saddened that, as Abraham was asked by God to give up Isaac, Kierkegaard felt he was asked by God to give up his true love, Regina.
June 15, 2023
Always fun to ruminate on faith, despair, anxiety, religion, and sin during workdays
December 27, 2021
I had been stumbling upon references to Kierkegaard for several years starting with preliminary Danish author research before our trip to Denmark, but after my sister chose a Danish book on happiness (The Book of Hygge) for my mom’s book club, I thought: Whelp, before I read that, I’m going to want to get a handle on some sort of basic Danish philosophy! It’s time to read Kierkegaard.
Yeah, I’ve got a weird working mind that way.
Either way, I looked up Kierkegaard on Audible and picked out a title that sounded promising. Four hours later (over the course of a couple weeks), I am not sure that Kierkegaard will give me any actual insight into this Danish book that I’ll be reading next, BUT I am definitely glad that I read it.
Fear and Trembling takes nineteen verses out of the Bible and runs with them. When I first started, I doubted that Kierkegaard could pontificate on the simple (yet memorable and impacting) story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac for the whole story. Well, not only were my doubts put to rest, but I feel as if Kierkegaard actually held back!
Hearing this, one might wonder if Kierkegaard went all Victor Hugo and the Paris sewer system on these nineteen verses, but to me it did not feel that way at all (i.e., it was not taxing or frustrating or making you grind your teeth at the author for deliberately putting the reading audience through such a prolonged and pointless delay). Instead, Kierkegaard does not waste words in this attempt to explain a, frankly, inexplicable thing: how one—truly, genuinely, sanely—could offer up one’s beloved and miraculously-god-given child as a sacrifice in the manner that Abraham did.
You do not think about it much beyond just the idea that this is one of those quirky Old Testament Bible stories. It has a happy ending (spoilier: Isaac lives). Abraham is rewarded for his obedience. But something here is deeply troubling … or illuminating … and that is the balance that Kierkegaard is respectfully going for. His assertion is that Abraham’s act is a paradox, one which capably reveals the true character of a deep, rich, and fervent act of faith. That assertion forces us to re-look at the way we view faith, and it has the ability to be transcendent.
To try to help us wrap our minds around it, first he has to demonstrate how, by secular standards, this would be considered an act of insanity. Then he has to show us how Abraham’s situation distinguishes itself from the delusional. Then he uses this to pinpoint a type of faith that most of us do not have or will not reach, but one that we could at least strive for in a way that will bring us closer to God.
Kierkegaard’s insights manage to inspire deeper thinking, stronger self-reflection, while tossing away the easy aphorisms or Christian clichés that most people rely on for daily religious living. No wonder he made a lasting impact on philosophical thinking. At the same time, his loyal adherence to a Christian theology probably keeps him from being as vaunted in an academic setting on a college campus. Kierkegaard is his own type of paradox!
I enjoyed Kierkegaard’s examples of other tales of sacrifice to contrast with the Abraham and Isaac story (even though I was not as familiar with most of them). He spends a lot of time showing why they do not demonstrate faith and how Abraham’s situation is unique in literature, and therefore important to understand for its own context.
For a lot of the writing, I was not always on his level—or, to put it less delicately, I was lost. It felt as though I needed to get into the reading for a while before I could start to sync with his message. Some of that might be him struggling to frame a spiritual concept through temporal means, while a good amount of it is probably user error (ahem, me!).
Ultimately, however, I always appreciate a writer who can manage to show me a new way to view something that might feel routine. Someone that can go beyond that and inspire me to be better? Why, that might even be the key to happiness in this life and what lies beyond! Maybe that Danish book about happiness that my sister is recommending is irrelevant at this point because it’s possible I already just read the best version of it already—though I’d probably need several more re-reads to properly process it and find out for sure!
Yeah, I’ve got a weird working mind that way.
Either way, I looked up Kierkegaard on Audible and picked out a title that sounded promising. Four hours later (over the course of a couple weeks), I am not sure that Kierkegaard will give me any actual insight into this Danish book that I’ll be reading next, BUT I am definitely glad that I read it.
Fear and Trembling takes nineteen verses out of the Bible and runs with them. When I first started, I doubted that Kierkegaard could pontificate on the simple (yet memorable and impacting) story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac for the whole story. Well, not only were my doubts put to rest, but I feel as if Kierkegaard actually held back!
Hearing this, one might wonder if Kierkegaard went all Victor Hugo and the Paris sewer system on these nineteen verses, but to me it did not feel that way at all (i.e., it was not taxing or frustrating or making you grind your teeth at the author for deliberately putting the reading audience through such a prolonged and pointless delay). Instead, Kierkegaard does not waste words in this attempt to explain a, frankly, inexplicable thing: how one—truly, genuinely, sanely—could offer up one’s beloved and miraculously-god-given child as a sacrifice in the manner that Abraham did.
You do not think about it much beyond just the idea that this is one of those quirky Old Testament Bible stories. It has a happy ending (spoilier: Isaac lives). Abraham is rewarded for his obedience. But something here is deeply troubling … or illuminating … and that is the balance that Kierkegaard is respectfully going for. His assertion is that Abraham’s act is a paradox, one which capably reveals the true character of a deep, rich, and fervent act of faith. That assertion forces us to re-look at the way we view faith, and it has the ability to be transcendent.
To try to help us wrap our minds around it, first he has to demonstrate how, by secular standards, this would be considered an act of insanity. Then he has to show us how Abraham’s situation distinguishes itself from the delusional. Then he uses this to pinpoint a type of faith that most of us do not have or will not reach, but one that we could at least strive for in a way that will bring us closer to God.
Kierkegaard’s insights manage to inspire deeper thinking, stronger self-reflection, while tossing away the easy aphorisms or Christian clichés that most people rely on for daily religious living. No wonder he made a lasting impact on philosophical thinking. At the same time, his loyal adherence to a Christian theology probably keeps him from being as vaunted in an academic setting on a college campus. Kierkegaard is his own type of paradox!
I enjoyed Kierkegaard’s examples of other tales of sacrifice to contrast with the Abraham and Isaac story (even though I was not as familiar with most of them). He spends a lot of time showing why they do not demonstrate faith and how Abraham’s situation is unique in literature, and therefore important to understand for its own context.
For a lot of the writing, I was not always on his level—or, to put it less delicately, I was lost. It felt as though I needed to get into the reading for a while before I could start to sync with his message. Some of that might be him struggling to frame a spiritual concept through temporal means, while a good amount of it is probably user error (ahem, me!).
Ultimately, however, I always appreciate a writer who can manage to show me a new way to view something that might feel routine. Someone that can go beyond that and inspire me to be better? Why, that might even be the key to happiness in this life and what lies beyond! Maybe that Danish book about happiness that my sister is recommending is irrelevant at this point because it’s possible I already just read the best version of it already—though I’d probably need several more re-reads to properly process it and find out for sure!
January 21, 2024
"By relating itself to its own self, and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power which constituted it."
A good friend of mine once said that existentialism is more "helpful as a personal philosophy" than something to be applied for general society-level analysis. Being a philosophical materialist, I see such limitations. The podcast "Philosophize This" also helpfully has a two-part episode contrasting the perspectives of Kierkegaard and Marx on the nature of the "self".
Having said that, central to Kierkegaard is the notion of an irrationalist "leap of faith". He emphasizes a dialectical tension which makes that leap necessary for our salvation, yet something immensely discomforting to face. The inability to take that leap, says Kierkegaard, is or leads to "despair". Disentangled from a strictly Christian grounding, there's something resonant in this in a deep way which may well be worth applying, at least in the way it's been explained to me. The temptation to either drag our feet or to escape into another external source of identity beyond our own consciousness can be powerful, but to take the leap and be true to ourselves seems ultimately the better option even if we can't justify it rationally.
A good friend of mine once said that existentialism is more "helpful as a personal philosophy" than something to be applied for general society-level analysis. Being a philosophical materialist, I see such limitations. The podcast "Philosophize This" also helpfully has a two-part episode contrasting the perspectives of Kierkegaard and Marx on the nature of the "self".
Having said that, central to Kierkegaard is the notion of an irrationalist "leap of faith". He emphasizes a dialectical tension which makes that leap necessary for our salvation, yet something immensely discomforting to face. The inability to take that leap, says Kierkegaard, is or leads to "despair". Disentangled from a strictly Christian grounding, there's something resonant in this in a deep way which may well be worth applying, at least in the way it's been explained to me. The temptation to either drag our feet or to escape into another external source of identity beyond our own consciousness can be powerful, but to take the leap and be true to ourselves seems ultimately the better option even if we can't justify it rationally.
May 15, 2020
In the two treatises that this book is comprised 0f, Kierkegaard, the theosopher poet, attempts with mixed but never indolent results to demonstrate a myriad of beguiling and utterly unique theses. Fear and Trembling, which I find preferable to The Sickness Unto Death, is quite the manuscript. Herein we see the apex of the author's critical and poetic faculties, the resulting inquiry into anguish being a grand work that succeeds far more than it fails, which, as in the case of both of these books, is regrettably not all too rare, luckily it is not all too prevalent either, and thus the most rewarding features of these pieces makes them more than worthwhile. While discord certainly persists in my relationship with Kierkegaard, it is doubtful that I should soon abandon it, how else might I explore that sliver of my being who desires only to be absolutely and dutifully bound to the will of God?
January 21, 2024
„Ať už se člověk narodil třeba v malých poměrech, přece žádám, aby si proti sobě samému nelidsky neodpíral snění o královském hradu a aby tak nesnil jen z dálky a neurčitě; chci, aby se nevyvyšoval ani nesnižoval tím, že by se snižoval nepatřičně. Žádám na něm, aby byl člověkem cele a aby i ve snu vystupoval s důvěrou a důstojně.“
„Třebaže se jedno pokolení učí od druhého, vlastní lidskosti se žádné z nich od předcházejícího nenaučí. V tom musí každé pokolení začínat od začátku, nemá jiný úkol než pokolení předcházející a také se dále nedostane, pokud ovšem dřívější pokolení svůj úkol nezradilo a nepodvádělo samo sebe.“
Neskutečně náročné čtení. Některé části mi byly nepřístupné, nepochopitelné, komplikované. I tak ale nelituji. Mnoho myšlenek mi zůstane v paměti hodně dlouho.
„Třebaže se jedno pokolení učí od druhého, vlastní lidskosti se žádné z nich od předcházejícího nenaučí. V tom musí každé pokolení začínat od začátku, nemá jiný úkol než pokolení předcházející a také se dále nedostane, pokud ovšem dřívější pokolení svůj úkol nezradilo a nepodvádělo samo sebe.“
Neskutečně náročné čtení. Některé části mi byly nepřístupné, nepochopitelné, komplikované. I tak ale nelituji. Mnoho myšlenek mi zůstane v paměti hodně dlouho.
July 7, 2018
Bad lovers are bad readers. Just finished Notebooks of Simone Weil, so on an astrology - theology kick. Weil (Aquarius sun, Cancer moon, Sagittarius rising), Kierkegaard (Taurus sun, Cancer moon, birthtime unknown). Me (Libra sun, Libra moon, Taurus rising) Go bulls or something.
Took a year to finish. Last time I talked about Kierkegaard in 2017, found it impossible to put his effect on my thinking into words. Still fumbling, still trembling. Quite, quiet, quite an error to correlate Kierkegaard's concept of despair with Western phenomenon of clinical depression. Like the concept of language and translation: loses meaning when not in context, or relation, to the culture it emanated from. Discussion on Socratic irony in relation to sin, has much merit for anti-capitalist politics today. If you knew and could recognize, what the right thing is, you would do it. The text is more foreplay of what I defined it as above, though I would be curious to see a discussion between Socratic irony, sin, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Another tangent, someone once said to me that they seem to only encounter me in times of crisis. Is it not sort of funny that men say they encounter you in a time of crisis? Something, something patriarchal, or we could say that the subjectivity entwined with wom*nhood is defined by approaching m(e)n, while in crisis: financial crisis, romantic crisis, emotional crisis. Revision of statement: I find you most endearing when you are in a time of crisis.
Bad lovers are bad readers. Always falling in love with philosoph-act-ivists, or as Kierkegaard was describing himself as possessing, "...a poetic existence in the direction of the religious." Bad romantic endings with Cancers and Capricorns. Cancers are very charming, I'll admit, in high school I was sweet on Benjamin and Kafka. If you have your computer open to the Wikipedia page on Moses, there's a good chance that I will be smitten.
Made it my task to look up two words as I finished this text: consanguinity and immanence. Bad definitions (Is the beauty of Kierkegaard's writing his disregard from being momentarily wrong? Positing definitions constantly and refuting them) : Consanguinity, or related by blood, with a close affinity. Relating the words affinity and infinity together. Immanence, or emanating from within. Immanence as distinct from transcendence. I believe I am leaning towards the former. More descent: immanence, from Latin immanere, or to remain in, dwell in, tangent thought towards the idea of holy wells. Transcendence, Latin verb tran(s)scendere, to surpass or exceed. (Not intended in relation to contemporary identity politics) Transcendence as quality of G*d, immanence of m(e)n. I don't want to, or need to, I suppose, dwell in my sin. But it is always apart of me.
Currently listening to Ron Hardy's edit of Isaac Hayes' Can't Turn Around [Finding Hardy to be a better lover, in terms of Chicago House, than Frankie Knuckles] Edit: First Choice (Let No Man Turn Asunder). Hardy (Taurus Sun, moon unknown, either Capricorn or Aquarius)
Odd treatment in other reviews: bemoaning of true love. [First Choice, in Ron Hardy's edit, "It's not over between you and me..."] Regina and Soren, reunited in heaven? It's not over between you and me. We regret decisions, or choices we make in the moment. Regina marries another man. Kierkegaard wavers about publishing "The Sickness Unto Death", is galvanized by an auditory hallucination.
The soul: ascent and descent. Little written about Kierkegaard and his relationship to astrology, though he does consider it a science on something that "...does not exist." Return to the mathematical concept of limits, or a positive or negative value of a function as it approaches a given value. (I was bad at calculus, forgive the definition)
Despairing over choice of words: being called a "negative" person. What wonders the concept of "self-care" has done towards anti-capitalist politics! Bad lover, bad reader: the self, or the individual, as the afterbirth of capitalism. Ivan Ilyich writes of a *mutual self-care* which I find more interesting. Or rather, let's consider the *vibes* of a person in terms of a positive or negative position. A positive person, then, getting as far away from zero, as a negative person.
Bad lovers are bad readers are bad writers. Hiding your personal life in text? Progenitor to Kraus. Also, Lil Kim's Hardcore. I Love B.I.G. Bad friends, bad lovers, and bad husbands. Should we continue to despair over what kept Soren and Regina apart? (My mom still believes that Usher and Chili will still get back together.) I don't believe it, though I know Kierkegaard suffered till the end of his mortal existence over the affair, over the dillydallying. Still listening to Ron Hardy mixes, "...loving you and needing you is my mistake. I'm never gonna make that same mistake again."
Took a year to finish. Last time I talked about Kierkegaard in 2017, found it impossible to put his effect on my thinking into words. Still fumbling, still trembling. Quite, quiet, quite an error to correlate Kierkegaard's concept of despair with Western phenomenon of clinical depression. Like the concept of language and translation: loses meaning when not in context, or relation, to the culture it emanated from. Discussion on Socratic irony in relation to sin, has much merit for anti-capitalist politics today. If you knew and could recognize, what the right thing is, you would do it. The text is more foreplay of what I defined it as above, though I would be curious to see a discussion between Socratic irony, sin, and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing. Another tangent, someone once said to me that they seem to only encounter me in times of crisis. Is it not sort of funny that men say they encounter you in a time of crisis? Something, something patriarchal, or we could say that the subjectivity entwined with wom*nhood is defined by approaching m(e)n, while in crisis: financial crisis, romantic crisis, emotional crisis. Revision of statement: I find you most endearing when you are in a time of crisis.
Bad lovers are bad readers. Always falling in love with philosoph-act-ivists, or as Kierkegaard was describing himself as possessing, "...a poetic existence in the direction of the religious." Bad romantic endings with Cancers and Capricorns. Cancers are very charming, I'll admit, in high school I was sweet on Benjamin and Kafka. If you have your computer open to the Wikipedia page on Moses, there's a good chance that I will be smitten.
Made it my task to look up two words as I finished this text: consanguinity and immanence. Bad definitions (Is the beauty of Kierkegaard's writing his disregard from being momentarily wrong? Positing definitions constantly and refuting them) : Consanguinity, or related by blood, with a close affinity. Relating the words affinity and infinity together. Immanence, or emanating from within. Immanence as distinct from transcendence. I believe I am leaning towards the former. More descent: immanence, from Latin immanere, or to remain in, dwell in, tangent thought towards the idea of holy wells. Transcendence, Latin verb tran(s)scendere, to surpass or exceed. (Not intended in relation to contemporary identity politics) Transcendence as quality of G*d, immanence of m(e)n. I don't want to, or need to, I suppose, dwell in my sin. But it is always apart of me.
Currently listening to Ron Hardy's edit of Isaac Hayes' Can't Turn Around [Finding Hardy to be a better lover, in terms of Chicago House, than Frankie Knuckles] Edit: First Choice (Let No Man Turn Asunder). Hardy (Taurus Sun, moon unknown, either Capricorn or Aquarius)
Odd treatment in other reviews: bemoaning of true love. [First Choice, in Ron Hardy's edit, "It's not over between you and me..."] Regina and Soren, reunited in heaven? It's not over between you and me. We regret decisions, or choices we make in the moment. Regina marries another man. Kierkegaard wavers about publishing "The Sickness Unto Death", is galvanized by an auditory hallucination.
The soul: ascent and descent. Little written about Kierkegaard and his relationship to astrology, though he does consider it a science on something that "...does not exist." Return to the mathematical concept of limits, or a positive or negative value of a function as it approaches a given value. (I was bad at calculus, forgive the definition)
Despairing over choice of words: being called a "negative" person. What wonders the concept of "self-care" has done towards anti-capitalist politics! Bad lover, bad reader: the self, or the individual, as the afterbirth of capitalism. Ivan Ilyich writes of a *mutual self-care* which I find more interesting. Or rather, let's consider the *vibes* of a person in terms of a positive or negative position. A positive person, then, getting as far away from zero, as a negative person.
Bad lovers are bad readers are bad writers. Hiding your personal life in text? Progenitor to Kraus. Also, Lil Kim's Hardcore. I Love B.I.G. Bad friends, bad lovers, and bad husbands. Should we continue to despair over what kept Soren and Regina apart? (My mom still believes that Usher and Chili will still get back together.) I don't believe it, though I know Kierkegaard suffered till the end of his mortal existence over the affair, over the dillydallying. Still listening to Ron Hardy mixes, "...loving you and needing you is my mistake. I'm never gonna make that same mistake again."
only-read-part-of-it
August 23, 2025I led a Catherine Project group on Fear and Trembling.
October 14, 2025
pt 1:
Be yourself!
pt 2:
wake up sheeple 🐑
Be yourself!
pt 2:
wake up sheeple 🐑
April 18, 2021
5 stars for Fear and Trembling. 4 stars for Sickness Unto Death.
December 15, 2020
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.
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.
November 11, 2019
“Nullum exsistat magnum ingenium sine Lalique dementia” - “There never existed great genius without some madness"
I got a lot from SK's two works, but it took work and I had to actively continue to engage even while he maintained a consistent religious tone.
What I like:
Kierkegaard's distinction between depression and despair, themes of the absurd (hello Camus!), his obsession with the paradoxical, his assertion that the essential task of human existence is speculation and thought ("utilized thought") and knowledge. For your life to culminate anything short of this, SK sees as comical, absent minded (which is so much softer, more playful than Nietzsche, than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, than Sophocles and Aristotle). Paradox lives in the dichotomy between God’s understanding of what human life “ought” to be and our own. Or, more richly put, when you delve deeper: an individual needs a certain ethical, religious, intellectual “maturity” or capacity to consciously submit oneself. To consciously choose, as it were, God. And THAT is why consciousness is a sickness because to truly give your life, genuinely devote yourself, to seriously be devout, you need to make the CONSCIOUS decision. But here are where religious philosophies fail Camus - any path that simply abdicates to some higher power, knowing authority, well - that isn't sufficient. It is a cop out. So this consciousness is needed but won’t it all, invariably, sabotage the individuals very capacity to choose Christianity, a higher power, etc.
I appreciate that SK asserts that many people don't have a sense of self at all. That faith cannot be achieved through passivity or with ease. Your self isn't a given, simply inherent in the fact that you are of mind and matter. You need to do the work. A human being is not yet a self, the self lies in the way in which your soul relates to your body. And that relation is dynamic, is constant, constantly positioned, lots of oppositions. A lot of people NEVER develop a self. They’re born in the crowd, live, die… never a self. This is the most common form of despair bc people not willing to go through that activity. Something you have to engage in, through force of will. It isn't like a heartbeat.
Additionally, SK provides a critique of a Hegelian principle that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, that we are maturing and growing and building as a society. But for SK, each generation starts anew. And that concept really resonated with me, this feeling as though consciousness isn't even linear, progressive. We’re asking the same Qs, sorting the same struggles, perhaps even more so. A struggle against societal forms.
So, ultimately, I like the first piece of what SK identifies, the elements of despair, the tension and introspection and self awareness needed to form a self, but his solution doesn't work for me.
I got a lot from SK's two works, but it took work and I had to actively continue to engage even while he maintained a consistent religious tone.
What I like:
Kierkegaard's distinction between depression and despair, themes of the absurd (hello Camus!), his obsession with the paradoxical, his assertion that the essential task of human existence is speculation and thought ("utilized thought") and knowledge. For your life to culminate anything short of this, SK sees as comical, absent minded (which is so much softer, more playful than Nietzsche, than Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, than Sophocles and Aristotle). Paradox lives in the dichotomy between God’s understanding of what human life “ought” to be and our own. Or, more richly put, when you delve deeper: an individual needs a certain ethical, religious, intellectual “maturity” or capacity to consciously submit oneself. To consciously choose, as it were, God. And THAT is why consciousness is a sickness because to truly give your life, genuinely devote yourself, to seriously be devout, you need to make the CONSCIOUS decision. But here are where religious philosophies fail Camus - any path that simply abdicates to some higher power, knowing authority, well - that isn't sufficient. It is a cop out. So this consciousness is needed but won’t it all, invariably, sabotage the individuals very capacity to choose Christianity, a higher power, etc.
I appreciate that SK asserts that many people don't have a sense of self at all. That faith cannot be achieved through passivity or with ease. Your self isn't a given, simply inherent in the fact that you are of mind and matter. You need to do the work. A human being is not yet a self, the self lies in the way in which your soul relates to your body. And that relation is dynamic, is constant, constantly positioned, lots of oppositions. A lot of people NEVER develop a self. They’re born in the crowd, live, die… never a self. This is the most common form of despair bc people not willing to go through that activity. Something you have to engage in, through force of will. It isn't like a heartbeat.
Additionally, SK provides a critique of a Hegelian principle that we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, that we are maturing and growing and building as a society. But for SK, each generation starts anew. And that concept really resonated with me, this feeling as though consciousness isn't even linear, progressive. We’re asking the same Qs, sorting the same struggles, perhaps even more so. A struggle against societal forms.
So, ultimately, I like the first piece of what SK identifies, the elements of despair, the tension and introspection and self awareness needed to form a self, but his solution doesn't work for me.
February 22, 2025
Among the canonical works of existentialist thought, few possess the arresting force and literary ingenuity of Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, this enigmatic text is no dry philosophical treatise but rather a meditation of uncommon intensity—part theological inquiry, part narrative exegesis, part philosophical performance. It is, in short, a work that defies easy categorization, much like its author, that perennially restless Dane whose critique of both reason and institutional Christianity would shape the intellectual currents of the next two centuries.
The book takes as its central motif the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac—an episode that has troubled theologians and moral philosophers for millennia. But where others have sought to rationalize the tale, to render it palatable for human comprehension, Kierkegaard refuses. His Abraham is not a figure of untroubled obedience but a man caught in an impossible paradox, suspended between divine command and human ethics.
To read Fear and Trembling is to encounter a work that is not merely about faith but is itself an act of faith—written with the conviction that true belief demands not logic, not reason, but something far more radical: the "leap" into the unknown.
The Knight of Faith vs. the Tragic Hero
Kierkegaard, with his habitual irony and rhetorical cunning, does not merely argue his point; he dramatizes it. He introduces two archetypes, the tragic hero and the knight of faith, through which he contrasts conventional moral virtue with the far more unsettling demands of true faith.
The tragic hero—embodied in figures such as Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for the greater good—is comprehensible. His actions are painful, yes, but they adhere to a moral logic. He acts in accordance with ethical principles that, however harsh, are still within the bounds of human reason.
Abraham, by contrast, stands alone in his ordeal. His willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be justified by ethics, nor can it be rationalized as an act of duty to society. He does not kill for a cause, for justice, for the good of the many. He prepares to do so solely because God commands it. And here lies Kierkegaard’s terrifying proposition: that true faith is not an extension of ethics but a contradiction of it.
The knight of faith, then, is not simply a good man; he is a man who obeys God even when obedience defies all worldly understanding. This is the scandal of faith, its outrageous and unsettling nature—one that Kierkegaard insists most people, even self-proclaimed believers, fail to grasp.
The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
One of the book’s most provocative ideas is what Kierkegaard calls the "teleological suspension of the ethical." In plain terms: the moral law, which ordinarily governs human conduct, is not the highest authority. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is, from an ethical standpoint, monstrous. But within the logic of faith, it is something else entirely—a submission to a divine order that transcends human morality.
Kierkegaard is not advocating moral relativism; rather, he is exposing the limits of moral reasoning. If Abraham had obeyed human ethics, he would have refused to sacrifice Isaac, and in doing so, he would have acted righteously—by human standards. But faith, in Kierkegaard’s formulation, demands more than righteousness; it demands total submission to the divine, even when the divine command appears to contradict all earthly reason.
It is here that modern readers may recoil. The notion that ethics can be "suspended" for faith’s sake is a deeply unsettling one, particularly in an era that prizes rationality and moral autonomy. Yet this is precisely Kierkegaard’s point: faith is not comfortable. If it does not disturb, it is not faith—it is merely social convention dressed in religious garb.
Kierkegaard’s Literary Brilliance
Though often categorized as a philosopher, Kierkegaard was, at heart, a literary genius. Fear and Trembling is as much a work of imaginative storytelling as it is a theological exploration. Kierkegaard reimagines Abraham’s story in multiple ways, each retelling peeling back new layers of meaning. In one version, Abraham cannot go through with the act and despairs. In another, he secretly wishes to disobey but outwardly complies. In yet another, he becomes mute, unable to express the torment of his faith.
This method of repetition, of circling around a single event from different vantage points, is part of what gives Fear and Trembling its hypnotic, almost incantatory power. Kierkegaard does not seek to "solve" the problem of Abraham; he forces the reader to inhabit it, to experience its anguish firsthand.
Moreover, the book’s pseudonymous authorship is itself a literary device. Johannes de Silentio, the supposed writer, is not a believer—he admires Abraham but admits he cannot comprehend him. By placing his argument in the mouth of one who remains outside faith, Kierkegaard both enacts and critiques the limits of philosophical analysis.
Faith and the Modern Condition
Though written in the 19th century, Fear and Trembling speaks powerfully to the dilemmas of modernity. We live in an age that demands rational justification for every belief, that seeks to reduce all convictions to logic, psychology, or social utility. Kierkegaard stands as a rebuke to this tendency. Faith, he insists, cannot be domesticated in this way. It is not a calculation, not a set of moral guidelines, not a self-improvement program. It is a terrifying, absolute commitment to something beyond reason.
For the modern reader, this raises uncomfortable questions. Is faith possible in a secular age? Can one truly believe in God without demanding explanations, assurances, proofs? Kierkegaard would argue that to demand such things is precisely to miss the point. Faith is not knowledge. It is not certainty. It is a leap—a mad, beautiful, incomprehensible leap—into the unknown.
Final Thoughts: A Book That Demands to Be Reckoned With
To read Fear and Trembling is not merely to engage with a philosophical text but to wrestle with a spiritual challenge. It is a book that resists easy consumption, that frustrates as much as it illuminates. It does not leave the reader with tidy conclusions but with a lingering, unsettling question: What does it mean to believe?
Kierkegaard offers no comfortable answers. He does not seek to reassure but to disturb. And in that disturbance, in that confrontation with the limits of reason, he compels us to reconsider the very nature of faith itself.
It is, in short, a book that lives up to its name—one that inspires both fear and trembling.
The book takes as its central motif the biblical story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac—an episode that has troubled theologians and moral philosophers for millennia. But where others have sought to rationalize the tale, to render it palatable for human comprehension, Kierkegaard refuses. His Abraham is not a figure of untroubled obedience but a man caught in an impossible paradox, suspended between divine command and human ethics.
To read Fear and Trembling is to encounter a work that is not merely about faith but is itself an act of faith—written with the conviction that true belief demands not logic, not reason, but something far more radical: the "leap" into the unknown.
The Knight of Faith vs. the Tragic Hero
Kierkegaard, with his habitual irony and rhetorical cunning, does not merely argue his point; he dramatizes it. He introduces two archetypes, the tragic hero and the knight of faith, through which he contrasts conventional moral virtue with the far more unsettling demands of true faith.
The tragic hero—embodied in figures such as Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for the greater good—is comprehensible. His actions are painful, yes, but they adhere to a moral logic. He acts in accordance with ethical principles that, however harsh, are still within the bounds of human reason.
Abraham, by contrast, stands alone in his ordeal. His willingness to sacrifice Isaac cannot be justified by ethics, nor can it be rationalized as an act of duty to society. He does not kill for a cause, for justice, for the good of the many. He prepares to do so solely because God commands it. And here lies Kierkegaard’s terrifying proposition: that true faith is not an extension of ethics but a contradiction of it.
The knight of faith, then, is not simply a good man; he is a man who obeys God even when obedience defies all worldly understanding. This is the scandal of faith, its outrageous and unsettling nature—one that Kierkegaard insists most people, even self-proclaimed believers, fail to grasp.
The Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
One of the book’s most provocative ideas is what Kierkegaard calls the "teleological suspension of the ethical." In plain terms: the moral law, which ordinarily governs human conduct, is not the highest authority. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac is, from an ethical standpoint, monstrous. But within the logic of faith, it is something else entirely—a submission to a divine order that transcends human morality.
Kierkegaard is not advocating moral relativism; rather, he is exposing the limits of moral reasoning. If Abraham had obeyed human ethics, he would have refused to sacrifice Isaac, and in doing so, he would have acted righteously—by human standards. But faith, in Kierkegaard’s formulation, demands more than righteousness; it demands total submission to the divine, even when the divine command appears to contradict all earthly reason.
It is here that modern readers may recoil. The notion that ethics can be "suspended" for faith’s sake is a deeply unsettling one, particularly in an era that prizes rationality and moral autonomy. Yet this is precisely Kierkegaard’s point: faith is not comfortable. If it does not disturb, it is not faith—it is merely social convention dressed in religious garb.
Kierkegaard’s Literary Brilliance
Though often categorized as a philosopher, Kierkegaard was, at heart, a literary genius. Fear and Trembling is as much a work of imaginative storytelling as it is a theological exploration. Kierkegaard reimagines Abraham’s story in multiple ways, each retelling peeling back new layers of meaning. In one version, Abraham cannot go through with the act and despairs. In another, he secretly wishes to disobey but outwardly complies. In yet another, he becomes mute, unable to express the torment of his faith.
This method of repetition, of circling around a single event from different vantage points, is part of what gives Fear and Trembling its hypnotic, almost incantatory power. Kierkegaard does not seek to "solve" the problem of Abraham; he forces the reader to inhabit it, to experience its anguish firsthand.
Moreover, the book’s pseudonymous authorship is itself a literary device. Johannes de Silentio, the supposed writer, is not a believer—he admires Abraham but admits he cannot comprehend him. By placing his argument in the mouth of one who remains outside faith, Kierkegaard both enacts and critiques the limits of philosophical analysis.
Faith and the Modern Condition
Though written in the 19th century, Fear and Trembling speaks powerfully to the dilemmas of modernity. We live in an age that demands rational justification for every belief, that seeks to reduce all convictions to logic, psychology, or social utility. Kierkegaard stands as a rebuke to this tendency. Faith, he insists, cannot be domesticated in this way. It is not a calculation, not a set of moral guidelines, not a self-improvement program. It is a terrifying, absolute commitment to something beyond reason.
For the modern reader, this raises uncomfortable questions. Is faith possible in a secular age? Can one truly believe in God without demanding explanations, assurances, proofs? Kierkegaard would argue that to demand such things is precisely to miss the point. Faith is not knowledge. It is not certainty. It is a leap—a mad, beautiful, incomprehensible leap—into the unknown.
Final Thoughts: A Book That Demands to Be Reckoned With
To read Fear and Trembling is not merely to engage with a philosophical text but to wrestle with a spiritual challenge. It is a book that resists easy consumption, that frustrates as much as it illuminates. It does not leave the reader with tidy conclusions but with a lingering, unsettling question: What does it mean to believe?
Kierkegaard offers no comfortable answers. He does not seek to reassure but to disturb. And in that disturbance, in that confrontation with the limits of reason, he compels us to reconsider the very nature of faith itself.
It is, in short, a book that lives up to its name—one that inspires both fear and trembling.
August 9, 2024
One of the pleasures of reading a classic work of literature is discovering how accessible and entertaining it is. That was not my experience with these two books by Søren Kierkegaard. There were moments when I felt like I completely followed what Kierkegaard was saying, but these quickly passed as he went off into abstract philosophical jargon.
Fear and Trembling takes as its kernel the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. We learn from the footnotes supplied by the translator, Walter Lowrie, that Kierkegaard was implicitly comparing Abraham's willingness to sacrifice what he loved to his own decision to break off his engagement with his fiancée. The Sickness unto Death, written a few years later, analyzes despair. Once again, Lowrie's notes show us various autobiographical echoes in Kierkegaard's obscure text.
Walter Lowrie is known for writing the best English-language biography of Kierkegaard. I have to assume he understands Kierkegaard's works well. I'm not sure his translation conveys the meaning to a lay reader, however. Or maybe I am too dense to handle a challenging philosophical text. I am still curious to read some of his other books, but perhaps I will seek out a different translator for comparison.
Fear and Trembling takes as its kernel the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son Isaac. We learn from the footnotes supplied by the translator, Walter Lowrie, that Kierkegaard was implicitly comparing Abraham's willingness to sacrifice what he loved to his own decision to break off his engagement with his fiancée. The Sickness unto Death, written a few years later, analyzes despair. Once again, Lowrie's notes show us various autobiographical echoes in Kierkegaard's obscure text.
Walter Lowrie is known for writing the best English-language biography of Kierkegaard. I have to assume he understands Kierkegaard's works well. I'm not sure his translation conveys the meaning to a lay reader, however. Or maybe I am too dense to handle a challenging philosophical text. I am still curious to read some of his other books, but perhaps I will seek out a different translator for comparison.
June 27, 2008
"Sickness Unto Death"
I re-read this essay as a form of self-medication. SK's analysis of despair is disturbingly accurate - like a surgeons knife that cuts at all the right places. I recognize that this book can be an exercise in learning something about the author; but i suspect that its true worth is in "reading" the reader. Perhaps it will be just another diatribe on Christendom that you read; or maybe, it might just uncover those places in your life that need life breathed into them from a living God.
I re-read this essay as a form of self-medication. SK's analysis of despair is disturbingly accurate - like a surgeons knife that cuts at all the right places. I recognize that this book can be an exercise in learning something about the author; but i suspect that its true worth is in "reading" the reader. Perhaps it will be just another diatribe on Christendom that you read; or maybe, it might just uncover those places in your life that need life breathed into them from a living God.
October 27, 2020
Full disclosure, this is the actual book I read but I wanted to separate my reviews of F&T and Sickness so I marked F&T as its own book. This will be my thoughts on Sickness Unto Death.
First off, as one of the relatively few primary philosophy texts I've read, Sickness gave me quite a hard time, at least in the beginning. SK's definition of self is one of the most convoluted, twisting, circular sentences I've ever read and I eventually had to give up deciphering it so I could read the rest of his work. That said, I got the impression that SK's self is really a combination of body (finite) and soul (infinite) but in the sense that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The self is constituted by the relationship between body and soul and how it interacts with itself (kinda meta, right?). SK's self is important because that is how he goes on to define his various different types of despair, which was probably the more interesting of the two parts.
For SK, despair is the sickness [that results in] death; not necessarily death in a bodily sense, but rather in a spiritual sense. Everyone is in some form of despair all the time, some of which can be quite deceptive. That said, the common factor underlying all forms of despair is the inability of one to truly actualize their self. For some reason or another (SK lists quite a few) the individual is behaving or thinking things that are counter to their true nature. The aim is to, before God, self-actualize and enter into a private relationship with Him. Without going through all the types he lists, I'll pick out a few that stood out to me. First there are the despairs of possibility and necessity. The former is common enough: there are so many things that you could be that you're too busy exploring them or getting excited about them to actually become them. SK says that here "the self runs away from itself", hoping to chase all the possibilities available to it. The latter (despair over necessity) was the more interesting one for me. This is referring to things like Philistinism or anyone with a profound lack of faith (i.e. things *have* to be a certain way). SK talks about how probability is actually antithetical to possibility by "carrying [possibility] like a prisoner in a cage". He relates this to his concept of the absurd (which we saw in F&T) and says how all humans know that their destruction (death) is inevitable (a necessity), but its faith (possibility) that they use to not live in despair at all times. The belief that the universe (God) acts of its own will that is unpredictable to us is a source of hope (possibility) in the face of cold, hard necessity.
He goes on to talk about conscious and unconscious despair and as awareness of despair increases, so too does the suffering and proximity to God. The idea is eventually to humble yourself before God and allow him to help you with your despair. This line of thought continues into the much less interesting Part Second about sin. SK says that despair is sin and that it is a sin that is committed at every instant, so that only God can deliver us from it. I found this chapter circuitous and not incredibly valuable, especially when compared to the psychological analysis SK presented in Part First.
The bits that appealed to me in both F&T and Sickness were definitely the parts that smelled of existentialism. Interestingly, I encountered existentialism in a sort of reverse chronological order, reading SK (the Father of Existentialism) last. Something that really rubbed me wrong with SK that isn't the case in Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and others is that the Absurd is represented by God and has a will. Maybe this is the part of me that SK talks about feeling "offense" at Christianity. The offense comes from people unwilling to accept help from all-powerful Father and unwilling to humble themselves before Him. Maybe that's me. At any rate, I'd much rather prefer to place the individual above God, blasphemous though it may be, because at the end of the day, that's all I have. I live my own life and if the universe doesn't have any meaning, maybe I can use that to add some to my life, by contrast.
All in all, definitely a challenging read, but glad I finally got to read the Father of Existentialism.
First off, as one of the relatively few primary philosophy texts I've read, Sickness gave me quite a hard time, at least in the beginning. SK's definition of self is one of the most convoluted, twisting, circular sentences I've ever read and I eventually had to give up deciphering it so I could read the rest of his work. That said, I got the impression that SK's self is really a combination of body (finite) and soul (infinite) but in the sense that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The self is constituted by the relationship between body and soul and how it interacts with itself (kinda meta, right?). SK's self is important because that is how he goes on to define his various different types of despair, which was probably the more interesting of the two parts.
For SK, despair is the sickness [that results in] death; not necessarily death in a bodily sense, but rather in a spiritual sense. Everyone is in some form of despair all the time, some of which can be quite deceptive. That said, the common factor underlying all forms of despair is the inability of one to truly actualize their self. For some reason or another (SK lists quite a few) the individual is behaving or thinking things that are counter to their true nature. The aim is to, before God, self-actualize and enter into a private relationship with Him. Without going through all the types he lists, I'll pick out a few that stood out to me. First there are the despairs of possibility and necessity. The former is common enough: there are so many things that you could be that you're too busy exploring them or getting excited about them to actually become them. SK says that here "the self runs away from itself", hoping to chase all the possibilities available to it. The latter (despair over necessity) was the more interesting one for me. This is referring to things like Philistinism or anyone with a profound lack of faith (i.e. things *have* to be a certain way). SK talks about how probability is actually antithetical to possibility by "carrying [possibility] like a prisoner in a cage". He relates this to his concept of the absurd (which we saw in F&T) and says how all humans know that their destruction (death) is inevitable (a necessity), but its faith (possibility) that they use to not live in despair at all times. The belief that the universe (God) acts of its own will that is unpredictable to us is a source of hope (possibility) in the face of cold, hard necessity.
He goes on to talk about conscious and unconscious despair and as awareness of despair increases, so too does the suffering and proximity to God. The idea is eventually to humble yourself before God and allow him to help you with your despair. This line of thought continues into the much less interesting Part Second about sin. SK says that despair is sin and that it is a sin that is committed at every instant, so that only God can deliver us from it. I found this chapter circuitous and not incredibly valuable, especially when compared to the psychological analysis SK presented in Part First.
The bits that appealed to me in both F&T and Sickness were definitely the parts that smelled of existentialism. Interestingly, I encountered existentialism in a sort of reverse chronological order, reading SK (the Father of Existentialism) last. Something that really rubbed me wrong with SK that isn't the case in Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and others is that the Absurd is represented by God and has a will. Maybe this is the part of me that SK talks about feeling "offense" at Christianity. The offense comes from people unwilling to accept help from all-powerful Father and unwilling to humble themselves before Him. Maybe that's me. At any rate, I'd much rather prefer to place the individual above God, blasphemous though it may be, because at the end of the day, that's all I have. I live my own life and if the universe doesn't have any meaning, maybe I can use that to add some to my life, by contrast.
All in all, definitely a challenging read, but glad I finally got to read the Father of Existentialism.
December 20, 2024
Both works contained here (but especially 'Fear & Trembling' ) are impossible to critique. One can only dialogue, interact, and dwell with these works. Kierkegaard has his flaws, overwrought prose among them, but his insights and positions are so pivotal for modern ways of life. Especially someone like me, a mere novice who is just beginning, to rate Kierkegaard is a fools task. Yet to not do it, to merely read and then move on without any reflection would be ever more foolish.
'Fear & Trembling' beautifully articulates the foolishness of faith. By taking the story of Abraham and Issac (God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son), Kierkegaard explores the absurdity of faith. To him, or at least the pseudonym, the normal state of things is to try and mirror the ethical which is the universal. The universal rules of humanity are the moral principles we (generally) agree on. Faith, however, is the individual placing themselves over the universal. It's an absurdity and yet Abraham became the Father of Faith precisely because of that absurdity. Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham's moment of faith with other figures who sacrifice their children. He highlights Agamemnon's own moment of sacrifice. In Kierkegaard's own words, "Abraham's whole action stands in relation to the universal. It's a wholly private undertaking." Agamemnon's, on the other hand, necessarily revolves around the armies and ships at his command. Fear & trembling come in to view when we think of how absurd it would be to live like that, the depravity of such actions if they were not in faith, and the burden or weight of discernment.
That ties into the second text which I found less clear. 'Sickness Unto Death' recounts despair as the 'mood' (to borrow Heideggerian terminology. Much of my own understanding of these texts were through those lens and I found obvious and subtle connections between the two thinkers that deserve closer study) of humanity. We are either in despair at not willing to be oneself or in despair at willing to be oneself. He spends much of the text exploring what those means but it's not very clear. What is clear, however, is that Sin is the knowledge of despair before God. Sin is a positive position, as opposed to a negative in the classical sense, of not being grounded in God. Faith, the opposite of sin in this system, is the willingness to be grounded in God (more or less, I left out some jargon.) It's beautiful and worth reflection. By no means classical theism, it retains much force and power. Much of the second half is about Sin and how Sin is key to God's Revelation because only through Revelation are we aware of Sin. "Orthodoxy insists that there must be a revelation from God in order to teach fallen man what sin is..." is one such quote. A clear connection between the two works is that Kierkegaard holds that man is individual before God and the grace of Christianity is that we are able to be called akin to God. Such akinship, however, means that "the whole weight of this falls upon him in fear and trembling."
Also in these texts are critiques of casual Christianity, mindless apologetics, and other forms of defense. They are more or less compelling but by no means the main thrust of the texts. Someone more familiar with Hegel would likely get more from these texts as well. As I (eventually) open up Hegel, Kierkegaard will be opened up as well. Wrestling with Kierkegaard was a pleasure and one any serious person ought to do as well. It will be too long before I get the chance to read these again.
'Fear & Trembling' beautifully articulates the foolishness of faith. By taking the story of Abraham and Issac (God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son), Kierkegaard explores the absurdity of faith. To him, or at least the pseudonym, the normal state of things is to try and mirror the ethical which is the universal. The universal rules of humanity are the moral principles we (generally) agree on. Faith, however, is the individual placing themselves over the universal. It's an absurdity and yet Abraham became the Father of Faith precisely because of that absurdity. Kierkegaard contrasts Abraham's moment of faith with other figures who sacrifice their children. He highlights Agamemnon's own moment of sacrifice. In Kierkegaard's own words, "Abraham's whole action stands in relation to the universal. It's a wholly private undertaking." Agamemnon's, on the other hand, necessarily revolves around the armies and ships at his command. Fear & trembling come in to view when we think of how absurd it would be to live like that, the depravity of such actions if they were not in faith, and the burden or weight of discernment.
That ties into the second text which I found less clear. 'Sickness Unto Death' recounts despair as the 'mood' (to borrow Heideggerian terminology. Much of my own understanding of these texts were through those lens and I found obvious and subtle connections between the two thinkers that deserve closer study) of humanity. We are either in despair at not willing to be oneself or in despair at willing to be oneself. He spends much of the text exploring what those means but it's not very clear. What is clear, however, is that Sin is the knowledge of despair before God. Sin is a positive position, as opposed to a negative in the classical sense, of not being grounded in God. Faith, the opposite of sin in this system, is the willingness to be grounded in God (more or less, I left out some jargon.) It's beautiful and worth reflection. By no means classical theism, it retains much force and power. Much of the second half is about Sin and how Sin is key to God's Revelation because only through Revelation are we aware of Sin. "Orthodoxy insists that there must be a revelation from God in order to teach fallen man what sin is..." is one such quote. A clear connection between the two works is that Kierkegaard holds that man is individual before God and the grace of Christianity is that we are able to be called akin to God. Such akinship, however, means that "the whole weight of this falls upon him in fear and trembling."
Also in these texts are critiques of casual Christianity, mindless apologetics, and other forms of defense. They are more or less compelling but by no means the main thrust of the texts. Someone more familiar with Hegel would likely get more from these texts as well. As I (eventually) open up Hegel, Kierkegaard will be opened up as well. Wrestling with Kierkegaard was a pleasure and one any serious person ought to do as well. It will be too long before I get the chance to read these again.
September 1, 2025
"Fear and Trembling," focuses on the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. Kierkegaard uses this narrative to explore the nature of true faith, which he argues cannot be comprehended through rational or ethical reasoning alone. Key to this work is the concept of the "knight of faith"—an individual who makes the “leap of faith,” embracing the absurd and suspending ethical norms out of absolute trust in God’s command. Kierkegaard contrasts this figure with the "knight of infinite resignation," who accepts loss but does not believe in the absurd restoration faith promises. The book grapples with the paradox that genuine faith often appears irrational yet requires profound courage and individuality, challenging readers to confront the tension between universal ethics and personal belief.
In contrast, "The Sickness Unto Death" delves into the psychological and spiritual condition Kierkegaard terms "despair," which he sees as a sickness of the self—a failure to achieve true selfhood by aligning with one's true nature as a spirit rooted in relation to God. Kierkegaard categorizes despair into forms reflecting ignorance or rebellion against this selfhood, emphasizing that despair is both a universal human condition and a source of existential crisis. The text presents the self as a synthesis of the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, and argues that overcoming despair requires a conscious willingness to relate properly to God. This work is a profound inquiry into identity, authenticity, and the human struggle to find eternal significance beyond temporal existence.
Together, these works examine deeply personal and paradoxical aspects of existence—how faith transcends reason in "Fear and Trembling," and how despair challenges the coherence of self in "The Sickness Unto Death." Both highlight Kierkegaard’s commitment to the individual's subjective experience as central to meaning, faith, and authenticity. They also prefigure key existentialist concerns with anxiety, choice, and authentic being. Kierkegaard invites readers not only to contemplate the divine-human relationship but to confront the demanding psychological realities of living a fully authentic life amidst uncertainty and paradox.
These texts offer a profound exploration of the spiritual and existential challenges that define the human condition, emphasizing that meaning and selfhood emerge through personal commitment and the courageous embrace of life’s profound uncertainties.
In contrast, "The Sickness Unto Death" delves into the psychological and spiritual condition Kierkegaard terms "despair," which he sees as a sickness of the self—a failure to achieve true selfhood by aligning with one's true nature as a spirit rooted in relation to God. Kierkegaard categorizes despair into forms reflecting ignorance or rebellion against this selfhood, emphasizing that despair is both a universal human condition and a source of existential crisis. The text presents the self as a synthesis of the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, and argues that overcoming despair requires a conscious willingness to relate properly to God. This work is a profound inquiry into identity, authenticity, and the human struggle to find eternal significance beyond temporal existence.
Together, these works examine deeply personal and paradoxical aspects of existence—how faith transcends reason in "Fear and Trembling," and how despair challenges the coherence of self in "The Sickness Unto Death." Both highlight Kierkegaard’s commitment to the individual's subjective experience as central to meaning, faith, and authenticity. They also prefigure key existentialist concerns with anxiety, choice, and authentic being. Kierkegaard invites readers not only to contemplate the divine-human relationship but to confront the demanding psychological realities of living a fully authentic life amidst uncertainty and paradox.
These texts offer a profound exploration of the spiritual and existential challenges that define the human condition, emphasizing that meaning and selfhood emerge through personal commitment and the courageous embrace of life’s profound uncertainties.
October 19, 2019
Reading this was an entirely new experience for me, in that it presupposed a familiarity with, and at times a belief in, Christian concepts which I have previously looked upon without emotion. But holy shit. Kierkegaard's writing is probably the most emotionally and morally gripping I've ever encountered. Every sentence feels like it demands thought not just to intellectually comprehend but also to morally work-through, and there are large parts of both works here I feel like I could go over again and again. Ultimately I am not sure how I stand on many of SK's "conclusions" about Christianity/the world, but I am also not sure I understand them appropriately to have a "position" on them. And I fully recognize that taking up any sort of intellectual/argumentative response to much of what he is saying is entirely missing the point of his message! Moreover, I am somewhat afraid to admit it, but I found myself moved and even shaken by the conception of faith/paradox/the absurd, and how it relates to the question of "silence" which SK (and Witt) discusses. Both works here are great and jam-packed with devastating power. I probably slightly prefer Fear and Trembling because I think the way he goes through the Abraham exposition is just haunting, but the extended psychological and sociological character of The Sickness is also brilliant. It deserves mentioning that the writing also abounds with wit, beauty, and even humor; though all of that does get overshadowed by the intense moral seriousness of the bulk of things. In a sense all SK is writing here is "self-help," but it is self-help that leaves one exhausted from the energy required to pour into and grapple with SK's thought. Look forward to coming back to it in the future and reading other works of his.
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