Kierkegaard

Works

An authorship of pseudonyms, plus signed religious writing.

• Fear and Trembling (1843), by Johannes de Silentio, on Abraham and the teleological suspension of the ethical — written by a narrator who says he cannot understand the man he is describing.
• The Concept of Anxiety (1844) analyses anxiety as the dizziness of freedom.
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) contains the case that subjectivity is truth, and the declaration in which Kierkegaard denies that the pseudonyms' views are his.
• The Sickness Unto Death (1849), by Anti-Climacus, is the analysis of despair as a misrelation of the self to itself.
• Works of Love (1847), signed, distinguishes commanded love of the neighbour from preferential love.

Central ideas

Five, and the last is the one this work has most reason to notice.

• Anxiety is not fear. Fear has an object; anxiety is about possibility itself — the dizziness that comes with being able to do otherwise. It discloses freedom rather than signalling a fault.
• Despair as a misrelation of the self to itself, and — the decisive move — despair that need not be conscious. On his account the commonest form is the kind the person does not know they are in.
• Subjectivity is truth: for questions about how to live, HOW something is held — with what passion, at what risk — is part of what makes it true for the one holding it. It is a claim about appropriation, not a licence for relativism about facts.
• The stages: aesthetic, ethical and religious ways of organising a life, moved between by leap rather than by argument, since an argument would keep the person in the sphere they were reasoning from.
• Indirect communication: a truth about existence cannot be delivered, so the writing arranges for the reader to arrive at it. The pseudonyms are the technique, and he insisted in print that they not be quoted as him.

Distinctive vocabulary

Four terms that popular use has emptied.

• Anxiety: relation to possibility as such, distinguished from fear by having no object. Not stress, not worry, and not angst as a mood.
• Despair: a structural misrelation of the self to itself, frequently unconscious. Not sadness and not hopelessness.
• Leap: a movement not underwritten by the reasoning that led to its edge. The phrase leap of faith is a later coinage and it flattens what the leap costs.
• The single individual: the one who cannot be represented by a category. Not individualism and not self-reliance.

Debates and disagreements

One dispute is directly about author and work.

• How to read the pseudonyms. He demanded they be cited as their fictional authors rather than as him, and scholarship differs on how far to honour that. It is a live methodological argument about the separation of a writer from a work, conducted on a corpus designed to force it.
• Whether subjectivity is truth amounts to irrationalism. Defenders hold it concerns the mode of appropriation and not the standard of truth; the text supports the reading but does not compel it.
• Whether the teleological suspension of the ethical licenses religiously motivated harm. Levinas's counter is that Abraham's genuinely ethical moment is hearing the second voice that stops him.

Intellectual relationships

An opponent, a model, and a set of heirs who took the vocabulary without the faith.

• Hegel is the polemical target — the system with no place for the existing individual — though scholars now hold the attack often lands on Danish Hegelians rather than on Hegel.
• Socrates is the model for indirect communication and for the writer who declines to hand over a result.
• Heidegger's anxiety, being-toward-death, and the anonymous everyday are heavily indebted to him and sparingly acknowledged.
• Camus, Tillich and May, all in this same lens lineage, are the twentieth-century inheritance, and each takes something different.
• Adorno wrote the standing ideology critique of the interiority.

How it changes this reading

Kierkegaard is named in the lineage of the Existential lens, and one part of his practice matters here beyond the lens.

• For the lens he supplies the founding move: the existing individual is not an instance of a general category, so an account that resolves a person into types has changed the subject rather than explained it.
• Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom gives the lens a way to read difficulty as disclosing possibility rather than as malfunction — which is a different claim from saying difficulty is good.
• The pseudonymity is the part that bears on this work's method rather than on its lens. He wrote an entire authorship under names he disclaimed, precisely to keep a text from being read as its author's report, and then had to say so in print because readers did it anyway. That is the oldest version of the problem this work is built around.
• It is not evidence about anyone's anxiety, despair, faith, or interior state.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four figures, and one of them refuses him by name.

• Søren Kierkegaard: the single individual, anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, despair as misrelation, and the leap.
• Paul Tillich: ultimate concern and the courage to be, which translate the religious into a category available without a confession.
• Albert Camus: the absurd held without resolution, and revolt without appeal.
• Rollo May: the same vocabulary carried into psychotherapy, where anxiety becomes something a clinician meets.

Where the ideas meet

All four refuse the same consolation.

• None treats a life as a problem a system can solve on the person's behalf.
• All four read anxiety as disclosing something about a situation rather than as a simple malfunction.
• Each holds that how a person holds a commitment matters and not only what they hold.

Where they part

This lineage contains a named refusal, which makes it unusable as a single position.

• Camus rejects the leap explicitly, calling it philosophical suicide: for him the absurd must be held without resolution, and Kierkegaard resolves it. Citing the two together for an existential outlook joins a position to its published refutation.
• Tillich's ultimate concern is deliberately available to someone with no religious commitment; Kierkegaard's category is specifically Christian and specifically scandalous, and the generalisation is what he would have objected to.
• May's clinical frame makes anxiety something to be worked with therapeutically, which sits awkwardly beside the claim that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom and not a disorder.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and two limits are unusually hard.

• The pseudonymous works do not state his views, on his own instruction. A quotation from Johannes de Silentio or Anti-Climacus is a quotation from a constructed author.
• Despair in his sense is most often unconscious, which makes attributing it to anyone unfalsifiable by construction — no behaviour could count against the attribution, so nothing here may rest on it.
• The concepts describe conditions of existence, not diagnoses, and the vocabulary supplies no evidence about conduct or interior life.

Criticisms

The objections come from inside and outside the tradition.

• The teleological suspension of the ethical has been read as licensing religiously motivated harm, and Levinas's counter-reading is the standing reply.
• Adorno's charge that the interiority is a withdrawal from social conditions rather than a depth beneath them.
• The pseudonymity makes responsible citation genuinely difficult, and most citations disregard the instruction he left.
• The polemic against Hegel frequently misses its stated target.
• The late attack on the Danish church is extreme, and its standing within the authorship is disputed.

Common misreadings

Five uses this placement does not license.

• Attributing a pseudonymous statement to Kierkegaard, which he explicitly asked readers not to do.
• Using leap of faith for any belief held without evidence; the leap follows resignation and is a specific movement rather than a shrug.
• Using anxiety or angst loosely for stress or worry, which drops the distinction from fear that the whole analysis rests on.
• Reading the stages as developmental steps a person completes in order.
• Attributing despair to a person, which his own account makes unfalsifiable since its commonest form is the kind nobody reports.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's anxiety, despair, or faith.
• It cannot convert a category of existence into a description of a life.