# Søren Kierkegaard > *Edited for clarity by the editorial review* **19th Century (1813–1855) | Existentialism / Christian Philosophy** --- ## 1. First Principles Let me begin—not with a system, but with a confession. I do not start with Being, or with Spirit knowing itself, or with the World-Soul unfolding through history. I start with something far more scandalous: **the single existing individual**. That is my first principle. Before all abstraction, before every system, before Hegel's *Begriff* (his concept of the "Concept," which would swallow up the particular into the universal), there stands **you**—this existing human being, this concrete self, who must live, choose, and die. I take as given that existence precedes essence—meaning that no abstract concept can fully capture what it means to be human. A chair is fully defined by its concept; a human is not. We are a **synthesis** (a unity of opposites) of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of necessity and possibility. To be human is to be this unstable unity, this constant task of becoming what one is—not like a plant simply unfolding its seed, but through passionate inwardness, through choice, through the dreadful freedom that comes with being a self before God. I take as given that **truth is subjectivity**. This does not mean "anything goes." It means that the truth that matters most—the truth by which you live and die—cannot be handed to you on a silver platter of propositions. You must make it your own inwardly, with infinite passion, in the face of objective uncertainty. I take as given that anxiety (*Angest*) is the dizziness of freedom, that despair (*Fortvivlelse*) is the sickness unto death, and that the single individual stands higher than the crowd. The crowd is untruth. --- ## 2. The Meaning of Life Now to your question: What is the meaning of life? I must answer not with a formula but with a direction. ### The goal: becoming a self before God The meaning of human existence is **to become a self before God**—to pass through the aesthetic, the ethical, and finally the religious stages of existence, each of which must be *lived*, not merely thought about. Life's meaning is not discovered through detached contemplation; it is won through the terror and sweetness of passionate choice. ### The aesthetic stage In the **aesthetic stage**, one lives for immediate pleasure, for the interesting, for the erotic and the reflective. The aesthete—like the seducer Johannes in *Either/Or*, Part I—tries to escape boredom through novelty. But this life collapses into despair because it has no eternal validity. The aesthete's "meaning" is a mirage that keeps receding. ### The ethical stage In the **ethical stage**, one lives by the universal demand of duty. Judge William in *Either/Or*, Part II, shows us the beauty of marriage, vocation, and moral seriousness. Here meaning is found in fulfilling one's role in life, in being a good person according to universal moral law. This is noble—but it is not yet the highest. ### The religious stage The **religious stage**—and here I mean specifically Christian existence—is where the individual enters a **teleological suspension of the ethical** (a suspension of ordinary morality for a higher, God-given purpose). Abraham, the knight of faith in *Fear and Trembling*, is willing to sacrifice Isaac. From the ethical standpoint, he is a murderer. From the religious standpoint, he is a man of faith. He cannot make his act understandable to anyone; he must stand in an absolute relation to the Absolute, alone, trembling, in fear and trembling. ### The final answer The meaning of life, then, is not happiness, not prosperity, not the realization of Reason in history. It is to become a Christian—not in the easy, cultural, "Christendom" sense of going to church on Sunday, but in the terrifying sense of a single individual risking everything on an **absolute paradox**: that the eternal, infinite God entered time as a particular human being. This cannot be proven. It must be believed, and faith is the highest passion—a risky, uncertain, passionate inward appropriation. --- ## 3. Actionable Insights If my philosophy were a program to be applied, it would betray itself. Yet I can point to ways of *existing*. **First: Stop being a spectator.** Do not live at second hand—reading about life in the newspapers, adopting the opinions of the crowd, letting the "Public" think for you. The crowd is untruth. Withdraw into the inwardness of your own existence. As I wrote in my journals: "The thing is to find a truth which is true *for me*, to find the idea for which I can live and die." **Second: Cultivate passion over certainty.** You will never have enough evidence to be safe in the most important decisions—whether to marry, whether to believe in God, what work to devote yourself to. The objective uncertainty is precisely what makes the leap of faith possible. Do not wait for proof; jump. The meaning is in the leap, not in the landing. **Third: Embrace anxiety as your teacher.** When you feel anxious, you are touching the vertigo of freedom. You are realizing that you must choose, that no system or adviser can choose for you. Do not numb this feeling. Let it drive you toward earnestness (*Alvor*). **Fourth: Practice the "Purity of Heart" that wills one thing.** In the book by that title, I wrote that to will one thing is to will the Good in truth—not for reward, not for reputation, but because it is the Good. Simplify your existence. Strip away the many distractions, the many loves, the many cares. **Fifth: Read alone, pray alone, die alone.** You enter existence alone, and you leave it alone. Face this solitariness, and in it, find yourself standing before God. Then the company of others becomes genuine fellowship rather than a flight from yourself. --- ## 4. Contrarian View / Strawman An honest opponent might say: *"Kierkegaard, you have made life impossibly difficult. You demand that each individual become a knight of faith, that every choice be made with infinite passion, that we reject the comfort of shared moral rules. But is this not a recipe for paralysis? If every decision must be a life-or-death leap, the ordinary person—the baker, the mother, the farmer—cannot live this way. Your philosophy is an aristocratic spiritual athleticism for the few, not a way of life for human beings. Moreover, your emphasis on subjectivity opens the door to fanaticism. If truth is subjectivity, then any lunatic who passionately believes he is Napoleon is as valid as a saint. Your rejection of objectivity leaves us with no way to distinguish genuine faith from self-assertion. And your attack on the crowd is itself a corruption: does not the mother raising her child in love—a task you call 'aesthetic'—participate in the eternal just as deeply as Abraham on Mount Moriah? You have drawn the line between the ethical and the religious too sharply, and in doing so, you have abandoned the ordinary believer to an impossible standard."* ### My response I hear this objection, and I must respond gravely. **First:** I have never said that every individual must be Abraham. The knight of faith is a *paradox* that cannot be distinguished from the tax collector. The true knight of faith looks exactly like the most ordinary of men—he enjoys his dinner, walks with his wife, delights in the finite—and yet in the inwardness of his spirit, he has made the double movement of infinite resignation and faith. My philosophy is not for an elite; it is for everyone, but it demands that everyone become **subjective** (deeply, personally engaged). **Second:** Truth as subjectivity is not "whatever I feel like believing." It is the *how* of belief, not the *what*. The passionate believer in a falsehood is still in untruth precisely because he faces the infinite challenge of the God-relationship with an inadequate object. The Christian paradox—the God-man—provides an objective content that is not arbitrary. Subjectivity is not license; it is infinite passion directed at the absolute paradox. **Third:** The mother raising her child in love is not merely aesthetic—she may be living the ethical with religious inwardness. I have been misunderstood as despising the ordinary. I do not. I want to elevate the ordinary by making it a vessel of the eternal. As for the charge of impossibility: precisely. The task is impossible. That is why we need grace. That is why faith is a gift. My philosophy does not make life easy; it makes life a task. And that is the meaning. --- ## 5. Final Reflection I have written under pseudonyms. I have suffered the scorn of my age, the mockery of the *Corsair* (a satirical magazine), the condescension of the Hegelians. I died young, in the street, refusing the last sacrament from a priest who was an officer of the state-church—a church that had, in my view, betrayed Christianity. I leave behind no system, no world-historical philosophy, no building blocks for a future university department. I leave behind something more fragile and more urgent: a mirror. Look into it. You will not see my face. You will see your own. And you will be asked: **Are you a Christian?** Not "were you born in one." Not "do you go to church on Sunday." But *are you*—in the inwardness of your existence, before God, in fear and trembling? That is the only question that matters. The meaning of life is the task of becoming what you are. And you are a self. And the self must choose. And the choice is everything. If you would, I have written something in *Concluding Unscientific Postscript* that may serve as my epitaph: "Subjectivity is truth, subjectivity is reality." — *S. Kierkegaard* --- ## 6. Strengthened Through Critique ### Weak Point 1: The Non-Cognitivist Trap **The problem.** Kierkegaard defines truth as subjectivity—passionate inward appropriation before objective uncertainty. But this formulation plays on two meanings of "truth." If I passionately appropriate a false proposition—say, that the moon is made of green cheese—I have the "how" (infinite passion) without the "what" (correspondence to reality). Kierkegaard's response (Section 4) insists that the Christian paradox supplies objective content, but he never explains *which* paradoxes qualify. Why does "God became man in Jesus" count as the absolute paradox, while "the Prophet Muhammad received the Qur'an" does not? By vaguely invoking "the how, not the what," he risks collapsing into **non-cognitivism** (the view that religious language expresses emotion or commitment rather than making truth claims). If Kierkegaard means something stronger—that the paradox is *objectively true*—then he smuggles in the very correspondence theory of truth he claimed to transcend, and the critic is entitled to ask for evidence. **The counterargument.** Either Kierkegaard's doctrine reduces to "it is true for me" (a psychological report, not a metaphysical claim), or it secretly depends on a dogmatic Christian metaphysics that universal reason cannot endorse. In the first case, he cannot refute the fanatic; in the second, he has abandoned the radical individualism of the leap and fallen back on church authority. **A strengthened revision.** Kierkegaard should explicitly distinguish *truth as appropriation* (subjective truth) from *truth as correspondence* (objective truth) without collapsing one into the other. The meaning of life hinges on subjective truth—whether one *relates correctly* to what is objectively ultimate. This requires two independently justified claims: (a) that the Christian revelation is the most adequate object for infinite passion (a modest, arguable thesis about fittingness), and (b) that the *how* of appropriation constitutes the meaning of life, not because it generates truth, but because it constitutes authentic existence. This preserves the leap while conceding that objective-historical scholarship can and should inform *which* paradox is worthy of one's infinite passion. ### Weak Point 2: The Individuation Problem for "The Crowd is Untruth" **The problem.** Kierkegaard's attack on "the crowd" (Section 3) as the source of inauthenticity conflates *social dependency* (uncritically adopting beliefs from others) with *sociality as such* (the inescapable fact that human beings are shaped by language, culture, and relationships). A self that withdraws entirely into inwardness does not find pure self-presence; it finds a self already shaped by its historical and social context. The mother raising her child is not "merely aesthetic" but is engaged in a fundamentally relational way of being that Kierkegaard's framework cannot fully honor, because it treats shared moral rules as something to be surpassed. **The counterargument.** If the crowd is untruth, and universal moral rules must be "teleologically suspended," then every social bond—friendship, citizenship, parenthood—is merely a temporary rung on a ladder one ultimately kicks away. This is not an elevation of the ordinary but a radical **solipsism** (the view that only the self exists) that makes genuine community impossible to understand. **A strengthened revision.** Kierkegaard should introduce a *post-suspension return to the ethical*—a second immediacy in which the knight of faith re-enters and lives within shared moral life, but with transformed inwardness. Abraham's ordeal is a crisis, not a permanent way of life; the meaning lies in re-entering the human community as one who has stood alone before God and now loves the finite *through and because of* the absolute relation. This parallels his own structure of the "double movement": infinite resignation, then the leap of faith, then the joyful reception of the finite. Articulating this as a *reconciliation with society* rather than a permanent break would strengthen the account without abandoning the existential core. ### Weak Point 3: The Normative Vacuum of the Leap **The problem.** The demand to "leap without evidence" (Section 3) is compelling as a description of existential commitment, but it provides no way to tell *good* leaps from *bad* ones. A woman leaping into an abusive marriage, a devotee leaping into a destructive cult, and Abraham leaping toward Moriah all exhibit passionate inward appropriation. Kierkegaard cannot distinguish these cases without appealing to the very objective standards (shared moral rules, rational deliberation) he claims to set aside. **The counterargument.** Without a way to judge *when* the suspension of ethics is justified, Kierkegaard's philosophy licenses any extremist act committed with enough inward passion. This is not a defense of faith but a recipe for moral catastrophe. **A strengthened revision.** Kierkegaard should concede that shared moral rules are *presumptively binding* (they hold unless there is an extraordinary reason to set them aside) and that setting them aside for a higher purpose requires a very specific justification: the individual must experience an *absolute duty to God* that is *incommunicable* (cannot be explained to others in universal terms) and that arises from a *God-relationship already established through ethical striving*. This is not "leap first, ask later"—it is "live the ethical life wholeheartedly, and only then discern whether the Absolute calls you beyond it." This makes Abraham's test understandable as a limit-case rather than a template for everyday decisions. The meaning of life, then, is not the suspension of ethics but the infinite deepening of ethical existence until it opens onto the religious. --- **Revised Summary of Kierkegaard's Strengthened Position:** The meaning of life is **to become a self before God**—which requires (1) distinguishing subjective appropriation from objective truth without collapsing one into the other, (2) recognizing that the religious stage re-enters and transforms social life rather than abandoning it, and (3) treating the "teleological suspension of the ethical" as an extraordinary limit-case, not a general rule. The leap of faith is real, but it is a leap that ethical life has *prepared you for*—a leap made ready by earnest striving, sustained by a community of faith, and aimed at a God whose revelation shapes the content of our passion. The single individual stands higher than the crowd, but the crowd—when each member stands individually before God—is the church. And that, perhaps, is where the meaning is finally lived: not in the solitary peak of Mount Moriah, but in the ordinary, terrifying, and joyful task of loving the finite as a gift from the infinite. --- ## Reading Guide If you are new to Kierkegaard and want to explore his ideas further, start with *Fear and Trembling*—it is his most dramatic and accessible work, telling the story of Abraham and Isaac to explore faith, ethics, and the individual's relationship with God. Follow it with *Either/Or*, which presents the contrast between the pleasure-seeking "aesthetic" life and the dutiful "ethical" life through two fictional authors. Remember that Kierkegaard wrote many of his works under playful pseudonyms, so treat each voice as a character making a case rather than Kierkegaard himself speaking directly—this is part of his method, not a trick. The key is not to "agree" with him but to let his questions unsettle you, because for Kierkegaard, a question that disturbs your comfortable assumptions is already doing its work.