Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard wrote in nineteenth-century Copenhagen, in Danish, under a small forest of pseudonyms — Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, Constantin Constantius — each given their own voice and position. He thought direct philosophical communication couldn't reach what he wanted to reach. You had to be tricked into noticing your own situation.

His enemy was Hegel — or more precisely, the System, the assumption that philosophy could absorb the individual into a totality that made sense of everything. Kierkegaard's answer was the existing individual, irreducibly particular, whose decisions cannot be settled by abstract reasoning. *Either/Or* (1843) stages the choice between the aesthetic life (immediate, sensuous, ultimately empty) and the ethical life (committed, responsible, oriented to duty). Later works push past the ethical to the religious — the highest stage in Kierkegaard's existence-scheme.

*Fear and Trembling* (1843), under the Johannes de Silentio pseudonym, is the book on Abraham. Asked by God to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham must suspend the ethical (do not murder your son) for the sake of the religious (obey God absolutely). The book is an extended meditation on what Abraham must have felt, and whether the leap of faith — irreducible to ethical reasoning — is anything we can recognize from the outside. Kierkegaard thinks it isn't; faith is essentially incommunicable, lived in fear and trembling, in absolute solitude before God.

*Concluding Unscientific Postscript* (1846) is the methodological masterpiece — the longest argument in his work for why subjectivity is truth, why objective uncertainty held fast in the passion of inwardness is what faith actually is. He died at forty-two, exhausted by his polemic against the established Danish church.

Twentieth-century existentialism — Sartre, Marcel, Jaspers, Tillich, the early Heidegger — all run through Kierkegaard. So does dialectical theology (Barth). The pseudonymous strategy makes him hard to quote responsibly; what *Kierkegaard* thinks and what *Anti-Climacus* says are not necessarily the same thing, and this is by design.