KIERKEGAARD, SØREN

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on May 5. A prolific author, he produced an impressive series of books devoted to philosophical and religious themes, including a parallel series published under various pseudonyms. He is perhaps best known for his critical engagement with the guiding values of Protestant Christendom in the mid-nineteenth century. Fearing that Christianity had become dangerously enmeshed in the bourgeois malaise sweeping Europe at the time, he urged his readers to aspire to lives of greater passion, intensity, inwardness, and faith. In a sustained provocation that won him few contemporary admirers, he vowed to reintroduce the practice of Christianity into Christendom.

Kierkegaard's most influential pseudonymous work, Fear and Trembling (1843), challenges the primacy assigned to the universality of ethical life. With specific reference to the biblical story of Abraham on Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard raises the possibility that some religious obligations may actually trump the recognized ethical obligations of contemporary Christian practice. As indicated, supposedly, by the trial of Abraham, the pursuit of faith may eventually oblige individuals to seek the truth of their existence beyond the ethical universal, in the religious sphere. Through his pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, Kierkegaard alleges that the "greatness" of Abraham remains an anomaly within contemporary Christian belief and practice. Abraham can be considered "great" only by virtue of his faith, and the most compelling expression of his faith was his decision to obey his God's command to sacrifice his only son Isaac. If Johannes is correct in his analysis, then the "greatness" of Abraham is inextricably linked to his willingness to perform what Johannes calls a "teleological suspension of the ethical," that is, an abrogation of his moral obligations in the service of a higher, religious obligation.

Some readers insist at this point that Kierkegaard simply misidentifies or exaggerates the "greatness" of Abraham. Still others allow that Christians continue to honor Abraham only as a symbol of their Judaic prehistory. Yet, the point Kierkegaard raises bears further consideration: Do people not, at least occasionally, admire individuals who exempt themselves from acknowledged moral conventions? If so, how can people persist in their avowed allegiance to ethical universality as the highest expression of human flourishing? Do people not in fact reserve an even higher status for those "knights of faith" who, like Kierkegaard's Abraham, sacrifice morality for a supposedly higher purpose?

As these questions indicate, Kierkegaard's critical engagement with conventional morality was motivated in large part by the overriding value he attaches to the life of authentic individuality. Although conventional morality serves most people, most of the time, as a perfectly adequate expression of their humanity, it proves to be inadequate, and even inhospitable, to those who seek an authentic, singular existence. The individuals whom Kierkegaard most admired find the truth of their existence not outside themselves (for example, in public expressions of the ethical universal), but within themselves, in the passion and spirit that constitute their essential inwardness. The greatest expression of inwardness, he further believed, is faith, wherein the individual is raised above the ethical universal and placed in an absolute relationship to God. Kierkegaard thus concluded that conventional morality may actually pose a formidable obstacle to the pursuit of a life of faith.

Kierkegaard rarely commented directly on the rise of modern technology, but his writings are peppered with insights into the subtle ways in which emerging technologies contribute to the overall leveling of social life. The busyness that defines life in the modern epoch is both supported and exacerbated by the introduction of technological wonders, which enable modern people to distract themselves ever more effectively from their spiritual emptiness. While not the cause of the spiritual poverty that Kierkegaard detects around him, technology encourages people to postpone indefinitely the difficult regimen of self-examination and introspection that he prescribed.

Toward the end of his life, Kierkegaard engaged in an increasingly vituperative attack on the Danish state church, which, he believed, had fallen captive to the dispassionate values of bourgeois modernity. Owing in part to the fallout from this attack, he died in disrepute on November 11. Since the time of his death, however, his philosophical reputation has grown steadily. In the early twenty-first century he is widely read for his pioneering contributions to depth psychology; his prescient criticisms of the spread of bourgeois values; his fresh interpretations of Christian faith and practice; his astute observations on contemporary political life; his challenge to ethical universality; and, perhaps most prominently, his spirited defense of authentic individuality.

DANIEL CONWAY

SEE ALSO Alienation;Existentialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arbaugh, George E., and George B. Arbaugh. (1967). Kierkegaard's Authorship: A Guide to the Writings of Kierkegaard. Rock Island, IL: Augustana College Library.

Hannay, Alastair. (2001). Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kierkegaard, Søren. (1985). Fear and Trembling, trans. and introduction by Alastair Hannay. New York: Viking Penguin.

Kierkegaard, Søren. (1989). Sickness unto Death, trans. and introduction by Alastair Hannay. New York: Viking Penguin.

Kierkegaard, Søren. (1997). Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. and trans. with introduction and notes by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.