Existentialism & the Absurd
Foundations
Existentialism, the Absurd, historical contextKierkegaard
Subjectivity, despair, leap of faithSartre
Freedom, bad faith, authenticityCamus
The Absurd, Sisyphus, revoltCore Themes
Freedom, anxiety, meaning, alienationKey Thinkers
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Beauvoir, KafkaExistential Ethics
Responsibility, authenticity, guiltExistential Psychology
Therapy, meaning, modern applicationsLiterature & Art
Key works, absurd narratives, cinemaModern Applications
AI, business, society, existential riskAdvanced Topics
Absurdism vs nihilism, time, death, identityThe Man Behind the Pseudonyms
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) lived a short, intense life almost entirely within the city limits of Copenhagen. He never held a university post, never married, never traveled much. By the time he died at 42, he had produced one of the most original bodies of philosophical and religious writing in the West — much of it published under elaborate pseudonyms (Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Johannes de Silentio, Vigilius Haufniensis) so that the reader would have to wrestle with the ideas for themselves, without leaning on the author's authority.
A Life of Inwardness
Kierkegaard's father was a wool merchant and a brooding, guilt-ridden Pietist who once, as a starving shepherd boy, cursed God on a Jutland heath. Søren grew up convinced his family was under divine punishment. His "great earthquake" — the moment he glimpsed the depth of his father's guilt — shaped his lifelong concern with sin, anxiety, and the inwardness of religious life.
He inherited enough money to live without a job and spent his days walking the streets of Copenhagen, talking to people, watching the bourgeois Christianity around him with growing horror. By the end of his life, he was waging open war against the Danish State Church for what he called its "Christendom" — a comfortable, watered-down social religion that he believed had nothing to do with the terrifying personal demand of actually following Christ.
Regine and the Sacrifice
The Broken Engagement
In 1840 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, a girl ten years his junior whom he loved deeply. A year later he broke the engagement. He believed his melancholy temperament and his religious vocation made him unfit for marriage — or perhaps that he had to give her up, as Abraham gave up Isaac, to do the work he was called to do.
Regine appears, hidden, in nearly everything Kierkegaard wrote. Fear and Trembling (1843) — his great meditation on faith and sacrifice — was, on one level, a private letter to her.
Truth is Subjectivity
If you have to remember one Kierkegaard slogan, make it this one: "Truth is subjectivity." It comes from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), and it has been misunderstood for 180 years.
Kierkegaard does not mean "everyone has their own truth, who's to say." He means something far more precise — and far more disturbing.
Against the Hegelian System
The dominant philosopher of Kierkegaard's youth was G.W.F. Hegel, whose vast system attempted to show that reality itself was the unfolding of "Absolute Spirit" through rational stages — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — culminating, conveniently, in the Prussian state and Lutheran Christianity. From a great enough height, every contradiction was resolved.
Kierkegaard found this monstrous. Not because Hegel was wrong about everything, but because the System left out the one thing that mattered most: the existing individual. The professor lecturing on world-historical reason still has to go home, decide whether to marry, decide whether to believe in God, decide whether to forgive his father — and the System gives him no help at all.
The How, Not the What
"Truth is subjectivity" means: for the questions that matter most to a human life — Is God real? Should I marry? What is worth dying for? — what matters is not just what you believe (the objective content) but how you hold it (the inward passion with which you stake your life on it).
An "objective" thinker can examine Christianity from the outside, weigh the historical evidence, and conclude with cool detachment that it is "probably true." But, says Kierkegaard, that detached thinker has missed the point completely. Christianity is not a hypothesis. It is an existence-communication — a demand to bet your life. The truth of it can only be lived, in fear and trembling, by a single individual who actually leaps.
The Two Worshippers
Imagine two people in a church. The first is a Lutheran in correct doctrinal standing, who recites the creed correctly but with no inwardness — bored, distracted, going through motions. The second is a "pagan" who prays passionately to an idol with all his being.
Kierkegaard's shocking suggestion: the second person is closer to true religiousness, because truth is in the how. Objectively the pagan is in error; subjectively the Lutheran is.
The Three Stages of Existence
Across his pseudonymous works — especially Either/Or (1843) and the Stages on Life's Way (1845) — Kierkegaard maps three fundamental modes of existence. They are not just psychological types; they are spheres of life, each with its own logic, its own satisfactions, and its own characteristic despair.
1. The Aesthetic Stage
The aesthete lives for the immediate — sensation, novelty, mood, beauty, pleasure. The seducer in Either/Or is the pure type: he organizes his entire life around the pursuit of interesting experiences. He may be a hedonist, an artist, a Don Juan, a connoisseur, an ironic intellectual. What unites them is that they live in the moment and refuse binding commitments.
The aesthete's secret terror is boredom — the moment when the next experience fails to thrill, and the emptiness shows through. To stay in the aesthetic stage, you must keep running. The honest aesthete eventually discovers that he has no continuous self at all, only a string of moods. This is the despair of the aesthetic.
2. The Ethical Stage
The ethical individual has chosen herself. She has stepped out of the immediacy of mood and committed to universal duties: marriage, work, citizenship, parenthood, the keeping of promises. Where the aesthete asks "Is it interesting?", the ethical person asks "Is it right?"
Kierkegaard largely admires this — Judge William, the spokesman for the ethical in Either/Or, gets some of the best writing in the book. But the ethical too has its limit. The ethical demand is universal; it speaks to anyone in your situation. But what about you, in your unrepeatable particularity? What about your guilt, which no universal rule can wash away? The ethical, taken seriously, drives you to the edge of itself.
3. The Religious Stage
The religious individual stands before God as this single one, beyond what any universal rule can capture. Kierkegaard distinguishes two sub-stages — Religiousness A (a general religiousness available to anyone, marked by inwardness, guilt, and resignation) and Religiousness B (specifically Christian, defined by the Incarnation as an "absolute paradox" that reason cannot dissolve).
The transition from ethical to religious is not a smooth ascent. It is a leap. And it is here that Kierkegaard introduces his most disturbing example: Abraham.
Anxiety & Despair
Two of Kierkegaard's most influential works dissect the moods that haunt every stage: The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849). Modern psychology — from Freud to existential therapy — would be unthinkable without them.
The Dizziness of Freedom
In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard makes a sharp distinction between fear and anxiety (Angst). Fear has an object: you fear the dog, the exam, the diagnosis. Anxiety has no specific object — it is a mood that arises from the bare fact of being free.
Anxiety, Kierkegaard insists, is not a pathology. It is the educator of the spirit — the inward signal that you are a free being who must choose. To never feel anxiety is to be spiritually asleep. The challenge is to learn to live in anxiety without being destroyed by it.
The Three Forms of Despair
In The Sickness Unto Death, written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard offers what may be the most penetrating typology of despair ever written. The "self," he says, is a relation that relates itself to itself — a tension between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and necessity. Despair is the misrelation of that self to itself.
1. Despair of Not Being Conscious of Having a Self
The most common form. You are in despair, but you don't know it. You live a comfortable, distracted, conventional life — career, hobbies, consumption — and never stop to ask whether you are truly the self you were called to be. This, Kierkegaard says, is despair too: maybe the worst, because you can't even feel it.
2. Despair of Not Willing to Be Oneself (Weakness)
You feel the call to be a deeper self, but you flinch. You want to be someone else — anyone else. You distract, you drink, you scroll, you envy. The pain is real but you do not face its source. You despair of yourself but lack the courage to be yourself.
3. Despair of Willing to Be Oneself (Defiance)
The most spiritually advanced — and the most dangerous. You will to be yourself, but on your own terms alone, with no acknowledgment of the Power that posits the self. You make yourself the author of your own being. This is the despair of the proud Promethean self that refuses every grace. Kierkegaard sees in this the demonic.
The cure for despair, in all its forms, is the same: in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the Power that established it. For Kierkegaard, that Power is God. For later, secular existentialists, the structure of the diagnosis remained even when the cure was rewritten.
The Leap of Faith
"Leap of faith" is Kierkegaard's most famous phrase and his most misunderstood. It does not mean a sloppy, irrational lunge into wishful thinking. It means something specific and harrowing.
Abraham and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
In Fear and Trembling (1843), under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio ("John of Silence"), Kierkegaard meditates obsessively on Genesis 22 — God's command that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac on Mount Moriah.
From the ethical standpoint, Abraham is a would-be murderer. The universal moral law forbids killing your child. Yet Abraham raises the knife — and the religious tradition calls him "the father of faith." How?
Kierkegaard's answer: Abraham performs a teleological suspension of the ethical. He acts on a private, direct relation to the absolute that the universal cannot underwrite. He cannot explain himself. He cannot even speak: any words he might say ("God told me to") would be heard as madness. The knight of faith is utterly alone, sustained by nothing but a relation no one else can verify.
The leap, then, is the movement from the ethical (where everything is justified by universal reason) to the religious (where the single individual stands in absolute relation to the absolute). It cannot be deduced. It cannot be proven. It can only be made.
Kierkegaard's Legacy
Kierkegaard died in 1855, almost forgotten, in the middle of his open polemic against the Danish State Church. He was rediscovered in the early 20th century — first by German theologians (Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann), then by philosophers (Heidegger, Jaspers), then by the French existentialists. Without him there is no Sartre, no Camus, no Tillich, no Buber, no Yalom.
What did he give us?
- The existing individual as the proper subject of philosophy.
- The vocabulary of anxiety, despair, dread, the leap, the moment.
- The insistence that the most important truths are lived, not proven.
- The diagnosis that modern, comfortable, spiritless life is itself a form of despair.
- A model of indirect communication — pseudonyms, irony, parable — that Nietzsche, Kafka, and Dostoevsky would all develop.
The atheist existentialists would reject his Christian conclusions. They could not reject the questions. Sartre's anguish is Kierkegaard's anxiety in secular dress. Camus's revolt is the leap without God. Heidegger's authenticity is the courage to be oneself in the face of death — a translation of The Sickness Unto Death into ontology.
Next in the Series
In Part 3: Jean-Paul Sartre — Radical Freedom & Bad Faith, we'll meet the most famous existentialist of all. Sartre takes Kierkegaard's dizziness of freedom and strips away God, leaving us "condemned to be free." We'll explore his slogan existence precedes essence, the famous Parisian waiter trapped in bad faith, the violence of "the look," and the strange, demanding ideal of authenticity.