Introduction to Kierkegaard: The Religious Solution

Kierkegaard’s core claim is that despair isn’t just a mood—it’s the symptom of failing to become a self. Human beings are a “synthesis” of opposing forces—finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity—and the central task of life is learning how to relate those forces in a way that produces genuine selfhood. When the synthesis is mismanaged, the result is despair: a “sickness of spirit” that leaves a person without a self, regardless of outward success.

Kierkegaard then maps despair onto distinct “existence spheres,” showing how different life views handle (or mishandle) the problem of selfhood. Many people never consciously build a life view at all; they drift as “mass men,” passively copying socially approved values. Their attention stays outward, so they never develop an inward awareness of individuality. Even when such people seem socially functional, Kierkegaard insists they lack a self because they never own their choices.

From there, he turns to aestheticism, the life of experimentation. After an awakening from social conformity, a person may treat life as a field of possibilities, trying different personas, careers, relationships, and pleasures. But aestheticism refuses enduring commitment: serious bonds threaten freedom because they limit the ability to discard one life experiment for another. Pleasure can stave off boredom—especially in the “refined aesthete,” who alternates between music, travel, conversation, and fine food—but it cannot supply lasting meaning. Between pleasures, emptiness returns as nihilistic indifference: action feels pointless, effort feels too tiring, and even movement becomes a burden. In Kierkegaard’s framing, aestheticism inevitably collapses into despair, often without the person fully recognizing it.

The ethical sphere offers a different cure: commitment. The ethicist seeks a coherent, continuous identity by making definite choices and living by them over time. Instead of treating community as a set of external norms to mimic, the ethical person participates with self-awareness, aiming to harmonize individuality with social duties—becoming a “social self” rather than an isolated one. Yet ethical life has its own vulnerability. Social morality is not absolute; societies are flawed, and the ethicist can end up harmonizing with a “sick society.” More deeply, ethical identity leans on finite measures like merit and worldly success, which vanish—so the self built on them can be swept away by time.

An educator called anxiety then reveals the limits of ethics by teaching possibility: dread can become a doorway to a deeper understanding of what can’t be secured within the finite. When ethical certainty fails, despair can be “rooted out” only by faith. Faith requires a “double movement”: first, a “night of infinite resignation,” renouncing worldly attachments through renunciation so complete it can follow deep pain or disillusionment; second, a return to the finite through trust that what was renounced will be regained. Kierkegaard illustrates this with Abraham and Isaac, and with the idea that the person of faith may look outwardly ordinary while inwardly living “in the world but not of it.” Faith is risky because the existence of God is not demonstrable with certainty; it depends on holding fast to uncertainty rather than resolving it. Ultimately, eternity demands one decisive question: whether a person lived in despair. If despair remained, then everything else—status, success, or loss—cannot save the self.