Kierkegaard explained his ideal of religious faith through the story of Abraham, the Jewish patriarch was ordered by God to kill his only son. On the one hand, Abraham knew that this was a violation of God’s law; on the other hand, Abraham knew that he had clear orders to kill. What rational, abstract “knowledge” about the world could Abraham rely upon to arrive at the correct decision? According to Kierkegaard, it didn’t exist. This meant that Abraham had to commit himself to one course of action or the other by relying on faith, risking the possibility that it might well be wrong.
Kierkegaard believed this to be the human condition, or humanity’s “existential situation.” We can’t know what the right thing to do is and no abstract philosophical system can help us. We can’t know what our “essential nature” is because we aren’t born with one. In the end, we have to choose — and risk choosing wrong. Outside of this, there is no “existence” for humanity.
It is no surprise that this existential situation produces anxiety and dread in people — we would prefer easy answers and certainty, but there is simply no way to obtain them. According to Kierkegaard, our insecurity causes us to become alienated from our own lives and so we try to find some means of overcoming this — we are willing to do something, anything, to find release. In the end, though, we usually just end up making things worse. You can’t lose yourself in a crowd, in a mob, or in a group pursuing collective action — in the end, you are still on your own and have to face your own choices, for good or for ill.
Kierkegaard argued that, in the still places of our isolation, we needed to face our relationship with God. Instead of allowing ourselves to be driven away from God by the distractions we use to try and alleviate our anxieties over our finiteness, we should instead seek greater communion with the infinite and absolute nature of divinity. This in turn requires a “leap of faith,” to be contrasted with strict, even robotic adherence to moral laws. Instead of trying to understand God through abstract and objective reason, one must experience the presence of God immediately and subjectively, allowing God to lead us wherever we are needed.
Most of what Kierkegaard wrote was quickly forgotten soon after his death. His work might have languished in obscurity for quite some time if it hadn’t been discovered by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Their translations of his books and further development of his ideas created the nexus around which modern existentialism would grow in Europe.
