Søren Kierkegaard · Philosophy
Against Hegel’s vast impersonal ‘System’, Kierkegaard insists that the most important truths are not objective propositions to be contemplated but ways of <em>existing</em> to be lived. ‘Truth is subjectivity’: for the questions that matter most, what counts is not what you know but how passionately and inwardly you relate to it.
Søren Kierkegaard, writing in Copenhagen in the 1840s, believed that philosophy had forgotten the single most important fact about itself: that it is done by an existing human being who must live and die, choose and act, suffer and hope. The reigning philosophy of his day was Hegel’s - a magnificent System that claimed to comprehend all of reality, history, religion, and thought as the rational self-unfolding of the Absolute. Kierkegaard’s objection was not that the System was wrong in detail but that it had left out the one thing that cannot be left out: the existing individual who builds and contemplates it. The philosopher, lost in his system, forgets that he himself is a particular person, here and now, with a life to lead and a death to face. He builds a vast palace of thought and lives, Kierkegaard jokes, in a shed beside it.
The deepest truths, Kierkegaard insists, are not like the truths of astronomy or mathematics - objective facts that are the same for everyone and demand only that we get them right. They are truths about how to exist: what to value, whom to love, what to believe, who to become. And these cannot be settled by detached, objective contemplation, because they are not finally about the world out there at all; they are about the inward relation of a person to their own existence. To treat the question ‘how shall I live?’ as if it were the question ‘how far is the sun?’ is to miss its entire character. Kierkegaard’s philosophy is the sustained attempt to recover the existing individual from the abstractions of the System, and to ask the questions that matter not in the cool key of objective knowledge but in the urgent key of a life that must be lived.
Kierkegaard sharpens the point by distinguishing two completely different ways of seeking truth, which he calls objective and subjective reflection. Objective reflection asks what is true: it directs attention outward, to the content, the proposition, the fact, and strives to grasp it accurately and impersonally, indifferent to who is doing the grasping. This is the right approach for science, history, and mathematics - and Kierkegaard has no quarrel with it there. But subjective reflection asks a different question: it directs attention inward, to the relationship of the existing knower to the truth, and asks how the individual exists in relation to it. For the questions of how to live and what to believe with one’s whole being, Kierkegaard argues, it is subjective reflection that matters, because here the truth is not a fact to be observed but a task to be lived, and a life is not contemplated but enacted.
He drives this home with a deliberately provocative example concerning religious faith. Imagine two people praying. One is in a true church, with a true conception of God, but prays in a false spirit - by rote, distractedly, without inwardness. The other is in a pagan temple, with a confused and partly false conception of God, but prays with the whole passion of an infinite, heartfelt longing. Where, Kierkegaard asks, is there more truth? His startling answer: in the second, for ‘the one prays in truth to God though he worships an idol; the other prays falsely to the true God and hence worships in fact an idol’. The objective correctness of the first is worth nothing without the inward truth of the relationship; the subjective passion of the second realises the truth of worship even through an imperfect object. This is not a license for ignorance - Kierkegaard is not saying the content does not matter at all - but a radical reordering of priorities for the truths of existence: the how can matter more than the what.
With ‘truth is subjectivity’ and the impossibility of an existential system, Kierkegaard launches the philosophy that would make him, in retrospect, the father of existentialism. The whole movement that runs through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and beyond begins here, with the insistence that existence comes before system, that the individual cannot be dissolved into the universal, and that the questions that matter are not objective puzzles to be solved by thought but tasks of living to be faced in passion, choice, and commitment. Kierkegaard puts the single, concrete, existing individual - ‘that individual’, as he called his reader - at the centre, against the abstractions of the System, the herd of ‘the public’, and the comfortable evasions by which we avoid the difficulty of becoming a self.
This reorientation transforms what philosophy is for. It is no longer the construction of theories about reality from a detached standpoint; it is an aid to existing, a summons to inwardness, a provocation to the individual to take up the task of their own life. Kierkegaard wrote not to inform but to awaken - to make his reader uneasy, to strip away illusions, to force the question ‘but how do you exist?’. His later thought develops this into the famous analysis of the three stages of existence (aesthetic, ethical, religious), the diagnosis of anxiety and despair, and the account of faith as the supreme passion of the individual. But all of it flows from this first insight: that for a human being who must actually live, the truth is not something to be known from outside but something to be become from within - and that no system, however grand, can do your existing for you. The objective thinker, Kierkegaard says, can explain everything except his own existence; the subjective thinker is concerned with nothing else.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Kierkegaard, attacking Hegel’s impersonal System, holds that for the questions that matter most ‘truth is subjectivity’: the decisive thing is not the objective content but the inwardness and passion with which an existing individual relates to it. Explain the claim and what it opposes.
Leads to G. W. F. Hegel.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.