Leaving Kierkegaard

It’s time we outgrow the 19th-century philosopher who, in his own way, presaged post-modern views about Christianity.

merican social scientist Richard Hanania recently wrote about outgrowing German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was a fascinating read. That post-modern thinker has remained an interesting figure: a harbinger of the nihilism in modern life, a penetrating psychologist into man’s inner tensions between greatness and limitations, and a sardonic troll of the stuffy philosophical world before trolling emerged as a social media moniker.

Not only investing a Romantic approach to Western thought, but Nietzsche also denigrated the past as a source of all wisdom in itself. His push for radical individualism, disregard for systems, and an energetic drive to normalize faith in the self (since there wasn’t anything else to believe in) inspired and radicalized a generation of thinkers.

A lot of these rebellious thinkers, so-called iconoclasts, are indeed people who failed at life. Nietzsche clearly had Daddy issues, surrounded by women, put upon all the more because of his weak constitution. He struggled to be a man in a world that vaulted masculinity to an impossible ideal for those physically limited. Indeed, Hanania was onto something when he pointed out that Nietzsche is a crutch for men who (think they have) failed at life.

Hanania’s commentary also reminded me of another philosopher whom I had read during my high school and early college years. More Christian in bent regarding the authority of the Scriptures, he still rebelled against “the system and the man,” arguing that the established Church and Christian culture were failing in God’s mission. His own voracious reading and logorrhea run rampant, revealing many turns of humor and wit.

In some ways, this philosopher/theologian was a brighter, religious foil to Nietzsche’s dark, laughter-of-the-damned atheism.

I am writing about the wily Dane, Soren Kierkegaard.

My senior year in high school, I came across his writings in the local library. His last name alone was hard to ignore. From there, I read his signature treatise on faith and the sacrificial account of Abraham and Isaac, Fear and Trembling. The poetic depth of his passages on the role of the poet and the beautiful courage of Father Abraham brought tears to my eyes. I admired The Knight of Faith, desiring to live a life filled with peace and purpose, in which everything has meaning and encounters nothing but wonder in an otherwise plain world.

Kierkegaard’s other work, The Sickness Unto Death, captivated me, as well. His first paragraph (“Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self? But what is the self? … “) made me laugh out loud. His cryptic syntax served as a necessary jab and tonic to the prolix Hegelian universalism swamping European colleges and discussion halls at the time. The titles of his books were quite gruesome, and his voluminous readings on the topics were profound in every sense. Kierkegaard intended for his writings to be difficult because he was engaging in parody but also stripping away the self-righteousness of a smug world determined to prove its own smarts.

He popped the pretension of Danish academics. He maligned the bland hypocrisy of the Danish clergy. He trained much of his mockery against philosopher du jour George Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, and that Germanic gargantuan insistence on reducing everything to a strict dialectical process without ethical considerations. Hegel’s attempt at a new dynamic logic rejected Aristotle’s foundational Law of the Excluded Middle, which bothered Kierkegaard—and should outrage all of us!

For someone who struggled with living at the time, I found solace in reading Kierkegaard. I enjoyed his humor and broad rhetorical tricks. I was amazed at how a writer for a minor Scandinavian language could express such complex, powerful, and eternal thoughts. From the three stages of life: aesthetic, ethical, and religious, to his discussions about truth and subjectivity, to the realities of the sickness unto death, which is sin, to his playful insolence, almost as though like some philosophical Andy Kaufman, Kierkegaard pretended to be someone else and wrote entire books in that person’s persona.

Irony and indirect communication were his game, and breaking the smug self-satisfaction of the masses was his aim.

There is a harshness to Kierkegaard, though, a relentless Pharisaism which gives off the impression that no one is good enough. As W. H. Auden later wrote, Kierkegaard turned into a spiritual prima donna, thinking that he was better than everybody else.

The hardships we face cannot be overcome by philosophical texts. Who can overcome the sorrows and struggles of life with lots of thinking? There are bills to pay, people to see, challenges to deal with, hardships to overcome, and victories to enjoy. All of the abuses and traumas that I had suffered as a child could not be resolved by reading philosophy.

Furthermore, faith in falsehood cannot save, no matter how earnest the faith. Truth matters, and truth is not something that we come up with or is something merely grounded in our personal experience. In one of his most massive texts, The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard writes: “Truth is subjectivity.”

No, it isn’t. If you jump into a pool, thinking it’s ten feet deep but actually only three feet deep, you will crack your head on the concrete. If you are dying of thirst in the desert, and you spy an oasis, only to find more sand, you will die. Kierkegaard’s determination to turn inwardness into certainty is not only wrong but dangerous. He minimized biblical revelation in other ways. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard argued that God doesn’t speak anymore. Yet the New Testament is replete with accounts of the Holy Spirit directing man to do God’s will.

Kierkegaard’s miserly misunderstandings of Christianity ignored the fullness of the sacrifice that Christ Jesus accomplished on the Cross, and one can see the serious problems people will run into when they take someone like Kierkegaard seriously. If Nietzsche’s philosophy was consolation for those who were no good at living, then Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a comfort measure for Christians who don’t understand the Gospel.

Christian faith is not subjective. It’s not about our feelings, but it’s based on the accomplished fact and the eternal efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Where Kierkegaard talked about Jesus as an example, the Gospel proclaims Him as the Savior whom we receive. Only then do we follow him, only then do we learn to love others, and only because we learn that He first loved us.

As I matured, I found Kierkegaard unappealing and unrewarding. Kierkegaard believed in a law-centered, man-centered Christianity, one where man has to try harder in his own efforts, where there is never a sense of peace and rest. Very little time did he spend expounding on the wonders and grace of God, the Finished Work of Jesus Christ, and the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.

Hanania’s excellent write-up about growing out of Nietzsche motivated me to reflect on how I learned to grow up out of Kierkegaard. While the Wiley Dane, who lashed out at academia and the established church, was entertaining for a time, I realize today that retreating into philosophical word play was just a comfort measure to run away from deeper problems.

In other words, philosophy for people who have failed at life.

 

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/04/leaving_kierkegaard.html