Soren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard appears in the book not simply as a critic of philosophical systems but as a thinker who makes their limits matter to lived commitment. Against the reassurance of a completed account of reality, he insists on becoming, uncertainty, and decisions that cannot be justified in advance by a universal framework. The resulting picture of faith is deliberately unsettled: sacrifice has no guaranteed payoff, religious action cannot be conclusively distinguished from madness or retreat, and the highest meaning may appear in an undignified human form. These tensions bring Kierkegaard into unexpected proximity with Hegel and, in the book’s argument, with dialectical materialism.

Becoming Against the Completed System

The book frames Kierkegaard’s disagreement with Hegel through the distinction between objective and subjective thought. Objective thought turns what it considers into results; subjective thought remains a process because the existing individual is still coming to be. Kierkegaard’s objection is therefore not merely that Hegel’s system leaves out private feeling. A system that apprehends history as though it had reached finality risks treating an unfinished reality as already complete, while the person who exists within history cannot occupy that supposedly final vantage point.

This distinction also complicates the familiar image of philosophy looking backward from dusk, gathering a completed path into a system. In the book’s account, people caught up in historical events often experience themselves as constrained by necessity, whereas later observers can discern paths that might have been taken differently. The contrast matters because Kierkegaard locates openness not in an observer’s retrospective reconstruction but in the existing subject’s unresolved process of becoming. A person cannot step outside existence and regard a life as finished from an eternal standpoint.

The book sets this account against the materialist claim that contingency belongs to reality itself. In an idealist picture, the world may seem open to participants but closed from the absolute perspective of a complete whole. Kierkegaard’s theology, as interpreted here, gives that completeness a different status: the closed whole appears only as a radical Beyond, not as a substance hidden inside the world. His God is correlated with reality’s unfinished character rather than installed as its underlying object or ground. This reading makes his theology central to the book’s examination of the gap between thought and being, and to its effort to supplement historical materialism with an account of how that gap emerges.

Commitment, Sacrifice, and the Leap

Kierkegaard’s importance to the book rests especially on the claim that practical commitment precedes theoretical justification. Its discussion places him alongside Kant and Fichte in treating the choice of a life as a fundamental decision, not the conclusion of a proof that compels every rational observer. Philosophy may describe or defend a commitment, but it cannot provide a final theory that removes the contingency of choosing. The point is not that thought is irrelevant; it is that no theoretical account can take the place of the choice on which a person’s orientation depends.

This priority of decision shapes the book’s account of sacrifice. Kierkegaard’s idea of infinite resignation names a sacrifice for which no ordinary exchange can supply an adequate reason. The person is asked to dedicate an entire life without being able to treat divine meaning as a reward that will eventually compensate for the loss. If the supposed end becomes a possession to be gained, the sacrifice ceases to be unconditional. The book emphasizes the resulting severity: from an external point of view, such a decision may look like madness, since it offers nothing that can settle the question of what the sacrifice is for.

The account connects this religious structure to Versagung, a term the book uses for a self-related renunciation that culminates not in secure possession but in the loss of the very thing for which the sacrifice was made. Its force is not simply that a person gives up valued goods. The decisive reversal is that the cause or object that seemed to make the sacrifice meaningful is itself lost in the act. The book accordingly treats meaningless sacrifice as a key point of contact between Kierkegaard’s theology and dialectical materialism: the act cannot be reconciled with a reassuring calculation of costs and returns.

God as Relation and the Unresolved Religious Choice

In the book’s interpretation, Kierkegaard’s God cannot be understood as a supreme thing among other things. God is not a substance whose properties can be listed independently of how a person relates to the divine. The account instead makes the manner of relation decisive: absolute devotion is not a route to an external object but the relation in which God becomes meaningful. Self-renunciation expresses the distance between human life and divine transcendence, but that distance cannot be converted into a contract promising that sacrifice will be repaid.

The relation also has a social dimension. The book reads the Christian passage from Christ as divine individual to the Holy Spirit as Love literally: the divine is present in the link between individuals rather than secured as a separate, substantial entity. This interpretation preserves a gap between the finite and the infinite without turning that gap into a measurable distance between two objects. It helps explain why the religious cannot be reduced to a stable set of outward characteristics.

That instability is clearest in the book’s discussion of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious. Kierkegaard does not offer the religious as a comfortable synthesis that reconciles the aesthetic and ethical modes of life. A choice that appears aesthetic may have religious significance, but there is no identifiable property that conclusively proves the transformation. The book uses Julia Flyte’s decision in Brideshead Revisited as an example: her withdrawal from marriage toward transient love affairs might be read as a retreat from ethical commitment, yet it may also register an assumption of the human situation’s paradox. There is no guarantee that it is a leap of faith rather than evasion. The same deed remains divided between interpretations, leaving doubt in place rather than furnishing a secure religious standpoint.

Anxiety, Innocence, and Ethical Disruption

Kierkegaard’s account of the movement from innocence to sin gives this uncertainty a psychological and ethical form. The book describes an innocent spirit as peaceful and untroubled by conflict, yet also exposed to nothingness. That nothingness produces anxiety: the spirit projects its own actuality without knowing what that actuality is. Anxiety here does not begin as a settled feeling with a clear object. It belongs to the unsettled possibility that precedes the ethical distinction between guilt, good, and evil.

The passage into the ethical is presented as a leap, not as an outcome psychology can smoothly explain. The book distinguishes the psychological account of anxiety from a further, nonpsychological dimension that it compares with metapsychology. What disrupts the initial balance is an intervention from outside, the divine prohibition. In this construction, the emergence of ethical responsibility cannot be reduced either to an already established moral code or to an entirely transparent psychological cause. The leap exposes the subject to a demand whose meaning is not settled by the prior state of innocence.

This helps clarify why the absence of a universal normative guarantee matters politically as well as religiously. The book raises the possibility that refusing to treat a positive ethical framework as final may open a space for struggle over freedom and democracy, rather than simply licensing arbitrary choice. Kierkegaard’s lesson, as presented, is that the ethical call can be betrayed when it is translated into a fully settled universal scheme. The resulting paradox is demanding: commitment is necessary, but no framework can relieve the agent of responsibility for confronting the contingency in which commitment occurs.

Antigone and the Comedy of Incarnation

Kierkegaard’s modern Antigone gives the problem of commitment a dramatic shape. Unlike Sophocles’ Antigone, who acts by burying her brother and assumes her fate through that deed, Kierkegaard’s figure is inwardly burdened by knowledge she cannot share. She loves and admires her father, Oedipus, while knowing the truth of his crimes. Unable to disclose that knowledge or communicate her sorrow, she is condemned to impassive suffering; in the account summarized by the book, death becomes the only route to a peace that sharing might otherwise have made possible. Her predicament is not simply a tragic conflict between public duties. It is an isolation produced by the impossibility of making her knowledge communicable.

The book extends this thought experiment to a postmodern Antigone in a Stalinist setting. Such a figure might publicly denounce her father or brother out of unconditional love, yet the very act that appears ethically clear would leave her more isolated. Others would fail to understand betrayal as an act of love. The example sharpens Kierkegaard’s interest in choices whose outward description cannot settle their inward or ethical meaning: public action need not make a commitment intelligible to its audience.

Alongside this severity, the book stresses Kierkegaard’s account of Christianity as comic. Incarnation brings the highest and lowest together in the figure of Christ, not as two separate substances but as a single, incongruous appearance. The analogy is a king’s expected entrance announced by trumpets, followed instead by a poor, stumbling clown: the disparity is the point, not a defect to be explained away. The book contrasts this comic understanding with a solemn ascent toward wisdom that misses Christianity’s humor, and argues that a representation of Christ’s death lacking this comic dimension misses something essential. In its reading, Kierkegaard’s significance lies partly in holding together what systematic thought would prefer to separate: absolute meaning and ordinary humanity, unconditional sacrifice and no guarantee, serious commitment and comedy.