Ludwig Feuerbach used the word ‘existence’ in a similar sense, but he wanted to secularise religious thinking, whereas Kierkegaard affirmed authentic religion as not reducible to social ethics (‘Sædelighed’ in Danish, ‘Sittlichkeit’ in German).
Martin Heidegger translated Kierkegaard’s ‘existentiel’ into German as ‘existenziell’ but restricted it to what he called the ontic; for the ontological he used ‘existenzial’, a word rare in German, though Edmund Husserl had used it in Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1910-11), and Kierkegaard had even on occasion used, probably coined, a Danish word ‘existential’, meaning for him the same as ‘existentiel’, in his private writings. He is alternatively alleged, but without evidence, to have adopted the word(s) after he learned from a conversation with, or about, the Norwegian poet and critic Johann Sebastian Cammermeyer Welhaven that he used the Norwegian ‘existensiell’ in this way.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had used ‘existential’ as an English word and meditated on the nature of ‘existence’ in The Friend as early as 1809, before Kierkegaard was born. The philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling influenced Coleridge, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and was said by Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz to have orally named his own later philosophy as ‘Existenzialphilosophie’; but it is by no means established, although it is possible, that Coleridge's use of ‘existential’ or Kierkegaard’s use of ‘existentiel' or ‘existential' were themselves directly suggested by, or derived from, Schelling.
None of these usages, of course, should be confused with, or reduced to, the bare ‘existential quantifier’ (‘there exists an x such that...’) in subsequent logic and mathematics.
Kierkegaard insisted that, whether pseudonymous (‘with the left hand’) or in his own name (‘with the right hand’), his writing was always religious, though he denounced institutionalised religion (such as Danish 19th-century ‘Christendom’) as a perversion of authentic, existential religion. Much writing by ‘existential’ therapists censors (and implicitly censures) Kierkegaard’s always-religious writing at the outset, claiming to find its ‘relevant’, secular-‘existential’ meaning. Ludwig Binswanger secularises The Sickness Unto Death in this way in his ‘The Case of Ellen West’. But this is just what Kierkegaard was attacking as a betrayal.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric by Johannes de silentio, published in Copenhagen on 16 October 1843, together with two other books, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology by Constantin Constantinus and Three Upbuilding Discourses by Søren Kierkegaard. Our seminars on this extraordinary event in publishing history, its context, and its implications, started on 14 October 2018, celebrating these three books’ hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary, and will conclude, at least for the time being, on 29 October 2023, the one hundred and eightieth anniversary.
The author of all three books was Kierkegaard, as he acknowledged in ‘A First and Last Declaration’, the further postscript that he, in his own name, added to Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
We began by exploring this astonishing creative incandescence and its aftermath in a subseries of the Inner Circle Seminars, ‘Kierkegaard: 16 October 1843 and beyond’.
Our close reading of Fear and Trembling continues in 2023 with the fifth and sixth seminars on this text, conducted by Professor Daniel Conway and other world authorities.
Other leading international specialists will explore over the next few years the other major works by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms: Philosophical Crumbs, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Works of Love, The Sickness Unto Death.
Professor Marilyn Piety, conducted in 2021 and 2023 memorable seminars on Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, published by the pseudonyms Constantine Constantius and Johannes Climacus in 1843 and 1844, respectively, which she has also translated.
Fear and Trembling focusses with terrible intensity on the dialectical tension between Abraham’s love and awe for God and his love for his son Isaac. It is a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the Akedah, the account (Genesis, 22:1-19) of Abraham’s ‘binding’ of Isaac in preparation for a sacrifice prevented only by an angel’s last-minute intervention. The meaning of the Akedah has been debated for millennia by Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and (more recently) atheist thinkers. It is chanted from the Torah scroll in synagogues at the New Year, with great textual precision, though everyone is free to propose his or her own interpretation. In Christianity it is held to prefigure the crucifixion of Jesus. The Qur’an does not name Ibrahim’s son in this narrative, and Islamic scholars have debated whether it was Ishmael or Isaac; today it is held to have been Ishmael; animal sacrifices on Eid al-Adha commemorate Ibrahim’s sacrifice of a ram instead of Ishmael. The Akedah has been the basis of many great works of art, music, drama, and poetry.
Other seminars, conducted by world authorities, including George Pattison, Marilyn Piety, C. Stephen Evans, Jerome (Yehuda) Gellman and Mariam al-Attar, have focussed in turn on: the problem of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms; the two other works (Three Upbuilding Discourses and Repetition) published with Fear and Trembling on 16 October 1843; the interpretations of the Akedah in Kierkegaard and the Hasidic masters; and whether or not some form of ‘divine command theory’ is advocated by Kierkegaard, his pseudonyms, or any or all of the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. (In a dialogue of Plato’s, Euthyphro is confused when Socrates asks him whether the gods love the good because it is good or whether the good is good because the gods love it. Many philosophers have thought that Socrates’s question presents a severe problem for divine command theory, but recently other philosophers have argued that there are forms of this theory not vulnerable to the problem Socrates raises for Euthyphro. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught that for Judaism there is no problem, no divine command theory. God loves what is good because it is good, not the other way round; and God has to abide by what is moral: there are no exceptions.)
Kierkegaard insisted in ‘A First and Last Declaration’:
‘... if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.’
Johannes de silentio, Johannes Climacus, and the other pseudonyms are like characters in a drama written by Kierkegaard. He called it ‘indirect communication’, a dialectic of perspectives which invites the reader to work out his or her own point of view. Much commentary on Fear and Trembling and the other pseudonymous works ignores Kierkegaard’s urgent request to respect their pseudonymous nature. This leads to serious misunderstandings. Even the pseudonymous writers sometimes entertain and expound diametrically opposite views within a single work. The pseudonym is not necessarily committed to either view, and Kierkegaard is not necessarily committed either to a polarity of views as entertained by the pseudonym or to either such view as entertained by the pseudonym or to the pseudonym’s non-commitment to such a polarity of views or to either of these.
Evaluations of Kierkegaard vary.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, himself one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, said Kierkegaard was
‘by far the most profound thinker of the last [19th] century’
and
‘too deep for me’.
Dr Abraham Myerson, a psychiatrist, in 1945 diagnosed Kierkegaard as
‘a psychiatric case’
and his writing as
‘a schizoid and certainly utterly incomprehensible presentation by a mind which is quite deviate’.
Professor Ernesto Spinelli, an existential therapist, in his 2017 essay ‘Kierkegaard’s dangerous folly’ in Existential Analysis, denounced Kierkegaard for allegedly admiring Abraham’s
‘self-evident lunacy’.
Those who have acknowledged indebtedness to, or have struggled with, Søren Kierkegaard include Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Miguel de Unamano, Rainer Maria Rilke, Martin Buber, Theodor Haecker, Ludwig Binswanger, Ferdinand Ebner, Igor Stravinsky, Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Karl Jaspers, Franz Kafka, Rudolf Bultmann, György Lukács, Niels Bohr, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Charles Williams, Franz Rosenzweig, Georg Trakl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Emil Brunner, Edith Stein, Herbert Read, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jorge Luis Borges, Viktor Frankl, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Abraham Joshua Heschel, W. H. Auden, Jan Patočka Maurice Blanchot, Simone de Beauvoir, Rollo May, R. S. Thomas, Albert Camus, Thomas Merton, Emil Fackenheim, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Szasz, David Holbrook, Peter Lomas, Alice von Hildebrand, Aaron Esterson, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, John Heaton, R. D. Laing, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jacques Derrida, David Cooper, John Updike, David Lodge, Henrik Stangerup, Roger Poole, Robert Stolorow, Alice Holzhey, and many others.
Kierkegaard’s idea of authentic religion differed from everybody else’s. He had contempt for the Danish Church: for ‘Christendom’, as he called it. For him, religion was radically existential, individual. But his vision of the individual was, despite what many have alleged, the antithesis of an encapsulated, isolated, unsocial, worldless, reified ‘self’. Rather, as Anti-Climacus put it in The Sickness Unto Death, the ‘self’ is a ‘relation’ which ‘relates itself to its own self’; it is ‘that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self’, while ‘resting in the [divine] power that established it’; and, as Kierkegaard insisted in his own name in Works of Love (1847), this ‘self’ is only truly itself in loving God and, inextricably, the other: whether spouse, child, family member, friend, neighbour, stranger.
One of Heidegger’s most important early courses of lectures was on The Phenomenology of Religious Life (1920-21). Heidegger wrote in Being and Time (1927) that, of all Kierkegaard’s writings, his ‘upbuilding’ (i.e., explicitly religious) works had the most philosophical significance.
Kierkegaard’s work is a fundamental investigation of the existential phenomenology of individual, non-institutionalised, religious experience, as well as the religious implications of all experience, indispensable for unprejudiced understanding of both ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ clients.
Professor John Lippitt, who guided our reading of Fear of Trembling in three remarkable seminars, has pointed out in his book Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought that Søren Kierkegaard can be very funny. His readers take the risk of being compelled to laugh out loud. As his pseudonym Johannes Climacus wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
‘... an existing humourist is the closest approximation to one who is religious ...’
These seminars on Kierkegaard’s works have enabled existential therapists, Daseinsanalysts and others, to reflect more deeply on the foundations of their discipline. Invited speakers often attend their colleagues’ Inner Circle Seminars, in addition to those they themselves conduct.
Professor C. Stephen Evans, who conducted a superb seminar on Divine Command Theory and Fear and Trembling, described the seminars as
‘a real intellectual feast.’
Professor Marilyn Piety, Professor of Philosophy, Drexel University, Philadephia, USA, who conducted a marvellous seminar on Kierkegaard’s Repetition on 28 February 2021, wrote:
‘I can’t thank you enough for inviting me to be a part of the seminar series. It was one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had. It was a wonderful group of people and an excellent discussion.’
And a seminar participant wrote afterwards:
