Kierkegaard on Faith and Desire: The Limits of Christianity and the Human Heart

This dissertation analyzes and evaluates several major productions by Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). It focuses on three works Kierkegaard authored under pseudonyms – Either / Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), and Philosophical Fragments (1844) – and the non-pseudonymously authored Works of Love (1847). The dissertation argues that for Kierkegaard, Christian faith is a distinctive capacity of the individual human being that enables the individual to organize their desires and pursue the good life in a way that is qualitatively superior to what is available outside of Christianity.

Through exegesis of Kierkegaard’s works, the dissertation identifies two elements of Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christian faith that recur throughout his authorship. The first is an axiom that undergirds Kierkegaard’s conception of the good life, namely that for the best possible life to be lived (that is, the Christian life), a person must ultimately be individually responsible for their own happiness or unhappiness. The second is a complex juxtaposition between Christianity and alternative, non-Christian worldviews (collectively called ‘Paganism’ by Kierkegaard) which Kierkegaard performs to provoke his reader into making the decision to affirm Christianity. If, with the assistance of God, the individual does so (that is, has faith), their desires and motivations are reorganized to enable a higher form of happiness and a new form of moral engagement (love for the neighbor).

The dissertation characterizes this juxtaposition through a stagecraft analogy: the mechane, a crane that lifts a theater actor to simulate flight. The analogy highlights the relationship of asymmetrical dependence between Kierkegaard’s accounts of Christianity and non-Christian alternatives. For an actor to take flight (happiness) with the mechane (Christianity), the hoist (faith) that suspends them must be supported by a tension force from the ground (‘Paganism’). Faith requires awareness that the theological and anthropological scaffolding that makes Christian faith possible is transcendent and distinctive. But at the same time, to avoid compromising the transcendence and distinctiveness of faith, the individual cannot completely foreclose the possibility of that which Christianity negates, for example, through rational proofs or research into the historical origins of the Christian tradition.