Commitment can shield irrationality
Emphasising subjective appropriation risks allowing intensity to substitute for evidence or ethical accountability.
Nineteenth-century philosophy · 1813–1855
Soren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard resists living by abstraction, asking how a particular person becomes responsible for commitments no system can make on their behalf.
Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and religious writer who published both signed works and texts under carefully constructed pseudonyms. His writing explored anxiety, despair, faith, love, choice and the difficulty of becoming a self before God.
AgencyEthicsMind
The question he enters
The question Soren Kierkegaard enters
What can objective evidence decide when the question is how you will exist and what you will commit yourself to?
The central move
Return truth to the existing individual
Kierkegaard distinguishes possessing true information from relating oneself truthfully to a claim that reorganises a life. Ethical and religious commitment cannot be outsourced to a system or crowd. The issue is not that evidence is irrelevant, but that no detached proof can perform the individual's task of choosing and becoming.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Subjectivity
- The lived manner in which an existing person relates to truth, commitment and their own becoming.
- Anxiety
- The unsettling awareness of possibility and freedom, experienced as the dizziness of what one may become or do.
- Despair
- A misrelation in the self: refusing oneself, willing to be oneself without dependence, or failing to become a self.
- Leap
- The qualitative transition into commitment that cannot be produced by accumulating detached probabilities alone.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
Pseudonyms complicate attribution
Different works stage incompatible voices, so statements by a pseudonymous author cannot automatically be treated as Kierkegaard's final doctrine.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
- Google BooksEither/OrWebPseudonymous presentations of aesthetic and ethical ways of living.Either/Or, Part I, translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard's Writings III, Princeton University Press ebook edition, 2013, ISBN 9781400846931. · Controlled preview and bibliographic record for Part I only; this destination does not provide the complete two-part work. Checked Aug 2026.
- Google BooksFear and TremblingWebFaith, sacrifice, ethical universality and the story of Abraham.Kierkegaard's Writings, volume VI; edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. · Edition-specific bibliographic record and controlled preview; this is not represented as a downloadable full text. Checked Aug 2026.
- Google BooksThe Sickness Unto DeathWebDespair and the self as a relation that must become rightly related to itself and its source.Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard's Writings XIX, Princeton University Press ebook edition, 2013, ISBN 9781400847020. · Controlled Google Books preview and edition record; readable extent may vary by region. Checked Aug 2026.