Kierkegaard on Faith and Truth: The Three Stages, the “Leap” and Truth as Subjectivity

Last updated: November 3, 2026

For Søren Kierkegaard (1813 to 1855), faith is a passionate personal commitment made in the face of objective uncertainty, which is why no amount of weighing the evidence gets you there. The truth that matters most to a human life is, in the famous formula of his pseudonym Johannes Climacus, that “truth is subjectivity”. Climacus defines it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) as “an objective uncertainty held fast in the appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness”, in the Swenson and Lowrie translation quoted by the philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works place this kind of faith at the top of three ways of living, which he called the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.

The meme shows those three spheres as a rising scale of excitement: mild interest at the aesthetic, delight at the ethical and open-mouthed ecstasy at the religious. It gets the order right and the mood badly wrong, and the mood is where Kierkegaard gets interesting.

Why Kierkegaard Is All Over Your Meme Feed

Kierkegaard is one of the most memed philosophers on the internet, and it is easy to see why. He was a gloomy Dane in a top hat who wrote books with titles like Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, broke off his engagement to the woman he loved, and walked the streets of Copenhagen so often that locals knew him as a familiar oddity. Melancholy, anxiety and romantic regret are three of the internet’s favourite subjects, and he got to all of them first.

He also wrote lines that fit perfectly into a caption. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” comes from his journal of 1843, written under his own name. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” is from The Concept of Anxiety (1844). And the so-called ecstatic lecture in Either/Or contains what may be the first relationship meme in philosophy: marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, and you will also regret it; marry or do not marry, you will regret both. That line is spoken by a pseudonymous aesthete, not by Kierkegaard in his own voice, a distinction this post keeps returning to.

The third favourite genre is Kierkegaard against Hegel. Kierkegaard mocked the Hegelian “System” for explaining everything except the one thing that matters to an existing person: how to live. A thinker who builds a vast palace of ideas and then lives in a shed beside it, he wrote, is a comic figure. The memes that show a weeping Kierkegaard next to a serene, all-explaining Hegel are not far off his own self-image. If you want to know what he was rebelling against, try Hegel’s Dialectic Explained.

The meme in this post belongs to a fourth genre: the three stages. It is a good joke because it captures the structure and gets the feeling wrong, as the sections below explain. The religious stage is not where the fun starts. In Kierkegaard’s telling, it is where the fear and trembling begin.

Who Is Speaking? A Note on the Pseudonyms

Most of Kierkegaard’s famous lines on faith were published under other names, so “Kierkegaard said” is, strictly, a misattribution he asked readers to avoid. He published his major philosophical works under pseudonyms, each with its own outlook.

Either/Or (1843) comes from the pen of several invented authors, Fear and Trembling (1843) is signed “Johannes de silentio”, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript is by “Johannes Climacus”, who, as the IEP puts it, writes about Christian faith but “doesn’t live it”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Kierkegaard explicitly asked anyone citing these works to attribute the views to the pseudonyms, although scholars read some pseudonyms, Climacus among them, as closer to Kierkegaard’s own views than others. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy makes the point sharply: it is Climacus, “but not Kierkegaard”, who proclaims that truth is subjectivity. That matters for the meme: the three spheres reach us through different voices, each arguing from inside its own way of life, which is an odd way to write a self-help ladder.

The cast is long. Victor Eremita edits Either/Or, Constantin Constantius narrates Repetition, Vigilius Haufniensis analyses anxiety, and Anti-Climacus, a pseudonym Kierkegaard said stood higher than himself, writes The Sickness unto Death. Alongside them runs a parallel stream of signed “upbuilding discourses”, short religious meditations published under his own name, sometimes on the same day as a pseudonymous book. Kierkegaard later explained that he had held out the pseudonymous works with his left hand and the discourses with his right. Readers who quote only the left hand get a much stranger Kierkegaard than the one he intended.

Three Spheres, and the Gaps Between Them

The pseudonymous works describe three “existence-spheres”, or stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. They are ways of living rather than a timetable of maturity, and nobody drifts from one to the next by getting older.

The aesthetic life, set out in the first volume of Either/Or, is organised around enjoyment and what is interesting, and it can be crude or highly refined. The ethical life, defended in the second volume by a judge named Wilhelm, means, in the SEP’s phrase, that “the I chooses itself”: taking on duties, marriage and a vocation, and becoming accountable. The IEP adds a detail the meme leaves out: between the aesthetic and the ethical lies the boundary zone, or confinium, of irony, and between the ethical and the religious the confinium of humour, which it describes as “irony to a higher power”. Neither boundary is crossed by argument. The SEP stresses that for Kierkegaard a morally free action always comes from a “leap” and cannot be seen as necessary. You do not reason your way from one sphere into the next; you choose, and the choice cannot be fully justified from the side you are leaving.

The Religious Sphere Is Not the Fun One

The meme’s ecstatic third panel is close to the opposite of what Kierkegaard describes. His best-known picture of faith is a father walking up a mountain to kill his son.

Fear and Trembling retells the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis 22. Johannes de silentio admires Abraham and admits he cannot understand him. Judged ethically, Abraham is about to commit murder; judged religiously, he is the father of faith. The book asks whether there is a “teleological suspension of the ethical”, a higher purpose that can override ethical duty, and the SEP notes that scholars still disagree about whether the story actually contains one. The IEP reads the book as apparently concluding that Abraham is a knight of faith, religiously justified in suspending the ethical, and that his faith can only be believed “by virtue of the absurd”.

Then comes a twist the meme could not show. The knight of faith, as Johannes imagines him as a contemporary of his own, does not look holy at all. As the philosopher Sharon Krishek puts it in a review of Sheridan Hough’s book on the passage, he looks like a tax collector, “as far as can be from a deeply religious or spiritual man”. Faith, on this picture, leaves no outward trace.

Faith Against Proof: Why Kierkegaard Refused to Prove God

Most philosophers who wrote about God before Kierkegaard tried to show that belief was reasonable, whether through proofs of a first cause, arguments from design or Kant’s moral postulates. Kierkegaard thought the whole project was a mistake, and not only because the proofs might fail. Even if they succeeded, they would produce the wrong thing: a conclusion held with the cool confidence of a geometry theorem, not the passionate commitment that faith is supposed to be.

His pseudonym Johannes Climacus puts the point with a deliberately annoying symmetry in Philosophical Fragments (1844). If God does not exist, it is impossible to prove it; and if he does exist, it is folly to want to prove it. The deeper reason is the content of Christian faith itself. Its central claim, that the eternal God became a particular human being at a particular time, is what Climacus calls the absolute paradox. Reason cannot digest it, and the natural reaction of the understanding is offence. Faith is the passion that holds on to the paradox anyway, without turning it into something comfortable.

This is why Kierkegaard is both admired and resisted by philosophers of religion. Critics argue that a faith which renounces reasons cannot be distinguished from fanaticism, and the Abraham story makes the worry vivid. Defenders reply that Kierkegaard is not against thinking but against a particular illusion, the idea that the most important decisions of a life can be outsourced to an argument. Either way, the position is clearer than the slogans suggest. “Faith begins precisely where thinking leaves off,” as Fear and Trembling says, is not a licence to stop thinking. It is a claim about where thinking runs out.

The sharpest critique came from an unexpected direction. Albert Camus, who admired Kierkegaard’s honesty about the absurd, accused him in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) of committing what he called philosophical suicide: seeing clearly that the world offers no answer and then leaping into faith anyway, which for Camus meant abandoning the very lucidity that made the insight valuable. Kierkegaard’s defenders answer that Camus misreads the leap as an escape, when for Kierkegaard it is a harder way of staying with the paradox. The quarrel between the two is one of the founding arguments of existentialism, traced in Absurdism vs Existentialism.

Truth as Subjectivity, Without the Relativism

“Truth is subjectivity” is a claim about how you hold your deepest beliefs, and relativists who borrow it tend to skip that part: for the questions that decide how to live, Climacus argues, the how of believing matters as much as the what.

In the Postscript, Climacus contrasts objective reflection, which asks what is true, with subjective reflection, which asks how a person relates to it. For mathematics or history, objective reflection is the right tool. For questions like whether God exists, how to die or what to live for, Climacus argues, it can never deliver a certainty that would make commitment unnecessary, and a person who waits for that certainty will wait forever. Hence the definition quoted above: the truth for an existing person is an objective uncertainty held fast with passionate inwardness. Not every reader is convinced. Robert Merrihew Adams, in “Kierkegaard’s Arguments Against Objective Reasoning in Religion” (The Monist, 1977), takes the arguments seriously, calls the first of them “a bad argument”, and rejects the ideal of maximal passion behind the others as “an impossible ideal”, while granting that Kierkegaard is onto something about how doubt works in religious commitment. The IEP notes that Climacus also writes “subjectivity is untruth”, which should make anyone pause before printing the first half on a T-shirt.

Kierkegaard Quotes on Faith, and Who Said Them

Because Kierkegaard wrote through pseudonyms, the question “who said it?” has an unusual answer. Here are the lines people search for most, with the work they come from and the voice that speaks them.

The pattern is telling. The most radical statements about faith come from pseudonyms who stand outside faith or at its edge: Johannes de silentio admires Abraham but cannot understand him, and Climacus writes about Christianity while denying that he is a Christian. The lines signed by Kierkegaard himself are quieter and more pastoral. He described the pseudonymous works as indirect communication, meant to provoke readers into their own decision, and the signed upbuilding discourses as the direct word he stood behind. Reading him well means noticing which kind of text you are in.

“Leap of Faith” Is Not in His Published Works

The phrase most closely associated with Kierkegaard does not appear in his published works. He wrote about a “leap”, a qualitative transition that cannot be reached by gradual reasoning, but not about a “leap of faith”.

The Kierkegaard scholar Mariele Nientied reports in “Kierkegaard without ‘Leap of Faith’” that a search of the digital edition of his collected works found that the famous phrase does not occur even once in the published writings. The idea of a leap is his, and it runs through his work: the leap by which, according to The Concept of Anxiety, sin enters the world, the leap between spheres, the decision that cannot be fully justified in advance. Where exactly the compressed formula came from is less clear, but it has become, in Nientied’s words, “the most influential phrase” in the debate about him. The popular phrase suggests jumping blind. Kierkegaard’s leap is made with your eyes open, after you have followed the reasons as far as they go and found that they stop short. The IEP uses “leap of faith” itself as a convenient summary, which shows how firmly the phrase has stuck.

Regine Olsen and the Price of Faith

Behind the abstractions of the three spheres lies a story that every biography tells and every reader of Fear and Trembling eventually hears. In September 1840 Kierkegaard became engaged to Regine Olsen, then eighteen. Within a year he broke it off, apparently convinced that his melancholy, his religious vocation or some secret he never fully explained made marriage impossible. To spare her reputation he tried to make himself look like a cad. She was devastated; he left for Berlin, and within two years published Either/Or, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, all haunted by the theme of renunciation.

Many scholars read Abraham’s willingness to give up Isaac as, among other things, a mirror of Kierkegaard giving up Regine, though they disagree about how far the parallel goes. The difference matters. Abraham, in Johannes’ account, believes that he will receive Isaac back in this life, by virtue of the absurd. Kierkegaard did not get Regine back. She married Johan Frederik Schlegel in 1847, and Kierkegaard, who never married, left her his estate in his will. She declined the money but accepted some of his papers and belongings. He wrote in his journal that if he had had faith, he would have stayed with Regine. By his own standards, he had reached infinite resignation, not faith.

This is not gossip for its own sake. It explains why Kierkegaard’s writing on faith is so far from the meme’s happy third panel. Faith, for him, is not a reward that arrives once you climb past ethics. It is a relation to God sustained through loss, anxiety and the constant possibility of offence, and it is lived by people who often look entirely ordinary from the outside. For the despair that precedes it, see Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair.

A Christian Who Attacked the Church

Kierkegaard was a Christian who spent his final years attacking his country’s church, which is why both of his usual labels, “first existentialist” and “Christian philosopher”, need a footnote.

The SEP warns that the title “father of existentialism” obscures “at least as much as it reveals”, especially for readers who associate existentialism with atheists like Sartre. The SEP describes his overall aim as “reintroducing Christianity into Christendom”: working out what it means to become a Christian in a country where everyone already counted as one. In the last two years of his life (1854 to 1855), the SEP reports, he attacked the Danish state church in the name of “New Testament Christianity”. His complaint was about comfort: Danes were Christians by citizenship and habit, baptised into a faith they had never had to choose. Show him the meme’s grinning third panel in 1855 and he would probably have recognised the state church.

The attack was his final work. In 1854 and 1855 he published a series of pamphlets called The Moment, accusing the Danish state church of turning Christianity into a comfortable civil religion in which everyone is a Christian by birth and therefore nobody is one in earnest. When he collapsed in the street in October 1855 and was taken to hospital, he refused to receive communion from a pastor, saying he would accept it only from a layman. He died on 11 November 1855, at forty-two. His funeral turned into a small scandal when his nephew protested at the graveside that the church was burying a man who had denounced it. It is a fitting end for a writer who believed that the most dangerous enemy of faith is not unbelief but a faith that costs nothing.

For Kierkegaard’s darker side, read Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair: Finding Meaning in an Existential Crisis.