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

Last updated: October 19, 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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