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What Is Kierkegaard's View Of Existence

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In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus remarks that “truth is subjectivity” as he interrogates our state of existence by laying out the existential preconditions for receiving the truth. The paradigm that Kierkegaard is concerned with came from the German philosopher, Hegel. In specific, Kierkegaard opposes Hegel’s paradigm and German idealism as Kierkegaard argues that Hegel failed in that his paradigm cancels out individual freedom. In other words, Kierkegaard accuses Hegel of having a philosophy with no ethics as detaching the individual from human existence is odd. According to Kierkegaard, the emphasis must be placed on the individual for the spiritual life of the individual is the main issue. In doing so, he distinguishes between speculative philosophy …show more content…

In subjective truth, there is persistent striving wherein all competition and finality will be postponed, which is in opposition to Hegel’s idea that one can reach a point wherein they are complete. Kierkegaard’s criticism of objective truth is a critique of existentially detached thinking as he holds that to be abstract/absent minded, means there is no ethics. Despite his high regard for subjective truth, he does not deny truths of logic and mathematics as he does not refer to experiential subjectivity, rather he speaks exclusively of religious truths or existential subjectivity. Furthermore, even with regard to ethics and religion, he is not a subjectivist as he does not claim that religious truth is subjective in a relativistic way for his notion of subjectivity relates more to existential action rather than individual perception. Above all, Kierkegaard does not imply that there is no objective truth, but rather that one misses the point of life by focusing on the objective instead of the

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