International Journal of Systematic Theology Volume 1 Number 1 March 1999

The Normative Resources of

Kierkegaards Subjectivity Principle
MYRON B. PENNER*

Abstract: Kierkegaards subjectivity principle is a critique of modern

epistemology that remains normative. These norms result from analysis of
subjectivity in terms of its reflexive and constitutional elements. Kierkegaards
epistemology is intrinsically theological and explicates human subjectivity in
terms of Christian doctrinal concepts such as revelation, sin and atonement.
Here the superiority of Christianity is located not in its propositions as such,
but in a way of being that effectuates a certain propositional understanding of
the world as it establishes the ground for human subjectivity.

The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make
what is problematic disappear.
Ludwig Wittgenstein1
The difficulty (which, please note, is essentially the same in every generation;
thus now and in the year 1700 etc., it is just as difficult to become a Christian
as in the first generation, and as in every generation when Christianity was
introduced into a country) consists in subjectively coveting information about
the historical in the interest of ones eternal happiness, and the person who
does not have this highest subjective passion is not a Christian, because... an
objective Christian is a pagan... To repeat: the difficulty is that I cannot come
to know anything historical in such a way that I (who objectively can indeed be
very well satisfied with information) subjectively can base on it an eternal
happiness, not someone elses, but my own that is, that I can think it.
Sren Kierkegaard2
The putative collapse of the modern epistemological project poses new challenges
to Christianitys claims of exclusive truth. This paper examines the resources of
* New College, Edinburgh, EH1 2LX, UK.
1 L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 27.
2 S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans.
and ed. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992),
vol. 1, pp. 577f.
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and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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Sren Kierkegaards subjectivity principle for answering the kind of challenge

presented to the Christian Church in a post-Enlightenment philosophical setting.
The scope of such a task is wide and variegated and is a formidable front for anyone
to defend; there are, for example, hermeneutical issues, historical issues and
doctrinal issues. I will limit myself to a particular subset of these problems, the
epistemological issues, as they confront Sren Kierkegaards theological
epistemology of subjectivity. I propose that Kierkegaards conception of the
nature of truth and the norms which govern it provides a model on which
Christianity can warrant its exclusive truth claims in a theological and
philosophical environment that has accepted a critique of the modern project.
My inquiry is situated in Kierkegaards most explicit and comprehensive treatment
of subjectivity in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments.
The resources of this will then be explored in terms of its potential as a constructive
principle that warrants Christian exclusivist claims.

Subjectivity and truth

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript we encounter Kierkegaards pseudonymous
declaration3 that truth is subjectivity. The definition of this subjective truth is an
objective uncertainty, held fast through an appropriation with the most passionate
inwardness, and it is the highest truth there is for an existing person.4 This
reworking of the traditional categories of truth theory postulates an interesting, if
cryptic, philosophical principle, the heart of which are issues of epistemology and
belief.
Johannes Climacus, the most philosophical and dialectical of Kierkegaards
pseudonyms, formulates this definition after arguing for the insolvency of both the
empirical definition of truth, as the agreement of thought with being, and the
idealist notion of truth, as the agreement of being with thought. The failure of both
theories is in their attempt to prescribe the parameters of truth solely in terms of an
objective emphasis on what is said. This objective reflection turns truth into an
object whose point it is to disregard the subject. However, the genuinely existing
person employs a subjective reflection in which truth becomes appropriation,
inwardness, subjectivity.5 Climacus recommends an orientation to matters of truth
in which the emphasis is on how a thing is said, as opposed to what is said.6 He
further elaborates, saying that When the truth is asked about subjectively, the
3 Kierkegaards penchant for signing pseudonyms to his earlier aesthetic works opens a
hermeneutical Pandoras Box one which I do not intend to open here. Throughout the
paper I will retain a sensitivity to the pseudonyms and their discrete personalities, but
will also use Kierkegaard interchangeably with a given pseudonyms name to refer to
the ideas contained in Kierkegaards writings.
4 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 203.
5 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 192.
6 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 202.
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individuals relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation
is in truth the individual is in truth, even if he were to relate himself to untruth.7
Truth, says Climacus, is the existential position of an individual; it is the being in
truth of the person that is emphasized. Truth is fundamentally salvific. This
existential mode or relation is brought about as the product of a certain kind of selfactivity which he interchangeably calls inwardness, passion, and subjectivity.

The nature of subjectivity

Kierkegaard employs his concept of subjectivity in two distinct ways. One refers
to the nature and constitution of the human subject as individual. Subjectivity in
this first sense is a state which may be described; it is something we are (or can be),
and refers to humans as they are in so far as they are subjects.8 We may call this
constitutional subjectivity. For Kierkegaard humans possess a kind of existence,
distinct from physical objects of the universe, given to us as our task. Kierkegaard
often uses subjectivity broadly to refer to the subject-forming activities of interests,
attitudes and compulsions in contrast to the objectifying activities of employing
objective reason in abstract philosophical reflection. This aspect of subjectivity
shares much with Heideggers notions of care and concern as the human
persons fundamental self-relation to the world of objects (beings) around her.9
Human existence is a duplexity, a juxtaposition of contraries, demarcated along
the lines of possibility and actuality. 10 Human persons are a duality11 and exist in a
tension equally composed of possibility and actuality, finite and infinite, temporal
and eternal, thought and existence, ideality and reality, and so on, where in each
pair the first term belongs to one half of the disjunction that comprises the human
person while the second term belongs to the other. This duplex situatedness
generates an interested being-in-the-world. Kierkegaards term is Interesse, which
has the dual meaning of being between and of being a matter of concern.12
7 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 199.
8 As a general concept, existence denotes a temporal unfolding and a becoming in time,
inherently comprised of motion. See Kierkegaards discussion of proving the existence
(Tilvrelse) of something in timespace in Philosophical Fragments, Johannes
Climacus, trans. and ed. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1985), pp. 39ff.
9 Heidegger uses these terms in a more developed and specific way than Kierkegaard uses
subjectivity, but they share a basic agreement. For Heidegger care is the fundamental
constituent of Dasein (the human person) with the three-fold manifestation of
possibility, facticity and falling, while concern denotes an individuals relations to
things, not other persons. See M. Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and
Row, 1962).
10 See Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, pp. 32443, 35860; vol. 2, pp. 41, 73f.
11 This is not to be understood as Cartesian substance dualism.
12 See J.D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics. Repetition, Deconstruction and the
Hermeneutic Project (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 300, n. 22.
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Constitutional subjectivity is fundamentally characterized by the literal sense of

being-between definite states which in turn produces a teleological or intentional
being-toward that expresses the interested awareness of subjectivity.
Second, Kierkegaard refers to subjectivity as an activity humans must do; he
calls us to be subjective, to exercize inwardness, to have passion. Let us call this
element of Kierkegaards subjectivity reflexive subjectivity. Kierkegaard uses
the terms subjectivity, inwardness, and passion to refer to the one activity of
becoming subjective. Reflexive subjectivity is predicated upon the type of
interested reflection (thinking) that is appropriate to the human person as existing
subject, and is most often referred to by Kierkegaard as inwardness. Here the
focus is on integrity and inner motivations in contrast to the externalities of
social position, reputation, and the results of actions.13 Reflexive subjectivity
trades on Kierkegaards analysis of the duplexity of human existence. In
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard describes the double-reflection
of the subjective thinker who is aware of the duplexity of existence.14 This
reflection of inwardness is distinguished from the objective thinkers
disinterestedness to the particularities of the thinking subject. In doublereflection the thinker is fundamentally concerned with the actuality of her/his
own existence, its temporal situatedness, and how she/he is to negotiate the
exigencies which come from being in the world.15 Inwardness in this sense is a
double-reflection because it not only abstracts concepts (as possibilities) from
concrete reality (actuality) as does objective reflection, but it thinks these again
in relation to the actuality of the thinkers existence in order both to apply them
to and realize them in it.

The truth of subjectivity

This analysis of subjectivity provides us with a preliminary understanding of what
Climacus means when he states that subjectivity is truth. There are four important
points I would like to make in this regard.
First, the thesis that truth is subjectivity is not an outright denial of the
existence of objective facts, as some would have it. Kierkegaard distinguishes
between essential knowledge, which pertains to Socratic ethical self-knowledge,
and accidental knowledge, which consists in information about the universe.16
13

14
15
16

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 73; cf. vol. 2, pp. 2437. Robert C.
Roberts also draws this distinction in Existence, Emotion and Virtue: Classical Themes
in Kierkegaard in A. Hannay and G.D. Marino, eds, The Cambridge Companion to
Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 178. See also Sren
Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, trans. and ed. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong
(Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1967), vol. I, no. 73; vol. IV, no. 4542, 4571.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, pp. 724.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 357.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 205.
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Essential knowledge is subjectivity (in both our above senses) and is the highest
truth for an existing person. While Kierkegaard does not believe propositions
actually exist they instead have a kind of thought-existence distinguished from
existing in actuality17 he does believe that as ideal objects they are instantiated as
acts or states of existing beings.18 These propositions may express cognitive
relationships to the objectively real world and are able to provide approximate,
fallibilist knowledge (as possibility). Merold Westphal notes that in Climacus
theory of truth as subjectivity it is affirmed that there is objective truth of two kinds.
One kind is unavailable to us (that is, the Gods-eye point of view on reality), while
the other is available but inappropriate to the self-understanding and self-choice
before the ethical and before God.19
Second, Kierkegaard is reconfiguring the question of moral and religious
(essential) truth in the ontological terms of the relationship of the thinker to the
propositions expressed. J. Heywood Thomas aptly notes that Kierkegaard is
emphasizing that the nature of a truth claim is that it says how things are so that
however much we want to insist on the fact that truth relates to what is said it is
in the end an ontological rather than a logical or semantic [problem].20
Kierkegaard is reprioritizing modernitys emphasis on objective truth and
insisting that even should this obtain in an individual, it is of very little value
because humans, apposite to the constitutional rendering of subjectivity, are not
mere possibility but actuality as well. The highest truth there is for an existing
human is to reduplicate in actuality what is conceptually grasped that is, to be in
truth. Truth conceived in this way, as uniquely human truth, is a form of existence
whereby a concrete ego thinks the universal abstract ideal and at the same time
exists through his/her thinking of it as a repetition that actualizes the subjective
thinkers various relations (interests and concerns) to his/her conception of them.
Here Kierkegaard can be seen fruitfully to be articulating a concept which
prefigures and anticipates Wittgensteins forms of life. Kierkegaard ultimately sees
truth as a matter of felicitously engaging in forms of life.
17 Kierkegaard distinguishes two kinds of existence: factual and ideal (thought,
conceptual). See his discussion in Philosophical Fragments, pp. 39ff. Factual being
refers to that which exists as actual, and there are no degrees of this type of being. Ideal
being, or essence, can be explored for coherence and to see what logical relations it
involves, but essence is conceptual and not in a necessary relationship with factual
being qua actuality/existence. Kierkegaard is very careful here to avoid Anselms error
of identifying existence as a property of a thing, which Kant so cogently rebutted. See
Journals, vol. I. no. 1057.
18 C.S. Evans, Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaards Concluding Unscientific
Postscript in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, p. 172. See also Evans,
Kierkegaards Fragments and Postscript: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes
Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 119f.
19 M. Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaards Concluding Unscientific
Postscript (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1996), p. 116.
20 J. Heywood Thomas, Kierkegaards Alternative Metaphysical Theology, History of
European Ideas 12 (1990), p. 59.
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Taken together, the first two points entail a third, namely that any sense of
ultimate truth must be understood eschatologically. Any fallibilist view of
knowledge depends upon an eschatological fulfilment, either explicitly or
implicitly. There is presumed to be a Gods-eye point of view that, even if never
obtained, is potentially attainable and is the basis upon which our fallibilist claims
are assumed to be veridical. Truth, in both its sense as a propositional expression of
an objectively real state of affairs and in its soteriological sense of my being in the
truth, is always provisional and waiting for its ultimate expression in a final
cognizing and redemptive act. Science, that paragon of observation and objective
information, is always in need of revision in the light of new evidence. I am
constantly in need of self-examination and redirection as long as I am in spatiotemporal existence there is always a gap between my knowing and my doing,
and my conceiving is itself incomplete. Now we know in part and we prophesy in
part.21
The fourth and last point is that inwardness or subjectivity is an activity or state
that has a normative capacity with epistemological overtones. Reflexive
subjectivity, as a kind of reflection, provides a critical principle whereby beliefs
may be regulated and as such is an epistemological principle. Constitutional
subjectivity provides the descriptive parameters for genuine expression of human
authenticity, which in turn suggests a criterion for adjudicating ways of being in the
world. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript we read that the definition of truth
stated above is a paraphrasing of faith,22 which involves an inherent element of
risk and uncertainty. The astonishing conclusion Climacus comes to at the end of
Concluding Unscientific Postscript is that the how [of faith] can only fit one
thing.23 In his Journals and Papers we read Kierkegaards own commentary on
Johannes Climacus religious philosophy.
In all the usual talk that Johannes Climacus is mere subjectivity, etc., it has
been completely overlooked that in addition to all his other concretions he
points out in one of the last sections [of the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript] that the remarkable thing is that there is a How with the
characteristics that when the How is scrupulously rendered the What is also
given, that this is the very How of faith.24 Right here, at its very maximum,
inwardness is shown to be objectivity and this is a turning point of the
subjectivity principle, which as far as I know has never before been carried
through or accomplished in this way.25

21
22
23
24
25

This fits very nicely with some recent attempts at articulating the eschatological
significance of narrative Christology. See R. Bauckham, The Future of Jesus Christ
(Finlayson Memorial Lecture, 1996, in press).
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 204.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, pp. 610f.
See Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, pp. 610f, 613f.
Journals, vol. IV, no. 4550.
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Kierkegaards emphasis on the subjectivity of truth turns out to be a radical attempt

to turn epistemology on its head and privilege ethics as First Philosophy.26 The
ethical How takes precedence in governing our beliefs over the rational What of
modernist, rationalist epistemology. The subjectivity principle, in its epistemic
relevance, may be scripted simply as The How determines the What. I want to
follow this suggestion of Kierkegaards, and try to unravel how this might be the
case.

Kierkegaard and epistemology?

Kierkegaards epistemological position is best understood a` propos Barths and
Ricoeurs projects to reinscribe general hermeneutics within special or biblical
hermeneutics.27 My suggestion is that Kierkegaards categories of accidental and
essential knowledge correspond to the hermeneutical categories of general and
special hermeneutics. Climacus is privileging special (or theological) epistemology over a general theory of knowledge; or perhaps to say it better, Kierkegaard
sees general epistemology (accidental knowing in the abstract) as derivative from
and an instance of a paradigmatic theological (and incarnational) theory of
knowledge (essential and interested knowledge). The substantial argument of both
the Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is that when one reverses
this order and makes theological knowledge a special case of an objective theory of
knowledge one is wrong on both counts, and in Works of Love Kierkegaard argues
that only when oriented from a position of love (characterized by the Godrelationship) is there genuine knowledge.28 Hence the inclusion of the terms
Christianity, eternal happiness, and other theological jargon as Climacus
discusses issues of truth and knowledge. The Socratic subjectivity of truth is a
genuine form of knowledge but ends in an aporia of self in which the truth of
subjectivity is that subjectivity is ultimately untruth as revealed in the incarnation
of the God-man. Sin is an epistemological category that renders human subjectivity
irredeemable from within immanence. Through obedience to God and appropriation of the atonement, this genuine transcendence ratifies the subject once more in

26 I do not mean to suggest that we should read Emmanuel Levinas programme of ethics
as First Philosophy into Kierkegaard; if they are compared, I mean to suggest the
opposite. As a fundamentally Judaic concern, Levinas programme is essentially
different from Kierkegaards. I do not intend to address these differences here, but will
note that Levinas is neither radical nor original given my reading of Kierkegaard.
27 See K. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), p. 466; P. Ricoeur,
Philosophical Hermeneutics and Theological Hermeneutics, Studies in Religion 5
(19756), p. 25. See also K. Vanhoozer, The Spirit of Understanding: Special
Revelation and General Hermeneutics in R. Lundin, ed., Disciplining Hermeneutics.
Interpretation in Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), pp. 15963.
28 Works of Love, trans. and ed. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1995), pp. 22735.
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eternal blessedness (truth). But we run ahead of ourselves and will return to this
later.
The preceding analysis of subjectivity in terms of its constitutional and
reflexive forms is the way Kierkegaards concept of subjectivity appears when
different questions are asked of it. Both are aspects of the same phenomenon or
category. Kierkegaard presents his analysis of subjectivity both as a critique of
modernitys emphasis on objective reason, and as a constructive principle that
corrects the metaphysical and epistemological project of modernity. Kierkegaard is
laying out a prescription governing the formation of our beliefs. Of course, this is
not all he is trying to do, but it is precisely these resources of his subjectivity
principle that go unnoticed in Kierkegaardian scholarship. Taken together, the
constitutional and reflexive elements of human subjectivity provide a cogent way
forward in opposition to modernitys objectivism and infallibilism. Thus understood, the subjectivity principle is fundamentally concerned with what I will call
felicitous doxastic practice, to convey the idea of a faithful or apt manner of human
belief formation. This somewhat awkward terminology attempts to avoid the
traditional language of epistemology something Kierkegaard was keen to do but
in the end it means something very similar to our ordinary usage of the word
knowledge.
Kierkegaard is interested in epistemology, and many readings of him as a non/
anti-epistemologist fail to recognize the significance of his meta-epistemological
discussion of subjectivity.29 A thorough-going Kierkegaardian epistemology will
elucidate both the general and the theological levels of epistemology and their
interface. I will not provide a comprehensive treatment of this kind of
epistemology; my central purpose here is to explore the nature of and resources
offered by such an epistemology. However, it will be useful to sketch briefly the
basic characteristics of such a general epistemology, before discussing some of the
details in the application of the subjectivity principle.
Kierkegaards epistemology of subjectivity is (1) foundationalist and (2)
fallibilist in its justification. I use the concept of justification in a fallibilist sense to
signify a normative belief or procedure that provides warrant for beliefs such that
the belief in question would have what Paul Ricoeur calls attestation the
assurance necessary to believe in (rather than merely believe that) something as
true.30 In this manner foundation simply signifies a contingent, material basis or
29

30

For example, D.R. Law in Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1993), p. 71. Kierkegaard may be seen as completely against epistemology only if
epistemology is perceived in the very narrow way of the Enlightenment; that is, to have
as its appropriate and legitimate task to ascertain and prescribe indubitable foundations
for the adjudication of beliefs (as abstract, independently existing propositions). If we
cease to think of epistemology in this prescriptive, infallibilist and a priori way, and
instead focus on it as a descriptive, fallible task, describing how it is that some beliefs
are privileged and others not, then this picture of Kierkegaard disappears.
See P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.
21, 301f.
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ground for our belief the place where our attempts at justification end. This is
fallibilist in that our justifications are never absolute and our truth claims are
always open to revision. Furthermore, the type of justification employed is (3) a
naturalistic kind and is (4) externalist. Kierkegaards approach to questions of the
nature and regulation of belief is naturalistic, in terms of the grammar of concepts,
not metaphysics. Kierkegaard, like Wittgenstein, sees philosophys task as the
grammar of concepts because the only cognitive access we have to reality by
thought is its conceptual essences.31 For Kierkegaard this is also linked to a virtue
theory, for the manner in which we perceive the world, that is, the concepts we
glean from it, is dependent upon our position in the world (our forms of life), rather
than some specific intellectual action we perform. That which makes our beliefs
warranted is not located directly in our consciousness. Beliefs are not dependent
upon our justifying them before the tribunal of our reason, our being able
consciously to trace the justificatory chain of believed-on-the-basis-of relations,
before they are felicitous. Our cognitive position in the world is deemed good or
bad according to ethical standards that regulate our position in the world.
Kierkegaard, then, is interested in epistemology in a capacious sense of the
term, in that he is interested in the nature of beliefs and the regulation of them. He
is not attempting to establish an infallible rational basis for belief that removes
objective uncertainty, or trying to continue the modern project on its terms, or even
attempting to provide a developed epistemic theory. Nonetheless, Kierkegaards
subjectivity principle is epistemologically programmatic, and this was his intention.

Subjectivity as a regulative doxastic principle

One very important feature of this doxastic regulation is that the propositional
content of belief is important. To reiterate, Kierkegaard is not reducing the norms
which regulate our beliefs to mere subjective whim or any strong emotive state.
Kierkegaard insists that he is misinterpreted if one thinks that in all his talk of
passion he intend[s] to sanction every uncircumcised immediacy, every unshaven
passion.32 As we saw earlier, truth for Kierkegaard involves both actuality and
possibility, propositions as thought (or possibility) and actions as existence (or
actuality). The point at which these two things converge in a human person is
belief.

The nature of belief

The Danish term Kierkegaard uses for faith is tro. Translated into English, tro
generally denotes faith in the religious sense, but in Danish, tro also includes
31 See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), nos. 370,
373.
32 Journals, vol. III, no. 3127.
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the more synoptic meaning of the English word belief, as concerning some fact
regarding the furniture of the universe. Kierkegaard uses this term to refer to both
religious belief and the everyday kinds of beliefs we have about the real world,
and he carefully distinguishes these two uses for us in the text of the
Fragments.33 Kierkegaard calls tro-as-belief faith sensu laxiori or faith in the
ordinary sense. As Law notes, this is a purely epistemological category,34 and
denotes those beliefs concerning objects of historical becoming. On the other
hand, Kierkegaard denotes tro in the religious sense as faith sensu eminentiori
or sensu strictissimo faith in the eminent or strict sense. Kierkegaard is
couching his discussion in a religious framework, but is not giving us an account
only of religious belief. It is true that he is giving us an account of religious
belief, in fact, an account of Christian belief, but at the same time he is giving an
explanation of doxastic practice in general. It so happens that Kierkegaard thinks
that there can be no adequate non-Christian account of epistemology,
metaphysics, or belief.
Passion and belief
The nature of belief is central to our understanding of Kierkegaards subjectivity as
a regulative doxastic principle. First, the nature of belief is for Kierkegaard a
feature of our subjectivity that is, of our humanity which consolidates our
rational and non-rational modes of being-in-the-world. Climacus refers to belief
and doubt as opposite passions.35 In Two Ages, passion is put forward as an
essential and necessary ingredient in an individuals development of character.36
The expression of passion which shapes and moulds the human person and gives it
permanency over time is character.37 It is in passionate formation of character that
a persons life is held together in a unified perspective and presents the cognitive
subject with its collocation in the midst of the motion of reality. Passion is able to
do this because it is in fact the context and substance of motion itself.38 To be an
existing subject is to be in motion and motion is inherently agent-ful; thus it is in
passion-as-agency (that is, subjectivity) that one achieves the genuine motion of
existence as a unified self. Kierkegaard prompts us: Here one is again reminded of
my thesis that subjectivity is truth.39 To act passionately is to exist.

33
34

35
36
37
38
39

Philosophical Fragments, pp. 87f.

D.R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, p. 89. For Laws discussion of the
senses of tro, see pp. 869. See also H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, editorial note 43,
Journals, vol. II, no. 311, and C.S. Evans, Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard,
p. 171.
See Philosophical Fragments, p. 84.
S. Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary
Review, trans. and ed. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978), pp. 62, 64, 68.
See Kierkegaard, Two Ages, pp. 62, 77.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 312.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 313.
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Passion, then, is Kierkegaards term for the constitutive force of the human
subject which enables the human person to achieve the existential concretion
(subjectivity) of his abstract eternality (thought) with his transitive temporality
(existence). The term passion connotes a link with human emotions, and for
Kierkegaard it is a particular kind of non-rational (emotional) inward possession
that is an essential force in directing and shaping a persons life. This concept of
passion is correlative to our everyday use of the terms values and ideals, which
are not rational entities but are inner capacities which find expression through
emotions.40 These are dispositions that must be slowly cultivated, and this is
accomplished by willing to do other things, which our imagination is able to
present to our consciousness as possibilities. Kierkegaard is an indirect volitionalist
who thinks that we make choices to be certain kinds of people and value certain
kinds of things; that is, by projecting for ourselves a range of possibilities (via
imagination) and then choosing to pursue a particular range of those, we cultivate
specific correlative kinds of passions, which in turn form our belief dispositions.41
It is in this way that our beliefs are products of our volition and are resolutions.
As a type of passion, belief for Kierkegaard is a nexus of possibility and
actuality in the individual and is the site of existential concretion. Belief is literally
an anticipation of the eternal in existence.42 To put it differently, beliefs are
necessary states of human persons if they are to attain a fully developed
subjectivity. As a feature of our subjectivity, the content of belief is given to us by
our ways of being in the world; that is, the passions or dispositions which move us
to give cognitive assent to certain propositions are generated as we position
ourselves in specific ways in reality. This is the sense in which Kierkegaard is an
externalist. In any talk of justifying or warranting a belief, the final court of appeal
is the manner in which the belief is generated, not the reasons upon which the
subject consciously bases her/his belief. We believe certain things because we are
positioned in the world in such a way that we are inclined to believe, or see, that
some propositions are true over others. Part of this positioning may include very
refined pieces of rational argumentation, but Kierkegaard reminds us that we only
believe those propositions which we accept, and this acceptance is not a simple
matter of rational inquiry. Even our reasoning is situated in our subjectivity.
Kierkegaard cordons off subjectivity as a separate sphere of existence from the
sphere of possibility. As thought, reason is limited in a quasi-Kantian way and deals
in possibility, not actuality, and has the ability only to inform conceptual existence
(what Kierkegaard calls essence). Belief, as a feature of subjectivity, is not a
purely rational entity and in so far as belief-formation occurs as the product of our
passions or dispositions, beliefs are not directly and exclusively regulated by the
exercize of reason that is, by way of abductive, deductive or inductive arguments.
40 C.S. Evans, Kierkegaards Fragments and Postscript, p. 69.
41 C.S. Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaards Philosophical
Fragments (Indianapolis, Indiana: University of Indiana Press, 1992), p. 134.
42 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, p. 313.
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As we humanly engage the world we form beliefs. These beliefs are paradoxical
for reason, in that they are neither completely rationally determined (that is,
produced only by reason) nor rationally determinable (that is, absolutely certain in
Descartes sense). However, reason with its evidential concerns does play a role in
the regulation of belief on some level. It is able dialectically to clarify the concepts
beliefs employ and identify good and bad passions. Reason, though logical
argumentation, is a kind of passion and belief-producing disposition, and therefore
retains strict censure over a certain range of beliefs mathematical or scientific
beliefs, for example. The point is that, for Kierkegaard, reason no longer exercizes
exclusive, hegemonic control over the regulation of belief.
Levels of belief
There are two distinguishable levels of belief in Kierkegaards thought. There is,
first, belief in the typical sense of believing some proposition of the world.
Kierkegaards understanding of this has been explicated in the foregoing analysis of
belief. As we engage the world through our various modes of being we form
beliefs. A second level of belief pertains more generally to the kinds of passions or
dispositions that produce beliefs. These passions are in a significant sense products
of our wills and therefore are selected in some fashion. Kierkegaard refers to belief
at this level as a life-view. The way we are in the world, the kinds of passion in
which we ourselves invest, or, again, the manner in which we act in the world and
process the everyday experiences we have, is a product of the life-view we have.
This is pre-reflective interpretive framework through which we make existential
sense of experience. It is not a specific set of propositions, not simply the aggregate
of ones experiences to date, but is an overall orientation to experience, a means of
determining (that is, of providing a determination for) what counts as evidence or
reasons to believe a given proposition.43 It is instructive to see life-views
functioning in the same capacity as Wittgensteins concept of a world-picture,
which serves as the basis or foundation (Grundlage)44 for, or point of departure45
of a communitys looking at the world.46 Life-views and world-pictures are the de
facto source of both certainties and knowledge-claims.47
43

44
45
46
47

Kierkegaard writes: A life-view is more than a quintessence or a sum of propositions

maintained in its abstract neutrality; it is more than experience [Erfaring], which as
such is always fragmentary. It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience
[Erfaringens Transubstantiation]; it is an unshakable certainty in itself won from all
lived experience [Empirie]. Early Polemical Writings, trans. and ed. J. Watkin
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 76.
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 167.
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 105.
See M. Kober, Certainties of a World-Picture. The Epistemological Investigations in
On Certainty, in H. Sluga and D.G. Stern, eds, The Cambridge Companion to
Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 418f.
For Wittgenstein, these world-pictures are much more a function of communal
interaction than Kierkegaard was willing to grant. As I understand it, these world
pictures are, for Wittgenstein, the product of language-games: see On Certainty, p. 105.
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Life-views also have a functional similarity to Paul Helms concept of a belief

policy in so far as he defines this as a strategy or project or program for accepting,
rejecting or suspending judgment as to the truth of propositions in accordance with
a set of norms.48 Both positions realize that accepting a proposition as a matter of
fact cannot be done as an evidential concern only, and that while there can be
reasons why one belief policy is superior to others, there can be no purely rational
evaluation of them. They are different in that Kierkegaards idea of life-views is
more global and refers more to a singular prevailing paradigm by which certain
belief-producing passions are evaluated, whereas Helm claims that a persons
noetic structure may accommodate more than one belief policy.49 This does not
render Helms and Kierkegaards concepts irreconcilable. Rather, in referring to
multiple, co-existing belief policies, I believe that Helm is referring to another level
of belief, in between the two I have identified in Kierkegaard. I see nothing in
Kierkegaard to stop us from seeing belief-forming passions as having levels, where
there are general families of passions which subsume various genera under them.
To use Helms vocabulary, I see a life-view as a global belief policy about the kind
of belief policies we employ that is, a policy by which we adopt other
intermediate belief policies.
Kierkegaard, then, has at least two levels at which beliefs are formed and
regulated. One deals with the forming of specific beliefs, the other with the
general orientation one has toward reality which leads one to adopt certain
strategies, criteria, and so forth, for the regulation of belief. This second level is
very much a matter of seeing the world in a certain way, which has a communal
aspect.

Normative belief
There is a two-fold nature to the normative application of the subjectivity I want
to emphasize. Subjectivity in both its reflexive and constitutional elements
provides the norm for beliefs that corresponds to the levels of belief discussed
above.
In its reflexive element, as a specifiable action and type of reflexive activity,
subjectivity plays a role in regulating the formation of specific beliefs. As one
engages in the subjective reflection of inwardness, one may examine and analyse
the passions or dispositions or virtues which one possesses and employs as they
give expression to certain propositions. One may then take steps to correct or
change this by imagining new possibilities and deliberately engaging them in a new
form of life. It would be extremely interesting to develop a general account of
belief acquisition and normative regulation at this level. As mentioned earlier, the
shape of this would be in the form of a virtue epistemology albeit a much
different kind of theory from the current virtue theories, which are committed to a
48 P. Helm, Belief Policies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 58.
49 P. Helm, Belief Policies, p. 58.
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static, ahistorical Cartesian subject, and are essentially theologically neutral.50

Beliefs warranted at this level are primarily (but not exclusively) those Kierkegaard
designated as accidental. But, as we have already suggested, there is another,
deeper kind of normativity in Kierkegaards thought.
The constitutional element of subjectivity (as constantly informed by the
reflexive element) provides a critical principle to regulate our ways of being in the
world that give rise to specific beliefs we form, by the teleological structure of
human subjectivity. It is given to me to actualize myself such that I am presented
with a unified perspective on reality that makes sense of myself and my
experiences. In other words, the task of my existence is to provide a narration that
renders an account of my concerns and interests in such a way that the subject of
the plot (that is, my self) understands itself.51 My suggestion is that we view
Kierkegaards theory of the existence-spheres, whose telos culminates in
religiousness B (Christianity) as a grammar of this narrative fulfilment of the
self. It is this aspect of Kierkegaards subjectivity principle which effectively
moves beyond the Enlightenment vision of epistemology and wrests the modern
conception of the human subject as abstracted epistemological pivot, as [an]
atemporal zero-point of cognition.52 Kierkegaard provides the space for a speaking
and narrating self who, from its lived experiences, always understands itself in its
speech and in its narration.53
Kierkegaard describes four spheres which define the contours of human
existence and are an effort to describe the boundaries and the parameters of the
various teloi one can employ in the movements of and toward subjectivity. First, in
Either/Or 54 we are presented with the aesthetic and ethical spheres. The aesthete
lives his/her life by the categories of pain and pleasure, and the ethicist his/hers in
terms of good and evil. The aesthete is trapped by a deterministic nihilism that
mutes the possibility of becoming a self by relativizing all choice. It is only by a
movement to the ethical by virtue of ethically assuming oneself that one may
repeat oneself and become an existing subject.55 In Fear and Trembling the
50

51
52
53

54
55

For a sampling of current virtue epistemologies, see A.I. Goldmann, Epistemology and
Cognition (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1986); J. Kvanvig, The
Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield,
1992); E. Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991); L. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996).
See C.O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (London: Yale University Press, 1997),
pp. 247.
C.O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, p. 25.
C.O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity, p. 26. I owe much of my reading of
Kierkegaards theory of existence-spheres to C. Schrag. See also The Kierkegaard Effect
in the Shaping of Modernity in M.J. Matustk and M. Westphal, eds, Kierkegaard in
Post/Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 117.
Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. and ed. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1987), 2 vols.
Either/Or, vol. 2, pp. 20727.
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ethical sphere is teleologically suspended in the religious as the self recognizes its
inability to ground its categories of good and evil in itself. The ethical founders in
the existential encounter with the presence of the Law-giver and his infinite
demand for submission. This religiousness is identified in Concluding Unscientific
Postscript as Religiousness A, the religion of transcendence-within-immanence.56
This is a religion within the limits of reason that seeks to ground ones ethical
obligation in a metaphysical construal of God and his relation to human
subjectivity.
Religiousness A is fractured as the efforts of the self to establish itself as the
guilt-consciousness become sin-consciousness and the truth that was subjectivity is
now, in its own right, seen to be untruth.57 Sin-consciousness is effected by the
historical intrusion of God in the spatio-temporal dimension as the only possible
historical departure for the eternal happiness (salighed) of human subjectivity.58
The incursion of God into time, the incarnation of God as man, is the necessary
means of providing the condition for the possibility of a developed human
subjectivity by granting the ontological conditions in which this may take place.
Religiousness B emerges as a non-metaphysical grammar as metaphysics founders
on the interest (interesse) of subjectivity.59 The subject matter of Religiousness B is
subjectivity, actuality itself, which is paradoxical and beyond reason.
In the realization of the movements of the existence spheres, one finds that
to be a self, an existentially concrete subject who makes sense of his/her
narrative history, is to be a self in relationship with God in Jesus Christ, the
external manifestation of which is a life penetrated with self-denying love.60 This
functions normatively in two respects. First, it provides a critical principle for the
evaluation of our ways of being in the world. This is accomplished by the
provision of a life-view in which subjectivity may be realized. Kierkegaards
analysis of Religiousness B locates the superiority of the Christian life-view in its
ability to provide the categories for the other existence-spheres and their
concomitant belief policies. As a ground for subjectivity it relativizes the belief
policy strategies of the aesthete. In its ability to provide the basis for
communitarian ethics by providing the category of the neighbour who must be
loved as oneself, it relativizes the ethico-religious belief policies of both the
56 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, pp. 555ff. See also S. Kierkegaard, Fear and
Trembling, trans. and ed. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1983).
57 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, p. 207.
58 This is the entire point of Fragments, to which Concluding Unscientific Postscript is the
conclusion. The epigraph to Fragments reads: Can a historical point of departure be
given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than
historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge? This is
expanded further in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, especially chapter four (pp.
36186).
59 S. Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. and ed. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1983), p. 149.
60 This is the subject of Kierkegaards Works of Love.
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ethical and Religiousness A spheres. The life-view that gives us the conceptual
means of envisioning and enacting a developed subjectivity is the one which
fulfils the teleological structure of human narrative self-identity.
Second, the superiority of the Christian life-view means that the conceptual
categories which arise from these ways of being in the world are the categories by
which one forms and evaluates ones life that is, it provides a normative context
for reflexive subjectivity. Constitutional subjectivity functions to provide a means
of sorting belief policies. While the shift from one form of reference to another, or
from one existence sphere to another, cannot be rationally decided, constitutional
subjectivity provides us with a basis to sort these out conceptually. One cannot
remove all objective uncertainty, nor categorically prove the superiority of a set of
belief policies, but as one is in the world and develops ones subjectivity, the ability
of the conceptual categories and belief policies employed reveals itself
pragmatically in the efficacy of these strategies to actualize the intended goals.

Conclusion
Kierkegaards subjectivity principle provides norms which avoid on the one hand
the excesses of modernity with its emphasis on metaphysicalepistemological
rationality, and on the other hand the relativistic pluralism of postmodernity. The
deepening of ones subjectivity through a concrete self-knowledge is the touchstone
of Kierkegaards epistemological paradigm that necessitates genuine knowledge,
yet this ethically grounded knowledge is fallible. Rendered this way, the
subjectivity principle entails the exclusive truth of Christianity as the only
conceptual system that adequately provides the being-in-truthness, the salvation of
the human person, by its ability to account for the constitution and aporia of the self
in a genuine transcendence-beyond-immanence understood via the categories of
Gods revelation, human sinfulness and atonement. Kierkegaard locates the
superiority of Christianity not in its doctrinal propositions as objectively true facts
about God and the universe, but in a way of being that effectuates a certain
propositional understanding of the world as it establishes the ground for human
subjectivity. These norms, as we have seen, do not provide categorical proof or
remove all objective uncertainty from Christian belief, but provide an existential
test for propositions and belief policies by exploring them for their conceptual
clarity and pragmatic efficacy to actualize a narrative of the self which is fully
unified.

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