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Kierkegaard’s leap of faith: irrational, or beyond reason?

Aoife Brennan Fellow
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Faith & reasonModern EuropeanExistentialism#kierkegaard#leap-of-faith
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In Fear and Trembling (1843), written under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, Kierkegaard considers Abraham, who is ready to sacrifice Isaac at God's command. Johannes can't understand Abraham. He calls this a "teleological suspension of the ethical": Abraham's relation to God goes beyond the universal demands of ethics.

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), the pseudonym Johannes Climacus says that truth is subjectivity and that faith involves passionate commitment in the face of objective uncertainty.

People call this "irrationalism". But I'm not sure. Kierkegaard seems to think reason has limits, and that faith is what happens at those limits, not a rejection of reason. Is there a real difference between "against reason" and "beyond reason"? Or is that just a nicer way of saying the same thing?

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  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Remember the pseudonyms. Johannes de Silentio repeatedly says he can't make the leap; he admires it from outside. Reading the book as Kierkegaard's own plea for the leap misses its irony.

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  2. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Iqbal's approach to religious experience is a useful contrast. He thought religious experience is a form of knowledge that reason can and should examine, the way we examine sense experience. For him, faith isn't beyond reason but a further source of data for it.

  3. Layla Haddad

    Fellow

    In al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error, his crisis of doubt ends not with an argument but, as he describes it, with a light that God cast into his breast. And yet he goes on to write closely argued books. Being rescued by something beyond reason didn't make him give up reasoning; it gave him somewhere to stand.

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