I just finished reading some of Kierkegaard, the father of existentialist philosophy, and WOW. I was blown away, so I had to write - after jotting tons of notes in the margins, swirling all the ideas around in my brain, I had to get them on paper to sort them out and really think about them in their fulness. You know how that is? After reading the first two parts of Fear and Trembling, here are my thoughts. I'd love to know what you all think too! He's definitely raised some compelling questions.

To Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, faith is a complicated phenomenon.

According to Kierkegaard, faith is not the wide-eyed optimism of an eternal idealist, the roller-coaster thrill-spill ride of one who hopes for the best and is disappointed by anything less. It’s not this, he says (denouncing those who believe faith means never having doubtful thoughts. Faith, however, is also not closed-eyes resignation, (what Kierkegaard calls the “infinite resignation” the measured acquiescence of a man whose eyes gaze forever into the distance, seeking in the realm of the eternal what he cannot find in the present world. It is neither of these things, he believes – instead, it is both, and more.

To illustrate his idea of faith, he uses the allegory of a young boy, the “knight of faith” to be, a boy who adores a far-off princess he can never practically (in this world) possess. Still, he has seen her and loved her, and he cultivates this love to its fullest, drinking in thoughts of her at every moment, but making sure this is more than a mere obsession – he really thinks about if he wants this love to be “the content of his life,” and decides he does, having “imbibed all the love and absorbed himself in it.” This is what seems to be Kierkegaard’s first stage, that of possessing a hope, a wish, in which he can “concentrate the whole of his life’s content and the meaning of reality.”

In what seems to be the second stage, however, the boy realizes the truth that he can never have the princess (while still having decided to love her wholly, putting his soul into the love) and that in this life, the finite life, it is impossible to be with her. In this stage, he does not forget her, moving on (having so fully inhabited his love, he cannot move on) but neither does he languish in despair, denied meaning for the rest of his existence. Instead, his love takes on an eternal character, becoming “the expression of an eternal love,” expanding the concept from just “loving this particular girl on earth” into an eternal love that has validity and existence, even if it is just in his mind, in his soul, in some spiritual realm far from this world. In doing this, the boy recognizes that he cannot possess the girl on earth – but he realizes that his love still can find expression in the spiritual world. His love “now bends inwards, but is neither lost nor forgotten.”

Kierkegaard recognizes that some individuals choose to stop at this second stage, where there is “eace and repose,” this “infinite resignation.” Through infinite resignation, the individual goes beyond the temporal and the physical to recognize and accept the eternal and the spiritual, becoming aware of himself or herself as a spiritual being.

While Kierkegaard acknowledges that this achievement of infinite resignation is admirable and deeply significant, he does not believe that it is the endpoint in the individual’s journey, nor the signifier of faith. Instead, it is the necessary (but not the only) step that one must take to finally acquire faith.

To acquire faith, Kierkegaard poses the necessity of a third stage, the fabled “leap” based on what he calls “the strength of the absurd” – a concept that can best be described in his own words.

From Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling:
“The moment the knight resigned he was convinced of the impossibility, humanly speaking; that was a conclusion of the understanding… In an infinite sense, however, it was possible, through renouncing it [as a finite possibility]; but then accepting that [possibility] is at the same time to have given it up, yet for the understanding there is no absurdity in possessing it, for it is only in the finite world that understanding rules and there it was and remains an impossibility.”

Lost yet? I had to read the passage over several times before I finally think I grasped what he’s saying. The process of faith comes in three stages, (I’ll say it as a three-part argument, though the syllogism doesn’t *logically* work):

1. I have a wish, a deep desire.
2. This desire is impossible to achieve in the Finite. (K’s “infinite resignation,” first part)
3. However, it *is* possible in the Infinite. (K’s “infinite resignation,” second part)
To these stages, however, Kierkegaard adds another, the step of faith….
4. And so, I believe it is possible in the Finite. (K’s Faith)

After everything, Kierkegaard believes, after having absorbed a love completely, completely realized its impossibility, and completely realized its possibility and existence in the eternal/spiritual world, the individual *then* can gain the faith to believe in its possibility in the world of today, in “this life.”

Thus, after everything, the boy has created, resigned, and recognized his love’s spiritual dimension, and is now free to re-envision his love as something that he trusts may still come to him.

First, his love rested on the princess. Then, his love rested on the permanent, the spiritual. But now, with the act of faith, his love rests on the promise, the strength of the absurd, the melding of temporal and eternal, spiritual and physically real – a union and a paradox at once, which is true faith.

Interestingly, Kierkegaard says what most people call “losing their faith” (an act which many – and maybe myself – would say that I have done, in changing my beliefs from my childhood religion to a more deistic conception of God – is really actually the act of teetering on the edge of “infinite resignation.” What we have lost, in “losing faith,” is not our faith – it is the loss of the naivete of our earlier fully-felt wish, the thing that we hoped to grasp, but now know it is out of our reach. What we should do, at this point, according to Kierkegaard, is make the movement into “infinite resignation,” winning “myself in my eternal consciousness, in a blessed compliance with my love for the eternal being.” Next, however – next, after infinite resignation, is the stage of true faith, the one I can’t say I fully understand, even in his explanation, but the one I want to. I really do want to. (And Kierkegaard did too, as he admitted he could describe it but did not himself possess it).

On this journey, we have, we resign, and then we receive – we gain “the whole of temporality on the strength of the absurd,” the ability to live life with a knowledge of our deepest want and our inability to have it – and the ability to truly live even then, believing that still we will have it, even if it is “impossible.”

Faith, then, is not mere idealism, which does not dare resign, cannot “look the impossibility in the eye.”

It is not mere resignation, which does admit the impossibility, but stops there – that cannot conceive of anything further.

Instead, it is faith – what other way to describe it – that says I love this, I know I can never have this, except in the eternal realm, but still I trust for it in the physical realm – because I have grasped the paradox, and still take that leap.

I still don’t know quite what that means.

Whatever it is, I know it’s what many philosophers have pondered, what thousands of theologians have talked about, still without one clear definition – but it’s an ultimate goal, or it was for a while.

In this age, Kierkegaard says, we skip through all the thought-passages of human history and seize upon skepticism as the goal of philosophy, ignoring faith as either the domain of the ignorant, the deluded, or the superstitious – and false forms, whether in religion or elsewhere, do fall into these categories. But should we dismiss faith so glibly? For Kierkegaard, it’s the journey of a lifetime. It’s the journey that most are never able to achieve. That he himself was never able to achieve, but could only stand at the gap of infinite resignation and see the other side – but not touch it.

Knowing this, is it something we want to achieve?

Do I want it?

I have not yet read enough Kierkegaard to know if he offers a method to achieve such faith. I would be skeptical if he did, as that would seem to reduce his work of philosophical depth into a mere cult-handbook, promising yet another formula for faith-in-six-months, some simplified rule-stratum that distills the complex workings of the human soul down into something that sounds like a diet program –

And yet.

Something in me wishes there were such easy answers.

But Kierkegaard, like other philosophers, like all those who delve deep into the realms of human thought and infinite mysteries, does not offer a universal formula for achieving anything, but recognizes that the process must be individual – but still tie into universal truths. True to what would become an existentialist tenet, we must make our decisions ourselves, undertake the journey ourselves.

We have freedom, in this – sometimes terrifying, sometimes awe-inducing, freedom.

But will we act on it?