Soren Kierkegaard’s 3 Stages for a Meaningful Life

The grave of Soren Kierkegaard, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Public Domain

Civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr. once said “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” This attitude became known as the “leap of faith,” which was first explained by the existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in the mid-1800s. For Kierkegaard, faith was an embrace of the world’s paradoxical complexities. This embrace is necessary to live a meaningful life, but it can only take place at the end of life’s three stages.

Soren Kierkegaard’s ‘Stages on Life’s Way’

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1813, Kierkegaard was the youngest of seven children. His family was wealthy and very religious. Young Kierkegaard studied theology, philosophy, and literature at the University of Copenhagen, but he never pursued a clerical or an academic career. He preferred the life of a solitary thinker.

A Danish theologian, philosopher, and poet, Soren Kierkegaard wrote extensively on faith and religion. Public Domain

By the early 1800s, Western philosophers tended to deem reason the most powerful human faculty. Kierkegaard disliked this emphasis. He thought reason couldn’t help with the most pressing concern for every human being: meaning. The Danish philosopher thought that meaning must be cultivated through faith, which he understood as the belief in something that cannot be fully explained or justified by reason.

To better understand the relationship between faith and reason, Kierkegaard wrote “Stages on Life’s Way” (1845), described by Princeton University Press as “intensely poetic.” His peculiar writing style merged fiction and nonfiction. The book begins with a banquet that resembles Plato’s “Symposium,” where participants discuss love’s causes and effects in human beings. Next is a speech by a character named Judge William. He offers an elaborate praise of marriage as the ethical evolution of passionate love. The rest of the book is in the form of a diary written by a nameless young man who, like Kierkegaard, was deeply in love but ended his engagement when he realized it could not prosper. The diary is discovered by “Frater Taciturnus.” Taciturnus eventually confesses that the diary was his own fabrication, which he wrote to illustrate the “three stages” of life.

The Aesthetic Stage

The aesthetic stage consists in the pursuit of pleasures, which for Kierkegaard included both base, carnal pleasures and the “higher” pleasures found in the “arts.” People in the aesthetic stage try to avoid suffering by distracting themselves with gratifying experiences like sex, drink, and music. Not only do aesthetes try to avoid suffering, but they also eschew responsibility because it requires hardship. The constant pursuit of pleasure distracts from more important, ethical things, like study, family, and religious practice.

While the aesthetic stage provides temporary satisfaction, it ultimately leads to despair. It also fails to create meaning, which is necessary to live a good life. Kierkegaard anticipated this conclusion to “Either/Or,” an earlier text which is often deemed his most influential work:

“So it appears that every aesthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives aesthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not. But when one knows it (and you indeed know it), a higher form of existence is an imperative requirement.”

The Ethical Stage

The ethical stage is a shift towards responsibility. When people enter the ethical stage, they turn their attention away from fleeting pleasures and toward more fulfilling experiences. Living for others becomes paramount. This growth from self-interest to altruism is best illustrated in marriage, the appropriate evolution of the erotic love that consumes couples in the aesthetic stage.

Kierkegaard described marriage as “the ‘telos’ [goal] of individual life; it is the highest ‘telos’ in such a way that anyone who evades it crosses out the whole of earthly life. ... To be a married man is the most beautiful and meaningful task; the person who did not become married is an unfortunate whose life did not permit him that or who never fell in love.”

However, Kierkegaard thought that even the life of marriage and fidelity was insufficient for achieving true fulfillment. Married life is still based in a strong sense of self, which religious practice helps to deflate: “From the essentially religious point of view, it cannot be denied that it makes no difference whether or not a person has been married. Here the religious opens the infinite abyss of the abstraction. ... The religious abstraction desires to belong to God alone.”

People must independently develop religiousness, regardless of their interpersonal circumstances. To do so requires faith.

The Religious Stage

According to Kierkegaard, a religious life was marked by a personal relationship with God. He believed this relationship could only emerge people recognized that their lives depended on the divine principle that governs the world. Once people came to this realization, they had to be willing to surrender their wants to something greater than themselves. That was the only way to know themselves and their true place in the cosmos: “Only religiously can I become intelligible to myself before God.”

The surrender to greater powers doesn’t happen through reason. Reason is essential to living an informed life, but it is insufficient to nurture meaning. Kierkegaard thought that faith could reach heights that reason could never conceive.

A statue of Soren Kierkegaard Colin/CC BY-SA 4.0

At the heart of faith, he posited, was the willingness to embrace life’s absurdity. The philosopher often used the story of Abraham, the Christian patriarch, to illustrate his point. When commanded by God to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham faced a paradox: Should he obey and take his son’s life, or should he follow his instincts, save his son, and disobey God in the process?

Neither. There was a third option. Abraham trusted that God was good, and that God’s will was part of a greater plan he couldn’t understand. He accepted the paradox between his personal will and the divine will, trusting that his acceptance would eventually result in a better outcome. Abraham’s trust was not ill-placed. God provided a ram for sacrifice, and Isaac lived.

When we take the leap of faith like Abraham, we admit our inability to fully understand the world. We also choose to trust in the world’s divine arrangement. Kierkegaard knew that the human mind was incapable of justifying this attitude through reason. The leap of faith required trust in the world, and the courage to embrace life even when it defies logic. Although Kierkegaard was a Christian, his insights apply to everyone and can help us reflect on the essential importance of faith, and how to best practice it in our lives.

What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to [email protected]