All Roads Lead Back to Faith

Kierkegaard believes that “subjectivity is truth.” The only way to have a relationship with God is through faith, and faith can only be subjective, never objective. To illustrate, he describes two different men (apologies for the gendered language) who try to “outsmart” faith. 

Let’s call the first man Man 1. Man 1 wants to have faith, but he wants his faith to be backed by reason. According to Kierkegaard, all reason is approximation (making generalizations to the eternal based on probability). Man 1 eventually finds that the thing he wants to have faith in is highly probable. This gives him a little ego boost – he starts to think he is above “shoemakers and tailors” since his belief is a product of deliberation as opposed to faith. But Kierkegaard claims that the absurd or god cannot be known through reason – it can only be believed through faith, so this man falters. Absurdity is uncertainty, and uncertainty that cannot be known through the means of probability. 

Then there’s another man, let’s call him Man 2. Man 2 has faith but wants to understand himself in his faith. He wants to understand his own existence through faith, instead of through subjectivity, like Kierkegaard would recommend. So he takes the path of an objective exploration of the self through the lens of faith and arrives at a highly probable explanation of himself – having the same ego boost as Man 1. But once again – he falters. He arrives at a place where he no longer even has faith since he almost ‘knows’ himself and in the path of faith you cannot ‘know’ yourself as an object, you can only inquire and accept uncertainty about the self, and have faith in god.

Here’s a how Kierkegaard would respond to one of their decisions: