Kierkegaard’s Religious Understanding of “Subjectivity”

Abstract

This article tries to show that there is a religious understanding of “Subjectivity” in all writings of Soren Kierkegaard, especially, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and other works. He uses key concepts such as Christianity, truth, passion, God, faith for describing and explanation of “subjectivity”. For Kierkegaard, Christian faith is not a matter of regurgitating church dogma. It is a matter of individual subjective passion, which cannot be mediated by the clergy or by human artifacts. For example, he criticizes the current attitude to Christianity, mainly based on objective and historical attitude. In addition, it can be said that, by means of these concepts, he wants to introduce existentialistic subjectivity instead of modern philosophical subjectivity (Cartesian and Kantian one). It seems that most of the thinkers tend to confuse Kierkegaard's discussion of subjectivity with subjectivism. Kierkegaard stresses the former, and need not be seen as advocating the latter. Kierkegaard is not particularly interested in epistemological theories of objective truth. He is simply not all that concerned with the status of ordinary empirical or scientific truths. Rather, as a primarily ethico-religious thinker, his concern is with truth as it pertains to the existing individual.

Keywords

• subjectivity
• christianity
• truth
• faith
• kierkegaard