The Logic of Faith in Christianity

A companion piece to The Concept of Anxiety, this work continues Søren Kierkegaard's radical and comprehensive analysis of human nature in a spectrum of possibilities of existence. Present here is a remarkable combination of the insight of the poet and the contemplation of the philosopher.

In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard moves beyond anxiety on the mental-emotional level to the spiritual level, where--in contact with the eternal--anxiety becomes despair. Both anxiety and despair reflect the misrelation that arises in the self when the elements of the synthesis--the infinite and the finite--do not come into proper relation to each other. Despair is a deeper expression for anxiety and is a mark of the eternal, which is intended to penetrate temporal existence.

Berdyev's life was nothing but a triangular struggle against the aristocratic environment in which his family belonged and lived in it, against the revolutionary Marxist environment in which he lived during his first youth and against the orthodox environment in which he lived a mature period in a certain sense.

The main characteristic here is subjectivity as a self-determining force - and this subjectivity and rational power that we have met before in the form of the one who has not yet been defined within himself and whose goal - as it appears in the realm of reality - is in this the most specific thing possible.

The separation of religion from the subject manifests itself in the emergence of an actual will. In the will I am an actual and free being, and I present myself against the subject as another, in order to represent it with myself by removing it from that state of separation.