Kierkegaard , Socrates and Existential Individuality

The 19 century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was a profoundly religious thinker. He is also regarded as the father of Existentialism, one of the most important philosophical movements of the 20 century. The term ‘existentialist’ is applied to those philosophers, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who held that the foundation of all philosophical thought is to be found in the actual, existing, Individual. For the existentialist, in opposition to traditional philosophy, it is not a matter of seeking to clarify the general structure of what is – existence in its broadest sense – by appealing to a prior and intelligible order that imbues it with its sense; rather, what is must be understood in its positivity, that is as it appears to the concretely existing Individual. As Sartre puts it in Being and Nothingness, the essence of what is lies in its ‘“appearing” which is no longer opposed to being but on the contrary is the measure of it’. It might be thought, then, that there is something paradoxical in the fact that Kierkegaard is regarded as both a religious thinker and a proto-existentialist, since religion, in contrast to Existentialism, seems to suppose or demand a negation of actual existence, draining it of its intrinsic significance in favour of a divine world that fills it with meaning. How, then, does the religious aspect of Kierkegaard’s thought not exclude the existential aspect?