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Kierkegaard’s “Subjectivity Is Truth”

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus treats subjectivity as a mode of existence. A subject is a person who must choose, act, and become someone over time. The claim that “subjectivity is truth” concerns truths whose meaning depends on how someone lives in relation to them.1

The existing thinker

Climacus contrasts the existing thinker with an imagined observer who views life as a finished system. The existing thinker has no such vantage point, as they think from within an unfinished life whose choices alter what it becomes.

This matters in ethics and religion because a person may understand an obligation while avoiding it, or study faith without trusting, praying, or changing.

Objective knowledge clarifies the object of belief.

Subjective reflection asks how the knower relates to it. The person asking cannot remain a spectator.2

Inwardness is sustained involvement

Inwardness is the degree to which someone is involved in what they affirm. Through appropriation, an idea acquires authority within a life: ethical principles become habits and obligations. Religious claims become practices and forms of dependence.

Because a person continues to change, appropriation is never finished. A commitment must be renewed and sometimes recovered after failure.2 Climacus calls this involvement passion, describing what a person stakes on a commitment, not simply how strongly they feel.

Decision under uncertainty

People cannot wait for a complete view of their lives before acting. Reflection can improve a judgment, but it can also extend indefinitely. Choice begins when someone takes responsibility for a possibility without pretending that uncertainty has vanished.3

Faith intensifies this structure. No finite amount of historical or philosophical evidence can make it risk-free. Uncertainty does not prove the belief, and passion does not make its object correct but instead makes trust possible as a way of relating to that object.

Truth as a task

Existential truth is therefore a continuing task. A doctrine can be memorized, while a person's relation to it decays into habit or indifference. This concern drove Kierkegaard's attack on Danish Christendom. Church membership and correct doctrine could make Christianity seem automatic, though no institution could believe, obey, or repent for an individual.

Subjectivity does not make sincerity the final test of truth. The object of commitment still matters, and in Kierkegaard's Christian framework a person cannot overcome sin by greater inwardness alone.2 Existential truth joins truth to the unfinished work of living by it. Climacus is a fictional voice rather than Kierkegaard's final authority, so the formula must also be read within the book's indirect method.3 Its roots lie in the search for an organizing truth to live by.

References

  1. Søren Kierkegaard. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 199–211. https://web.stanford.edu/~jsabol/existentialism/materials/kierkegaard-cup-shorter.pdf. ↩

  2. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 199–211, especially pp. 203–210. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. John Lippitt. “Søren Kierkegaard.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2025 edition, sections 1 and 2. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/kierkegaard/. ↩ ↩2