Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith, Despair and Hope

Every time I come back to Kierkegaard, I’m surprised by how much sharper he is than I remembered. Especially when it comes to despair—not the everyday kind, but the deep existential stuff that creeps in when we realize we don’t really know what it means to be ourselves.

Most people skim The Sickness Unto Death and walk away thinking, “Ah, Christian guilt trip.” But that’s such a surface-level take.

This post isn’t a Sunday school lesson. It’s about what Kierkegaard actually meant by despair, and why his idea of a “leap of faith” might still be the most radical (and misunderstood) answer we have to existential anxiety—even for nonbelievers.

If you think you’ve already “got” Kierkegaard, great—then this will push you further. And if you’re skeptical of the whole leap thing? Perfect. That’s where things get interesting.

What Despair Really Is (and Why It’s Not Just Depression)

Let’s dig into something most readings gloss over: Kierkegaard doesn’t treat despair as a feeling. He’s not talking about sadness, hopelessness, or what we’d today call clinical depression. He’s doing something way deeper—and honestly, way weirder. For Kierkegaard, despair is ontological. It’s baked into what it means to be a self.

“The self is a relation that relates itself to itself, or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”

Yeah, it’s a mouthful. But it’s not just wordplay. This is Kierkegaard’s big swing: the self isn’t a thing; it’s a dynamic process. We’re not born as selves—we become selves by trying (and usually failing) to hold together two parts: the finite and the infinite.

So what is despair, then? It’s what happens when that relation breaks down—when we can’t (or won’t) integrate who we are now (finite, social, embodied, limited) with who we might be (infinite, free, eternal). And that break can take many forms. Kierkegaard outlines three major types of despair:

Three Kinds of Despair (and Why They Still Matter)

Not knowing you’re in despair
This is the most insidious kind. It’s the person who’s fully absorbed in the external world—career, family, politics, whatever—and has no idea they’re avoiding themselves. Kierkegaard calls this “despair of ignorance.”
Think of someone who’s constantly busy, productive, socially successful… but never sits with the deeper “why” of their existence. They’re fine—until they’re not. And when the cracks show, it feels like everything’s collapsing.
Not wanting to be yourself
This is the despair of weakness. You know you’re not living authentically, but you’re scared to change. You hide behind roles, expectations, and other people’s definitions of who you should be.
Kierkegaard says this kind of despair is often wrapped in self-pity or anxiety. It’s when you’re aware of your possibility but feel paralyzed. There’s no real belief that becoming a truer self is even possible.
Trying to be yourself—without any help
This one’s the trickiest. It looks like strength, but it’s actually defiance. You try to “be yourself” purely on your own terms—cut off from the infinite, from anything outside yourself. It’s raw individualism.
Think Nietzsche’s Übermensch, but stripped of Kierkegaard’s relational foundation. This self refuses to be grounded in anything beyond its own will. Kierkegaard calls this the “demonic” form of despair. It’s not evil—it’s desperation posing as mastery.

Why This Still Feels So Relevant

I think this breakdown is still one of the sharpest analyses of human disconnection we have. Kierkegaard’s not saying despair is something that happens to you. He’s saying it’s what we’re all already in—unless we consciously do something to transform it.

And here’s what really hits: despair can be hidden under hyper-functionality, overconfidence, or even spirituality. Kierkegaard forces us to ask: Is the self I’m presenting actually a self that’s in proper relation? That’s an uncomfortable question. And for me, at least, it lands harder than anything I’ve read in modern psychology or philosophy.

If you’ve read Heidegger, you can already see the overlap. His idea of Geworfenheit (thrownness) echoes this sense of being out of sync with the world. But where Heidegger leans into ontological alienation, Kierkegaard insists there’s still a path—a way to reintegrate the self, though it’s neither easy nor rational.

That path?

It’s what he calls the leap. But before we get there, we need to clear up some myths—because if you’re thinking “irrational blind faith,” you’re missing the point entirely.

What the Leap of Faith Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Let’s get this straight: Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith” isn’t irrational. Or at least, not in the way people usually think. It’s not a cop-out, and it’s definitely not the same as “just believe.” In fact, if you think of the leap as abandoning reason, you’ve missed what makes it so philosophically wild—and so useful, even in a secular frame.

So here’s what the leap is really about: committing to something that can’t be guaranteed by logic alone. Not because reason is bad, but because reason eventually runs into its own limits—especially when it comes to existence, identity, and meaning.

We tend to forget that Kierkegaard was trained in Hegelian philosophy and spent most of his career fighting it. He thought Hegel’s system—this grand totalizing structure of reality—was arrogant, even dangerous. Because what does Hegel do? He tries to reconcile all contradictions through mediation and synthesis. Kierkegaard’s move is the opposite. He doesn’t resolve the paradox. He sits inside it. He lets it burn.

“The paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like a lover without passion.”

So what’s the paradox? At the center of faith, it’s this: the eternal becomes temporal. The infinite becomes finite. In Fear and Trembling, it’s Abraham standing on a mountain, ready to kill Isaac, with no ethical justification—but absolute trust in something higher than the ethical. If you’re not offended by that story, you’re not reading it hard enough.

But—and this is important—you don’t have to be religious to get something from this. Kierkegaard’s leap isn’t limited to the God of Abraham. The real heart of it is the existential risk of commitment. You leap because no calculation can tell you what’s going to happen. And you leap not because you’re stupid, but because you’re alive.

5 Misconceptions About the Leap (and What It Actually Means)

Let’s clear some debris, shall we?

The Leap is not a rejection of reason.
It’s a recognition of reason’s boundaries. Faith, in Kierkegaard’s view, begins where logic stops. It’s not “anti-reason”; it’s post-reason—like choosing love, or forgiveness, or creativity. These aren’t irrational choices; they’re deeper than logic.
It’s not a one-time act.
People think the leap happens once and you’re done. Nope. It’s daily, sometimes hourly. Kierkegaard calls faith a “task for a lifetime.” That’s because we’re constantly tempted by despair’s safer options: numbness, certainty, autonomy.
It’s not “believing despite evidence.”
It’s not belief without evidence—it’s belief that transcends what evidence can settle. Kierkegaard isn’t interested in “proving God.” He’s interested in what it feels like to live with no external guarantees.
The leap is intensely individual.
There’s no group leap. No institution can do it for you. This is why Kierkegaard is so obsessed with Abraham. Not because he wants to revive Old Testament ethics, but because Abraham acts alone, without explanation, and without anyone else validating his decision.
It’s not religious in the narrow sense.
You can leap into art. Into justice. Into another human being. Into being a parent. Into anything that demands more from you than you can prove in advance. Faith here means risking yourself for something greater than yourself.

Faith as Repetition – A Subtle (and Overlooked) Insight

One of Kierkegaard’s most underappreciated ideas is that faith isn’t just a leap—it’s also a repetition. Not a cycle, not routine, but what he calls repetition with inwardness. It’s that feeling when you return to something familiar, but it means something radically different because you’ve changed.

Think about the first time you forgave someone who didn’t deserve it. Or chose to stay with something after the honeymoon phase was over. That’s repetition with risk. That’s the leap.

And here’s the strange part: Kierkegaard sees this as the closest thing to “eternity” we get in this life. Not some far-off heaven. But the repeated act of choosing to exist, fully and faithfully, without certainty.

What If You Don’t Believe in God? (Secular Versions of the Leap)

So, what if you’re not religious? What if God isn’t part of your existential vocabulary? Is Kierkegaard still relevant?

Totally. In fact, I think secular thinkers are only now catching up to what he was doing. Because underneath all the Christian language, Kierkegaard’s real subject is how to live meaningfully in a world that gives you no ultimate answers.

Let’s walk through a few ways Kierkegaard’s leap shows up in secular philosophy:

1. Albert Camus and the Absurd

Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is famously about rejecting the leap—in fact, he names it as a failure of philosophical integrity. He thinks embracing the absurd means refusing to look for transcendent meaning.

But even Camus ends up with a kind of leap: he says we should “imagine Sisyphus happy.” That’s not reason. That’s existential affirmation, without proof. It’s a kind of faith in the absurd itself. He just refuses to call it that.

2. Paul Tillich and Ultimate Concern

Tillich—though theologically inclined—reframes faith as “ultimate concern”. That is, whatever you treat as most important in your life is, functionally, your God. And you can’t prove your concern is justified in advance—you just live it.

This turns the leap into a matter of existential orientation, not belief in a deity. You’re betting your life on what matters most to you. Whether that’s justice, love, truth, or something else—you leap.

3. Secular Existentialism and Moral Commitment

Take Sartre. No God, no pre-written essence. But still—you have to choose, and your choice gives weight to the world. Sound familiar?

The Kierkegaardian twist here is that choice without inwardness becomes bad faith. Kierkegaard forces us to look at how we choose, not just what. Are we choosing because we’re trying to escape despair? Or because we’ve faced it and moved through it?

4. Modern Cognitive Science and Radical Uncertainty

Here’s a wild connection: some current research in philosophy of mind and decision theory frames human action as a “normative bet” in environments of radical uncertainty.

Sound familiar?

That’s the leap. It’s the same existential move—deciding to act when there’s no algorithm, no final answer, no total picture. You improvise. You commit. Not because you’re irrational, but because it’s the only way to live.

Final Thoughts

Kierkegaard’s leap of faith isn’t about religion. Not really. It’s about what happens when you realize that no amount of thinking will ever save you from having to choose who to be.

The leap is terrifying because it has no safety net. But it’s also the only thing that makes freedom possible. Whether you leap toward God, justice, art, or just the raw business of becoming a self—Kierkegaard’s challenge holds: Will you risk yourself, even when nothing is guaranteed?

That’s not a theological question.

It’s an existential one.

And it hasn’t aged a day.