This chapter first offers an overview of key concepts in The Sickness unto Death, such as human nature, self, despair, and wholeheartedness. It then discusses the relation between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, offering a comparison of different types of despair (or doublemindedness). In this connection, it discusses the relations between faith and reason, and philosophy and theology. It is argued that the relatively neglected Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, entitled “Despair is Sin,” reinterprets the problem of despair from Part One by introducing the Christian concept of sin. In Part Two, sin represents an unwillingness to be oneself before God that involves self-deception. Overcoming despair, on the other hand, requires an unconditional will to be oneself before God. However, the latter does not accept everything as it is but rather hopes against hope to reconcile ideals with reality. For Kierkegaard, this hope is interconnected with Christian faith, charity, and moral commitment. Indeed, overcoming despair by forming a wholehearted or coherent self represents a fundamental moral and religious task according to Kierkegaard.

Chapter 7 discusses the relation between ethics and religion in Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous writings. It is shown that – despite appearances and despite influential commentators – religion cannot possibly conflict with ethics. There is not only strong textual evidence ruling out such conflict but also principled reasons, showing that there is no conceptual room for such conflict, since Kierkegaard is a Christian Platonist who identifies the good with the divine. Indeed, his account of religion is clearly moralized since he takes religion to concern practical questions of how to live morally. For Kierkegaard, religion thus entails ethics and vice versa, although we must distinguish between Christian and non-Christian variants of both. Still, he holds that the former can override the latter to some extent. But this does not involve any break with ethics (as such) or any moral exceptionalism that is beyond or above morality. Instead of suspending ethics, Kierkegaard stresses the overriding nature of morality, seeing what we ought to do all-things-considered as a specifically ethico-religious question. His position is therefore far less problematic than normally assumed.

Chapter 2 deals with the critique of the aesthetical stage by focusing on Either/Or. It is shown that this critique offers an original answer to the “why be moral?” question relevant to contemporary debates on amoralism and practical moral skepticism. Specifically, Either/Or develops an original critique of amoralism that escapes a difficult dilemma associated with justifications of morality. According to this dilemma, any such justification must either offer moral or nonmoral (prudential) reasons for being moral. But the former seems circular and question begging, whereas the latter seems like the wrong kind of reasons, which could only support egoism and legality, not altruism and morality. However, Kierkegaard develops three different argumentative strategies that all escape this dilemma, providing strong motivation and reasons for assessing ourselves morally. He thus offers a powerful critique of amoralism that is relevant to contemporary concerns, while being rooted in historical discussions of Kantianism, German Romanticism, and idealism.

The final chapter shows that Kierkegaard discusses the ethics of belief, that is the normativity that governs the formation, maintenance, and relinquishment of beliefs. Kierkegaard is a clear nonevidentialist concerning religious belief, since he denies that justified religious belief requires sufficient evidence (indeed, such evidence is impossible). Still, the widespread fideist reading of Kierkegaard, which takes belief to involve a self-constituting leap of faith, is challenged by a pragmatist reading, which takes belief to be justified by normative practical reasons instead. By examining different interpretations and different primary sources, the chapter concludes that the ignored pragmatist reading is highly promising both textually and philosophically. Despite appearances (and long-standing interpretative traditions), Kierkegaard does offer justificatory practical reasons for religious belief. Still, an element of fideism remains, since divine revelation seems to constitute itself supernaturally at least in part, although this does not amount to a blind leap of faith.

Chapter 5 shows that Kierkegaard does not reject prudence or self-interest as antieudaimonism tends to do. Instead, he develops a noneudaimonistic ethics and theology, in which morality overrides prudence in cases of conflict. Still, his concept of the highest good (eternal happiness) involves a synthesis of morality and prudence, in which happiness is conditioned by morality. Like Kant, Kierkegaard develops a noneudaimonistic “highest good” and rejects both predestination and Pelagianism, sketching an intermediary view that combines human agency with divine grace. However, he departs from Kant by combining a modern account of alterity, in which morality is essentially other-regarding, with the idea that morality is Christocentric, since it concerns imitating Christ and serving the neighbor. The result is an account of morality and happiness which is not only broadly Augustinian and Kantian but also highly modern.

By discussing different interpretations, Chapter 12 shows that Kierkegaard is a suprarationalist, who takes faith to be above reason, not against it. Specifically, he is neither an irrationalist, who takes faith to be irrational, nor an antirationalist, who claims that faith and reason oppose each other, without any logical contradiction or irrationality. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, faith seems capable of overcoming the hostility and antagonism between faith and reason that antirationalism emphasizes. Still, Kierkegaard’s nonreligious pseudonyms do contrast faith and reason in order to counteract theological views that are overly rationalistic and scientific. Indeed, Kierkegaard goes as far as criticizing the Augustinian idea of faith seeking understanding. But instead of promoting blind faith, he attacks rationalist and intellectualist accounts of faith that do not do justice to the mysteries of divine revelation and the incarnation. He therefore maintains that faith cannot be reduced to conceptual understanding, although it must nevertheless both involve and seek practical understanding.

Chapter 9 examines different readings of the notorious thesis that “subjectivity, inwardness, is truth” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is argued that, instead of involving objectionable subjectivism, subjective truth involves an original, adverbial theory of truth that is relatively unexplored. Specifically, subjective truth concerns living truly by being wholehearted (as suggested by Daniel Watts). In addition, it is closely associated with subjective, practical justifications of religious belief found in pragmatism (practical nonevidentialism) concerning religious belief. However, these subjective justifications of belief need not involve subjectivism or fideism, since belief could be supported by practical reasons that are objective by holding even if they are not subjectively recognized. Indeed, Concluding Unscientific Postscript seems to presuppose objective truth and some form of metaphysical and metaethical realism. For Kierkegaard, there are objective, formal constraints on selfhood that prevent relativism and subjectivism. Specifically, wholehearted selfhood, which is to be true to oneself, requires full moral commitment and faith, hope, and charity.

Chapter 4 discusses Kierkegaard’s elusive critique of ethical eudaimonism. It is shown that Kierkegaard develops and radicalizes an influential Kantian critique of eudaimonism, according to which ethical eudaimonism entails egoism and instrumentalism concerning virtue that make morality second to self-interest. In the late twentieth century, discussions of this familiar critique have been renewed by the reemergence of virtue ethics and eudaimonism. Still, many share the worry that eudaimonism involves an objectionable egoism and instrumentalism concerning virtue. Although Kierkegaard’s critique of eudaimonism is controversial and more successful against hedonistic eudaimonism (Epicureanism) than Stoicism or Aristotelianism, it still seems largely defensible. At least, reconstructions indicate that genuine (noninstrumental) other-regard is incompatible with eudaimonism’s focus on personal happiness (eudaimonia) as the highest good. Kierkegaard thus seems to succeed in weakening ethical eudaimonism and in developing a noneudaimonistic view that is broadly Kantian.

Chapter 3 connects Kierkegaardian critiques of amoralism to discussions of wantonness and Humeanism in action theory. By discussing the cultivation of love (and higher-order motives), it is argued that practical rational agency requires moral normativity. The chapter then presents and discusses Kierkegaard’s strong views about the inescapability of morality, interpreting it as a form of constitutivism concerning moral normativity, which tries to derive practical normativity from practical agency itself. However, Kierkegaard seems to combine such constitutivism with the theological view that moral obligations depend on us belonging to God as his creation. Still, he is not a divine command theorist who sees divine commands as necessary and sufficient for moral obligations. Rather, he sketches a form of moral realism and criticizes subjectivism in ethics.

Chapter 6 argues that it is Kierkegaard, rather than Kant, who denies that religion is anything beyond or above ethics. It thus criticizes the widespread view that Kierkegaard reacted against Kant’s (alleged) reduction of religion to ethics by introducing the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” First, Kierkegaard rules out secular ethics by identifying the good and the divine. Second, he moralizes religion by interpreting natural religion in terms of non-Christian ethics and Christianity in terms of Christian ethics. For Kierkegaard, the first two are necessary yet insufficient, so that Christian ethics may only partially replace non-Christian ethics. As a result, there is no suspension of ethics in general, only a suspension of one variant of it by another variant. Even in the case of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, Kierkegaard’s position is far more defensible than normally assumed, since he maintains that it would have been “an error on [Abraham’s] part,” if he were to murder Isaac (SKS 24, 375, NB24:89 / KJN 8, 379). Finally, he denies that anyone could possibly imitate Abraham’s sacrifice by killing someone.

Chapter 10 shows that Kierkegaard develops his views on faith and reason by using classical German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant. Specifically, he develops the much-discussed category of the leap by making creative use of Jacobi and Lessing. The result is an original account of the leap relevant to both philosophy of religion and more general debates concerning rationality, incommensurability, and noncommensurability. Specifically, the “leap” concerns both general transitions between different normative standards and religious conversions in particular. Even when different standards diverge and conflict, such leaps need not be blind or irrational, if one abandons standards that collapse internally, and the new standards hold up. This general approach allows Kierkegaard to sketch a Kantian reductio of religious nonbelief. However, he appears to follow Schelling in taking Kant’s critique of the ontological argument for God’s existence to show that being is not a predicate, and that thought and being, possibility and actuality, are therefore heterogeneous. Whether or not something exists is then a contingent matter that cannot be known a priori.

The introduction provides an outline of the book and summarizes its main ideas and theses. In addition, it briefly discusses methodology in the history of philosophy and Kierkegaard’s controversial use of pseudonyms.