The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

by Ben Shapiro

Instead, Kierkegaard posited that human beings had to find meaning by looking within. The system by which one chooses to live is a leap of faith—but in that leap, man finds his individual meaning. “Subjectivity is the truth,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Objectively there is no infinite decision or commitment, and so it is objectively correct to annul the difference between good and evil as well as the law of noncontradiction and the difference between truth and untruth.” Truth can be found in ourselves.3 To Kierkegaard, this meant making the leap of faith to believe in a God beyond man-made ethics—his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Kierkegaard focused on passion as opposed to reason—he deemed passion the most important driving force in life, and concluded, “The conclusions of passion are the only reliable ones.”4 He hoped, of course, that the passionate leap would be toward the Christian God. But his belief system would lead not to God, in the end, but to worship of subjectivity.