Ideas

The Leap

the leap
Camus's charge against religious existentialism: that Kierkegaard and the believers escape the absurd by leaping into faith, which he called philosophical suicide.
Documented

Kierkegaard under review

Soren Kierkegaard described the movement of faith in Fear and Trembling (1843, as Johannes de silentio): after the infinite resignation comes the leap, believing 'by virtue of the absurd' that with God all things are possible. Camus devotes a chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) to Kierkegaard, Chestov, and Jaspers, accusing them of finding the absurd and then deifying it, exchanging lucidity for hope, which he names philosophical suicide.

Assessment: Documented: Kierkegaard 1843; Camus 1942, chapter on philosophical suicide.
Stories

The leap as compliment

Believers reclaim the term happily: the leap is the point of faith, a feature requiring the absurd to exist at all. Kierkegaard's knight of faith, who leaps and then walks among us buying curtain rods, is deliberately more ordinary than Camus's rebel.

Assessment: One man's philosophical suicide is another man's Tuesday.
Interesting claims

The line between lucidity and hope

The quarrel is precise and unfalsifiable: both sides agree the world offers no rational guarantee, and disagree only about what honesty permits afterward. Camus calls hope a betrayal of the evidence; Kierkegaard calls staying put a failure of nerve. The archive verdict: the disagreement is the doctrine.

Assessment: The abyss is documented; the jumping technique is not.
Sources and further reading
  1. Soren Kierkegaard (as Johannes de silentio), Fear and Trembling, 1843
  2. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942, 'Philosophical Suicide' chapter
  3. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846
Worth asking

If faith is a leap off the cliff of reason, is the leap courage or retreat?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+