Kierkegaard's concept of paradox of faith is
closely associated with his concept of absurd (often the two denote the same meaning in
Kierkegaard's writings). A paradox for Kierkegaard is a situation in which two
opposite values or views collide. Faith, for example, is a paradox to Kierkegaard since it favors
the individual over the universal, while (Hegelian)
ethics says the opposite. Here the paradoxical contradiction is between the ethical and the religious,
two of Kierkegaard's three spheres of existence of stages in life. Abraham
faced such a paradox when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac, a contradiction
between his common ethical duty to his son and his personal religious duty to
God.
Kierkegaard thinks that the central category of
the religious sphere is the paradox of faith. Jesus for Kierkegaard is such a
paradox since he exemplifies the clash between universal reason and subjective
devotion. Jesus is also paradoxical since he is at once a source of moral ideal
and a redeemer from sin (which is Ideal unattained, see Kierkegaard
on Morality). Kierkegaard's philosophy is riddled with such paradoxes
that, unlike Hegel's dialectic, cannot be mediated.
