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God Is Dead. Prove It: Kierkegaard vs. Nietzsche and the Fight That Never Happened

ByPeter

Philosophy’s most consequential debate was never held. The two men who defined what it means to exist as a conscious, suffering, choosing individual — Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche — never met, never corresponded, and likely never read each other. Kierkegaard died in 1855, when Nietzsche was eleven years old. And yet the argument between them is so alive, so unresolved, that it runs beneath nearly every serious question about meaning, selfhood, God, and despair that philosophy has produced in the century and a half since.

This is an attempt to stage that fight honestly. Not to declare a winner — I am not sure there is one — but to follow the argument wherever it actually leads.

Two Pre-Existentialists Who Built the House They Never Agreed to Share

The term “existentialism” belongs to the twentieth century. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were not existentialists in the formal sense — they pre-dated the movement, and both would have resisted the label with considerable ferocity. But they share a foundational rejection that makes them the twin sources of everything that follows: the rejection of Hegel’s systematic rationalism, the insistence that philosophy begin not with abstract categories but with the specific, concrete, irreducibly individual human being.

Hegel had constructed an elaborate architecture in which history, consciousness, and reality unfolded according to rational necessity. The individual was, in this system, a vehicle for the Absolute Spirit’s self-realization — significant only as a node in a larger process. Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche found this intolerable. Not merely wrong, but spiritually insulting. The individual was not a vehicle. The individual was the point.

From that shared refusal, they walked in opposite directions.

Kierkegaard’s Opening Move: Despair Is the Human Condition

Kierkegaard’s philosophical project begins with an unflinching diagnosis. In The Sickness Unto Death, he defines despair not as an emotion but as a structural feature of selfhood — the condition of a self that fails to become what it is. The self, in Kierkegaard’s analysis, is a relation: it is constituted by relating itself to itself, and it exists in genuine selfhood only when it grounds that relation in what he calls “the Power that constituted it” — God.

Without that grounding, the self is always in some form of despair. It may not feel it acutely. It may distract itself endlessly. But the despair is there, as a kind of ontological deficit, the gap between what the self is and what it is meant to be.

The three stages of existence that Kierkegaard maps across his pseudonymous works — the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious — are not arbitrary categories. They are modes of being, and each lower stage is, in his view, ultimately self-defeating. The aesthete who lives for sensation and novelty consumes himself. The ethical person who lives by duty and principle discovers that no finite standard can fully account for the demands of the Absolute. The only resolution is the leap — the Springet — into faith.

This leap is not irrational. Kierkegaard is insistent on this point and has been consistently misread. He does not advocate abandoning reason. He advocates recognizing reason’s limits as a rational conclusion. The leap is made with full awareness that it cannot be logically compelled — that it is, in the deepest sense, a free act of the individual will. In Fear and Trembling, he uses Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac as the paradigmatic case: Abraham does not understand the command. He cannot justify it ethically. But he acts in faith, and that act constitutes a form of relationship with the Absolute that no ethical framework can contain or explain.

Nietzsche’s Counter: There Is No Absolute, and That Is Good News

Nietzsche begins from a different diagnosis. His famous declaration in The Gay Science — “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” — is not a triumphant atheist announcement. It is a reckoning. Nietzsche understood that the death of God was also the death of every system of value that depended on God for its legitimacy: objective morality, universal truth, the Christian teleology of suffering redeemed by transcendence. The ground had shifted, and most people had not yet noticed.

His response to this diagnosis is not despair — it is a challenge. If God is dead, then the values that humanity has lived by for two millennia must be re-evaluated from the foundation. The Umwertung aller Werte — the revaluation of all values — is Nietzsche’s central project. And the human being capable of this revaluation, of creating new values from within rather than receiving them from without, is the Übermensch.

The Übermensch is not an arrogant fantasy. He is a philosophical necessity. If there is no transcendent source of value, then either humanity collapses into nihilism — the conviction that nothing means anything — or it generates meaning from itself. The Übermensch is the person who chooses the second path, who affirms existence in all its suffering and contingency, who says amor fati — love of fate — and means it without reservation.

Where Kierkegaard’s individual grounds the self in God, Nietzsche’s individual grounds the self in the self. The will to power is not aggression or domination — it is the fundamental drive of every living thing to extend, to create, to express itself. The fully realized human being is one who channels this drive not into resentment or subjugation but into genuine self-mastery and creation.

The Sharpest Point of Contact: What Do You Do With Despair?

Here is where the fight becomes genuinely interesting, and where I find myself unable to stand cleanly on either side.

Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of despair is, in my view, more psychologically precise than Nietzsche’s. The self that attempts to constitute itself entirely from within — to be its own ground, its own source of value, its own justification — faces a problem that Nietzsche’s framework does not fully address: it must, at some point, account for the arbitrary origin of its own will. Why these values and not others? Why this self-creation and not a different one? Nietzsche’s answer — because life affirms itself, because the will to power expresses itself in creation — is powerful as a description but circular as a justification. The self that creates its own values can always ask, with perfect legitimacy, who authorized the creating self.

Kierkegaard’s answer — that the self is constituted by a power other than itself, and that genuine selfhood requires relating to that power — sidesteps this circularity. But it purchases coherence at a cost: it requires the leap. It requires trusting something that cannot be demonstrated, that stands outside the reach of rational verification.

Nietzsche would say this is precisely the problem. The leap of faith is, in his reading, a failure of nerve — the moment at which the honest confrontation with groundlessness is abandoned in favor of a consoling fiction. His diagnosis of Christianity in On the Genealogy of Morality is that it is a morality of the weak: a system constructed by those who cannot master their own suffering, who transform resentment into virtue and weakness into righteousness.

But this is where Nietzsche’s critique of Kierkegaard specifically runs into difficulty. Kierkegaard is not a morality of resentment. He is not arguing from weakness. The leap of faith in Fear and Trembling is performed by Abraham, whose faith is described as the hardest possible achievement — harder than resignation, harder than ethical conformity, demanding more of the individual than any system of duty could require. Kierkegaard’s religious stage is not comfort. It is terror and trembling before the Absolute, sustained by faith in the face of the absurd.

That is not the Christianity Nietzsche attacks. Which means Nietzsche’s most powerful critique misses its most formidable target.

Where Nietzsche Has the Better of It

Despite my admiration for Kierkegaard’s precision, Nietzsche wins on one crucial point: the phenomenology of creation.

Whatever one believes about the metaphysical status of God, the experience of genuine creative act — of making something that did not exist before, of imposing form on chaos through will and craft — is real and does not obviously require transcendent grounding. When I am deep in the construction of a leather briefcase, cutting and stitching and burnishing with the knowledge that the thing I am making will outlast me — the experience is not one of reaching toward the Absolute. It is one of willing something into existence. It is, in Nietzsche’s precise sense, an expression of the will to power at its most constructive.

Nietzsche maps that experience accurately in a way Kierkegaard does not. The aesthetic stage, in Kierkegaard’s framework, is ultimately a deficient mode — a way of being that the individual must pass through and beyond. For Nietzsche, the artistic, creative, self-expressive life is the highest life, not a step on the way to something else.

The Question Neither Fully Answers

Both thinkers leave a residue of unresolved difficulty.

Kierkegaard cannot demonstrate the existence of the God to whom the self must relate. He admits this. But his honesty about the limits of demonstration does not dissolve the problem — it merely reframes it as a choice. And the choice to leap, however intellectually honest, remains underdetermined by the argument itself.

Nietzsche cannot demonstrate that the self-creating individual will not, in the end, collapse into the same despair Kierkegaard diagnoses — the despair of willing to be oneself, of carrying the entire weight of value-creation on a will whose own origins remain permanently opaque.

Both thinkers are, in the deepest sense, honest about what they do not know. That is what makes the argument between them permanent rather than resolvable. It is not a debate that ends with a correct answer. It is a tension that the individual must inhabit — choosing, provisionally, where to stand, and remaining willing to be destabilized by the better argument.

Choosing a Corner, for Now

I came to philosophy through Nietzsche. I return to him often — for the honesty, for the courage, for the refusal to console. The amor fati has been one of the most practically useful philosophical concepts I have ever encountered: the insistence on loving what is, not resenting it.

But Kierkegaard put pressure on something Nietzsche left unexamined. The self that wills itself into coherence must eventually account for the will itself. That question does not have an easy answer on either side of the argument.

What I have come to believe is that the fight between these two men is not one philosophy survives by resolving. It is one philosophy survives by continuing to take seriously — refusing the cheap resolution of settling too quickly into either faith or defiant self-creation, and remaining genuinely open to what the better argument demands.

That openness is, in my view, closer to Kierkegaard’s spirit than Nietzsche’s. Which may be the most disorienting conclusion of all.

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Sources:

Peter Kalafatis

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