Kierkegaard and absolute knowledge

Kierkegaard, responding to Hegel’s claim to deliver absolute knowledge, agrees with Nietzsche that we are not purely rational creatures, and that we can never obtain a godlike point of view. His pseudonym Johannes Climacus makes this plain: “A logical system is possible, but a system of existence is impossible for anyone but God.” We humans can certainly construct logical systems, but they never perfectly capture the whole truth about existence. Our systems can never be totally complete or final in the sense that they are unrevisable. However, it is important that Kierkegaard does not think this means that there is no objective truth that we can seek. Reality is a system for God, and objective truth is simply the truth as God knows it. Furthermore, since we are created in God’s image, there is reason to hope that our search for truth will not be completely in vain. We remain finite, fallible, and sinful creatures, but if we are God’s creatures we have reason to hope that we can at least approximate the truth we need to have as human beings. It is something like this faith in our cognitive powers that underlies Reid’s philosophy of common sense as well.—Evans, A History of Western Philosophy, 582–83