SKC Workshop Spring 2026

Taekuk Kim

(Sogang University, South Korea)

"Upbuilding toward Self-Realizing Happiness through Anxiety and Despair"

This study interprets happiness not as something that can be completely defined, but as an existential phenomenon that must be questioned as the fundamental purpose of individual life. From this perspective, it argues that Kierkegaard’s concepts of “faith” and “earnestness” can constitute a form of self-realizing happiness for contemporary individuals living through anxiety and despair.

Grounded in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the human being as “the single individual,” faith and earnestness are disclosed not merely as religious or psychological categories, but as an existential “upbuilding”—a movement continually directed toward authentic selfhood. Within this movement, anxiety and despair are interpreted not as pathological states, but as existential phenomena encountered: anxiety functions as the best tutor that cultivates “earnestness,” while despair marks the failure of authentic selfhood and, at the same time, the decisive moment in which the individual can leap into “faith.”

Rather than justifying faith within the framework of normative ethical theory, this paper seeks a philosophical justification that discloses faith as an existential movement repeatedly enacted within the structure of human existence itself, thereby showing that the movement of faith can be applied to contemporary individuals at the existential level, without adherence to Christian doctrine.