The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre
Palgrave Macmillan Cham
2024
Softcover
XII, 88
Reviewed by: Tyler Perkins (Gannon University)
The Burden and Dignity of Possibility: On Riccardo Pugliese’s The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre
Introduction
If the Socratic prescription for living well is to “let no day pass without discussing goodness and […] that life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” then, as Riccardo Pugliese suggests in The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre, the existentialist counterpart might read: let no day pass without choosing oneself — and that a life without this sort of choice is not worth living (Plato 1993, p. 23). But how is one able to choose? What choices are available? What is the self that one must choose? And how does this make life worth living? What kind of failure results from failing to choose?
These are the animating questions of Pugliese’s concise and provocative volume. The book is neatly divided into two parts: the first investigates “the relationship between freedom and possibility in Kierkegaard,” while the second “dwells on the idea of freedom as condemnation as it was conceived by the philosopher who most radicalized its scope: Jean-Paul Sartre” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 1–2). At first glance, the book appears to offer a familiar exegetical pairing of two major existentialists. Yet Andrea Tagliapietra’s preface signals a more ambitious aim: a reorientation of existentialism around the category of possibility, challenging the long-standing ontological priority given to actuality and essence in Western metaphysics.
Pugliese develops two intertwined arguments: first, that existentialist thought uniquely subverts the classical dichotomy between possibility and reality, treating possibility not as mere potentiality or lack, but as an ontologically rich mode of being. Second, that this ontological shift has significant ethical consequences — particularly for the question of how to live. His reinterpretation of Kierkegaard and Sartre thus serves not only to clarify their positions, but to advance a broader philosophical proposal: that the self must be understood through the lens of possibility, and that a life lived well is one that takes up this burden with lucidity.
In what follows, I first summarize the major claims and structure of the book, then assess its interpretive and philosophical contributions. I conclude by reflecting on the ethical and phenomenological implications of reading existentialism as a meditation on the dizziness — and dignity — of possibility.
Possibility and Selfhood in Kierkegaard
The first half of the book offers a reading of Kierkegaard centered on the ontological and ethical role of possibility. Drawing primarily on Either/Or and The Sickness unto Death, he presents Kierkegaard as a thinker who defines the self through exposure to what might be—and what might be chosen.
Using Kierkegaard, Pugliese argues that possibility provides the ontological basis for human existence itself. Prior to realizing any one possibility—to choosing, that is—one is at the zero-point of existence, as a nothingness (at least in that moment). Possibility here is framed as “permanent indecision, the unstable balance between opposing alternatives that present themselves in the face of any given possibility” (Pugliese 2023, p. 2). This zero-point is more than a fork in the road (does one go down one path or the other?), Pugliese quotes Kierkegaard’s Diario, where he compares the experience of possibility to being caught at “an intersection of ways that radiate in all directions” and at which one is compelled to turn down several (albeit incompatible) roads at once. What’s more, the existential condition of possibility is not overcome by the act of choosing. Pugliese claims that Kierkegaard’s remark “implies that from choice there is no escape,” this, it seems, is because one transgresses the zero-point only to arrive back at it (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).
The Aesthetic and the Ethical
Choosing isn’t merely one option among others in the face of possibility. Because human existence is defined by possibility, choosing is necessary. To be sure, echoing Kierkegaard, Pugliese describes choice as “an ineradicable component of our persona […] the individual is not what he is but what he chooses to be […] even the renunciation of choice is a choice, albeit a type of choice by which man renounces himself” (Pugliese 2023, p. 3).
Thus, the first dilemma at the heart of Pugliese’s existentialist ethic is not between choosing and not choosing—not choosing, he tells us, is itself a choice. Instead, it’s between renunciation and commitment; between, in Kierkegaardian terms, the aesthetic stage and the ethical stage.
When in the aesthetic stage, one lives according to the motto carpe horam (seize the hour!), immersed in a world of immediate, external goods. The aesthete is “one who grounds himself and the meaning of his life on external agents (e.g., wealth), or independent from one’s own will (such as beauty, health, talent, or intelligence)” (Pugliese 2023, p. 6). While Pugliese notes structural similarities between Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage and later existentialist notions such as Heidegger’s thrownness or Sartre’s facticity, he does not address whether he interprets it as a normative program, or on a more descriptive register. However, since Pugliese claims that modern ethics after Kierkegaard emphasizes transformation, growth, and development, his argument appears to carry an implicit normative force. Readers should be aware, however, that this is not the only — or even the dominant — interpretation of Kierkegaard’s stages.
By contrast, one passes from the aesthetic to the ethical stage “by assuming full responsibility for his own freedom, commits himself to a task to which he remains faithful,” and “embraces the repetition that the aesthete has shunned” (Pugliese 2023, p. 4). This review will cover Pugliese’s treatment of the ethical stage in a later section. For now, the question is, where is the tipping point between the aesthetic and the ethical? Answer: Despair.
Despair as the culmination of the aesthetic life
In Either/Or, Kierkegaard examines the existential condition of despair through the figure of Judge Wilhelm — a representative of the ethical stage who offers a sustained critique of aesthetic life. As Pugliese emphasizes, despair marks “the first, inescapable step toward the ethical stage,” because it is in despair — a crisis that is, paradoxically, “deeply and intensely coveted” — that the self first becomes aware of itself as something to be chosen (Pugliese 2023, p. 14). This reflective awareness is the defining feature of the despairing aesthete, who “becomes aware of himself, of his own freedom, and of the possibilities that this awareness entails” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).
This moment of critical self-awareness brings existential clarity to the aesthete; it is the recognition that they have “tied the very purpose of their life to transient, finite, and fleeting things and feelings. The despairing aesthete’s perspective reveals “the futility of everything and its ephemeral character” (Pugliese 2023, p. 10). With the futility of their vanity in full view, the despairing aesthete has no reason to continue their pursuit of meaning and purpose in immediate and external goods. But how can this despair be distinguished from mere dissatisfaction—from the boredom or weariness that follows exhausting one’s options for pleasure? As Pugliese puts it, the despairing aesthete, having exhausted even their own fantasies, now “marches irrevocably toward the abyss” (Pugliese 2023, p. 11).
In the end, Pugliese presents the despairing aesthete as a kind of tragic seer—someone who has penetrated the illusion of aesthetic meaning and now lives with the naked awareness of its futility. This is not the despair of ignorance, but of insight. The cost of this lucidity, however, is paralysis: with all values dissolved, no action seems justifiable. Judge Wilhelm’s ethical challenge, then, is not to negate despair but to embrace it—to “choose despair” as the first step toward becoming a true self. In framing despair this way, Pugliese gives it a paradoxical dignity: it is not merely a dead end, but the beginning of responsibility.
Choice of self as foundational to ethical existence
According to Pugliese, the ethical life begins when one recognizes that freedom is not simply given but must be grasped. This means choosing not merely between options but choosing to become a self in the fullest existential sense. It is “a great original choice that determines the horizon of [their] existence, namely, the choice to choose” (Pugliese 2023, p. 13). The critical self-consciousness one gains through despair “will lead [them] to a condition of complete transparency and lucidity, which existentialists call authenticity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 15).
In chapter 3, “The Choice of Self,” Pugliese follows Kierkegaard in describing ethical selfhood as a movement through three existential moments: (1) Self-recognition as absolute freedom – “I can do anything.” (2) Self-recognition as a necessity, based on one’s history and conditioning – “I am constrained by my facticity.” (3) Self-recognition in one’s eternal worth through repentance – a synthesis of (1) and (2) yielding a stable identity. This sequence does not imply resolution or closure. Rather, it marks the conditions under which a stable identity emerges.
For Pugliese, this existential choice represents the minimal condition for authenticity. It does not guarantee ethical fulfillment, but it opens the horizon in which commitment, responsibility, and selfhood become possible. In this sense, the ethical is the willingness to relate to oneself through an enduring commitment to continual self-perfection.
The threefold structure of ethical selfhood in Pugliese’s reading highlights the paradox at the heart of existential subjectivity. One must come to terms with being a synthesis of opposing forces: freedom and necessity, transcendence and facticity. The pain of despair reveals the self as absolutely free. Yet in the second moment, the individual “clashes against the limits of his contingency and discovers that he has a history, and that this history is indivisibly interwoven with the histories of other men, bound to become a single, collective history” (Pugliese 2023, p. 18). It is precisely this finitude, when confronted freely, that makes ethical selfhood possible. In Kierkegaard’s terms, the final synthesis arrives not in denial of either pole, but in a kind of existential reconciliation: the choice to affirm both freedom and necessity in the act of becoming oneself.
Pugliese argues that the moment of self-recognition as a necessity adds an extra dimension to the existential weight of responsibility. One is not only responsible for who they freely choose to become, but also for the nexus of background conditions—historical, social, and personal—that have shaped their becoming. Repentance is the existential structure through which individuals redeem themselves in their “entirety and complexity” (Pugliese 2023, p. 19). Repentance, for Pugliese, is not merely a reconciliation of contradictions within the self. It is existentially significant because it marks the culmination of ethical selfhood — the moment at which one becomes answerable to something both immanent and transcendent. Quoting Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Pugliese formulates the effect of repentance as a kind of mystical rebirth, whereby “the self chooses itself or rather receives itself,” and “Man does not become different from what he was before, he just becomes himself; consciousness gathers, and he is himself” (Kierkegaard 1843, quoted in Pugliese 2023, p. 19).
Pugliese began by comparing the aesthete’s predicament to being adrift in an open and indeterminate sea of possibility, one who is content with the amusement of considering, but never realizing any of the possibilities that lay before them—a kind of infinite existential procrastination. The ethical individual has been emboldened by their critical self-awareness to resolutely and passionately choose. Yet neither clarity nor resolve can shield the ethical individual from what Pugliese calls the “painful and melancholic irreconcilability between opposite life paths,” a suffering felt most acutely in the sacrifice possibility at the altar of actuality (Pugliese 2023, p. 23).
Sartre and Freedom as Condemnation
In the arc of Pugliese’s text, Kierkegaard lays down the premises for some of the philosophical conclusions he wishes to draw out of his engagement with Sartre and 20th-century existentialism. However, while Kierkegaard provides much of the philosophical foundation for more recent existentialist philosophies, Pugliese is careful to distinguish Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialism from the kind of philosophy that was done as a response to the “feeling of desolation and estrangement from life” and “the idea of the individual as a clearly distinct entity opposed to society as a whole” (Pugliese 2023, p. 28). Chapter 4, “Existentialism and the Birth of the Modern Era,” gives a relatively straightforward and uncontroversial account of the cultural, philosophical, and political changes that took shape between the mid-19th to early-20th centuries in Europe.
The Age of Anxiety (1918-1939) upended almost every aspect of humanity’s philosophical self-understanding. Important for the development of existentialism is the “process of rationalization that will dismantle all the theological or metaphysical premises on which universal value judgments had previously been based,” as well as “the positivist illusion that such ideals can be objectively grounded in historical or social facts and their development,” and humanity’s loss of its “central position in the universe,” all adding up to a general feeling of “bewilderment and loneliness” (Pugliese 2023, pp. 26-7).
In Chapter 5, “Human Existence,” Pugliese begins to develop existentialism as a philosophical response to the spiritual and cultural crisis of the Age of Anxiety. To do so, he situates 20th-century existentialism against the backdrop of Hegel’s philosophical anthropology. Hegel, in Phenomenology of Spirit, distinguishes between the natural, biological dimension of the human being and the rational, self-conscious capacity that defines human subjectivity. For Pugliese, this model is not embraced by existentialism so much as reworked: the existentialist inherits Hegel’s emphasis on self-consciousness and negation, but without the metaphysical assurances of a reconciled totality or final synthesis.
If Kierkegaard demonstrates that human beings have the freedom to transform themselves, to choose to give themselves purpose by making a passionate commitment to themselves, then Hegel offers the structural resources to explain how such transformation is ontologically possible. Existentialists inherit the notion that human beings are split between their immediate impulses and the reflective distance afforded by self-consciousness. For Sartre, whom Pugliese take up in the second half of the book, this struggle is reframed as a fundamental tension between existence and essence.[1] It is from within this tension that Sartre articulates his claim that being-for-itself (i.e., consciousness) negates and transcends being-in-itself (the natural, biological dimension). By denying one’s immediate impulses, “a crack, a fissure, a nothingness is introduced within the fullness of being by human existence” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Against the backdrop of the Age of Anxiety, Sartre offers not a return to metaphysical certainty, but a redemption of human dignity. Humanity may no longer receive purpose from God or the state but retain the capacity to give it to itself.
However, that capacity is not exercised unconsciously; it “occurs through the precise decision on the part of the individual to interact with it in order to modify it and give it the desired direction actively, in the course of one’s life” (Pugliese 2023, p. 33). Pugliese thus shows that beginning from ontology rather than ethics still leads us back to a reflection on freedom. It is because human beings are ontologically structured to define themselves in relation to their circumstances that “human existence implies that each of our actions contributes to the overall shaping of our life in its entirety.” One imagines that Sartre would go a step further because for him, action does not merely shape a life, it constitutes essence. Thus, Pugliese returns to and reinforces the grounding thesis of the text: human existence is characterized by possibility, “openness to all,” and that man is “free to choose what he wants to become” (Pugliese 2023, p. 38).
In Chapter 6, “Transcendence and Freedom,” Pugliese extends the ontological significance of possibility into the domains of epistemology and perception. He traces how existentialists inherit and revise Kant’s critical philosophy, particularly the claim that “the world we experience on a daily basis is merely the projection of our way of thinking and perceiving reality” (Pugliese 2023, p. 43). While Sartre may accept a version of this “projection thesis,” he breaks from the Kantian framework by rejecting the idea that perception is conditioned by universal categories shared by all. For the existentialist, it is not transcendental structures but the “free and individual choice, unique and unrepeatable because it is different for each person, which determines the appearance of the world” (Pugliese 2023, p. 44). In this way, Pugliese shows that possibility is not only the ground of ethical life but also of perception itself — the very way the world is given to consciousness.
Freedom and the Demand for Meaning
20th-century existentialism, shaped by the cultural disorientation of the Age of Anxiety, reinterprets Kierkegaard’s ethical demand through the concept of authenticity, emphasizing how important it is to choose oneself. For thinkers like Heidegger and Sartre, the greatest threat to selfhood is not merely the pursuit of pleasure, but the pull of conformity—the pressure to define oneself through the gaze and expectations of others. As Pugliese puts it, communal life “creates alienation and detachment from oneself” under the sway of what he calls “the dictatorship of one” (Pugliese 2023, p. 47). This phrase names the subtle but pervasive temptation to submit to prevailing norms and social routines, effacing difference in the process.
Existentialist thinkers from Nietzsche to Sartre have long warned against the leveling effects of normalization. However, while Pugliese rightly emphasizes their shared resistance to the herd, he glosses over the significant differences in their positions—particularly Nietzsche’s explicitly prescriptive ideal of self-overcoming, in contrast to the more descriptive and phenomenological approaches found in Heidegger and Sartre. This omission risks flattening the conceptual terrain that existentialism traverses in its effort to think authenticity under modern conditions. It is true that one ought to strive to live passionately and authentically, but taken to its radical extreme, this demand risks isolating the individual from the shared fabric of social life. Authenticity, in this register, becomes not just a struggle against conformity, but a potential estrangement from others altogether. The text seems to arrive at a more nuanced position in spite of the omission, which acknowledges that these philosophers “invite us, as individuals, to not adhere uncritically to a particular school of thought, challenging us to think about things autonomously, inwardly, and silently, and to arrive at a final decision using our critical consciousness” (Pugliese 2023, p. 52).
In the final chapter, “Freedom as Destiny,” Pugliese reorients the existential notion of freedom away from abstraction and toward situated commitment. Freedom, he argues, is not a blank slate, but a task that must be worked out within the irreducible constraints of one’s historical, cultural, and personal situation. In this sense, destiny does not oppose freedom but names the terrain through which it must move. Drawing on Sartre’s later reflections, Pugliese shows that the highest form of freedom is not flight from one’s conditions, but the capacity to assume them lucidly and transform them meaningfully. This closing gesture also recalls Kierkegaard’s emphasis on repetition, showing that the ethical life is not simply an escape from despair or an assertion of novelty, but a return to one’s existence with renewed commitment. By ending here, Pugliese reinforces his central thesis: that existentialism, far from a philosophy of despair, is a sustained meditation on the dignity and difficulty of becoming a self through possibility.
Conclusion
The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre is both an accessible introduction to key existentialist thinkers and a philosophically ambitious proposal in its own right. Pugliese’s central claim—that possibility is not merely a psychological horizon but the ontological condition of freedom and selfhood—offers a compelling thread that runs from Kierkegaard’s stages of life through Sartre’s ontology of negation and responsibility. The book succeeds in showing how existentialism responds to the modern loss of metaphysical grounding not with despair, but with an ethic of lucidity and self-commitment. At times, its interpretive scope risks smoothing over significant differences between thinkers, particularly in its treatment of authenticity and the pressure of social conformity. Yet Pugliese’s clarity of exposition and structural elegance allow the philosophical force of the existentialist tradition to come through. For readers interested in the ethical and ontological stakes of freedom—not just as a cultural idea, but as an existential task—this volume offers a valuable and thoughtful guide.
Bibliography:
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters. Edited by Edith Hamilton. 16. print. Bollingen Series 71. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Pugliese, Riccardo. The Dizziness of Freedom in Kierkegaard and Sartre. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-38138-6.
[1] It’s not clear if Pugliese wants to say that, for Sartre, essence and givenness are one and the same. When Sartre famously claims that “existence precedes essence” in Existentialism is a Humanism, essence is not meant to stand in for the concept of facticity, or one’s situation that they may take a stand on.
