ABSTRACT
M. Jamie Ferreira’s influential monograph critiqued and revised popular understandings of Kierkegaard on the relations of the will, imagination, reason, and passion in the transition to faith. According to Ferreira, one of the most widespread errors had been the tendency to construe faith’s “leap” as a heroic act of will and to portray Kierkegaard as a radical volitionalist. Qualitative existential transitions do not require a singular act of intentional decision. Faith is an imaginative transition rather than an abrupt episode of volitional exertion. The transition to faith is a shift in perspective in which the accumulation of considerations that point to a new paradigm reaches a critical threshold. Climacus’ view of the will should be understood in terms of the classical tradition’s rational appetite and attraction rather than volition. The decision to adopt a new paradigm is simply an affirmation of a reorienting shift in perspective, in which one option seems to be the only possible one.
