Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History

Kierkegaard on the Philosophy of History

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He proposed to her in , but mysteriously broke off the engagement less than a year later during a period of melancholy and depression. Regine later married and left Denmark, but she remained Kierkegaard's muse and the love of his life. It was immediately understood to be a major literary event , although it also had its critics.

His rather intemperate reaction to some poor reviews in the Danish satirical paper "The Corsair" led to verbal assaults, social exclusion and even to ridicule on the street of Copenhagen. From onwards, Kierkegaard's focus moved from criticism of Hegel to criticism of the hypocrisy of Christendom by which he meant the institution of the church and the applied religion of his society, rather than Christianity itself and of modernity and its shallow and passionless view of the world in general. In Kierkegaard's final years, from , he began a sustained literary attack on the Danish State Church through scholarly works, newspaper articles and a series of self-published pamphlets.

Kierkegaard died on 11 November in Frederik's Hospital, Copenhagen , possibly from complications from a fall from a tree when he was a boy. He provided an extended contrast between the aesthetic and ethical ways of life, concluding that the radical human freedom of the aesthetic inevitably leads to "angst" dread , the call of the infinite , and eventually to despair.

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Once this is realized, the individual may enter the ethical sphere. Focusing on the Biblical story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, this work as well as "Repetition" of the same year , moves beyond the aesthetic and the ethical , and introduces a higher stage on the dialectical ladder, the religious.

It describes a third way of life, the possibility of living by faith in the modern world, emphasizing the importance of the individual and developing a conception of subjective truth. These works discuss fundamental issues in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion , such as the nature of God and faith , faith's relationship with Ethics and morality, and the difficulty of being authentically religious. His works from to written using a pseudonym , including "Philosophical Fragments" , "The Concept of Dread" , "Stages on Life's Way" and, especially, the massive "Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments" , focus even more on the perceived shortcomings of the philosophy of Hegel and form the basis for existential psychology.

His second period of authorship, including works such as "Two Ages: A Literary Review" , "The Book on Adler" published posthumously in , "Christian Discourses" , "Works of Love" , "Edifying Discourses in Diverse Spirits" and "The Sickness Unto Death" , is focused more on the perceived hypocrisy and shallowness of Christendom and modern society in general.

He attempted to present Christianity as he thought it should be, and encouraged embracing Christ as the absolute paradox. From around until his death, Kierkegaard carried on a sustained literary attack on the Danish State Church , with books such as "Practice in Christianity" , which he himself considered his most important book , "For Self-Examination" and "Judge for Yourselves!

We can see in the journey from eros in the "aesthetic authorship" to agape in the "second authorship" a personal attempt by Kierkegaard to sublimate his selfish desire for Regina into a self-sacrificing universal duty to love the neighbor. On his own terms this is impossible for a human being to achieve alone. It is only possible if love as agape is received as a gift by the grace of God. The "authorship" and "second authorship" had been governed by Kierkegaard's elaborate method of "indirect communication.

It is designed to make it harder for the reader to appropriate the text objectively and dispassionately.

Instead, the text is folded back on itself, layered with riddles and paradoxes, and designed to be a mirror in which the way the reader judges the text amounts to a self-judgment on the reader. The different works in the "authorships" are related to one another dialectically, so that a reader has to traverse a complicated journey to arrive at the threshold of Christian faith. The method of indirect communication requires meticulous attention to each word, and to the dialectical trajectory of the whole oeuvre.

At times, the subtlety of the method nearly drove Kierkegaard to distraction, and he had to rely on the intervention of "Governance" [ Styrelse ], to let him know whether it was appropriate to publish the works he had written. But ultimately Kierkegaard began to think that this elaborate method of indirect communication, and his obsession with linguistic detail were temptations to the demonic.

Besides, time was running out and some direct, decisive intervention in Danish church politics was necessary.

Mynster But when the new Bishop Primate elect, H. Martensen, announced that Mynster had been "a witness to the truth" Kierkegaard could not restrain himself. On September 28th Kierkegaard collapsed in the street. A few days later he was admitted to Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, where he died on November 11th.

Although Kierkegaard explicitly leaves On the Concept of Irony out of his "authorship," it functions as an important preface to that body of work. According to the theory of existential stages contained in the authorship, irony functions as a "confinium" [border area] between the aesthetic and the ethical. But it also functions as a point of entry to the aesthetic.

As Kierkegaard argues in On the Concept of Irony , irony is a midwife at the birth of individual subjectivity.

Soren Kierkegaard biography

It is a distancing device, which folds immediate experience back on itself to create a space of self-reflection. In Socrates it is incarnated as "infinite negativity" - a force that undermines all received opinion to leave Socrates' interlocutors bewildered - and responsible for their own thoughts and values. That is, Socratic irony forces his interlocutors to reflect on themselves, to distance themselves critically from their immediate beliefs and values.

Faust is the first example of a reflective aesthete.

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He is lost in reflective ennui and craves a return to immediate experience. This is the basis of his attraction to Margarete, who embodies innocent immediacy. At its most extreme, the aesthete is unhappily and utterly self-alienated by means of temporal dislocation. He or she lives only in the modality of possibility and never in the modality of actuality, and therefore fails to be self-present. Yet, by means of reflective self-knowledge, the prudent rotation of moods and the arbitrary focus of interest, this "unhappiness" can be transformed into the greatest happiness for the aesthete.

The "infinitizing" element of possibility becomes the realm of freedom, where even the most banal events can be "poeticized" by aesthetic sensibility. Actuality is transformed into nothing more than an occasion for generating reflective possibilities, rather than being an obstacle or a task. Johannes the seducer need see only a dainty ankle descending from a carriage to reconstruct the whole woman - just as Cuvier reconstructs the whole dinosaur from a single bone. His seduction of Cordelia is not aimed at mere sexual consummation, but more at narrative consummation - she is to be used as an occasion, and manipulated in whatever ways Johannes deems necessary, to become the character in the story of seduction he has predetermined.

But this detachment from the actual, by self-centered immersion in reflective possibility, is exactly what On the Concept of Irony had accused the German Romantics of achieving with their use of irony. On the Concept of Irony had already argued for the necessity to go beyond immersion in irony, or mere possibility - to become a "master of irony," so that irony could be used strategically for ethical and religious ends.

The first volume is written from the point of view of the reflective aesthete, who has run astray in possibility. Although its main theme is love, this is conceived selfishly as erotic desire. The papers that comprise volume 1 are written ad se ipsum [to himself].

The aesthete's brilliant pyrotechnics are demonically self-enclosed, ironically cutting him off from genuine communication. The second volume, on the other hand, is written by a judge, who advocates transparency and openness in communication. It is written in the form of letters, as a direct communication to the aesthetic author of the first volume. The letters implore him to realize the limitations of his demonic self-enclosure, and to embrace his ethical duties to others.

Whereas the paradigm of love in volume 1 is seduction, the paradigm of love in volume 2 is marriage. Marriage is a trope for the universal claims of civic duty. It requires an open, intimate, transparent, honest relation to an other. Yet the first section of volume 2 argues for the aesthetic validity of marriage.

Judge Wilhelm wants to persuade the aesthete that ethical love is compatible with aesthetic love - that love in marriage does not exclude sensual enjoyment and love of beauty as such, but only the selfishness of lust for "the flesh. It pertains to the body and psyche, to the exclusion of spirit, which is the definitive Christian category.

Yet the claims of the judge ring hollow. It presents us with a radical, exclusive choice between the aesthetic and the ethical, yet the judge tries to show their compatibility in marriage.

Edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison

The final word of the book belongs neither to the aesthete, the judge, nor even to the pseudonymous editor, but to an anonymous parson. The assumption shared by both the aesthete and the ethicist is that love can provide a means for ascent to the divine. Whereas erotic desire provides a means for the aesthete to ascend to a state of reflective possibility unconstrained by actuality, in which he becomes his own creator-god, the judge conceives ethical love to be a dialectical advance on aesthetic selfishness - in the direction of God. The original model for this ladder to paradise is Plato's account of love [eros] in the Symposium.

Philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard

But the model is appropriated by many subsequent writers, including Augustine and Johannes Climacus, a sixth century monk from Mt. Sinai, who wrote a book called Scala Paradisi. Kierkegaard borrows this name for his pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

But it is in order to parody the notion that humans can ascend to the divine under their own power. Each of the pseudonymous books in the "authorship" makes a gesture of movement from human to divine, whether by means of the aesthetic sublime, ethical virtue, the religious leap of faith, or philosophical dialectics.

But in each case the apparent movement is "revoked" in some way. Ultimately Kierkegaard endorses the Lutheran view that human beings are radically dependent on God to descend to us. The next two books in the pseudonymous authorship, Fear and Trembling and Repetition , are supposed to represent a higher stage on the dialectical ladder - the religious.

They are supposed to have moved beyond the aesthetic and the ethical. Fear and Trembling explicitly problematizes the ethical, while Repetition problematizes the notion of movement. It tries to understand psychologically, ethically and religiously what Abraham was doing in obeying an apparent command from God to sacrifice his son. It apparently concludes that Abraham is "a knight of faith" who is religiously justified in his "teleological suspension of the ethical.

The end for which this ethic is suspended is the unconditional command of God. But such obedience raises difficult epistemological questions - how do we distinguish the voice of God from, say, a delusional hallucination? The answer, which induces fear and trembling, is that we can only do so by faith.

Abraham can say nothing to justify his actions - to do so would return him to the realm of human immanence and the sphere of ethics. The difference between Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia, and Abraham is that Agamemnon could justify his action in terms of customary morality. The sacrifice, however painful, was demanded for the sake of the success of the Greek military mission against Troy.

Such sacrifices, for purposes greater than the individuals involved, were intelligible to the society of the time. It was unjustifiable in terms of prevailing morality, and was indistinguishable from murder. But while Fear and Trembling is supposed to have moved beyond the aesthetic and the ethical, its subtitle is "a dialectical lyric.

It ends with an "Epilogue" that asserts that, as far as love and faith go, we cannot build on what the previous generation has achieved. We have to begin from the beginning. We can never "go further. Repetition begins with a discussion of the analysis of motion by the Eleatic philosophers. It goes on to distinguish two forms of movement with respect to knowledge of eternal truth: recollection and repetition.

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