Kierkegaard, the Aesthetic and Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Abstract

Kierkegaard’s writings reflect his great passion for and love of art, particularly the plays of Shakespeare and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.1 Although Kierkegaard ‘read’ works of art existentially from the religious perspective of ‘artful living’, he refrained from including even these beloved works within the category of the religious.2 This omission results from his desire to avoid the idolatrous pagan categories of philosophical aesthetics, which desire blinds him to the autonomous religious status of authentic art.3 The question which Kierkegaard does not address explicitly is: what are the attributes of privileged speech? This question is potent because his interpretative practices in reading Mozart are paradigmatic of his general approach to interpretation. The structure of his arguments is always brilliant and worth considering, but, although Kierkegaard is a strong and perceptive reader of texts, he none the less does not deem it necessary to account for aspects of the text which do not conform to his fundamental presuppositions.4 From the laconic comments on interpretation in Philosophical Fragments we note that Kierkegaard’s singular approach and purposeful omissions are a mode of instructing the reader in the proper relationship between authority, authoring and the tasks of re-authoring.KeywordsDramatic ActionAuthentic WorkInterpretative PracticePhilosophical FragmentPerceptive ReaderThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.