Other‐Worldliness in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love

Abstract

From early on, certain religions have been criticized for promoting an orientation of other-worldliness which implies and supports neglect of (or even contempt for) this-worldly needs. Marx voiced the modern criticism of ‘the other-world’: ‘The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.’ Thirty years later another angry critic of religion, Nietzsche, deplored the ‘concept of the “beyond,” the “true world” invented in order to devaluate the only world there is – in order to retain no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality!’ and insisted that ‘If one shifts the centre of gravity of life out into the “Beyond” . . . one has deprived life as such of its centre of gravity.’ Soren Kierkegaard’s various accounts of religiousness, with their emphases on inwardness and subjectivity, have seemed to some a paradigm example of such an irresponsible deflection of attention from, and devaluation of, this world. Two early twentieth-century interpretations of Kierkegaard’s thought focused decisive attention on this criticism and significantly contoured the subsequent reception of his thought. Martin Buber, in 1936, offered perhaps the most well-known criticism of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the relation to God as other-worldly or ‘acosmic.’ Addressing Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with the ‘individual’ or ‘single one’ (culminating his Point of View), Buber’s version of the charge of acosmic otherworldliness emphasized an either/or between God and creation: for Kierkegaard, the exclusivity of the relation to God (the chosen one)