Kierkegaard's Philosophy Research Articles

KIERKEGAARD E KANT: ALGUMAS APROXIMAÇÕES ENTRE A ÉTICA DO AMOR E A ÉTICA DO DEVER

The aim of this paper is to analyze, with approximate order, two ethical positions. To achieve this goal, the text will look in their introductory considerations, the context and objectives of Kierkegaard´s Works of Love, since there is clearly expressed the ethics second the Danish author. In its first part, the focus of the article will consist in evaluating the rationality of ethics of duty especially through an investigation of goodwill and freedom, which is developed in the third section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the second part, the paper will analyze the speech Kierkegaardian Thou shalt love, which is part of the Works of Love. Finally, in conclusion, be carried out approaches and pointed out the significant differences between the two thinkers. Here will be used more intensively, also the reflections of commentators from both authors. However, the main focus of the research will take place around the Kierkegaardian reflections, which will be evaluated in a more exhaustive. Reflection on Kant's moral philosophy does not go just the same, but rather seek to understand it in dialogue with the philosophy of Kierkegaard.

Works of Love in a World of Violence: Kierkegaard, Feminism, and the Limits of Self‐Sacrifice

Feminist scholars adopt wide‐ranging views of self‐sacrifice: their critiques claim that women are inordinately affected by Christianity's valorization of self‐sacrifice and that this traditional Christian value is inherently misogynistic and necrophilic. Although Søren Kierkegaard's Works of Love deems Christian love essentially sacrificial, love, in his view, sets significant limits on the role of self‐sacrifice in human life. Through his proposed response to one who requests forgiveness, “Do you now truly love me?” Kierkegaard offers a model of forgiveness that subverts traditional ideals of the self‐sacrificing and submissive woman while keeping love central. The question asserts self‐love, involves redoubling and double danger, and expresses a refusal to imitate Christ's suffering. I propose a reading in keeping with Grace Jantzen's vision for a feminist philosophy of religion, which reads against the grain and “seeks to break through to new ways of thinking that may open up divine horizons.” My reading is further supported by Kierkegaard's contention that everything essentially Christian bears a double meaning. In light of the subversive potential found in the discrepancy between apparent love and actual love, as well as the duty to name the sin of one who has behaved in an unloving manner, I argue that Kierkegaard's philosophy of love resists simplistic understandings of self‐sacrificing love.

Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety

Blake and Kierkegaard: Creation and Anxiety

Contingency, Necessity, and Causation in Kierkegaard's Theory of Change

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard's theory of change is motivated by a robust notion of contingency. His view of contingency is sharply juxtaposed with a strong notion of absolute necessity. I show that how he understands these notions explains certain ambiguous claims he makes about causation. I attempt to provide a coherent interpretation of his view of causality that is consistent with both human choice and the causal sequence of change. I end by suggesting a compatibilist interpretation of Kierkegaard's philosophy.

Kierkegaard and the concept of negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno

The main subject of this paper is the influence of Kierkegaard's philosophy on the concept of Adorno's dialectics. This article is focused on the analysis of Adorno's work published in 1966 titled Negative Dialec-tics. Adomo 's concept of dialectics, which is based on undefined experience, is broadly similar to the negative concept of existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Although Adomo uses the Hegelian dialectics to expose the ways in which Kierkegaard’s thoughts fali into idealism. Finally, Adomo adopts Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian identity of thinking. Adomo, in Negative Dialectics refers to Kant, Hegel Heidegger, but seldom to Kierkegaard. A careful analysis shows that a number of themes and concepts of its predecessor have been assimilated to his philosophy.

From Žižek's Monstrous Politics to the Political Theology of Kierkegaard's Housing Project

Abstract: Slavoj Žižek's leading question is how we are to reformulate a leftist anti-capitalist project in an era of global capitalism. In attempting to answer this question, Žižek often uses Kierkegaard's insights to add weight to his analysis of the problems associated with our social and political reality. Yet when one reads Žižek's work on Kierkegaard one is struck by the sheer number of inconsistencies that are generated. Žižek considers Kierkegaard from the point of view of the political in such a way that he avoids the religious, but Kierkegaard is clear that if a proper politics is to exist, it must be grounded in religious selfhood. The single individual, as Kierkegaard makes clear in Two Ages, is “an essentially human person in the religious sense.” Kierkegaard's views are directed by a religious notion of selfhood. Politics without this source is a form of despair. By failing to see ourselves as religious beings, we are in despair. This despair cannot be the basis from which to transform the coordinates of our current position. Kierkegaard's philosophy provides us with a radical opening from which to re-think political theology from the position of the single individual to come. The program that Žižek upholds is not adequate for the transformation of society or self because it does not have a religious understanding of the individual. As such, Žižek's position is grounded in despair, not love.

The Concept of Writing, with Continual Reference to “Kierkegaard”

This essay explores the role that writing plays within the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Given that a majority of his commentators seemingly agree that his philosophy is thoroughly “Socratic,” emphasis on what Mallarmé once called the “insane game of writing” perhaps shows that this claim is somewhat inaccurate. For if the Socratic logos is defined according to the proximity of living speech, then the fact that Kierkegaard was, above anything else, a writer would perhaps position him much closer to Plato than to Socrates. This becomes all the more evident when considering what Kierkegaard called the “poet-dialectician,” which is indeed a name that is somewhat paradoxical given that it signifies the Socratic philosopher who must engage in those activities which Socrates himself—notably in Plato's Phaedrus—had disparaged as removed from the essence of truth: namely, to write and to poetise. So if Kierkegaard's philosophy is really Socratic in nature, how can he resemble such a “pure thinker” who never wrote a single word?

Allegory, Capital, Modernity: Peer Gynt and Ibsen's Modern Breakthrough

It is one of the least challenged suppositions of Ibsen criticism that Peer Gynt offers a satirical portrait of the titular hero's escapist flights of fancy.1 According to this canonical view, Ibse...

Who If Not He? A Narrative Semiotic Reading of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or

There is nowhere a truth that would teach me who I have to be; a truth that I would not understand if I had not already become who I have to be. Vincent Descombes This essay proposes an interpretation of Kierkegaard's Either/Or I (1987) [1845] from a narrative semiotic perspective. It aims to show how the philosophy of life communicated in this book is constructed by a creative manipulation of linguistic signs and a hidden presence of narrative patterns. Some clarifications may be helpful in elucidating this potentially controversial theoretical standpoint on Kierkegaard's philosophy. My desire to understand Either/Or led me to search for ways that I could use my experience as semiotician and narratologist to shed light on what at first seemed to me like an obscure and mystifying collection of riddles. This in turn encouraged me to approach the text on its own terms, as a self-contained entity, instead of placing it in a tradition of thought and comparing it with other philosophical or religious ideologies like perhaps a more conventional interpretation would do. In this respect I engaged with the text from an outsider's perspective, and therefore as an innocent to expert opinion. The resulting reading of Either/Or is in terms of the world that it constructs through its stylistic structure and writing strategy more than in terms of its intertextual references to other philosophic texts. Following the advice of Maurice Blanchot (1988), who wrote that to truly understand a book one has to give oneself to it, I attempted to blend my voice with that of the writer and to reach an understanding of the text by following its movement. The Narrative Framework Before concentrating on Either/Or, a background description of some pertinent narratological concepts would be useful. A widely accepted method of narratological analysis, which will be followed here, distinguishes two textual levels, the story and the discourse (Chatman 1978 and 1990, Prince 1982, Marsen 1998). The level of story contains events, settings and agents-the propositional content of the narrative. The level of discourse contains the linguistic organization, spatio-temporal and deictic structures, and the semiotic code (i.e., whether a text is verbal, visual, etc.)-the presentational form of the narrative. In this scheme, the role of the narrator, the presenter of information, is paramount. Even when not playing a specific role in the story, the narrator is logically presupposed by any utterance as its emanating and organizing source, responsible for the amount, detail, hierarchical order and evaluation of the information presented. Typologies of the narrator formulated in the 1970s and 80s, the peak of narratological interest, tended to focus on action, i.e., whether or not the narrator is an agent in the story, and/or knowledge, i.e., what and how much the narrator knows in relation to the (other) agents (Genette 1972, Bal 1977, Bremond 1973, Coste 1989). In the last decade or so, focus has shifted from text analysis to ideo-cultural issues of power relations and representations of identity (Jameson, 1998, Gibson, 1996, Currie, 1998). The reading proposed in this essay attempts a synthesis of these approaches. It aims to show how the philosophy of life that is communicated in and by the text depends not only on the propositional level (what is said), but also on the relations between who speaks, who sees (whose perspective orients the story), and who knows (the ideological and epistemological sources of knowledge that legitimize the presented information). These relations can be traced in the organization of textual sequences and in discursive structures, and create an identity of the narrator. The identity or presence of the narrator that emerges through these textual relations determines, to a considerable extent, the meaning attributed to the text by the reader. In terms of this approach, the narrator not only describes different possibilities of life; he also incarnates different possibilities of life, seeks the freedom to incarnate them, or seeks ways to abandon them. …

Text and the Performative Act

Commenting on Nicomachean Ethics, bk. X, Kierkegaard criticizes Aristotle because he rates contemplative life higher than practice of political virtue.1 Kierkegaard says, the contemplative life is isolation.2 To think solely for sake of thinking, he argues, is to think disinterestedly, which is not human (umenneskelig) way to be. Something happens between being and thinking. He calls it existence (Existents) claiming this ontology of singularity (den Enkelte) involves a comportment directed outside itself. That is to say, being is both finite and infinite, is oriented both vertically and horizontally, toward wholly Other which constitutes a secret, is unsayable, as well as toward other other. Because of being's vertical orientation Kierkegaard has to produce a new methodology by which to present his philosophy of existence. This new approach involves two different communication forms: a direct communication, which is im/possible for communicating unsayable, and an indirect communication that is concealed and only reveals itself upon solicitation. This indirect communications form necessitates existential appropriation for its understanding. Existence is for Kierkegaard human (menneskelig) way to be. This critique of Aristotle is from period of Kierkegaard's first pseudonymous texts: Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition. It is tempting to suggest that it is Aristotle's metaphysics that is aim of his critique, but that would be a departure from Kierkegaard's philosophy which is engaged both within and beyond limits of metaphysics. Still, these early texts address a thinking that we do not encounter in indirect communications concealed within them. These writings constitute a phenomenology of singularity without context, and thus they resemble Aristotle's own approach which, by dissecting various components of human experience, found it easier to see what each contains.3 With Kierkegaard's authorship we are introduced to singularity from a number of perspectives, not perspectives that in any way can be considered real-therefore pseudonymity-but perspectives that attempt to describe experiences of singularity first outside of a problematizing context and later, as we shall see, within it. What is of immediate interest is thus Kierkegaard's methodology, movement between direct and indirect communication, and requirement that these two modes of communication be read differently in order to reveal his phenomenology of singularity. The problematic occurs when in these early writings a context is seemingly included: for example, marriage, work, and political in Either/Or II , Sarah, general (det Almene), not to mention tax collector in Fear and Trembling, and a journey to Berlin in Repetition. These (worldly) inclusions, however, do not constitute context; rather, they are for purpose of presenting a philosophy of existence. That is to say, they assist in explaining ontological structure of singularity. Kierkegaard is not operating within a subject/object paradigm. He is not examining human relationships as such. That only happens later in Works of Love, for example, where Kierkegaard posits a context, thus problematizing existence. In domain of thinking, positive can be classed in following categories: sensate certainty, historical knowledge, speculative resuits. But this is precisely untrue .... All of this positive fails to express state of knowing subject in existence.4 Kierkegaard's project is fairly obvious as Calvin O. Schrag has so eloquently shown: As Heidegger's ontological and existentialist descriptions can arise only from ontic and existential experience, so Kierkegaard's ontic and existential elucidations express an implicit ontology.5 However, being of singularity, as Kierkegaard understands it, contains dimensions quite different from, for example, those of Heidegger's Dasein, being of which is finite. …

The poetics of disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery

Poetics of Disappointment offers nothing less than a complete revision of our understanding of romantic poetry. By examining the lineage of Wordsworth, Shelley, Stevens, and Ashbery, Quinney challenges Harold Bloom's identification of major romantic poems as crisis lyrics and questions his idea that the disappointment these poets explore is compensated by their celebration of a heroic Rather, Quinney argues, the form of disappointment examined by the romantic poet often finds him bewildered and oppressed, in a state beyond the simple failure of literary ambition or romantic love. Beginning with Wordsworth's major autobiographical poems, including Tintern Abbey and the Intimations Ode, Quinney identifies a strain of romantic and postromantic lyric that devotes itself to capturing a disoriented sadness, a disappointment in which the self is isolated and frozen. She considers poems by Shelley, Stevens, and Ashbery, which she argues concern not specific disappointments but a psychic state of being disappointed. According to Quinney, an experience of loss has fractured and paralyzed the formerly hopeful self because that self seems in retrospect arrogant and naive or, as Ashbery puts it, the dream sustaining all other dreams dies. Quinney's critical prose is wonderfully fluent, conversant with theory but never relying on jargon to make her complex and sensitive argument. Drawing on the psychological insights of Freud and Klein and on the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Quinney sees in her paradigm of disappointment a sophisticated representation of self that goes beyond mere pathos or melancholia. The history of romantic and postromantic poetry, she finds, is not a history of ambitious self-assertion but a collective testimony of chagrin over the broken promises of the self.

Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox: Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Philosophy of Kierke-Gaard

Divine Madness and the Absurd Paradox: Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the Philosophy of Kierke-Gaard

The existential meaning of the art of theatre in Kierkegaard's philosophy

In this paper, I will consider Kierkegaard's approach to the art of theatre: Does he view the art of theatre as existentially relevant to concrete existence or does he see the art per se, as well as the attendance at theatrical performances, as reflecting a break with life? One of the characteristic ways of describing the relationship between art including the art of theatre - and existence in Kierkegaard's thought, appears in the work of S. Crites: ...the modem reader is likely to be doubtful about the idealistic premises that inform his discussions of art, and may be troubled by the apparent separation of art from life, or at least from the ethical and religious centre of human existence. I This description seems justified since the theatre is a classic expression of the aesthetic stage, as the latter is described by Kierkegaard. The aesthetic stage, by its very nature, is severed from the ethical problem of concrete existence - self-choice. Moreover, Kierkegaard himself ascribes to the theatre a status of "artificial actuality" or "shadow existence. ''2 In a critique of his times Kierkegaard writes: "This public likes to transform all actuality into a theatre, to have nothing to do itself but imagine that everything anyone does happens in order for it to have something to chatter about. ''3 The theatre is a medium of the imagination and, as such, it separates man from existence. Both actor and spectator are together in an illusory world of suffering and tension, rather than experience the suffering and tension of concrete existence. 4 Kierkegaard claims that, in fact, the theatre serves to compensate man for his inability to contend with existence. In the theatre, victories never won in life come within reach.

Divine madness and the absurd paradox: Ibsen's Peer Gynt and the philosophy of Kierkegaard

Preface Introduction: A Critical History of Peer Gynt Prologue: The Spheres Birth Act One: The Dreamer Act Two: The Troll Act Three: Roundabout Departure Act Four: World-Historical Madness Retreat Act Five: The Crossroads Epilogue: The Image of Peer Gynt Bibliography Index

The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion.

The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion.

Kierkegaard's Philosophy: Implications for Counseling

This article discusses how the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard can provide useful guidelines for the study of the counseling process. Kierkegaard's philosophy is also compared with selected contributions of Freud, Skinner, Rogers, and May and with four common themes of counseling and psychotherapy.

The Psychology of Faith and the Meaning of Transcendence in the Philosophy of Kierkegaard

The objective of the article is to examine the phenomenological meaning of the concept of faith in the philosophy of Kierkegaard and consider its psychbological implications. The article begins with a discussion of the aesthetic and ethical modes of existence showing how these are components of religious consciousness. A dialectical resolution of the conflict between aesthetic and moral impulses places the religious consciousness before a possibility which Kierkegaard calls the theological self that is wholly unlike what is known. It is in the context of the discussion of the possibility of this extraordinary self-identity that the attitude of faith and sin are analyzed. The movement toward the possibility which transcends the known is a death and rebirth process which, according to Kierkegaard, man is unable to choose on his own. Here the meaning of Christ is discussed as the bridge between the finite and infinite which replaces the necessity of choice with an acceptance of this extraordinary possibility achieved through a suspension of the standards of the ordinary and familiar. The article ends with a discussion of the role of reason and indirect communication in the dialogue between therapist and patient where the therapist is seeking to communicate a world view that transcends what for the patient is probable and familiar.