Reading Of Kierkegaard Research Articles

Thoughts on Reading Kierkegaard in a Pluralist Society

Soren Kierkegaard’s Lutheran existentialism represents a distinctively postmetaphysical philosophy of religion, focused in particular on a Christian vision of ethical authenticity. His philosophy continues to pose challenging questions for postmetaphysical philosophers in contemporary pluralistic settings. Focusing on specific works of Kierkegaard, this essay develops three such questions: (1) Can philosophy in a postmetaphysical vein still give advice for the pursuit of the good life, today’s diversity of life styles and values notwithstanding? (2) How can a postmetaphysical philosophy relate to the ethical teachings and truth claims of religious doctrines? (3) Is postmetaphysical philosophy still capable of an “upbuilding and awakening” discourse that can induce and stabilize an ethical self-consciousness?

Kierkegaardian Virtues and the Problem of Self-Effacement

One of the more well-known objections to Kierkegaard’s moral philosophy is that he presents a view of moral life that is self-absorbed almost to the point of solipsism, focused on the subject’s own moral status rather than acting from responsiveness to others. Kierkegaard commentators have gone to great lengths to debunk such readings, to demonstrate that Kierkegaard is indeed a far more other-oriented ethicist than such critiques would suggest. At the same time, many—though not all—commentators have come to read Kierkegaard as a Christian virtue ethicist. Yet virtue ethics itself has been objected to on the grounds that it is (1) self-effacing (it requires us to act for reasons or from motives other than those virtue ethics itself endorses), (2) egoistic (it serves the benefit of the agent themselves), and (3) self-absorbed (it causes the agent to focus on themselves rather than others). This paper considers whether and how these objections might apply to Kierkegaard, and argues that his moral psychology has specific resources for answering these objections in distinctive ways.

“My Dear Reader—but to Whom Am I Speaking?” Kierkegaard Read with the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative

Abstract This article introduces a rhetorical theory of narrative in reading Kierkegaard, comparing Kierkegaard’s praxis to Phelan’s definition of “somebody telling somebody else that something happened on some occasion and for some purpose(s).” Use of pseudonyms problematizes “the somebody” telling and makes apparent the differing purposes of author and narrator. In the early authorship, the purpose is usually a life-view. The “something happened” may seem irrelevant in Kierkegaard, but it evokes questions of lived experience and life-view. The “occasion” for telling is textually mediated, and thus draws a novel connection to literary history. Finally, I examine Kierkegaard’s real and authorial readers.

Is There a Suspension of Subjectivity?

Abstract This article examines the Kierkegaard reception of the Danish theologians K. Olesen Larsen and Johannes Sløk, who both understood Kierkegaard as attempting to radically subvert the freedom of the human being. Initially, I show how current Kierkegaard research on the question of subjectivity, freedom and indirect communication differs from the readings of Olesen Larsen and Sløk. Subsequently, and in contrast to this, Olesen Larsen’s somewhat ambivalent attempt to read Kierkegaard as undermining human freedom is presented. Third, I show how Sløk arrives at a somewhat similar result, though in a more coherent way. In conclusion, the article offers a brief discussion on the plausibility of this interpretation.

Toward an Upbuilding Metapsychology: Kierkegaard, Lacan, and the Infinite Movement

Abstract This paper seeks to consider the similarities between Kierkegaard’s life stages and Lacan’s orders to demonstrate that we can understand each description in a structurally similar way to the other. Accordingly, a reading of Kierkegaard is developed that uses his life stages to describe a metapsychology, and a reading of Lacan is developed that shows how his orders can be conceived of progressively. All this leads to a further analysis of the different ways in which each stage relates to repetition and a culmination in which the achievement of faith in Kierkegaard is thought together with the analytic cure in Lacan.

Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion by Will Williams

Reviewed by: Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion by Will Williams Ronald F. Marshall Kierkegaard and the Legitimacy of the Comic: Understanding the Relevance of Irony, Humor, and the Comic for Ethics and Religion. By Will Williams. New York: Lexington Books, 2018. xxi + 201 pp. H. V. Martin's classic, Kierkegaard the Melancholy Dane (1950), made it sound like Kierkegaard did not have a funny bone. Professor Williams of Le Tourneau University has now laid that to rest by showing that "it is an error to read Kierkegaard as solely listing a series of direct propositions, ignoring his irony entirely" (132). Williams adds that "the comic is not just illustrative of his edifying project, but [End Page 85] essential to it" (94). That is because "the comic can both prepare one for becoming a Christian and remind one of how a Christian is supposed to live" (185). Williams, however, does not jettison Kierkegaard's seriousness in the name of lightheartedness, because Kierkegaard is not about "the uproariously despairing play of an untamed irony" (132). Without that check Kierkegaard would be linked up with Jeremy Sisto as Jesus playing tag with his disciples in the movie, Jesus (1999). Williams first elucidates the concept of the comic in Kierkegaard's book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which he believes is Kierkegaard's best treatment of the subject. He then shows how this analysis is confirmed in three later works—Prefaces, Upbuildoing Discourses in Various Spirits, and The Corsair Affair. In the last part Williams shows how deconstructivist and theological appropriations of Kierkegaard's humor neglect his serious side (122, 177). Williams gives a Kierkegaardian definition of humor as a polemical incongruity that subverts a prominent norm (6, 7, 16, 34). He thinks this definition shows that Christianity is "the most humorous view of life in world-history"—in keeping with Kierkegaard's judgment, that Christianity is "the least conformed to the expectations and understandings of the world" (55n147). Even though Williams finds this definition useful, he concedes that it is a construct and that in the end Kierkegaard questioned all neat, composite definitions of humor (178). I wish Williams would have tested his key definition of Kierkegaardian humor by applying it to examples from Kierkegaard's writings—including 250 of them in Thomas Oden's The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (2004). One example has a wise man telling an unbeliever that praying for help in a storm at sea is no time, at long last, to start praying because "if heaven discovers that you are on board, the ship will capsize" (Oden, 134). This remark is in keeping with the definition's standards. They are also illustrated when Kierkegaard has a man say what he liked about Sunday's sermon—"Well, there were some really good things in it—for example, the Lord's Prayer" (Journals, ed, Hongs §2:1760). Another comment sees New Testament Christianity being related to the state church the way a most sorrowful melody is "played with the beat of dance music." [End Page 86] (Journals, §§3:3623). These examples prove Kierkegaard's point that "the wisdom of the secular mind is always relativism…. If I forget this relativity, then the comical appears. And no one will care about my acting out of fear and trembling before God. It is absolutely impossible, absolutely, for a Christian not to make himself laughable. For what is more laudable than the absolute in this world, which is a world of relativity" (Journals §1:492). Williams shows that Kierkegaard's humor undergirds the fact that he was not a "Nietzschean critic of traditional Christianity, nor a proud aesthete whose fine art is to be appreciated without understanding, nor a perverse self-torturer whose writings are primarily to be plumbed for their prurient biographical details, nor a Deconstructionist Mad Hatter who makes witty banter while important matters go unexamined, but a perceptive Christian who is concerned that the traditional faith is being mishandled and distorted in the name of fashionable philosophy and cultural complacency" (182). Ronald F. Marshall First Lutheran Church of West Seattle Seattle, Washington Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins...

Logic and Voice

In this paper, I aim to reconstruct and discuss Stanley Cavell’s interpretation and critique of analytic philosophy. Cavell objects to the tradition of analytic philosophy that, in its eagerness to provide abstract, theoretical reconstructions, it has failed to understand the importance of “the human voice” for philosophy. First, I outline Cavell’s retelling of the history of analytic philosophy from Frege and Russell to ordinary language philosophy. Second, I turn to Cavell’s reading of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in order to show what the suppression of the human voice is supposed to mean and entail. Central to Cavell’s account is a particular view of language according to which no structure can explain our capacity for sense-making. Third, I exemplify Cavell’s approach by analyzing his debate with Kripke. Kripke sees the absence of “rails” determining meaning as a skeptical problem and calls for a communal solution. Cavell, by contrast, accepts the absence of rails while highlighting the need for individual responsiveness. In the conclusion I contrast the analytic interest in theory, structure, and abstraction with what I see as Cavell’s humanism. While respectful of key aspects of the analytic tradition such as its commitment to rigor and transparency, Cavell wished to bring the human subject back into philosophy.

What is Worldly Logic and Why Might it Lead to Suicide? Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Critique of Logic

Abstract In contemporary philosophy, there is a growing interest in how Søren Kierkegaard’s metaphilosophy and philosophical methodology may have influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein. This paper contributes to this discussion by arguing that each shares and critiques a particular conception of logic that I term “worldly logic.” Roughly, “worldly logic” contends logic and metaphysics are intimately interconnected. It further argues that reading Kierkegaard’s brief thoughts on logic, in the Climacus texts, through the lens of the later Wittgenstein, helps to clarify the nature of Kierkegaard’s critique. Finally, it argues that their shared abhorrence of a particular sort of philosophy of logic is principled and apt.

Arne Grøn’s Existential Hermeneutics: Existence, Ethics and Religion

This paper presents an introduction to Arne Grøn’s existential hermeneutics as a philosophical method, while also attempting to indicate how Grøn’s work contributes to and engages in a number of crucial topics in modern continental philosophy. The first section of the paper shows how Grøn draws on Paul Ricoeur and Michael Theunissen to rethink the concept of existence through a reading of Kierkegaard that uncouples this concept from the self-evident status it attained in twenty-century existentialism. The second section of the paper argues that Grøn proposes an existential ethics that takes the Kierkegaardian notion that humans are inherently normative beings and uses this as a basis for a critique of ethics, as well as for establishing an ethics of vision inspired by Kierkegaard. The third section of the paper presents a reading of Grøn’s notion of religion as an inextricable part of human existence.

Reading Kierkegaard, against and with Adorno – From Objectless Inwardness to Self-reflection through the Other

Abstract Søren Aabye Kierkegaard’s thought has often been regarded as a philosophy of inwardness, especially within the German-speaking world. Theodor W. Adorno takes an ambivalent attitude toward this view: He criticizes Kierkegaard’s conception of subjectivity as ‘objectless inwardness’, while pointing to its potential for self-reflection that enables the subject to recognize its relationship to the outside world. Beginning from this ambivalent interpretation, this study aims to read Kierkegaard against and with Adorno. First, it clarifies that Kierkegaard does not remain in a closed ‘objectless’ conception of inwardness. Second, it explores how Kierkegaard conceives of inward self-reflection on remorse for sin, which is brought about through the ‘other’ and makes the subject confront its own reality. Thus, Kierkegaard’s concept of inwardness not only overcomes its objectlessness, but also implies a subjective self-reflection through the ‘other’, which can lead to social critique.

Nouvelles voies ou avancées en bioéthique

Le présent texte analyse l’effet des événements exceptionnels de la pandémie de 2020 et des réactions gouvernementales de confinement qu’elle a entraînées, sur deux questions d’éthique qui se posaient avant que le virus ne fasse ses ravages. Ces deux questions – choisies parmi d’autres – étaient celle de l’unité de l’éthique médicale et celle de la nature spécifique de l’éthique des pharmaciens. Or, les réponses que ces deux questions appelaient avant la pandémie se sont trouvées profondément changées dans leur sens et dans leur valeur après l’expérience que nous avons vécue. Quand le réel fait son intrusion, il ne se contente pas de faire bouger les pratiques ; la théorie change tout autant. Les questions anciennement posées continuent de se poser, mais un certain nombre de solutions se trouvent discréditées parmi celles qui nous paraissaient devoir être prises en compte : une certaine bureaucratie, dans un cas, pour résoudre illusoirement les questions d’efficience éthique ; une vague métaphysique des mœurs dans l’autre pour croire que l’on peut s’acquitter à bon compte de la distinction d’un médicament et d’une marchandise. Une lecture de Kierkegaard nous a semblé salutaire dans le premier cas ; tandis qu’un appel à la recherche éthique et politique touchant les questions de pharmacie nous a semblé d’une urgence absolue, dans le second cas.

A Hermeneutic for and from Reading Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination

This essay provides a close reading of Kierkegaard’s later signed text, For Self-Examination. While many of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts often are selected for their philosophically explicit engagements with Hegelian philosophy, I use Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage to draw out how Kierkegaard circumvents it in this one. I first provide historical context, noting how Kierkegaard turned to earnest works after his public humiliation in the Copenhagen newspaper, undermining his ability to deploy irony effectively. Second, I briefly develop Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectic as a model for how selfhood is constituted through work and labor. Third, I dwell with a close reading of Kierkegaard’s book both in its composition and in its interpretation, bringing out how it donates grace rather than work (à la Hegel) to the reader’s attempt at self-realization. I conclude by noting one challenge to Kierkegaard’s ideal of addressing the “single individual” from the perspective of intersectional analysis.

Reviving the Dead: A Kierkegaardian Turn from the Self-Positing to the Theological Self

Kierkegaard scholars have traditionally chosen to read Kierkegaard as either a theologian or a philosopher. As a result, his corpus is bifurcated as theologians and philosophers lean on their preferred texts. Beneath this practice is an underlying assumption that philosophy and theology “make two,” or should be kept in separate corners. However, a contemporary movement in philosophy known as New Phenomenology has challenged this dualistic maxim and instead finds it appropriate for phenomenology to draw from a theological archive. This article suggests that the possibilities New Phenomenology makes available help us retroactively better understand Kierkegaard’s text, Sickness unto Death. Fictional author, Anti-Climacus uses theology strategically to open up J. G. Fichte’s ontological monism and to move constructively beyond the dead end of his philosophy. Sickness unto Death effectively demonstrates New Phenomenologist, Emmanuel Falque’s claim that the more we theologize, the better we philosophize.

Adorno on Kierkegaard on Love for the Dead

This article employs Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia to clarify Adorno’s reading of Kierkegaard. Adorno finds in Kierkegaard’s view of love for the dead both the consummate reified fetish of our instrumentalizing exchange society, and the only unmutilated relation left to us in our otherwise thoroughly damaged lives. Adorno’s negative dialectics emerges as the melancholy science resulting from a disfigured mourning’s present impossibility, upholding a material moral motive rooted in the unmournability of historical catastrophe. Yet this very melancholia also proves to be the last unlikely refuge of hope—in a Kierkegaardian sense—for a future redemption.

Kierkegaard, Freud, Lacan, Nasio y la Repetición

Lacan recomienda la lectura de Kierkegaard, un autor que Freud no cita, con lo cual nos invita a una experiencia transdisciplinaria sobre la noción de repetición, como elemento de lo inconsciente, en un intento de dar mayor profundidad filosófica al propio Sigmund Freud. Se parte de la pregunta de Kierkegaard si la repetición es posible. Para los presocráticos no era posible ya que el mundo es inmóvil para ellos, mientras para Heráclito estaba en un continuo devenir dialéctico, la cual se anticipaba a Hegel, filósofo bastante estudiado por Lacan. Para Kierkegaard, la repetición es la vida misma. Nasio nos muestra dos tipos de repetición: la sana y la patológica, asunto que tratamos de dilucidar aquí, de la que podemos liberarnos por la elaboración a través de la reviviscencia, síntesis de la inmovilidad presocrática y el devenir heraclitiano.Abstract Lacan recommends reading Kierkegaard, an author who Freud has not cited at all, which invites us to a transdisciplinary experience on the notion of repetition, as an element of the unconscious mind, in an attempt to provide greater philosophical depth to Sigmund Freud. Our starting point is Kierkegaard's question whether repetition is actually possible. For pre-Socratics, it was not possible since the world was immobile for them, while for Heraclitus, the world was in a continuous dialectical state of becoming, which anticipated Hegel, a philosopher Lacan has studied thoroughly. For Kierkegaard, repetition is life itself. Nasio shows us two types of repetition: the healthy one and the pathological one, an issue that we hereby try to elucidate. We can liberate ourselves from repetition by elaborating through reviviscence, synthesis of the pre-Socratic immobility and the Heraclitian becoming.

On repetition and theatricality: Dialogue with Samuel Weber

In this article, I question the notion of theatricality, which points to the ever-problematic encounter of philosophy and theatre. I do this in dialogue with Samuel Weber’s elaboration of this concept in his book Theatricality as Medium from 2004 as well as with his reading of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, An Essay in Experimental Psychology, which can be found in Weber’s discussion with Terry Smith titled Repetition: Kierkegaard, Artaud, Pollock and the Theatre of the Image. I argue that viewing the encounter of philosophy and theatre through the perspective of repetition offers a very productive reading, which can be, in general, also referred to Weber’s notion of theatricality, as far as this notion points to certain hollowness or a gap in the processes of representation. To show this, I delineate the concept of productive repetition through Kierkegaard’s concept of Gjentagelsen and link it to Weber’s general notion of theatricality. However, Weber’s elaboration of the concept of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium proves to be very open and therefore also pretty vague, which makes it harder to explicate its clear function. I further proceed by examining Weber’s thesis about theatre setting the scene of possibility in relation to Kierkegard’s theory of posse and the notion of coincidence. I conclude that, unlike Weber’s notion of theatricality in Theatricality as Medium, his suggestion of understanding theatre as the space of possibility proves to be an exact concept, which connects philosophy and theatre through the mechanism of repetition.

Ritual without belief? Kierkegaard against Rappaport on personal belief and ritual action, with particular reference to Jonathan Lear’s ‘A Case for Irony’

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a Kierkegaardian critique of Roy A. Rappaport’s classic treatment of religious rituals. It discusses Rappaport’s claim that public and outward acceptance of a religious ritual is sufficient for successfully enacting it – even where such acceptance is devoid of any personal commitment on the participants’ part. To interrogate Rappaport, the paper develops Jonathan Lear’s reading of Kierkegaard and builds on the Danish theologian’s remarks on the Christian sacraments to argue that, pace Rappaport, personal engagement is necessary to the successful enactment of religious rituals. In this sense, I will show with Kierkegaard how inner belief is a necessary pre-requisite for the performance of any religious ritual whereas in Rappaport’s view it is ritual action itself which creates a posteriori the possibility for personal religious faith.

Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling by Paul Martens

Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling by Paul Martens

Concrete and Otherworldly: Reading Kierkegaard's Works of Love alongside Hegel's Philosophy of Right

AbstractHere I argue that much of the confusion surrounding the status of material aid to the neighbor in Kierkegaard's Works of Love is cleared up once one sees the text as participating in a movement that has a fundamentally Hegelian substructure: from Moralität in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits to Sittlichkeit in Works of Love. As might be expected, Kierkegaard takes this Hegelian structure in a very different direction than the Hegel of Philosophy of Right—a direction best described as an Augustinian ethic that is both concrete and otherworldly.

Peripheries of Space, Self and Literary Style in R. S. Thomas’s Readings of Søren Kierkegaard

One question that has dominated discussion of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings is how to take account of their literary form when determining their meaning and purpose. This article contends that by paying greater attention to the reception of Kierkegaard’s writings in works of creative literature we can learn a significant amount about the interaction of aesthetic form and theological content within them. To demonstrate this, it conducts a close reading of seven poems about Kierkegaard by the twentieth-century Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas (1913-2000). Each of Thomas’s poems situates the experience of writing and reading Kierkegaard’s works on a sequence of spatial, psychological and literary peripheries. By doing this, they illustrate how those works decentre and destabilise the single individual reader aesthetically in a manner that correlates with the necessary decentring and destabilising of the individual self before God. They illustrate, too, a correspondence between the sensation of aesthetic collapse that accompanies the ultimate incommensurability of form and content in Kierkegaard’s writings and the sensation of spiritual collapse that accompanies a recognition of the incommensurable paradox at the heart of Christian faith.