“A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance
-
Carson Seabourn Webb
Abstract
Today the term “enthusiasm” signifies little more than innocuous excitement. During the Enlightenment, however, the term was abuzz with pejorative innuendos of sub-humanity, the many nuances of which were debated in the public sphere. Its significance was more sting than substance, however, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard could complain that the category of enthusiasm had become hopelessly unclear. Despite this, based on The Book on Adler and on three texts in which Kierkegaard uses Socrates as a prototype of enthusiasm, I argue that Kierkegaard’s concept of enthusiasm places him in the lineage of earlier Enlightenment writers, such as Lessing, Shaftesbury, and Kant, whose conceptions and critiques of enthusiasm Kierkegaard was familiar with. By putting Kierkegaard’s use of the comic in The Book on Adler into conversation with Shaftesbury’s and Kant’s comedic remedies for enthusiasm, the extent to which Kierkegaard is an inheritor of and detractor from this tradition becomes evident
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Section 1: Kierkegaardian Philosophical Concepts: Self-Understanding and Existence
- “Ne Quid Nimis.” Kierkegaard and the Virtue of Temperance
- Going No Further: Toward an Interpretation of “Problema III” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
- The Aporia of Decision: Revisiting the Question of Decision in Kierkegaard
- Kierkegaard in Nature: The Fragility of Existing with Naturalism
- Section 2: Kierkegaardian Religious Concepts: Reason, Faith, Imitation
- Kierkegaard’s Aesthetics and the Aesthetic of Imitation
- Søren Kierkegaard’s Historical Jesus as the Christ of Faith
- Faith in a Rational Age: A Dialogue with Climacus
- Climacus and Kierkegaard on the Outward Relationship with God
- Section 3: Rediscovering Kierkegaard’s Sources
- Shaftesbury—An Important Forgotten Indirect Source of Kierkegaard’s Thought
- Freedom and the Temporality of Despair
- “A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance
- Section 4: 20th Century Responses to Kierkegaard
- Ways of Dying: The Double Death in Kierkegaard and Blanchot
- Das Problem des religiösen Akosmismus in der Kierkegaard-Rezeption von Karl Jaspers
- Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt and the Advent of the “Hollow Men” or towards a Kierkegaardian Reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem
- Von der Kulturkritik der „Menge“ zur existenzialen Analytik des „Man“
- Abbreviations
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Section 1: Kierkegaardian Philosophical Concepts: Self-Understanding and Existence
- “Ne Quid Nimis.” Kierkegaard and the Virtue of Temperance
- Going No Further: Toward an Interpretation of “Problema III” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
- The Aporia of Decision: Revisiting the Question of Decision in Kierkegaard
- Kierkegaard in Nature: The Fragility of Existing with Naturalism
- Section 2: Kierkegaardian Religious Concepts: Reason, Faith, Imitation
- Kierkegaard’s Aesthetics and the Aesthetic of Imitation
- Søren Kierkegaard’s Historical Jesus as the Christ of Faith
- Faith in a Rational Age: A Dialogue with Climacus
- Climacus and Kierkegaard on the Outward Relationship with God
- Section 3: Rediscovering Kierkegaard’s Sources
- Shaftesbury—An Important Forgotten Indirect Source of Kierkegaard’s Thought
- Freedom and the Temporality of Despair
- “A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance
- Section 4: 20th Century Responses to Kierkegaard
- Ways of Dying: The Double Death in Kierkegaard and Blanchot
- Das Problem des religiösen Akosmismus in der Kierkegaard-Rezeption von Karl Jaspers
- Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt and the Advent of the “Hollow Men” or towards a Kierkegaardian Reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem
- Von der Kulturkritik der „Menge“ zur existenzialen Analytik des „Man“
- Abbreviations
