Selfless Passion: Kierkegaard on True Love
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Ingolf U. Dalferth
Abstract
In the Works of Love Kierkegaard answers the question what love is not by distinguishing types of love or by outlining cases or instances of how love occurs in human life (a descriptive approach) but by exploring what must be true for love to be at all (normative approach). Thus, he offers not a descriptive or conceptual but rather a hermeneutical and orienting account of love. Love as an orienting ought is sheer activity, always present, and therefore a mode of life rather than one particular activity among others. Living in this mode means loving others as a selfless self-but this can only be done when we are enabled to see ourselves and our neighbors not only as selves and other selves but as we are seen by God: as God’s neighbors. The upshot of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutical account of love is that love cannot be fully understood as a (reciprocal or onesided) I-you-relationship. Rather, such a relationship is a relationship of love only if and insofar as love-and therefore God-as the middle term enables two selves to fully relate in a you-you-relationship, a relation of true love.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Preface
- Table of Contents
- Section 1: Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Motifs and Figures
- Kierkegaard on the Atonement: The Complementarity of Salvation as a Gift and Salvation as a Task
- Recognition and Its Discontents: Johannes de Silentio and the Preacher
- In Defense of a Straightforward Reading of Fear and Trembling
- Verführung nach Kierkegaard. Ein soziologischer Versuch
- Johannes Climacus on Coming into Existence: The Problem of Modality in Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript
- Kierkegaard’s Passion for Equality
- The Abyss of Demonic Boredom: An Analysis of the Dialectic of Freedom and Facticity in Kierkegaard’s Early Works
- Section 2: Love and Passion
- Selfless Passion: Kierkegaard on True Love
- Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love
- Self-Love and Neighbor-Love in Kierkegaard’s Ethics
- Love as a Relation to Truth: Envisioning the Person in Works of Love
- “Love” Among the Post-Socratics
- Love, Death, and the Limits of Singularity
- Kierkegaard and the Sheer Phenomenon of Love
- Love’s Hidden Laugh: On Jest, Earnestness, and Socratic Indirection in Kierkegaard’s “Praising Love”
- Passion as a Will to Existence in Kierkegaard
- Section 3: Kierkegaard in Dialogue
- Die philosophische Verflüchtigung des Glaubensbegriffs. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit Immanuel Hermann Fichte
- Kierkegaard and the Traditions of the Comic in Philosophy
- Why a Danish Golden Age? Structural Holes in 19th Century Copenhagen
- Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Living by a Guiding Passion
- The Self as a Center of Ethical Gravity: A Constructive Dialogue Between Søren Kierkegaard and George Herbert Mead
- Section 4: Current Debates and Controversies
- The Soul of a Philosopher: Reply to Turnbull
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Preface
- Table of Contents
- Section 1: Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Motifs and Figures
- Kierkegaard on the Atonement: The Complementarity of Salvation as a Gift and Salvation as a Task
- Recognition and Its Discontents: Johannes de Silentio and the Preacher
- In Defense of a Straightforward Reading of Fear and Trembling
- Verführung nach Kierkegaard. Ein soziologischer Versuch
- Johannes Climacus on Coming into Existence: The Problem of Modality in Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript
- Kierkegaard’s Passion for Equality
- The Abyss of Demonic Boredom: An Analysis of the Dialectic of Freedom and Facticity in Kierkegaard’s Early Works
- Section 2: Love and Passion
- Selfless Passion: Kierkegaard on True Love
- Kierkegaard, Metaphysics, and Love
- Self-Love and Neighbor-Love in Kierkegaard’s Ethics
- Love as a Relation to Truth: Envisioning the Person in Works of Love
- “Love” Among the Post-Socratics
- Love, Death, and the Limits of Singularity
- Kierkegaard and the Sheer Phenomenon of Love
- Love’s Hidden Laugh: On Jest, Earnestness, and Socratic Indirection in Kierkegaard’s “Praising Love”
- Passion as a Will to Existence in Kierkegaard
- Section 3: Kierkegaard in Dialogue
- Die philosophische Verflüchtigung des Glaubensbegriffs. Kierkegaards Auseinandersetzung mit Immanuel Hermann Fichte
- Kierkegaard and the Traditions of the Comic in Philosophy
- Why a Danish Golden Age? Structural Holes in 19th Century Copenhagen
- Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Living by a Guiding Passion
- The Self as a Center of Ethical Gravity: A Constructive Dialogue Between Søren Kierkegaard and George Herbert Mead
- Section 4: Current Debates and Controversies
- The Soul of a Philosopher: Reply to Turnbull
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
