A Figurative Necessity in Dealing with Selfhood in Kierkegaard’s Thinking
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Anne Louise Nielsen
Abstract
This article concerns the concept of selfhood in Kierkegaard’s thinking. First, it rejects any scholarly attempt to establish an essentialist metaphysics of selfhood in Kierkegaard; instead, it seeks to show how the author himself develops his thoughts on subjectivity by applying numerous literary figures and a good deal of irony. Secondly, the article underpins this reading by displaying a specific figure, “The Walking One,” that indicates that actual and individual existence is to be completed only in an actual and individual movement. From here, “The Walking One” opens up new vistas to recognition, communication and language-however, in a paradoxical way. This is proved through analyses of Philosophical Fragments (1844), The Sickness unto Death (1849) and also an upbuilding discourse “He is Believed in the World” (1847). In this light, it is argued that Kierkegaard performs a subtle dialectics between standstill and walking or between “break” and “practice.”
© 2016 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Preface
- Table of Contents
- Section 1: Interpreting Kierkegaard: Problems and Perspectives
- Kierkegaard on the Power of Love and Despair
- Geglaubte Verzweiflung: Wider eine atheistische Lesart Kierkegaards und ihre Ursächlichkeits-Rhetorik
- A Figurative Necessity in Dealing with Selfhood in Kierkegaard’s Thinking
- Kierkegaard as an Antimodern Moralist: Re-Thinking “Socio-Political” Categories in Recent Kierkegaard Scholarship
- Fertile Contradictions: A Reconsideration of “The Seducer’s Diary”
- On Separation as the Condition for All Existential Ethics
- Reue als Schlüssel zur existentiellen Selbstwerdung. Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kierkegaards Beichtrede von 1847
- Section 2: Source-Work Studies
- Schleiermacher in the Kierkegaardian Project: Between Socratic Ignorance and Second Immediacy
- The Monumental Task of Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom
- Section 3: Kierkegaard Reception
- Faith in the Mode of Absence: Kierkegaard’s Jewish Readers in 1930s France (Rachel Bespaloff, Benjamin Fondane, Lev Shestov, and Jean Wahl)
- Gesellschaft und Kritische Philosophie. Kierkegaards und Jaspers’ Analyse der geistigen Situation Europas im Vergleich
- Kierkegaard und das ‚jüdische Denken‘: Die Rezeption Sören Kierkegaards in der jüdischen Moderne im Kontext des Orientalismus
- La puissance du don. Le don comme centre de la relation de l’homme avec Dieu, dans les discours édifiants de Kierkegaard, à la lumière de l’herméneutique du don de Jean Paul II
- Martin Heidegger Reads Søren Kierkegaard – or What Did He Actually Read?
- Section 4: Primary Texts in Translation
- Andreas Frederik Beck’s Review of Philosophical Fragments
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelei
- Preface
- Table of Contents
- Section 1: Interpreting Kierkegaard: Problems and Perspectives
- Kierkegaard on the Power of Love and Despair
- Geglaubte Verzweiflung: Wider eine atheistische Lesart Kierkegaards und ihre Ursächlichkeits-Rhetorik
- A Figurative Necessity in Dealing with Selfhood in Kierkegaard’s Thinking
- Kierkegaard as an Antimodern Moralist: Re-Thinking “Socio-Political” Categories in Recent Kierkegaard Scholarship
- Fertile Contradictions: A Reconsideration of “The Seducer’s Diary”
- On Separation as the Condition for All Existential Ethics
- Reue als Schlüssel zur existentiellen Selbstwerdung. Überlegungen im Anschluss an Kierkegaards Beichtrede von 1847
- Section 2: Source-Work Studies
- Schleiermacher in the Kierkegaardian Project: Between Socratic Ignorance and Second Immediacy
- The Monumental Task of Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom
- Section 3: Kierkegaard Reception
- Faith in the Mode of Absence: Kierkegaard’s Jewish Readers in 1930s France (Rachel Bespaloff, Benjamin Fondane, Lev Shestov, and Jean Wahl)
- Gesellschaft und Kritische Philosophie. Kierkegaards und Jaspers’ Analyse der geistigen Situation Europas im Vergleich
- Kierkegaard und das ‚jüdische Denken‘: Die Rezeption Sören Kierkegaards in der jüdischen Moderne im Kontext des Orientalismus
- La puissance du don. Le don comme centre de la relation de l’homme avec Dieu, dans les discours édifiants de Kierkegaard, à la lumière de l’herméneutique du don de Jean Paul II
- Martin Heidegger Reads Søren Kierkegaard – or What Did He Actually Read?
- Section 4: Primary Texts in Translation
- Andreas Frederik Beck’s Review of Philosophical Fragments
- Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
