Volume 2013, Issue 1

Kierkegaard’s complex use of atonement language has generated interpretive disputes about his understanding of that doctrine. The perplexity is due to the fact that Kierkegaard employed four different atonement motifs, all rooted in the history of the Christian tradition and all circulating in his contemporary Denmark. Two of these emphasized the objectivity of the atonement, while two of them described it as a phenomenon in the subjectivity of the believer. The unique thing about Kierkegaard’s use of all of these themes was his insistence that they only acquired significance when they were situated in the appropriate forms of pathos, which his literature tried to evoke. Consequently, the integration of these seemingly divergent views of the atonement would occur not in a theological system, but in the harmonization of specific passions in the life of an individual.

Johannes’ invocation of the hypocritical preacher marks the rhetoricaldramatic center of Fear and Trembling. His labor of expectoration has granted him the opportunity to measure himself against his unknown twin (viz., the hypocritical preacher) and his/their alter ego (viz. the knight of morality). As we see, however, Johannes squanders this opportunity to advance his quest for self-understanding. Refusing to recognize himself in the figure of the hypocritical preacher, he is altogether unprepared to acknowledge his own status and service as a knight of morality. Frightened by his sudden transformation, Johannes hastily steers “Problema III” toward the artless conclusion it receives in Fear and Trembling.

In this essay, I attempt to carve out interpretive space for a so-called “straightforward” reading of Fear and Trembling. Toward this end, I argue that recent attempts to challenge the reliability of Johannes de Silentio and/or emphasize the presence of a “hidden message” succeed, in large part, by (1) misconstruing the goals and method of Kierkegaard’s indirect communication and (2) relying too heavily on elements of the text that lend only circumstantial support to their interpretation. Given this, interpreters should be considerably more open to the possibility that Kierkegaard means what Fear and Trembling explicitly says.

Seduction is not solely a matter of literary history (anymore). In the 1980s a community has emerged that, up to the present day, developed practical methodologies applicable in any public venue and social gathering. Nonetheless, the leading figures of this PickUp community strongly acknowledge their predecessors as they can be found in literary history. Prominently, Kierkegaard, in his “Seducer’s Diary,” has introduced such a predecessor. As part of Either/Or, the diary meticulously unfolds and portrays the interactional dynamics of seduction. To analyze this process sociologically is the main objective of the present article. In order to achieve this goal, the essay comments on how fictional literature can become material for social science and, after pointing to the multiple layers of the reader/writer/editor-relation, focuses on two questions crucial to seduction as a micro-interactional procedure: (1) What is the effect of seduction, in particular for the seduced? Arguing that seduction involves a form of empowerment, the article finds an explanation for Cordelia’s letters being displayed before Johannes’ narration begins. (2) What are the concrete techniques of seduction? Isolating three of them-including the gaze-the essay concludes that Kierkegaard was not only a theologian, religious author and philosopher, but he was also a social theorist.

If we take the Interlude of Philosophical Fragments seriously, we find Johannes Climacus commits himself to some puzzling and problematic metaphysical theses. At least two interpretations of Climacus’ view of modality-a possibilist reading and a Platonist reading-find reasonable textual support, though the latter is preferable in being less philosophically problematic. Even this reading faces difficulties, however, that go beyond the discussion in the Interlude and threaten to undermine the plausibility of the central Kierkegaardian theme of becoming a self. I suggest a way this theme can be reinterpreted in contemporary metaphysical terms to be rendered more philosophically tenable.

Fundamental in Kierkegaard is passion for equality among persons, and this in a double sense: passion-“desire”- for equality, but also passion for-“for the sake of”-equality. Now, if the ethical and religious are of inestimable importance in human life, then justice demands that potential for them be equally accessible to all. But how? All are so differentiated. In what can equal potential be rooted, if not in passion? Enter the Christian faith, however, and an enormous problem, anchored precisely in Kierkegaard’s concern to take seriously the specificity of Christianity, arises: No passion can produce Jesus; so how can Jesus and equality be brought together? Can they be brought together?

One of the central challenges facing every modern subject-the difficulty of negotiating the tension between freedom and necessity-comes powerfully into view in Kierkegaard’s figure of the aesthete. In this paper, I focus on this tension as it is expressed in the aesthete’s experience of boredom, and I argue that his demonic reaction is best viewed as an attempt to bring about the divorce of freedom from the immediate embedded context, or spirit from factical reality. I investigate the origin of demonic boredom, its meaning, and the various ways to master it by examining aesthete A’s reflections in Either/Or as well as Vigilius Haufniensis’ discussion of the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety.

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.

Noting Heidegger’s critique of Kierkegaard’s way of relating time and eternity, the paper offers an alternative reading of Kierkegaard that suggests Heidegger has overlooked crucial elements in the Kierkegaardian account. Gabriel Marcel and Sharon Krishek are used to counter Heidegger’s minimizing of the deaths of others and to show how the deaths of others may become integral to our sense of self. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s discourse on the work of love in remembering the dead. Against the criticism that this reveals the absence of the other in Kierkegaardian love, the paper argues that, on the contrary, it shows how Kierkegaard conceives the self as inseparable from the core relationships of love that, despite of death, constitute it as the self that it is.

Kierkegaard faces a dilemma. On the one hand, he endorses the biblical command to love our neighbors as ourselves. As such, he thinks self-love and neighbor-love should be symmetrical, similar in kind as well as degree. On the other hand, he recommends relating to others and ourselves differently. We are to be lenient, charitable and forgiving when dealing with others; the opposite when dealing with ourselves. To resolve this tension, I argue that being more stringent with ourselves is not a moral ideal for Kierkegaard. It is a gambit designed to rehabilitate us from our tendency toward the opposite extreme.

According to Kierkegaard, love plays a foundational role in human existence. In Works of Love, he identifies love as “the deepest ground” of existence and as “the source of everything,” a “passion of the emotions” that exerts its influence like a “hidden spring,” flowing from a single source “along many paths” and “forming the heart” of each human being. In this paper, I explain how love can provide grounding and orientation in the ways that Kierkegaard claims it can. Love is manifested in different forms, all of which are subject to the imperative of loving thy neighbor as thyself: it permits us to realize our own individuality and to appreciate the distinct existence of other persons, thus enabling us to inhabit a meaningful world. Thus, at the same time, love enables us to be and also to know.

Victor Eremita proposes that the reader understand parts I and II of Either/Or as parties in a dialogue; most readers in fact view II as a devastating reply to I. I suggest that part I be read as a reaction or follow-up to Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Much of part I presents reflective characters who are aware of their freedom but reluctant or unable to adopt the ethical life. The modern Antigone and the Silhouettes are sisters of Alcibiades-failed students of Socrates. I articulate and defend their modes of loving, which are significantly different from Don Giovanni’s and Johannes the Seducer’s purely aesthetic approaches to love. Such feminine love, I argue, dwells in the disputed territory between passion and action, substance and freedom, the aesthetic and the ethical. Antigone’s love is a passion she both suffers and tries to appropriate. The Silhouettes’ devotion to their beloved makes them dependent on him. I defend this dependence even though it is undoubtedly a form of despair. By appealing to Sartre’s account of love, I argue moreover that this love involves a recognition and appraisal of the beloved absent in the love exemplified by Fear and Trembling’s knight of infinite resignation.

Love and death are two predominate and multifarious themes in Kierkegaard’s authorship. The aim of this paper will be to demonstrate that a coherent, unified understanding of Kierkegaard’s views on love and death can only be attained when the two concepts are brought together and thought in relation to singularity and community. Reading death through love, we will argue that Kierkegaard’s insistence on loving and remembering the dead requires a recognition of the limits of human singularity, which itself enables a new way of understanding life within community-and that love’s repetition proves to be death’s contradiction.

In this article we will argue that Kierkegaard has a positive view of love as a sheer natural and universal phenomenon. This sheer phenomenon of love is rooted in God’s love and is implanted in human nature by its Creator. Therefore this natural urge to love, that manifests itself both as a lack and a surplus, should not be juxtaposed to Christian neighbor love. For Kierkegaard there is one love, but this one love, hidden in the ground in every person, puts on different shapes and lets itself be known through these different forms. In this article we are interested in the dreaming and searching desire as described in “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic” in the first part of Either/Or, as these first and unconscious forms of love are the presupposition for falling in love, another form of love that is investigated in the article. We will argue the original form of love is preferential love, but that neighbor love, as a non-preferential type of love, springs from the same love that is given by God and hidden in every person.

Socrates is closer to Kierkegaard’s sense of Christian life than we might suspect, especially in the duty to love the ugly elaborated in Works of Love. Socratic jest gives indirection to passion for the sake of loving the neighbor. This passage buttresses the thesis that comedy forms a confinium between the ethical and religious spheres, and advances ugly, laughing, yet lovable Socrates as a comic paragon.

Kierkegaard might be aptly called a philosopher of passion due to his enormous emphasis on this concept. At the same time his notion of passion is highly original and does not correspond to common usage of the term. That is why the paper begins with pointing out the differences between the two. However, the main intention of the paper is to interpret his specific concept of passion as a will to existence on the basis of analyzing the correlative relationship between passion and existence, and as a part of this goal to outline some positive aspects of passion as found in Kierkegaard’s authorship.

Who is Kierkegaard’s target when he criticizes the philosophical “volatilization” of Christian faith? In this paper I will argue that Kierkegaard’s early dispute with Immanuel Hermann Fichte in the spring of 1837 can be considered not only as the background of this critique, but also as the key to its proper understanding. After outlining the argument in Fichte’s book The Idea of Personality and Individual Continuity (1834) in Section I, I will provide an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s critical remarks on the younger Fichte in journal entry AA:22 in Section II. In Section III, I will then explore the relation between AA:22 and the journal entry CC:12, in which Kierkegaard for the first time expresses his critique of the philosophical “volatilization” of central Christian concepts. Here I hope to show that, according to Kierkegaard, the philosophical “volatilization” of Christian faith consists in the inappropriate usage of this concept within the philosophical realm, a misuse which results from conflating the realms and boundaries of philosophy and Christianity.

The paper relates Kierkegaard’s body of thought on the comic, irony, and humor to ten traditions of the comic (eight dating from antiquity and two from modern and postmodern times) that represent philosophy’s complex relationship with the comic. I emphasize the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance roots in Kierkegaard’s vision of the comic and in doing so hope to fill a gap within the pertinent scholarship. In particular, I inquire into the sources of his thought in and his indebtedness to these traditions in order to determine how, if at all, his conception of the comic, irony, and humor may be deemed original.

Situating historical intellectuals within a wider Danish “Golden Age” is common in Kierkegaard research, but there are few explanations for why this period occurred and why it would develop as a single cultural entity. I review a prominent example in the secondary literature, Bruce Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, and then present, through the use of structural hole theory, an alternate interpretation of the Golden Age’s origins and cultural makeup-one that portrays it as both intellectually heterogeneous yet structurally cohesive. Furthermore, I suggest that the evolution of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, rather than being exogenous to this cultural system, was definitively shaped by the social processes that produced the Danish Golden Age.

Contrary to the longstanding philosophical prejudice against the passions, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both offer an ideal way of life that is guided by a central passion. Both offer an account of how this passion can provide stability, guidance, and direction to one’s life as a whole. This paper explores what Kierkegaard means by passion, how a passion can be guiding for life, and why this is so important. It addresses Nietzsche’s thoughts on passion as a way of furthering this goal by means of a comparison and contrast.

This paper examines the striking similarity between Kierkegaard’s and Mead’s theories of the self as relation, reflection and process as well as the normativity behind these theories. It is claimed that the theologian and the social psychologist share the view that the human being is an ethical being because its self is a dual relation; it relates to itself and in this relating it relates to an Other. Thus, regardless of their diverging views on the nature of this Other, they both define that of becoming a self as an unavoidable task: the task of standing in an ethical relation to oneself and to the Other. It is argued that differences in professions can be overcome: while reading Kierkegaard in the light of Mead helps to underline the relational character of Kierkegaard’s ethical notions, reading Mead in the light of Kierkegaard underlines the normative aspect of Mead’s social psychology.

Jamie Turnbull has argued that Kierkegaard cannot be read either as a philosopher or as someone whose work can be understood and utilised in philosophical terms. In a previous Yearbook article, he singles us out as representative of a misguided approach that sees Kierkegaard as capable of contributing to contemporary philosophical debates. In this paper, we argue that Turnbull’s position both fails in its own terms and depends upon an unduly narrow conception of philosophy.