Volume 2016, Issue 1

Is it possible to live and love without despair? Kierkegaard raises this question by way of an anecdote about lost love in The Sickness unto Death. A girl believes she despairs over the loss of her beloved, but really despairs over herself. As such, her love is selfish and unhealthy. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard sheds light on an alternative approach to love via a similar anecdote. The girl experiences despair because she lacks the Eternal, not the beloved. In order to live and love without despair, she must recognize her essential dependence upon God, especially in her relationships.

In Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death the self’s other is usually identified with God. But because the sickness of the title is despair, the religious dimension of this text should be considered with particular regard to its psychological dimension. Indeed, one might ask, if meaningful talk about the self is, according to Anti-Climacus, grounded in (Christian) faith or if the latter’s actual usage of the term “despair” much rather implies that the self’s origin and nature can be fully captured from a non-theistic and in fact purely scientific perspective, a perspective which in turn is bound up with or at least gravitates toward existentialism. As I will argue, this second interpretation, which has most recently been defended by Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, misses crucial points in Kierkegaard’s (mis‐)usage of causality and thus cannot be sustained.

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.”

The aim of this paper is to reassess Kierkegaard’s position as a “sociopolitical” thinker. In Section I the limitations of certain prevailing interpretations of Kierkegaard’s socio-political thought are discussed. In Sections II and III I advance a hermeneutic label which I believe to be more adequate to his thought, that of “antimodern.” Finally, in Section IV I draw some general conclusions with regard to the importance-not only for socio-political studies of Kierkegaard but also for other approaches-of understanding his place in the tradition of thought to which he belongs: that of the “moralists.”

The present article wishes to question and complicate the longestablished portrayal of Johannes the seducer as an unambiguously evil character. After a careful psycho-existential analysis of his personality, I will draw attention to his fundamentally contradictory nature. Next, turning to his relation to Cordelia, I will indicate different existential possibilities available to her after the traumatic experience of seduction. The article ends with a multifaceted hypothesis about the kind of selfhood Johannes may embody in Kierkegaard’s philosophical universe.

The solitary nucleus of the Kierkegaardian subject reduced existential selfhood from its very beginnings to an atomistic and Eleatic position. I wish to contend that this isolated self may not be easily reduced to an amoral self. Rather, this irreducibility or separation of the subject establishes the condition for any ethical demand. Even though this claim may finally reach beyond Kierkegaard, I argue that it provides us with a basis for all existential ethics.

This article seeks to interpret Kierkegaard’s concept of remorse as a key to the understanding of his conception of self-becoming. I argue that, according to Kierkegaard, remorse is to be considered an answer to guilt. Guilt, however, becomes a reality for-and becomes revealed to-its subject only vis-à-vis the Other. Accordingly, I further argue that Kierkegaard puts a special emphasis on the beholdenness of remorse: as an answer it is nevertheless and simultaneously a gift-a grace-of the Other, and therefore must be perceived in its irreducible dialectic of activity and passivity. In the mode of passivity the culprit suffers a conviction, or more precisely a verdict of truth; and yet, in order to incorporate this truth into his self, i.e., to become the self he truly is, he has to appropriate it, and such appropriation is, according to Kierkegaard, realized, and realized only, through the act of remorse. I unfold my interpretation primarily on the basis of Kierkegaard’s Leiligheds-Tale from 1847, yet contextualize it by drawing on his pseudonymous works also.

In this paper I identify Schleiermacher as an intermediary between the two stages of the religious set forth in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Gesturing toward categories integral to the Kierkegaardian project at large, I also argue that he occupies a pivotal role between Socratic ignorance and second immediacy. These schemata uncover answers to a dilemma that has recently been articulated: whereas Kierkegaard administers highest praise to Schleiermacher at the beginning of his pseudonymous authorship, he becomes inexplicably hostile toward him at the end of his life and authorship.

This essay develops the argument that Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom in his late writings can be fruitfully understood as a monumental task in two senses: first, as attacking the monuments of Christendom, and particularly those associated with Jakob Peter Mynster and Hans Lassen Martensen, and second, as itself a monument to the existential demand of what Kierkegaard identifies as authentic New Testament Christianity. Towards this end, the notion of the monument is introduced and employed to illuminate the critical and constructive nature of Kierkegaard’s attack. The essay concludes by reflecting on what it would mean to preserve such a Kierkegaardian monument.

In the 1930s, Jean Wahl, Lev Shestov, Benjamin Fondane, and Rachel Bespaloff were among the first to seriously introduce philosophical readings of Kierkegaard’s works in France. As Jewish intellectuals within a particularly troubled period in history, their readings of Kierkegaard were informed both by the problems of self-identification imposed upon them by the political context, and by a particular ontological understanding of human nature. This article argues that these considerations are essential for understanding how these early existential thinkers read the Dane and appealed to him in ways quite distinct from the Christian or atheist trends in existential philosophy.

Kierkegaard is an epochal philosopher who represented-not only in himself, but also in his philosophical Total-Tanke-the signs and concerns of an entire age: he defined not only his own Danish Golden Age, but he also contributed significantly to understanding its own deeper crisis through a relentless critique of culture and society in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. In the context of the analysis and the reception of A Literary Review (En Literair Anmeldelse, 1846), and in relation to Kierkegaard’s influence on philosophical and sociological perspectives in contemporary criticism, this paper explores: 1) Kierkegaard’s influence on Karl Jaspers’ book Man in the Modern Age (Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 1931) with particular reference to the latter’s conception of modernity and mass society; 2) the philosophical assumptions underlying the “European spiritual situation” and the destructive aspects of contemporary mass society according to Kierkegaard’s social and political thought; 3) the relevance of Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the crisis as an opportunity to acquire a deeper understanding of the origin and the nature of human existence.

Starting after 1900, there was an intense and fruitful discussion of the philosophy and literature of the “Christian author” Kierkegaard amongst Jewish intellectuals in many different fields. This raises the question of why and in what way Kierkegaard’s work became particularly relevant in the context of Jewish Modernity. The paper outlines some ways in which Kierkegaard could be appropriated into Jewish thinking, paying particular attention to the discourse of Orientalism. By assimilating Kierkegaard’s thinking to orientalist notions of “Jewish thought” that were constructed in opposition to “Christian” or “Western” thought, writers like Martin Buber, Max Brod, Gershom Scholem or Lev Shestov see him as a mediator between Judaism and Christianity, or, in more extreme cases, explicitly claim him as “Jewish.” The Jewish reception of Kierkegaard therefore gives prime examples of how differences between “Jewish” and “Christian” thinking get constructed through debates concerned with identity.

This paper is an attempt to read Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses centred around the theme “Every Good and Perfect Gift is From Above” in the perspective of hermeneutics of the gift presented by John Paul II in his book Man and Woman He Created Them. The authors analyze two completely different biblical themes-the Pope examines the issue of corporeality of the first people on the basis of Genesis, whereas Kierkegaard studies the creative power of God’s word in human existence, focusing on a passage from the Epistle of James. They show that the relationship between human beings and God, despite its individual character, may come into being only through the involvement of another person. The center of this meeting of two people in God is the already mentioned gift, understood here, in the highest sense, as a gift of love in which both parties are giving and receiving at the same time. The convergence of conclusions of both authors shows the anthropological coherence of the message of the Holy Scripture and gives rise to reflections on the essence of humanity.

This paper presents an overview of the sources that Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe provides for a discussion of the Heidegger-Kierkegaard relationship. I identify the translations Heidegger used and the writings that had the most impact on him. Moreover, I show that Heidegger’s relation to Kierkegaard was not consistent over his intellectual life, distinguishing five periods: an initial period of productive engagement (1919-1923); a complex period during the years in Marburg (1923-1928); an affirmative period back in Freiburg (1929-1934); a period of historical classification in the history of being (1935-1945); and an absence in the late writings (1946-1976).

The present article presents the Danish theologian Andreas Frederik Beck and provides an English translation of his book review of Philosophical Fragments. In Kierkegaard’s time, Beck was a proponent of left Hegelianism and a follower of Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss. As a student of the University of Copenhagen, Beck was acquainted with Kierkegaard personally and had a special interest in The Concept of Irony, which he reviewed in 1842. In 1845 Beck published an anonymous book review in German of Philosophical Fragments in a theological journal in Berlin. This review, which appears here in English translation for the first time, provides some insight into the contemporary reception of this important work.