Volume 25, Issue 1

While the only extensive discussion of music in Kierkegaard’s work is the famous treatise based on Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in the first part of the pseudonymous Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard did write other brief passages, in which he made comments on musical aspects. Two recent articles have pointed to attitudes toward music in such passages which seem to differ from the negative evaluation of music as a religious or theological medium in the first part of Either/Or by the fictitious aesthete A. With a point of departure in the two mentioned articles, I attempt to further discuss the possible relationship between the ethical and the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s musical thought, involving passages from both parts of Either/Or as well as a few journal-entries. Finally, Erika Fischer-Lichte’s distinction between staging and performativity is brought to bear on these issues.

Although there is a broad agreement among Kierkegaard’s scholars that Assessor Wilhelm is an ethical thinker, the agreement on what kind of ethics his standpoint represents has been much harder to come by. The suggestions range from Schiller to Aristotle and from Kant to Hegel. The article contends that the apparent lack of a coherent ethical theory on Assessor Wilhelm’s part is in fact part of a deliberate ethical strategy. Based on Vigilius Haufniensis’ distinction between first and second ethics, it is argued that Assessor Wilhelm occupies a space in between, in which he attempts to create a dynamic for A in the direction of the so-called second ethics, and this by mainly using ironic means.

Kierkegaard is famous for his use of narrative set pieces to illustrate and make vivid his ideas to his reader. Less famous is his use of narrative variation, a technique deployed twice in Fear and Trembling , in which he takes a given narrative and introduces a series of variations on the narrative to explore the possibilities of selfhood made available to the narrative’s protagonist. In this paper I explore this technique, help determine the ends it serves, and then apply this understanding to the use of the device in the text to see how it functions to advance its argument.

This article interrogates the concepts of faith, the ethical, and tragedy in Fear and Trembling by examining Johannes De Silentio’s allusions to heroic characters. I argue that these heroes are emblematic of faith or tragedy through their orientation to a promise in their respective mythic narratives. Abraham’s faith in the covenant with God commits him to the reconcilability of virtue and the good life, while the tragic heroes’ commitments to the ethical reveal their inability to transcend the (tragic) presumption that virtue and the good life are ultimately incommensurable. I conclude by sketching a politics corresponding to De Silentio’s conception of tragedy.

This paper attempts to investigate Kierkegaard’s thought through the category of mimesis. First, two meanings of the word are distinguished and analyzed: the archaic meaning that links it to the concept of re-enactment, and the traditional meaning that links it to the aesthetic field of art. These two meanings are then considered in relation to Kierkegaard’s opus, showing the oscillation of mimesis as corresponding to that between the aesthetic, which lives in fantasy and in the unfulfilled possibility, and the religious, which finds its identity in the imitation of Christ and in the transparent relationship to God.

The article provides a reconstruction of Kierkegaardʼs conception of self-knowledge, mainly in the light of The Concept of Irony , The Sickness unto Death , Philosophical Fragments and selected upbuilding discourses. The concept of self-knowledge, which in Kierkegaard goes beyond mere epistemology, is shown in its duality, as a process which is for Kierkegaard both substantial and relational: to know oneself is for Kierkegaard both an ethical claim upon man and a religious act whose accomplishment is dependent on Godʼs intervention. The article next discusses how self-knowledge involves a relationship to and “knowledge” of God. Finally, it is shown that self-knowledge presupposes not only that one believes himself or herself to be known by God, but also by his or her fellow human beings: self-knowledge requires engagement in the lived world and with others.

The article aims at analysing a long and unduly neglected concept in Kierkegaard’s thought: the concept of martyrdom. I argue that this is indeed of central concern for Kierkegaard, and, moreover, that he conceptualizes it in a semantically unified and consistent way. In order to prove this I will focus on the so-called NB journals and provide a comprehensive account of the terms martyrdom and martyr in the context of these sources. Upon closer scrutiny, Kierkegaard distinguishes between two basic types of martyrdom: immediate and reflective. All other forms, as they appear in the journals (and also in the pseudonymous authorship), can be traced back to these basic types.

This article offers a detailed and compact account of what might be called Kierkegaard’s Faust project, that is, the collection of notes, bibliographies and reflections on the mythical German necromancer that the young Kierkegaard registered in his various journals and notebooks from the years 1835 – 1837. As is well known, the young writer presumably intended to pen a book or essay about the universal idea represented by Faust. Additionally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s project within the context of the 1830s, the reception of the Faustian myth among his Danish contemporaries such as J.L. Heiberg and H.L. Martensen, and the enthusiasm for Goethe that seized Copenhagen during those years.

This article explores Kierkegaard’s largely overlooked 1838 paper “Telegraph Messages from a Mousvoyant to a Clairvoyant concerning the Relation between Xnty and Philosophy,” and argues that it can be read as a polemic against the speculative unity of philosophy and Christianity and speculative thought’s epistemological optimism, especially targeting the Danish speculative theologian Hans Lassen Martensen. It will be suggested that the “Telegraph Messages” offer a corrective to this view by separating Christianity and philosophy and underlining the ambiguity of human existence and the paradoxicality of the religious sphere, thus foreshadowing key themes in Kierkegaard’s mature pseudonymous authorship.

This article critically examines and discusses the charge, raised by Adorno in his essay on Works of Love , that Kierkegaard’s rewriting of the Gospel story of the good Samaritan reduces neighbor love to abstract inwardness. It has been somewhat ignored in the reception of Adorno’s text that he also praises Kierkegaard as a critic of his time. I explore Adorno’s appreciation of this dimension in Works of Love and seek to develop it further by examining Kierkegaard’s sharp eye for discovering how the inhumanity of the slavery in the past persists in more hidden and subtle ways in the modern world dominated by the instrumental rationality of economics.

Simone de Beauvoir’s moral philosophy has received relatively little attention in the scholarly world. This article seeks to bring her Ethics of Ambiguity into dialogue with Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love , two works written a century apart, but which both strive to offer a response to challenges concerning the dangers of existential philosophy’s focus on subjectivity. Despite some fundamental differences in orientation, especially with regard to questions of action and social change, Beauvoir and Kierkegaard’s works offer complementary models for understanding how existential ethics can move beyond subjectivist stances and allow for attentiveness to the plurality of concrete, singular others.

This paper explores the connection between Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of despair and W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness. The concepts have been separately argued to share a root in Hegel’s “Unhappy Consciousness,” and further, each notion in part explains the interaction of a person with their culture. The paper seeks to highlight the importance of culture in interpreting Kierkegaard’s despair, and to do so by including a critique via Du Bois that a person’s existence in a culture of oppression potentially impacts one’s relation to oneself, whether that person is the oppressor or the oppressed.

The development of Vertigo ’s main characters provides a detailed illustration of the dialectics of despair as analysed in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death , in particular of the so-called ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ types of failed selfhood. This article shows the relation of selfhood and despair to dizziness both in Kierkegaard’s work and in Hitchcock’s film, and it examines the religious subtext of Vertigo. The dramatis personae of Judy and Scottie are analysed by applying Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of despair. They display a variety of failures to relate to their selves, like unconscious and conscious despair, possibility’s despair, despair over the earthly and despair of the eternal. Moreover, they epitomize the gendered types of despair as depicted in The Sickness unto Death: losing one’s self in relation to someone and obsessively striving for self-assertion at the cost of others.

The essay emphasizes the unsolvable tension between activity and passivity implied in Kierkegaard’s reduplication as an author of authors. To characterize the different approaches to pseudonymity, I will use the term Halvbefaren [the inexperienced seaman] to refer to a reading that appeals only to Kierkegaard’s or to the pseudonyms’ authority over the authorship, and Helbefaren [the experienced seaman] to refer to another interpretation that recognizes that unsolvable tension between them. Recurring to the sailing metaphor implicit in these terms that appear in Climacus’ Postscript , I defend the thesis that the pseudonyms open the authorship from within, overcoming Kierkegaard as a usual author, as the only captain of the entire authorship. The mutiny performed by the pseudonyms cannot be resolved by simply transferring the authority to the pseudonyms themselves, and it creates a subjective space in the authorship so it becomes a matter of the experience of the reader.

This article provides an English translation of Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s “Literary Winter Crops” from 1843. The young Kierkegaard cultivated a positive relationship with Heiberg, who was the most powerful cultural figure in Denmark at the time. Heiberg published Kierkegaard’s first articles in his literary journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post , and in Kierkegaard’s early works such as From the Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony , there are clear signs that he continued to court Heiberg’s favor. Heiberg’s dismissive book review of Either/Or in “Literary Winter Crops” definitively ended the relationship. Deeply offended, Kierkegaard from this point on waged a polemical war with Heiberg. Heiberg’s short review played a large and negative role not just in their personal relationship but also in Kierkegaard’s development generally. This work appears here for the first time in a complete English translation.