Volume 26, Issue 1

This article offers a philosophical account of the so-called journal of Gilleleje. I would like to argue that in this text from 1835 one can trace the early philosophical musings of Kierkegaard on the existential question of the discovery of the self and the development of selfhood, one of the main motifs in the authorship of the Dane. Additionally, I discuss the literary trends of the 1830s in Golden Age Denmark, particularly the boom of the Danish short novel and Heiberg’s admiration of Goethe, analyzing in what way this local context impacted Kierkegaard’s ideas in the journal of Gilleleje.

Readers of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments witness the development of Johannes Climacus from an initial posture of aesthetic detachment to a mutually elevating partnership with his unnamed interlocutor. Despite his (exaggerated) suspicions of philosophy, Johannes cautiously assents in Chapters IV and V of the Fragments to the philosophical innovations suggested by his unnamed critic. As he does so, he not only exposes the limitations of the Socratic account of recollection, which is what he set out to do, but also, and inadvertently, reveals the limitations of his own “thought-project.” As it turns out, the most notable (and persistent) of these limitations is his own fear of (ethical) commitment, which he associates with a union so toxic that one who is ill wed may crave the hangman’s noose. Despite the success he enjoys in developing his “thought-project,” and the camaraderie he experiences with his former adversary, Johannes concludes Fragments by retreating to the safety of the aesthetic nook from which he ever-so-briefly emerged. Fascinated by philosophy but frightened by (what he takes to be) its serious implications, he contents himself with the “fragments” and “crumbs” of which his philosophical diet consists.

This paper explores the tension in Kierkegaard’s Christian discourses between Kierkegaard’s overt emphasis on Scriptural authority and Kierkegaard’s imaginative Scriptural use, through an analysis of the discourse series, “Thoughts That Wound from Behind—for Upbuilding.” The paper argues that Kierkegaard employs Scriptural language both imaginatively to create distanciation and directly to create confrontation, without differentiating how Scriptural authority functions in these two uses. The paper concludes that when Kierkegaard emphasizes Scriptural authority, he is really emphasizing the authority of “Christian concepts” stabilized in Christian tradition, and that he utilizes Scripture freely and imaginatively to challenge readers with those authoritative concepts.

In this paper, I look into the identity of the neighbour in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, whom I argue has not been identified adequately by previous interpreters. I propose to clarify the identity of the neighbour by contrasting her with the ethical other as presented in four alternative ethical theories. I then set out to reconstruct ethical otherhood in a comparative analysis of Aristotelian virtue ethics, Kantian deontology, Hegelian theory of recognition, and Millian utilitarianism. Ultimately, through a both close and—admittedly—productive reading of Works of Love , I interpret and discuss the fundamental features of Kierkegaard’s neighbour over against these four positions.

In this paper, I aim to show the evolution of Kierkegaard’s views on the state scattered in his Papers. To do this, I will carry out an analysis divided into chronological periods, and I will characterize each period in terms of its main features. The goal is to give a comprehensive account of Kierkegaard as a champion of the monarchical and authoritative state, who loses his patience and attacks the established order only when he thinks that Christianity’s truth is at the greatest risk. This interpretation contrasts both with a mere despotic Kierkegaard and with a more liberal one.

Kierkegaard’s texts suggest countervailing construals of the respective roles of divine and human agency in an individual’s pursuit of blessedness. Kierkegaard paradoxically suggests that the individual must depend entirely on grace for the birth and development of faith, and at the same time actively cultivate faithful dispositions and passions. But Kierkegaard did not espouse Calvinistic divine determinism, or Pelagian autonomous human agency, or the Arminian cooperation of the two. For Kierkegaard, the ostensible paradox of grace and free will is not a cognitive conundrum but is rather a challenge to integrate faith as a gift and faith as a task.

The paper is concerned with the nature of Kierkegaard’s commitment to God’s loving providence as it shows itself in his writings in general, and in his remarks on Governance’s Part in his Authorship in particular. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, God’s loving providence is not an objective fact that he discovers as intervening in nature, history or in his private life and authorship. Rather, God’s loving providence is fundamentally hidden in the wretchedness of existence. God is like a hidden experimenter who does not intervene in his experiment. Thus, the passion of faith determines the issue, for Kierkegaard. God’s loving Governance is realized in inwardness, in loving the neighbor, and in living this love in self-denial, obedience and suffering.

It is known that Kierkegaard’s relation to politics was problematic and marked by a somewhat reactionary stance. The nature of this problematic relation, however, will be shown to lie in the tension between his double skepticism of the order of establishment [ det Bestående ] on the one hand, and the political associations of his age on the other. In this tension he is immersed, trembling between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand Kierkegaard is hesitant to support the progressive political movements of the time due to his skepticism about the principle of association in the socio-psychological climate of leveling and envy. On the other hand, his dubious support of the order of the establishment, in particular the Church and Bishop Mynster, becomes increasingly problematic. The importance of 1848 is crucial in this regard since this year marks the decisive turn in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Using the letters to Kolderup-Rosenvinge in the wake of the cataclysmic events of 1848 as my point of departure, I wish to elucidate the pathway towards what Kierkegaard himself understands as his Socratic mission.

This study is dedicated to exploring the ways in which Kierkegaard provides a criterion for thinking about the principles of plurality when, in the context of distinguishing between Socrates and Christ, between different conceptions of difference—between those that support the difference of the other and those that do not—he writes that, just as no one must separate what God has joined, so no one must join what God has separated. When Kierkegaard then makes central to faith the incommensurability of single individuals, he indicates that the inviolable singularity of self and other is the one principle that can be true for all—that can be plural—since it is the one principle that is inclusive of all. In my paper I argue through Kierkegaard that the relationship between the singular and the plural embraces the paradox of absolute difference, the paradox of difference as absolute: the single individual exists only by standing in absolute relation to all others as absolute; the plural exists only insofar as it involves the commitment to the singular standard that, as absolute, preserves the difference of all.

This article argues that Kierkegaard’s account of emotions has something important to contribute to contemporary philosophy of emotions. The argument proceeds in five steps. The first section starts by outlining two influential paradigms in contemporary philosophy of emotions: the feeling theories and the cognitive theories. The second section then turns to a critique of two prominent approaches that read Kierkegaard’s conception of emotions as belonging to the cognitive theories. The third section presents Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist of emotional ambiguity, while the fourth section attempts to outline a taxonomy of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of emotional experience. The fifth and final section argues that Kierkegaard’s primary contribution to contemporary philosophy of emotions is to be found in his concept of anxiety as the experience of human freedom particularly with respect to the ambiguity of feeling and understanding characteristic of this fundamental affective phenomenon.

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that the concept of Eiendommelighed in Kierkegaard has a considerable philosophical weight, although it figures only marginally. It is emphasized that Kierkegaard—well ahead of the deconstruction of community in contemporary philosophy—creates a concept by which the complicity of singularity and community becomes evident. The gist of the concept is an indistinction between the proper and the improper. Eiendommelighed is that by which singularities, or neighbors, are called into the inappropriability of their ownmost being. This call is then recalled between neighbors who in this way form an (im)proper community.

The phrase, “Without Authority,” is used so frequently by Kierkegaard that it becomes a kind of signature; yet it remains little understood. I argue that the phrase works to resist patriarchal, top-down, institutionally sanctioned authority: the authority of “direct” communication. Kierkegaard is not alone in contesting the tyranny of patriarchy: another tyranny—of anonymity, of the crowd—threatens to do away with patriarchal authority too, and with it all authority, all communication. Kierkegaard’s “without authority” defies patriarchy and does so at the risk of this wild-fire destruction, for the sake of a different communication that might yet be possible.

In The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air (1849), Kierkegaard presents a succinct critique of Romantic aesthetics, in line with contemporary critiques of ecocriticism and ecophilosophy, e.g. by Timothy Morton . Whereas Romantic poets see nature as a mirror of their inner thoughts and pathos, thereby divinising themselves and their creativity, Kierkegaard emphasises the authority of the Creator and the exteriority of nature. He identifies the consequences of such Romantic self-infatuation on all levels of discourse: aesthetics, ethics, epistemology and ontology, and seeks to formulate an alternative. I argue that the discourses thus represent an alternative philosophy of nature, revealing an immediate joy for the gift of being-there. Being human thus means being dependent on and embedded in nature. This makes Kierkegaard a highly relevant interlocutor for contemporary ecophilosophy and ecocriticism, as revealed by Knausgård’s novel Morgenstjernen (2020).

The present article argues that the philosopher Frederik Christian Sibbern played a fairly substantive role in the development of what has come to be known as Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. Specifically, Sibbern had already worked out some of the key elements of Kierkegaard’s critique that culminates in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This is demonstrated by means of an analysis of two works by Sibbern which are important for his critical discussion of Hegel’s philosophy: Remarks and Investigations Primarily Concerning Hegel’s Philosophy from 1838, and On the Concept, Nature and Essence of Philosophy: A Presentation of Philosophy’s Propaedeutic from 1843.

This article examines three early writings of Hans L. Martensen, Søren Kierkegaard’s teacher and the target of his criticisms. The writings focus respectively on self-consciousness, mysticism, and freedom. They each make important claims about religion, and together they disclose the young Martensen’s systematic understanding of the epistemological, mystical, and moral-ethical dimensions of human experience as shaped by the representations of Christian faith and life. The analysis reveals an agile thinker, whose creative philosophical and theological ideas are the product of imaginative speculation growing out of passionate religiosity. Some connections will be drawn from these essays to the writings of Søren Kierkegaard.

The common ground where Thorvaldsen and Kierkegaard meet is Copenhagen. This essay focuses on the places—both physical and theoretical—in which the comparison between the two is made possible. First of all, the Vor Frue Kirke, where some of Thorvaldsen’s most important sculptures are displayed, as well as where Kierkegaard used to go both as a member of the community and as a preacher. This article presents a perspective on the intersection that exists in a horizontal sense for Thorvaldsen, and for Kierkegaard in a vertical sense, culminating at the feet of the altar from which their heartfelt messages emanate.

The present study poses a simple question, namely, what are the specific forces that might at times hinder rather than advance individual moral development? To answer this inquiry, I will investigate the writings of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, examining the two aesthetic protagonists found in their works—Johannes the Seducer and Dmitri Karamazov. I will utilise the Kierkegaardian framework of the three existential stages to illustrate that it is an over-reliance on gratification, coupled with an instrumental approach towards beings that not only prevents these two aesthetes from behaving morally, but also from even recognising the ethical perspective as a viable existential position.

In contemporary philosophy, there is a growing interest in how Søren Kierkegaard’s metaphilosophy and philosophical methodology may have influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein. This paper contributes to this discussion by arguing that each shares and critiques a particular conception of logic that I term “worldly logic.” Roughly, “worldly logic” contends logic and metaphysics are intimately interconnected. It further argues that reading Kierkegaard’s brief thoughts on logic, in the Climacus texts, through the lens of the later Wittgenstein, helps to clarify the nature of Kierkegaard’s critique. Finally, it argues that their shared abhorrence of a particular sort of philosophy of logic is principled and apt.

A distrust of focus on subjectivity and the individual provoked by his meeting with Sartrean existentialism led György Lukács to turn his early but qualified admiration of Søren Kierkegaard into an accusation of fostering a bourgeois culture of the kind Kierkegaard is usually thought to have opposed. Not every Marxian thinker has been equally wary of subjectivity, but all have found in Kierkegaard a crucial absence of concern for human exploitation within a context of natural scarcity. However, a more measured reading suggests a case for resolving the need to choose between Lukács’s insistence on “spirit” as a collective notion and Kierkegaard’s as cultivation of a trans-historically oriented, self-stabilizing social will.

This study asks how Sartre’s version of the dialectic of recognition is present in Kierkegaard’s works. For Sartre, the dialectic begins with an awareness that the other sees me and judges me. I experience this as a threat to my autonomy, and I fight back with a variety of strategies designed to mitigate the effects. Inter-subjective relationships are grounded in conflict from which there is no exit. Similarly, Kierkegaard characterizes the natural, self-centered way of seeing the other as inherently self-centered and contentious. And yet some of Kierkegaard’s texts lay the ground for a way out. Unlike Sartre, he is sensitive to modifications to the structure of the dialectic of recognition that depend on a change in the basic mode of looking. That is, how I see, evaluate, and judge the other can alter the foundation of the interaction from something mutually contentious to something mutually edifying.

In 1959, Lao Sze-Kwang (1927 – 2012), a well-known Chinese Kantian philosopher and author of the New Edition of the History of Chinese Philosophy , published On Existentialist Philosophy introducing existential philosophers to Chinese readers. This paper argues that Lao misinterpreted Kierkegaard’s ultimate philosophical quest of “how to become a Christian” as a question of ‘virtue completion,’ because he failed to recognize and acknowledge Kierkegaard’s distinction between aesthetic, moral and religious passion. By describing and clarifying Lao’s misinterpretation, the paper then argues that Lao’s trichotomy of the self fails to give due credit to the independence of religiousness from morality and aesthetics in Kierkegaard’s thought.

Bruun and Hansen claim that Kierkegaard decided to publish Two Ethical-Religious Essays on commission with Gyldendal so as not to be linked to the penname H.H. Elsewhere, however, Kierkegaard indicates that the Essays , although they stand outside of the authorship, are to be understood in relation to it. Furthermore, Bruun and Hansen do not explain why Kierkegaard chose Gyldendal and not some other house. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s concept of the peritext, I argue that it was Gyldendal’s reputation as a leading theological publisher that led Kierkegaard to select it for a work demarcating the boundary of his authorship.