Das Problem des religiösen Akosmismus in der Kierkegaard-Rezeption von Karl Jaspers

Abstract

Karl Jaspers’ reception of Kierkegaard has been characterized by some commentators as a largely uncritical appropriation. In my paper I argue that this view is not entirely adequate since the former’s attitude to the Danish thinker is by no means purely affirmative. By contrast, it seems to me that the punctum saliens of his criticism is the idea of a religiously motivated negation of the world (religiöse Weltverneinung), which certainly dominates the later thought of Kierkegaard. In order to justify my claim both Jaspers’ existential concept of the world and that of a world negation will be dealt with. In the main part of the article I will try to reconstruct, from a historical point of view (a) the shaping and development of Jaspers’ increasingly sharp criticism of Kierkegaard’s “acosmic” view of Christianity and (b) his late self-distancing from the Danish thinker. In my concluding remarks I will point out that although his criticism is in principal not unfounded, it is nevertheless one-sided and reductionistic, since it is based mainly on Kierkegaard’s polemical writings from the late period of his Kirchenkampf and as such ignores or at least underestimates some important aspects of Kierkegaard’s early thought