Published by De Gruyter

Volume 19 Issue 1

Issue of Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook

Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available June 21, 2014

Masthead

Page range: i-viii

Download PDF

Section 1: Kierkegaardian Philosophical Concepts: Self-Understanding and Existence

June 21, 2014

“Ne Quid Nimis.” Kierkegaard and the Virtue of Temperance

Rob Compaijen

Page range: 3-28

Abstract

In this article I argue that-despite Kierkegaard’s seemingly harsh critique of temperance-it plays a crucial role in the ethics he worked out under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity. Anti-Climacus, following Socrates in the Philebus, thinks of the good life as a “mixed” life in which the different and opposed dimensions of human existence, peras and apeiron, are in due proportion. In Anti-Climacus’ ethics the process of realizing the “mixed” life does not, contra the Socratic conception, involve reason restricting desire, but, instead, the will (infused with self-knowledge) grounding imagination in the facticity of human existence. It is through this perfectionist process that we are able to imitate Christ, which is how Anti- Climacus ultimately understands the good life. Moreover, I suggest that we could understand this form of temperance as a virtue. In the conclusion I show that Kierkegaard’s seeming critique of temperance is actually a critique of mediocrity

June 21, 2014

Going No Further: Toward an Interpretation of “Problema III” in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Daniel Conway

Page range: 29-52

Abstract

The concluding paragraphs of “Problema III” in Fear and Trembling feature a narrator determined to defend the good name of Abraham. Rejuvenated by his excursion to the aesthetic-ethical confinium, Johannes de silentio endeavors to defend the ethical merit of Abraham’s notorious promise of divine providence. Along the way, however, Johannes unexpectedly arrives at the realization that his supposed bond with Abraham is little more than a fabrication on his part. As “Problema III” approaches its conclusion, Johannes suspends his quest for self-understanding. Without Abraham as his traveling companion, he will go no further

June 21, 2014

The Aporia of Decision: Revisiting the Question of Decision in Kierkegaard

Bjarke Mørkøre Stigel Hansen

Page range: 53-78

Abstract

In this essay I will examine the various ways in which the concept of decision emerges in the writings of Kierkegaard focusing mainly on the Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript. This prepares the way for revisiting Kierkegaard’s concept of decision. Doing so indicates the radical way in which Kierkegaard connects the concept of decision to an aporia. The crucial existential concept of decision not only concerns the difficulty, or even the impasse, pertaining to knowledge, but also relates to the question of how the singular finds his or her own way through existence

June 21, 2014

Kierkegaard in Nature: The Fragility of Existing with Naturalism

René Rosfort

Page range: 79-108

Abstract

This article argues that in order to evidence the importance of Kierkegaard outside of Kierkegaard studies, we need to acknowledge that we live in a naturalized world. This acknowledgment brings out the necessity of reformulating Kierkegaard’s thinking in ways that make his arguments intelligible against the background of naturalism that dominates contemporary culture. After having explained what is meant by a naturalized world and by naturalism, the article attempts a reformulation of Kierkegaard’s notion of existence as one way to articulate the importance of Kierkegaard’s thinking about human beings in a naturalized world

Section 2: Kierkegaardian Religious Concepts: Reason, Faith, Imitation

June 21, 2014

Kierkegaard’s Aesthetics and the Aesthetic of Imitation

Wojciech Kaftański

Page range: 111-134

Abstract

This paper challenges the general approach to Kierkegaard’s engagement with imitation, which privileges a strictly religious reading. Heretofore imitation has been apprehended as a coherent concept shaped within the context of imitatio Christi in the devotio moderna. I locate Kierkegaard’s writings in the broader context of mimesis. Analyzing particular mimetic structures woven into the text, I show that a plurality of imitative models that are different from Christ occurs therein. Addressing the distinction between the religious and the aesthetic in Kierkegaard, I inquire into the status of these imitative models. Referring to the term “Mellembestemmelserne” and “ekphrasis”-the rhetorical device of aesthetics-I show that the other models of imitation exhibit supportive roles to the highest type of prototype (Christ) and therefore question the solely religious rendering of mimesis and the aesthetic confines of Kierkegaard’s concept of aesthetics

June 21, 2014

Søren Kierkegaard’s Historical Jesus as the Christ of Faith

Mogens Müller

Page range: 135-152

Abstract

In The Concept of Irony (1841) Kierkegaard employs tendency criticism in his analysis, showing how the picture of Socrates is highly dependent upon the perception of the authors describing him: Xenophon, Plato and Aristophanes. Further, in Philosophical Fragments (1844) and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), following up on Lessing’s problem, if anything historical is capable of offering a point of departure for an eternal consciousness, he develops his paradoxical Christology claiming the divine not to be directly recognizable. Accordingly, one could imagine that Kierkegaard could accept the result of historical critical scholarship claiming the dependence of the gospel stories, on their authors’ perception of Jesus. However, Kierkegaard reads the gospels as if biblical criticism did not exist. The earthly Jesus of the gospels not only is the Christ, but he also has become so without the confession to him as the resurrected Lord. Thus Kierkegaard totally eliminates the “fact” that we have access to the historical Jesus through the reception of his believers alone

June 21, 2014

Faith in a Rational Age: A Dialogue with Climacus

Annemarie van Stee

Page range: 153-166

Abstract

Johannes Climacus has been invited to address a 21st century, largely secular audience on the topic of religious faith and its (ir)rationality. Climacus refuses to lecture, but in the dialogue that ensues, his views become clear. This article is my transcript of the meeting as it unfolds. Climacus finds himself confronted with contemporary theoretical positions regarding the (ir)rationality of faith as well as with real-life cases such as a touchy-feely type of spirituality and religiously inspired terrorism. In response, he clarifies his idea of faith as subjective truth, revealing the criteria he uses to distinguish faith from pseufaith. Throughout, the lively dialogue shows the enduring relevance of Climacus’ thought

June 21, 2014

Climacus and Kierkegaard on the Outward Relationship with God

Andrew B. Torrance

Page range: 167-186

Abstract

Overshadowed by a superficial reading of his pseudonym, Johannes Climacus’ statement “subjectivity is truth,” Søren Kierkegaard has come to be perceived in the theological world as overly individualistic and anthropocentric in his thinking. This has contributed to the perception that, for Kierkegaard, it is the individual Christian who is in charge of her Christian faith. In this essay, I endeavor to challenge this perception through an analysis of Climacus and Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the outward nature of the God-relationship

Section 3: Rediscovering Kierkegaard’s Sources

June 21, 2014

Shaftesbury—An Important Forgotten Indirect Source of Kierkegaard’s Thought

Lydia B. Amir

Page range: 189-216

Abstract

The third Earl of Shaftesbury is not only a forgotten indirect source of Kierkegaard’s thought, but an important one as well. Kierkegaard adopts many ideas of the British philosopher of the Enlightenment, paraphrases him in his journals and writings and refers to him explicitly when introducing his interest in the legitimacy of the comic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. To the best of my knowledge, however, there is no reference to Shaftesbury in the literature on Kierkegaard; thus, the relationship between the two thinkers has not been investigated. In this article, I propose to fill this gap as well as explain how Shaftesbury could have influenced Kierkegaard’s thought. I argue that Shaftesbury anticipates some of the problems that Kierkegaard is usually credited with formulating, as well as some of the solutions Kierkegaard found to the problems they share. In particular, I maintain that Kierkegaard’s reference to Shaftesbury reveals an important debt.With his views on the relation of the comic to truth, Kierkegaard not only joins the interminable debate that followed Shaftesbury’s alleged assertion that ridicule is the test of truth but also settles it by devising his ethics of the comic

June 21, 2014

Freedom and the Temporality of Despair

Jamie Aroosi

Page range: 217-230

Abstract

This paper analyzes the “Interlude” from Philosophical Fragments, suggesting that not only is there a sophisticated critique of Hegel within it, despite recent scholarship that has asserted the contrary, but that we also find Kierkegaard offering intriguing insight into the nature of despair. Specifically, in the “Interlude,” by way of a subtle and sophisticated criticism of Hegel, Kierkegaard describes the unique sense of temporality that characterizes despair

June 21, 2014

“A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance

Carson Seabourn Webb

Page range: 231-252

Abstract

Today the term “enthusiasm” signifies little more than innocuous excitement. During the Enlightenment, however, the term was abuzz with pejorative innuendos of sub-humanity, the many nuances of which were debated in the public sphere. Its significance was more sting than substance, however, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard could complain that the category of enthusiasm had become hopelessly unclear. Despite this, based on The Book on Adler and on three texts in which Kierkegaard uses Socrates as a prototype of enthusiasm, I argue that Kierkegaard’s concept of enthusiasm places him in the lineage of earlier Enlightenment writers, such as Lessing, Shaftesbury, and Kant, whose conceptions and critiques of enthusiasm Kierkegaard was familiar with. By putting Kierkegaard’s use of the comic in The Book on Adler into conversation with Shaftesbury’s and Kant’s comedic remedies for enthusiasm, the extent to which Kierkegaard is an inheritor of and detractor from this tradition becomes evident

Section 4: 20^th Century Responses to Kierkegaard

June 21, 2014

Ways of Dying: The Double Death in Kierkegaard and Blanchot

Cathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen

Page range: 255-284

Abstract

Focusing mainly on Christian Discourses and the discourse “At a Graveside,” this paper seeks to unfold and discuss the various ways of dying depicted by Kierkegaard. By engaging Maurice Blanchot’s conception of a “double death,” I will argue that different relations to death are attributed to the pagan and to the believer. Special attention is drawn to the divergent temporalities that apparently define the possibilities and impossibilities of dying. This approach also involves an investigation of the “dispersion” and the “contemporaneity” pertaining to the dying pagan and the dying believer, respectively

June 21, 2014

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

István Czakó

Page range: 285-300

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

June 21, 2014

Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt and the Advent of the “Hollow Men” or towards a Kierkegaardian Reading of Eichmann in Jerusalem

Gabriel Guedes Rossatti

Page range: 301-328

Abstract

Hannah Arendt realized through her confrontation with Eichmann in Jerusalem that totalitarian regimes and, in a more general sense, modernity promote “thoughtlessness,” understood as the inability to think from an ethical point of view. As such, I argue that Eichmann’s figure is entirely comprehensible from a Kierkegaardian perspective, inasmuch as Kierkegaard had already comprehended in the mid-nineteenth century that modernity was accountable for the fomenting of “nobodies” characterized precisely by “thoughtlessness.” In this sense, my article seeks to promote an approximation between Kierkegaard’s and Arendt’s works (with special reference to Eichmann in Jerusalem) with the intention of discussing the centrality of the Socratic-Augustinian notions of “conscience” and “individuality” in their conceptions of ethics and politics. In sum, I argue that what links both Kierkegaard’s and Arendt’s thought is a form of “Socratic citizenship.”

June 21, 2014

Von der Kulturkritik der „Menge“ zur existenzialen Analytik des „Man“

Gerhard Thonhauser

Page range: 329-356

Abstract

The article examines the influence of Kierkegaard’s understanding of “the crowd” (Mængden) on Heidegger’s conception of “the one” (das Man). Even though a detailed analysis reveals striking similarities in their phenomenological descriptions, a fundamental difference between the two accounts can hardly be overlooked. Whereas Kierkegaard considers “the crowd” a contingent condition of his own authorship, Heidegger takes “the one” to be a necessary component of the structure of Dasein as such. This not only leads to divergent understandings of the relation between authentic and inauthentic existence, but it also and ultimately points to a fundamental difference in terms of the basic anthropological premises underlying and guiding Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s work as a whole. In order to historically contextualize the present study, the crucial intermediary role of the translator, critic and author Theodor Haecker will also be specified

June 21, 2014

Abbreviations

Page range: 357-364

About this journal

Since the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (KSYB) was first published in 1996, it has served as the authoritative periodical in the field. From 2011 the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook has been a peer-reviewed yearbook open to submissions by all Kierkegaard scholars. KSYB is published on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen.

The goal of the Yearbook is to advance Kierkegaard studies by encouraging top-level scholarship in the field. The editorial and advisory boards are deeply committed to creating a genuinely international forum for publication which integrates the many different traditions of Kierkegaard studies and brings them into a constructive and fruitful dialogue. To this end the Yearbook publishes articles from all related fields (philosophy, theology, literary studies etc.) in English, French and German. Submissions should be sent to the editorial secretary, Peter Šajda at: ksyb@degruyter.com.

The deadline for submissions for the 2023 issue of the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook is October 1st, 2022.

Potential authors should consult the “Submission guidelines”.
All submissions will be blindly refereed by established scholars in the field. Only high-quality papers will be accepted for publication. Potential authors should be prepared to make changes to their texts based on the comments received by the referees.