Konturen: Vol 7 (2015)
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Kierkegaard and German Thought
This issue is dedicated to the memory of David J. Kangas.
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Item Open Access Being Human: Kierkegaard's 1847 Discourses on the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air(University of Oregon, 2015) Kangas, David J.This article is a reading of Kierkegaard's 1847 discourses on "The lilies of the field and the birds of the air." In these discourses, I argue, Kierkegaard pursues the problem of the being of the human being—that is, engages a critique of the fundamental structures of human reality. I show, in particular, how Kierkegaard elaborates a critique of care or concern. The lily and the bird exist without concern. Without collapsing the difference between the being of the lily or bird and the human being, Kierkegaard elaborates a possibility of human existence that is not organized around the project—which is to say in terms of "care." Taking the lily of the field and the bird of the air as emblems of affirmation, he expresses human existence attuned to the superfluous or "whyless" character of reality.Item Open Access Clouds: The Tyranny of Irony over Philosophy(University of Oregon, 2015) Stern, MichaelBoth Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche maintained an abiding concern for Socrates throughout their productive lives. Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on irony through a Socratic lens and Nietzsche once declared that try as he might, he could not completely separate his concerns from those he associated with the Greek. Kierkegaard famously favored Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates in his comedy Clouds, claiming that it accurately portrayed the illegibility of the ironist. Nietzsche leaned toward Xenophon’s Socratic writings but most famously blamed Plato’s Socrates for the demise of tragic culture. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche engaged with the variety of Socratic depictions throughout their careers and perhaps more importantly, both employed irony in a Socratic fashion inflected by textual concerns. In other words, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche understood irony as both the indication of an epistemological limit, and as a strategy to induce the reader to think herself into the text. My article “Clouds: The Tyranny of Irony over Philosophy” analyzes this common concern and its implications for our understanding of European modernity.Item Open Access The concept of Byrony(University of Oregon, 2015) Gurley, D.“The Concept of Byrony” examines Kierkegaard’s lyrical relation to Lord Byron. As an alternative to models of German influence, this paper discusses Kierkegaard’s quotations of Byron’s poetry and allusions to the poet himself. The paper establishes a poetical relationship between the two writers in terms of irony and metaphor. Kierkegaard’s sense of irony is creative but not unique; its roots can be located in earlier writings of the Danish Golden Age. Of particular importance is the development of irony in the works of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the young writers that surrounded him, including the young Kierkegaard himself. It was in Heiberg’s salon where Byron seems to have first stepped into the Danish literary landscape. For Kierkegaard and Danish letters in general, the reception and celebrity-status of Byron perhaps play a more important role than his verse, although another acolyte of Heiberg’s, Frederik Paludan-Müller, wrote poetry that strongly illustrates Byron’s poetical influence in Danish verse. The paper also examines the Byronic notion of the empty sign, a metaphor that points to its own meaninglessness as a further poetic relationship. Moreover, the Byronic hero as a model for a lived life provided Kierkegaard with a powerful public mask that accompanied him to his last days. I term this mask and masquerade Byrony. In its conclusion the paper marks a significant similarity between the death-scenes and epitaphs of these major nineteenth-century European writers.Item Open Access The Ethical Context of Either/Or(University of Oregon, 2015) Kosch, MichelleThis is a sequel to an earlier paper ('Kierkegaard's Ethicist' Archiv 2006) in which I argued that J. G. Fichte (rather than Kant of Hegel or some amalgam) was the primary historical model for the ethical standpoint described in Kierkegaard's Either/Or II. Here I offer some new support for that claim. In the first section I present some evidence for Fichte's prominence in the landscape of philosophical ethics in the 1830s and '40s in Germany and Denmark. I argue that Kierkegaard's use of Fichte as a foil was not idiosyncratic, but was rather the obvious choice in the historical context. In the second section I describe some additional substantive and textual reasons for thinking Fichte was the figure looming largest in the background of Kierkegaard's construction of the ethical standpoint in Either/Or.Item Open Access "The Happiness of 'Slight Superiority'": Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on Resentment(University of Oregon, 2015) Conway, DanielMy aim in this essay is to pair Kierkegaard with the German-born philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). I am particularly concerned to juxtapose their complementary investigations in the etiology and operation of resentment, which both thinkers identified as exerting a powerfully retardant force within the bourgeois societies of late modern European culture. Indeed, both were concerned to demonstrate the extent to which the corrosive power of resentment had transformed the religious injunction to "love they neighbor" into a culturally sponsored program to "beggar thy neighbor." The result of this pairing, or so I hope to demonstrate, is a productive division of philosophical labor: From Nietzsche, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s readers may gain a clear sense of how a community founded on ressentiment may accommodate “healthy” expressions of comparative advantage and relative superiority. Even when exaggerated and amplified, however, these expressions pose no threat to the conservative, contractionary structure of the ethical life of the community in question. In particular, as we shall see, Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment may explain that, and why, the seemingly daring meditation conducted by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling yields such a muddled and unsatisfying conclusion.Item Open Access How to Go Beyond an Ontotheology of the Human Subject? Anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger(University of Oregon, 2015) Librett, Jeffrey S.By examining Martin Heidegger's critique of Søren Kierkegaard, this essay reconsiders the limits that an ontotheology of the subject may or may not impose on investigations of the relations between being and time. I begin by summarizing briefly both Heidegger's rejection of subject-centered thought and his critique of Kierkegaard as an example of such thought. I then delineate the sense in which, and gauge the extent to which, in The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard unsettles both the modal-ontological categories on which such subject-centered thought is based and the "vulgar" notion of time that, according to Heidegger, traditionally attends the invocation of these categories. Finally, I indicate briefly some ways in which Heidegger's thought remains partially beholden to an ontotheology of the subject. The more general implication is certainly not, however, that Kierkegaard outdoes Heidegger in some sort of competition in the deconstruction of metaphysics. Rather, this approach to the question of the metaphysics of the subject by way of the anxiety-analyses of Heidegger and Kierkegaard suggests that the exact character of such a metaphysics and the specific meaning of "subject" and "subjectivity" remain open and pressing questions, especially given that Heidegger's fundamental ontology (and his Seinsdenken), as well as Kierkegaard's critique of Hegelian systematicity, remain marked by traditional notions of sovereign self-determination, and its ontologyItem Open Access Introduction: Kierkegaard and German Thought(University of Oregon, 2015) Stern, MichaelKierkegaard's own fondness for prefaces introduces our volume.Item Open Access Mutiny of an Error: Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on Suicide(University of Oregon, 2015) Klebes, MartinIn their philosophical work Ludwig Wittgenstein and Søren Kierkegaard both reflect on suicide as a response to existential despair. While Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of The Sickness unto Death, rejects the contemplation of suicide as an outright barrier to an "awakening" of the self to its own sinful condition, Wittgenstein's diary notes betray a different attitude towards such thinking; while he largely concurs with Kierkegaard's characterization of despair, Wittgenstein strikes a less confident pose concerning the possibility of a leap into faith that would all at once overcome any though of suicide.Item Open Access The Stillness of History: Kierkegaard and German Mysticism(University of Oregon, 2015) Piety, M. G.The German mystics were particularly important for Kierkegaard because of the proximity of Germany to Denmark and because of their influence on both German idealism and the Pietist tradition in which Kierkegaard was raised. This article is the first attempt to look at the issue of how the views of the German mystics may have influenced Kierkegaard's though. It begins with an introduction to what one could call mystical epistemology, but then looks more specifically at the epistemology of two medieval German mystics, Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, and at Kierkegaard's exposure to German mystical tradition. Finally, it presents an account of religious epistemology that makes clear that it is largely indistinguishable from the epistemology of Eckhardt and Tauler.Item Open Access Tragedy, History, and the Form of Philosophy in Either/Or(University of Oregon, 2015) Lisi, Leonardo F.Kierkegaard’s essay “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” makes two basic claims of far-reaching consequences for the theory of the tragedy and for philosophy more generally. The first is the claim that the essence of tragedy in all its historical manifestations consists in the representation of an irreducible contradiction between two qualitatively distinct principles: substantial determinants and individual agency. The second is Kierkegaard’s contention that, within this essence, the difference between the genre’s ancient and its modern forms rests on the different relations to that contradiction, on whether it is accepted as an objective fact or as a reflexive possibility. In the present article I elucidate Kierkegaard’s argument in terms of these two claims and point to some of their larger implications. With respect to the first, I show that it introduces a significant challenge to the conception of historical time on which our category of modernity depends. As concerns the second, I argue that it constitutes an engagement with what Kant calls as the modality of judgments (whether an object is possible, actual, or necessary), which Kierkegaard here attacks in the version given to it by the young F.W.J. Schelling. Kierkegaard’s rejection of Schelling’s argument on this point goes to the heart of the idealist project and ultimately questions what the form of philosophy should be.