The Single Individual in Kierkegaard: Religious or Secular? Part 2

Abstract

In Part 2 of my study I focus on Works of Love of Kierkegaard in analyzing his concept of the single individual in light of what I call the hermeneutics of the relationship of the religious and the secular. I continue to emphasize that the hermeneutical distinction that Kierkegaard critically makes between Christianity and Christendom is the distinction, not between the religious and the secular but between, rather, a true understanding of the relationship of the religious and the secular, on the one hand, and an idolatrous conception of that relationship, on the other.

Acknowledgement

I want to thank Avron Kulak for reading a preliminary version of my study and for providing me with critical comments on it.

Notes

1. I use “man” throughout my study in the non-gendered sense of the Latin homo, as distinct from the gendered vir. A note on citations: (1) when I cite within a single paragraph passages from the same page of a work, the page reference is given at the end of the last passage cited; (2) with regard to the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard, I cite him as the “author” of these works; and (3) all emphases found in passages cited are in the original.

2. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 376; hereafter cited in the text. In Works of Love Kierkegaard uses the terms eternal, universal, and moral (ethical) as truly describing love (and faith) and, consequently, as consistent with the concept of moral duty, which, for Kant, embodies the universality of the categorical imperative, and so as altogether distinct from how they are used in Fear and Trembling, where they are opposed to the religious.

3. The exceptions are Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Buber’s I and Thou. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche views what he calls his own “unconditional honest atheism” (“and its is the only air we breathe, we more spiritual men of this age!”) as one of the “inner consequences [of Christianity]—it is the awe-inspiring catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God [as found in Christendom, I would add]” (In The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Viking Press, 1953], 160).

4. See Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, both of which I analyze in detail in my book, Rethinking Philosophy in Light of the Bible: From Kant to Schopenhauer (forthcoming).

5. Kierkegaard writes in Philosophical Fragments that “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that… has wanted to base his [the single individual’s] happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy… no mythology… no historical knowledge (which is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which… one can say… that it did not arise in any human heart” (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985], 109; also see 36).

6. For an extended critique of “hidden inwardness,” see Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 214f and 253.

7. In the first paragraph of the first principal section of Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard tells us that the single individual is characterized as the ethical and the universal when “sensately and psychically qualified in immediacy” (trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], 54). Sense and psyche (body and soul) bear here the same meaning as immediate sensation and immediate cognition in Philosophical Fragments.

8. See also Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 212ff.