Whatever one generation learns from another, no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. In this respect, each generation… has no other task than what each previous generation had, nor does it advance further.
—Søren Kierkegaard, Epilogue to Fear and Trembling
The present age is essentially… devoid of passion, flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence. … we must say of the present age that it is going badly.
—Søren Kierkegaard, “The Present Age”
This Special Issue of The European Legacy marks the bicentennial of the birth of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) by addressing two interrelated challenges: first, the challenge that Kierkegaard directs to the single individual in the present age and, second, the challenge that the present age directs to Kierkegaard’s thought. Today, Kierkegaard’s thought is often framed as a reaction against both Enlightenment rationalism and the over-emphasis on systematization and reflection in Hegelianism. Kierkegaard is thereby understood as prompting the turns of both existentialism and the postmodern deconstruction of the subject. Yet, in treating his work in an objectivist-historical manner, such a framing of the thought of Kierkegaard does not address the ways in which his critiques of Enlightenment rationalism and Hegelianism were also deep engagements with his present age. Thus, any adequate engagement with Kierkegaard must contend with the very category of the present age.
To approach the questions raised above regarding the relationship between Kierkegaard’s thought and the single individual in the present age, it is, therefore, critical to clarify Kierkegaard’s conception both of the present age and of the single individual. For Kierkegaard, because all generations, and all individuals in all generations, share the same task, they all—each generation and all individuals—constitute the present age. The present age, then, is a category of—is comprehended by—the history in which single individuals must learn to respond to the issues and debates that distinguish their particular time by establishing as their most fundamental priority—by accepting as their most fundamental task the problem of becoming—what Kierkegaard calls in Fear and Trembling the essentially human. For, according to Kierkegaard, by being divided against themselves, alienated from themselves in their superficiality and indolence, single individuals in the present age have already shunned their essential human task. The present age, for Kierkegaard, is thus an age of despair in which the single individual who goes badly must engage in what Kierkegaard describes in Philosophical Fragments as the task of coming historically into existence as the genuine contemporary—the task of loving God and neighbor.
How, then, should we understand Kierkegaard’s assertion that love of God and neighbor is the standard by which we situate ourselves in and address the problems of the present age—both his own age and ours? From what standpoint, in other words, are we to assess the relevance of Kierkegaard in the year 2013, if, as he says, the present age and its problems are known only by and through coming into existence as the neighbor? In asking about the ways in which Kierkegaard’s thought challenges us today—but when or what is “today”?—must we not also ask about the principles that guide our response to Kierkegaard? At issue, then, is what it would mean today to be a genuine contemporary of Kierkegaard, of the present age, of ourselves.
These questions are discussed in this Special Issue by six contributors, each of whom examines different implications of Kierkegaard’s thought for debates that are central to our times. The essays include: (1) Mark Cauchi’s deliberations on how celebrating Kierkegaard at year two hundred situates him in our present age by criticizing his conception of modernity, which involves rethinking the relationship between the religious and the secular; (2) Grant Havers’s analysis of how consideration of the relationship between the individual and history in the thought of both Kierkegaard and Theodor Adorno allows us to assess the latter’s critique of the former and reformulate Kierkegaard’s contribution to political theory; (3) Ada S. Jaarsma’s discussion of the relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought for current neoliberal and biopolitical strictures and subjectivities and the problematics of sexuality and identity; (4) Paulette Kidder’s examination of the relationship between Kierkegaard’s conception of philosophy and Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of film, specifically his theory of the cinematic presentation of marriage; (5) Avron Kulak’s discussion of how the relationship between love and history in Kierkegaard’s works provides the hermeneutical principles for understanding both his treatment of Socrates and his polemical attack on Christendom; and (6) Walter Wietzske’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s concept of single individuality and how it relates to Christine Korsgaard’s concept of normativity.
The very breadth of these issues testifies to the fact that Kierkegaard still has much to teach us—perhaps primarily that, because no one learns the essentially human from, and thus no one can teach the essentially human to, another, we come into existence as the neighbor only when we presuppose the essentially human in all: to love, Kierkegaard insists, is to presuppose (build up) love in the other. Yet, because it is through love—of God and neighbor—that the problems of the present age are revealed, it is precisely in presupposing the essentially human in all, precisely in loving the other as oneself, that our failures to be the neighbor are made manifest. As Kierkegaard writes in Philosophical Fragments, the deepest self-reflection is the consciousness of sin. It is thus not only with profound respect and gratitude for the challenge that Kierkegaard addresses to us as single individuals in the present age but also with true fear and trembling in light of that challenge that the authors of these essays address themselves to Kierkegaard and his readers.