Kierkegaard on the Dancers of Faith and of Infinity

Epoche: A Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2018

Dance is intimately connected to both Kierkegaard's personal life and his life in writing, as exemplified in his famous nightly attendance at the dance-filled theater, and his invitation to the readers of "A First and Last Explanation" to (in his words) "dance with" his pseudonyms. The present article's acceptance of that dance invitation proceeds as follows: the first section surveys the limited secondary literature on dance in Kierkegaard, focusing on the work of M. Ferreira and Edward Mooney. The second section explores the hidden dancing dimensions of Kierkegaard's "leap" and "shadow-dance" (Schattenspiel). And the third section reinterprets the pseudonymous works richest in dance, Repetition and Postscript, concluding that the religious for him is the lighthearted dance of a comic actor through the everyday theater of the world.

2016

In this paper I discuss two key works written by Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Practice in Christianity, under the pseudonyms Johannes de Silentio and Anti-Climacus respectively. I focus on three questions: what is Johannes view of faith, what is Anti-Climacus' view of faith and how are these Kierkegaard's conclusions? I argue that stemming from Johannes' and Anti-Climacus' points of view, Kierkegaard's view of faith is the aligning of the self in a trusting relationship with the God-man. One outside of faith can perceive faith to be a paradox or find faith offensive; one must have faith to avoid offense and overcome the paradox. Chapter 1 focuses on the connection between Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms using his work The Point of View. In this chapter I map out Kierkegaard's method of communication and the purpose for his use of pseudonyms. Chapter 2 focuses on Johannes' view of faith in Fear and Trembling. Johannes says that faith is formed through a private relationship with God. One with faith is silent about this relationship from the point of view of one who is in the ethical. Johannes understands faith dialectically. Faith is a paradox to Johannes because he does not understand the justification for Abraham's action. Chapter 3 focuses on Anti-Climacus' view of faith in Practice in Christianity. Anti-Climacus presents a rigorous account of faith. He says faith is being a contemporary of the God-man and meeting the requirements of believing the God-man's words. When one becomes a contemporary with the God-man one can become offended by the God-1 Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, trans.

Kierkegaard is widely regarded as the quintessential proto-existentialist. This paper's aim shall thus be twofold : (1) to examine his treatment of the myth of Abraham in Fear and Trembling, and (2) to attempt to ascertain the ways in which his revolutionary conception of faith came to alter the subsequent philosophical landscape of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Modern Theology, 2019

What is the role of the image in faith? How should we relate to Abraham and Christ? Through new readings of two of Kierkegaard’s rarely compared texts, this article locates the religious power of the image in its ability to cleanse the subject of received mis-images of Christianity, and suggests that Kierkegaard was here inspired by elements of Rheno-Flemish mysticism. Kierkegaard not only identifies this inward existential kenosis as the correct form of imitation, he narratively induces this in his reader. As well as examining this textual performativity and the imagination’s role of kenotically preparing the subject for her subsequent upbuilding, this article identifies the movement of kenosis as constitutive of faith – a task that involves suffering, but a suffering that is always accompanied and tempered by love.

The present article deals with religious faith by comparing the so-called double movement of faith in Kierkegaard to Kant's moral faith. Kierkegaard's double movement of faith and Kant's moral faith can be seen as providing different accounts of religious faith, as well as involving different solutions to the problem of realizing the highest good. The double movement of faith in Fear and Trembling provides an account of the structure of faith that helps us make sense of what Kierkegaard means by religious faith in general, as well as to understand better the relation between philosophy and Christian thinking in Kierkegaard. It is argued that previous scholarship has described the relation between Kierkegaard and Kant in a misleading manner by interpreting Kant as an ethicist and overlooking the role of grace in Kant. (2012) 48, 199-220

Kierkegaard on Faith and Desire: The Limits of Christianity and the Human Heart, 2021

This dissertation analyzes and evaluates several major productions by Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). It focuses on three works Kierkegaard authored under pseudonyms – Either / Or (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), and Philosophical Fragments (1844) – and the non-pseudonymously authored Works of Love (1847). The dissertation argues that for Kierkegaard, Christian faith is a distinctive capacity of the individual human being that enables the individual to organize their desires and pursue the good life in a way that is qualitatively superior to what is available outside of Christianity. Through exegesis of Kierkegaard’s works, the dissertation identifies two elements of Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christian faith that recur throughout his authorship. The first is an axiom that undergirds Kierkegaard’s conception of the good life, namely that for the best possible life to be lived (that is, the Christian life), a person must ultimately be individually responsible for their own happiness or unhappiness. The second is a complex juxtaposition between Christianity and alternative, non-Christian worldviews (collectively called ‘Paganism’ by Kierkegaard) which Kierkegaard performs to provoke his reader into making the decision to affirm Christianity. If, with the assistance of God, the individual does so (that is, has faith), their desires and motivations are reorganized to enable a higher form of happiness and a new form of moral engagement (love for the neighbor). The dissertation characterizes this juxtaposition through a stagecraft analogy: the mechane, a crane that lifts a theater actor to simulate flight. The analogy highlights the relationship of asymmetrical dependence between Kierkegaard’s accounts of Christianity and non-Christian alternatives. For an actor to take flight (happiness) with the mechane (Christianity), the hoist (faith) that suspends them must be supported by a tension force from the ground (‘Paganism’). Faith requires awareness that the theological and anthropological scaffolding that makes Christian faith possible is transcendent and distinctive. But at the same time, to avoid compromising the transcendence and distinctiveness of faith, the individual cannot completely foreclose the possibility of that which Christianity negates, for example, through rational proofs or research into the historical origins of the Christian tradition.

This paper argues that a properly "Christian deconstruction" of reason, for Kierkegaard, depends on the necessity of finitude and guilt and their rootedness in an existential anthropology. That is, the paradoxes of reason (perhaps practical reason in particular) that lead to reason's own self-deconstruction are precisely exposed in an existential anthropology that conceives of the human being as spirit and thus as task, and as such, inevitably finite and (ironically) powerless vis-à-vis this task. Christian deconstruction then hinges, I argue, on Kierkegaard's existential anthropology, which in turn depends upon finitude or the essential impotency of the human being vis-à-vis an ironic task of selfhood. First, I will discuss Kierkegaard's conception of the self as task from The Sickness Unto Death, as well as the conditions for the possibility of conceiving of such a self. Then I will argue that the conditions for the task of selfhood reveal an ironic paradox at the root of the task itself, and yet this paradox enables the recognition of the impossibility of such a task, allowing for the deconstruction of the self and reason and the moment of grace and decision. Finitude qua impotency and guilt prove then to be a necessity for grace and faith.

2003