Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- Sigla used for Kierkegaard's published writings
- 1 Introduction: Kierkegaard's life and works
- 2 Pseudonymity and indirect communication
- 3 The human self: Truth and subjectivity
- 4 The stages of existence: Forms of the aesthetic life
- 5 The ethical life as the quest for selfhood
- 6 Religious existence: Religiousness A
- 7 Christian existence: Faith and the paradox
- 8 Kierkegaard's dual challenge to the contemporary world
- For further reading: some personal suggestions
- Index
6 - Religious existence: Religiousness A
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Chronology
- Sigla used for Kierkegaard's published writings
- 1 Introduction: Kierkegaard's life and works
- 2 Pseudonymity and indirect communication
- 3 The human self: Truth and subjectivity
- 4 The stages of existence: Forms of the aesthetic life
- 5 The ethical life as the quest for selfhood
- 6 Religious existence: Religiousness A
- 7 Christian existence: Faith and the paradox
- 8 Kierkegaard's dual challenge to the contemporary world
- For further reading: some personal suggestions
- Index
Summary
The concept of the ethical is, as we have seen, central to many of Kierkegaard's early pseudonymous writings, including Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. However, the concept of the ethical is also important in what may be Kierkegaard's most important philosophical work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, attributed to the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, though with Kierkegaard's own name on the title page as editor. Postscript (as I shall abbreviate it) is, as the title claims, a sequel to an earlier book, Philosophical Fragments, also attributed to Climacus with Kierkegaard as editor.
Fragments (again to use an abbreviated title) takes the form of an extended thought-experiment in which Climacus first develops what he calls the “Socratic” view of the Truth and how the Truth can be acquired, a view that draws on the Platonic view that humans have an inborn knowledge of “the Forms,” so that what we call learning is actually “recollection.” This Socratic view seems to stand for any human philosophy that views the Truth as something immanent to human nature, something humans can access through their own rational efforts. Climacus then pretends to invent an alternative to this view, using the tools of logic and the imagination. The alternative, however, looks suspiciously similar to Christianity, since it centers on the idea that human beings have lost the Truth and can only regain it through a Teacher who is both divine and human, an incarnate deity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- KierkegaardAn Introduction, pp. 110 - 138Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009