Intermission: the Corsair affair
Intermission: the Corsair affair
Three: as many readers observe it, the majority of Kierkegaard’s later religious or ‘single-mindedly’ spiritual text (1846–55) bear his real name, even symbolically in the case of the much celebrated Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847) where the lyrical evocation of ‘purity of heart’ seems, indeed, clearly indicative of a new beginning. What we see is however not necessarily the Augustinian kind of ‘return of’, say, ‘a repentant playboy’ to the bosom of God, the ultimate source of one’s authenticity. The nominal oneness does not guarantee the oneness of the named but could, on the contrary, further disguise the actual complexity of the person’s psychological identities. When, in 1850, Kierkegaard writes:
Socrates did not possess the true ideal, nor had he any notion of sin, nor that man’s salvation required a crucified God…. He therefore retained irony which simply expressed his superiority to the world’s folly. But for
a Christian, irony is not enough, it can never answer to the terrible truth that salvation means that God is crucified, though irony can dstill be used for some time in Christendom, to arouse people
(Journals, undated)
Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 360
he sounds, looks, different, indeed. But has he discarded irony entirely? Would the eradication of irony be enough? Note: his later text is equally, heuristically, ‘arousing’. Kierkegaard, one must remember, questioned in every step of the way any dogmatic, self- servingly pietistic, institutionalized talk of a one-time rebirth or redemption. The force of religious belief, manifest ever more intensely in his later works, is in the very transformative or trans-substantive becoming of a person: repeatedly practised, not merely held, faith makes one ‘one-self’, the self being, as Anti-Climacus says in Sickness unto Death (1849), practically ‘a relation which relates itself to itself’. The Kierkegaard used selectively by French existentialists later was just that self.
Four: curiously, the late Michel Foucault, the late twentieth-century thinker, who creatively revived traditional ascetism, also held a similar view: ethics as a self-relation rather than, more moral-mechanically, self-regulation. As with many ‘post-modern’ or ‘post-Hegelian’ philosophers (e.g. Jacques Derrida), who pointedly resist universalizing the concrete stance of the autobiographical I, Foucault’s so-called ‘quasi-religiosity’ has Kierkegaardian resonances. The last two decades have been seeing ‘dead-locked’ limit- philosophy’s articulated turn to ethics and religion, which resembles, and seems even to
be anticipated by, Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’. Inspired by Emmanuel Levinas’s radical, ethico-theological reworking on the phenomenological tradition of modern philosophy, Continental philosophers of religion, today, such as Jean-Luc Marion and John Caputo, are debating the very possibility of the Gift (Gave), that which is, in the idiom of the later Kierkegaard, ‘absurdly’ given from God—as opposed to a priori given as a condition (Kant)—which it is always wrong for us humans (or Christians) not to accept. The task (Opgave), for Kierkegaard, is to realize it, every time the gifting happens to the believer. The task, for us readers, would be to receive the Kierkegaardian gift of thought, critically.
Parts
» Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Thought
» ANTI-COLONIAL MOVEMENTS AND IDEAS
» SIMON J.POTTER ARNOLD, MATTHEW (1822–87)
» S.JONES BERNSTEIN, EDUARD (1850–1932)
» THE BODY, MEDICINE, HEALTH AND DISEASE
» BONALD, LOUIS DE (1754–1840)
» PAMELA PILBEAM CARLYLE, THOMAS (1795–1881)
» CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ AUGUSTE (1768–1848)
» CHINESE THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
» CIESZKOWSKI, AUGUST (1814–94)
» JOHN MORROW COMBE, GEORGE (1788–1858)
» ALAN R.KING COMTE, AUGUSTE (1798–1857)
» The conservative reaction to radical natural-rights theory
» French conservatives and the challenge of the revolutionary past
» Institutional continuity and intellectual and moral discontinuity in British conservatism
» JOHN MORROW CONSIDÉRANT, VICTOR (1808–93)
» CONSTANT, BENJAMIN (1767–1830)
» CLIVE E.HILL DEMOCRACY, POPULISM AND RIGHTS
» PAMELA PILBEAM DEWEY, JOHN (1859–1952)
» DILTHEY, WILHELM (1833–1911)
» DOSTOEVSKY, FEODOR (1821–81)
» CHERKASOVA DU BOIS, W.E.B. (1868–1963)
» Saint-Simon and Saint-Simonism
» Other forms of non-Marxian socialism
» GREGORY CLAEYS EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (1803–82)
» ENFANTIN, BARTHÉLEMY-PROSPER (1796–1864)
» Revolutions, citizenship and sexual difference
» Socialism, labour, evangelical reform and public speaking
» Women’s rights at mid-century: an international movements
» KATHRYN M.TOMASEK FEUERBACH, LUDWIG (1804–72)
» FOURIER, CHARLES (1772–1837)
» KARINE VARLEY FREUD, SIGMUND (1856–1939)
» GREGORY CLAEYS GANDHI, MOHANDAS K. (1869–1948)
» GARIBALDI, GIUSEPPE (1807–82)
» CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN GEORGE, HENRY (1839–97)
» GOBINEAU, JOSEPH COMTE DE (1816– 82)
» LYMAN TOWER SARGENT GREEN, T.H. (1836–82)
» EVELINA BARBASHINA HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
» From conjectural history to the Whig interpretation of history
» The critique of the idea of progress
» HUMBOLDT, WILHELM, FREIHERR VON (1767–1835)
» TIM KIRK HUXLEY, T.H. (1825–95)
» CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE
» SIMON J.POTTER INDIAN THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
» INDUSTRIALISM, POVERTY AND THE WORKING CLASSES
» INTELLECTUALS, ELITES AND MERITOCRACY
» Tanzimat and the Ottoman Empire
» Other responses to colonialism and modernity
» Opening of the country and the Meiji Restoration
» CHUSHICHI TSUZUKI JEFFERSON, THOMAS (1743–1826)
» JEVONS, WILLIAM STANLEY (1835–82)
» One person, many faces: an introduction to a resonant life
» Stages on Life’s Way: from aesthetic, via ethical, to religious
» Intermission: the Corsair affair
» KROPOTKIN, PIETR (1842–1921)
» LABRIOLA, ANTONIO (1843–1904)
» LAMARTINE, ALPHONSE DE (1790– 1869)
» Continental liberalism FRANCE
» GREGORY CLAEYS LIEBKNECHT, WILHELM (1826–1900)
» LOMBROSO, CESARE (1835–1909)
» MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1800–59)
» Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
» Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche
» GREGORY CLAEYS MAISTRE, JOSEPH DE (1753–1821)
» MALTHUS, THOMAS ROBERT (1766– 1834)
» MARSHALL, ALFRED (1842–1924)
» GREGORY CLAEYS MARX AND MARXISM
» The development of Marxism to 1914
» GREGORY CLAEYS MAURRAS, CHARLES (1868–1952)
» MEINECKE, FRIEDRICH (1862–1954)
» MICHAEL LEVIN MILL, JOHN STUART (1806–73)
» THE NATION, NATIONALISM AND THE NATIONAL PRINCIPLE
» CHRISTOPHER DUGGAN NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)
» DAN STONE NOVELS, POETRY AND DRAMA
» The development of Owen’s thought after 1820
» The development of Paine’s thought
» DAVID GLADSTONE PARETO, WILFREDO (1848–1923)
» Alternatives to classical economics
» Utilitarianism and the marginal revolution
» ANTHONY BREWER PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1809– 65)
» ‘Psychology has a long past but a short history’
» ‘Time present and time past’: James’s Principles
» RANKE, LEOPOLD VON (1795–1886)
» Biblical criticism and moral critiques
» TIMOTHY LARSEN RENAN, JOSEPH-ERNEST (1823–1892)
» GEORGIOS VAROUXAKIS RICARDO, DAVID (1772–1823)
» ROMANTICISM, INDIVIDUALISM AND IDEAS OF THE SELF
» Individualism, individuality, the self and psyche
» From alienation to Romantic love
» Critique of Political Economy
» Nihilism, populism, anarchism and early Marxism
» Religious and moral developments in Russian literature and philosophy
» SAINT-SIMON, HENRI DE (1760–1825)
» SAY, JEAN-BAPTISTE (1767–1832)
» RICHARD WHATMORE SCHELLING, F.W.J. (1775–1854)
» SCHLEGEL, CARL WILHELM FRIEDRICH VON (1772–1829)
» CLIVE E.HILL SIEYÈS, EMMANUEL-JOSEPH (1748– 1836)
» RICHARD WHATMORE SIMMEL, GEORG (1858–1918)
» DAN STONE SISMONDI, JEAN-CHARLES-LÉONARD SIMONDE DE (1773–1842)
» Social Darwinism and politics
» Social Darwinism, secularism and religion
» MICHAEL LEVIN SOREL, GEORGES (1847–1922)
» SPENCER, HERBERT (1820–1903)
» CLIVE E.HILL STEWART, DUGALD (1753–1828)
» TIM KIRK STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808–74)
» TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1861–1941)
» S.JONES THEORIES OF EDUCATION AND CHARACTER FORMATION
» THEORIES OF LAW, CRIMINOLOGY AND PENAL REFORM
» JOHN PRATT THEORIES OF THE STATE AND SOCIETY: THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS
» THIERS, LOUIS-ADOLPHE (1797–1877)
» GEORGIOS VAROUXAKIS THOREAU, HENRY DAVID (1817–62)
» ALAN D.HODDER TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1805–59)
» EVELINA BARBASHINA TÖNNIES, FERDINAND (1855–1936)
» Middle and late nineteenth-century utopianism LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM AND UTOPIANISM
» LATER NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOCIALISM
» GREGORY CLAEYS WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. (1856–1915)
» CLIVE E.HILL WEBER, MAX (1864–1920)
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