I. A Defense of Adorno's Reading of Kierkegaard On February 27, 1933, Theodor W. Adorno published his first work, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, which was a revision of the Habilitationsschrift that Adorno wrote under Paul Tillich and Max Horkheimer between 1929 and 1931. The Reichstag fire raged that evening, the climax of the Nazi Machtergreifung, and in a matter of days Adorno's most important interlocutors—Walter Benjamin and Siegried Kracauer—would flee Germany. The political context of the Nazi takeover is the (...) obvious background to Adorno's Kierkegaardbuch , the monograph that became the…. (shrink)

The duty to love one's neighbor as oneself is at the core of Kierkegaard's Works of Love . In this book, Kierkegaard unfolds the meaning of neighborly love and claims that it is the only valid form of true love. He contrasts between neighborly love and preferential love (which includes romantic love and friendship) and criticizes the latter for being nothing but a form of selfishness. However, in some contexts, Kierkegaard seems to acknowledge the significance of preferential love relationships, and (...) does not disallow them. Therefore, his understanding of preferential love appears to be confused and inconsistent. My essay discusses the tension in Kierkegaard's position regarding preferential love, and by presenting recent readings of Works of Love , it asks whether this tension is resolvable and offers a suggestion for a possible solution. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's writings contain seemingly divergent pictures of the relation of God's grace and human works. The differences are evident in the ways that he portrays the connection of human beings’ natural loving capacities to God's gracious enabling of love. What is the relation of human affiliative dispositions, such as attachment to family and friends, to the more extraordinary forms of Christian love, such as loving strangers, enemies, and God? Kierkegaard sometimes stressed the continuity of natural loves and God's grace and (...) sometimes their discontinuity because in different contexts he was pursuing different edifying purposes. On the one hand, he emphasized the continuity of the two when he was attempting to stimulate the appropriate yearning that is a precondition for welcoming God's grace. On the other hand, elsewhere he stressed the difference of the natural loves and Christian love in order to foster an appreciation for the uniqueness and gratuity of God's self-giving. (shrink)

In this article, I embark on an analysis of Søren Kierkegaard's view of human otherness in strict correlation to his Christian philosophy. More specifically, my aim is to show that Kierkegaard's thought is essentially informed by a decisive appropriation of the soteriological category of sin which has momentous implications for Kierkegaard's views of selfhood and intersubjectivity. The main argument is that both Kierkegaard's negative evaluation of human otherness and his acerbic indictments of any collectivist interference in salvific matters cohere with (...) his appropriation of the doctrine of the Fall. At the same time, I show in what sense Kierkegaard deems human alterity to be indispensable to one's spiritual self-becoming expressed through the Christian imperative of loving the other as neighbor. Seen thus, agape, while supplementing Kierkegaard's creationistic psychology, actually becomes the necessary restorative opposite of sinfulness in the self's encounters with the distinct uniqueness of the human other. (shrink)

The ethics expressed in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love has been subject to persistent criticism for its perceived indifference to concrete persons and failure to attend to the other in their individual specificity. Recent defenses of Works of Love have focused in large part on the role of vision in the text, showing the supposed “blind” empty formalism of the emphasis on the category of “the neighbor” to serve a normative model of seeing the other correctly. However, when this problem is (...) viewed in the broader context of Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of moral vision, two further, thus far unanswered, problems emerge: How can we see the other and the moral demand they represent at the same time, and how can we see the other and our own condition at the same time? This paper draws on other Kierkegaardian texts to show how Kierkegaard’s model of moral vision allows for the simultaneity in vision necessary to overcome these challenges. (shrink)

Kierkegaard’s attitude toward the family of issues usually associated with the rubric ‘nature and grace’ has long been disputed by his interpreters. Some of have seen him as a proponent of the ‘grace perfects nature’ position while others have viewed him as a radical bifurcator of nature and grace. Actually, Kierkegaard’s treatment of these issues is more nuanced. He does propose that human nature intrinsically possesses a yearning that can only be satisfied by God’s grace (and therefore nature is oriented (...) toward grace), but he suggests that the grace that God offers is utterly unanticipated, counter-intuitive, and potentially offensive (and therefore grace disrupts nature). The prospect of God’s self-emptying love is something that nature did not know would fulfill its deepest longings, and which excites both attraction and repulsion. (shrink)