ABSTRACT It is commonly argued that Kierkegaard’s famous observation that life can be understood backward, but must be lived forward excludes the possibility of intellectual preparation to life. This article suggests the view that, while it is not the case that Kierkegaard has an elaborate vision of thinking about the possibilities of life one faces, he engages the notion of imaginary construction [experimentere] to propose existential prototypes for mental exploration that prepare us for life lived forward. It is concluded that (...) the person capable of imaginary construction has to be able to be firmly in control of the possibilities she faces. In Kierkegaard’s view, such a control requires the grasp of the opposite temporal directions – to be both looking at one’s past and future. Kierkegaard’s employment of such a double temporal vision of existence is modelled on Janus Bifrons, the two-faced god who is effectively able to simultaneously look both backward into the past and forward into the future. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article engages Frater Taciturnus’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ to argue for a religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard. This religious aesthetics is designed to purify the passions and help the believer ‘see’ the religious ideal, but also to confront the aesthetic spectator with the religious reality of her own situation. My claim for this revised reading of religious poetics in Kierkegaard derives from Taciturnus’s view of a superior form of religious ideality that comes ‘after actuality’. This ideality is not an (...) envisioned ideal that is untested by actuality and thus ‘illusory’ but an ideal that is graspable only after the self has acknowledged the actuality of their sinful condition, rather than any specific actual sin. To appreciate this form of ideality, Frater Taciturnus repeatedly resorts to visual metaphors and the power of imagination, suggesting that the religious ideal must be ‘seen’ with a sort of synoptic vision capable of looking past both comedy and tragedy and resulting in the purification of our typical affective responses to aesthetic objects. Seeing in this way, the individual imaginatively engages in religious aesthetics and grasps the religious ideality by affirming the actuality of their own sinfulness and receiving forgiveness for that sinfulness. (shrink)

Drawing on insights from Søren Kierkegaard, Art and Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Account defends the idea that art matters in our society today because it can play a pivotal role in helping us become better and more authentic versions of ourselves.

I argue that Kierkegaard has an account of thought experiment. While his contemporary Ørsted’s contributions to the early history of the concept of ‘thought experiment’ have been recently acknowledged, Kierkegaard’s contributions remain largely unrecognized. I argue that Kierkegaard’s method of ‘imaginary construction’ [Tanke-Experiment] aims at identifying underlying invariants in objects of experience. I outline similarities between Ørsted’s pursuit of invariants in the sciences and Kierkegaard’s fictional variations in Repetition. One implication is that Kierkegaard’s view is more scientific and methodological than (...) is standardly thought by Kierkegaard scholars, who more commonly treat imaginary construction as a literary device. A further implication is that Kierkegaard, like Ørsted, is interested in the success or failure of mental acts, rather than (or in addition to) practical action, as is more standardly associated with Kierkegaard. One original development, beyond what Kierkegaard inherits from Ørsted, is the role of thought experiments as exceptions. An exception is a case that falls outside a rule without breaking it. Exceptions can neither establish a rule nor refute its necessity; however, they turn attention to relevant principles and further determine their content. I highlight similarities between Ørsted’s account of thought experiments and Kierkegaard’s as a method of variation. (shrink)