Kierkegaard and the Assumptions of Philosophy
Abstract
This thesis explores the philosophy of early existentialist Søren Kierkegaard as implicitly critiquing the assumed essence of objectivity both directly understood as Absolute Truth in a classically Hegelian sense, but also in a more oblique meta-textual fashion in the presence of his varied pseudonymity. The first chapter takes on classical readings of Kierkegaard as a philosophy of stages—sometimes as aesthetic-ethical-religious, or otherwise despairing-anxious-faithful—and offers the alternative comprehension of a philosophy of moods which encompasses all these same “stages” as existing in and through each other in subjective existence. In the second chapter, I take the traditional reading of stages and unpack its complications in the presence of the varied and complicated pseudonyms his works were published under. These pseudonyms represent an ironic distance not simply from the ideas embraced in each work but from philosophy itself understand as instances of objective reasonings. In the third chapter, I explore Theodor Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard which refuses readings of him centered on the necessity of the pseudonyms. His refusal to comprehend the writing of philosophers as poetry and his ultimate desire for the “truth content” that followed him to the very end in his Aesthetic Theory are underlined by the very hermetic irony held in his essential style; himself subject to the poetry he longs to rid of. It is with this modern critique that I hold my interpretation of Kierkegaard as implicitly attacking the very foundations of philosophy as reason and calling to its readers to re-examine the idea that, as Kierkegaard famously wrote, “subjectivity is truth.”