VDM Verlag Corporeality, Consciousness and Religion: A Study in Søren Kierkegaard's Anthropology

The present analysis situates the thought of Søren Kierkegaard in the context of the language and categories proper to the philosophical world of German Idealism and the Enlightenment. As emphasized in contemporary research, Kierkegaard?s stages are not levels of consciousness of the Absolute, mirroring God?s self-awareness. The stages are shaped by finite human existence, which strives towards identity by successive interpretations of the self in terms of normative presuppositions. Nevertheless, the approach determining Kierkegaard?s philosophy of existence is itself immanent to an idealist method of self-grounding. Such self-grounding is originally conceptualized in Fichte?s interpretation of Kant?s transcendental ego, with his radical attribution of the inexplicable power of world-creation to knowledge. The simultaneous crisis of the rational world-construction, giving rise to the category of religion as a challenge to the nihilism of purely autonomous reason, is not due to the impact of new ideas, but to an internal amplification of the idealist philosophy of the self. The study aims to emphasize and delineate this often-ignored hermeneutic synthesis at play in Kierkegaard. About the Author Karstein Hopland is professor emeritus of the Study of Religion at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively about Christianity in the modern era, religion and philosophy, including Søren Kierkegaard.