Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | November/2020 |
Spalte: | 1099–1101 |
Kategorie: | Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Kangas, David J. |
Titel/Untertitel: | Errant Affirmations. On the Philosophical Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Religious Discourses. |
Verlag: | London u. a.: Bloomsbury Academic 2017. X, 198 S. Geb. £ 90,00. ISBN 9781350020054. |
Rezensent: | Iben Damgaard |
In the opening sentence of the preface, David J. Kangas points out that »Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, was a brilliant polemicist« (IX). Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings present a harsh critique against speculative thought, »the present age«, the established church and so much else. In the »No« of the polemical writings, K.s perceives »something of the spirit of resentment animating them« (IX), in contrast to Kierkegaard’s religious discourses, for what re-sonate in them is »the affirmation that ›there is a today, with an in-finite emphasis upon is‹« (X).
According to K., the discourses like »the work of art« give time and »create room to breathe, the very breath of affirmation« (X). They point towards »an affirmation of reality that is uncondi-tioned, that is, without cause or occasion […] an affirmation of being in its superfluity« (5). Throughout the book, K.s shows how the discourses bring forth this surplus of being as opposed to the self’s actualizing itself through projects, goals, wishes and desires. Since this is an affirmation over nothing, it appears »perverse or errant« (6) – hence the title of the book.
In recent years, Kierkegaard’s various edifying discourses have received much more attention in Kierkegaard scholarship than they used to. K.s leaves discussions in the secondary literature aside and chooses to focus instead on Kierkegaard’s own writings. He points out that this book is not: »a systematic exposition of the philosophical content of the religious discourses« (X). Furthermore, it is not »an effort to separate out some purely philosophical core from these writings, which would imply an artificial split between the philosophical and the religious« (1), for it is, according to K., precisely in their character as religious that »the discourses achieve a philosophical radicality, an effort to think beyond the terms of the inheritance bequeathed by Descartes and repeated so profoundly in speculative idealism« (1). This book beautifully succeeds in grasping and opening up the philosophical in the religious rather than clinging to simplistic divisions between the philosophical and the religious, and this is one of the many strengths of this rich and thought-provoking book.
Errant Affirmations consists of three parts. In the first part »Inversions of thought and speech: the edifying discourses (1843–44)«, K. explores how »in faith one is not gathered up into a wholeness of meaning, but into an unreserved welcome of the future« (15). K. aptly addresses a Nietzschean critique of religion: When Kierkegaard’s discourse claims that a human being’s highest perfection is to need God, is this then a nihilistic resentment dimi-nishing the human being in favor of a supreme being? K. shows how »the discourse fights its way through various misunderstand-ings to uncover a power of affirmation that neither rests in nor excludes human capability« (68).
The second part of the book »Occasions of affirmation: occa-sional discourses (1845)«, argues that the Kierkegaardian understanding of confession is not about the Augustinian facere veritatem, it is rather »an undoing, a deconstituting« (93), a matter of becoming still. K. furthermore interestingly shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of death in the discourse »At a Graveside« radi-cally differs from Heidegger’s philosophy of being-toward-death.
In the third part of the book »Bloomings: discourses on ›The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air‹ (1847, 1849)«, K. attends to how Kierkegaard explores the negative possibility of becoming self-ensnared in our own representations of the real as well as the possibility of unconditioned joy in being present today. K. addresses the critique of metaphysics in asking whether Kierkegaard in this emphasis on joy as self-presence today »repeat the fundamental gesture of the modern metaphysics of self-consciousness – namely, grasping the constant self-presence of the ego, its lack of any difference, in its capacity as a foundation?« (164) K. argues that according to Kierkegaard, joy is not a liberation from infinite sorrow, from finitude, temporality and mortality, for the self-presence of joy is not interpretable »in terms of self-certainty of self-consciousness« (164), it is rather »the temporal-ity of a beginning that is not a beginning towards anything definite, that is, not the beginning of a project« (165).
In this wonderful book, K. convincingly argues that Kierkegaard’s discourses are not about making reassurances of some normative moral or theological foundations, they are »about finding a way to affirm, each time again, reality in its excess to norms. Such affirmation – if and when it occurs – can never, in principle, be authorized; it must remain an errant affirmation« (171).