Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work The Sickness unto Death belongs among his most popular and most commented works. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, numerous philosophers paid close attention to the theory of selfhood systematically expounded in this work. The study examines the critique of this theory formulated by Romano Guardini in a series of essays published in the 1920s. Guardini’s critique is an important contribution to the German mid-war debate on the nature of Kierkegaard’s philosophy and continues to provoke scholarly reactions even today. It is, therefore, relevant to study Guardini’s arguments in detail in order to see whether his definition of Kierkegaard’s theory as “dynamic personalism” is tenable.
Carl Schmitt sees the year of 1848 as the critical point of the 19th century. With reference to the events of that year the Communist line of interpretation was constituted which explains the 19th century through the prism of the continuity of the revolutionary movement’s development. The symbol of this continuity is The Communist Manifesto which connects the revolutionary events of 1848 and 1917. Against this tradition of interpretation Schmitt promotes a different line of interpretation based on an alternative continuity. Although the group of thinkers belonging to this line is relatively heterogeneous Schmitt identifies three diagnostic-prognostic moments that connect them. Included in this line are both Søren Kierkegaard and Juan Donoso Cortés, whose respective contributions he analyses. His parallel reading of these authors includes a problematic exposition of some aspects of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.
The paper identifies four models of social involvement in Kierkegaard’s treatise The Single Individual. These models are embodied in four figures discussed by Kierkegaard: the professional leader of the crowd, the truth-witness, the politician who loves being a human being and loves humankind, and Kierkegaard himself as an author. The paper explores the motives, stances, activities and goals of these figures. It analyses their attitudes to the single individual and the crowd, as well as to politics. The investigation develops against the background of Martin Buber’s claim that Kierkegaard makes a demand on the single individual to withdraw from political life and renounce any ambition to form it.
Kierkegaard’s influence on the social-political thought is a lively topic in current scholarly debates on Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Buber’s social-political reception of Kierkegaard is relatively well-known but the research has so far focused almost exclusively on Buber’s dialogical oeuvre (i.e. works written after 1916). The paper broadens the scope of research by elucidating Buber’s pre-dialogical reception of Kierkegaard’s ideas and conceptual emphases. It examines the ways in which Kierkegaard provided inspiration for Buber’s philosophy of Judaism, theory of patriotism and theory of political groups.
In 1914 Theodor Haecker presented Kierkegaard to the German-speaking public as a social critic, when he published the translation of a fragment from Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review (1846). The translation inspired several influential authors of the interwar period, who commented on the condition of the society of that time. One of them was Karl Jaspers who believed that Kierkegaard’s views were more relevant in the 20th century than they were in the 19th century. In his work The Spiritual Condition of the Age (1931/1932) Jaspers adopted several motifs from Kierkegaard’s critique of society. In the present paper the author examines thematic points of intersection of Kierkegaard’s reflections on the public and Jaspers’ reflections on the mass. He elucidates also Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’ views on excellence, envy, levelling and modern media. Both thinkers provide original and incisive analyses of the decadent features of modern society.
Theodor Haecker (1879 – 1945) was an influential commentator, translator and promoter of Kierkegaard’s philosophy during the era of the German “Kierkegaard Renaissance.” In 1914 he published the translation of one part of Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review (1846) to which he attached a twenty-five-page-long Afterword. In the Afterword he engaged in a sharp polemic against the contemporary cultural and political liberalism promoted in certain German periodicals. He based his criticism on Kierkegaard’s findings concerning the levelling role of the modern press. Haecker’s translation and commentary create a philosophical continuum that attests to the lasting relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought. They influenced the thinking of a number of German-speaking philosophers, such as K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, F. Ebner and T. W. Adorno.
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