Kierkegaard s Relations to Idealism Demystified

MARÍA JOSÉ BINETTI

Kierkegaard in Context: Essays in Honor of Jon Stewart

Mercer University Press

Lugar: Macon; Año: 2019; p. 98 - 111

For decades, Kierkegaardian studies have been on the lookout for idealist and Hegelian ghosts, as if idealism were a sort of spectrum haunting the healthy unfolding of thinking. The Danish zeal for distinguishing itself from German colossus of philosophy, together with the postmodern zeal for distinguishing itself from speculative modernity, have created the hallucinatory effect of idealist phantom and set up Kierkegaard in the sacramental position of the grand anti-idealist and anti-Hegelian champion. In Kierkegaardian accordance, existentialism and post-modernity have also been laid in the anti-metaphysical and irrational ground of non-philosophy. In short, the historiographical destiny of Kierkegaardian studies has been the construction of the grand idealist myth together with its anti-idealist counterpart. In the course of recent years, Jon Stewart has the merit of having denounced this historiographical myth, about which he says: ?this is a nice dramatic story to tell undergraduate students and to rehearse in introductory textbook but in the end, instead of providing a useful framework for further studies, it gives rise to a series of misunderstandings and outright myths about the Hegel-Kierkegaard relations, and thus about the development of philosophy in general.? The dramatic story of modern and contemporary philosophy has broken the essential continuity of thinking, and introduced instead a dualistic paradigm made by exclusions, equivocations, and conceptual distortions of all kinds. The oppositions existentialism vs. idealism, irrationalism vs. rationalism, anti-philosophy vs. metaphysical thinking are the outcome of such a confusion. Jon Stewart?s work tries to deconstruct this great drama of contemporary philosophy in order to restore the historical and speculative continuity of thinking, untangle conceptual ambiguities, and show the deep confluence between Kierkegaard and the idealist project. His patient reconstruction of Danish Hegelianism tries to check the uncritical oversimplifications of the historiographical mainstream and provide one of the main supports on which to set up a positive approach of Kierkegaard to idealism in general, and to Hegel in particular. In contrast to the dominant story, Stewart has shown the way in which ?many of Kierkegaard?s best-known concepts such as ?repetition,? the theory of stages, and ?the leap? originally come from Hegel.? Following Jon?s Stewart landmark works, this paper aims to explain the positive influence of absolute idealism on Kierkegaard?s existential thinking. It does not mean that Kierkegaard would be only and merely an idealist philosopher; he is also many other things in many different ways, even contradictory ones. But among all that, he is also an idealist thinker in his singular and unique way.