Abstract

Most of Kierkegaard’s thought can best be understood as a series of reactions to what he regarded as the excesses of Hegelian speculation. In this work Professor Hamilton provides a stimulating and comprehensive examination of these reactions. He explains in detail how Hegel’s method of direct communication with its claim to the possession of total truth provoked Kierkegaard to imitate Socrates’ ‘maieutic art’ by employing indirect communication through the use of pseudonyms. Then too, Hegel’s preoccupation with the development of the Absolute in world-history served only to cause Kierkegaard to respond with his emphasis on the significance of the individual. Furthermore, the unification of the finite with the infinite within the System seemed to Kierkegaard to be a crude form of pantheism and aroused him to affirm a gulf between the creature and the Absolute. Hegel’s preoccupation with abstraction and Reason only intensified Kierkegaard’s concern for the concrete historical moment in which the individual must struggle to make his leap of faith in the face of the Absolute Paradox. Partly because the Hegelian System viewed faith as ‘an immediate certainty’, Kierkegaard could reiterate that faith is a process and must be constantly achieved. The System’s concern for objective truth and its reduction of Christianity to a philosophical doctrine only reinforced Kierkegaard’s conviction that truth is subjectivity and cannot be learned through abstractions but must be lived with intense passion. Finally, Hegel’s emphasis on a fluid logic increased Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm for the traditional logic and his insistence that this logic should not be distorted by being used to interpret the movements of freedom. In presenting these oppositions to Hegel the work can help to provide an effective introduction to Kierkegaard. However, the work is limited since it merely assumes that Kierkegaard’s interpretations of Hegel are valid. Recent scholarship, particularly by Knox and Seeberger, would indicate that some of these interpretations are highly debatable.