Abstract

In an attempt to set the record straight on this notorious and important confrontation, Stewart delivers an exhaustive 650-page account of Hegel’s role in Kierkegaard’s authorship. The fundamental claim is that the “standard view” of the Kierkegaard-Hegel relation, which sees Kierkegaard and Hegel in unqualified opposition, is a total misconception. That view was born originally of the Danish reception of Kierkegaard in the early part of the twentieth century, and finally consolidated as canon and law by Thulstrup in his 1967 work Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846. In providing his explanation for this academic perversion, Stewart manages to cast his own project in a distinctly heroic light. The dominant research on the subject, he writes, “gives clear expression to the ideological commitments of the day”. Malantschuk, for instance, “portrays Hegel as the forerunner of the totalitarian communist states with his purported absorbtion of ethics into the state and his glorification of the monarch as the highest power”. Earlier, in 1945, Søe introduces Hegel as “a main presupposition both for Karl Marx and for the life view of Nazi Germany”. According to Stewart the politics of the day won out over honest scholarship, which was based on the division of academic camps, each with their own ideological commitments, rather than the unfettered pursuit of the kind of academic freedom which his own study will demonstrate.