Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions

3. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel

33 Chapter Three
Kierkegaard’s Critique of Hegel H aving considered how the philosophical question of movement has developed over the very broad historical period from Heraclitus to Hegel, we now shift our focus to the more immediate background to Kierkegaard’s authorship. Kierkegaard was born in 1813—the year that Hegel’s Science of Logic was published—and he spent the 1830s studying philosophy and theology at the University of Copenhagen. This decade within the academy was, of course, formative for Kierkegaard: Hegel’s ideas were still fresh and exciting, and provoked fierce debates between his followers and his opponents . The preoccupation with movement that characterizes Hegelian philosophy prompted its detractors to turn with renewed interest to Aristotle, and to champion the old principle of contradiction in opposition to the dialectical logic of mediation. This intellectual milieu within which Kierk -egaard served his philosophical apprenticeship provides invaluable insight into the theme of movement that emerges in the 1843 pseudonymous texts. However, during the 1830s Kierkegaard’s development was influenced as much by his increasing dissatisfaction with academia as by his studies: questions of becoming took on a personal significance as he struggled to exist in an environment dominated by intellectual reflection. This means that Kierkegaard’s thematization of movement involves far more than evaluating the relative merits of Hegelian and Aristotelian accounts of becoming. This philosophical discussion does in fact take place in the 1843 texts, but it is dramatized within the theater of existence that is created through Kierkegaard’s writing. His narrators and characters debate the principles of mediation and contradiction, discuss the ancient Greek aporia of becoming, and question the limits of ethical reason—but they also experience melancholy, face decisions, and make journeys. One of the most striking aspects of Kierkegaard’s renowned existentialism is his questioning of the academic, intellectual life as an existential possibility. Kierkegaard is responding primarily to Hegel, but also to philosophy in general, when he asks whether the truth and meaning of becoming can be communicated through concepts. Kierkegaard’s interest in movement has to be understood in the context of his critique of Hegel, but because this critique is motivated by personal concerns as well as by philosophical and theological conflict, it requires very careful handling. The philosophical positions and styles of Hegel and Kierkegaard are, at least in some respects, so profoundly antithetical that it can be difficult to make sense of their opposition without taking sides. Do we have to make a choice between either Hegel or Kierkegaard—between immanence and transcendence, reason and passion, world history and subjective existence? Do we have to decide that one thinker is right, and the other wrong? This possibility raises its own questions as to how such a judgment could be made, and what it might mean, with respect to philosophical positions. The problem is deepened further by the fact that opposition , or contradiction, is itself an issue that divides the two thinkers: the view that they are incommensurable is in a sense already Kierkegaardian , while any attempt to reconcile the two philosophies would incline toward an Hegelian standpoint. Kierkegaard opposes “the single individual ” to the rational, systematic method, and in particular to the concept of mediation, with which he identifies Hegel; whereas the totalizing, historicizing force of Hegel’s philosophy suggests that Kierkegaard’s position, like all others, can be incorporated into the dialectic (perhaps at the stage of alienated, unhappy consciousness) as a ‘moment’ of the Idea’s progressive self-comprehension. In addition, the fact that Kierkegaard addresses Hegel polemically, rather than engaging directly with his texts, brings into question his understanding of Hegelian philosophy. Readers more sympathetic to Hegel might simply dismiss Kierkegaard’s challenge as dogmatic and reactionary , and as an attack on a straw man. We must certainly bear in mind that Kierkegaard’s encounter with Hegelian philosophy was mediated by the interpretations of speculative thinking that were circulating in the University of Copenhagen, and we will shortly examine these in some detail. It is true that much of Kierkegaard’s acquaintance with Hegel was, at best, second hand: in 1837 he attended some of Martensen’s lectures on Hegel’s logic, but became bored by the second half of the course and 34 Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming resorted to copying the lecture notes from other students. During his stay in Berlin in 1841 Kierkegaard heard lectures on Hegelian philosophy and theology...