Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard

by Mark C. Taylor

Taylor (humanities and religion, Williams College, Massachusetts) reconsiders the two philosophers based on the notion that all modern philosophy lies between the poles of their thought. He has added a new introduction to the 1980 original edition.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

298 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Mark C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, Harvard University, 1973; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1968), is a philosopher of religion who chaired the Department of Religion at Columbia University 2007–2015. Previously, he was Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where he began his teaching career in 1973.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a meta-philosophy this book gives the reader of today. Derrida and post-structuralism were a thing in 1980, and the world took Kierkegaard as a theologian who created existentialism and created psychoanalysis before it had a name. Luckily for the world, by 1980 the world was moving away from Kierkegaard’s weirdness and Derrida's incoherence.

Kierkegaard has a pseudo author find a pseudo manuscript in an old desk with a pseudo-story with a fake diary of a mad seducer who fools himself as he fools his imaginary gullible victim while the Judge fools himself most of all. It is it any wonder that Reginia (she was 15 when they met!) never said yes to Kierkegaard?

Socrates studied ‘being in the polis’ and used his irony to mystify. Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on ‘Socratic Irony’ and then wrote his pseudonymous works with multiple identities independently distributed providing sociological, psychological, cultural with either/or (aesthetic, moral) perspectives. Kierkegaard is concerned with the theological, the science of the nothing, while for Kierkegaard ‘anxiety is about nothing’, and he takes the leap of faith across that chasm as he makes his focus the study of being a Christian in the modern world while knowing that ‘irony is jealous of authenticity’.

Hegel cares about being qua being. Heidegger starts and finishes his “Being and Time” with Hegel for a reason. Kierkegaard begins where Hegel ends and goes back to the beginning as he takes the law’s appearance and makes the appearance the law. Cognitive development starts with appearance while reality becomes sense certainty.

Hegel is a philosopher; Kierkegaard is a theologian. Hegel kills God to have God become real. Kierkegaard knows the problem. The more we are certain of the divine the less worthy we are of becoming divine. Though in the end no matter what route Kierkegaard takes his Christian God is silly, and the best way to understand Hegel is to realize that he knows God is real because every time he prays to God he knows he hears him because we ourselves are God. Kierkegaard needs Hegel to make sense of his world; Hegel doesn’t need Kierkegaard.

I think the only philosopher who I can’t stand is Derrida; this author likes him as he unfolds his story through a post-structuralist lens. There’s a reason Derrida grates on me. When I read his stuff, I feel as if he is insulting me the reader for believing his incoherent rubbish. It’s possible Derrida is going for an ironic truth that escapes me, but I don’t think so. Kierkegaard at times with his multiple pseudo-personalities does that, but I can follow his writing and I’m in on the insult. As an aside, Kierkegaard is probably the best philosophy (theology) writer except for Nietzsche.

It is the out of vogue philosophy from 1980 that I would recommend the book. A better book and more recent is the one by Jon Stewart (not the host of the Daily Show) “Kierkegaard relations to Hegel reconsidered”, it gives a more modern take on the relationship between the two, and it doesn’t have that pesky post-structuralism hanging around.