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Kierkegaard on emotion: a critique of Furtak's Wisdom in Love

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2010

JAMIE TURNBULL
JAMIE TURNBULL*
Affiliation:
Hong Kierkegaard Library, St Olaf College, 1510 St Olaf Avenue, Northfield, MN55057
*
e-mail: me@jamieturnbull.com
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Abstract

In Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity, Rick Furtak argues that emotions are cognitive phenomena to be understood in terms of the relation between subject and object. Furtak uses his conception of emotion to argue (in what he takes to be a Kierkegaardian spirit) that love is the source of meaning and value in human (and, specifically, Christian) life. This paper places Kierkegaard's views, and the role love plays in them, in his historical context. I argue that Furtak's approach fails to account for the subtle and complex role religious love plays in Kierkegaard's thought, and ultimately leaves him at odds with Kierkegaard methodologically and metaphysically.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , December 2010 , pp. 489 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

Notes

1. For a recent survey of contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship see, Jamie Turnbull ‘Kierkegaard and contemporary philosophy’, in R. Králik, P. Šajda, R. Pavón, L. Llevadot, C. Dobre, and J. Jurová (eds) Kierkegaard and Great Philosophers (Šal'a: Sociedad Iberoamericana de Estudios Kierkegaardianos, 2007), 173–186.

2. Rick Anthony Furtak Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

3. I am not persuaded by the argument that Kierkegaard's texts should be attributed to his pseudonyms. Attributing the texts to Kierkegaard does not foreclosing being able to give an account of his work in which pseudonymity plays a pedagogical function. Whereas attributing them to the pseudonyms concedes too much to the interpretative position that holds Kierkegaard's works to be hermetically sealed particulars.

4. Similarly, Furtak writes that ‘[s]ignificance … is … likely to require both a perceiving subject and an external world to be perceived: it is neither a property of “objective reality” as viewed from nowhere now a weirdly self-projected light that radiates out from us onto a featureless environment’; Furtak WL., 7.

5. See Jon Stewart Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

6. Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). For instance, Kierkegaard can be said to draw such a distinction on the following pages: 440, 455, 492, and 509.

7. Specifically, the following two passages suggest that passion plays this role: ‘Only momentarily can a particular individual, existing, be in a unity of the infinite and the finite that transcends existing. This instant is the moment of passion’ (Kierkegaard Postscript, 197); ‘An existing person cannot be in two places at the same time, cannot be subject-object. When he is closest to being in two places at the same time, he is in passion’ (ibid., 199).

8. James Conant ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and nonsense’, in T. Cohen, P. Guyer, & H. Putnam (eds) Pursuits of Reason (Lubbock TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), 214, my emphasis.

9. Similarly, in the journals we read: ‘God himself is this: how one involves oneself with Him. As far as physical and external objects are concerned, the object is something else than the mode; there are many modes; someone perhaps stumbles upon a lucky way, etc. In respect to God, the how is what’; Søren Kierkegaard Journals and Papers: II, F-K (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1970), 123.

10. Søren Kierkegaard Works of Love (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). Cf. 207, 376.

11. For example, see Kierkegaard Works: 7–9, 12, 17, 18–19, 21, 24–25, 29–31, 32–34, 35–37, 38–39, 40, 44, 49–50, 52, 53, 57, 61, 64–65, 66–67, 109, 112, 113, 114–115, 118–119, 120–121, 124, 129, 142, 143, 146, 311, and 369.

12. For this reason I find myself in disagreement with Stokes when he claims that for Kierkegaard, ‘passion is … always intentional. If I am passionate, I am passionate about something’; Stokes, Patrick ‘“Interest” in Kierkegaard's structure of consciousness’, International Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (2008), 452CrossRefGoogle Scholar, first emphasis mine.

13. Cf. Kierkegaard Works, 50, 165, 339; cf. the passage on explanation 202–203.

14. God is the ‘source of all love’; Furtak WL, 3; cf. 9–10.

15. This paper has benefited from comments by Rick Anthony Furtak, Peder Jothen, and Anthony Rudd. The interpretation of Kierkegaard advanced in this paper, as holding to a kind of acosmism, is a controversial one. It is, nonetheless, precisely what is required to conceive of his views aright.