Spiritual trial in Kierkegaard: religious anxiety and Levinas's other
Spiritual trial is indeed "spiritual" - it is possible only in someone who is not utterly spiritless as Kierkegaard means the word - but it is not true, as Kierkegaard's pseudonyms occasionally maintain, that it makes sense only as a religious category, unless religious is redefined i...
| Published in: | International journal of philosophy and theology |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis
[2019]
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| In: |
International journal of philosophy and theology
Year: 2019, Volume: 80, Issue: 4/5, Pages: 495-509 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Kierkegaard, Søren 1813-1855
/ Temptation
/ Lévinas, Emmanuel 1906-1995
/ Religion
/ Anxiety
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| RelBib Classification: | AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism CB Christian life; spirituality KAH Church history 1648-1913; modern history KDD Protestant Church TK Recent history VA Philosophy |
| Further subjects: | B
Kierkegaard
B spiritual trial B Levinas B Time |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) |
| Summary: | Spiritual trial is indeed "spiritual" - it is possible only in someone who is not utterly spiritless as Kierkegaard means the word - but it is not true, as Kierkegaard's pseudonyms occasionally maintain, that it makes sense only as a religious category, unless religious is redefined in radically general terms, as Kierkegaard in fact does, along with the ideas of offense, anxiety, inwardness, and desire. Every existing individual has some minimal acquaintance with spiritual trial, if only as an anxiety about a continual imminent possibility. I argue that spiritual trial, as Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms intend it - although they do not of course put it in these Levinasian terms - is inseparable from a certain phenomenology of the subject that begins with Kierkegaard and that turns spiritual trial into something essential to becoming a self, the result of one's vulnerability to alterity, one's anxiety to defend one's autonomy against the experience of the other as other. Spiritual trial, in Kierkegaard's strict sense, is therefore best understood as a special form of a very ordinary, basic experience, a kind of primordial trauma, of which Emmanuel Levinas has so far given us the most complete phenomenological description. |
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| ISSN: | 2169-2335 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: International journal of philosophy and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2019.1677172 |