SYNOPSIS
Henry Pietersma on Mediation
March 30, 2001
Kierkegaard Circle
Pietersma focuses his concern with mediation and Religiousness
A by asking how one relates to God while simultaneously maintaining social
and political commitments as part of living in the world. This concern
arises in connection with Climacus in the Postscript as to
how a particular human subject becomes a universal subject. The Hegelian
doctrine of mediation does not shed any proper light on the question
since, as Climacus understands the doctrine, the Hegelians assumed
that religion is a theory and therefore its content is intellectual
inferior to abstract thought. They succeeded in jumbling up the ideas of
state, sociality, community and society such that God could not conceivable
show Himself in any other way but in the relative. In the end the
difference, as Pietersma notes, between the absolute and the relative was
erased through the Hegelian mediation.
Though critical of Hegel, Climacus nevertheless employs Hegelian ideas
of absolute/relative and infinite/finite, and expressions such as “joining
together” to introduce an existential relation in which the relata
are independent of one and other. That is, the absolute is independent
of the relative in the relation of the two. This Climacian move,
for Pietersma, means that the attitude of renunciation is to be practiced
in the world, and that the unity of the religious life is a matter of tempering
acceptance with disassociation. One of the implications of this life orientation
is that the ascetic life is not radical enough.
Abrahim H. Khan, Trinity College,
University of Toronto
Bruce Howes
Climacus and the Limits of Language
December 7, 2001
On December 30, 1929 in conversation
with members of the Vienna Circle, Ludwig Wittgenstein referred fairly
directly to what Kierkegaard in Philosophical Fragments calls the
'ultimate paradox' : ... we do run up against the limits of language.
Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something and
he referred to it in a
fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). (WITTGENSTEIN AND
THE VIENNA CIRCLE, p. 68).
The context of these remarks were such that Wittgenstein was clearly
pointing to Fragments as a means by which to better understand his own
Tractarian views on language's limits. Taking guidance from Wittgenstein's
remarks, we will undertake a study of Kierkegaard's critique of language,
referring principally, but not exclusively, to Kierkegaard's Climacus works.
BH
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