Kierkegaard and/or philosophy

By discussing The Concept ofAnxiety, often called Kierkegaard’s most difficult book, I wish to suggest his relationship to philosophy or, at least, to what he considered philosophy’s standpoint. Kierkegaard did not consider himself a philosopher but rather a Christian. It is the Christian standpoint he opposes to the philosophical standpoint, showing the reader by this opposition what characteristics he considers each to have. Kierkegaard’s Christian approach to the human condition is evidenced by his choosing anxiety as a fundamental concept. He explicitly links anxiety with a central Christian dogma. He says, ‘the psychological treatment of the concept of “anxiety”, but in such a way that it constantly keeps in mente and before its eye the dogma of hereditary sin’14.t His approach to the human condition locates a science-psychology-within the framework arising from a religious dogma. This is surely problematic. As always with Kierkegaard, there is the matter of standpoint; the question of which intellectual instrument-with, as he puts it, its ‘mood’-is, and how it is, appropriate. In contrast to the standpoint he has chosen, he says of philosophy or metaphysics

Epistemology · Metaphysics · Opposition (politics · Philosophy of mind · Reflexive pronoun · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Law · Philosophy