The Jewel on a Frozen Lake (2019) Symposium & School of Philosophy, Slovenia & Croatia
7th International Philosophical Symposium, Cankarjev dom & municipality of Cernomelj, Slovenia.
Søren Kierkegaard, 13- 17 May, 2019.
The Symposium will be attended by 40 Kierkegaard scholars from 20 countries, including Norway, Denmark, Canada, Germany, China, India, Mexico, Iceland, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia.
School of Philosophy at Island Unije, Croatia.
Kierkegaard in Dialogue, 19-24 May, 2019.
Kierkegaard in Dialogue, 19-24 May, 2019.
Link to the program at the CERI-SK website.
The
Jewel on a Frozen Lake: Kierkegaard on the Meaning of Action
Jasna
Koteska
ABSTRACT
The
paper analyses the paradox in Søren Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the meaning
of action in his famous 1846 tract “Two Ages: A Literary Review”. As is well-known,
to describe the two ages Kierkegaard used a parable of a precious jewel on a frozen
lake covered with thin ice. If the age is revolutionary, Kierkegaard writes, the
whole community celebrates the courage of a person who will sacrifice his life for
the common goal. And vice versa, if the age is reflective, people consider the
hero’s action as unreasonable and meaningless, they ridicule his courage and strength,
and reduce the hero’s sacrifice to a simple display of skills. The paradox occurs
when Kierkegaard describes the revolutionary vigor. Otherwise known for his masterful
literary style, Kierkegaard enigmatically avoided the playful, urgent and swift
descriptions, which would correspond to the momentum needed for revolutionary action
and instead chose repetitive and dull sentences. E.g.: “The age of revolution
is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture”; “The tension
and resilience of the inner being are the measure of essential culture”; “The age
of revolution is essentially passionate” and so on.
The
obvious question is why Kierkegaard, who was aware that repetition brings reduction
of jouissance, chose to interpret the revolutionary age through repetition, and
with the same melancholy and mourning with which he described the present age? Was
it because he considered every revolution as essentially a repetitive event? Or,
because he believed that each self-sacrifice (the hero on thin ice) is always
already a senseless gesture, which cannot get an approval of the community? Or,
more radically, what if there is no age which can be called a revolutionary
age? What if there is nothing exclusive in history, and each epoch is just a set
of practical decisions about what kind of life one wants to commit oneself to? The
paper argues that Kierkegaard developed a notion that both pleasure of the
aesthetical and the ethical existence - “the life of a poet” and “the life of a
judge” are incomplete, the only resolution of human’s destiny must come about
in the form of a religious choice. Due to the radical antagonism of human
situation, humans are incapable of bypassing the abyss between the finite and
the infinite, therefore the action is always conducted without a full meaning,
without a rational knowledge of the consequences of that action and with a leap
of faith; therefore the true action can come only in the form of a conduct of
the single individual directed towards the highest
good as it is understood in Kierkegaard.
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| School of Philosophy, Croatia, 2019 |
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7th Philosophical Symposium, Slovenia, 2019 |
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