Kierkegaard and Phenomenology

Kierkegaard and Phenomenology
Oxford Handbooks Online

Claudia Welz
The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard
Edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison
Print Publication Date: Jan 2013 Subject: Religion, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
Online Publication Date: Jun 2013 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601301.013.0024
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's writings about and related to phenomenology.
It evaluates whether Kierkegaard's account of religious life can be considered a
phenomenology of religion, and reviews arguments for and against interpreting
Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist. The chapter also explores the relation between
Kierkegaard and phenomenology by examining the influence of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel's in Kierkegaard, and by comparing Edmund Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's
forms of phenomenology to that of Kierkegaard.
Keywords: Soren Kierkegaard, phenomenology, religious life, Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Edmund Husserl,
Martin Heidegger
I. Introduction: Kierkegaard—a
Phenomenologist?
THE task of relating Kierkegaard to phenomenology immediately raises the question as to
which type of phenomenology is at issue. It would, of course, be anachronistic to call
Kierkegaard a ‘phenomenologist’ in the sense that this word acquired in the twentieth
century. However, Kierkegaard was without doubt acquainted with Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit, inspired Heidegger, and anticipated issues that became
prominent in the so-called ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology.
Despite some early tentative attempts to find phenomenological traits or to identify a

phenomenological method in Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms (Schrag 1961; McCarthy
1978; Taylor 1980; Pojman 1984; Come 1988), it is only since the 1990s that such
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attempts have been used for in-depth investigations of Kierkegaard's works (Disse 1991;
Grøn 1997; Lincoln 2000; Welz 2008). The current debate is mirrored by the essays in
Hanson (2010).
Phenomenology in the broadest sense of the word deals with phenomena, i.e. with
appearances in the how of their appearing to someone. While it is uncontroversial that
Kierkegaard has offered viable descriptions of phenomena such as anxiety or despair, it is
highly controversial whether one can legitimately consider him to be a phenomenologist.
In particular, there is disagreement concerning the question as to whether Kierkegaard's
project includes a phenomenology of the divine and of religious life. Can God and faith be
taken as ‘phenomena’ at all? The question is radicalized further if connected to the
problem of theodicy and then leads to the question as to whether it is at all possible to
trace manifestations of divine love in human life.
If one answers in the affirmative, one presupposes that God enters and affects
(p. 441)
experience, although his properties such as wisdom and goodness can, according to
Kierkegaard, never be ‘right in front of our noses’ (SKS4: 246f./PF: 42). Neither evil nor
God's goodness can be seen ‘as such’. Rather, the way something appears is dependent
on the observer. In his 1853–5 journals, Kierkegaard claims that qua Spirit God is related
paradoxically or inversely to what appears phenomenally (SKS26: NB32:132 [JP3: 3099]).
Yet, if God's love can be hidden sub contrario, phenomenality does not so much reveal
God as become his hiding place.
For this reason, one might be sceptical about the idea that a phenomenological account
can show human existence to be indissolubly bound up with a God-relationship.
Experiences with God might count as a fact for the believer but remain no more than a
possibility for the phenomenologist. Does this mean that a phenomenology of religious life
—and all the more of the divine—is theoretically impossible? Can Kierkegaard's account
of religious life be incorporated into a phenomenology of religion only by omitting what is
most distinctive about this account or by reading Kierkegaard in a sense contrary to that
which he himself intended (Pattison 2010: 193)?
In what follows, the arguments that have been put forward for and against reading
Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist will be reviewed. In order to do justice to the
historical development, the relation between Kierkegaard and phenomenology will be
explored in five steps corresponding to different epochs in the history of phenomenology.
Firstly, I shall examine the heritage of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Kierkegaard. In
a second and third step, Husserl's and Heidegger's forms of phenomenology will be
compared to Kierkegaard. In a fourth step, it will be shown in what sense Kierkegaard
anticipated features prominent in French phenomenology. Finally, arguments against
seeing Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist will be reconsidered, followed by a proposal for
a classification of Kierkegaard's project in relation to these forms of phenomenology.
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II. Step 1: The Heritage of Hegel's

Phenomenology of Spirit in Kierkegaard
Hegelian aspects in Kierkegaard's writings include similarities in method—first and
foremost between Kierkegaard's Sickness unto Death and Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit (Janke 1974; Theunissen 1993: 149ff; Grøn 1996; Deuser 1997; Stewart 1997).
Phenomenology in the sense of a description and analysis of phenomena that is
reminiscent of German idealism has also been discovered in Works of Love (Grøn 1991,
1994, 1998b; Lincoln 2000; Dalferth 2002: 21–4), The Concept of Anxiety (Grøn 1993,
2008; Gonzáles 2010) and other writings (Stewart 2003). (p. 442)
The Sickness Unto Death as Phenomenology of Subjectivity, Despair,

and Freedom
One might trace Kierkegaard's understanding and practice of phenomenology back to

Hegel's usage, according to which it refers to the description, analysis, and dialectical
critique of the various forms and stages within the (self)experience of consciousness
(Schulz 2010: 125 n. 30). In this line, The Sickness unto Death can be read as a
phenomenology of subjectivity, despair, and freedom.
Grøn (1997: 35–9) suggests understanding The Sickness unto Death as a dialectical
negative phenomenology. Its point of departure is the problem that subjectivity tends to
escape our grasp precisely because subjectivity concerns us as a matter of what and who
we are. ‘In dealing with subjectivity, subjectivity itself comes in between’ (Grøn 2010: 84).
How, then, does it come to appear? According to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
consciousness relates to its objects but not to itself as object. Yet the self-givenness of
subjectivity is not reducible to the ‘mineness’ of experience, to my experiencing of
something else, or to the ‘co-givenness’ of subjectivity in something else that is ‘given’.
Rather, the conscious subject of experience is itself changed through its experiencing,
coming to experience differently. As a consequence, the self-givenness of subjectivity, its
being-given to itself as a self, its self-understanding, has changed as well (Grøn 2010: 85–
8, 96).
The ‘development’ of the self portrayed in The Sickness unto Death takes place through a
negative analysis of forms and figures of despair defined as not being oneself (Grøn 2010:
88–92). The truth (being oneself) is reached through untruth (not wanting to be oneself).
What comes to appear is the self that fails in, or even resists, understanding itself, but in
its failure and resistance it is given to itself as the self that is to be acknowledged.
Wanting or not wanting to be oneself is not just an ordinary choice between A and B.
Rather, it is a matter of what one is doing and wanting in what one is doing and wanting.
It is a choice in one's choices, and one might not always be conscious of what this choice
consists in. Although the figure of despair becomes more and more conscious of itself in
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the course of Kierkegaard's book, the negative or broken character of this progression is
due to the fact that Kierkegaard deals not only with figures or stages of consciousness,
but also with movements of existence. In existence, consciousness and will (or rather:
unwillingness) are intertwined in such a way that despair is connected to repugnance: to
not wanting to be oneself (Grøn 1997: 137–42). At its extreme, human freedom presents
itself to itself as the possibility of unfreedom (Gonzáles 2010). Freedom is reached
through despair, although despair is generally a misuse of freedom (Dahlstrom 2010: 58–
62).
Kierkegaard's emphasis on the intertwinement of consciousness and willing indicates that

he aims at an ethical phenomenology that discloses the conditions, aims, and limits of
human action. Further, the fact that he interprets self-enslaving freedom in theological
terms, as sin, indicates that his phenomenology of despair is inspired by religious
interpretations of the human condition. These two points seem to suggest that
Kierkegaard has developed a Hegelian phenomenology of ethico-religious life. But does
(p. 443) Kierkegaard's phenomenology also include a phenomenology of the divine or of
an ‘absolute spirit’—and if not, why not?
Works of Love as Ethical and Theological Phenomenology of Invisible

Love
Both Hegel in his Phenomenology and Kierkegaard in Works of Love describe the
structure of the absolute as ‘reduplication’, ‘spirit’ and ‘love’ (SKS9: 182, 278/WL: 182,
280; SKS26: NB 33:23 [JP4: 4571]; Hegel 1986: 23). Yet, similarity in terminology does
not imply that Kierkegaard and Hegel mean the same. Since Works of Love and the
journal entries from that period are silent about Hegel, the relation between Hegel's and
Kierkegaard's positions can only be reconstructed on the basis of a systematic
comparison of their texts (Welz 2007a; 2008b: 72–83, 108–36, 219–25).
(1) In the Phenomenology Hegel portrays the progressively increasing self-

consciousness of the absolute spirit until it comprises the whole world and is no
longer opposed to it (Hegel 1986: 31, 78–80, 557). Kierkegaard portrays, on the one
hand, human love in different existential situations, (mis)relations, and forms of
interaction, and, on the other, the regulative ideal of divine love as described in the
New Testament. Viewing the ‘is’ in the light of the ‘ought’, he also takes into account
the norm and criterion of our actions (Deuser 1993: 120, 129). Seen from this
perspective, human love is not only a form of consciousness or self-knowledge, but
also and above all a form of praxis, of acting for the good of the other (Lincoln 2000:
355f., 442–4, 498f.). In seeing love as the practical relationship between human
agents in relation to God, Kierkegaard effects a pragmatic turn of Hegel's
Phenomenology. Love is no longer thought of in the context of a ‘science of
appearing knowledge’ (Hegel 1986: 591), but in a social and soteriological context
where it concerns human life as whole.
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(2) For Hegel, love can and ought to be an object of knowledge. For Kierkegaard,
this is possible only in a limited sense, since the origin, life, and works of love belong
to the sphere of inwardness and faith and therefore remain hidden (SKS9: 16f., 147,
278/WL: 8, 146, 280f.). Love shows itself in words, emotional movement, and actions,
but we have to believe in love and to trust that it is there in order to ‘see’ or
understand that it is love and not something else that shows itself. God's love
becomes phenomenally present only in its effects, i.e. in intersubjective relations that
are characterized by the formative influence of all participants, and only in actu, i.e.
in being expressed and realized in human actions and interpretations (Lincoln 2000:
38f., 244f.). Divine love and human love of neighbour are not additional phenomena
alongside others but offer a new interpretation of and another way of dealing with
existing phenomena. Kierkegaard's phenomenology remains idealistic in so far as it
envisions not only the worldly phenomena of erotic love, friendship, or neighbourly
love but also the horizon in which they appear, namely God's love. However,
otherwise than in Hegel, the latter is ‘known’ only as the unknowable.
(p. 444) (3) According to Hegel, the spirit gains experience through self-alienation
and self-appropriation (Hegel 1986: 38f.). Hegel polemicizes against the ‘upbuilding’
but ‘boring’ idea that divine life is just the ‘play of love with itself’, unspoilt identity
and unity with itself without gravity and pain, self-estrangement and its overcoming
(Hegel 1986: 24). As self-opposing reduplication, the absolute is self-reflection in
otherness. The life of the spirit endures negativity, death, and devastation (Hegel
1986: 36). Evil is an inalienable moment of the spirit (Hegel 1986: 566f.).
Kierkegaard, however, holds fast to the belief that God's eternal love remains
unchanged in the course of time. Its element is ‘infinitude, inexhaustibility,
immeasurability’ (SKS9: 180/WL: 180). It never turns into what is not love, and
therefore will always remain opposed to its opposite.
(4) Hegel's concept of the absolute spirit comprises the finite spirit that finally
knows its identity with the ‘eternal as such’, whereas Kierkegaard, assuming an
identical structure of the human and the divine spirit in the activity of loving, insists
that the temporally existing spirit that relates the body and the soul remains, for the
time being, ‘before God’. The works of love of which Kierkegaard speaks are actions
of finite subjects, not of an absolute spirit. Hegel interprets the absolute spirit's
being with the other of itself as love, while Kierkegaard distinguishes between God
as Spirit of Love and human spiritual power in relation to God (SKS9: 356/WL: 362).
III. Step 2: Kierkegaard and Husserl's

Transcendental Phenomenology
As all scholars concede that Kierkegaard is not a phenomenologist in the classical,
Husserlian sense (Hanson 2010: p. xi), the main issue here is to show why not. This will
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be done by, first, pointing to characteristics of Husserl's phenomenology that are absent
in Kierkegaard's work and, second, pointing to what is crucial for Kierkegaard but
bracketed in Husserl's phenomenology.
Reduction to the Transcendental Ego—Rigorous Science?
Husserl's phenomenology can be described as an analysis of consciousness on the basis

of the so-called ‘reduction’, i.e. the leading-back to the factors involved in phenomenality
that are otherwise overlooked, and the epoché, i.e. the suspension of the natural attitude
prior to and apart from the philosophical interest in the display of phenomena. In most of
his works, Husserl reserves the word epoché for the phenomenological reduction leading
back to the transcendental ‘I’ as agent and dative of manifestation (Husserl 1970: §41;
1983: §33). Through intentionality, the transcendental ‘I’ constitutes phenomena.
Constitution is the process that permits that which is constituted to appear, articulate
(p. 445) and show itself as what it is. Intentionality is the object-directedness of
consciousness. Only in or rather for consciousness can something extra-mental be given

to experience and appear as a phenomenon, i.e. as a manifestation of that which is
intended (Zahavi 2003; Husserl 1984: 614, 646, 666). Being is interpreted
phenomenologically as a particular mode of givenness to transcendental subjectivity
which is, as it were, a ‘view point’ on the world and everything worldly (Husserl 1976:
217, 233, 303).
As to the status of phenomenology, Husserl held it to be not merely one positive science
among others, but the basis for all positive science and properly scientific work.
According to Logical Investigations, phenomenology establishes a domain of neutral
research in which various sciences have their roots (Husserl 1984: §1). In The Crisis,
however, phenomenology is also concerned with the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) and the
texture of lived experience. Like the later Husserl, Kierkegaard confronted a crisis in
European society and turned to what Husserl called the Lebenswelt as the place where
existential thinking is rooted (Dooley 2010: 169). Nonetheless, the ultimate objectives of
Kierkegaard and Husserl clearly diverge. Kierkegaard does not mention the suspension of
the ‘natural attitude’. Neither is he occupied with the laws of ‘constitution’ or with
‘intentionality’ in the context of phenomenology taken as a rigorous science.
Instead of understanding transcendental subjectivity as the non-empirical condition of

human experience, Kierkegaard disclaims transcendental subjectivity in favour of a more
comprehensive phenomenology of the conditions of factual human existence including
temporal development, the freedom and the sociality of subjects, and narratives relating
to autobiographical identity (Deuser 1997: 272f., 276–8). Kierkegaard is not first and
foremost interested in exploring the conditions of possible experience but rather in what
is in fact experienced and what should be done. In Husserl's sense, then, Kierkegaard is
plainly not a phenomenologist.
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Excluding Divine Transcendence?
As the absolute, God is by definition beyond any possible intuition (Bloechl 2010: 30).
Kierkegaard's preoccupation with the paradox of God's incarnation in Jesus Christ, of the
eternal entering human temporality, raises the question of whether Husserlian
phenomenology can account for the dynamics of divine transcendence that affect and
surpass human consciousness. Kierkegaard was aware of the fact that seeing our lives in
terms of the movement of creation, fall, and redemption is not something that can be read
off from what we experience. Rather, it is a faith-based interpretation of life that comes
from beyond the limit at which human thought breaks down (Pattison 2010: 194).
Yet Husserl, too, took these problems seriously—for epistemological and for theological
reasons. It is well known that Husserl explicitly excluded God's transcendence from the
field of phenomenological research (Husserl 1976: 125). The thought of God can be
adequate only on condition that God is neither confused with inner worldly entities, nor
with the world as the horizon of possible experience or with the experiencing subject. For
this reason, Husserl cannot conceive of God as a given phenomenon among other
phenomena.
In his Nachlass Husserl describes God as the Alpha and Omega of all processes of
(p. 446)
constitution, as the ground, entelechy and telos of conscious life (Husserl 1973b: 608–10;
Hart 1986; Laycock 1986; and Ms. B II 2, 54; E III 4, 60–1; F I 24, 41b). As that which
‘aims’ in all intentional aiming and as the teleological ‘target’ of this aiming, God is
identical with the source and destination of transcendental (inter)subjectivity (Husserl
1973a: 9). Yet, neither the synthesis of all constituting subjectivity nor the synthesis of all
constituted objectivity is experientially given to us. Thus, Husserl has good reasons to
bracket divine transcendence. God is not given in experience but only in a reflection
about experience, i.e. in a second-order experience. There is nothing that compels us to
identify the ground, entelechy, and telos of experience with God. Such an identification
would assert more than the data of the experience itself (Welz 2008: 40–58).
Is it not precisely for this reason that Kierkegaard resists any attempt to prove the
existence of God? Husserl's reflections about God might be closer to Kierkegaard's than
hitherto assumed. When Shestov met Husserl in 1928, Husserl made Shestov promise to
read Kierkegaard (Shestov 1962; Paradiso-Michau 2006). Yet, it belongs to the desiderata
of future research to scrutinize Husserl's Kierkegaard-reception.
IV. Step 3: Kierkegaard and Heidegger's

Hermeneutical Phenomenology
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Despite integrating Kierkegaardian concepts into his own ontological project, Heidegger
relegated Kierkegaard to the category of an ontico-existentiell psychologist or religious
thinker (Wyschogrod 1954; Caputo 1987: 82f.; Dreyfus 1991; McCarthy 2011: 114;).
Although Heidegger understated his dependence on Kierkegaard, the following
arguments speak against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist in
Heidegger's sense: (1) Kierkegaard did not develop philosophy as universal
phenomenological ontology; (2) Heidegger's ambiguous relation to Kierkegaard makes it
difficult to depict the Dane as congenial phenomenologist; (3) Kierkegaardian faith
questions the reliability of the links between Being, manifestation, and consciousness
(Pattison 2010: 188, 191, 194, 202f.).
Universal Phenomenological Ontology?
In Being and Time, Heidegger defines philosophy as ‘universal phenomenological

ontology’ and Wissenschaft von den Phänomenen (Heidegger 1996: 34; 1993: 28). The
universality of phenomenology as science of all thinkable phenomena seems to be at
variance with Kierkegaard's emphasis on the individual and the mystery of its self-choice.
Further, in contrast to Heidegger, Kierkegaard does not take the question of the meaning
of being as the fundamental question (Heidegger 1996: 3). Yet, although their projects
differ (p. 447) significantly in their aim and design, there seems to be a point of contact in
their methodology in so far as Heidegger's ‘hermeneutic of Da-sein’ (Heidegger 1996: 34)
builds on Kierkegaard's hermeneutics of human existence. In designating the analysis of
existence as origin and end of all philosophical explorations, Heidegger is close to
Kierkegaard's core interest.
In his 1920 review essay, ‘Critical Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldview’,
Heidegger praised ‘the height of methodological rigor’ that Kierkegaard reached (Kisiel
and Sheehan 2007: 147f.). Heidegger's formulations of the tasks of phenomenology are
remarkably reminiscent of Kierkegaardian formulations in The Sickness unto Death and
The Concept of Anxiety. Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger highlights the relationality and
historicity of the self: ‘The self is what it is in its relations to the world of the self’ (Kisiel
and Sheehan 2007: 142f.). Heidegger announces programmatically that the concrete self
must be made the starting point of the approach to the problems of existence. He
observes that the factic, i.e. historically actualized life is already at work within how we
approach the problem of self-appropriation. Heidegger's description evokes Kierkegaard's
analysis of the self that does not want to be itself in despair. Heidegger suggests applying
a hermeneutical method—‘the interpretive, historically actualizing explication of the
concrete modes of fundamental experience in which I have myself’ (Kisiel and Sheehan
2007: 143), thereby catching not only the universal but precisely the individual features
of human experience.
Further, Heidegger stresses that ‘having oneself anxiously’ (bekümmert) is actualized

before any knowledge about it. Bekümmerung is an affective experience that extends into
one's past (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 138f.). Heidegger explains that the ‘I’ experiences
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this past ‘within a horizon of expectations placed ahead of itself by itself’ (Kisiel and
Sheehan 2007: 139f.). This connection between temporality and anxious concern (Danish:
Bekymring) can also be found in Kierkegaard's 1848 Christian Discourses, e.g. in ‘The
Care of Self-Torment.’ Self-torment consists in care about the next day. We can cause this
care because we can look ahead in ‘fear’, ‘presentiment’, and ‘expectancy’ (SKS10: 82/
CD: 73). Kierkegaard recommends turning wholeheartedly to the day today, turning our
back to the goal, trusting that God measures out the trouble that is enough for each day.
Self-torment loses its strength when one no longer lends one's own strength to it, the
strength of a being existing tensed, in the tension between past and future.
This fits well with Heidegger's lecture course ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of
Religion’ where he sees the human being as ‘an object in becoming, standing within
time’ (Heidegger 2004: 25). For Heidegger, ‘the genesis of dogma can only be understood
from out of the enactment of Christian life experience’, which is constituted by
‘compressed temporality’ without time for postponement (Heidegger 2004: 79, 85). Like
Kierkegaard, Heidegger does not focus on the transcendental ‘I’ beyond time, but rather
on the embodied and ‘enworlded’ self that is intensely concerned about matters of life
and death. And like Kierkegaard, Heidegger does not accentuate theoretical approaches
to religion, but rather the practical implications of religious commitment.
However, in Being and Time Heidegger does not follow Kierkegaard who assumes that the
human being is compounded of the temporal and the eternal (SKS10: 80/ (p. 448) CD: 71).
It is not clear whether Heidegger, in prioritizing the future over the present, takes up
Kierkegaard's notion of the future as eternity's incognito, since he reduces human
existence to radical finitude. Further, Kierkegaard's concept of Bekymring does not
correspond to Heidegger's concept of Sorge, ‘concern’ or ‘care’ with which he
circumscribes the structure of existence. While Heidegger's agenda was clearly in line
with Kierkegaard's at the time of his lecture courses on the Phenomenology of Religious
Life, this is no longer the case in Being and Time.
Heidegger's Ambiguous Relation to Kierkegaard
According to Heidegger's footnotes in Being and Time, Kierkegaard is not a

phenomenologist devoted to fundamental ontology, for Kierkegaard thought through ‘the
problem of existence as existentiell’, but ‘the existential problematic [aiming at the
question of being as such in general]’ is foreign to him (Heidegger 1996: 407 n. 6).
Heidegger concedes that Kierkegaard ‘got furthest of all in the analysis of the
phenomenon of Angst—but he did so in the theological context of a psychological
exposition of the problem of original sin’ (Heidegger 1996: 405 n. 4). Heidegger holds
that theology can find the ontological condition of the factical possibility of sin in his
existential analysis of being guilty (Heidegger 1996: 410f. n. 2), thereby suggesting that
his phenomenological analysis can ground Kierkegaard's theological analysis. Moreover,
he claims that he has explored a more primordial temporality, while Kierkegaard got
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stuck ‘in the vulgar concept of time’ in the sense of the human being's ‘being-in-
time’ (Heidegger 1996: 412f. n. 3; Quist 2009).
This raises two questions. First, how are Heidegger's dismissive statements about
Kierkegaard in Being and Time related to his praise of Kierkegaard's methodological
rigour in 1920? Second, do Heidegger's descriptions of his relation to Kierkegaard
correspond to the way he actually works with Kierkegaard's thoughts?
(1) When reading Heidegger's early occasional writings, one can detect an astonishing
development. In 1920, Heidegger wrote to Karl Löwith that Kierkegaard ‘can only be
theologically unhinged’ and that ‘Kierkegaard must be appropriated anew, but in a strict
critique that grows out of our own situation. Blind appropriation is the greatest
seduction’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 97f.). Heidegger finds himself misinterpreted as a
Kierkegaardian and underscores that he at least wants something else. Curiously enough,
this is written in a Kierkegaardian spirit. Kierkegaard's theory and praxis of indirect
communication and his non-persuasive rhetoric fight against blind appropriation. Thus,
Heidegger did exactly what Kierkegaard wanted when reading him critically.
In another letter to Löwith from 1921, Heidegger declares the incommensurability of

their respective heritage, milieu, and life contexts. It comes as a surprise that Heidegger
continues with the confession to be a ‘Christian theologian’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007:
99f.). At that time, Heidegger was after a phenomenology of Christianity in its historical
particularity. Yet, a year later, a new phase is inaugurated when radical questioning
(‘scepsis’) wins out over any specific ‘world view’ (Kisiel 1995: 80). In the typescript to his
(p. 449) ‘Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle’ (1922), Heidegger
claims that ‘if philosophy is fundamentally atheistic’, then it has ‘decisively chosen factic
life in its facticity’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 165). Heidegger adds that philosophy's
‘atheism’ means ‘staying clear of the seductive activity concerned solely with arguing
glibly about religiosity’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 479f. n. 24). These quotes demonstrate
that Heidegger's growing distance from his Christian background goes in line with his
growing reserve towards Kierkegaard.
(2) Still, there is reason to suspect that Heidegger did use Kierkegaard's ideas, albeit
without either affirming or denying their origin. Heidegger's notes to his 1921 Freiburg
lecture course ‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’ show that he interpreted Augustine with
the help of direct quotes from Kierkegaard without indicating where they come from
(Heidegger 2004: 130, 186, 192, 199, 202). In addition, Heidegger read Augustine's Latin
key terms in a Kierkegaardian way. The following two examples are worth mentioning:
First, Heidegger takes the term molestia, which literally denotes ‘trouble’, in order to
point to the burden, which pulls life down and endangers the having-of-oneself. He
establishes that hidden in this lies self-importance and the possibility of falling, but at the
same time the opportunity to win oneself and to appropriate the burden (Heidegger 2004:
181–3, 200). The movement in Heidegger's interpretation is noticeable. The negative
possibility of losing oneself is turned into an opportunity of being strengthened by what
drags one down. Kierkegaard, too, tries to reverse negativity so that it becomes
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something that gets one further. Discourse 7 in his Christian Discourses about ‘States of
Mind in the Strife of Suffering’ is entitled ‘The Joy of It: That Adversity Is Prosperity’. It
pleads in favour of accepting the inevitable and withstanding the temptation to give
oneself up and to let fall oneself.
The second example concerns Heidegger's notes on the term tentatio. On his view,
temptation is ‘no event, but an existential sense of enactment, a How of
experiencing’ (Heidegger 2004: 186). Identifying life with temptation, he defines tentatio
as an ‘opening in relation to oneself’, but also as ‘falling’ that does not simply happen, but
is experienced. Possibility turns out to be the true ‘burden’. These sketchy notes remind
us, again, of Kierkegaard's description of despair in its ambiguity of, on the one hand,
happening to oneself in so far as one becomes overwhelmed by it and, on the other hand,
being enacted by oneself in so far as it is oneself who despairs. The difficulty lies in the
fact that one has to relate somehow to what happens to oneself. Temptation discloses
possibilities that one would otherwise have missed. In The Concept of Anxiety,
Kierkegaard links up the anxiety provoked by the sight of one's possibilities with an
insight in the abyss of freedom that makes one dizzy (cf. SKS4: 365f./CA: 61).
It is natural to draw a line to Being and Time, where the two motifs appear again, albeit
modified. The realization that the temptation of and the tendency towards falling endure
throughout life is mirrored in Heidegger's characterization of human existence as Sorge,
which has threefold structure of Geworfenheit—Seinkönnen—Verfallen, i.e. of facticity or
thrownness, potentiality, and falling-prey-to. Already in one of his sketches from 1921, he
jotted down the questioning sentence ‘In how far the tentatio is a genuine
existential’ (Heidegger 2004: 191). In Being and Time, he made it into an existential.
Despite (p. 450) Heidegger's denials, his phenomenological analysis of human existence
was profiting considerably from Kierkegaard's discoveries. Denying Kierkegaard's
influence, Heidegger indulged in performative self-contradictions.
Theological Objections
The theological objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist

concern two issues: (1) Does the intentional structure of religious consciousness not
resist clarification, if faith will always be ambiguous and if there will be no way of finally
telling whether it expresses a genuine God-relationship? (2) If human beings as sinners
are estranged from the ground of their being, then not even the most careful analysis of
human consciousness can account for this condition, let alone for how God might be
present in or to human life.
Regarding the first point, we should not forget that Heidegger changed the original title
of the school binder in which he had bound his studies of the phenomenology of religion.
The original title was ‘Phenomenology of Religious Consciousness’. Later the word
‘consciousness’ was crossed out and replaced with the word ‘life’. Further, in contrast to
the usual philosophy of religion of his time, Heidegger concentrated not only on
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conscious religious experiences, but first and foremost on the historical situation in which
they were gained (Heidegger 2004: 52, 58, 259). He was well aware of the problem of
guiding or misleading preconceptions. Therefore, he developed the so-called ‘formal
indication’ that is designed to keep the problems open by keeping away preconceived
opinions or classifications, asking after (1) the experienced ‘what’, i.e. the content of
experience, and (2) after the ‘how’, i.e. the way in which it is experienced, and (3) the
relational meaning in which the experience is enacted (Heidegger 2004: §§11–13). This
procedure shows that Heidegger did not try to clarify what cannot be clarified, but rather
had the courage to face the ambiguities of faith and religious consciousness.
Regarding the second point, Heidegger's interpretation of the Augustinian phrase

quaestio mihi factus sum [I have become a question to myself] (Heidegger 2004: 130)
shows that he did not ignore the basic experience of being-hidden-from-oneself due to sin.
Human beings wish that the ‘truth’ reveals itself to them, but they themselves close
themselves off against it and do not want to be discovered by it (Heidegger 2004: 148,
189). Heidegger determined the category of sin as ‘category of individuality’ (Heidegger
2004: 199). Needless to say, he therein followed Kierkegaard, though again without
saying so.
In the last two sessions of Bultmann's theological seminar on ‘Paul's Ethics’ at the
University of Marburg in 1923–4, Heidegger gave a lecture on ‘The Problem of Sin in
Luther’. Here he claimed, ‘Faith can be understood only when sin is understood, and sin
is understood only by way of a correct understanding of the very being of the human
being’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007: 194). He illustrated what this means by referring to a
remark found in Kierkegaard's journal of 1852, invoking ‘a human being who sits there in
mortal anxiety—in fear and trembling and great spiritual trial’ (Kisiel and Sheehan 2007:
194). The spiritual dimension has been deleted in Being and Time. Only the tendency of
(p. 451) falling that also pertains to sinning is taken over and integrated into a
description of the human condition which, however, is not seen as determined by the God-
relationship.
To sum up: Since Kierkegaard's concern is to live coram deo and not before being or
before death, he is not an ontologist in Heidegger's sense of the word (Hart 2010: 17f.).
For Heidegger, theology is an ontic, not an ontological science (Heidegger 1998: 41). Is it
possible to ground theological anthropology in Heidegger's fundamental ontology?
Heidegger would like to have the former inscribed in the latter. However, if the two are
located on the same level and offer competing views of the human being, this does not
work. While Heidegger developed his Phenomenology of Religious Life in a
Kierkegaardian style, he definitely departed from Kierkegaard's concern in Being and
Time. Therefore, Kierkegaard does surely not belong to the league of ontologically
devoted phenomenologists.
Yet, nearly all post-Husserlian existential phenomenologists—Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers,

Marcel, Ricoeur, and Derrida—owe their principal debt to Kierkegaard. Moreover, the
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protagonists of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, too, are indebted to

Kierkegaard.
V. Step 4: Kierkegaard and the ‘Theological

Turn’ in French Phenomenology
In his 1991 essay, Le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française, Janicaud
coined the notion of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology. His essay is a
critique of what he took to be a perversion of the phenomenological method for explicit or
implicit ends (Janicaud 2000). The persons put on trial were the so-called ‘new
phenomenologists’, namely Lévinas, Marion, Chrétien, and Henry. Referring to the
paradoxical, the enigmatic, and the oblique, this school of thought wishes to challenge
Heidegger's claim that everything that is must appear within the horizon of our relation
with being (Bloechl 2010: 24, 33). The preoccupation with ontology and epistemology at
the expense of what is transcendent, exterior, beyond, and otherwise than the totality of
being or knowledge is criticized. Kierkegaard anticipated some elements characteristic of
this school of thought, e.g. the appreciation of particularity and singularity instead of
generality, of contingency instead of necessity, of the time-bound incompleteness and
openness of experience instead of a completed system of knowledge, and of its
multidimensionality and plurality that is not subordinated to universal principles.
Scholarly attention has recently focused primarily on Lévinas’ relation to Kierkegaard (cf.
Janiaud 2006; Simmons/Wood 2008; Westphal 2008; Welz/Verstrynge 2008; Sheil 2010;
Paradiso-Michau 2011) and on Derrida's reception of Kierkegaard (Beyrich 2001a; Dooley
2001; Schmidt 2006; Mjaaland 2008; Llewelyn 2009). Derrida himself asserted (p. 452)
that ‘it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful and who interests me
most’ (Derrida/Ferraris 2001: 40). Accordingly, the first subsection deals with
Kierkegaardian motifs in Lévinas’ phenomenology, the second with Marion's and
Derrida's debate on the (im)possible gift, which is also a debate on the limits of
phenomenology, and the third summarizes the state of the art concerning the other
protagonists of the French debate.
Lévinas on God's Non-Phenomenality
Lévinas’ relation to Kierkegaard was ambiguous. On the one hand, he praised

Kierkegaard's efforts to resist totality as well as ‘the Kierkegaardian God’ understood as
‘persecuted truth’ (Lévinas 1996: 71). On the other hand, Lévinas attacked what he
perceived to be Kierkegaard's ‘violence’ and his attempts to transcend the ethical
(Lévinas 1976: 77–92; 1998b). Still, most scholars agree that Lévinas is much closer to
Kierkegaard than his harsh criticisms would suggest (Westphal 1992, 1995, 2000; Butin
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1999; Beyrich 2001b; Ferreira 2001, 2002). The following three Kierkegaardian motifs are
especially worth mentioning (Welz 2007a–c and 2008b: 277–326).
First, like Kierkegaard, Lévinas recurs to the Neoplatonic tradition of God as ‘the Good
beyond being’, i.e. to a conception of an absolute that can never become an object of
knowledge. Lévinas claims that God, in principle, does not manifest himself phenomenally
and therefore cannot be present and presented in the same way as worldly entities. God
does not appear, but remains an enigma beyond cognition and absent from perception
(Lévinas 1996: 66, 77). Lévinas appreciates the enigmatic character of the
Kierkegaardian God who, in his revelation, preserves his incognito instead of appearing
as a phenomenon (Lévinas 1996: 70f.), yet he rejects the Christological explanation
because for him, God's epiphany does not occur above all in the face of Christ, but, if at
all, in the face of any human other—without being identified. In the ethical relation to a
human You, God remains an anonymous He, ‘a third person or Illeity’, ‘the he in the depth
of the You’ (Lévinas 1996: 141).
Second, in Lévinas, the idea of God's non-presence and anonymity acquires a similar
function to the concealedness of God's love in Kierkegaard. It makes human beings
become present for each other, doing to each other directly what God can do only
indirectly. God's revelation is expressed through the love of the neighbour whose
vulnerability appeals to one's solidarity. Lévinas leaves behind the primacy of the
theoretical plane. This brings him close to Kierkegaard. Further, like Kierkegaard,
Lévinas finds it impossible to await action ‘from an all-powerful God’ (Lévinas 1998a: 94).
Yet, while Kierkegaard's God can be addressed personally, and while the activity of loving
can be ascribed to him, Lévinas interprets the divine attributes, above all, as imperatives
addressed to human beings.
Third, Lévinas observes that we have been accustomed to reason in the name of the
freedom of the ego—‘as though I had witnessed the creation of the world, and as though I
could only have been in charge of a world that would have issued out of my free will’—yet
this freedom is finite, and the subjectivity of a subject come late into a world does not
consist ‘in treating this world as one's project’ (Lévinas 1981: 122). He transfers the legal
(p. 453) metaphor from theodicy—God on trial?—to subjectivity so that it is not God
transcendent but me who is summoned to appear, the self in the accusative prior to the
ego taking a decision, answerable for everything and everyone, responsible even for what
I did not will and before having done anything (Lévinas 1996: 88, 90, 93f.). This
understanding of the subject as utterly responsible creature that is affected before being
able to (re)act can be read as a radicalization of Kierkegaard's understanding of
intersubjectivity. Both Kierkegaard and Lévinas affirm the antecedence of passivity to
activity in so far as we receive ourselves from elsewhere.
Marion and Derrida on the (Im)Possible Gift
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While Lévinas opposes God's non-phenomenality to the phenomena phenomenology deals

with and thereby acknowledges its limits, Marion has instead tried to extend
phenomenology and adapt it to theological affordances. Marion maintains that God can
well be taken as a phenomenon that is present to us. He characterizes God as a
‘saturated phenomenon’ with an excess of intuition that gives more than the intention
ever has intended (Marion 2000: 195f.). This phenomenon is ‘a paradox’ that imposes ‘an
impossible experience’, for the eye sees only its own impotence to constitute anything at
all, and the constituting subject finds itself constituted by what it receives (Marion 2000:
210). While Lévinas seeks to replace the epistemological paradigm of intentionality by the
ethical paradigm of responsivity, Marion inverts intentionality and turns it into counter-
intentionality.
However, even if we cannot see God and experience only our bedazzlement, the very
attempt to see or experience something presupposes intentionality, no matter if the
intentions are fulfilled, disappointed or overwhelmed. Therefore, Derrida reiterated
Janicaud's critique when discussing with Marion at Villanova University in 1997 (Caputo
and Scanlon 1999). It is doubtful whether a theory that rejects the condition of a horizon
as a ‘prison’ of phenomena, that denies the hermeneutical as-structure of manifestation
and challenges intentionality and constitution is rightly called phenomenology. If Marion
is a phenomenologist, then he is not one in Husserl's and Heidegger's sense. While
Heidegger defines theology as a thinking of Revelation (Offenbarung) and philosophy as a
thinking of revealedness (Offenbarkeit), Marion suggests taking phenomenology as
‘donatology’—a new ‘first philosophy’ as rational foundation for theology (Caputo and
Scanlon 1999: 63).
Marion seeks to avoid the aporia of the gift that Derrida sketches in his book Given Time
where the prime example for an impossible gift that is called a present and is said to be
given but nevertheless cannot be present as gift is time (Derrida 1992: 14f., 29). Derrida
claims that as soon as the gift is presented and recognized as a gift, its character as a
gracious gift begins to be destroyed because it will inevitably oblige its recipient and
enter a circle of exchange and payback (Derrida 1992: 12–14, 23). Therefore, the ‘pure’
gift has to remain aneconomic. Can the gift of God's presence then be preserved in an
oeconomia salutis? Marion alternately brackets the giver, the recipient, and the gift-
object. He wants to reduce the gift to givenness. However, seen from a theological
(p. 454) point of view, this is just as problematic as the implications of Derrida's
approach, which aims at a critique of the self-present subject.
The problems of both approaches become clear when one confronts the debate on the
(im)possible gift with Kierkegaard's 1843 Upbuilding Discourses on James 1:17–22, which
are about the difficulties of receiving what God gave (SKS5: 39–56, 109–158/EUD: 31–48,
109–58). Kierkegaard's view of how God's presence as love can be given, received, and
communicated as a gift can function as a critical corrective of Marion's and Derrida's
views. Kierkegaard's insights question both Marion's extension of traditional Husserlian
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and Heideggerian phenomenology and Derrida's diagnosis of its aporetic character. (For a
more detailed argumentation, see Welz 2008: 327–74.)
Chrétien, Henry, and Lacoste
For Chrétien, too, Kierkegaard is a significant point of reference (Chrétien 2002: 15, 36f.,
72f., 75; 2004: 52). However, to my knowledge, Chrétien's reception of Kierkegaard has
not yet been investigated more closely. Nor has Henry's reception of Kierkegaard,
although he discusses Kierkegaard's account of despair and takes Kierkegaard to be a
phenomenologist (Henry 1973: 676ff.).
Lacoste's so-called ‘liturgical reduction’ that involves ‘a certain bracketing of world and
earth’ (Lacoste 2004: 175), as the one who prays withdraws from world and earth but
remains before God, has been related to Kierkegaard's descriptions of the person in
prayer who is looked at by God and has to look to him—suggesting that Kierkegaard, too,
practiced a liturgical reduction where the ‘I’ that stands before God is exposed to the
counter-intentionality of the divine gaze and thereby called into question (Hart 2010: 15–
18). However, the same could be said about any praying person without this person
necessarily having to be a phenomenologist.
Thus, it remains a task of future research to explore in what sense Kierkegaard also has
inspired Chrétien, Henry, and Lacoste. So far, it has become clear that it is impossible to
reduce Kierkegaard's specific way of approaching phenomena to any type of existing
phenomenology that has been recognized as phenomenology. In what sense, then, if at all,
can Kierkegaard nonetheless be labelled a ‘phenomenologist’? This disputed question will
be reconsidered in the next section.
VI. Step 5: Reconsidering the Quaestio

Disputata
In what follows, I will summarize the arguments against any phenomenological reading of
Kierkegaard (Pattison 2002: 69–85; 2005: 82–9), attempt to counter these counter-
arguments where possible, and offer my own proposal of how Kierkegaard's project could
be classified. (p. 455)
Arguments Against Understanding Kierkegaard as a

Phenomenologist
Pattison raises the following three objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a

phenomenologist:
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(1) Husserl's and Heidegger's forms of phenomenology rest upon a self-legitimating

and self-interpreting intuition, whereas the phenomena Kierkegaard describes are no
determinate phenomena that we could apprehend in a pre-reflective manner but are
ambiguous, concealed, oblique phenomena like anxiety and despair, i.e. imaginative
evocations of particular ways of viewing the world, depending on how we look.
Rather than resolving the question of self-knowledge, these phenomena are enigmas
whose interpretation must always remain a matter of debate, and they make it
questionable whether knowledge is at all possible in relation to ourselves.
(2) Second, while Hegel's, Husserl's and Heidegger's forms of phenomenology claim
to be forms of science, Kierkegaard's ‘second ethics’ in Works of Love is not a science
but a matter of concrete judgment concerning good and evil.
(3) In a rhetorical question, Pattison asks: What kind of phenomenalization could
adequately and of itself stand as a grounding intuition of a transcendent God? (3.1)
This sets a question mark against any kind of general ontology that might nurse an
ambition to embrace both divine and human, God and creature. (3.2) Kierkegaard's
statements are guided by theological fore-conceptions that are presupposed rather
than derived from experience. A Christian phenomenology that is constructed on the
basis of dogmatic presuppositions would be open only to those who shared them.
Countering the Counter-Arguments
What responses can be given to these counter-arguments?
(Ad 1) The phenomena described by Kierkegaard also belong to the subject area of
Husserl's and Heidegger's forms of phenomenology. Husserl's concept of intentionality
gives access both to corporeal reality and to ideality, phenomena can be given either in
perceptual presentation or in linguistic representation, and even ideal objects can appear
intuitively in a categorial fashion (Zahavi 2003: 17–35, 107f.). Husserl's and Heidegger's
phenomenologies of the mood attest to the fact that they also describe ambiguous,
concealed and oblique phenomena (Heidegger 1993: 277, 296; Lee 1993, 1998).
Phenomenology gives a perspective-bound interpretation of constituted objects, which
entails one's own meaning-giving contribution (Husserl 1984: 54, 397, 399). The
Heideggerian Dasein is far from being self-transparent. Therefore, phenomenology needs
hermeneutics to gain access to the phenomena, work through the coverings and explicate
them. It follows that hermeneutical phenomenology is not in principle unsuitable for the
explication of phenomena as unfathomable as anxiety and despair, sin or faith.
(Ad 2) It is correct that Works of Love is not scientific in Hegel's, Husserl's and
(p. 456)
Heidegger's sense. Kierkegaard does not even provide an extended ethical theory.
Instead, he understands ethics as an existential project of the individual. Nevertheless,
Works of Love can be read as a ‘phenomenology of love’ if phenomenology is defined in
the broad sense of a reflective method of describing phenomena, which is not only based
upon the attentive observation of phenomena, but also in search of appropriate linguistic
Page 17 of 27

distinctions that can catch the differences between a variety of similar phenomena.
Thereby it is crucial to consider again and again whether one's intuitions correspond to
one's descriptions, and to see how a certain matter discloses itself in various situations.
(Ad 3) Pattison's third objection addresses the most serious difficulties. (3.1) I agree that
including God in a general ontology is problematic, and human fallibility might distort the
ways we think, speak, and feel about God. However, the experience that God surpasses
our experience should not lead us to claim that divine transcendence has no relation
whatsoever to experience. At least the transformation of our experiences and concepts
can be experienced—through ‘someone’ or ‘something’ ultimately eluding our experience.
(3.2) Kierkegaard understands ‘becoming a Christian’ as a lifelong task, and therefore he
keeps distinguishing between the factuality of the life of those who understand
themselves as Christians and the biblical ideals of how a Christian life should be lived.
Consequently, Kierkegaard's work remains open to everyone who is ready to consider
handed-down concepts that challenge one's own experience and to reconsider both the
concepts and the process of experience.
Semiotic Phenomenology of the Invisible
My proposal is to classify Kierkegaard's project as semiotic phenomenology of the

invisible (Welz 2008b: 378–84). Unlike Janicaud, I do not think that theology and
phenomenology have to remain separate because faith consists in giving oneself over to
the hold of things we do not see, while there is nothing to look for behind the phenomena
of phenomenology (Janicaud 2000: 103). After all, phenomenology and theology deal with
the same worldly things and the same persons to whom they appear. However, can a
phenomenology of the invisible God avoid dealing with something behind visible
phenomena?
A phenomenology of the invisible must deal with something behind the phenomena,
namely the horizon of interpretation. This horizon is, however, not just the background of
whatever appears; it is also the foreground that predetermines how we see what we see
and how we interpret what we cannot see. Kierkegaard's theological and ethical project
must involve a semiotic dimension because sin, faith, and love can be given as such only
in a linguistic process of signification, determination, and interpretation. If God appears
as present, this is not due to God's own perceivable (non)apparition but rather to the
mediation of his non-material presence by signs which do, in fact, appear. Signs do not
necessarily make visible what is invisible, but they can at least refer to that which
remains invisible.
Since we have no sensual impressions of God, we can only become aware of him
(p. 457)
with inner experience, but he is not given in it as a determinable thing being present.
Thus, any supposed phenomenology of ‘God’ turns out to be a phenomenology of the
human understanding of God. It is only retrospectively that we can find God's discreet
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traces: in newly oriented emotions and actions, thoughts and talks. Kierkegaard outlines
these existential changes and sketches what could be called a phenomenology of religious
life.
VII. Conclusion: The Abiding Questions of

Phenomenology
The similarities and differences between the projects of the figures considered here
suggest that Kierkegaard is historically and conceptually located between German
idealism and French phenomenology. Yet, his project can surely not be fully assigned to
any of these types of phenomenology. It remains idealistic in so far as Kierkegaard's
descriptions link factual experiences with their regulative ideal and offer an overall view
of the physical and metaphysical aspects of reality. It is post-idealistic in clinging to the
first-person perspective of description. My characterization of Kierkegaard's project as
‘semiotic phenomenology of the invisible’ does not imply that Kierkegaard was a
phenomenologist in any stricter programmatic sense. Kierkegaard has not promoted
phenomenology theoretically, but he practised it ‘as a manner or style of
thinking’ (Merleau-Ponty 1958: p. viii). Instead of always seeking to go directly ‘to the
things themselves’, Kierkegaard sometimes turned rather to prior interpretations in
terms of which to develop his own interpretations (Westphal 2010: 52).
The comparison between Kierkegaard and Heidegger showed that the similarities in
hermeneutical methodology do not entail similarities in the results of their respective
explorations. To conclude, I would like to argue that although Kierkegaard's ethical and
theological project diverges from Heidegger's ontological project, there are nevertheless
at least three points of contact between Kierkegaard and Heidegger. The commonalities
concern that which motivates any phenomenological enterprise: difficulties that can
hardly be surmounted otherwise.
(1) First, there is the difficulty of beginning at the beginning. If a phenomenon is

something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself and thus is in
need of an explicit exhibiting (Heidegger 1993: 35), phenomenology cannot just ‘read
off’ the phenomena. After all, we are not just dealing with the phenomena, but are
doing so in form of traditions, opinions, or fossilized interpretations (Grøn 2010:
79f.). By trying to go back zu den Sachen selbst, phenomenology questions our
preconceptions. ‘In order for us to come to ask the questions where philosophy
begins, we have to critically appropriate traditions which both disclose and close
these questions’ (Grøn 2010: 80). That is why Kierkegaard has expressed the desire
to examine anew the human condition that we think we know already. As he
avouches in the Postscript, the importance of his pseudonyms does not consist in
making any unheard-of discovery, but in wanting (p. 458) ‘once again to read through
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solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human
existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers’ (SKS7:
573/CUP1: 629f.).
(2) Second, when observing something, the observer has a blind spot, namely his or
her own first-person perspective. Phenomenology is dealing with precisely this
problem, the difficulty of not overlooking the one who is looking. Kierkegaard's texts
point to the reader and make apparent that humans come to appear in making things
appear (Grøn 2010: 92). For example, our own judgement about another reveals
what is in ourselves. Kierkegaard has elaborated on this dialectic in the first
discourse in Works of Love. In Being and Time, Heidegger speaks of the opacity of
Dasein that in average everydayness flees from or forgets its being, although it is
nearest and most familiar (Heidegger 1996: 41). We have the capacity of self-
understanding; yet, we do not ‘get’ ourselves. Kierkegaard, too, struggled with what
obstructs human self-understanding: temptation and self-deception—states and
movements in which self-consciousness can no longer be taken at face value (Gregor
2010: 140).
(3) Third, the tendency of self-evasion includes the difficulty of dealing with negative
experiences. In Kierkegaard, the figures of despair indicate the constant possibility
of failing oneself. What comes in between is, again, oneself: the self not wanting to be
itself. While Kierkegaard and Heidegger have the problem in common, they do not
support the same solutions. In Kierkegaard, the negativity of missing oneself and
misrelating to God in despair and sin is to be overcome with the help of faith. When
Kierkegaard advocates keeping the ‘wound of negativity’ open (SKS7: 84/CUP1: 85),
negativity is related to becoming, and we cannot overcome becoming. In The
Concept of Anxiety, negativity is a possibility related to human freedom. Does this
negative possibility correspond to the tendency of falling-prey-to that Heidegger
describes in Being and Time? In Heidegger, fallenness is described as an ontological
structure. This implies that it is unavoidable. We can at best appropriate
inauthenticity as a part of authentic existence. Kierkegaard would never accept this.
Here the ways part.
Can Kierkegaard, then, be counted as a phenomenologist? To put it in one sentence: he is

a phenomenologist at least in so far as he had a sense for the abiding questions of
phenomenology.
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Page 26 of 27

Suggested reading
Deuser (1997).
Grøn (1997, 2010).
Hanson (ed.) (2010).
Janicaud (2000).
Levinas (1998b). (p. 463)
Lincoln (2000).
Pattison (2010).
Ricoeur, Paul (1979). ‘Philosophieren nach Kierkegaard’, in Michael Theunissen (ed.),

Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 579–96.
—— Ricoeur, Paul (1980). Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. and trans. Lewis S. Mudge
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press).
Welz (2007a, 2008).
Westphal (1995, 2008).
Claudia Welz
Claudia Welz is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen

and Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research. She has studied
Theology and Philosophy in Tübingen, Jerusalem, Munich, and Heidelberg, and
obtained her Ph.D. and venia legendi from the University of Zurich. Her doctoral
dissertation Love's Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (2008) was awarded
the 2009 John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. Her habilitation thesis is
entitled Vertrauen und Versuchung (Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
Page 27 of 27

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Abstract and Keywords

Despite some early tentative attempts to find phenomenological traits or to identify a

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II. Step 1: The Heritage of Hegel's

The Sickness Unto Death as Phenomenology of Subjectivity, Despair,

One might trace Kierkegaard's understanding and practice of phenomenology back to

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Kierkegaard's emphasis on the intertwinement of consciousness and willing indicates that

an ‘absolute spirit’—and if not, why not?

Works of Love as Ethical and Theological Phenomenology of Invisible

(1) In the Phenomenology Hegel portrays the progressively increasing self-

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III. Step 2: Kierkegaard and Husserl's

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Reduction to the Transcendental Ego—Rigorous Science?

Husserl's phenomenology can be described as an analysis of consciousness on the basis

consciousness. Only in or rather for consciousness can something extra-mental be given

Instead of understanding transcendental subjectivity as the non-empirical condition of

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Excluding Divine Transcendence?

IV. Step 3: Kierkegaard and Heidegger's

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Universal Phenomenological Ontology?

In Being and Time, Heidegger defines philosophy as ‘universal phenomenological

Further, Heidegger stresses that ‘having oneself anxiously’ (bekümmert) is actualized

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Heidegger's Ambiguous Relation to Kierkegaard

According to Heidegger's footnotes in Being and Time, Kierkegaard is not a

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In another letter to Löwith from 1921, Heidegger declares the incommensurability of

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The theological objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist

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Regarding the second point, Heidegger's interpretation of the Augustinian phrase

Yet, nearly all post-Husserlian existential phenomenologists—Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers,

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protagonists of the ‘theological turn’ in French phenomenology, too, are indebted to

V. Step 4: Kierkegaard and the ‘Theological

Lévinas on God's Non-Phenomenality

Lévinas’ relation to Kierkegaard was ambiguous. On the one hand, he praised

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Marion and Derrida on the (Im)Possible Gift

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While Lévinas opposes God's non-phenomenality to the phenomena phenomenology deals

approach, which aims at a critique of the self-present subject.

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Chrétien, Henry, and Lacoste

VI. Step 5: Reconsidering the Quaestio

Arguments Against Understanding Kierkegaard as a

Pattison raises the following three objections against understanding Kierkegaard as a

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(1) Husserl's and Heidegger's forms of phenomenology rest upon a self-legitimating

Countering the Counter-Arguments

What responses can be given to these counter-arguments?

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Semiotic Phenomenology of the Invisible

My proposal is to classify Kierkegaard's project as semiotic phenomenology of the