Living Joyfully after Losing Social Hope: Kierkegaard and Chrétien on Selfhood and Eschatological Expectation

Simmons, J. Aaron

doi:10.3390/rel8030033

Religions

2017

DOI: 10.3390/rel8030033

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Living Joyfully after Losing Social Hope: Kierkegaard and Chrétien on Selfhood and Eschatological Expectation

J. Aaron Simmons

Abstract: Abstract:In this essay, I offer an existential-phenomenological consideration of what it might look like to live joyfully after losing social hope. Using the example of the widespread hopelessness that many are feeling in light of the election of Donald Trump, I suggest that the danger of losing hope is that we can also lose our selfhood in the process. In order to develop a conception of "eschatological hope" that would be resistant to the loss of such social and political expectations, I draw specifically on… Show more

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Cited by 4 publications

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“…For another study concerning how forgetfulness has been studied, for example, in Freud, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, see alsoVolf, (Volf 2006).13 For recent studies on Chrétien's balancing between religion and phenomenology, see Andrew L. Prevot,(Prevot 2015).See also Joshua Davis's development of a connection between Henri de Lubac and Chrétien, and he argues how Chrétien employs Heidegger's distinction between manifestation (Offenbarkeit) and revelation (Offenbarung) to defend applying phenomenology towards religious topics(Davis 2010, p. 181). And for more on the question of Chrétien on faithfulness vis-à-vis hopelessness, see J Aaron Simmons, (Simmons 2017…”

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Faith and Forgetfulness: Homo Religiosus, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Heidegger

Alvis

2019

Religions

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Religion often is conceived as the sine qua non of the human, thus imbedding religious activity implicitly even within our cosmopolitical globalization processes and secular political concepts. This depiction of the human as ever-religious raises a host of concerns: Does it justify that we can believe ourselves to hold a religious identity without any existential choice or faith? Would it entail the presumption of God’s existence, thus possibly leading to God’s becoming a banal Faktum that inhibits the subject from being able to disavow God or not believe? And finally, how is it possible to relate authentically/existentially with our religious life without disregarding this quality of religion as always already operative? In order to provide more specificity to this latter question in particular, this paper focuses on an essential aspect of homo religiosus: faith. Focusing principally upon Heidegger and Jean-Louis Chrétien, this paper develops three ways “forgetfulness” is indispensable to faith; or in another sense, how faith itself also operates in, and is acheived through implicit ways. Indeed, if forgetting is essential to faith, and faith is essential to homo religiosus, then “forgetting” also to some degree is essential to religious life.

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Faith and Forgetfulness: Homo Religiosus, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Heidegger

Alvis

2019

Religions

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Real Love

Bowen¹

2021

Journal of Religious Ethics

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While Kierkegaard creates characters who represent various ways of existing as lovers in the aesthetic and the ethical spheres, namely, Johannes the Seducer and Judge William, he does not have a corresponding character for love in the religious sphere. Is there truly only marginal space for romantic love in Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, or did his own personal history prevent him from being able to imagine what that might look like? This paper examines a commonly overlooked discourse, “On the Occasion of a Wedding,” for Kierkegaardian insights on erotic love in the religious sphere. Against understanding erotic love as a moment (in the aesthetic sphere), or a duty (in the ethical sphere), this paper explores how “On the Occasion of a Wedding” recasts erotic love as gift. Kierkegaard stages the “imagined occasion” of a wedding as a phenomenological reduction through which love presents itself with gift‐like characteristics. Respecting the gift‐status of love transforms the lover into a grateful recipient rather than a seducer or a conqueror. This paper concludes that the proper response to love as gift would be neither to refuse it in favor of nihilistic uncertainty nor to possess it through triumphalistic objectivity, but to humbly embrace both its “already” and its “not yet” dimensions.

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Kierkegaard in the Anthropocene: Hope, Philosophy, and the Climate Crisis

Guyatt

2020

Religions

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What is the role of hope in the climate crisis? What type of hope does this crisis demand? How can we sustain hope, in order to resist falling into fatalistic despair or paralyzing fear, whilst always guarding against hope giving way to happy complacency? This essay considers these urgent questions through a novel encounter between the Christian philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, and recent eco-critical and empirical research on the affectivity of climate change mobilization. I begin by outlining the scope and aims of this essay (1st section), before introducing some affective dimensions of the climate crisis (2nd section), particularly the place of hope. Next, I examine Kierkegaard’s account of hope, and explore the extent to which it corresponds to the type of hope needed in the climate crisis (3rd section). Here, I show that Kierkegaardian hope is a therapeutic practice which subverts the eco-anxiety and sense of helplessness that can otherwise prevent individuals from engaging in positive climate action. Finally, I compare Kierkegaard’s theologically grounded hope with the hope held by climate change activists without religious faith (4th section). Participating in collective climate action anchors the individual’s hopes in a larger, collective hope, which I suggest is sustainable in ways that are partially analogous to the therapeutic functions of Kierkegaard’s Christian hope.

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Living Joyfully after Losing Social Hope: Kierkegaard and Chrétien on Selfhood and Eschatological Expectation

Cited by 4 publications

References 28 publications

Faith and Forgetfulness: Homo Religiosus, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Heidegger

Faith and Forgetfulness: Homo Religiosus, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Heidegger

Real Love

Kierkegaard in the Anthropocene: Hope, Philosophy, and the Climate Crisis

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