Voracious hermeneutics : on Kierkegaard's concept of the interesting
Kierkegaard understood modernity as a crisis of authority emerging in the aftermath of European secularization, and thus as an epistemic and ultimately moral crisis wherein self-consciousness is marked by an absence of universal integration. The consequent prioritization of aesthetic detachment, which he believed he witnessed as a dominant trend in the contemporary philosophy, was for him a counter-productive response to and expansion of the crisis. The first volume of his first pseudonymous work, Either/Or, written from the perspective of an aesthete, consists of seven expositions on different artistic media and character types. As each exposition reveals progressively deeper forms of individual alienation and groundlessness, the aesthete grows increasingly obsessed with 'the interesting'-Kierkegaard's name for the discrepancy between human concealment and disclosure. From an initial attempt to regain immediacy and integration through music, to the culminating quest for selfish pleasure through a perverted diary of seduction, these expositions highlight the aesthete's growing belief that 'justice is done to aesthetics' only when individuals attempt to make life 'interesting'. My thesis illuminates the complex
Eagan, Anthony
Voracious hermeneutics : on Kierkegaard's concept of the interesting. Kierkegaard understood modernity as a crisis of authority emerging in the aftermath of European secularization, and thus as an epistemic and ultimately moral crisis wherein self-consciousness is marked by an absence of universal integration. The consequent prioritization of aesthetic detachment, which he believed he witnessed as a dominant trend in the contemporary philosophy, was for him a counter-productive response to and expansion of the crisis. The first volume of his first pseudonymous work, Either/Or, written from the perspective of an aesthete, consists of seven expositions on different artistic media and character types. As each exposition reveals progressively deeper forms of individual alienation and groundlessness, the aesthete grows increasingly obsessed with 'the interesting'-Kierkegaard's name for the discrepancy between human concealment and disclosure. From an initial attempt to regain immediacy and integration through music, to the culminating quest for selfish pleasure through a perverted diary of seduction, these expositions highlight the aesthete's growing belief that 'justice is done to aesthetics' only when individuals attempt to make life 'interesting'. My thesis illuminates the complex
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