"The Logic of Contemporaneity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of History"

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Søren Kierkegaard firmly rejected the idea of progress. Near the end of Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus explicitly denies that progress occurs within history. "The world is going neither forward nor backward," he writes "it remains essentially the same, like the sea" (Practice in Christianity, 232). We are not getting better every day, in every way. According to Anti-Climacus, we are the same as we have always been. After reviewing Kierkegaard's explicit comments about history, this paper then sets Kierkegaard's denial of progress in its historical context, arguing that he develops a counter-philosophy of history which combats the prevailing Hegelianism of his age. G.W.F. Hegel, J.L. Heiberg, Christian Molbech, and H.L. Martensen will each be briefly reviewed. The paper then goes deeper into Kierkegaard's own thought, drawing connections between Kierkegaard's philosophy of history and the themes of imitation and contemporaneity, showing how a denial of history’s progress enables contemporary humans to interact with the same world Christ faced. In short, Kierkegaard's understanding of contemporaneity--which is crucial to his Christology, his ethics, and his critique of Christendom--is built upon his philosophy of history. The overall aim of this paper is to establish a clear, textually based understanding of Kierkegaard's philosophy of history, with the hope that comparisons to Friedrich Schleiermacher's philosophy of history might organically arise during panel discussion.