| This dissertation examines and evaluates Soren Kierkegaard's potential constructive contribution to Christian ethics. To restate, its purpose is to press the foundation of the frequent contemporary attempts to appropriate Kierkegaard's thought for Christian ethics. Since Kierkegaard makes explicit claims that dying to [at afdoe] is the qualification that protects the essentially Christian from being taken in vain, the purpose of the dissertation, narrowly defined, is to trace the appearance and role of dying to in Kierkegaard's thought as it pertains to his normative Christian and ethical claims.;In sum, dying to is both (1) the necessary preparatory movement that occurs before the practice of Christian ethics and (2) constitutive of Christian ethics. The dissertation argues that Kierkegaard appropriates and attempts to subvert internally the formal dialectical logic of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, as dying to becomes the definitive expression of the negative movement away from immediacy, the movement of moral subjectivity [Moralitat] that necessarily precedes social ethics [Sittlichkeit]. Therefore, the dissertation argues that dying to is structurally present throughout Kierkegaard's developing attempts to articulate the dialectic movement towards Christian ethics in many forms (such as Socratic irony, resignation, and self-examination), each of which disallows a return to Hegelian Sittlichkeit. More specifically, this means that Christian ethics are possible only after one has died to the world (defined as concern for the temporal), and dying to the world is the mode of existence that singularly characterizes Christian ethics (defined as concern for the eternal). The culmination of the dialectic, therefore, yields the stark thesis that there is no possibility of social ethics in Kierkegaard's thought.;The method employed to support this thesis and illuminate the deep structure of Kierkegaard's dialectical development of Christian ethics is a close reading and evaluation of representative texts (The Concept of Irony, Fear and Trembling, Purity of Heart, Works of Love, and For Self-Examination ) that span his diverse corpus. And, the bipartite structure of the dissertation highlights the defining contributions of both Socrates and Christ for Kierkegaard's notion of dying to. |
