The relationship of historical knowledge and eternal happiness in Kierkegaard's 'Fragments' and 'Postscript'

The present project sets out to restore the autonomy of the philosophical works of Soren Kierkegaard and their participation in the tradition of German idealism and romanticism. It starts with an exegesis and assessment of the two dominant misinterpretations of Kierkegaard's philosophy, mainly existentialism and the Hegelian interpretation of Kierkegaard's texts. The first section addresses the works of the existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Wahl, which pioneered the misreading of Kierkegaard's philosophical achievement as the basis of existentialism. The second section develops the arguments of Mark Taylor's text, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (1980), which argues that Kierkegaard's philosophical production would not have been feasible independently of Hegel's philosophy, since they address essentially the same issues. The development of these readings of Kierkegaard's texts and their partiality is followed by the third section, which provides a brief account of the dominant idealist and romantic concepts that are recurrent in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (1844) and Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846). This section delineates Kierkegaard's view of romantic irony and shows its application in the structure of the two texts. Also, it elaborates Kierkegaard's outlook upon German idealism and modern philosophy. The fourth section focuses upon the notions that Johannes Climacus develops in the Philosophical Fragments in attempting to address the question: Can eternal happiness be built upon historical knowledge? The thorough development of the key notions of the Fragments is fundamental for the fifth section of the project, which is concerned with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript . Section five tackles the key chapters of the Postscript in which Climacus continues the development of the appropriate notions to show the relationship of historical knowledge and eternal happiness. The project concludes with the claim that Climacus' account of Religiousness A and Religiousness B anticipates the religious attitude of the modern subject and opens up the possibility to accept Christianity in the freedom of subjectivity.