The A to Z of Kierkegaard's Philosophy by Julia Watkin

Author:Julia Watkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2001-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

– R –

RAHBEK, KNUD LYNE AND KAMMA. See HEIBERG, JOHAN LUDVIG; OEHLENSCHLÄGER, ADAM.

REASON AND UNDERSTANDING. Kierkegaard uses Reason (Fornuft), Understanding (Forstand), and Reflection (Refleksion) to refer to the intellectual side of the human psyche. He tends to use “understanding” of things to do with the empirical world and “reason” for conceptual reflection about what lies beyond immediate human experience. The term reflection might be said to denote the existential element of thinking, whether about immediate human experience or about ideas and possibilities. As Johannes Climacus in Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard sees humans as ever striving to extend the boundary of thought until it can go no further. Climacus sees this as indicative of an instinctive human existential longing for God and as part of the path to the laying aside of human reason in the encounter with the paradoxical (see Paradox). By this, Kierkegaard is far from disparaging human reason, since he is no friend of unthinking religiosity. On the contrary, there can be no question of authentic faith until a person has grasped the difficulties of religious belief, something Kierkegaard emphasizes through Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in which Johannes Climacus sees it as his task to attack unthinking belief in search of certainty by “making difficulties.” The unimaginative Philistine is also given a hard time for devoting his life to temporality (see Eternity/Time) using the measure-stick of probability in the attempt to live a safe existence. Such a one operates with a restricted understanding and never reaches the daring endeavor of faith. See also IMAGINATION.

RECOLLECTION. The pleasure-seeking aesthete uses the tactic of “recollection” (Erindringen) in his or her attempt to eternalize the pleasure experience. That is, one consciously “photographs” into one’s memory the high spots of special pleasure-giving events as they happen. Then later, at one’s leisure, one can recall the event and thus reexperience the pleasure. In this way one “eternalizes” it in one’s memory. The experience of recollection is thus different from remembering an event as it happened, in that it is a selection of the ideality of the experience as being the totality of the event. In Stages on Life’s Way, William Afham gives the aesthetes’ banquet (In Vino Veritas) as an example of the tactic put to work. As with aesthetic repetition, however, the tactic of recollection is shown to be a failure. The totality of the banquet experience in fact included party hangovers in the morning, while William Afham does not appear to have been at the banquet he so vividly describes. The other thing is that the recollection consists of the intellectual recall of the past and cannot bring back the actuality of the event.

The concept of recollection also appears in Kierkegaard’s authorship from a more philosophical perspective. Kierkegaard shows his familiarity with the Greek view of knowledge as recollection (Plato’s Meno); that is, that to learn something is really to recall something one already knew. The superiority of Greek recollection to aesthetic recollection is that the recollection concerns eternal truth and not the attempt to eternalize the pleasure experience.

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