Corporeality Consciousness and Religion

The present analysis situates the thought of SørenKierkegaard in the context of the language andcategories proper to the philosophical world ofGerman Idealism and the Enlightenment. As emphasizedin contemporary research Kierkegaard's stages arenot levels of consciousness of the Absolutemirroring God's self-awareness. The stages are shapedby finite human existence which strives towardsidentity by successive interpretations of the self interms of normative presuppositions. Nevertheless theapproach determining Kierkegaard's philosophy ofexistence is itself immanent to an idealist method ofself-grounding. Such self-grounding is originallyconceptualized in Fichte's interpretation of Kant'stranscendental ego with his radical attribution ofthe inexplicable power of world-creation toknowledge. The simultaneous crisis of the rationalworld-construction giving rise to the category ofreligion as a challenge to the nihilism of purelyautonomous reason is not due to the impact of newideas but to an internal amplification of theidealist philosophy of the self. The study aims toemphasize and delineate this often-ignoredhermeneutic synthesis at play in Kierkegaard.