Analiza i Egzystencja (Jun 2006)
Smierć i umieranie w 'Papirer' Sorena Kierkegaarda (DEATH AND DYING IN SOREN KIERKEGAARD'S PAPIRER)
Abstract
'Papirer' is a large collection of Kierkegaard's private and intimate notes, published posthumously. They reveal a crucial influence of Kierkegaard's constant expectation of his immediate death on his existential philosophy. Kierkegaard sees the relationship to one's own finiteness and mortality as the hallmark of one's spiritual standing. The 'situation of death', i.e. an authentic confrontation with the inescapability of one's own death, becomes for Kierkegaard a privileged moment of both the discovery of the truth about the authenticity or the lack of the authenticity of one's own existence, and of the spiritual transformation. The crucial condition of such transformation is the 'death to the world'. One dies to the world by giving up freely all desires directed towards anything other than God, the Infinite Good, and in fact the only authentic good. The 'situation of death' helps to make this existentially crucial step, because it creates a necessary separation of the individual from the 'crowd'. 'Sickness unto Death' is for Kierkegaard a state of mind, characterized by despair, of someone who failed to achieve a truthful relationship with his own mortality, and ultimately with his own existence.
