SKC Project Seminar

Suzan ten Heuw

(Leiden University, Holland)

"Kierkegaard’s Thinking About the Self in Light of His Relation to Fichte"

Both Fichte and Kierkegaard have written about the self. They have focused on consciousness and on the inner life of the self, which has resulted in a theory of the self. In my presentation, I present Kierkegaard as a thinker who responds to the idealism of Fichte. This response can, for example, in particular be seen in Kierkegaard’s use of typical Fichtean concepts in his writing The Sickness unto Death, such as setting the self, the reflexive structure of subjectivity and pairs of concepts such as finitude and infinitude, and necessity and freedom that Fichte combines. The overall question my project seeks to answer is what role Fichte played in Kierkegaard’s authorship, in particular for the development of Kierkegaard’s notion of the self in The Sickness Unto Death. I attempt to examine how Fichte helped Kierkegaard to develop himself as a philosopher of the self.