ABSTRACT
The most frequent occurrence of the word “thoughtlessness” in Kierkegaard’s published works is in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, followed by The Concept of Anxiety, with the third place being shared by Stages on Life’s Way and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. But since it operates as a structural concept throughout Kierkegaard’s production, Kierkegaard also implies the concept as often as he uses the term explicitly. Since there seems to be no great change regarding Kierkegaard’s use of this concept, apart from a relative semantic concentration given to the concept after the “Corsair affair” and a relative sharpening of other concepts involved in discussions related to the concept, I shall simply treat its development in a diachronic fashion. In sum, at most one could say that there seems to be a very slight change in terms of Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of thoughtlessness after the “Corsair affair” in that the latter led him to a greater consciousness concerning both the depth and the seriousness of the process of dehumanization implicit in the project of modernity as he saw it at work in his society.
