ABSTRACT
John D. Caputo relates Soren Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian philosophy in Denmark which Kierkegaard accused of reducing the single individual to a spectator of life. He focuses on a familiar element to those familiar with such short introductions of Kierkegaard, covering Kierkegaard’s three stages: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Caputo explains Kierkegaard’s use of the pseudonyms, their relationship to his personal life, and the way in which his later interpreters have understood them. He provides insight into Kierkegaard’s fear of a modern world in which the single individual would be absorbed into the crowd and lose what made him unique, a process that he called “leveling,” a process. Caputo notes that Kierkegaard, in his earlier writings, kept eternity and time in a dialectical equilibrium, but in his later writings, Caputo sees Kierkegaard’s rejection of all worldly pleasure, particularly that of sexual desire and marriage, as an indication of “time [being] overwhelmed by eternity”.
