ABSTRACT
As the nineteenth century unfolded, Hegel and Schopenhauer, considered by many the two most intriguing thinkers of the post-Kantian generation, exercised formative infl uences on two very different minds, which, in turn, were imposing infl uences on two very different philosophical schools of thought. Early on, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) struggled to adapt Hegel’s system to his own aims. From the outset, that project moved with some awkwardness. Kierkegaard’s dissertation, submitted to the University of Copenhagen in 1841, was steeped in Hegel’s antithesis between growth and resistance, as Kierkegaard struggled mightily to fi t his theory of irony into Hegel’s theory of a synthesis between antitheses. So, in The Concept of Irony, he praises Shakespeare in Hegelian terms, as if to say that Shakespeare’s genius embodied the synthesis between the opposites of Being and Nothing. Hegel’s insistence on Christian rectitude attracted him, of course, but it was Hegel’s voluntarism that conformed to young Kierkegaard’s philosophical presentiments, as it would to the aging stillChristian apologist.
