Wilson, Eric G.: The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination, 2003 (2009 paperback edition)

Initially influenced by Schelling’s lectures on positive philosophy (1841–1842), Kierkegaard ultimately withdrew from his lectures, devoting his attention exclusively to the redaction of Either/Or. The Concept of Anxiety was written in the shadow of that work under a uniquely anonymous pseudonym. Of course, anxiety in his deformalization of late idealism was not a concept; it belonged and did not belong to the understanding. Indeed, it precedes human actions under the sign of inherited “sinfulness” and as sheer possibility. If Kierkegaard aligned freedom with a leap, then anxiety was the affect precursive to it. Anxiety was the prethetic knowing that we are able to do. . . X. Tracing the “spiritual” history of the human race which carries the sins of the fathers even as it freely enacts sin, Kierkegaard urged that the more spiritual the culture, the more anxious it was. No longer the adjuvant of reason as in Hegel, anxiety belonged to the irreducible condition of a living subject. Over the five years that separated the Concept of Anxiety from Sickness onto Death, Kierkegaard’s mood of “Angest” will intensify as it is approached from his new perspective of Coram Deo (“before God”). Within the new perspective, the status and the meaning of the self is altered, showing a clearer relation to infinity. For the task of Kierkegaard’s philosophy—learning to become the nothing that one is—had attained a new stage in his existential dialectic. His arguments influenced Heidegger’s recourse to anxiety as a passage toward the question of being.

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A New Deal Between Mankind and its Gods

Islam after Liberalism ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190851279.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 105-124

Author(s):

Abdennour Bidar

Keyword(s):

New Deal ◽

Political Process ◽

Human Species ◽

Death Of God ◽

New Era ◽

New Man ◽

Starting Point ◽

History Of ◽

Dialectical Process ◽

Spiritual History

This chapter discusses Muhammad Iqbal’s response to the argument of Friedrich Nietzsche about the exit from religion. Instead of considering this event as the death of god, Iqbal considers it as the birth of a new man, and the starting point of a new era in the spiritual history of humanity. Following Iqbal’s line of thought, the chapter points to a de-Westernization of the theory of an exit from religion and, in so doing, offers a critique of Western liberalism. In Iqbal’s view, liberation from the guardianship of God does not mean there is no longer any relationship between God and humanity. Thus, when Iqbal talks about a metaphysical liberalism, he is referring to the intuition of the future, characterized by the next step in our spiritual evolution where the human species is liberated from the vision of a divine form as something different from itself, and has instead liberated itself in this divine form. In this sense, the exit from religion signals the beginning of a dialectical process of integrating God into humanity. Accordingly, Iqbal’s ideas can serve as a tool for understanding liberalism and secularization not only as a political process but as a spiritual re-birth for humankind.

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Dlaczego w koncepcji Jaspersa postać Jezusa znajduje się poza „czasem osi”?

Karl Jaspers. Filozofia wieczysta - filozofia czasu ◽

10.24917/9788380846616.6 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 117-134

Author(s):

Paweł Wójs ◽

Keyword(s):

Human Spirit ◽

The Past ◽

Axial Age ◽

The Future ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Spiritual History ◽

Whole Earth

Karl Jaspers’s concept of the Axial Age (German: Achsenzeit), or the unprece- dented age of the highest rise of the human spirit, shows the kinship of people belonging to such different civilizations as Greek, Jewish, Hindu and Chinese. The Axial Age is not only the subject of research for many scholars dealing with the past, but also a possible foundation for the future realization of the peaceful unity of people of the whole Earth. The article focuses on the figure of Jesus, considered by Jaspers as one of the four paradigmatic individuals (German: die maßgebenden Menschen), i.e. people with the greatest influence in the spiritual history of humanity. Therefore, the presence or absence of Jesus in the Axial Age will bring serious consequences. The article presents Jaspers’s arguments for recognizing the period between the 8th and 2nd century BC as the Axial Age, and the possibility of expanding it.

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