S. Kierkegaarduna teoría del cielo

Zusammenfassung

The thesis to be hereby defended is of Kierkegaard as a ‘heaven’ philosopher, that is to say, concerned about joy and perfect good. The reading I propose is based fundamentally on the close study of Kierkegaard’s worldwide works; both those he wrote under a pseudonym and those he signed with his own name. When I claim that Kierkegaard is a ‘heaven’ philosopher I am not making any kind of statement regarding life after death, nor am I making a theological speech. Here heaven refers to the existential possibilities of the human being to live facing good and joy. The chapters of the thesis are dedicated to analyzing human existence, with patience and love as two essential realities to enable us to live in a state of heaven. Subsequently I deal with the relevance of faith and God, and in the same way the possibility of the type of existence that this leaves open to us. In the final chapter I gather together all the previously explored ideas in order to show what joy and the perfect good actually mean for the Danish philosopher, his way of understanding human existence across time and the decisive role that yearning -not anxiety- play in the existent’s own comprehension of it all. The thesis does not reflect biographical interest nor the supposed irrationalism or fideism of the Danish writer. Neither do I make my own, Kierkegaard’s supposedly successive and exclusive ‘Scheme of the Three Stages’. His way of understanding human existence does not fit easily into this scheme. It is necessary to defend the great importance of sensitivity and the central essence of what is ethical, interpreted, on the one hand, as choosing to choose and on the other hand, becoming what we are, individual beings. In the same way I have showed how the existent’s analysis should not necessarily be based on the mapped out path that leads us from birth to death, passing through stages of anxiety and despair. Here the aim is to contextualize human existence as something far more complicated and ambiguous, with a diversity of possible paths to follow, all of them unified by the common central experiences of yearning, patience, love, trust, hope and joy, regret and guilt, eternity and God. Heaven thus being joy and a perfect good for the existent who lives in this world, taking its origin in the central and decisive experience of love. In the thesis I highlight the Kierkegaardian contribution to the current debate in French philosophy on the category of event. In conclusion I show how the most difficult part is to reach our own existence, that where we always live in. The possibility of the movement of repetition and being ‘reborn’, and the recovery of the importance of love as the key to rethinking human nature are topics which are all given foremost significance in the thesis. Kierkegaard’s philosophical thoughts shed light upon a theory of truth formed in relation to a theory of action, the recovering of the category of existence without falling into a Heideggerian analysis of the topic, and the decisive relevance of what is ethical, of love itself, of otherness, of the happenings and developments in the striving to come closer to truth, good and joy –that is to say–, heaven.