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DEMOCRATIC TENDENCIES: LIBERAL PROTESTANTISM AND THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN PLURALISM
- JOEL D. S. RASMUSSEN
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- Journal:
- Modern Intellectual History / Volume 15 / Issue 3 / November 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 05 April 2017, pp. 893-908
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- Article
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In a recent collection of essays assessing the thought of William James in transatlantic perspective, Berkeley historian emeritus David Hollinger opened his contribution by recounting two memorable exchanges:
The sermon at William James's funeral on 30 August 1910 was preached by the Reverend George A. Gordon, a name recognized today only by religious history specialists, but in 1910 a pulpiteer so prominent that he was sometimes described as “the Matterhorn of the Protestant Alps” . . . Gordon, a close friend of James, was the minister of Boston's Old South Congregational Church. When the great philosopher died on 26 August, his widow immediately selected Gordon to perform the service. Mrs. James made clear to Gordon why she wanted him. You are “a man of faith,” which “is what [William] was.” About this she was firm, apprising Gordon that she wanted at this funeral service “no hesitation or diluted utterance” in speaking about faith.
Mrs. James had good reason to say these things. Her late husband had been candid about his feelings of spiritual solidarity with Gordon. “You and I seem to be working . . . towards the same end (the Kingdom of Heaven, namely),” James had written to his clergyman friend not long before, although [he claimed Gordon did] this “more openly and immediately” than [he did].
4 - Kierkegaard, Hegelianism and the theology of the paradox
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- By Joel D. S. Rasmussen, University of Oxford
- General editor Nicholas Boyle, University of Cambridge, Liz Disley, University of Cambridge
- Edited by Nicholas Adams, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Impact of Idealism
- Published online:
- 05 December 2013
- Print publication:
- 21 November 2013, pp 91-113
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Summary
In the decades following the First World War, there emerged first in Germany and France, and then spreading outward, what has aptly been called a Kierkegaard ‘craze’ in which the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) was excavated from his relative obscurity and heralded in an era of deep cultural malaise as a ‘protesting’ thinker on one hand, and as a ‘rousing’ thinker on the other. With respect to the former, Kierkegaard was supposed to protest against the absolute Idealism of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), a philosophy of evolutionary necessity, which, in the words of Michael Theunissen, ‘identifies the beginning as the wrapped-up end and the end as the unwrapped beginning’. With respect to the latter, Kierkegaard is said to rouse readers about ‘existentialism’. But what is existentialism? Generally, it is characterised as the philosophical commitment to understanding oneself subjectively in life's concrete, contingent and ultimately absurd specificity, instead of pursuing the always-elusive universal knowledge of a totalising objective metaphysical system. Kierkegaard – in the pseudonymous works Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Sickness unto Death, among others – is often reckoned to be the father of this existentialism, a distinctively modern philosophical tradition in which figures as otherwise diverse as Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre were all supposed to be related. Kierkegaard's prioritisation of subjectivity over objectivity, along with his rejection of the alleged abstractions of Hegelianism, was embraced by those who regarded the most important questions of philosophy as bearing not on the philosophy of history, the identity of meaning and being or absolute knowing, but rather on the concrete actuality of existing human beings. His analyses of such affective dimensions of human experience as anxiety, boredom and despair were supposed to signal a decisive break with philosophical traditions that regarded reason as the principal psychological faculty. Such analyses chimed well with the phenomenology of twentieth-century existentialists, just as Kierkegaard's emphasis on the importance of freely choosing oneself in one's concrete existence harmonised with their discussions of human authenticity.