Abstract
The question of what it means to love the dead touches both our relationships to specific others and our relationship to history as such. To address the question at the level of the individual, I examine Søren Kierkegaard’s account of loving the dead as a non-reciprocal love that deepens the consciousness of the lover. I then re-examine reciprocity within a phenomenological framework of being for others, specifically Jan Patočka’s account in “Phenomenology of Afterlife”. With a better understanding of what it means to remain open to the other who has died and of how the other lives on through me, I turn to Kierkegaard and Patočka’s combined reflections on relating to historical events and on the meaning of history for the present, drawing from Kierkegaard’s idea of “becoming contemporary with” the past and Patočka’s philosophy of history.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The numbers within slashes refer to the page numbers of the printed Czech text, included within slashes in the above English translation.
- 3.
See Ferreira 1999 and 2001 for close readings of this chapter in the wider context of Works of Love. For a discussion of the critiques of preferential love in Kierkegaard, see the debate between Ferreira 2001 and Krishek 2009. For a good summary and interpretation of this debate, see Lippitt 2012. For a less sympathetic reading of Kierkegaard on these issues, see Adorno 1939.
- 4.
As far as I know, Adorno is the first to compare Kierkegaard’s text to Kant’s project, though it is a comparison likely to occur to any reader familiar with both authors. “Any ‘preference’ [in loving] is excluded with a rigour comparable only to the Kantian Ethics of Duty” (Adorno 1939, 416).
- 5.
One of Kierkegaard’s examples in this chapter is Donna Elvira from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In Elvira’s case, a sort of demonic hatred accompanies her love after she is seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni.
- 6.
Many Kierkegaard scholars would vehemently disagree with me here and would point to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on love as “work” in Works of Love and the Upbuilding Discourses to counter the understanding of love I have presented. See the debate between Ferreira and Kriskek for examples of this alternative, more positive view of Kierkegaardian love.
- 7.
See Adorno’s shrewd discussion of the neighbour in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (Adorno 1939, 419ff).
- 8.
Adorno rightly links this to Kierkegaard’s Lutheranism and its insistence on a “‘breaking down’ of nature” (Adorno 416). See also Hampson 2014.
- 9.
The only analogue in Patočka’s work is the “sacrifice for nothing” that he explores in his 1973 Varna Lecture “The dangers of technicization in science according to E. Husserl, and the essence of technology as danger according to M. Heidegger” (Patočka 2022c, 289–292).
- 10.
For an extended discussion of them, see e.g. Patočka 2022d, 130ff.
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
In fact, in Kierkegaard’s telling, Christ’s contemporaries found it more difficult to ‘become contemporary’ with him because they were offended (scandalised) by him. On the other hand, those who, like Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, fail to understand Christ as the scandalon, are apt to misunderstand what it is to have faith and what Christ actually demands of them.
- 14.
“Whether it actually happened this way, whether it is as ideal as it is represented, can be tested only by ideality, but one cannot have it historically bottled” (Kierkegaard 1989b, 439).
- 15.
This bears similarities to what Alain Badiou (2013) calls ‘fidelity’ to the truth brought forth by an event.
- 16.
“Will the human being of the planetary epoch really be capable of living historically?” (Patočka 2022b, 322).
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Plunkett, E. (2024). What Does It Mean to Love the Dead?. In: Strandberg, G., Strandberg, H. (eds) Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life After Death. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49548-9_9
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