Kierkegaard’s identification of “consciousness” with “interest” in his unfinished work Johannes Climacus adds a distinctive dimension to his phenomenology of subjectivity. Commentators, however, have largely identified interesse with lidenskab, a conflation I argue to be mistaken, or have otherwise failed to note the structural implications of interesse for Kierkegaard’s account of cognition. I draw out these implications and argue that the Climacan account of interest as the experience of findi…
Read moreKierkegaard’s identification of “consciousness” with “interest” in his unfinished work Johannes Climacus adds a distinctive dimension to his phenomenology of subjectivity. Commentators, however, have largely identified interesse with lidenskab, a conflation I argue to be mistaken, or have otherwise failed to note the structural implications of interesse for Kierkegaard’s account of cognition. I draw out these implications and argue that the Climacan account of interest as the experience of finding ourselves in-between ideality and reality implies, in the context of Kierkegaard’s trichotomous ontology of consciousness, a form of non-thetic self-referentiality built into cognition itself. This self-referentiality also has the intriguing implication of making consciousness itself inherently teleological.