Elodie Gontier

Life is the “theme of our time” as Ortega would say. Yet, as the work of Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka shows it, life is not always questioned in depth. According to her reflections on the ontopoietic genesis of life, we will focus our interest on life, from the point of view of Kierkegaard’s thought. What is life in concreto? Life as the ontopoietic progress of the impulse of existing emerges in the auto-individualization of the being. Our task to comprehend a praxical movement of life in Kierkegaard’s work is to be considered from the point of view of the classical philosophy with the distinction Aristotle made between two notions of life: ζωη (Zoé) and βιος (Bios). By ζωη, the Stagirite means life in general, referring to what is common to all the living beings and makes them animate. It is the act of being alive in the manner of a plant that grows and dies. In her book on the soul of the plants, Hedwig Conrad-Martius will guide us step by step through the world-of-life and lead us to the presence of the plant in the sense that it has a life of its own, “a life that is existentially fixed on a ground”. That thought is not different from Kierkegaard’s existential questioning: how do we make the difference between the animal kingdom and the vegetal kingdom? What can we learn about life in general from the vegetal kingdom, and of course about our lives as Individuals (Den Enkelke)? The Lily of the field and the Birds of the air, two metaphors for Kierkegaard to tell us about life, will illustrate our researches on a life to be built.

A religious and philosophical treatise called Works of love was written by Kierkegaard in 1847 under Kierkegaard’s name. It’s a Christian book and not pseudonomical writing like his early writings. R. Gregor Smith notes that Kierkegaard’s study of love reaches to the heart of Christian thought. Indeed, it discusses the matter of Love in his different senses: self-love, love for the neighbour and love for God. So, it focuses on the relation between the self and the others. In Works of Love, he sets up a contrast between the natural loves like erotic love (Elskov) and friendship (Venskab) on one hand, and the love for God and neighbour on the other hand. There is an evident tension between the different attitudes that Kierkegaard expresses in that writing with regard to preferential love. That why, perhaps, a great critics Løgstrup judges Works of Love to be “a brilliantly thought out system of safeguards against being forced into a close relationship with other people1”. In this article, I offer a brief account of some Kierkegaard’s key concerns about love: its’s preferential love and its being a form of self-love. I will discuss the means of preferential love which presents romantic love and friendship. This is, according to Kierkegaard, a real form of selfishness. Christian love is expressed in the Divine Commandment: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” as Matthew said (22:39), so Kierkegaard shows that “Christian love teaches us to love all people, unconditionally all” (1995, 49). That words “shall” is the “very mark of Christian love” because that love is the duty to love neighbour, any neighbour as one loves oneself. Why does Kierkegaard separate two kinds of love? Is it so different? Preferential love is excluded from the category of neighbourly love because it is understood by the poet. That is to say that preferential love is only showing by the poet way. Therefore, erotic love and friendship aren’t dismissed altogether but only as long as they are understood in the pagan way, or more clearly as a poet manner.