Becoming a Self / Edition 1

by Merold Westphal

Overview

Soren Kierkegaard (1818-55) is perhaps best known for his existentialism, and his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition makes him a religiously committed postmodernist. Becoming a Self provides a reader's guide to the book often taken to be Kierkegaard's most important contribution to philosophy and theology. Merold Westphal includes the portion of Kierkegaard's text that develops his infamous thesis that truth is subjectivity, and offers a dose reading of the entire text of Postscript. In addition, he locates the text in the larger authorship of Kierkegaard, with special attention to the theory of stages or existence spheres; in the debate with Hegel, which is one of its most distinctive features; and in the conversations that make up contemporary postmodern philosophy. While postmodernism is usually thought to be inherently secular, Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, shows us what a variety of postmodern insights might look like if appropriated by religious thought. He tries to show that the demise of classical paradigms of selfhood do not require the abandonment of subjectivity and inwardness altogether, and that a decentered self can still be a responsible self. This volume continues Westphal's attempt to show that the individualism and "irrationalism" that have for so long been associated with Kierkegaard's thought are not the abandonment of community and thoughtfulness but powerful protests against major pathologies of complacent modernity. In this light, Kierkegaard's thought can be seen as a non-Marxist form of ideology critique.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557530905
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	09/01/1996
Series:	Series in the History of Philosophy
Pages:	276
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Merold Westphal is the author of a number of books, including Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society; Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity; andGod, Guilt, Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. He is also coeditor of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity.

Table of Contents

PREFACE
NOTES ON TEXT, TRANSLATION, AND ABBREVIATIONS
PART ONE: Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: Placing Postscript in Kierkegaard's Life
CHAPTER TWO: Placing Postscript as a Pseudonymous Text
CHAPTER THREE: Placing Postscript in the Theory of the Stages
PART TWO: Commentary
CHAPTER FOUR: Preface and Introduction
CHAPTER FIVE: The Objective Issue of the Truth of Christianity
CHAPTER SIX: The Subjective Issue—Something about Lessing
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Subjective Issue—Becoming Subjective
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Subjective Issue—Truth Is Subjectivity
CHAPTER NINE: The Subjective Issue—The Subjective Thinker
CHAPTER TEN: The Subjective Issue—For Orientation in the Plan of Fragments
CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Subjective Issue—Pathos
CHAPTER TWELVE: The Subjective Issue—The Dialectical
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Subjective Issue-Conclusion Together with Appendix
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Beyond Postscript: The Teleological Suspension of Hidden
Inwardness in Religiousness C
PART THREE: Text
TEXT
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

"This is an eminently successful piece of work and just the sort of thing we have come to expect from Merold Westphal. The text is a lucid, lively, humorous, readable, brisk, judicious commentary in American English from which students on many levels will profit." —John D. Caputo

From the Publisher

Plotting the Past
stands out as a serious work marked by sharp analytical skills and an unusual breadth of subject matter encompassing questions of genre and ideology that are central to present-day critical discourses.

Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian

Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Italian

This is an eminently successful piece of work and just the sort of thing we have come to expect from Merold Westphal. The text is a lucid, lively, humorous, readable, brisk, judicious commentary in American
English from which students on many levels will profit.”

John D. Caputo

Why Manzoni’s I promesi sposi and ‘Del romanzo storico’ – models, respectively, for the writing and the theroretical rejection of historical fiction – should continue to resonate in both the creation of and debates surrounding twentieth-century Italian fiction is a question amply and eloquently answered in Della Coletta’s Plotting the Past. A felicitous combination of broad contextual and detailed textual analyses, these readings of Manzoni, Lampedusa, Morante, and Eco animate issues of genre, gender,
historiography, literary history, and epistemology, all the while focusing on the construction of what might called an ‘ethics of historical fiction.’ The relationship of that vexing couple – history and fiction – has rarely been so lucidly scrutinized, nor the reasons for its continuing union so convincingly and gracefully argued. This book is a major achievement.”

Rebecca West

. . . Coletta has given us a book that is engaging,
challenging, and astute. For its mature historical sense and theoretical refinement, Plotting the Past
deserves high praise.

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