"'See For Your Self': Contemporaneity, Autopsy and Presence in Kierkegaard's Moral-Religious Psychology" more

The achievement of “Contemporaneity” with the putatively historical event of the incarnation is a key element in Kierkegaard’s description of religious belief, a concept that found later expression in the work of Gadamer and Bonhoeffer. Yet it has been objected that Kierkegaard provides no account of how such atemporal “contemporaneity” with historical events is actually possible. In his strident rejection of the then-dominant Hegelian processive understanding of history, Kierkegaard seems to endorse an impossible model of direct, historically-unconditioned engagement with the past. This paper explores Kierkegaard’s descriptions of contemporaneity on the experiential level to discern the structures of cognition and imagination necessary for the achievement of contemporaneity, as well as its evasion through imaginative distance. What emerges is not an historically-unconditioned way of thinking about the past, but a highly specific, self-referential mode of cognition which allows the contemplator to become meaningfully co-present with temporally distant events.