キェルケゴールに於ける信仰と倫理

Abstract

According to Kierkegaard, faith is the paradox where individuality holds a higher position than universality, although such would be viewed from the Hegelian standpoint, as Kierkegaard himself admits, to belong to no more than the category of 'moral forms of evil'. The present paper tries to analyse the construction of tha paradoxical ethical reality itself which constitutes the background of this conception of faith peculiar to Kierkegaard, especially from two viewpoints of dogmatics : justification and sanctification. Kierkegaard dwells in his 'Conception of Anxiety' on the idea of what is called 'the second ethics', which means the ethics of faith as against the normative ethics ; but in reality these two kinds of ethics are but two different contradictions in ethics. Justification as a dogmatic conception pertains to sins in the form of debt, while sanctification to sin in itself. Debt, so far as time is concerned, belongs to the category of the past, whereas sin to that of contemporaneity. Viewed from the point of their matters, what is denied in justification is the unvalued, while what is denied in sanctification is the valuable ; it is, according to Kierkegaard's own words, 'unlimited resignation' as opposed to the 'highest wish'. Kierkegaard points out as a type of debt 'the unrevealed', which is to be defined as 'the unspontaneously revealed', comprehending critical possibility revealed for the future and still immanent for self-potentiality. Sin is possible from the standpoint of contemporaneity which 'makes a subject another'. Thus the change from debt to sin consists in that from the past to contemporaneity. Kierkegaard calls in question ethics of faith, above all, from the standpoint of existential communion with Christ in a phase of transition like this. The ethical reality called into question here is self-hatred, a paradoxical ethics of love that renounces even the valuable expressed in the 'highest wish' for the sake of thou who art met in the phase of contemporaneity. Kierkegaard's ethics of faith, according to which what you do to the contemporary, that alone is decisive, has, it may thus be noted, a transcendental phase which cannot be comprehended to whatever extent ethical generality may be enlarged.