キェルケゴールに於ける宗敎的實存

Abstract

Kierkegaard, as is generally known, considers the three existencestages : aesthetic, ethical, and religious, in accordance with a scale of values based on the degree of dialectical inwardness in the existence that is entangled with negative factors, such as finiteness and nothingness. However, the pith of the existential problem of going through the stages from immediacy to Christianity seems to be the restoration of the personality to its integrity that was inwardly rent asunder by the consciousness of sin or guilt, that is, the problem of what is called "repetition", which is developed in connection with the conquest of nihilism. The realization of this supreme task for every individual is achieved fundamentally in the religious existence as the ultimate stand of the human being, which prefers "pathos" to "reason", "absurdity" to "rationality", "individuality" to "universality", "subjectivity" to "objectivity", breaking with the Greek and Hegelian university ethics which is called "the first ethics" by Kierkegaard. It is the aim of this paper to comprehend the religious existence as such in the category of transcendence breaking with immanence and to consider it in the double aspect of grace on the one hand and the paradoxical subjectivity in the extistence responding to it, on the other, or rather from the viewpoint of "contemporaneity" which synthesizes both of them. Generally, the truth for the existence searching after the eternal in time consists in the very place where, both the eternal contemporaneousness with Christ as an existing individual, which, whereas transcending the historical time, works upon in it from the absolute past to the absolute future, ❊ as it were, the descending contemporaneity based on grace, and the ascending contemporaneity with Christ on the part of the existing individual, which, acted by the above-mentioned paradoxical contemporaneity as grace, responds to it, namely, the contemporaneity as practising faith, meet each other perpendicularly. In that place, the existential contemporaneousness with Christ in His humiliation is converted into that with Him in His glory and "the instant", in Kierkegaard's sense, is realized actually or, "the repetition" as the new birth comes to be possible for existence. The task of the religious existence is only to prepare in itself such a place of contemporaneity as stated above. Furthermore, so far as contemporaneousness with Christ requires inevitably one's imitating Christ by actually following Him, it should involve the horizontal direction too, as the religious ethics of the love of one's neighbor which makes God the middle term. In this way "the second ethics", as that which overcomes the impotence of universality ethics, centering around the problem of repetition, and transcendently providing a ground for it, gets an important significance as the new ethics of contemporaneity, breaking through the sphere of simple subjectivity.