Campbell and Freire rely on an understanding of symbolic action that is not merely instrumental but expressive. Rather than thinking that “the ends justify the means,” these authors consider which messages are conveyed by the means they use and ask whether these implicit messages are conducive to their ultimate ends. In Chapter 4, I analyze how Søren Kierkegaard uses this reasoning to develop an innovative approach to communication that avoids being co-opted by misleading philosophies. A direct, confrontational approach, Kierkegaard reasoned, only serves to confirm people in their illusions, therefore writers need to create opportunities for readers to examine their own lives. I explain the benefits of criticism that transcends “us versus them” binaries and therefore demands interlocutors re-evaluate their categories.

Judge William of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or claims that the Jutland Pastor’s sermon expresses exactly what he had tried to say in his letters. This is far from obvious to the reader, and I suggest we bypass the Judge, reading the sermon directly with A’s essays on unhappy love and tragedy. Like the sermon, Part I’s “Shadowgraphs” deals with the psychology of persons who have (apparently) been wronged by someone they love and the defenses they construct on the beloved’s behalf mimic classic theodicies. The Pastor’s “practical theodicy,” which consists in thinking of ourselves as the wrongdoers, can be applied to their predicament as well. Yet imagining what that would mean in an abusive interpersonal relationship shows how perilous the Pastor’s theodicy is, alienating us from our own ideas of good and bad, right and wrong. A’s treatment of tragedy offers an alternative. Recognizing that God (or the beloved) is indifferent or simply evil restores our moral-emotional integrity.

In this essay, we survey the history of Either/Or’s English language reception in order to contextualize the importance of the Critical Guide’s contribution to current discussions of Kierkegaard.

Chapter 6 is dedicated to examining an article by the Danish thinker, poet, and writer Poul Martin Møller, “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality.” This article represents the most substantial treatment of nihilism in Danish philosophy. Møller reviews some of the then recent works in German literature about the controversial issue of whether Hegel’s philosophy contained a theory of immortality. He claims not only that Hegel’s philosophy does not have a theory of immortality, but also, absent such a theory, that it leads to nihilism. Like Jean Paul, Møller believes that the denial of immortality would render human existence impossible. Møller’s argumentative strategy is to use a reductio ad absurdum to refute the view that denies immortality. To begin, he assumes the correctness of this view, and then tries to explore further what precisely it would mean to hold it. Then from this he deduces negative consequences, which demonstrate that the view must be abandoned as contradictory. He follows this strategy through many different spheres: the life of the individual, social and political relations, art, philosophy, science, religion, and so on. He claims that all these spheres would collapse into nihilism if the belief in immortality is denied.

Jacobi’s influence on the founder of so-called existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard, has rarely been examined. This chapter explores Kierkegaard’s critical and somewhat polemical discussion of Jacobi’s notion of the “leap” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which not only shows that Kierkegaard was acquainted with Jacobi’s major work, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza but how it shaped Kierkegaard’s own particular development of the salto mortale.

The work of David Foster Wallace can be seen to critically renew ideas and concerns from existentialist philosophy and literature. Wallace repeatedly expressed his admiration of existentialist authors, and his fiction contains many explicit and implicit references to their writings. This chapter will provide an overview of the main themes and intertextual connections that Wallace’s work shares with the existentialists, such as a comparison with Sartre’s view of consciousness, Kierkegaard’s critique of irony, and Camus’s relation of meaningful existence to community; also, a brief comparative reading of the opening of Infinite Jest and Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” of “The Depressed Person” and Beauvoir’s “The Monologue,” and of “B.I. #20” and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Overall, Wallace shares with these authors the conviction that philosophy and literature are partially overlapping activities, that some philosophical problems are best approached through literature, and that their works therefore blur the boundaries between these modes of writing.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

Some find the theology of an eternal punishment to be morally repugnant and theologically without warrant. But even if such is true of traditional doctrines of Hell, typified by those of Aquinas, it is not implausible to read Inferno as an “anti-narrative,” among other reasons because the literatures that write of a truly infernal mentality – for example,that of Dr. Faustus in Marlowe’s play – are vastly significant and their significance would not be lost even were Hell as an eternal condition impossible. For an infernal will is psychologically possible, even if the Hell willed is impossible as an existent state of affairs.

In the epilogue, I offer a coda on the pursuit of leisure. While schools (teachers and administrators) can make strides toward cultivating leisure in students, the art of leisure is fundamentally a subjective task. It is learning how to be a person – how to live with and contend with the angels and demons that plague human existence.

In this chapter, I begin by considering Poet A – Kierkegaard’s compelling pseudonym who embodies how we usually understand and respond to this mood state. Poet A’s account reveals three key facets of boredom: the incessant striving of our voracious ego, the onset of existential fatigue, and our ever-resilient attempts to fend off boredom, seeking both to maximize freedom and maintain control. I then turn to Kierkegaard’s analysis in Sickness unto Death, penned by the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Rather than understanding boredom as a neutral mood state that comes and goes, Anti-Climacus diagnoses it as laced with forms of despair that easily overtake us. When we maneuver to escape this kind of boredom, we only become further mired in it. Anti-Climacus’ framework illuminates and brings conceptual depth and insight to the two dominant boredom responses I noted in the introduction, avoidance and resignation.

In this book, I make a case that schools should graduate students who know how to engage boredom productively when it arises. Rather than simply avoiding boredom or helplessly blaming boredom on something or someone else, such students take responsibility for their boredom. They develop internal resources for contending with boredom; they are adept and diplomatic at challenging boring circumstances, and they are equipped at finding worthwhile activities and practices that alleviate boredom. Such students acquire a capacity to discern a creative middle way between boredom avoidance, on the one hand, and stultifying boredom endurance, on the other hand. This middle way, I will argue, is the practice of leisure.

What is it to forget a concept, confuse one, or lose one? These are familiar terms of criticism for Kierkegaard, but they can seem strangely otiose or themselves confused. In his essay, Cavell elucidates these terms, their critical purport in Kierkegaard’s practice, and he seeks to offer an assessment of that practice – in particular, to assess whether the practice is itself philosophical. Cavell’s assessment leads him to discuss (early in the essay) the connection between the religious and the psychological and (late) the connection between the aesthetic and the psychological. Jolley reassesses Cavell’s assessment: he refocuses on the forgetting, confusing, or losing of concepts, and on the use of such terms of criticism – in Kierkegaard’s specifically, but also more generally in many philosophical practices that understand themselves as at once logical and dialectical. E.g., What is the difference, for Kierkegaard, between qualitative dialectic and quantitative? Is the making of such a distinction an application, a moment, of one or the other dialectic, and if so, what are the consequences of such self-application? Along the way, Jolley revisits Cavell’s understanding of the connection between the religious and the psychological, and the aesthetic and the psychological.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.