Hubert Dreyfus on Kierkegaard (Part 3 of 4)

UC Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus discussing Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death (TSUD), taken from an undergraduate class on Existentialism in Literature and Film. You can find the recording in iTunes U.

While I think Dreyfus makes some interesting points and useful insights, I think his summary suffers from its failure to discuss TSUD as a rejection of Hegel's speculative theology, and in particular as interpreted by Kierkegaard's intellectual rival Hans Martensen. Though Kierkegaard is rejecting a Hegelian (not necessarily to say Hegel's) position, he cleverly adopts Hegelian terminology in service of this argument. See, e.g., Kierkegaard's distinction of a positive self -- as opposed to the mere "negative unity" of soul vs. body -- is taken from Hegel's Science of Logic; see, e.g., Section 1448. For what I hope is a helpful synopsis of what a negative unity is, and why Kierkegaard thought the Self could not be a negative unity, see this article from Jack Marsh:
http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/marsh-self.shtml

For another take on The Sickness Unto Death, see our recorded discussion on the Partially Examined Life website, where we likely got more wrong than did Dreyfus.
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2010/11/21/episode-29-kierkegaard-on-the...

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