Kierkegaard contra Hegel and the system: does the system have any place for the existing individual?

Søren Kierkegaard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The system has no place for the existing individual. Hegelian speculative logic constructs a world-historical totality in which the singular existing person becomes a transient moment to be sublated, and in that sublation what it means to exist is forgotten. The Danish Hegelians — Heiberg, Martensen — have made it worse: they have appropriated the system into Christian dogmatics, making the God-man a speculative category rather than a paradox to be encountered in faith.

The critique is not from outside but from inside: the existing individual cannot be assimilated into a system without ceasing to exist as the thinker the system claims to think.¹²³⁴

Sources

1. Existence separates, and holds the various moments of existence discretely apart; the systematic thought consists of the finality which brings them together. In reality we are likely to encounter a deception, an illusion. This was dealt with in the Fragments, and to this treatment I must here refer.

   Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 108

2. Respecting the impossibility of an existential system, let us then ask quite simply, as a Greek youth might have asked his teacher (and if the superlative wisdom can explain everything, but cannot answer a simple > 109 question, it is clear that the world is out of joint): "Who is to write or complete such a system?" Surely a human being; unless we propose again to begin using the strange mode of speech which…

   Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 109

3. The facile deification of this pure thought as the highest stage in life shows that the thinker who does it has never existed qua human being. It is evidence among other things that he has never willed in any eminent sense of the word; I do not mean willing in the sense of exploit, but from the standpoint of inwardness.

   Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 270

4. The reference here is to Martensen's review of J. L. Heiberg's (→107,24) Indledningsforedrag til det i No- vember 1834 begyndte logiske Cursus paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole (→112,35), published in Maanedsskrift for Litteratur [Literary Monthly], vol. 16 (Copenhagen, 1836), pp. 515-528. Compare the entry CC:12, p. 189 in the present volume.

   Journals and Notebooks Volume 1, p. 412

Where the argument is made

• Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Climacus's polemic against the system, the section on 'Becoming Subjective' and the attack on world-historical reflection)
• The Concept of Irony (1841 dissertation, Hegelian in form, ironic in content)
• Philosophical Fragments

How the argument was received

The founding rupture of existential philosophy. Modern Hegel scholarship (Stewart 2003, Westphal, Pinkard) has tried to soften the opposition. The agent refuses the rapprochement.