Abstract

This dissertation is an interpretation of the thought of Soren Kierkegaard. It argues that the coherence, the originality and the continuing importance of Kierkegaard's work derive from its diagnosis of, and its analysis of the possible solutions to, the problem of meaning in modern culture. ;For Kierkegaard, modernity involves both the destruction of a traditional culture whose social hierarchies were the concrete expressions of distinctions between what was important and what was unimportant and the creation--largely through the mass media--of a culture whose illusions of meaning are the expressions of an attempt to conceal the possibility of meaningful distinctions which are individual and egalitarian. Kierkegaard's response to this situation includes a description of the self in terms of the issues it must resolve if it is to express meaningful distinctions in modern culture, an analysis of the unsuccessful attempts to resolve these issues and to express these distinctions, and an interpretation of Christian faith which claims to resolve these issues by taking Christ as the paradigm for the expression of meaningful distinctions which are individual and egalitarian. ;I argue that Kierkegaard scholarship has consistently failed to appreciate the originality of Kierkegaard's analysis of the problem of meaning in modern culture and that, as a result, it has consistently misinterpreted the accounts of the nature of the self and of Christian faith which are Kierkegaard's response to that problem. When these misinterpretations are cleared away, Kierkegaard emerges as a thinker of extreme relevance to contemporary culture. His account of the nature of the self exposes the contradictions in the reigning forms of modern subjectivity in the arts, in psychology and in religion and his interpretation of Christian faith is an original attempt to overcome these contradictions. Thus, Kierkegaard deserves to be taken seriously as a religious critic of modern culture and to be brought from the periphery to the center of current cultural debate