International Journal of Philosophy and Theology

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Ricoeur’s Kierkegaard

Timo Helenius

To cite this article: Timo Helenius (2019) Ricoeur’s Kierkegaard, International Journal of
Philosophy and Theology, 80:4-5, 356-373, DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2018.1525572

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2018.1525572

Published online: 29 Oct 2018.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
2019, VOL. 80, NOS. 4–5, 356–373
https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2018.1525572

ARTICLE

Ricoeur’s Kierkegaard
Timo Helenius
Department of Religious Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Keeping an eye on Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology in particu- Received 18 April 2018
lar, this essay maps out Ricoeur’s explicit references to Kierkegaard Accepted 15 September 2018
in the corpus of his major works. Even though many of these KEYWORDS
references are made only in passing, on their basis it is possible to Kierkegaard; Ricoeur;
construe a humbly withdrawing Kierkegaardian anthropology in philosophical anthropology;
Ricoeur’s work that, I claim, is nevertheless firmly present and phenomenology; finitude
which will shed substantial light to Ricoeur’s anthropological
thought as a whole. I argue that Kierkegaard is present in
Ricoeur’s work in ways that so far has gone undetected in Ricoeur
and Kierkegaard scholarship. This paper concludes that an extended
analysis of the relation between the two thinkers is warranted,
particularly regarding Ricoeur’s phenomenological stance that is
noticeably Kierkegaardian in some of its aspects.

Introduction: Ricoeur’s Kierkegaardian philosophy?

There is a peculiarly Ricoeurian ring in Vanessa Rumble’s observation – also comment-
ing on Kierkegaard’s work in general – that The Concept of Anxiety ‘is a complex
meditation upon the relation of freedom and nature: an effort to ascertain objectively
the extent of our freedom, a confession of our inability to do so, and an attempt to draw
us away from this concern, freeing our attention for a more active response to the
possibilities before us.’1 In spite of later finding Kierkegaard to be more deconstructive
or defiant in terms of the narrative structure of understanding – a feature that Ricoeur
endorses – Rumble affirms a profound thematic unity that is shared between the two
thinkers. Both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur ‘try to steer clear of the grandiose pretensions
of speculative philosophy, focusing instead on the ramifications of finitude for questions
such as the nature and possibility of self-knowledge, the extent of human freedom, and
the exigencies of the understanding.’2 This conclusion would lead us to consider
whether there perhaps exists a larger agreement, or perhaps even a philosophical
continuity, between the two thinkers.
There is no question that the observation of Rumble, a well-known and respected
Kierkegaard scholar, also sounds awfully Ricoeurian. In the light of her sketch of the
two philosophers’ similar interests, Rumble’s joining of Kierkegaard with Ricoeur is
indeed a compelling thought. It is, therefore, rather surprising to find that such
partnership and even speculation of such partnership is almost completely lacking in

CONTACT Timo Helenius [email protected]

© 2018 International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 357

Ricoeur scholarship. Given the almost absolute lack of references to Kierkegaard

(only twice, both in passing) in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on
Ricoeur – including his personal responses to each of the essays – it is safe to
state that in the eyes of larger Ricoeur scholarship Kierkegaard has not been
considered formative for Ricoeur’s thought, or having even had some general
importance to Ricoeur’s philosophical project. Such observation would also be
warranted by the fact that Kierkegaard is present in neither Charles E. Reagan’s
Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work nor in Reflection and Imagination: A Ricoeur
Reader (edited by Mario J. Valdés). All the more convincingly, in these works, and
the interviews included in them, Ricoeur himself remains silent about Kierkegaard’s
potential contribution to his philosophical outlook and his work.
There are, nevertheless, some scholarly texts that probe into the question of a
potential philosophical influence. I am thinking here in particular of Pierre Bühler’s
2006 essay ‘Ricoeur et Kierkegaard’ in Revue de théologie et de philosophie, Alison Scott-
Baumann’s discussion in her 2013 work Ricoeur and the Negation of Happiness, and,
most importantly, Joel Rasmussen’s 2012 essay ‘Paul Ricoeur: On Kierkegaard, the
Limits of Philosophy, and the Consolation of Hope.’3 A certain material limitation,
however, is strikingly present. It is safe to say that many of these existing texts on
Ricoeur’s indebtedness to Kierkegaard take two of his 1963 essays as their focal point.
Both ‘Kierkegaard and Evil’ (that focuses on the phenomenology of sin through the
‘profound emotions’ of anxiety and despair4) and ‘Doing Philosophy after Kierkegaard’
(that aims to recognize Kierkegaard’s genius and the fruit of his work without reducing
him to a mere existentialist) are understandably in the interests of those mapping the
continuity of Kierkegaard’s thought in the work of subsequent thinkers. Such limited
approach, however, still leaves much room for asking whether and how Kierkegaard
influenced Ricoeur’s work as a whole.
The two essays may, of course, provide some indication of whether this will be a case
worth to be considered at all. Ricoeur’s discussion in ‘Doing Philosophy after
Kierkegaard’ on the tension between Hegel and Kierkegaard may serve as an opening
to incorporating Kierkegaard as part of Ricoeur’s general, albeit internally conflicting
criticism of Hegel, for example. According to Ricoeur, in that essay, Hegel is to be
criticized for having restricted religion to a pre-philosophical stage in the systemic
becoming of the Spirit that is ultimately defined as absolute reflection (in its concrete-
ness) – Kierkegaard’s equally conflicting approach to Hegel serves as an argumentative
partner for Ricoeur at that point. But Ricoeur’s partnership with Kierkegaard is not
long-lasting; Ricoeur states that Kierkegaard, in turn, should be criticized for his
emphasis on the religious phase that does not give credit to the necessity of structure
and mediation. Not assessing the validity of that particular claim here any further – as I
will return to it toward the closing of this essay – the main point of this comparison
between Hegel and Kierkegaard is that Ricoeur, as a philosopher, places himself – as he
would do many times over – between these diverging positions. Philosophy, Ricoeur
argues in the 1963 essay, remains dynamic and alive by keeping these two standpoints
together; the exclusion of either one will even result in its death.5
Even though there would thereby be some grounds for arguing for the importance
of Ricoeur’s reliance on Kierkegaard in his assessment of philosophy, Ricoeur’s quick
handling of Kierkegaard in just two of his early-career essays does not provide us
358 T. HELENIUS

with any great insight into Ricoeur’s potentially Kierkegaardian philosophy in gen-
eral. Kierkegaard could simply be seen to serve as a means for Ricoeur’s own
formulation of the task and possibilities of philosophy as a discipline. It is therefore
reasonable to cast some doubt over the claim that the two essays alone could in any
greater extent reveal some previously undisclosed depth structures of Ricoeur’s
philosophical outlook. Put differently, Ricoeur’s Kierkegaardianism is not a given
that should be easily accepted. A more convincing explanation would already be that
the religiously accepting existential tone of Ricoeur’s writing simply follows from
Karl Jaspers, whose work Ricoeur read while being a prisoner of war, or from his
mentor Gabriel Marcel for whom Ricoeur’s 1949 dissertation, Le volontaire et
l’involontaire, was dedicated: ‘À monsieur Gabriel Marcel, hommage respectueux.’
All the more, in his introduction to the work, Ricoeur admits of using Marcel’s
insight as the source of inspiration: ‘meditation on Gabriel Marcel’s work lies at the
basis of the analyses in this book.’6 Rather than Kierkegaard, both Jaspers and
Marcel could more plausibly be said to have been formative for Ricoeur’s thought.
The question of Kierkegaard’s potential influence would, nevertheless, stand. Jaspers
was open about Kierkegaard’s influence on his thought, and Marcel – in spite of
being formatted by Pascal, Blondel, and Bergson – was much impressed when
reading Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript in the early 1940s. The
interesting thing about this timing is that Ricoeur’s devout interest in Marcel
followed the war; they had met at Sorbonne in 1934–1935, but the 1948 book on
both Marcel and Jaspers, as well as Ricoeur’s Marcel-influenced 1949 dissertation
work, follows Marcel’s awakened reading of Kierkegaard.
That there nevertheless is some definite influence and interest in Kierkegaard beyond
the more general aspects and themes that are present in many texts that carry a
Christian existential undertone is, I claim, apparent in Ricoeur’s admission, made
distinctly from the two essays (in a lecture that was given in Milan in 1960), that in
terms of his early (albeit also lasting) interest in philosophical anthropology (that he
understands to have become ‘an urgent task for contemporary philosophy’7),
Kierkegaard should be acknowledged as a source of philosophical support for him: ‘it
is perhaps Kierkegaard who gets closest to the initial intuition of our inquiry.’8 In the
light of ‘the problem of the inner disproportion within human beings or of their
antinomical structure, wherein they find themselves distended between an infinite
and a finite pole’9 in particular, Ricoeur’s stance is strikingly Kierkegaardian – this is
clear from Ricoeur’s brief commentary on Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death.10
Moreover, Ricoeur’s expertise on Kierkegaard is nowhere near being limited to that one
central text on theological anthropology.
Keeping an eye on Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology in particular, I hope to map
out Ricoeur’s explicit references to Kierkegaard in the corpus of his major works. Even
though many of these references are made passim, it is possible to construe a humbly
withdrawing Kierkegaardian anthropology in Ricoeur’s work that, I claim, is never-
theless firmly present and which will shed substantial light to Ricoeur’s anthropological
thought as a whole. While I will, in the end, pay special attention to the reciprocity of
the voluntary and the involuntary – or that of finitude and infinitude – I will thereby
also present an overview of Ricoeur’s philosophy of wagers as a reflection of
Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the leap.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 359

An overview: Kierkegaard in Ricoeur’s corpus

Even though sympathetic to Joel Rasmussen’s exposition in general, I am not fully
convinced of his claim that there are no remarkable traces of Kierkegaard in Ricoeur’s
works beyond the 1960s. According to Rasmussen, beyond the decade that saw the
publication of The Symbolism of Evil, Kierkegaard may perhaps be said – if anything
needs to be said at all – to be present in absentia. Ricoeur certainly does not elevate
Kierkegaard on a pedestal as it comes to his explicit acknowledgements of philosophical
support and heredity, but the lack of such admission does not yet render the idea
meaningless or unworthy to be explored. Challenging Rasmussen’s point, I claim that
Kierkegaard is present in Ricoeur’s work in ways that would warrant a deeper analysis
of the relation between the two thinkers.
Saving The Voluntary and the Involuntary (a title that I take to be more appropriate
than Freedom and Nature) for later, Kierkegaard makes an indubitably clear appearance
in Ricoeur’s works on fallibility and fallenness. At the outset of Fallible Man, while
discussing the pathetique of misery, Ricoeur portrays Kierkegaard as a culmination
point in a chain of reflections from Plato to Pascal and to Kierkegaard’s Concept of
Anxiety – a work that was extraordinarily important for the whole second part of
Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will: Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil alike. In
Fallible Man Ricoeur aligns himself in continuum with the three thinkers, and
Kierkegaard’s rigorous and truthful reflection in particular; there already has been a
progression that for Ricoeur is his ‘precomprehension of misery.’11 The task that
remains for Ricoeur is to put this progression of the pathetic, developed by means of
figurative images and symbols, in terms of a language that explicitly states its standing
as a philosophical discourse. The anthropological notion that human being consists of a
‘sliding from fragility to vertigo and from vertigo to the fall,’12 however, will soon
enough gain a prominent place in Ricoeur’s philosophical anthropology.
Kierkegaard’s stance that evil is ‘an upheaval, a leap, a positing’ – cited by Ricoeur in
both Fallible Man and The Conflict of Interpretations, as well as later alluded to in the
Critique and Conviction13 – then understandably also carried over to The Symbolism of
Evil. It’s exploration of the Adamic myth, or the anthropological myth par excellence, is
firmly, albeit also surprisingly, tied in with Ricoeur’s observation that ‘Sin is also positive
(a positing, positif), as Kierkegaard will say.’14 In Ricoeur’s words, the Adamic myth
‘points towards an underlying peccability which, as Kierkegaard says in The Concept of
Anxiety, endures and increases quantitatively.’15 For Ricoeur, Kierkegaard’s analysis
makes way for understanding the proper horizon for the avowal of one’s experienced
condition. The Concept of Anxiety not only theorizes but clarifies the passage or the leap
from ‘composition to fall,’ or, ‘from fallibility to fault’16 that posits a definite subject, a
person, or l’homme capable de faillir (to use Ricoeur’s expression in Fallible Man) – a
human being capable of falling.
For us, it is noteworthy that in spite of these references Ricoeur’s Kierkegaardian
attunement is yet nowhere near to be fully exposed. ‘The exchanges in The Symbolism of
Evil,’ Don Ihde has also pointed out (while placing that work as a hermeneutical
counterpart of Ricoeur’s phenomenology in The Voluntary and the Involuntary), ‘are
marked by an almost Kierkegaardian concern with guilt, anguish, and alienation.’17
360 T. HELENIUS

Ricoeur is open about this tendency to align his thought with Kierkegaard while
discussing the shut-in guilty consciousness in particular. ‘It is here,’ Ricoeur writes,
that what Kierkegaard called the sin of despair presents itself; not despair concerning the
things of this world, which is only regret for lost things turned toward the future, but
despair of being saved. Such is the sin of sins: no longer transgression, but a despairing and
desperate will to shut oneself up in the circle of interdiction and desire. It is in this sense
that it is a desire for death.18

Sin, for Ricoeur, is an ambiguous threshold that ‘in itself and for itself is the
impasse and the hell of guilt; it is a curse.’19 This thematic extends, however, deeper
into Ricoeur’s anthropology in a more general manner through the tension between
finiteness and infinity that, in the words of The Voluntary and the Involuntary,
results in thinking about freedom as inevitably bound to fault – just as it was
‘outlined by Kierkegaard’: ‘Freedom in bondage becomes the sole thinkable freedom;
the absurd becomes fundamental.’20 Ricoeur’s whole pursuit of anthropological
finitude/infinity then seems to be firmly aligned with the Danish theological and
proto-phenomenological thinker:
It is not possible for me to aim at completeness without running the risk of losing myself
in the indefinitely varied abundance of experience or in the niggardly narrowness of a
perspective as restricted as it is consistent. Between chaos and the void, between ruinous
wealth and destructive impoverishment, I must make my way by a road that is difficult
and, in certain respects, impossible. It is Ineluctable that I lose the wealth in order to have
unity, and vice versa. Kierkegaard clearly recognized the incompossibility of the require-
ments for becoming oneself; The Concept of Anxiety evokes the two ways in which a
human being may lose himself: in the infinite without finiteness or in the finite without
infinity, in reality without possibility or in imagination without the efficacy of work,
marriage, profession, political activity.21

In sum, for the whole second volume of Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, Kierkegaard’s
Concept of Anxiety and also The Sickness unto Death seem to have had an indisputably
important value.
As it comes to Ricoeur’s explicit and substantial references to Kierkegaard, this is
undeniably the high point of him doing so, just as Rasmussen correctly summarizes in
his essay. Explicit references to Kierkegaard are, in number, mostly found in Ricoeur’s
earlier texts. It would be another thing to conclude, however, that Ricoeur lost his
interest in Kierkegaard after the early 1960s. Following the publication of The
Symbolism of Evil and the two 1963 essays, Kierkegaard’s explicit role was nevertheless
largely reduced to a point of comparison and potential further clarification. Kierkegaard
appears in On Interpretation only as one of the many who theorized about desire, fear,
temptation, and about the human existence under the tyranny of law – he is listed
among St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Nietzsche, and Freud22 – and in reference to what
Ricoeur calls Spinoza’s suspension of the ethical.23
Moreover, a passing reference to Kierkegaard in The Rule of Metaphor merely serves
in the role of Ricoeur’s Heidegger criticism – ‘[Heidegger’s] ontology proceeds from a
listening turned more attentively to the Greeks than to the Hebrews, more to Nietzsche
than to Kierkegaard. So be it.’24 This criticism is extended in the third volume of Time
and Narrative where Ricoeur stresses that the existentiell conceptions of Augustine,
Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Sartre are ‘set aside [in Heidegger’s analysis of being-a-whole]
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 361

in the name of a kind of stoicism that makes resolution in the face of death the supreme
test of authenticity.’25 In a similar fashion, in the Essays on Biblical Interpretation
Kierkegaard is mentioned to have contributed, along with Luther and Barth, to
Bultmann’s understanding of the justification of faith. Yet more than that, however,
the essay on ‘Freedom in the Light of Hope’ takes on to discuss the existential either/or
and ‘with Kierkegaard again, the passion for the possible, which retains in its formula-
tion the mark of the future which the promise puts on freedom.’26
Here, stressing this point, I claim that such passing reference to the ‘passion for
the possible’ could be read as an indication of a much deeper affinity with
Kierkegaard than simply indicated by the brief notion itself. Linking Kierkegaard
to the crucially important thematic of human freedom, Ricoeur may clandestinely be
signaling of Kierkegaard’s continued role in his thought. A similar kind of a heavy
reference takes place in the beginning of Oneself as Another where Ricoeur criticizes
the Cartesian cogito and distinguishes it from the Kierkegaardian despair.27 The
reason for me to suggest such ‘heavy’ reading is to somehow understand the
otherwise rather sudden reappearance of Kierkegaard in Ricoeur’s last texts. After
about three and half decades of relative silence, Kierkegaard occupies a somewhat
different role in Memory, History, Forgetting. I want to draw attention to the fact that
in Memory, History, Forgetting Ricoeur not only repeats his use of Kierkegaard in the
context of criticizing Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s intratemporality but seemingly
also elevates Kierkegaard’s role when highlighting ‘repetition, the Kierkegaardian
theme par excellence, by virtue of which history appears not only as the evocation
of the dead but as the theater of the living of other times.’28 Ultimately, such living
history is also in Ricoeur’s sight in the last part of that work. Kierkegaard’s notion of
repetition, Ricoeur writes, is

capable of playing the role of connector between the ontology of historical being and the
epistemology of the historiographical operation. (…) The theme of repetition – originat-
ing, we have just recalled, in Kierkegaard – is, in its turn, of great fecundity regarding the
ontological foundation of the historiographical enterprise in its entirety.29

Again the possibility offers itself to read these references in a more substantial sense
than immediately indicated by the material volume of such notions; it is about the
placing of these references as well as about their relation to the main hermeneutical aim
that the work is putting forward – thereby suggesting that Kierkegaard may have had a
more notable role for Ricoeur’s thought than perceived by the scholarship.
Such reading may gain some support from an observation that also Rasmussen
makes; Memory, History, Forgetting essentially concludes with Kierkegaard and exposes
Kierkegaard’s thought as the key for unlocking the dilemma of needing to remember
and to forget – and to be and not to be concerned about these both. In short, the
epilogue to Memory, History, Forgetting makes a striking reference to Kierkegaard’s
upbuilding discourses. The collection of three ‘discourses’ that gains Ricoeur’s unwa-
vering attention is, in particular, ‘What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from
the Birds of the Air,’ meaning the second part of Upbuilding Discourses in Various
Spirits that was published at the outset of Kierkegaard’s ‘second authorship’ in 1847.
The collection focuses on the problem of being a human being through the critique of
362 T. HELENIUS

worry or concern; Kierkegaard’s focus is on de Bekymrede or ‘those who are worried.’30

Ricoeur’s discussion is rich with admiration for Kierkegaard’s analysis:
How could we not mention (…) Kierkegaard’s praise of forgetting as the liberation of care?
It is indeed to those who are full of cares [les “soucieux”] that the Gospel’s exhortation to
“consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air” is addressed.31

As can be expected, Ricoeur’s point, beyond care, is the ‘carefree memory on the
horizon of concerned memory, the soul common to memory that forgets and does not
forget.’32 For Ricoeur, Kierkegaard’s Lilies and the Birds essays embody a description of
a hermeneutic of forgetful non-forgetting that also concludes the inquiry of his own.
Let me now merely point out that we already have all this in Memory, History,
Forgetting, and I haven’t yet even mentioned Ricoeur’s rendering of acedia or spiritual
apathy in terms of ‘the sadness of meditative memory’ or ‘the specific “mood” of
finitude rendered conscious of itself’ by directly linking this causeless sadness or
mourning to Kierkegaard’s despairing sickness-unto-death.33 In his own comparative
reading, Rasmussen fails to pay substantial attention to these passages that would
emphasize the ultimate point that also he is making. The open question is – perhaps
now understandable more as a proposal – where is it that Ricoeur’s willingness to be
both knowledgeable and occasionally also enthusiastic about Kierkegaard’s thoughts is
coming from.
Concluding this overview of Kierkegaard’s explicit role in Ricoeur’s oeuvre with The
Course of Recognition, the impression that Kierkegaard continued to have a substantial –
albeit stealthily expressed – role for the whole arc of Ricoeur’s work is all the more
strengthened. Given the grave importance Ricoeur grants to the notion of love and
loving recognition in his last work, his reference to Kierkegaard in The Course of
Recognition is definitely not to be brushed off lightly – particularly as Ricoeur on
several occasions is seemingly also stealthily borrowing from other thinkers such as
Axel Honneth in the very same work; the pattern, therefore, is already in place. The
notion of agape, and its role in the process of recognition, lead us to pay attention to,
yes, a passing line, but the question of its importance should nevertheless be considered:
‘Agape is not, for all that, inactive. Kierkegaard could write at great length about “works
of love.”’34 Kierkegaard’s text ‘The Works of Love,’ Ricoeur seems to be saying, is of key
importance in understanding – by way of existential commitment to living the human
life by imitating Christ or the first love – how the self-giving and selfless love of agape
works and bears fruit also in terms of recognizing one’s self through this unconditioned
love. Using just a brief line, Ricoeur says much more than merely alludes – playfully –
to Kierkegaard’s work. Perhaps we could think that the surplus of saying in this case
means a certain Kierkegaardian surplus at the level of Ricoeur’s formation.

Ricoeur’s Kierkegaard: the origins

In order to trace some key components of Ricoeur’s perhaps surprisingly active love of
Kierkegaard, I will now focus on the formative years of Ricoeur’s phenomenologico-
hermeneutical work. Ricoeur’s interest in Kierkegaard is phenomenologically grounded.
In his Husserl essays35 Ricoeur argues, among other things, that Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche provided rigorous existential descriptions that provided a platform for
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 363

Husserl’s work, and also groups Kierkegaard among Husserl and Heidegger as a
philosopher of the instant or ‘the Moment’36 that discloses the living present. In
Ricoeur’s estimation, Kierkegaard contributed ‘the outlines of a quite strict phenomen-
ology’ in two senses that make him, along with Nietzsche, ‘the origin of existential
phenomenology.’37 In other words, while testing the phenomenological waters, Ricoeur
considers Kierkegaard as a noteworthy pioneer.
Two further observations about Ricoeur’s early phenomenological interest in
Kierkegaard are as follows: First, not only the value of Kierkegaard’s descriptions
of subjectivity is, in Ricoeur’s view, indisputable but also the apparatus developed
for such descriptions. This is clear, for example, in the case of The Concept of
Anxiety that Ricoeur credits as a solid and proper ‘phenomenology of freedom.’38
Second, Kierkegaard developed a methodology that aimed at achieving categories of
actual living individuality that stand in opposition to the eternity and logical
determination of Hegel’s system. Kierkegaard’s ‘existential thinking,’ Ricoeur main-
tains while referring to the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, ‘tends toward a strict elaboration of the “concepts” of the anti-system and
thus toward a phenomenology.’39 Ricoeur, it should be noted, views Kierkegaard
favorably as a thinker forming ground for the phenomenological analysis.
My claim is that this appeal in Kierkegaard’s thought is solidified and critically
adopted as an integral part of Ricoeur’s anthropology in The Voluntary and the
Involuntary. Even though Ricoeur’s argument comes in the wake of Kant’s antinomies,
it also has a peculiarly Kierkegaardian ring to it. This Kierkegaardian concern is more
than coincidental. Ricoeur himself takes up Kierkegaard critically in the beginning of
his 1949 dissertation work when explaining why it is not only possible but necessary to
abstract fault, at least temporarily so for the sake of the analysis, in favor of a pure
description of human freedom. Kierkegaard’s placing of fault, Ricoeur argues, was ill-
conceived:

The movement from a theory of the fault as a fall to a theory of the fault as birth and
unveiling of freedom seems to be outlined by Kierkegaard, who conjoins the two ideas
most equivocally: that corruption is born of the intoxication of freedom and that con-
sciousness is born of the fault.40

Moreover, Ricoeur is not content with Kierkegaard’s analysis of subjectivity that he

claims posits it ‘on the fringes of objectivity’ as, so states Ricoeur, Kierkegaard’s
notion of freedom presents freedom ‘as a rupture of all nascent fidelity to the point
of indignation and revolt, a rejection of the very condition of freedom connected by
motivation to a possible order of values.’41 In addition, Kierkegaard’s notion of
existence is not satisfactory as it, in Ricoeur’s repeated reading, does not hold on to
the mystery of living – or of existing ‘in life’ (en vie) – that unifies existence, whereas
it ‘breaks up as soon as it is thought into act and state, into freedom and necessity of
existing.’42
It is worthwhile to note that in spite of his criticism, in The Voluntary and the
Involuntary Ricoeur nevertheless gives credit to Kierkegaard, along with Descartes
and Kant, for having deepened the notion of subjectivity by identifying certain key
concepts, such as freedom, that clarify not only the idea but the structures of
consciousness. It is in Kierkegaard’s analysis of freedom and freedom as the will’s
364 T. HELENIUS

capacity to rebel against the given – the ‘freedom’s no’ – in particular that Ricoeur
appreciates the work of the Danish thinker:

Freedom, according to the existential thinker, trembles since it is the crisis of being, it is
anguished by the wide spaces it creates through possibility, it is anguished by the negation
which it introduces into the fullness of antecedent being. Starting with its own infinity, it is
the permanent possibility of disproportion, it experiences itself as its own temptation, the
temptation to exalt itself infinitely, just as it experiences the world and its body as
temptation, the temptation to sink into and lose oneself in the object. Thus freedom
dissolves the pact and in dissolving it, dissolves the paradox of freedom and necessity.43

The key thematic of le paradoxe de la liberté-nécessité, in other words, is directly related

to Kierkegaard’s work. On top of this all, Ricoeur seems to favor, along with Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard’s thoughts on what he calls ‘the original type of indefinite consciousness,’
‘the original indetermination,’ or ‘the original disorder with which I start in choosing
myself.’44 In sum, the anthropological thesis of being both capable and bound, capable
et situé, or of the reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary, is distinctly
Kierkegaardian.
The impression that one gets from these references and comments is furthermore
strengthened if we take into account Ricoeur’s lectures from the same period. Ricoeur’s
1953 lecture ‘True and False Anguish,’ published in History and Truth, is clear on its
Kierkegaardian influences. The essay probes into the Nabertian notion of primary
affirmation, but does it through anguish that questions this affirmation and stresses
disconcerting inquietude as the inescapable starting point for the self. In contrast to
fear, anguish (angoisse) – also translatable as anxiety – has no determined object but
rather signifies, being a question of both life and death, ‘a threat for my totality’ as
Ricoeur defines it in a rather Heideggerian but also Kierkegaardian manner.45 As some
other thinkers, however, these two, according to Ricoeur, were detached from the
anxiety of their own date, thereby perhaps making their analyses inferior or somehow
insufficient or inauthentic as Ricoeur implies. Ricoeur’s statement is difficult to under-
stand, but whereas ‘Kierkegaard thundered out in the dead calm of Scandinavian bliss,’
Heidegger’s apparent mistake was to write ‘Sein und Zeit without mention of the
European crisis and within the framework of an ontology more allied to Parmenides
than the contemporary public consciousness.46
An authentic contemporary anguish, Ricoeur writes, relates to being sensitive to two
ambiguities: that ‘of historical development’ and ‘of the modern State.’47 The rationality
of the two is being questioned – ‘we ourselves, as homo politicus, create the ambiguity of
our own history,’ Ricoeur summarizes48 – and this possibility of ‘nonsense’ (non-sens)
causes deep anxiety. The key point here is that Ricoeur calls this deep anxiety ‘the
anguish of guilt;’49 we have brought and are bringing it upon ourselves. Recalling
Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s fall, das Verfallen des Daseins, that is always and already
‘there,’ the futural point, however, is more prominent in terms of this guilt. ‘It is on the
basis of the second feature that looks toward the future,’ Ricoeur argues, ‘that guilt
becomes anguishing: I who am always already bound, I create and recreate evil in the
world by means of a free and yet unfree intention.’50 In other words, Ricoeur prefers
Kierkegaard over Heidegger.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 365

In spite of his earlier criticism, this is the precise and substantial entry point for
Kierkegaard in the context of our analysis. Ricoeur continues by explaining that the
anguishing guilt is the ‘component that Kierkegaard elucidated in the celebrated The
Concept of Anxiety,’ as the work relates dread or anguish to the possible, or, to ‘the
imminent possibility of degrading myself as a possibility of being free.’51 The anguish
that Kierkegaard brought forth concerns the very human existence as a life in the
paradoxical reciprocity of the voluntary and the involuntary; ‘this anguish uncovers
nothingness.’52 In sum, ‘the nothingness in question is neither death, not madness,
not nonsense, nor even this active negation of being-there which constitutes free-
dom. It is rather the vanity of freedom itself, the nothingness of a bound freedom.’53
It is this very anxiety that Ricoeur sets as a challenge to the primary affirmation,
explored and proposed by Nabert. Ricoeur’s expansion of this ‘unique experience’ by
way of relating it to Kant’s essay on radical evil and finally to the ‘ultimate’ or
‘properly metaphysical’ anguish of the possibility of divine chaos54 – to be resolvable
only in the absurd eschatological hope in the total silence of absentia dei – does not
take away the fact that, in Ricoeur’s eyes, Kierkegaard’s phenomenology is seemingly
very attractive.
The issue of attraction is trickier, however, as it comes to Kierkegaard’s existential-
ism. In Alison Scott-Baumann’s 2013 work Ricoeur and the Negation of Happiness,
Scott-Baumann refers to a series of eight two-hour lectures that Ricoeur held at Union
Theological Seminary in 1958 under the title of ‘Anthropology and Religion in the
Philosophy of Existence.’ The so far unpublished lecture manuscript is currently held in
Fonds Ricoeur in Paris – and only readable there as made evident by several attempts at
acquiring the manuscript that, unfortunately, were not met with success.55 From Alison
Scott-Baumann’s description and the affirming citations of the manuscript, however, we
may gather that in that lecture series Kierkegaard is approached, along with Hegel,
Nietzsche, and Marx, as one of the fathers of existentialism, followed by Heidegger,
Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre as their ‘sons.’ This would indicate that Kierkegaard is one
of the common denominators behind Ricoeur’s appreciation of Jaspers and Marcel.
Even though the whole idea of a coherent existential camp with ‘fathers’ and ‘sons’ was
soon discarded in Ricoeur’s 1963 Kierkegaard essays, the fact that Kierkegaard was in
the 1958 lectures assigned ‘dread and despair’56 as the category of existential negativity
speaks volumes. It is fair to assume that already at that time Ricoeur really considered
Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death as his key contribu-
tions; these two works also were of Ricoeur’s focal interest in the early 1960s
publications.
In addition, we are perhaps entitled to propose that having then discarded the
whole category of existentialism and also the idea of Kierkegaard as the father of
existentialism as ‘nothing more than a trompe l’oeil’57 – a kind of optical illusion –
Ricoeur insisted on this point in order to elevate and not to suppress Kierkegaard.
Calling Kierkegaard the father of existentialism is for the 1963 Ricoeur ‘perhaps the
cleverest way of taming him by cataloging him in a known genre.’58 In the ‘Doing
philosophy after Kierkegaard’ essay Ricoeur thereby even calls for freeing Kierkegaard
from the ‘family of philosophies that does not exist.’59 Ricoeur’s disdain is therefore
more related to the category of existential philosophy rather than to Kierkegaard,
whose work he seemingly appreciates.
366 T. HELENIUS

Our analysis has then brought us back to Ricoeur’s 1963 essays that may now open
differently; they are indeed not the only texts to speak of Ricoeur’s affinity with
Kierkegaard’s thought. As part of a larger set of texts and textual references, the essays
reinforce the point that Kierkegaard was not a tertiary level figure for Ricoeur but much
more like a secondary level, albeit still remarkably substantial, inspiration. This cautious
expression is quite intentional as questions of the exact nature of the relationship
between Kierkegaard and Ricoeur nevertheless remains; in ‘Doing philosophy after
Kierkegaard’ Kierkegaard is clearly understood and used in the context of Ricoeur’s
Hegel critique. As I pointed out earlier, Ricoeur is, quite unoriginally, critical of Hegel’s
handling and positioning of religion as a precursory to philosophy that, in turn, is a
more advanced stage in Geist’s self-becoming. Having used Kierkegaard for this critique
does not mean that Ricoeur would, however, remain uncritical of Kierkegaard whom
Ricoeur depicts as a philosophical outsider and insider at the same time. According to
Ricoeur, Kierkegaard should be criticized for his emphasis on the religious phase that
does not give credit to the necessity of structure and mediation. In short, Ricoeur places
himself as a philosopher between these diverging positions by maintaining that (1)
philosophy is always in relation to non-philosophy in the Kierkegaardian sense of
irrational experience, (2) it should concern a subject’s concrete existence at the level
of personal decisions, but (3) it should also view itself in the light of the paradox arising
from the conflict between Hegelian absolutism and Kierkegaardian existentialism: ‘The
question, “What is existence?” cannot be separated from the other question, “What is
thinking?” Philosophy lives on the unity of these two questions and dies of their
separation.’60 By emphasizing the third point, Ricoeur as if announces to remain
distinct from the two named thinkers.
To counter the point just made, it is not quite clear as to what extent Ricoeur’s so-
called criticism holds true. We can rightfully question whether Ricoeur’s this particular
assessment of Kierkegaard is completely accurate; perhaps he has exercised his right to
argue in the wake of Kierkegaard in the same, often explicitly unorthodox manner as he
did in the wake of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, or Honneth when arguing ‘after’ them,
referring to their thoughts but in the service of the argument he himself was building at
the time. The option that I have also proposed in relation to Ricoeur’s handling of some
other philosophers, is that Ricoeur may have been suppressing the Kierkegaardian
elements in order to distinguish himself from Kierkegaard who is simply a bit too
much like Ricoeur at the level of his thoughts (just as he would do, much like
Kierkegaard himself, with Hegel).
A brief illustration may make this point clearer. In his Concluding Scientific
Postscript, Kierkegaard discusses the need for a ceaselessly repeated transition from
ethical to religious subjectivity by using the famous notion of a ‘leap.’ The term,
however, should not cloud Kierkegaard’s actual point that concerns the unceasing
becoming of a self, or an authentic subject, by constantly placing, as if breaking from
thinking that is mediated, one’s faith or interest in the actuality of life that realizes
one’s ultimate potentialities.61 Kierkegaard’s point was not that there is existence
only in the realm devoid of thinking as Ricoeur may be read to be intimating. In
addition, we may perhaps think of Ricoeur’s key anthropological question of fini-
tude/infinitude or the possibility/necessity dialectics as a further test case. In his
reflection concerning the constituents of the self in its synthesis, Anti-Climacus
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 367

/Kierkegaard is clear in The Sickness unto Death – a work that Ricoeur also uses –
that the self is not only composed of infinitude and finitude but also that such a
synthetic self ‘is freedom’ as freedom is ‘the dialectical aspect of the categories of
possibility and necessity’ that the self manifests in its necessary relating to itself in
relation that is its possibility.62 Moreover, Kierkegaard also emphasized that the
human self is defined by self-consciousness and the will that make a proper person
or, rather, a Human Being (et Menneske). Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of human
self as defined by finitude/infinitude and possibility/necessity – executed in the work
that focuses on despair and sin – is therefore more grounding than Ricoeur’s
criticism would lead us to hold.
The self, as a conscious synthesis of the infinite and the finite, is a task unless made
concrete by the relationship to the other – for Anti-Climacus: God, and for Ricoeur: le
Tout Autre or l’Essentiel, in which the self may ‘rest transparently’ – through, as
Kierkegaard puts it, ‘an infinite moving away from itself’ that at the same time means
both a move away from the process of becoming a self, or from the self’s potentiality,
and a move into the full actuality of existence.63 Such leap, however, is damaging to the
self that fantasizes about being a full self as the standing ‘before God’ is thought to be an
untenable position to have; in this thinking, coram Deo would either negate or cancel
the self or affirm it too strongly. Either way, too much infinitude is simply too much for
the self. But the lack of infinitude, or of the personal spirit, is equally disconcerting as
sheer finitude reduces an individual into a passable index, meaning one another ‘no
name’ human being merely concerned with mundane matters that render the self tame
in their coziness and comfortableness. The self, therefore, is always in the state of
despair because of being a synthesis between unrestricted infinitude purported by the
imagination and the imposed finitude of cozy and spiritually empty unreflected
worldliness.
But just as the Scylla and Charybdis of infinitude and finitude define the becom-
ing of the self, the same applies for possibility and necessity. If either counter-
balancing aspect of the synthesis is missing, the self is in despair. And since for
Kierkegaard necessity equates with the necessity to be a self, and possibility with the
task of becoming a self, the self is pressed by these both while at the same time being
guarded by them both, thereby being in despair. If the self does not face the need to
be a self, it runs wild with the possibility and becomes an abstraction or ‘a mirage’
for itself. The self loses itself in its exhaustive chase of possibilities, or, in its abysmal,
deferred becoming – thus being in despair because of not recognizing that to be a
self is to be ‘a very definite something.’64 While the self needs to maintain itself in its
view, it is nevertheless also the case that human existence necessarily needs possibi-
lity without which it becomes dull and void, again falling into despair. It is necessary
to believe, and have faith in possibility, to maintain hope in something that is not a
given or a necessity. Human existence, according to Kierkegaard, is a continuous
battle of faith, and a struggle for salvation in possibility that exceeds probability; this
possibility is ultimately depicted as God. But pure possibility annuls and suffocates
the self and leads it into despair, just as pure necessity does. ‘Personhood,’
Kierkegaard therefore argues, ‘is a synthesis of possibility and necessity.’65 The self,
in other words, is active relating in despair to itself in relation that has possibility
and necessity as its modal attributes.
368 T. HELENIUS

Ricoeur’s wagers as a leap

It may be fair to summarize that there is, at the very least, a strong thematic continuity
from Kierkegaard to Ricoeur: phenomenological, existential, and anthropological. This
observation leads us, in conclusion, to consider the role of the various wagers Ricoeur
introduces as an aspect of his philosophy. As it the most well-known, there is the wager
that is the one referred to in a technical sense. The Symbolism of Evil makes evident the
shift of methodological emphasis that Ricoeur decides to undertake. The essence of
Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ‘wager’ (le pari hermeneutique), that is, Ricoeur’s turn to the
hermeneutics of symbols, is captured in the idea that Ricoeur imports from Kant’s third
Critique: ‘the symbol gives rise to thought.’66 Ricoeur commits himself to a view which
leads him to change the overall methodological approach from onto-existentially
inspired phenomenology to hermeneutical phenomenology – Ricoeur, in other words,
relies on a certain teleological suspension that some may think in terms of a philoso-
phical ‘leap.’
Such leap is not restricted to The Symbolism of Evil, whereas it is re-enacted through-
out Ricoeur’s corpus. De l’interprétation – translated as Freud and Philosophy – is based
on an explicit wager of Freud’s work ‘as a monument of our culture, as a text in which
our culture is expressed and understood.’67 Ricoeur’s plea, or his other wager in the same
text (meaning: his focus is more emphatically on symbols in order to understand ‘the
epistemology of symbolism,’68) not only places us again at ‘the origin of our speaking
being,’ but reinforces how we reappropriate reflectively our effort to exist.69 Ricoeur
seems to be stating that human existence and understanding the finite modes of that
existence is at the very core of his pursuit. To complement this analysis, Ricoeur’s 1972
essay La métaphore et le problem central de l’herméneutique – a precursor to The Rule of
Metaphor – discusses the construction of meaning in reference to a wager: la construction
prend la forme d’un pari.70
Many times over, it appears, Ricoeur makes a bet, a wager difficult to defend
philosophically, that leads him to find his position to be enriched by what was yet
undisclosed. The same is found at the other end of Ricoeur’s career. The Course of
Recognition, Ricoeur states, is a work né d’un pari – ‘born of a wager.’71 Despite the
‘successive elaborations of Anerkennung’ he then recounts in the late work, Ricoeur
insists that he needs to resort to the texts of Hegel’s Jena period in order to maintain a
‘hope of seeing resources of meaning disclosed that were not exhausted in Hegel’s later,
more accomplished books.’72 Here, once again, Ricoeur bets on a ‘wager,’ that is, he
leaves the shift of his argument philosophically unjustified. In spite of having acknowl-
edged the importance of the whole development of the concept, Ricoeur turns to argue
that an incipient stage of Hegel’s Anerkennung is, allegedly, more fruitful.73
The reason why he would openly do so – practice ‘bad philosophy’ so to speak –
relies on the view that, I believe, is explained in his early work and by his affinity with
Kierkegaard’s thought. If all of Ricoeur’s work is to be understood as a series of
incomplete approximations into the ‘poetics of being and of the will in being’74 that
will forever only remain anticipated, then a deep connection with Kierkegaard just may
appear in our sight. Put differently, for Ricoeur the poetics of being is undivided
participation with the beyond-the-self, in the full spontaneity of ‘life from above’ (La
vie d’en-haut).75 It is apparent, however, that Ricoeur’s human and methodological
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 369

capacities are far more limited than needed for reaching such beyond-the-self as the self
itself is beyond itself; the self will never fully have itself (here I am also thinking about
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death76). Even though from the
poetic point of view ‘the leap from the self to existence and the leap to the being of
Transcendence are but one and the same philosophical act,’77 Ricoeur has to acknowl-
edge – in a distinctly Kierkegaardian tone – that philosophy does not reach this level
but falls short in gaining such ontological fullness of the Whole. ‘From the point of view
of a doctrine of subjectivity,’ Ricoeur admits, ‘the movement of deepening and reflec-
tion remains another leap, the leap towards the Wholly Other (le movement d’appro-
fondissement et de réflection reste un autre bond, le bond vers le Tout-Autre).’78 The
indirect reflection, even as allowing certain clarifying ‘clearings’ (l’éclaircies), cannot
avoid the struggle of interpreting the ciphers that first of all need to be conveived as the
ciphers of the ‘higher’ that always remains in the mode of otherness. Reflection, in other
words, does not reach the onto-existential fullness but the threshold of that which is
beyond full comprehension as it is the possible.
The only option left for Ricoeur to use is to hold fast to the notion that ‘the
spontaneity of life below serves as a metaphor for higher life,’ even without fully
knowing the reasons for their affinity.79 Interestingly enough, Ricoeur also states in
The Voluntary and the Involuntary that wager is made without reason whereas a risk is
taken with insufficient reason or on some reasonable grounds: On parie sans raison, ‘we
wager without reasons.’80 Ricoeur’s prime wager – or his leap – is therefore his placing
of trust in the notion that philosophical reflection moves ‘from the lower to the higher,’
that is, from the concrete experience of a living, acting, and suffering subject to the
threshold of the Wholly Other, or of making all that is possible real in the Other (I am
thinking again about The Sickness unto Death). Ricoeur’s philosophy of the Wholly
Other, inasmuch as it exists, is ‘reversed’ in its reading the ciphers from subjectivity to
Transcendence as he himself characterizes it: ‘we are reading this philosophy of
Transcendence, which erupts from above downward, in reverse. In reading it thus
from the lower to the higher we shall discover the response of subjectivity to an appeal
or a grasp which surpasses it.’81 The language of discovery, uncovering, and revelation –
nous découvrons – is indicative of Ricoeur’s hopeful trust. Is this prime wager, which
relies on the faithful hope of a futural understanding and on infinite interestedness in
one’s existence, then not akin to Kierkegaard’s leap? I would bet on that.

Notes
1. Rumble, “The Oracle’s Ambiguity,” 607.
2. Rumble, “Narrative and Finitude,” 259.
3. Ibid., 259–61.; Bühler, “Ricoeur et Kierkegaard”; Rasmussen, “Paul Ricoeur: On
Kierkegaard”; Scott-Baumann, The Negation of Happiness, 68, 73–75.
4. Ricoeur, “Two Encounters with Kierkegaard,” 315.
5. Ricoeur, Lectures 2, 43–45.
6. Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 15.
7. Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 1.
8. Ibid., 5.
9. Ibid., 2.
10. Ibid., 5–6.
370 T. HELENIUS

11. Ricoeur, Fallible Man, 6–7.

12. Ibid., 11.
13. Ibid., 11.; Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 272, 274.; Ricoeur, Critique and
Conviction, 110.
14. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 81.
15. Ibid., 311.
16. Ibid., 343.
17. Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 83.
18. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 146.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 27.
21. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 312.
22. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 202, 449.
23. Ibid., 549. Ricoeur also uses Kierkegaard similarly in reference to Spinoza in his (yet to be
published) 1975 lectures on imagination.
24. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 312.
25. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 67, 254.
26. Ricoeur, Essays in Biblical Interpretation, 105.
27. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 6.
28. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 356.
29. Ibid., 378–379.
30. Kierkegaard, Various Spirits, 159–162, 212. For an alternative reading that emphasizes
impatience (in distinction with concern) and human nothingness, see Pattison,
Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 48–51, 54–56, and 77–79.
31. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 505.
32. Ibid., 505.
33. Ibid., 76.
34. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, 221.
35. ‘Husserl (1859–1938)’ was published in 1954 and ‘Phénoménologie existentielle’ in 1957;
both essays make reference to Kierkegaard.
36. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 16.
37. Ricoeur, Husserl, 206–207.
38. Ibid., 207.
39. Ibid., 207. For Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity as both truth and untruth, cf. Barrett,
‘Subjectivity is (Un)Truth.’
40. See note 20 above.
41. Ibid., 179.
42. Ibid., 410, 414.
43. Ibid., 445–446.
44. Ibid., 145.
45. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 287.
46. Ibid., 289.
47. Ibid., 295–296.
48. Ibid., 296.
49. Ibid., 298.
50. Ibid., 298.
51. Ibid., 298.
52. Ibid., 299.
53. Ibid., 299.
54. Ibid., 299.
55. Several esteemed scholars helped me in trying to obtain a copy of the manuscript. I am
especially thankful to David Pellauer for his generosity. For anyone having the opportu-
nity to read the lectures, they may be found at Fonds Ricoeur as ‘Inventaire 1, dossier
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 371

Anthropology and Religion in the Philosophy of Existence at Union Theological

Seminary, USA, 1957–1960(?) A.27. Feuillets 4057–4101.’
56. Scott-Baumann, The Negation of Happiness, 34.
57. Ricoeur, “Two Encounters with Kierkegaard,” 326.
58. Ibid., 326.
59. Ibid., 326.
60. Ibid., 341.
61. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 323–324, 328–329, 331–332, 343, 347. See
Adams, “Indirect Communication.”
62. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 29.
63. Ibid., 30.
64. Ibid., 36.
65. Ibid., 40.
66. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 348, 355.; Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 38.
67. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, xi.
68. Ibid., 14.
69. Ibid., 15–16. See Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 13.; Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 304.
70. Ricoeur, Écrits et conférences 2, 110.
71. Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, x-xi.
72. Ibid., 173–174.
73. Ibid., 171, 173–174.
74. Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 471.
75. Ibid., 415.
76. For Ricoeur’s reading of the self as an unstable relation in Kierkegaard’s Sickness unto
Death, see Ricoeur, Philosophical Anthropology, 5–6.
77. Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 468.
78. Ibid., 468.
79. Ibid., 405–406, 415. Cf. Ricoeur and LaCocque, Thinking Biblically, 265–303.
80. Ricoeur, The Voluntary and the Involuntary, 180.
81. Ibid., 468–469.

Notes on contributor
Timo Helenius received his PhD in philosophy from Boston College in 2013, and he has been
a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University since 2016.
Helenius has taught philosophy and ethics at Boston College, Mount Ida College, and – most
recently – at the University of New Brunswick Saint John as a Visiting Assistant Professor of
Philosophy. Helenius’s research has focused on contemporary Continental philosophy in
general and in Paul Ricoeur in particular. His work, Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A
Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity, was published by Lexington Books (Rowman &
Littlefield) in 2016.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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