Kierkegaard and the lonelywhithout-god

Ethical-contemporary considerations from the concluding unscientific postcript to the philosophical crumbs

Abstract

The present article approaches the dichotomy of “necessity vs freedom” and its implications for contemporary ethical grounds. Thus, it presents free will and causal notions as theoretical grounds, which are commonly seen as antagonistic to the subject matter. In order to deepen the question at hand, the article reaches to Kierkegaard’s Postscript to Philosophical Fragments as the central philosophical framework. Such thinker points out that a necessitarianism would entail the ending of responsibility and of the possibility of an ethical position. Therefore, it proposes that ethical foundations are within the individual and his relation to God. Meanwhile, because of contemporary psychological investigations on the causality of the self and the philosophical movement of “The death of God”, the Kierkegaardian proposition loses strength, suggesting a new proposal, here named, the Godless Loner: epistemologically limited, ontologically determined; existentially lost. The options left for his desperate situation are exacerbated consumerism and hedonism