The self in Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death: a Peircean and a Hegelian reading

• Autor(a) principal: McNabb, Darin
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Cognitio (São Paulo. Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/view/59912

The first six paragraphs of Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death are among the densest and most difficult passages to interpret in his entire oeuvre. There, he expounds the nature of the self in terms of relations, and many have interpreted it as an expression of Hegel's dialectic. In this essay, I read those paragraphs from Peirce's logic of relations and show that Peirce allows us to understand Kierkegaard much more clearly than Hegel. Moreover, despite all that Peirce and Hegel have in common, Peirce criticizes him severely with respect to the reality of Secondness. In analyzing this criticism and also what Peirce and Kierkegaard say about the importance of doubt vis-a-vis consciousness, I show that a Peircean reading of Kierkegaard is much more fruitful than the Hegelian framework that Kierkegaard knew. In the end, I reflect on the possibility of speaking of a semiotic Kierkegaard and an existentialist Peirce.