Søren Kierkegaard: A Boundary Thinker

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present Kierkegaard from the philosophical notion of limit as a hermeneutical key to understand both the content and the form of his thought. It is from this notion, fundamentally defined by Kant from the metaphor of the «boundary [Grenze]» of reason and criticized by Hegel from the «negative movement» of speculative dialectics, that Kierkegaard is seen as a thinker who, far from pointing out the limit between philosophy and Christianity, he becomes the boundary himself. What we try to show is how Kierkegaard, precisely for being a religious thinker, dramatizes the limit of philosophy within its own discourse and creates, in this way, a new form of doing philosophy, which consists of not knowing the limit, as all philosophy has always tried to do, but recognising it and illuminating it negatively in the discourse.

Keywords: Kierkegaard, limit, boundary, philosophy, christianity, Socrates, truth, paradox.