Critical Theory and the Knight of Faith
I am currently reading up on Kierkegaard and I believe I understand his Knight of Faith. It seems that the Knight of Faith follows only what his God tells him, according to his subjective relationship to God. Along with the teleological suspension of the ethics, which suppresses societies morals with their subjective relationship to God. Also, It abandons/avoids the spiritual trail ((Which is to place the potential action through ethical judgement and see if it withstands the court)(this is Kierkegaard's problem with Hegel's either/or(is that correct?))). With this abandonment of the spiritual trial, it also abandons critical thinking, this is where I saw a slight connection with critical theory. Now I admit that I have limit knowledge on Kierkegaard and even less knowledge on critical theory. From one podcasts talking about critical theory, it stated that the critical theory abandons critical thinking by the thought that a person being oppressed is not due to the individual but due to their environment. Completely eliminating a person's free choice and making each person being oppressed (which I think this is defined as people in poverty) only subjects to their oppressors(those who have money). This seems to represent the abandonment of the spiritual trail and go straight to prosecution of the oppressors.
Am I wrong? Will this only work if God is viewed as in Pantheism? Does this fall under the ethical stage that people are just conforming? Or does this fall under the demonic under the aesthetic stage, to where people want the moral high ground to attain their superiority? Or is there no correlation at all and I'm just trying to extract a limitless amount of meaning from a limit source?
Thanks for reading and have a good day yall.
Am I wrong? Will this only work if God is viewed as in Pantheism? Does this fall under the ethical stage that people are just conforming? Or does this fall under the demonic under the aesthetic stage, to where people want the moral high ground to attain their superiority? Or is there no correlation at all and I'm just trying to extract a limitless amount of meaning from a limit source?
Thanks for reading and have a good day yall.
Comments (3)
Sort of. I think that you could benefit from more time with Kierkegaard in order to clarify your thoughts and especially clean up your reading of him, which I take to be problematic enough that I hope you won't be offended if I refer you to some material rather than responding to you point by point. Kierkegaard is one of the few thinkers who, in my opinion, is worth a lifetime of study, so I definitely want to encourage you on that front.
With that said, I think the best undergraduate-level material out there on Kierkegaard is Burt Dreyfus's course on existentialism at Berkeley. I would highly recommend you listen to at least the first few lectures. I think he will provide a better response to your reading of Kierkegaard than any of us will: https://archive.org/details/Phil_7_Existentialism_in_Literature_and_Film
Best of luck!
Great! If you have any new thoughts please come here and share them. :)