Abstract

According to recent studies Kierkegaard must be recognized as the precursor or even the father of postmodernism. One of the chief exponents of this trend is J.D. Caputo, who, especially in his Radical Hermeneutics (1987), presents Kierkegaard's thought in line with Heidegger's or Derrida's philosophy as a huge effort "to restore factical existence to its original difficulty". In my paper I first try to show what could be the Kierkegaardian sense of the "original difficulty" of existence by analysing the unpublished and uncomplete manuscript The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethico-Religious Communication. In this text Kierkegaard, in polemics with modern culture and modern philosophy, argues in favour of "a more primitive thinking". Secondly I present in a broad outline the crucial contentions of Kierkegaard's philosophical production: (1) The concept of human being is normative; (2) The ethical task of each singular human being consists in transforming the psychic qualification of his existence in a pneumatic one; (3) The bedrock normative practice that determines the human being as "pneumatic" is the existential speech-act. Finally I summarize the main points of difference between the proposed interpretation of Kierkegaard's thought and Caputo's post-modern view