Paula Arizpe
The Metaphysics in the Development of Will in Simone Weil

Existence is conceiving one´s entire life
before one´s self and directing it all
in a sense determined by the
will and with one´s labor1.

In this paper, I intend to show the way in which Simone Weil’s methodology of decision is built and how it unfolds in 3 wider steps:
A) The weigh and measure of the values these constructions give way to.
B)  The way these are woven into practical decision.
C) How the limits of each one, opens a door to the next step with the consequent aggrandizement of TRUTH.

 

Urška Baloh
Ancient Anamnesis and Repetition - in Relation to Love

The article deals with the problem of remembering, as Plato inscribed in his texts, that knowledge is already in us, and we must only remember and recall it. A modern man understands the repetition differently, as something that can produce a new one, but how does it produce it? Kierkegaard understands the repetition, he understands the antiquity of the repetition in a different way than the special reincarnation of the soul, its remission. Today, human beings are essential creatures of existence, who wonder how to get through it? Here it is necessary to point out G. Deleuze, who understands the repetition as repression and puts this in context of difference. In this conception, Freud's legacy of thought is not negligible when he watched his grandson playing.
Cognition, play, desperate repetition of an act, is not it all a single craving to find love in the world and in your life?

Key words: remembrance, repetition, repression, love

Igor Černe
Ethical Evolution of Being

(Essay on the Meaning of Being)

A modern reflection on the ethical existence of a modern man, embedded in the maximum unbridled sense of the all-prevalent presence, liking and narcissism of unshakable widths, is a task preceded by a colossal reflection. This does not concern only the outward appearance of man, but above all his inner world, hidden from the daily routine for secular things. It is within this interior that we must find the basis for ethical action.

Key words: reflection, inner world, ethical action

Cyril Diatka
Search for the Truth of Jan Patočka

The contribution builds on the personal profile of the Czech philosopher and thinker Jan Patočka. The eternal life-realization of truth is connected with the spelling of Greek philosophy for modern man. The concept of the natural world as a research contribution to the tradition of Czech philosophy. Patočka is interested in Komensky's work. These Patočka's initiatives are approaching a personal attitude to the expression of undemocratic opinions and totalitarianism. This is related to his personal resistance to totalitarianism. These facts were manifested at the end of his life. He became an unconditional advocate of truth, humanity and democracy. In resisting the totalitarian regime and defending the truth, death is adopted in the Socratic way.

Key words: Jan Patočka, truth, humanity, democracy, resistance to totalitarianism, Socratic death

Abrahim H. Khan
Kierkegaard’s Literary Review of Two Ages: a Lexical Consideration

Kierkegaard as literary critic reviewed three novels relating to the existential situation in a secular age. They form a distinct cluster within his corpus or Samlede Værker.  His review of the Danish novel Two Ages is the most substantive of the three published as En literair Anmeldelse.  Given its thrust on life-views, there is good reason to accept it as an ethical critique. However, this study considers the text from a lexical perspective to determine whether and how that text has import for ethical praxis. Its focus is on words used at an aberrant frequent rate.2 In that connection, this essay advances three considerations towards a better understanding of both the text and the idea of ethical praxis. It does this in four phases: 1) create a list of terms peculiar to the text, 2) sketch a dimensional space for a summary of the text, 3) construct the summary, and 4) show whether and how the summary relates to understanding ethical praxis.   

Key words: Two Ages, lexical consideration, ethical praxis, understanding of the text

Tibor Mahrik
Decided to Die

Two important thinkers of his time, S. Kierkegaard and J. Patočka, lived in a different geo-political context, while both radically demonstrated their values, attitudes and views on the social events of their time. The study presents some aspects of their various philosophical considerations, ethical frameworks, and ways of expressing disagreement with the course of their time, revealing their common ground - willingness to the highest sacrifice in the name of truth and for the benefit of society.

Key words: Kierkegaard, Patoka, disagreement with the age, the highest sacrifice

Martin Beck Matuštík

Kierkegaard and “Fake News”:
The Leveling of Privacy and Communication in the Present Age of Social Media

"The individual is the category through which ... this age, all history, The human race as a whole, must pass“ (Kierkegaard, 1962:128).

In his seminal work, Two Ages, Kierkegaard (1972) presented one Of the first attempts to come to terms with threats to privacy and open communication posed by the modern emerging social media.
In the key section called “The Present Age,“ devoted primarily to the critique of the press, publishing industry as well as of the political assemblies and religious congregations, he introduces the term, “leveling communication“. If it can be demonstrated that the EuroAmerican West finds itself in a situation that evinces key aspects of Kierkegaard’s critique, then what can we learn from his defense,  of the singular individual deployed against the leveling of privacy and communication in the present age of digital social media?

Key words: leveling communication, digital social media, fake news

Miroslav Micov
What Threatens Western Civilization?

The main goal of the article is to support an open discussion about causes of malfunctioning of  liberal democracy in connection with the inability of the intellectual elity to explain some phenomenons through critical thinking. The article is  primarily focused on the exact definition of the concept of disadventaged groups of people, who are really and objectively reliant upon social support of the state (for example disabled groups of people, aging people, orphans etc.). Article deals with a question, how  irrational  and widespread definition of disadventaged groups of people (postmodern concept)  can lead to  the implementation of  dangerous ideological doctrines incompatible with the essence of democracy.

Key words: malfunctioning of liberal democracy, critical thinking, disadvantaged groups of people

Uroš Milić
Kierkegaard's Rotation of Authority

What I propose is an attempt to rethink the purpose of ambiguity within Kierkegaard's depiction of existence communication as struggle. Ambiguity is predominately understood as frailty, uncertainty, in short, a way to depict one's relation to a transcendent uknown. Even though this holds true, ambiguity also serves as a way Kierkegaard rotates an existential topology where singular existence, by encountering the limit of the universal (i.e. one's community), takes part in what Constantine Constantius would call a wrestling match in which the universal breaks. Hence what I plan to focus on are the three following aspects of ambiguity. Firstly, ambiguity can serve as a point of departure in understanding the way Kierkegaard confronts the interior i.e. religious sphere with the exterior i.e. ethical sphere of individual existence, both of which constantly circulate within the universal. Secondly, given the fact that the same circulation, understood also as continuity, is ruptured by a peculiar discontinuity (i.e. a crisis), the struggle of the individual leaves a qualitative expression that can be ascribed to the way Kierkegaard intertwines the relation between moods and one's placement within the universal. And lastly, the same expression becomes a trace of human existence that falls unto the communicator in the shape of an ethical calling: to observe, to communicate – not with authority but with distinction. What I suggest is a shift of focus in the way we approach Kierkegaard's texts, for what can be expounded from Rotation of  Crops can prove helpful in understanding the various compounds of Kierkegaard's ambigious and above all communicative topology. I will thus focus the following works. Either/Or (Rotation of Crops), Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death.

Key words: rethinking, ambiguity, struggle, existential topology, rotation of crops

András Nagy
WORKS OF HATE: The Central European Misreading of Kierkegaard in Three Ages

In my paper I focus on the controversies originated in the Central European reading or, rather “misreading” of Kierkegaard, due to the historical and political context of the region in the time of Kierkegaard’s reception by the several important Hungarian intellectuals. The “first age” in this process was that of the pre-revolutionary decade of the 1900s when a handful of young Hungarian intellectuals became passionately interested in the Danish thinker (the so-called “Sunday Circle” around Georg Lukács3). The same process later concluded in the very paradoxical “leap of faith,” arriving from the unresolved controversies of the bourgeois society directly to communism (Lukács referred to Kierkegaard4 when joining the Communist Party in 1918).
The “second age” was the time of institutionalized revolution that was growing into a totalitarian system first and briefly in Hungary in the 1919 communist republic5 then, escaping from the consequences of the political turmoil. Lukács and part of his group settled down first in Vienna, then in Berlin and finally in the USSR to closely witness the structure and working of Stalinism based on fear, hatred and lack of individuality. That time Lukács identified Kierkegaard as a “forerunner” of the decadent bourgeois philosophy who, in spite of his “subjective honesty” paved the way for another hatred-based totalitarian system, Nazism.6 Lukács’ arguments were based on the same sources he used also before and elaborated in his Destruction of Reason7.
The slow and contradictory consolidation of communist rule in the 1960s, simultaneously with the Marxist “renaissance” in Western Europe and with the Existential interpretation of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre in Central Europe opened the way for moderate political dissent as well, inspired indirectly by Kierkegaard’s thinking. In Hungary members of the so-called “Lukács school” played a very important role in this process8, just like in the political fermentation, by signing a petition to support the Charta ’77. While they provided philosophical basis for their political views, they were expelled from Hungary. At the same time Kierkegaard was “rehabilitated” by the communist cultural politics of the earlier accusations, and the focus moved back to the interpretation of the young Lukács. However, the current understanding of the Danish thinker lacked the focus on his theological writings and disregarded his coherently expressed political views, that were definitely unfit for the process of democratization.
The consequences of the misinterpretations and misrepresentations however became a part of our intellectual past, mirrored in Kierkegaard’s writings.

Bogomir Novak
Love in the Age of Simulacra

Motto d'un poème: que reste-t-il de nos amours? (Charles Trenet)
A dichotomous comparison is drawn in a table on Kierkegaard’s concept of love and current socio-economic tendencies. Due to the characteristics of the society of simulacra (Baudrillard, 1999), we move away from Kierkegaard’s postulate: “you must love”. Saint Paul describes agape love which builds bridges between people. Conversely, selfish, erotic, possessive, pompous, calculating love which is dominant in the time of world’s erotism destroys bridges. Kierkegaard accepts Lutheran premise of absolute responsibility for one’s love towards God which is love. Nothing remains from selfish, precarious love of likes; agape love never diminishes. Today’s consumerism accentuates the shallowness of the spiritless aesthetic consciousness meaning no basic human paradox has been brought to awareness nor religiously transformed.

Agape love is sacrificial, giving, considerate, attentive, and it is sourced in the abundance of goodness and beauty. No failure breaks love, no misfortune turns it away from itself. Love is resourceful since every negation is replaced by an affirmation. It is pure. There is no sin. Agape love is difficult since it calls for training oneself to be resilient (Novak, 2007) and for praying for patience. However, today on one hand there is unscrupulous production (Urbančič, Komel), plutocratic accumulation of material riches and external power and on the other deepening poverty. Icons have been replaced by glimpses of visual images, giving of oneself has been replaced by giving material gifts. Chrematistic model based on unfair indebting of all countries is a nechrophilic crematorium for the (Western) civilisation (Gržan, 2016).
Thanks to their courageous vagueness on the meaning, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love are an invitation to think about the non-accomplished completeness of human coexistence in the world with new corruptive obstacles. The Works of Love are a positive utopia. Pope Francis has made decisive strides towards an authentic attitude of the Christians. Only by “going against the stream” we achieve passion of spiritual life despite the hypocrisies of nonsense.

Key words: agape and erotic love, simulacra, sense, consumerism

Iztok Osojnik
Johannes Climacus, De omnibus dubitandum est and the Issue of Ethics of Banal Literature

The ethics of (my) literature is defined by the reference to Kierkegaard's notion that “any systematic science without any interest is hereby without meaning”. My uninteresting and average literary production, quite properly defined as a non-event (a jump into the emptiness of faith without any fate) is longer undermined by the following Kierkegaardian paradox: “When the ideal and the real lock together, a recapitulation happens. In the moment when I write something, the ideal [consciousness] calls on and explains that this is a recapitulation.” So there is no recapitulation. It is only the ideal, while on the other hand in an event something unique, non-recapitulative breaks out. That something that keeps recurring is the impossibility of the recapitulation of the same. “Actually there is no recapitulation.” The something, that recapitulates itself in the meaning, is by Nietzsche defined as the eternal recurrence - the recurrence of not the same event as the non-event of the same. In light of it also my work gains a certain dimension. Its averageness and non interestingness (for an other) is exactly such an event of the averageness and the non interestingness that never recur as the same. The averageness and the non interestingness in this perspective is the real of Kierkegaard. So here we have to do with something that the doubt as the “beginning of the highest form of being” does not reach up to. So where it is possible to locate my ethical creative working at? Is the actualization of particular virtual possibilities sufficient to recognize such a product as of the literary value? Is the crystallization of conditions and elements individualized in a literary process sufficient to charge an event and to talk about ethics of literature as about working ethics that constitutes the world in the light of a becoming into being (Seyn) only in the contact/non-event of the “reality”/ Real as about a self constituting, original working that elicits no doubt or - even better - is beyond any doubt, any conscious reach, and any systematic science. Being aware that only this subjectivates/individualizes me as a poet as well as a man. The averageness and the non interestingness characterizing my work so draw one's attention onto the banality of the symbolization (signifier) and onto only the bare existence in the stream of becoming. But not onto the higjest form of being and its suppositions (meanings, values). The ethics of the banal literature thus follows the imperative not to give up the workings beyond ideal, consciousness (of the unconsciousness). Literature is poiesis, creating, realizing, an event of being (Seyn). The art belongs into the event  of being (Ereignis). On that background it is possible to figure out  the incredible importance of the famous saying by Samuel Beckett from Worstward Ho: “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” And in his words again: “I have to speak, when I have no words, only words of others.” And in the famous end words of the Unnamable: “It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.” Beckett wrestles with the silence, he circles around the silence, the silence, which is impossible to catch by words. Lyoatard speaks of presentability of the unpresentable. “The silence is the Real, so far it resists to be symbolised by language, though it is the very it that frames the the symbolic before and after.” Lacan coined the neologistic term extimacy to address that inner nature of  the Real. The extimacy offers the answer to the hermeneutic question of ethics in literature, to the question of an event (Ereignis) of literature as the generosity (Urbančič) of being (Seyn), to the question of the unconscious workings as the meta-ethic (Badiou) of literature not in its aesthetic or morality (neither in its religiosity in the religious jump as Kierkegaard would suggest it), but in its extimity, the silence/abyss of being (Seyn).

Key words: banality, averageness, non interestingness, extimacy, Unconsciouses, un-success, meta-ethical jump, event, poiesis, generosity

Peter Kovačič Peršin
The Living Ethos of Edvard Kocbek

Edvard Kocbek is today recognized as a poet and thinker, who was the most profound of the spiritual and social life of the Slovene nation in the 20th century. He emerged from the youth renewal movement, which, after World War I, was founded by Italian German theologian and philosopher Romano Guardini, in order to encourage a European youth to create a new society of coexistence and social order after the catastrophic war. While studying in Paris, he was friends with a French personalist Emmanuel Mounier, who was extremely socially oriented and developed theology of engaged religion. Before the Second World War, Kocbek joined the Christian Socialists, who tried to link the left-wing political bloc to defending against fascism and Nazism. After the occupation of Yugoslavia, these forces formed a coalition to fight the occupiers of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian nation. He became a member of the illegal leadership of the Slovenian partisans, and since 1943 he was a member of the Tito's leadership of the Yugoslav Partisan resistance. As a Christian and consistent advocate of democracy he came during the war and especially after liberation into a dispute with the Communist Party, which introduced revolutionary terror. As one of the leaders of the liberation struggle and the social revolution, he persistently demanded the special moral hygiene of the revolutionaries and rejected the communist posture, which transformed man only into the function of class struggle and rejected personal morality and accountability. As he himself wrote, he wanted to testify as a Christian for the moral stance of the liberation struggle at the heart of the revolution. After 1952, the party blocked him from political activity and prevented the publishing of poetry and public speaking for two decades.

Kocbek's philosophical reflection, in view of his participation in social politics and revolution, focuses on the issue of ethos. As a personalist, he came to the conclusion that only a person, an ethically active individual, is capable of exercising personal and social freedom. He understood freedom as an embodiment of human original sovereignty. As a Christian, he saw in the fact of incarnation the basic engine of the spiritual and moral evolution of man. Man with the incarnation of his spirit in materiality and history overcomes determinism, including his own egoism, and opens for coexistence with his fellow man, to assume responsibility for the other and the world. His ethical maxim reads: As far as I'm with a neighbor, and I have what I give him. By doing this, man overcomes his biological and historical detrmination and opens up to the spiritual realization of his being in transcendence. The Etos of Engagement Faith demands, in particular, Christianity, that it is completely handed over to the historical engagement of fellow humans and the community. At the end of her life, in the face of an emerging crisis of values, the decline of the social sense, the humiliation of a person only in the use and destruction of the natural environment, she wrote a lucid insight: "The ethic that will save us is the ethos of interpersonal solidarity. ... This is much more than a social right and religious moralism."

Primož Repar
Fake and Good News: THE TURN OF SELF-DENYING LOVE. How with the Neighbor?

The article attempts to refer to the question of the divergence between existence and practice in the reflection of the residence of Salighed, or the realization of the uniqueness of the individual in the community. For this profound revolution in itself, which can also trigger the actual ethical renewal of society, one needs the courage to act to be anew. The neighbor is always this single individual before me, with whom I am in a relationship. The relation to the absolutely other builds the capacity of an existential turn, where the community is always formed in every relationship with the concrete neighbor. The article here seeks a cross-section between Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky.

Key words: bad and good news, the existential turn, repetition, a concrete neighbor

Janko Rožič
PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SPACE

Upati si in za hip izgubiti tla pod nogami, ne upati si in za vedno izgubiti sebe
Soren Kierkegaard

Architect and essayist Janko Rožič will present special views and insights into the space on the example of Ljubljana and Škocjan in the Karst, two places in which the philosophical symposium of Miklavž Ocepek, author of the book The Abandoned world, has been held for many years. In memory of a friend and philosopher, the architect will wonder why we think the world is abandoned? Are we still holding a special spatial mood, which emerged after the first and spread even further after the Second World War? Freud and Heidegger, two self-centered thinkers of the 20th century, identified him with the notion of "unheimlich" - non-native, foreign ... In the 21st century, it is possible not only to conceive not only the concept, but also the spatial mood?

Risto Solunchev and Trajche Stojanov
Etho-poietics and Anti-political Anarchism

In his late lectures, Foucault is deriving the concept of ethopoietics as a pure creation of the properties of one self, which is a divergent process contrary to main self-production in the Western civilization: externalization of the self into a discursive formation as an obligation to truth. Ethopoietics is quite opposite energia, as an internalization of the outer discourses as a matter for artistic self-creation. According to authors, Foucault is completely a Kierkegaardian thinker using the same Kiekergaardian tropes to express the self-relation of the self as a nonsystematic praxis. Self-artism is a refuse to get out into the “transcendence”, where power is the transcendental thing that conditions the appearance of the subject. The only ontological immanence is the epistemological field of the power and the State, in which we are reduced to a public thing and transparent self, a self-for-the-state. But, does this postmodern artism have any political relevance (a foundation for State-abolition program), or is it only a doxology, an irrelevant private project, that is, in sensu strictu, a detail on the structural archeology? In both perspectives, we are speaking about the “ontological dance of the Absolute” (Levinas), and that is the inner Hegelian root of the postmodernist’s self-artism as a negation. Political postmodern anarchism is an impossible task. As a revolt and resistance, postmodernism is constantly being returned back in to the knowledge of the State as a Hegelian immanent God, and restored as a moment of the same epos, of the same system.
But in Kierkegaard’s philosophy there is a deep concern about the creation of subjectivity, and the need to bind it with the transcendence. Kierkegaard is seeking for the meaning of the subjectivity out of the immanence, as a completely deontological search for the Absolute. “The Self is a relation which is related to itself.” The Self is a synthesis of the finality and infinity, “which is in relation to itself, and whose task is to become a being by itself, that could be achieved only through God”. This is a grounding of the existence into another existence, but existence that opens the perspective for an absolute self-creation, a creation that cannot be reduced to any system of morality and representation. This radical concept of ethopoiesis, that distorts the immanent ontology of the world, is a base for an anti-political anarchism that can be derived if we use Kierkegaardian radical thinking.

Pia Søltoft
Kierkegaard and Romantic Love

In the paper I will introduce to and substantiate Søren Kierkegaard’s notion of romantic love and show that Kierkegaard has a very unique way of describing love as a double bound urge that takes him out of the tense choice between eros and agape Anders Nygren later presents us with and makes him go beyond C.S. Lewis’ differentiation between Need-Love and Gift-Love. To Kierkegaard love is one. It shows itself as a passion. But this passion has many forms and these forms we know through our different ways of loving: parental love, infatuation, friendship, self-love and neighbor-love. To Kierkegaard, the way you love defines who you are and in that sense anthropology and love are very closely connected.
The paper is divided into five sections. First I offer a brief description of Kierkegaard’s view on the Romantics, his affections and his disagreements. Secondly I will introduce Kierkegaard’s own notion of love that rest partly on Plato’s view on Eros as passion, partly on the biblical definitions of love in 1 John and Matthew. Thirdly I will present Kierkegaard’s notion of love as a double urge to love and to be loved.  In the fourth section I will introduce Kierkegaard’s notion of being in love as preferential love. And finally, in the fifth paragraph, I will address Kierkegaard’s view on neighbor-love.

Key words: notion of love, romantics, to love and to be loved, neighbor-love

Igor Tavilla
The Revolutionary God. Some Notes in the Margin of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love

The article compares the social revolution with an internal revolution. Kierkegaard, at a time when K. Marx and F. Engels wrote the Communist Party Manifesto (1848), published Works of Love (1847), which we can have for his religious Manifesto. It is a very meaningful comparison, which I can deepen in my opinion. On closer examination, it turns out that, in fact, Marx's and Kierkegaard's works have recommended a revolution. But while Marx's Manifesto has to deal with a social revolution, Kierkegaard puts in the Works of Love an internal revolution, a revolution of the heart.
Love for the Neighbor: The Deepest Revolution - For the starting point, I will take the fourth debate of the second series, the title of which summarizes the quotation from the First Letter to the Corinthians - love does not seek its own. The Kierkegaard biblical perspective is fully revealed through this.

Dietmar Tauchner

RAINDROPS IN A WINE GLASS
(The existential Effect of Haiku)
haikai wa atarashimi wo motte inochi to zu
Haikai thrives on its renewal

In this essay, based on a lecture delivered at the first international haiku symposium of
the Austrian Haiku Association, Vienna, 2014, the author describes how Japanese haiku
has undergone several innovations over the centuries.

I don't know how it's called, but it's blooming
According to this haiku by Santoka Taneda, i'm going to give you in the following
minutes a brief overview about the history of haiku and its existential effects.

Cvetka Hedžet Tóth
Paul Tillich's Philosophical Theology

The old question of the relation between philosophy and theology is implied in Paul Tillich's philosophical theology. This unusual name describes better than any other the center of his thought and work called “on the boundary line between philosophy and theology”. His concept of theonomous metaphysics represents the point where philosophy and theology are in effect one and the same.
The paper entitled Paul Tillich's philosophical theology analyzes some aspects of his philosophical theology, especially the meaning of being connected with the concept of time. The true being, or the ultimate good, is a process of self-realization within and above temporal existence. Time is understood as kairos, the right, qualitative time in comparison with formal, quantitative time. For Tillich the meaning of history on the basis of the concept of kairos is an inescapable responsibility for history, responsibility rooted in the awareness of the eternal. For philosophy of history kairos in its general and specific aspects is every turning-point in history in which the eternal judges and transforms the temporal.

Key words: Protestantism, metaphysics, philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, kairos

Ciprian Turčan
The Ideal of Authenticity in a Modern Society

Be yourself, it is the extended slogan of (post)modern culture that celebrates the imperative of individual self-realization. From a formal point of view, the ideal of authenticity is unambiguous and comprehensible, but the essential problem lies in determining its content. In conditions of radical ethical pluralism and preferred moral subjectivism, its requirement seems to be absolutely justified. On the other hand, this ideal sharply contrasts with the hedonistic and consumer character of modern society, which narrows the authenticity of an individual and reduces his self-realization to the economic aspect of consumption. From this point of view, it is not surprising that in the discourse of authenticity appear some confusions, contradictions, warped and degraded forms of this ideal. The aim of the paper is to frame the ethical ideal of the authenticity of human existence as the ethical issue of good life in the conditions of modern plural society, emphasizing the necessary implications for the realization of the ideal of human authenticity in moral and political terms.

Key words: human authenticity, good life, plural society, the realization of moral ideal

Andrej Ule
About the Ethics for the Present Age

The subject of this essay is how one is to act in the present age, when there are no solid grounds left for moral reflections and choices. The fundamental dilemma of the modern individual lies between the multitude of choices that seemingly widen the spaces of freedom and the strengthening of anonymous control mechanisms that are narrowing these spaces. I am referring here to Kierkegaard’s reflections on the “»Present Age” that for Kierkegaard is essentially different from the “Age of Revolution”. Particularly important is Kierkegaard’s criticism of the media as the main supporters of the universal “levelling” of people, that is, making them neglect their of character and true virtuosity, and the public as engaging in generalized envy. This criticism can be transferred to the modern age of digital media. How is the individual today to resist these powers of universal levelling, control and manipulation that also undermine the possibility of the subject for obtaining existential authenticity? It seems we need to find a different angle to approach the problems that would reach beyond subjectivism, objectivism and intersubjectivism in this context. In this essay I propose the opening of the individual to interbeingness; that is, the relational conception of an individual’s existence. This involves becoming aware of the sensorily present and spiritual co-belongingness that encourages active compassion and love.
Key words: Kierkegaard, the Present Age, levelling, control, interbeingness, active compassion

Bojan Žalec
Kierkegaard and Violence

Author outlines the account of violence as we can shell it out from Kierkegaard's oeuvre. The central terms of this account are anxiety, sin, God's call, resisting the change of identity, and also crowd. On that ground the author connects Kierkegaard's understanding of violence with understandings of violence given by some other thinkers, especially Girard, and (thus) places it into a broader frame of (existentialist and phenomenological) hermeneutics of violence.

Key words: violence, anxiety, change of identity, Kierkegaard, Girard, hermeneutics of violence