O ponto de apoio Kierkegaardiano: o amor como o especificamente religioso

Abstract

This thesis entitled “The Kierkegaardian Supporting Point: love as the specifically religious”, is a central issue that determines or specifies the religious (character) according to Kierkegaard’s philosophy, whose religious reference is Christianity. The answer which constitutes the thesis is that love fulfills this role. Love is the specifically religious and therefore characterizes the religious existence. It is a transcendent factor, establishing a new quality in individual existence. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that the concept of love is the fundamental concept of the philosophical thinking about religion in Kierkegaard, which puts its fundamental philosophy of religion up by having this foundation. From a philosophical point of view, it is love which founds the central concepts related to religion in Kierkegaard and, in this sense, it is possible to make an analogy between the Archimedean supporting point and the concept of love in Kierkegaard. For him, the human spirit is a relationship in which the individual founds his/her existence on God, and that relationship (spirit) is the religious existence. But this existential sphere is movement, for spirit or the religious character is not given as a static feature. Every human being must become spirit, become a Christian. Love performs a transformation of the subject, giving him/her a spiritual interiority, that is, a properly religious one. Given that the problem of the thesis refers to the equivalence between the specifically religious and love, the path undertaken to demonstrate such equivalence is a correlation between the relational concepts of “faith” and “spirit” present in the book The Sickness unto Death, where that fundamental relationship is carefully and specifically crafted, and the concept of “love” in Works of Love, where the concept is offered in a wider and well-finished mode.