This thesis is dealing with Kierkegaard’s attack upon christendom on the viewpoint of political-social interpretation. Up to now, Kierkegaard interpretations which have been researched in Republic of Korea are investigations into his own concepts and themes, or exclusive events of his life. Kierkegaard’s attack upon christendom is the consistent conclusion of his life and thought. But Scholars of Kierkegaard in Republic of Korea had not researched on the attack. This attack is very important problem to resolve ultimate purpose of Kierkegaard’s writings.
During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Denmark experienced a surge of growth and change that transformed it from a backward, feudal, and agrarian state into a modern, liberal democracy. The philosophical principle at work in most of these changes is the principle of individualism as it is developed in liberal political theory. According to Kierkegaard, the religion of Denmark contributed to the cultivation of egotistical subjectivity. Kierkegaardian Self has three main characteristics. First, the self is a dynamic process which is always becoming in time through free will and freedom of choice. Second, the self is always a historical self, so that history is then a direct product of becoming self. Third, in order to be whole, the self must freely ground itself in a transcendental being(God). Becoming a self, in Kierkegaard’s approach, is the central form taken by our struggle to freely create history. To have a self means to have a history, and to have a history means to become a self.
Kierkegaard had become a self and have history through the attack upon christendom. The attack upon christendom is attack upon capitalization of Denmark. This attack is Kierkegaard’s war against the umwelt of the Church. To explore capitalism in the present, to diagnose its effects and to seek a remedy for them we should read the work of Kierkegaard. This is because, the latest form of capitalism is sujective. Having conquered the external world, destroying the vestiges of political resistance, capitalism is seeking to conquer the internal one.
The christianity of Republic of Korea has characteristics that Christianity is equal to serving United States of America and objecting Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. This illusion must be destroyed by Kierkegaard’s attack upon christendom. What kierkegaard teaches us is that the possible always precedes and is greater than actual. There is always an alternative, for what is comes into existence and passes out of existence. Being is incomplete and imperfect and there is no necessity in this world. It is upto us, whoever we are, to look for thr possiblities that have always accompanied the past, but we will only do so by looking towards the future out of this infernal frozen present in which all possibilities appear to have been annihilated and whose slogan is ‘there is no alternative’. On the contrary, Kierkegaard tells us, ‘in existence the watchword is always “forward”’