Leo Stan: Michel Henry. The Goodness of Living Affectivity. In: Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Ashgate, 2011.
There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard’s international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard’s writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.
Contents: Preface; Simone de Beauvoir: a founding feminist’s appreciation of Kierkegaard, Ronald M. Green and Mary Jean Green; Nicholas Berdyaev: Kierkegaard amongst the artists, mystics and solitary thinkers, George Pattison; Martin Buber: ‘No-one can so refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard himself’, Peter Å ajda; Albert Camus: walled within God, Leo Stan; Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s influence hidden and in full view, Vincent McCarthy; Michel Henry: the goodness of living affectivity, Leo Stan; Karl Jaspers: a great awakener’s way to philosophy of existence, István Czakó; Gabriel Marcel: the silence of truth, Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox; Jacques Maritain: Kierkegaard as ‘champion of the singular’, Nathaniel Kramer; Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Kierkegaard’s influence on his work, Elisabetta Basso; Friedrich Nietzsche: rival visions of the best way of life, Thomas Miles; Franz Rosenzweig: a kindred spirit in alignment with Kierkegaard, Claudia Welz; Jean-Paul Sartre: Kierkegaard’s influence on his theory of nothingness, Manuela Hackel; Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard in the Ox of Phalaris, George Pattison; Miguel de Unamuno: Kierkegaard’s Spanish ‘brother’, Jan E. Evans; Jean Wahl: philosophies of existence and the introduction of Kierkegaard in the non-Germanic world, Alejandro Cavallazzi Sánchez and Azucena Palavicini Sánchez; Indexes.