Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophe: Learning to Live on a Damaged Planet [Hardcover]

This volume argues for the relevance of Kierkegaard's employment of the prophetic noir, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, to understanding how to live in a time of climate change.S?ren Kierkegaard's work is teeming with images of earthquakes, floods, storms, volcanic eruptions, wildfires, burned down cities, and apocalyptic events that 'let the heavens fall and the stars change their places in the overturning of everything'. These disaster images are not just rhetorical packaging of the philosophical and theological content of his works. Rather, disasters play an important but largely understudied role in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence.Kierkegaard and Climate Catastrophefocuses onprophetic noirin Kierkegaard's work: the sombre mood that is evoked when the shadow of future disaster falls upon the present. Isak Winkel Holm's core contention is that the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard, modelled after the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, contributes to making his works urgently relevant today. From the vantage point of the contemporary world threatened by rapidly evolving climate catastrophes, Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence emerges in a more sombre light, dimmed by the future disaster: to exist, in the emphatic sense Kierkegaard gave to that word, is to live a meaningful human life even if things are darkened by the coming calamity. Thus, a thorough analysis of the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard offers an existential perspective on living in a world threatened by environmental devastation.Introduction: With Sorrow Before Him1. Science Presupposes Mood: Thought and Mood According to Kierkegaard2. Not Just a Future Language: Prophetic Noir in the Hebrew Bible3. This Moment is Life and Death: Prophetic Noir in Fear and Trembling4. A New Infallible Interpretive Law: The Journal Entry on the Great Earthquake5. He Does Not Prophesy: The Destruction of Jerusalem in 'Ultimatum'6. Stirring Up Life from its Deepest Fols)