Notes on Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Kierkegaard’s Thought

Not even Søren Kierkegaard was immune to the strongly renewed interest that the philosophers of classical antiquity—such as Plato and Aristotle—aroused in Germany during the first half of the 19th Century. Actually this interest was not only philological interest, but fully theoretical, as one can see especially in the case of Adolf Trendelenburg’s work on Aristotle’s writings and thought. The person who may have done the most to boost the study of Aristotle’s thought in Germany at that time was none other than G.W.F. Hegel. Ironically enough, however, a big part of this influence came from some of his strongest opponents, including Trendelenburg and Schelling, who found that they could draw upon Aristotle’s writings to escape from Hegel’s System and accordingly set out to reconsider, rework and reuse Aristotle’s philosophy in new ways, especially concerning the meaning of the concepts of being and not-being. Despite the many differences between them, both Trendelenburg and Schelling turned to Aristotle for partially similar reasons, in that each felt it was necessary somehow to “re-semanticize” the concept of being after Hegel’s radicalization of Idealism in the direction of logic. They sought thereby to reclaim the authentic weight of the concept of becoming from the falsehood—the “fiction,” as Schelling described it already in1834 —of the supposed “movement” within logic itself, out of which, according to Hegel’s Science of Logic, actuality arises.