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Resumé

How to read Danne-Virke - some hermeneutic Reflections

By Kim Arne Pedersen

In this paper a new interpretation is put on Grundtvig’s philosophical ideas as represented in the magazine Danne-Virke (D) 1816-1819. Arguments are adduced against the generally accepted understanding of these ideas represented by William Michelsen’s interpretation of Grundtvig’s philosophy as an alternative to Kant’s transcendental idealism and the Absolute Idealism, completely different from these philosophical traditions. According to William Michelsen, Grundtvig stresses the common experience of time as being independent of man and emphasizes the empirical theory of knowledge and the ordinary non-scientific language. Thereby, Grundtvig opposes Kant’s transcendental understanding of time and the ego-orientated speculation of the Absolute Idealism. Grundtvig therefore understands human knowledge as limited by time and space. Grundtvig separates knowledge and faith and claims that the only possible human understanding of God has to be symbolic, because man is created in the image of God. William Michelsen stresses, that Grundtvig never accepts a scientific knowledge of God or proofs of the existence of God.

The alternative interpretation in this paper uses a terminological method in reading Grundtvig’s /^-articles, examining the historical roots of his philosophical expressions. Although Grundtvig argues against scientific language, he combines pre-critical Wolffian descriptions of God’s aseite with the Absolute Idealism’s theories of the transcendental ego, founding time and space (cosmos) in God’s self-consciousness and founding the human knowledge in the principle of contradiction, understood as an expression of God’s Trinitarian self-consciousness or ego. Grundtvig is convinced that the limited human consciousness can only be explained by the consciousness of God, and he understands this idea as a variation of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. In this way, Grundtvig gives the human empirical knowledge a speculative foundation in God’s self-consciousness and uses this foundation in his attack on Kant’s transcendental understanding of time. Finally, this paper demonstrates that Grundtvig’s separation of knowledge and faith is not absolute. Faith involves a dimension of knowledge, and this knowledge has to develop from faith.