Volume 18, Tome III: Kierkegaard Secondary Literature: English L-Z 9781472477415, 1472477413

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KIERKEGAARD SECONDARY LITERATURE TOME III: ENGLISH, L–Z

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Volume 18, Tome III

Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources is a publication of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre

General Editor JON STEWART Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Denmark Editorial Board FINN GREDAL JENSEN KATALIN NUN PETER ŠAJDA Advisory Board LEE C. BARRETT MARÍA J. BINETTI ISTVÁN CZAKÓ HEIKO SCHULZ CURTIS L. THOMPSON

Kierkegaard Secondary Literature Tome III: English, L–Z

Edited by JON STEWART

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Jon Stewart; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jon Stewart to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9781472477415 (hbk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex Covantage, LLC Cover design by Katalin Nun Copyright © Jon Stewart, 2016. All rights reserved.

Contents List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

xi xv

David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian Curtis L. Thompson1 Lewis A. Lawson, (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines Matthew Brake5 Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard Thomas J. Millay

9

John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought Jamie Turnbull

15

John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling’ Paul Martens

21

John Lippitt and George Pattison (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard Jon Stewart

25

Laura Llevadot, Kierkegaard through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics María J. Binetti

31

Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard Thomas Gilbert

37

Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet Thomas Miles

41

Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard Joseph Westfall

47

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Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought Christian Kettering

53

Ronald J. Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator Timothy C. Hall

57

Gordon D. Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age Annemarie van Stee

61

Harold Victor Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane David Coe

65

Roy Martinez, Kierkegaard and the Art of Irony Andrew M. Kirk

69

Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity Marcia Morgan

73

Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard Marcia Morgan

77

David E. Mercer, Kierkegaard’s Living Room: The Relation between Faith and History in “Philosophical Fragments” Matthew Brake

81

Thomas P. Miles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life: A New Method of Ethics Roberto Sirvent

85

Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling” Geoff Dargan

91

Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology, from “Either/Or” to “Sickness unto Death” Tamar Aylat-Yaguri

97

Edward F. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time Tamar Aylat-Yaguri

101

Contents

vii

Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard Narve Strand

105

Harry A. Nielsen, Where The Passion Is: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments” Andrew M. Kirk

111

Katalin Nun, Women of the Danish Golden Age: Literature, Theater and the Emancipation of Women Jon Stewart

115

George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image Michael Strawser

119

George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture Daniel Arruda Nascimento

125

George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology David D. Possen

131

George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (eds.), Kierkegaard: The Self in Society Narve Strand

135

Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss Thomas J. Millay

141

Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion Michael D. Stark145 Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith Lee C. Barrett

151

Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication Carl S. Hughes

155

Hugh Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader Andrew Torrance

159

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Kierkegaard Secondary Literature

Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed Andrew Torrance

165

Joel D.S. Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love Luke Tarassenko

171

Gregory L. Reece, Irony and Religious Belief Jon Stewart

177

Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments” Robert M. Riordan

181

Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical Jamie Turnbull

187

Bartholomew Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno Leo Stan

193

Anne T. Salvatore, Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief Gene Fendt

199

Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion Annemarie van Stee

205

Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God Kyle Roberts

211

K. Brian Soderquist, The Isolated Self: Irony as Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony” Devon C. Wootten

215

Leo Stan, Either Nothingness or Love: On Alterity in Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings Marcia Morgan

219

Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered Paul Martens

225

Contents

ix

Jon Stewart, The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen and Kierkegaard K. Brian Söderquist

231

Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark Devon C. Wootten

235

Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification Jesus Luzardo

239

David F. Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard Thomas Gilbert

245

Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self Curtis L. Thompson

249

Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard Jon Stewart

253

John Heywood Thomas, Subjectivity and Paradox: A Study of Kierkegaard Luke Johnson

259

Curtis L. Thompson, Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard Jon Stewart

263

Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard Aaron Edwards

267

Peter Vardy, Kierkegaard Aaron Edwards

273

Jeremy D.B. Walker, To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart’ John Louis Haglund

279

Jeremy Walker, Kierkegaard: The Descent into God Curtis L. Thompson

283

Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics Leo Stan

287

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Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence Geoff Dargan

293

Julia Watkin, Kierkegaard Thomas J. Millay

299

Julia Watkin, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy Dean W. Lauer

303

Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction Thomas J. Millay

307

Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society Margherita Tonon

313

Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” Tony Kim

319

List of Contributors Tamar Aylat-Yaguri, Department of Philosophy, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat-Aviv, P.O.B 39040, Tel-Aviv 61390, Israel. Lee C. Barrett, Lancaster Theological Seminary, 555 W. James St., Lancaster, PA 17603, USA. María J. Binetti, CIAFIC—CONICET (“Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones científicas y técnicas”), Federico Lacroze 2100, C1426CPS, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Matthew Brake, George Mason University, 4400 University Dr., Fairfax, VA 22030, USA. David Coe, Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, MO 63105, USA. Geoff Dargan, University of Oxford, Regent’s Park College, Oxford OX1 2LB, United Kingdom. Aaron Edwards, University of Aberdeen, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, 50–52 College Bounds, Aberdeen AB24 3DS, Scotland, United Kingdom. Gene Fendt, Philosophy Department, University of Nebraska-Kearney, Kearney, NE 68849-1330, USA. Thomas Gilbert, Sociology Department, University of California-Berkeley, 410 Barrows Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-1980, USA. John Louis Haglund, St. John’s College, Oxford University, St. Giles Street, Oxford, OX1 3JP, United Kingdom. Timothy C. Hall, Thales Academy, 1201 Granite Falls Blvd, Rolesville, NC 27571, USA. Carl S. Hughes, Texas Lutheran University, 1000 W. Court Street, Seguin, TX 78155, USA. Christian Kettering, Liberty University, College of General Studies, 1971 University Blvd, Lynchburg, VA 24515, USA.

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Tony Kim, Graduate Institute of Christian Philosophy, 309 Cathedral Street, 1st Floor, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA. Andrew M. Kirk, The New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011, USA. Dean Lauer, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6A1, Canada. Jesus Luzardo, Fordham University, Philosophy Department, Collins Hall 101, 441 E. Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458, USA. Paul Martens, Department of Religion, Baylor University, One Bear Place #97284, Waco, TX 76798-7284, USA. Thomas P. Miles, Philosophy Department, Boston College, Stokes Hall, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3806, USA. Thomas J. Millay, Duke Divinity School, Box 90968, Durham, NC 27708-0968, USA. Marcia Morgan, Muhlenberg College, Department of Philosophy, 2400 Chew Street, Allentown, PA 18104, USA. Daniel Arruda Nascimento, Institute of Sciences of Society, Fluminense Federal University, Rua Aloísio da Silva Gomes 50, Granja dos Cavaleiros, Macaé, Rio de Janeiro, 27.930-560, Brazil. David D. Possen, Institut for Medier, Erkendelse og Formidling, Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet, Karen Blixens Vej 4, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. Robert Riordan, Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, 1510 St. Olaf Ave., Northfield, MN 55056, USA. Kyle A. Roberts, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, 3000 5th St NW, New Brighton, MN 55112, USA. Roberto Sirvent, Hope International University, 2500 Nutwood Avenue, Fullerton, CA, 92831, USA. K. Brian Soderquist, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Leo Stan, Department of Humanities, York University, 262 Vanier College, 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada.

List of Contributors

xiii

Michael D. Stark, School of Theology, Colorado Christian University, 8787 W. Alameda Avenue, Lakewood, CO 80226, USA. Annemarie van Stee, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Janskerkhof 13, 3512 BL Utrecht, The Netherlands. Jon Stewart, Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Narve Strand, IFIKK, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo, Blindernveien 31, 0313 Oslo, Norway. Michael Strawser, Department of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816-1352, USA. Luke Tarassenko, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, Pusey Street, Oxford OX1 2LB, United Kingdom. Curtis L. Thompson, Thiel College, 75 College Avenue, Greenville, PA 16125, USA. Margherita Tonon, c/o Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Andrew Torrance, University of St. Andrews, St. Mary’s College School of Divinity, St. Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JU, Scotland, United Kingdom. Jamie Turnbull, c/o Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen, Farvergade 27 D, 1463 Copenhagen K, Denmark. Joseph Westfall, Department of Social Sciences, University of Houston-Downtown, One Main Street, Houston, TX 77002, USA. Devon C. Wootten, Whitman College, 345 Boyer Avenue, Walla Walla, WA 99362, USA.

List of Abbreviations Danish Abbreviations B&A

Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaard, vols. 1–2, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard 1953–54.

Bl.art. S. Kierkegaard’s Bladartikler, med Bilag samlede efter Forfatterens Død, udgivne som Supplement til hans øvrige Skrifter, ed. by Rasmus Nielsen, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1857. EP

Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, vols. 1–9, ed. by H.P. Barfod and Hermann Gottsched, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1869–81.

Pap.

Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–3, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1909–48; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–3, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1968–78.

SKS

Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols. 1–28, vols. K1–K28, ed. by Niels ­Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag 1997–2013.

SV1

Samlede Værker, vols. I–XIV, ed. by A.B. Drachmann, Johan Ludvig Heiberg and H.O. Lange, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag 1901–06. English Abbreviations

AN

Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

AR

On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1955.

ASKB The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by H.P. Rohde, Copenhagen: The Royal Library 1967.

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Kierkegaard Secondary Literature

BA

The Book on Adler, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

C

The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CA

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

CD

Christian Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

CI

The Concept of Irony, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

CIC

The Concept of Irony, trans. with an Introduction and Notes by Lee M. Capel, London: Collins 1966.

COR

The Corsair Affair; Articles Related to the Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.

CUP1 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 1, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUP2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vol. 2, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982. CUPH Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. EO1

Either/Or, Part I, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EO2

Either/Or, Part II, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.

EOP

Either/Or, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1992.

EPW

Early Polemical Writings, including From the Papers of One Still Living; Articles from Student Days; The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, trans. by Julia Watkin, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

EUD

Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

List of Abbreviations

xvii

FSE

For Self-Examination, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

FT

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1983.

FTP

Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1985.

JC

Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

JFY

Judge for Yourself!, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1990.

JP

Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vols. 1–6, ed. and trans. by ­Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (vol. 7, Index and Composite Collation), Bloomington and London: ­Indiana University Press 1967–78.

KAC

Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944.

KJN

Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols. 1–11, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Söderquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2007ff.

LD

Letters and Documents, trans. by Henrik Rosenmeier, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

LR

A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2001.

M

The Moment and Late Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

P

Prefaces / Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

PC

Practice in Christianity, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.

PF

Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.

PJ

Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1996.

xviii

Kierkegaard Secondary Literature

PLR

Prefaces: Light Reading for Certain Classes as the Occasion May Require, trans. by William McDonald, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1989.

PLS

Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1941.

PV

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998.

PVL

The Point of View for My Work as an Author including On My Work as an Author, trans. by Walter Lowrie, New York and London: Oxford University Press 1939.

R

Repetition, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: ­Princeton University Press 1983.

SBL

Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.

SLW

Stages on Life’s Way, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ­Princeton: Princeton University Press 1988.

SUD

The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980.

SUDP The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, London and New York: Penguin Books 1989. TA

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978.

TD

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

UD

Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1993.

WA

Without Authority including The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on ­Fridays, An Upbuilding Discourse, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

List of Abbreviations

xix

WL

Works of Love, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995.

WS

Writing Sampler, trans. by Todd W. Nichol, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.

David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993 (Oxford Theological Monographs), xii + 231 pp.

David Law, in this clearly argued book based on his Ph.D. thesis at Oxford, tackles the question of whether Kierkegaard can be considered a negative theologian. In making his way towards a conclusion, he provides a rather thorough account of what negative theology is. The judgment made is that Kierkegaard is not a negative theologian if that designation requires being a Neoplatonist. However, he is a negative theologian if that appellation applies to those thinkers who emphasize the hiddenness of God. In fact, he is judged to be more negative than most negative theologians in that he does not allow his pursuit of the way of negation to lead to affirming the human’s mystical union. Those who have reflected seriously on how language and thought function in giving expression to religious claims eventually realize their shortcomings. Kierkegaard had a good sense for the capacity and incapacity of language and thought. Apophatic theology negates positive terms predicated of God; it serves to counter cataphatic theology, which makes affirmative theological claims. Both sides contribute to theology, but the negative theologian recognizes the need for negation to have the last word. Law does not find much explicitly apophatic language in Kierkegaard’s writings. But he inquires into those works to identify instances of what he terms “apophaticism,” or those elements in Kierkegaard’s thought that stress the human’s incapacity for grasping the divine. Law describes the nature of negative theology by considering three negative theologians: Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Meister Eckhart. He concludes that three claims characterize negative theology: the transcendence of God, the inadequacy of reason and language to grasp God, and the ascent of the human to a close unity with God. In considering Kierkegaard’s knowledge of negative theology, the field is extended to include Plotinus, Basis, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Nicholas of Cusa; however, Law concludes that while Kierkegaard was aware of these theologians and knew something of their thought, he generally was not very interested in the apophatic qualities of their thinking. On the other hand, Law contends that Kierkegaard’s writings themselves contain many parallels with features of negative theology. Instances of apophaticism are found in the analysis of each area of Kierkegaard’s thought: its methodological foundations (Chapter 2 on “Dialectics”), its anthropological reflections (Chapters 3–5 on “Epistemology,” “Truth,” and “The Stages of Existence”), and its theological

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understanding (Chapters 6 and 7 on “God” and “Christology”). Conclusions are stated in the last chapter on “Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian.” Law’s treatment of Kierkegaard’s dialectics identifies three areas towards which it is directed. It functions to criticize Hegel’s philosophy as undercutting human welfare through its fourfold negation (1) of existence as actuality, in emphasizing conceptual existence, (2) of movement, in stressing merely the quantitative variety, (3) of ethics, in undercutting decision and choice, and (4) of the philosophy/Christianity distinction, in incorporating Christianity into speculative philosophy. Kierkegaard develops an existential dialectics that avoids Hegel’s errors. This is accomplished by replacing Hegel’s principle of identity with the principle of contradiction. The result is an existential dialectics in which uncertainty becomes the starting point, the status of thought is reduced, and the existential union of thought and being is brought about by inward passion. An apophatic motif is present in the radically personal, subjective nature of thinking that qualifies thought’s objectivity. Truth remains hidden until it is made manifest in subjectivity. Existential dialectics keeps distinct qualities apart rather than allowing mediation to merge them; this differentiates Kierkegaard’s qualitative dialectics from Hegel’s quantitative dialectics. Anchoring this existential dialectics is a self that for Kierkegaard relates itself to itself in such a way that it is a positive third or capable of operating freely in relation to the structure constituting it. This existential dialectics enables one to gain personal insights. Communicating these insights requires a mode of communication that respects all of the principles of existential dialectics. This leads Kierkegaard to develop a dialectics of indirect communication as over against objective modes of communication. Law points out that such a dialectics enables the communicator to relate in such a way that the recipient’s need to appropriate the truth is respected, the recipient’s subjectivity is built up, and the recipient is empowered to become a genuine self. Chapters 3–5 reflect on anthropology, and each chapter identifies apophatic instances. Law’s account of epistemology clarifies that Kierkegaard’s interest is not in constructing a theory of knowledge but in examining how epistemology comes to bear on existential and religious issues. For Kierkegaard, knowledge, first, is relativized in its importance because it is judged to be uncertain, and, second, is influenced by the knower. Law’s analysis detects three epistemological apophatic motifs: (1) uncertainty of knowledge; (2) the danger of error in believing; and (3) the intrinsically personal act of an individual’s knowing and the unique knowledge gained. In the treatment of truth in Chapter 4 we learn that Kierkegaard develops his correspondence theory of truth on the basis of the existential division of thought and being, and this theory shifts the emphasis from the objective aspect of knowing to the subjective. Law finds the accusation of Kierkegaard’s subjectivism unjustified. The more apophatic themes emerging from Kierkegaard’s consideration of truth are that objectivity is not possible, that objectivity exists only for the individual, and that the so-called “object” of truth (as uncertain) is not accessible to rational analysis and remains essentially hidden. The aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence, the topic of Chapter 5, lift up several apophatic elements. Some of these are present in the earlier stages, but the paradoxicality of religiousness “B” with its notions of sin, the absolute paradox with its objective aspects (composed by the eternal entering temporality) and subjective aspects (composed by the subject’s

David R. Law

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inability to grasp the objective paradox), and faith generate a good many of them. Law concludes that there is an apophatic current running through the anthropological considerations of Kierkegaard’s writings. The basis for this lies in Kierkegaard’s theological viewpoint, which Law covers in the next two chapters. Scrutinizing Kierkegaard’s theology uncovers more apophatic motifs. An initial one is encountered in Kierkegaard’s idea that trying to define God is a mistake because God is unknown: being in a God-relationship eliminates the need to define God. One’s views of God must emerge from the relationship with God, and this God-relationship must always hold priority over the God-concept. Furthermore, remembering the qualitative difference between God and the human safeguards God’s transcendence. Attempts to prove God’s existence are also seen by Kierkegaard to be misguided. Neither deductive nor inductive reasoning succeed in this endeavor. The way to prove God is to worship God. The human can acquire knowledge of God, though, because God reveals Godself, indirectly and elusively, in a way that prohibits transforming the revelation into a direct, objective knowledge. This revealing takes place in the creating of free humans, in the individual’s self-development, and in the human’s ethical activity. God is present to the human in faith. Law considers Kierkegaard’s Christology under the categories of Incarnation and Soteriology. He notes that Kierkegaard understands the divine kenosis to be so real that the resulting humanity of God cannot be removed, and Christ’s humanity comes dangerously close to swallowing Christ’s divinity. In the incognito, God becomes unrecognizable and remains hidden. Law explains how the concept of contemporaneity is the manner in which Kierkegaard solves the problem of how an ancient event can be meaningfully experienced at a later time. The claim made is that every generation has the possibility of establishing a relationship to the Christevent, or of becoming contemporary with Christ. True contemporaneity happens through faith, which makes the Christ present to the person of faith in the here and now as a living event. For Law, the apophatic aspect of this contemporaneity lies in its paradoxical nature, that is, that the communion with Christ happens not through knowledge but through believing or trusting. The discussion of Soteriology finds apophatic motifs in relation to Christ the Atoner and Christ the Pattern. The Atoner’s work in suffering and death saves humans from their sins. The Pattern’s work of providing an example leads to a version of imitatio Christi. Each of these is the source of further apophatic themes. Law makes a very strong case that apophatic motifs are present in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. Apophaticisam functions implicitly in his thinking. Law finds close correlations between Kierkegaard and negative theologians in the areas of conceiving God, knowing God, viewing Christology, and employing indirect communication. But there are numerous differences between them as well, not the least of which is his reticence to affirm that the Christ imparts to the human being a share in divinity. Curtis L. Thompson

Reviews and Critical Discussions Ferreira, M. Jamie, review in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 45, 1994, pp. 421–4. Kangas, David, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 33, 1996, pp. 9–10. Taels, Johan, review in Bijdragen, vol. 57, no. 1, 1996, pp. 101–2.

Lewis A. Lawson (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1971, xx + 299 pp.

Lewis A. Lawson’s work Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines was published by the Scarecrow Press in 1971. Lawson states the goal of this work as follows: “My intent in selecting essays for inclusion in this anthology was to demonstrate the far-reaching impact of Kierkegaard upon contemporary American life.”1 Lawson’s strategy was to select articles that appeared in journals from a myriad of academic disciplines, such as education, sociology, and philosophy. Lawson introduces his project by tracing Kierkegaard’s introduction to the United States and his growing popularity over the first half of the twentieth century. This introduction includes more obscure facts like the study of Kierkegaard at Garrett Biblical Institute in Evanston, Illinois as early as 1887, as well as familiar stories, like the efforts of Alexander Dru, David Swenson, and Walter Lowrie beginning in the 1930s to translate a majority of Kierkegaard’s works into English. This availability of Kierkegaard’s works in English led to an increasing number of articles after 1940, which saw a peak of almost forty per year. This decreased to about twenty per year by 1960. Lawson notes that this decrease coincides with what he refers to as “the second stage” in Kierkegaardian scholarship.2 Whereas the first stage was largely “at the level of introductory, unevaluative description,”3 the second stage entails “a level of serious weighing and testing of that part of Kierkegaard’s thought which lends itself to philosophic analysis.”4 Additionally, there is a correspondence with this stage and a general familiarity with Kierkegaard’s work in the mind of the average literate American, so much so that “most articles now deal with one specialized aspect or another of his thought.”5 Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life: Essays from Various Disciplines, ed. by Lewis A. Lawson, Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1971, p. 22. 2 Ibid., p. xviii. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., pp. xviii–xix. 5 Ibid., p. xviii. 1

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It is this latter point where Lawson’s intention for this work seems most relevant. He wants to give a sampling of articles that reflect this “second stage” of Kierkegaardian literature in the U.S.A. He writes, “The articles vary greatly in their understanding of Kierkegaard’s thoughts and in their application of those thoughts to research in a specific discipline.”6 Lawson has gathered a seemingly random assortment of crossdisciplinary articles, ranging from Howard Johnson’s “Kierkegaard and Politics” originally published in Johnson’s A Kierkegaard Critique,7 to John R. Scudder, Jr.’s “Kierkegaard and the Responsible Enjoyment of Children.” Although philosophy is the best represented, the other represented disciplines include psychology, sociology, anthropology, music, literature, education, communication, and counseling. With the exception of David F. Swenson’s “The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard,” most of the included articles were written in the 1950s or 1960s. The inclusion of Swenson’s article is most likely owing to Lawson’s assessment that Swenson’s work represents “[t]he first serious American article.”8 Also included in this work is a bibliography containing all of the English articles Lawson could find at the time of his book’s publication. This bibliography only contains “articles or review-articles,” excluding “books or self-contained essays within books…[as well as] all single book reviews.”9 These articles are gathered from multiple disciplines, wherever “Kierkegaard may have been discussed or applied.”10 While helpful at the time, Lawson’s bibliography is today quite obviously out of date. If the student of Kierkegaard is looking for a random smattering of essays from the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s, then this book is a perfect fit. There are a number of essays, written in English, which demonstrate that Kierkegaard was being discussed in various academic disciplines by the middle of the twentieth century. What is not clear is how that shows that Kierkegaard was in any way relevant to contemporary American life. Lawson might have done better to describe his work as a cross-disciplinary sampling of Kierkegaard’s presence in the academy. Reading this book, one gets a sense that it was haphazardly thrown together. While the articles are multi-disciplinary, one wonders if they might be a little too random. Scudder’s article on the enjoyment of children may embody this dilemma the best. Scudder writes at the beginning of his article, “What possible contribution could Kierkegaard make to one’s relationship to children? He lacks all qualification…experience…knowledge…and the special understanding of children…?”11 Nevertheless, Scudder attempts to fit the development of one’s relationship to children into Kierkegaard’s three stages. It is the type of essay where one tries to “fit” Kierkegaard into one’s own ideas. One does not get the impression Ibid., p. 22. A Kierkegaard Critique, ed. by Howard A. Johnson and Niels Thulstrup, New York: Harper and Row 1962, pp. 74–84. 8 Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life, ed. by Lawson, p. ix. 9 Ibid., p. 253. 10 Ibid. 11 John R. Scudder, Jr., “Kierkegaard and the Responsible Enjoyment of Children,” in Kierkegaard’s Presence in Contemporary American Life, ed. by Lawson, p. 240. 6 7

Lewis A. Lawson

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that one is necessarily getting the best sampling of the literature that was available at that time. It is multi-disciplinary for the sake of being multi-disciplinary. It is not that this book is without value. There are some noteworthy articles, such as those by David Swenson and Howard Johnson. The introduction about the spread of Kierkegaard’s works in the English-speaking world is also quite insightful. The problem is that this collection simply lacks focus. Perhaps it would have been better if Lawson had written about noteworthy articles from the English-speaking world instead of merely providing a random sampling of articles of varying quality and importance. Although lacking consistent quality of content, overall Lawson’s anthology is an interesting sampling of the literature available on Kierkegaard in English during the mid-twentieth century. While the focus on works in English pertaining to American life may be off-putting to some international readers, this book works as a sampling of literature at a transitional time in Kierkegaard studies. As Lawson points out, this time period marks a shift from introductory, unevaluative literature to disciplinary application. Matthew Brake

Reviews and Critical Discussions Perkins, Robert L., “Always Himself: A Survey of Recent Kierkegaard Literature,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 12, no. 4, 1974, pp. 539–51. Thomas, John Heywood, review in Religious Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 1974, pp. 373–7. Thompson, Josiah, review in Scandinavian Studies, vol. 44, no. 2, 1972, pp. 270–1. Widenman, Robert, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 351–3.

Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1997, xviii + 347 pp.

This volume of collected essays—some previously published, others written specifically for the occasion—is part of a series of Feminist Interpretations of…, including Plato, Simone de Beauvior, Hegel, and Derrida. Nancy Tuana, the general series editor, writes that that goal of the series is a “reevaluation” of the Western philosophical canon, with specific attention to “the ways in which philosophers’ assumptions concerning gender are embedded within their theories.”1 This collection is focused on Søren Kierkegaard, and it is characterized most of all by its great variety of evaluations.2 No scholar absolutely condemns or condones Kierkegaard here; all fall somewhere in between these two poles, each for her or his own reasons. In addition, there is diversity of approach: Tamsin Lorraine offers a reading in conversation with Kristevian psychoanalysis, Mark Lloyd Taylor’s entry point is autobiographical, Jane Duran utilizes Kierkegaard constructively for feminist theory, while a number of contributors assess the positive and negative valences of Kierkegaard’s texts themselves from a feminist perspective. For all that variety, there are some unifying themes. The most prevalent is ambiguity. As Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh put it in their introduction to the volume, Kierkegaard’s “attitude toward women, the feminine, and the rapports between men and women is at best ambiguous.”3 On the one hand, Kierkegaard

Nancy Tuana, “Preface,” in Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1997, p. x. 2 Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh offer a typology for the essays in their introduction to the volume, with the first four readings being positive recoveries, the next three negative warnings, the following three syntheses of negative and positive aspects, and the last four essays constituting “a reclamation of the feminine” (ibid., p. 3). However, Christine Battersby rejects this typology as not precisely fitting the collection (review in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 14, 1999, p. 172); furthermore, such a typology unhelpfully reduces the complexity of the individual essays. Thus, it will not be utilized here. 3 Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, “Introduction,” in Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, p. 1. 1

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says some irretrievably sexist things about the essential nature of women. On the other hand, there are frequent intimations of a relation to God that may transcend any and all sexual differences. And, at any rate, are the sexist essentialist remarks Kierkegaard makes about woman’s nature intended to be historically bound social commentary, or eternally valid metaphysical assertions? Time and again the essays circle around these ambiguities. At some points, ambiguity is explored in the relation between essays (here one can see the editors’ art). For instance, Robert L. Perkins reads Stages on Life’s Way in a positive light. While the speeches of “In Vino Veritas” show “the modern romantic imagination with its all too apparent male chauvinism, sexual fantasy, and effort to exalt flesh over spirit,”4 the closing scene with Judge William and his wife demonstrate how Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ethical resists such subjugation of the feminine. In the following essay, Léon argues to the contrary that Judge William’s false praise and inveterate paternalism are possibly even more dangerous than the aesthetes’ contempt,5 for it paints an illusory veneer over what would otherwise be clear patriarchalism. The relegation of women to a lower status is most evident in their exclusion from the ethical sphere; according to Judge William, women do not have the requisite powers of reflection to enter into ethical decision-making. Though women may be religious, they are immediately so, without passing—as men must— through the sphere of ethical reflection.6 At this point, one begins to wonder whether the relation to God really does transcend gender difference in Kierkegaard; this is indeed a problem that does and should haunt the reader of these essays. In case one would like to excuse Kierkegaard by pointing out that it is pseudonyms who are writing these pieces, Léon backs up her readings with references to Kierkegaard’s journal entries.7 The juxtaposition between Perkins’ and Léon’s essays creates a lively debate that in fact characterizes the possible interrelations between all these chapters; the intersecting lines of agreement and disagreement could be multiplied indefinitely. Other essays contain a whole host of ambiguities within themselves, twisting and turning through all the various possible implications of Kierkegaard’s positions. Leslie A. Howe’s “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self” is exemplary in this regard. Taking up Walsh’s notion that there may be an androgynous psychology present in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the God-relationship,8 Howe casts this in doubt, showing how woman’s lack of reflective ability bars her from properly becoming a self before God.9 Robert L. Perkins, “Woman-Bashing in Kierkegaard’s ‘In Vino Veritas’: A Reinscription of Plato’s Symposium,” in ibid., p. 98. 5 Céline Léon, “(A) Woman’s Place Within the Ethical,” in ibid., p. 108. 6 Ibid., p. 114; p. 115; p. 127. Here Léon follows Christine Garside’s “Can a Woman Be Good in the Same Way as a Man?” Dialogue, vol. 10, 1971, pp. 534–44. 7 Léon, “(A) Woman’s Place Within the Ethical,” in Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, p. 128, n.2. See also Wanda Warren Berry, “The Silent Woman in Kierkegaard’s Later Religious Writings,” which is chiefly concerned with For Self-Examination, a signed work (in ibid., pp. 287–306). 8 Leslie A. Howe, “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self,” in ibid., p. 206. 9 Ibid., p. 229. 4

Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh

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Still, it is important to note—along with Mark Lloyd Taylor10—that woman becomes a universal pattern in the two discourses on “The Woman That Was a Sinner”: she places herself in silence before the mercy of God, as we all should.11 Yet, Howe notes, woman’s nature is not empowered here: it remains the same, and it is only selectively praised as a model for men.12 Males should imitate female silence before God, but not necessarily any other feminine attributes. Howe goes on to give due consideration to the historicist view that, in these descriptions of women, Kierkegaard is denouncing the stereotypical creature his society has created (as Birgit Bertung argues forcefully in “Yes, a Woman Can Exist”).13 This certainly does occur. Yet we cannot ignore the essentialist statements that accompany Kierkegaard’s cultural criticism, and it is ultimately wishful thinking to want to excise these from Kierkegaard’s true purpose.14 Both sides of the ambiguity must be preserved. In a final twist, Howe argues that Kierkegaard can be useful for feminists in providing an “analytic structure for understanding the process of acquiring selfhood,”15 but he can only be so used if his basic terms are redefined to exclude a hierarchy of spirit over nature and abolish essentialist gender claims.16 Nearly all of the positions in this collection are recapitulated here in Howe’s one essay, which does an admirable job of displaying the dual nature of the ambiguity so often noted: it is both in Kierkegaard’s texts themselves and in how feminist readers appropriate said texts. Finally, to depart briefly from the theme of ambiguity, it would be remiss not to mention Julia Watkin’s “The Logic of Søren Kierkegaard’s Misogyny, 1854– 1855,” an essay whose ramifications are many. Here Kierkegaard’s misogyny— so evident in these late years—is traced back to some of the basic metaphysical organizing principles of his authorship.17 Kierkegaard’s attack on marriage—really more misogamy than misogyny—is only one manifestation of the perennial conflict between eternity and temporality18 that runs throughout the whole corpus.19 Watkin summarizes the conflict in the following statement: “To the world of temporality belong progression and assertion of selfhood, quantity, expansion; to the realm of eternity belong self-denial, quality, renunciatory withdrawal.”20 Contra Bertung,21 10 Mark Lloyd Taylor, “Almost Earnestness? Autobiographical Reading, Feminist ­Re-Reading, and Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” in ibid., pp. 197–9. 11 Howe, “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self,” in ibid., p. 232. 12 Ibid., p. 234. 13 Birgit Bertung, “Yes, a Woman Can Exist,” in ibid., pp. 51–67. 14 Howe, “Kierkegaard and the Feminine Self,” in ibid., p. 238. 15 Ibid., p. 245. 16 Ibid., pp. 243–5. 17 Julia Watkin, “The Logic of Søren Kierkegaard’s Misogyny, 1854–1855,” in ibid., p. 71; p. 76. 18 Ibid., p. 72: “These two realms [eternity and temporality] stand in an inverse relation to each other.” 19 Cf. ibid., p. 76: “It can thus be seen that Kierkegaard does not become distorted in his later writings about marriage and sexuality. It is his metaphysical assumptions about God and creation, the eternal and the temporal, that make it difficult, if not impossible, for him to reconcile marriage and procreation with an ideal likeness to God that demands total self-renunciation.” 20 Ibid., p. 73. 21 Ibid., p. 63.

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Kierkegaard does have an ascetic side, and it explains much of what he has to say about women (whom he identifies with temporality)22 and their perceived role in marriage. Few essays have illuminated so much of Kierkegaard in so little space; precisely for that reason, Watkin’s is perhaps the most disturbing chapter of a collection whose provocations linger. Thomas J. Millay



22

See Sylviane Agacinski, “An Aparté on Repetition,” in ibid., pp. 141–4.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Akiş, Yasemin, review in Kadin/Woman, vol. 12, issue 2, 2011, pp. 67–70. Battersby, Christine, review in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, vol. 14, 1999, pp. 172–6. Søltoft, Pia, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 20, 1999, pp. 310–13. Woelfel, James, review in Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 181–91.

John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press 2000, xii + 210 pp.

Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, by John Lippitt, was published in 2000 by Macmillan Press in the United Kingdom, and St. Martin’s Press in the United States. The book is based on Lippitt’s Ph.D. thesis, undertaken at the University of Essex, and the influence of his supervisors (Michael Weston and Stephen Mulhall) might be discerned in its pages. Lippitt’s book stands firmly in a tradition of scholarship which attempts to read Kierkegaard as a philosopher, and more specifically as a moral-religious psychologist. In this respect it is preceded by works such as M. Jamie Ferreira’s Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (to which it acknowledges a debt), and in turn foreshadows the work of scholars such as Rick Furtak and Patrick Stokes.1 Lippitt’s book purports to be the first full-length study on humor and irony on Kierkegaard’s work in English. By way of qualification one should add that other instances of “the comic” are also treated, such as satire, and that the work is mainly concerned with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.2 Humour and Irony begins, in Chapter 2, by attempting to establish that Climacus’ irony, humor, and satire are to be understood as forms of “indirect communication.”3 These, we are asked to believe, are addressed to the Hegelian illusions of Kierkegaard’s reader, and find their basis and justification in the ethical nature of Kierkegaard’s project.4 In this Lippitt seeks to make the case that the ironic and satirical devices Kierkegaard aims at the Hegelian are not simply directed at his contemporary readers, but also intended to apply to future readers as well. For “Climacus’s message is this. If we are honest with ourselves, we can see that such illusions [e.g. objectivity, over-intellectualism] are ones to which we are susceptible. The satire ostensibly directed at the Hegelian ‘speculative thinker’ is thus also directed at our current selves.…”5 1 M. Jamie Ferreira, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991. 2 John Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press 2000, p. 1. 3 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 25, my emphasis.

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Against this background Lippitt goes on, in Chapter 3, to connect what he envisages to be the ethical nature of Kierkegaard’s critique with the tradition of moral perfectionism: a tradition which gives a significant role to figures that can be called moral exemplars. Calling upon the work of Stanley Cavell on this subject, Lippitt argues that such exemplars have an important role to play in Kierkegaard’s work and that the Postscript can be read in the light of the tradition of moral perfectionism. Chapter 4 takes on James Conant’s claim that the Postscript advances no substantive philosophical doctrines but is rather intended to reveal to its reader his or her own propensity to engage in philosophical nonsense. Lippitt argues, firstly, that Conant fails to appreciate the precise sense in which Kierkegaard holds the absolute paradox of the Incarnation to be nonsensical. For the nonsense attaching to the absolute paradox is said to differ from other kinds of nonsense, because it is offensive in a way that other forms of nonsense are not.6 Second, Lippitt charges Conant with overlooking what is involved in Climacus’ description of himself as a “humourist.” Taking this seriously, Lippitt claims, gives us a rather different view of the Postscript’s closing “revocation,” in which the text is apparently rejected as nonsensical. Locating the different flavors of the comic with respect to the confinium, or border territories, between the different existence spheres, or stages on life’s way, is the subject of Chapter 5. This discussion sets the stage for the case Lippitt seeks to make in Chapter 6, that irony and humor can have an important role to play in moving us to new ethical and religious ways of seeing. Drawing on the work of Ferreira, Lippitt seeks to establish that the comic has certain features in common with Gestalt shifts and metaphor: the means and devices that Ferreira calls upon to give an account of the transition, or leap, to an ethical or religious life view. In this, Chapter 6 argues that “the workings of comic incongruity parallel intimately at least the cognitive dimensions of the workings of a transition to a new [ethical and/or religious] existence sphere.”7 Chapter 7 raises questions about the legitimacy of the comic as a strategy, and how it might be justified. A discussion of the role irony can play in the move to an ethical life-view is the subject matter of the final chapter. This chapter also draws upon a debate between Gregory Vlastos and Alexander Nehamas regarding the interpretation of Socratic irony, and argues that Socratic irony (at least in the sense in which Socrates is presented as an ethicist in the Postscript) should be considered an instance of stable or “controlled” irony.8 Lippitt finally brings the book to a close with a general discussion of attitudes towards humor in the history of Christianity, and reflects on the question of whether a sense of humor might be considered a virtue. As far as the methodology of Humour and Irony is concerned, the book takes an approach already present in the literature at the time and seeks to apply it to a novel subject matter. In this respect Lippitt’s work, along with texts such as Anthony Rudd’s Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, seeks to reinforce

8 6 7

Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 155.

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the conviction that Kierkegaard’s work makes a contribution to philosophy (be that analytic or continental philosophy) and moral-religious psychology. Yet, in the wake of more contemporary and historically minded Kierkegaard scholarship, several of the central methodological tenets and theses of Humour and Irony appear problematic. These are, undoubtedly, tenets that Lippitt’s book shares with other works in this tradition of interpretation, but they are nevertheless worthy of mention. The first of these tenets concerns Kierkegaard’s historical context, and his place and role within it. As Lippitt informs us in the introduction to his book: [M]y view is that the Postscript’s view of irony and humor as forms of the comic is also of potential interest to those contemporary readers who have little or no concern with this period of the history of ideas. Because I hope to show Kierkegaard’s views to be of more than merely historical interest, then, relatively little of the space available to me will be taken up on historical background.9

The claim that “Kierkegaard’s view of x is of more than historical interest, therefore we do not have to be concerned to establish what Kierkegaard’s view of x is” might strike one as strange. Yet the important point is that despite being unprepared to outline the historical background to Kierkegaard’s work and thought, Lippitt’s project is premised upon a certain conception of that background and how Kierkegaard’s work appears when conceived against it. For, we are told, “Climacus’s satire is intended to expose the disguised vulnerability of the Hegelian assumptions dominant in the philosophy and theology of Kierkegaard’s day.”10 Indeed, Lippitt warns us not to overlook “the phenomenal influence of Hegelianism on the academy, Church, and educated society at large in Kierkegaard’s day—and hence the fact that most of the Postscript’s readers would have been ‘Hegelians’ of some sort.”11 This conception of Kierkegaard vis-à-vis the place of Hegelianism in his day and age plays a fundamental role in Lippitt’s argument. For instance, in giving an account of the comic as “ ‘non-discursive dismissal,’ ” Lippitt tells us, Of most importance for our concern is what happens when a particular discourse or way of seeing things becomes, or is in danger of becoming, so dominant that the option of critical argument against it becomes unavailable.…In his [Kierkegaard’s] case, the dominant world-view is Danish Hegelianism.12

Lippitt uses his claim that the dominance of Danish Hegelianism resulted in critical argument being “not available” to account for the necessity that Kierkegaard claims on behalf of his project of indirect communication; and thus to buffer the claim that the comic plays a role that critical argument cannot.13

9

11 12 13 10

Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 12. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 21, my emphasis. Ibid., p. 22.

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The problem with the conception of Kierkegaard’s historical context on which this argument is premised is that it has been drawn into question, if not made untenable, by more recent historical research.14 For attention to Kierkegaard’s historical situation reveals him to be one of a number of figures who were both influenced by, and concerned to critically engage with, Hegelianism. Indeed the figures in this debate (for example, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lasson Martensen, or Jakob Peter Mynster) argue with both Hegelian ideas and each other without the alleged necessity of having to resort to irony, satire, and humor in the process. Moreover, in this context Hegel’s thought does not appear as the norm but is rather regarded as a liberal, dangerous, and subversive movement.15 As such Kierkegaard’s work appears more in the manner of a defense of a theologically conservative position, against a more radical and liberal theology inspired by Hegel. In short, the reality of Kierkegaard’s historical situation is the very opposite of the conception upon which the argument of Irony and Humour rests. A similar problem can be said to attend Lippitt’s more ambitious, and dependent, thesis, that Kierkegaard intends his treatment of the Hegelian illusions which afflict his contemporary readers to treat his future readers as well (that is, us). As Lippitt puts it: [T]he “Hegelian” is not simply a figure at whom Climacus’s readers are invited to scoff. Rather, we are intended to see ourselves as prone to the same kind of confusions and evasions. Thus Climacus’s attack on Hegelianism is no mere footnote in the history of philosophy. His ostensibly anti-Hegelian satire is itself a form of indirect communication which, if we do come to see how it rebounds upon ourselves, serves a vital ethicalreligious purpose.16

Yet this claim is advanced without any clear conception of the illusions to which the Hegelian is said to be subject (Lippitt’s examples of “objectivity” and “overintellectualism” at this point are so general as to be vacuous), what would count as a treatment of these illusions, as well as any textual evidence to the effect that Kierkegaard wrote his works “intending” them to treat readers of the future. Yet, without these, Lippitt’s thesis that Kierkegaard’s views on the comic are of more than historical interest is substantially weakened. Given its concern with diagnosing and treating illusion, it is remarkable that, from the point of view of a more historical conception, perhaps the only illusion to be found in Humour and Irony is the one that the work itself embodies, namely, in its methodological presupposition that it is possible to read Kierkegaard without any attention to the details of the Danish intellectual, cultural, and theological context in which his thought was formed; as well as the closely related, and concomitant, assumption that a satisfactory reading can be arrived at on the basis of philosophy (or moral-religious psychology) alone. The problem with such an

See, for example, Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003. 15 Ibid., p. 139. 16 Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought, p. 5. 14

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approach, as subsequent work has attempted to make clear, is that it will necessarily lack the conceptual and modal resources to tell a rich enough story to do justice to Kierkegaard, and his attempt to defend a conception of Christianity as beyond the philosophical capacities of human beings. Despite the evident shortcomings of Humour and Irony in the wake of more recent historical research, it is still an important text in understanding both the history and contemporary landscape of Kierkegaard scholarship. It is a book that continues to inspire, influence, and provoke debate. Jamie Turnbull

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see pp. 789–90. Hamilton, Christopher, review in Religious Studies, vol. 38, 2002, pp. 225–46. Pattison, George, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 43, 2002, pp. 20–2. Robertson, Edwin, review in Theology, vol. 104, pp. 209–10.

John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling,’ London and New York: Routledge 2003, ix + 218 pp.

John Lippitt’s Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling’ (hereafter referred to as Guidebook to Kierkegaard) begins with the claim that “Fear and Trembling is probably Kierkegaard’s best-known and most commonly read work.”1 Despite its popularity, however, Lippitt remains convinced that Fear and Trembling is “as likely to be greeted by puzzlement or downright exasperation as by admiration.”2 This volume in the Routledge Philosophy Guidebooks series, therefore, serves as Lippitt’s attempt to begin to clarify the meaning of Kierkegaard’s profoundly rich text while also illuminating its complexity and nuance for first-time readers. To place this book in context, it may help to note that, in the middle of the twentieth century, the appropriation of “the absurd” by Albert Camus and JeanPaul Sartre contributed to a widespread reading of Fear and Trembling as the quintessential expression of Kierkegaard’s irrationalism or fideism. Prior to the publication of Guidebook to Kierkegaard, a scholarly reassessment of Fear and Trembling had begun piecemeal in several contexts, including two volumes edited by Robert Perkins—Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”: Critical Appraisals3 and the Fear and Trembling and Repetition volume in the International Kierkegaard Commentary series4—and Edward Mooney’s Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.5 Yet, Lippitt’s text serves as one of the first thorough attempts to open this reassessment to readers at an introductory John Lippitt, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling,’ London and New York: Routledge 2003, p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 2. 3 Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling”: Critical Appraisals, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1983. 4 Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1993 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 6). 5 Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Albany: State University of New York Press 1991. 1

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level. Since the publication of Lippitt’s Guidebook to Kierkegaard in 2003, Clare Carlisle’s Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is the only book in this genre that has come close to rivaling it in terms of ambition and scope.6 The Guidebook to Kierkegaard is well organized and straightforward. Aside from a brief biographical and methodological orientation, it consists of essentially two parts: (a) Chapters 2–5 attend to the individual sections of the text of Fear and Trembling and (b) Chapters 6–7 attend to larger interpretive issues, including Fear and Trembling’s pseudonymous authorship. In selecting this structure, Lippitt works inductively by leading the reader into the difficulties that the text entails through the text itself. The strength of the text is Lippitt’s detailed attention to all of the textual aspects of Fear and Trembling individually, from the Preface to the Epilogue.7 In this way, the reader is initiated into the text in its entirety before stepping back for evaluation and assessment. Throughout, Lippitt attempts to provide an even-handed presentation of the relevant contextual referents—whether explaining the importance of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit or the story of Sarah and Tobias from the book of Tobit—and assessment of the secondary voices—whether challenging Mooney’s interpretation of infinite resignation8 or partially affirming Stephen Mulhall’s description of Fear and Trembling as a self-subverting text.9 The challenge entailed in this method of approaching Fear and Trembling, however, is that important interpretive details—for example, that the text is written under a pseudonym with a specific point of view— need to be summarily introduced up front while the full weight of their significance lies latent throughout the reading of the text. That said, Lippitt does an admirable job in navigating these matters in a way that is transparent and, at least by the conclusion of the volume, as thorough as necessary for novice readers. The final two chapters in which Lippitt turns to broader interpretive issues surrounding the meaning of Fear and Trembling have received some criticism for displaying dispassion or excessive restraint.10 Although this criticism seems overstated, what seems to be meant is that Lippitt is neither clear enough nor energetic enough in articulating his own take on what the text means amidst his extensive attention to secondary debates (and this could be read as the obverse of his evenhandedness). Granting, of course, that it is very unlikely that any explanation or interpretation of Fear and Trembling could adequately communicate or mirror the pathos of the text itself, there are at least three important conclusions that Lippitt draws concerning the meaning of Fear and Trembling that reveal his own recommended interpretive trajectories at work throughout his reading.

Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s ‘Fear and Trembling’: A Reader’s Guide, London: Bloomsbury Academic 2010. 7 Even the epigraph is granted significant attention, though it is treated in the second part of the book. See Lippitt, Guidebook to Kierkegaard, pp. 137–8. 8 Lippitt, Guidebook to Kierkegaard, pp. 54–60. 9 Ibid., p. 132; pp. 194–205. 10 See, for example, M. G. Piety, review in Teaching Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 4, 2005, pp. 397–8. 6

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First, Lippitt clearly rejects biographical interpretations of the many-layered text that reduce it to merely a commentary on Kierkegaard’s relations to either his onetime fiancée Regine Olsen or his father Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard. Second, he reads Fear and Trembling as a Christian text, as a text that affirms the teleological suspension of the ethical in order “to make space for a conception of the ethical that includes grace,” even if a positive account of grace is not outlined in the text.11 Third, Lippitt argues that the flawed identity of the pseudonymous author is not fatal; rather, he suggests that Kierkegaard utilizes the imaginary Johannes de silentio to display the ethical value in engaging our emotional and imaginative faculties in attempting to live an “interested” or “subjective” life.12 This last point, however, reveals what I take to be the most significant flaw in Lippitt’s Guidebook to Kierkegaard, and it is a flaw that is probably best described as a misrepresentation in the title. In truth, the text is not and should not be used as a comprehensive guidebook to Kierkegaard or even to Kierkegaard’s contribution to contemporary philosophy (and perhaps this is only worth noting because both of these seem to be implied in the stated ambitions of the Routledge Philosophy Guidebook series). It is an excellent guidebook to Fear and Trembling, and it provides a very good summary of select contributions of Kierkegaard to contemporary thought. But it provides a limited picture. For example, the only other texts written by Kierkegaard that are granted more than a cursory mention are the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Practice in Christianity, The Sickness unto Death, and A Literary Review of Two Ages, and only one of these is not written by a pseudonym, and none of these is engaged systematically with reference to Kierkegaard’s thought or to his contribution to contemporary thought. Certainly, Lippitt’s extensive grasp of Kierkegaard’s corpus is evident throughout, and his claim about Johannes de silentio displaying an “interested” or “subjective” life is just one natural outgrowth of this familiarity. Yet, one will have a most difficult time tracing how Kierkegaard develops and employs this claim beyond the pages of Fear and Trembling. That said, Lippitt’s text remains an excellent and accessible introduction to reading Kierkegaard that provides the reader with confidence and yet leaves the reader wanting more. And, it would not be too much to say that it is still the case that one would be very hard pressed to find a better introduction to either Kierkegaard or Fear and Trembling. Paul Martens

Lippitt, Guidebook to Kierkegaard, p. 170. Ibid., pp. 205–6.

11

12

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 797. Damgaard, Iben, “Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling,” Ars Disputandi, vol. 4, 2004, pp. 74–7. Martens, Paul, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 50, 2006, pp. 29–31. Peters, Amy Leigh, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 2, 2005, pp. 262–4. Piety, M.G., review in Teaching Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 4, 2005, pp. 396–8. Pound, Marcus, review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, 2006, pp. 329–30.

John Lippitt and George Pattison (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, xx + 581 pp.

In recent years there has been a proliferation of the companions, guidebooks, and handbooks, as publishing houses race to create standard resources or reference works that research libraries will be obliged to buy. This is a special kind of genre. On the one hand, there is the expectation that these works contain serious pieces of research from top-level scholars. But, on the other hand, there is an expectation that they also be didactical and useful for students and less initiated readers. This is a difficult contradiction to negotiate. The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard belongs to this genre. It is edited by two veteran Kierkegaard scholars, John Lippitt and George Pattison. The task of The Oxford Handbook is rendered more difficult due to the complex and varied nature of Kierkegaard’s thought, which defies traditional disciplinary categories. Does one focus on his philosophy, on the religious dimension of his thought, or perhaps on the literary elements or psychological insights? To ignore any one of these would in a sense mean misrepresenting the whole. But yet with a limited number of pages at the editors’ disposal, this quickly becomes a delicate balancing act. In The Oxford Handbook the editors have managed to assemble an outstanding group of contributors who, it can be said, represent some of the leading scholars in the field. The 29 articles generally represent new and original research informed by the most recent discoveries and scholarship in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter and Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources.1 The editors have taken care to present a complex picture of Kierkegaard, and the collection should be praised for its broad coverage. One of the most felicitous editorial decisions seems to have been made fairly early on in the process. Kierkegaard studies has been plagued by a number of fixed ideas that are articulately catalogued in the Introduction of the work. These include the well-known biographical clichés about Kierkegaard’s father, Regine Olsen, the Corsair, etc. There are also a number of fixed themes, such as “the leap of faith,” See Thomas P. Miles’ discussion of the ways in which The Oxford Handbook builds on Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter and Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources: Thomas P. Miles, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 10, 2014 (online journal).

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“the stage theory,” “the truth for which to live and die.” Many of the older works in Anglophone Kierkegaard studies seem almost formulaic in the way in which these ideas get continually rehearsed. This established practice in Kierkegaard studies has not facilitated the understanding of Kierkegaard or advanced research in the field, but rather the contrary seems to be the case. Given this, one can only laud the decision to avoid using these kinds of fixed ideas to structure the collection. If one is going to make any headway with these topics, they must be understood in a larger context, which was invariably missing in the earlier analyses. So in this sense, this volume marks a refreshing improvement over so many of the earlier works in the literature. Instead of taking the easy road of simply listing the clichés and stock concepts, The Oxford Handbook takes up the much more difficult task of trying to define and delimit constellations of issues and concepts which fit together more naturally and illuminate a larger field of Kierkegaard’s thought. The volume is organized into three large sections: “Part I, Contexts and Sources,” which is dedicated to source-work research; “Part 2, Some Major Topics in the Authorship,” which can be understood as in some ways following the methodology known in philosophy as conceptual analysis; and finally, “Part 3, Kierkegaard after Kierkegaard,” which is concerned with the history of reception. This is a beneficial organizational structure that allows the volume to cover an enormous amount of material, representing many different areas in the field of Kierkegaard studies. Moreover, it is also highly intuitive, and after only a casual perusal of the Introduction and Table of Contents, readers can immediately grasp the guiding idea and thus identify the specific articles that are of special interest to them. On this point, it must be said that this volume represents an improvement over the wellknown Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, which is not organized according to any obvious systematic conception.2 The threefold organization of The Oxford Handbook in some ways reflects the general organization of the series Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, which likewise contains three parts: Part 1, Sources, i.e., sourcework research; Part 2, Reception, i.e., the history of the reception of Kierkegaard according to country, geographical region or discipline; and Part 3, Resources, which is a somewhat more heterogeneous rubric, but which nonetheless contains individual volumes which can be seen to overlap with the second section of The Oxford Handbook, i.e., “Some Major Topics in the Authorship.” Specifically, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15, entitled Kierkegaard’s Concepts, is conceived as a kind of Kierkegaard dictionary that identifies and investigates the key terms in the authorship in a systematic manner. Similarly, vol. 16, Kierkegaard’s Literary Figures and Motifs examines some of the main fictional characters that Kierkegaard uses, such as Faust, the Wandering Jew or Don Quixote. So in this sense some of this third part of Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources also aims at an analytic, in some ways text-immanent, approach to Kierkegaard’s texts in the same way that Part 2 of The Oxford Handbook does. But

The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1998.

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the organization of this material in Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources was in some ways far simpler due to the larger systematic ambition of that series. By contrast, John Lippitt and George Pattison were confronted with a much more difficult problem of selection since they had much more limited space at their disposal to cover the key topics in Kierkegaard’s authorship. This meant that painful decisions had to be made about what to include and what to omit. Part I of The Oxford Handbook has a good distribution of topics and material. One might argue that the outstanding article on “Kierkegaard and the History of Theology” (by David Law) is asked to do too much work comparatively. Recently, fruitful research has been done on Kierkegaard’s use of the Church Fathers, mysticism, and the Lutheran tradition. Articles on these topics might have helped to lessen the burden on the named article. Although some of this is treated in Bruce Kirmmse’s article on Kierkegaard and the Golden Age and in Anders Holm’s article “Kierkegaard and the Church,” the great importance of Grundtvig and Grundtvigians for Kierkegaard might also have been enough to merit an article on its own, especially when one considers how figures such as Hans Frederik Helveg, Jacob Christian Lindberg, and Kierkegaard’s elder brother Peter Christian exercised him through the years. With respect to Part II on the Major Topics, one might argue that there is a certain disproportion among some of these articles. For example, there is an article on “Kierkegaard’s Theology” (by Sylvia Walsh), which is asked to cover rather a lot of ground. By contrast, there are articles on “Love,” “Irony,” and “Death,” that is, specific concepts. For however important these might be as individual topics, it is a bit difficult to see them on equal footing with the topic “Theology,” which itself contains a number of different individual concepts and topics, such as the Incarnation, Sin, Revelation, Immortality, and God. With respect to philosophical topics, an article is dedicated to “Ethics,” but there is nothing specifically concerned with Kierkegaard’s views on metaphysics, epistemology, logic, or aesthetics, although some of these topics are treated briefly in some of the other articles, especially on the history of reception. Also more or less absent seems to be music and theater, which play such an important role in the authorship and which have been the object of a fair amount of recent research. A similar lack of proportion or perspective can arguably be seen in Part III. Here one finds an article dedicated exclusively to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This is problematic since, as is known, Nietzsche’s reception of Kierkegaard seems to be entirely second-hand, and thus one can legitimately raise the question of whether or not this is a topic for the history of reception at all, or if this might not just be a case of similar themes and issues appearing in the two authors. It is a complex matter to reconstruct what snippets from Kierkegaard that Nietzsche might have been familiar with based on his correspondence with Brandes or his reading of Martensen in German translation. The degree of specialization demanded to sort out this kind of thing seems out of proportion when one considers that there is an article in the same section that has as its goal to cover the entire theological reception of Kierkegaard. This is a huge topic, indeed, covering a number of different movements and traditions in different countries. The author here is asked to span a much wider field and paint in much broader strokes than was the case with the article on Nietzsche.

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Another very ambitious article is dedicated to the reception of Kierkegaard in modern European literature. This is a vast topic that is covered by some 6 tomes of Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources. Again, the task involved here does not seem to be in proportion with an article dedicated just to Nietzsche. A better case can be made, I think, for including the article on Heidegger since the latter did have a de facto and at least partially documentable reception of Kierkegaard; moreover, Heidegger is such a towering figure in the twentieth century, who influenced many different fields, that this topic seems to merit an individual treatment. It is also interesting to see that an entire article is dedicated to the reception of Kierkegaard in the phenomenological movement but nothing explicitly on Kierkegaard and existentialism. While this might seem striking at first glance, I think it can be defended on the following grounds: the relation of Kierkegaard to existentialism belongs to the category of clichés and fixed ideas in Kierkegaard studies, which only fairly recently has been called into question. Thus the omission of such an article is wholly in line with the volume’s goal to rethink some of the old ideas in innovative ways. Moreover, the very definition of what existentialism is and which thinkers belong to it would make such an article a highly complex matter. Recent research has also uncovered a wealth of important Catholic readers of Kierkegaard, for example, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Eugen Biser, Romano Guardini, Friedrich von Hügel, Henri de Lubac, Thomas Merton, and Erich Przywara. It would have been useful to have this tradition represented in a more meaningful way. One might also have considered including an article on the Jewish reception with a focus on figures such as Buber and Rosenzweig. None of these comments should be taken too seriously since clearly there is no absolutely systematic and exhaustive way to organize a volume of this kind, and any editorial decision about inclusion or omission will always be open to debate. But whatever the scope of these debates, the overall achievement of The Oxford Handbook cannot be called into doubt. It contributes a great service to Kierkegaard studies that will endure for quite some time in the future. But most importantly, it will help us to begin to breakdown some of the longstanding clichés in the field and to rethink the basic issues, concepts, and categories of the authorship. This is the future of Kierkegaard studies, and this volume does an outstanding job at pointing the way forward. Jon Stewart

Reviews and Critical Discussions Miles, Thomas P., review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, February 10, 2014 (online journal). Petersen, Anders Klostergaard, “Håndbog om Kierkegaard med visse mangler: Anmeldelse af The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, eds. John Lippitt and George Pattison,” Kristeligt Dagblad, May 1, 2013. Podmore, Simon, review in Expository Times, no. 125, 2014, pp. 560–1.

Laura Llevadot, Kierkegaard through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics, Aurora: The Davies Group 2013, xx +198 pp.

Laura Llevadot is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, and researcher at the Laboratoire d’Études des Logiques Contemporaines in Paris. Her Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Barcelona, 2006) was devoted to the “second philosophy” of Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard is the author to whom Llevadot’s main research and scholarly production is addressed. She has also published La philosophie seconde de Kierkegaard, and co-edited Filosofias Postmetafisicas. 20 años de filosofia francesa contemporánea.1 Llevadot reads Kierkegaard as a contemporary philosopher, writer of paradoxes, and esthete of communication. The French philosophy of difference and deconstruction determines the framework in which Llevadot interprets Kierkegaard. This philosophy assumes the death of God as new horizon of thought and tries to go beyond metaphysical thinking toward a postmetaphysical philosophy, specifically in the context of ethics. From this context arises the rapprochement between Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida. As a reading of Kierkegaard and Derrida, Llevadot’s study belongs to an interpretative stream that includes John Caputo, Mark Dooley, John Llewelyn, Hent de Vries, and Marius Timmann Mjaaland,2 among whom Kierkegaard emerges as pioneer of postmodern thinking. However, unlike these commentators, Llevadot is immersed in Spanish culture and language, and her philosophical background refers to the reception of French poststructuralism in Spain during the 1970s, as an

Laura Llevadot, La philosophie seconde de Kierkegaard, Paris: L’Harmattan 2012, and Filosofias Post-metafisicas. 20 años de filosofia francesa contemporánea, ed. by Laura Llevadot and Jordi Riba, Barcelona: UOC Ed. 2012. 2 Cf. John Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993; Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press 2001; John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2009; Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2002; Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Autopsia: Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2008 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 17). 1

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intellectual response to the Franco dictatorship.3 This is why, despite belonging to a larger interpretive stream, Llevadot has the merit of having introduced into Hispanic Kierkegaard studies a new and original reading. While the primary interest in studies on Kierkegaard and Derrida has focused on the theological dimension of deconstruction, Llevadot focuses on its ethical implications. How to support an ethics without ontological assumptions, that is, how to become free after having overcome excluding and hierarchical dualisms of subject and object, good and evil—this is the question Llevadot attempts to answer. If the theological analysis of deconstruction resulted in a kind of religion without religion, Llevadot’s endeavor addresses an ethics without ethics, such as Kierkegaard and Derrida proposed. Kierkegaard through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics is born from the project of reading Kierkegaard in the light of contemporary deconstruction as way to show the relevance of his thought, because, according to the author, “the possibility that Kierkegaard still matters today, depends to a good extent on this coincidence of approaches between Kierkegaardian ethics and deconstruction.”4 Reading Kierkegaard through Derrida means reading him after the death of God and phallogocentric metaphysics, reading his forms of communication as figures of deconstruction, and reading faith as a religious and ethical consciousness without prescriptive religion or moral duties. Paradoxically, from the death of God emerges the possibility of faith and love as organs of real comprehension. If it is possible to read Kierkegaard through Derrida, it is also possible to read Derrida through Kierkegaard, since both of them are involved in an impossible faith that dwells at the core of deconstruction. According to Llevadot’s reading, Kierkegaard and Derrida imply each other. This book brings together a number of articles composed between 2008 and 2012, some of them originally written in Spanish, and published in diverse journals and anthologies. It is divided into 3 parts, with a preface by Michael Marder, an author’s introduction, and an initial chapter on general considerations. In these first pages, Llevadot proposes the idea of a postmetaphysical ethics, namely, a second, originary, or hyper-ethics as common denominator between Kierkegaard and Derrida’s philosophy. The postmetaphysical quality of such an ethics would consist in “questioning the opposition between knowing and believing, knowledge and faith, rationality and irrationality,”5 questioning that is resolved in the access to an actuality that is neither clear nor distinct, but impossible, aporetic, undecidable, and therefore the subject-object of faith. According to postmetaphysical reasoning, knowledge becomes faith, faith becomes free action, and free action always decides love. The first part of the text, entitled “Belief and the End of Metaphysics,”6 discusses some ethical implications of the death of God: the overcoming of clear and distinct consciousness, and the emergence of freedom as absolute praxis. In this context arises Laura Llevadot, Kierkegaard through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics, Aurora: The Davies Group 2013, p. 13. 4 Ibid., pp. 27–8. 5 Ibid., p. XV. 6 Ibid., pp. 11–67. 3

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what The Concept of Anxiety called a “second ethics,”7 set up beyond finite goods and evils, and supported by a hypercritical faith that goes beyond representational knowledge, because it knows how to believe and to love the infinite, impossible and incalculable. Llevadot assimilates Kierkegaard’s second ethics to what Derrida calls a hyper-ethics, sustained in faith, the impossible and incalculable. Both Fear and Trembling, in the case of Kierkegaard, and The Gift of Death,8 in Derrida’s case, assume the biblical story of Abraham’s sacrifice as the structural model of ethical action, capable of suspending the rules of morality in order to leap to an absolute relation to the absolute. Thus, postmetaphysical ethics becomes the logical praxis of the impossible, an infinite and excessive action in which faith dwells. The second part of the book deals with the relationship to “Death”9—one’s own and another’s death—as constitutive of ethics. Unlike Martin Heidegger, who analyzes Dasein’s death as ontological possibility preceding and conditioning all knowledge, Kierkegaard understands death as a singular decision that assumes and surpasses representational knowledge believing the impossible, indeterminable, and paradoxical. Also, unlike Emmanuel Levinas, who thinks of the ethical decision in terms of dying for the other, Derrida and Kierkegaard would understand it as the free killing of the other in response to an absolute commitment. At this point, Llevadot returns to Abraham’s sacrifice, which is capable of turning free action into deadly negation, and negation into renewal, re-creation and absolute gift, beyond all goods and evils of a self-interested exchange. The third part is entitled “The Self and the Other”10 and addresses the ethical priority of the “you.” In a postmetaphysical context, the other means “you,” and this you overcomes the dualism between subject–object, self–world, and identity– difference. In fact, the “you” emerges as a reciprocal “third,” as a free and loving relationship between self and other. While Martin Buber’s ethical you is dissolved in classical dualistic ontology, and Levinas’ ethical other is irreducible and external to any relationship, Kierkegaard thinks of the you, i.e., the neighbor, as an immanent and subjective relationship, the dialectical reflection of oneself in the other, of identity in difference. Unlike Buber and Levinas, the Kierkegaardian-Derridean “you” overcomes the I’s identity by means of the other, and it prevents the I from closing itself into an empty abstraction. Reflecting on the other, Llevadot devotes the last part of her book to the praxis of confession as enactment of difference. Indeed, confession has a heterologic structure, because it unfolds and opens subjectivity to the other, by whom forgiveness and truth come into existence. However the other is called before whom the confession happens, Christian God or radical Other, it determines the reduplicative and differential dynamism of subjective action. Finally, the book concludes with an appendix devoted to setting up the analogy between postmetaphysical ethics and the film Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier.11 SKS 4, 329 / CA, 20. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2008. 9 Llevadot, Kierkegaard through Derrida, pp. 68–108. 10 Ibid., pp. 109–60. 11 Ibid., pp. 161–77. 7 8

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In both cases, the question is how to communicate an existential instance, which exceeds finite and representational understanding to conceive freedom beyond the confines of death, faith and the other. According to the aesthetic and indirect communication that Kierkegaard, Derrida or von Trier expresses, the question is not how to represent the world objectively, but how to signify subjective faith in this world, how to articulate a freedom which creates its own meaning, in the absolute and silent certainty of love. Kierkegaard through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics has the merit of opening up the dialogue not only between Kierkegaard and Derrida, but also between these two thinkers and Heidegger, Levinas, Buber, Deleuze, and Foucault, among others. Through a large constellation of voices and players, Llevadot brings out the free flow of difference in its affirmations, allusions, and contradictions. In that sense, Kierkegaard through Derrida seems to display in itself the performance of deconstruction as multiple writing, exceeded by an immeasurable truth never completely said, but paradoxically always inter-said. Kierkegaard through Derrida is also Derrida through Kierkegaard, since both thinkers are reciprocally supported by that ideal third, which mediates the dialogue of contemporary thought. If anything defines the history of ideas, it is its essential continuity by a mutual recognition, through which the past comes to the present, and the future repeats the origin. The postmetaphysical ethics, through which Kierkegaard prefigures Derrida, and Derrida comes back to Kierkegaard, speaks of this essential continuity that makes the present as originary as the past, and as novel as the future. That is why Llevadot’s work not only shows the contemporaneity of Kierkegaardian philosophy, but at the same time shows our own contemporaneity with a past addressed to repetition. Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics ultimately means returning to the origin, and producing the origin as a new third between Kierkegaard and Derrida, between them and us, between us and the future. María J. Binetti

Reviews and Critical Discussions Undetermined.

Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press 1938, xix + 636 pp.

This book, by Walter Lowrie, was the first English-language biography of Kierkegaard. It also presents, in encyclopedic fashion, seven appendices containing detailed synopses of each of Kierkegaard’s major writings as well as a glossary of commonly used philosophical terms in the authorship.1 As Lowrie notes repeatedly throughout the text, the biography was meant to serve as a general introduction to Kierkegaard for those who were unable to read his works in the original Danish or in German translation; indeed, many of the passages it contains from the authorship and journals appeared in English for the first time in this work. Lowrie himself writes that two-fifths of Kierkegaard is quotations from Kierkegaard’s writings. The biography acted as a kind of vanguard for Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander Dru’s coordinated and extensive translations of Kierkegaard’s works and journals, which were published during the late 1930s and early 1940s and meant to popularize Kierkegaard in the anglophone world.2 Kierkegaard was also groundbreaking due to its highly influential interpretations of the relation between Kierkegaard’s life and the substance of his thought. Lowrie was one of the first to articulate a systematic comparison of Kierkegaard’s life, his published works, and his journals, ultimately portraying them as integral parts of the Kierkegaardian mindset. Lowrie also popularized what are now tropes of Kierkegaard studies: the “melancholy” childhood, the revolt against and reconciliation with his father, Michael Kierkegaard (punctuated by a “great earthquake”), the doomed engagement to Regine Olsen, the revolt against Hegelian “speculation,” the Corsair crisis followed by a religious “metamorphosis” leading to war against the State Church. An argument could be made that much of the postwar secondary literature on Kierkegaard in English has been a progressive attempt to confirm, emendate, or reject outright the claims made by Lowrie. The biography provided a streamlined and unified perspective on Kierkegaard’s life and works, allowing it to organize and shape subsequent critical investigations into the same subject matter even as it presented The full content of these can be found in Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press 1938, pp. 591–631. 2 Lowrie later wrote an even more accessible biographical narrative, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1942 (second printing in 1944 and a third in 1946). 1

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its own singular take on the authorship. What is key is that Lowrie’s specific claims are less important than the general picture of a genius whose works dramatize his life and whose life was an enactment of his works. That being said, Lowrie makes numerous assumptions in the work that are questionable. Perhaps the most notable is his decision to interpret many of the early pseudonymous works (Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death) not for their relationship to Danish philosophical movements or literary Romanticism, but as biographical portraits of Kierkegaard as a university student and his relationship with Regine Olsen. Indeed, these books seem to have been Lowrie’s main sources for interpreting Kierkegaard’s personal and intellectual development from the years 1830 to 1841. This is demonstrative of the most frustrating element of Lowrie’s work: even as he quotes extensively from Kierkegaard’s writings in order to provide the reader with the most authentic viewpoint possible of Kierkegaard’s biographical development, Lowrie selectively quotes from the authorship and journals across different time periods and contexts in order to paint his own version of events. Likewise, his portrayal of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries is utterly dismissive.3 He furthermore views Kierkegaard unequivocally as a Christian thinker, forsaking almost all philosophical and literary analysis of Kierkegaard’s works in favor of his religious development. The style of the work is also anything but scholarly. Lowrie lets the reader know that in an earlier draft he had signed the work with two separate pseudonyms, feeling that as an ordained pastor it would have been improper for him to stand behind the content of the biography. He also laces his analysis with visual details of his own pilgrimage to Denmark, seeing firsthand the sights of Kierkegaard’s upbringing.4 Still, Lowrie’s colorful style and sentimental exposition of Kierkegaard have had a lasting influence in the secondary literature. His treatment of Kierkegaard’s relationship with Olsen is noteworthy in this regard. While viewing the cancellation of the engagement as emotionally manipulative, Lowrie ultimately tries to exonerate Kierkegaard due to his Christian faith and beautiful/edifying portrayal of the relationship in his literary works. Lowrie must be credited with providing one of the earliest justifications for interpreting the Kierkegaard–Olsen dynamic as relevant to the integrity of the wider authorship, and his influence is still felt in recent investigations such as those of Joakim Garff and Alastair Hannay.5 Furthermore,

As just one example, amidst scarce references to the enormously influential theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig, Lowrie labels him a “dilettante reformer.” See Lowrie, Kierkegaard, p. 473. 4 Lowrie furthermore prefaces each section of Kierkegaard’s life with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, playing up the image of the “melancholy Dane.” This is continued and embellished in A Short Life of Kierkegaard, which feels almost cinematic in its lurid descriptions of nineteenth-century Denmark and Kierkegaard’s strife-ridden existence. 5 See especially Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005, pp. 173–91, and Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, pp. 154–9. Each portrays the Olsen relationship as both a pivotal biographical event as well as a profound intellectual stimulus for Kierkegaard’s authorship. 3

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Lowrie’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms as “characters” and tasking the reader with “due diligence and discretion”6 with identifying the difference between Kierkegaard’s voice and those of his pseudonyms likewise helped establish a specific hermeneutic for interpreting the authorship. Lowrie disagrees with previous interpretations, such as that forwarded by Christoph Schrempf, that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writing practices were derived from the German Romantics. Another influential position Lowrie presents is that Kierkegaard’s intellectual development was teleological, culminating in a profound and thorough-going Christian existentialism whose foundation in the “aesthetical” and “speculative” writings of the early to mid-1840s was necessary only in order to expurgate their influence. Lowrie also advances the then novel thesis that Kierkegaard’s battle with the Corsair was an integral aspect of his writing productivity and caused a “metamorphosis” in his thought towards more explicitly Christian works. The final “attack on Christendom” not only represented Kierkegaard finally “becoming” a Christian in the last year of his life, but was also the product of several years of “venturing far out”7 and “loading the gun”8 of his ideas ever since his growing distrust of indirect communication beginning in 1848. The cumulative effect of this exposition is to provide Kierkegaard’s life with a strong narrative sweep, providing both entertainment for the lay reader and a highly provocative depiction of the evolution of Kierkegaard’s ideas. Today Lowrie’s biography is of interest mainly as a period document exhibiting the general character of the early English-language Kierkegaard reception, rather than for its historical interpretations of Kierkegaard’s life and authorship. Yet these interpretations are illuminating if only for revealing how many of the directions taken by modern scholarship find their roots in Lowrie’s original approach to Kierkegaard’s life. Thomas Gilbert

xviii. 8 6 7

See Lowrie, Kierkegaard, p. 288. Lowrie’s title for Section III of Part Five, “Becoming a Christian, 1848–1852”; see p. Lowrie’s title for Section I of Part Six, “The Corrective—The Sacrifice, 1852–1855.”

Reviews and Critical Discussions Anonymous, review in Congressional Quarterly, vol. 16, 1937–8, pp. 481–2. Anonymous, review in MoreBooks, vol. 13, no. 7, 1938, pp. 307–8. Anonymous, review in Times Literary Supplement, vol. 37, 1938, p. 488. Aubrey, Edwin Ewart, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 19, 1939, pp. 256–60. Barrett, Lee C., “The USA: From Neo-Orthodoxy to Plurality,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome III: The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 229–68; see pp. 230–1. Buonaiuti, Ernesto, review in Religio Rassegna, vol. 14, no. 4, 1937–8, pp. 299–304. Cant, Reginald, review in Church Quarterly Review, vol. 127, no. 254, 1939, pp. 268–94. Emmet, D.E., review in Philosophy, vol. 13, 1938, pp. 499–500. Geismar, Edward, review in Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, vol. 1, 1938, pp. 260–3. Green, Peter, review in The Manchester Guardian, June 28, 1938, p. 7. Greene, Theodor Meyer, review in Journal of Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 24, 1938, pp. 663–5. Hansen, Valdemar, review in Theoria, vol. 6, 1940, pp. 83–7. Mantripp, J.C., review in Hibbert Journal, vol. 37, 1938–39, pp. 661–5. — review in Quarterly Review, vol. 164, no. 2, 1939, pp. 237–43. Maude, Mary, review in Living Church, vol. 99, no. 5, 1938, p. 319. Miller, Sergeant Dickenson, review in Churchman, vol. 152, 1938, p. 16. Moore, W.G., review in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 40, 1939, pp. 225–31. Pauck, Wilhelm, review in New York Times Book Review, vol. 87, July 31, 1938, p. 5. Read, Herbert, review in Spectator, vol. 160, no. 5740, 1938, pp. 25–6. Sorainen (Sandelin), Kalle, review in Valvoja-Aika, Helsinki 1939, pp. 497–9. Sponheim, Paul, “America” in Kierkegaard Research, ed. by Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1987 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15), pp. 9–36; see p. 12. Steere, Douglas V., review in Scandinavian Review, vol. 27, no. 1, 1939, pp. 84–5. Stewart, Jon, “The Reception of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in the English-Speaking World,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2003, pp. 277–315; see pp. 298–300. Swenson, David F., review in Christian Century, vol. 55, no. 6, 1938, p. 847. Thomas, John Heywood, “The Influence of Kierkegaard’s Thought on Contemporary English-Speaking Theology,” Liber Academicae Kierkegaardiensis Annuarius, vol. 1, 1977–8, ed. by Alessandro Cortese, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1980, pp. 41–62. Tsanoff, Radoslav A., review in Ethics, vol. 49, no. 2, 1938–39, pp. 237–8. Underhill, Evelyn, review in Mercure de France, vol. 38, no. 224, 1938, pp. 168–9. Waelhens, Alphonse, review in Tijdschrift voor philosophie, vol. 2, 1940, pp. 669–71.

Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971, xiii + 327 pp.

Louis Mackey’s groundbreaking first book, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, continues to be one of the most challenging and influential texts on Kierkegaard. As a corrective to what has been called the “blunt reading” of Kierkegaard, this book challenges Kierkegaard scholars to confront the ineradicably poetic nature of Kierkegaard’s works. Mackey’s thesis, “that Søren Kierkegaard is not, in the usual acceptation of these words, a philosopher or a theologian, but a poet,”1 opened up a new way of reading Kierkegaard, one that Mackey demonstrates in the book: “if Kierkegaard is to be understood as Kierkegaard, he must be studied not merely or principally with the instruments of philosophic and theological analysis, but also and chiefly with the tools of literary criticism.”2 This thesis and method have since become the rallying call for the currently ascendant “postmodern” school of Kierkegaard scholarship, also known as the “New Kierkegaard.” Although it predates this movement’s flourishing by decades, Mackey’s Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet has been called the “first green shoot” “pioneering” this movement.3 Given this legacy, it is important to note that Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet is not as radically “postmodern” as Mackey’s later work on Kierkegaard.4 Its treatment of Kierkegaard’s texts bears the mark not of deconstructionism but of Mackey’s expertise in medieval exegesis and the close readings of twentieth-century “New Criticism.”5 As I will explain shortly, in claiming that Kierkegaard is a kind of poet, Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971, p. ix. 2 Ibid., p. x. 3 Roger Poole, “Reading Either-Or for the Very First Time,” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Elsebet Jegstrup, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press 2004, p.  45; Roger Poole, “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 66. 4 In many ways Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet bears the traces of Mackey’s 1954 Yale Ph.D. dissertation, The Nature and the End of the Ethical Life According to Kierkegaard. 5 Mackey points out these two influences on his early work on Kierkegaard in the preface to his later collection of essays entitled Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), pp. xv–xvi. In this preface Mackey emphasizes the progression between his earlier and later work on Kierkegaard, but he also notes that his earlier work, including Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, 1

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Mackey is not denying that Kierkegaard engages in philosophy or theology. Rather, Mackey claims that “whatever philosophy or theology there is in Kierkegaard is sacramentally transmitted ‘in, with, and under’ the poetry.”6 Yet this does not mean that Kierkegaard merely utilizes poetic devices as a means of conveying philosophical or theological content: “the literary techniques of Kierkegaard cannot be interpreted as devices for the expression of a content independently intelligible.”7 We cannot extract some purely theoretical content from their poetic form because the aim of these works is not to convey content, adding to the reader’s knowledge, but to move the reader to ethical awareness and decision: “he meant to drive his reader through poetic apprehension to ethical appropriation.”8 Mackey carefully establishes this thesis throughout the main chapters of the book with close readings of most of the pseudonymous works and several of the edifying discourses. In the concluding chapter, Mackey provides an overview and analysis of the poetic techniques employed by Kierkegaard and shows how Kierkegaard masterfully utilizes these techniques to address life in all its absurd complexity and uncertainty while precluding any detached, purely reflective response from his reader. Instead, this poetic form prompts a passionate, individual response: “The Kierkegaardian corpus can neither be ‘believed’ nor ‘followed’: it is and was meant to be—poetically—the impetus, the occasion, and the demand for the reader’s own advance to selfhood and to a solitary meeting with the divine.”9 What is needed to prompt this kind of response is a kind of communication that is Socratic or “indirect,” calling the reader to a point of individual decision without thereby jeopardizing this individuality by establishing the author as an authority for the reader to follow. Since “only poetry can adequately communicate inwardness in such a way as to emancipate the recipient,”10 Mackey concludes that Kierkegaard had no choice but to employ poetic form as only this would allow him to accomplish his existential, Socratic task. This brings us to the question evoked by Mackey’s title, namely, what “kind” of poet is Kierkegaard? The title comes from a quotation in which Kierkegaard calls himself “only a peculiar kind of poet and thinker [en egen Art Digter og Tænker],” specifically one “who, without authority, has had nothing new to bring but ‘has wanted once again the read through, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of the individual human existence-relationship, the old familiar text handed

shares certain “motifs” with this later work, namely an emphasis on Kierkegaard’s distrust of traditional forms of philosophy and theology and an emphasis on how Kierkegaard’s work explores the nature, uses, and limits of language and communication. See p. xviii. 6 Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, p. xi. 7 Ibid., p. 259. 8 Ibid., p.  290. Mackey does not use the word “ethical” here to refer narrowly to “the ethical way of life” proposed by Judge Wilhelm. In fact, Mackey ultimately presents Kierkegaard as offering quite a harsh critique of what the Judge proposes; by way of contrast, Mackey emphasizes the religious and specifically Christian nature of the appropriation that Kierkegaard’s works aim to prompt in the reader. 9 Ibid., p. 294. 10 Ibid., p. 292.

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down from the fathers.’ ”11 As Mackey shows us, Kierkegaard does not produce the kind of poetry we would normally expect from a poet, for example, literature intended to stand autonomously as an object of aesthetic appreciation.12 Rather, Kierkegaard always utilizes artistry in the service of his existential task, producing what Mackey calls the “poetry of inwardness” or “poetry of existence.”13 Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet should not be misunderstood as holding that what Kierkegaard writes is poetry rather than philosophy such that in reading him we can legitimately employ only literary criticism and never philosophical analysis.14 This misunderstanding overlooks Mackey’s repeated assertion that in the phrase, “a peculiar kind of poet and thinker,” the “conjunction ‘poet and thinker’ is essential.”15 It also overlooks and makes inexplicable Mackey’s own careful philosophical analysis throughout the book, for example, in tracing the arguments of Judge William in Either/Or or in showing the devastating implications for Judge William’s proposed way of life in the arguments of Johannes Climacus. Most fundamentally, this misunderstanding overlooks the subtle nuance of Mackey’s thesis, that “Kierkegaard is not, in the usual acceptation of these words, a philosopher.”16 However much Kierkegaard’s poetic form marks a departure from the tradition of modern systematic philosophy, Mackey points out that “in parting company with modern philosophy, Kierkegaard rejoined the philosophia perennis. Alongside his vitriolic critique of German speculation must be set Kierkegaard’s veneration for the Greeks, and in particular his devotion to Socrates, outranked only by his devotion to Christ.”17 Thus, rather than rejecting the notion of Kierkegaard as a philosopher, Mackey establishes Kierkegaard in the pantheon of history’s greatest philosophers, placing him alongside Greek thinkers like Socrates and Plato (whom he calls “the first and still the greatest philosophical writer in the West, who produced no treatises but only dialogues which serve the same purpose as Kierkegaard’s poetry of inwardness”)18 as well as medieval thinkers like Augustine. Mackey’s literary and philosophical analysis reveals the Kierkegaardian corpus to be a performative polemic against the speculative philosophy and theology of his day, one that sought to reintroduce into humanistic thinking the artistry of these earlier thinkers and the existential depth that this artistry allowed them: “He opposed the course of modern philosophy to the end that he might reinstate philosophy itself in its historic and poetic destiny.”19 Reduplicating this process, Mackey’s book undertakes a parallel attack on the philosophy of his own day: “Unless the philosopher is content to restrict his operations to the pseudo-linguistics of language SKS 12, 281 / WA, 165; compare SKS 7, 573 / CUP1, 629–30. Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, p. 296. 13 Ibid., p. 289. 14 This seems to be the view of David Gouwens in his book Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 6. 15 Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, p. 295. 16 Ibid., p. ix, emphasis added. 17 Ibid., p. 268. 18 Ibid., p. 268. 19 Ibid., p. 269. 11

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analysis, the quasi-mathematics of symbolic logic, or the strange mixture of geometry and mysticism that makes up most phenomenology, he must become a poet.”20 He warns that “when modern thinkers reject the form of poetry they also renounce their ancient birthright and their humanistic heritage.”21 Mackey declares this polemical critique of contemporary philosophy to be one of the main goals of his book.22 Like Kierkegaard, Mackey expresses his critique of modern philosophy not only in stated arguments but also performatively, in how he writes. One of the things that readers find most striking and unique about Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet is the artistry, elegance, wit, and moving passion of Mackey’s writing. Even those who disagree with Mackey’s thesis tend to recognize him as a Kierkegaardian after Kierkegaard’s own heart in this respect. It is not just his sensitivity to Kierkegaard’s artistry that makes Mackey’s work so penetrating and profound, but it is also Mackey’s own artistry as an author. Combined with the dialectical rigor of his conceptual analysis and his sensitivity to the poetic intent of the works, the clarity and erudition of Mackey’s writing make this book an excellent source for students wishing to pull together the various images, personae, and strands of thought they have encountered in Kierkegaard’s texts. Yet Mackey’s artistry and erudition can also pose a challenge, even for advanced scholars. (For example, in the first ten pages of the first chapter alone Mackey offers untranslated quotations in Latin, Italian, French, and German.) His writing style seems to presuppose a reader who is as widely learned and intellectually voracious as Mackey himself, a difficult if not impossible demand. Thomas Miles

Ibid., p. 295. Ibid. 22 Ibid., p. xiii. 20 21

Reviews and Critical Discussions Mackey, Louis, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), pp. xv–xvi. Newmark, Kevin, “Taking Kierkegaard Apart,” introduction to Sylviane Agacinski, Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Kevin Newmark, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1988 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), pp. 6–7. Roger Poole, “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 66–7. — “Reading Either-Or for the Very First Time,” in The New Kierkegaard, ed. by Elsebet Jegstrup, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press 2004, p. 45, p. 48, p. 57n. Robatyn, Dennis, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 9, 1974, pp. 328–34. Stengren, George L., review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 11, no. 3, 1973, pp. 421–4.

Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), xxv + 205 pp.

Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard was published in the series Kierkegaard and Postmodernism, edited by Mark C. Taylor, by the Florida State University Press in 1986. It is Louis Mackey’s (1926–2004) second monograph on Kierkegaard,1 and is a collection of essays on Kierkegaard written and, in all but two cases, previously published between 1960 and 1982. The book opens with a Foreword by series editor Taylor, in which he attempts to explain the development or transition in Mackey’s thought, from his earlier rhetorical reading of Kierkegaard to his later, postmodern or deconstructive one, and to explain briefly something of the unusual structure of the book itself (something Mackey also attempts in his Preface). According to Taylor, “Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard is not a book.… written over a period of twenty-two years (1960–82), the essays that comprise this volume display no overall coherence and do not unfold a strictly consistent interpretation of Kierkegaard.”2 Despite Mackey’s decision not to arrange the chapters in the order in which they were written, Taylor offers a developmental model for understanding what Mackey is up to in the essays that compose the book. He notes that, “it is possible to group the points of view represented in these readings (and rereadings) under the general headings ‘early’ and ‘late.’ ”3 In order of publication, the essays run: “The Analysis of the Good in Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart,” 1961 (Chapter 2 of Points of View); “The View from Pisgah: A Reading of Fear and Trembling” and “The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard’s Ethics,” 1972 (Chapters 3 and 6, respectively); “A Ram in the Afternoon: Kierkegaard’s Discourse of the Other,” 1981 (Chapter 5); “Once More with Feeling: Kierkegaard’s Repetition,” 1984 (Chapter 4); and then “Starting from Scratch: Kierkegaard Unfair to Hegel” and “Points of View for His Work as an Author: A Report from History,” both published for the first time in Points of View (Chapters 1 and 7, respectively) in 1986. Taylor notes that, “In the middle of the volume, there is a hole or a gap; a ten-year silence separates the earlier and later essays. During this decade of silence, The first being Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1971. 2 Mark C. Taylor, “Foreword,” in Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1986 (Kierkegaard and Postmodernism), p. ix. 3 Ibid., pp. ix–x. 1

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Mackey rethinks Kierkegaard (and one suspects much else) from A to Z.”4 It is in this decade, Taylor suggests, that Mackey developed an interest in and affinity for deconstruction. Despite Taylor’s efforts to assist readers in coming to terms with Points of View chronologically, Mackey begins his Preface by noting (and thus the first words of Mackey’s in the book are): “The earliest essay in this collection was written in 1960, the latest in 1982. I would be the last to argue that their chronological sequence is matched by a succession of refinements in my understanding of Kierkegaard. For that reason, among others, they are not here arrayed in order of composition.”5 Arranging the essays neither chronologically nor thematically puts the reader in the position of having to determine for himself or herself what ties, if any, bind the seven chapters together into a single volume—a volume which by its very title resists the univocality of a single perspective or point of view. Making that effort himself, Taylor suggests that, “The tangled lines of Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard repeatedly return to questions that bear on the possibility and impossibility of language.” And further, “If Points of View could be said to have a theme (which it really does not), this theme might be defined as ‘alterity’ or, more precisely, ‘the very alterity of the other-than-discourse.’ ”6 Despite their differences, the seven chapters of Points of View present us (in varying, sometimes contradictory ways) with readings of Kierkegaard that centralize the difficulty—in fact, for Mackey, the impossibility—of language to accomplish what Kierkegaard himself calls “direct communication.” Language—at least written language in the hands of Kierkegaard (and his many personae)—cannot refer; it can only gesture. That prevents Kierkegaard from engaging straightforwardly in anything we might call “philosophy” or “theology,” both of which presuppose (according to Mackey) the possibility of making direct reference to transcendent truths in words, and of the power of language to communicate such truths directly to others. Mackey’s articulation of his ultimate insight in Points of View, present in every chapter to some extent, is twofold: “(1) Kierkegaard’s writings are absolutely antiphilosophical and resolutely antitheological. (2) Because the paleonymic predicament requires him to deconstruct philosophy and theology in the terms of traditional religion and reflection, the antiphilosopher Kierkegaard becomes the Torquemada of discourse, his works a merciless in/disquisition on/of (the problem of) language.”7 That is to say, from the point of view of Points of View, Mackey reads himself all along to have been attempting to show us a deconstructive Kierkegaard, one who writes but does not write, in a language that is not language, for readers who are unable to read what has been written/not written. Despite the inability of language to communicate in the ways traditionally supposed possible by philosophy and theology, Kierkegaard writes, and writes “with a portentousness that can only be called apocalyptic.”8 As Mackey concludes, “It is this combination of Ibid., p. x. Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, p. xv. 6 Taylor, “Foreword,” in Mackey, Points of View, p. xiii. 7 Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, p. xviii. 8 Ibid., p. xxiii. 4 5

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irony and apocalypse—ironic apocalypse or apocalyptic irony—that is the unwritten message of Kierkegaard’s works. Unwritten and—in view of the circumstances that produced them—unwriteable. Unreadable forever, and irresistibly compelling endless interpretation.”9 Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard is, then, unified by its commitment (in varying degrees of explicitness and intensity) to the view that there is no one “correct” or “authorized” reading of Kierkegaard—that, in fact, some of the greatness of Kierkegaard is that his works are infinitely and indefinitely open to multiple coincident and contradictory interpretations. The different essays meet that challenge (by offering readings of Kierkegaard) while posing that challenge anew for us (by prompting us, once more—with feeling!—to read Kierkegaard for ourselves). And yet the different essays are different. Largely, that difference lies in two areas: (1) the different chapters offer readings of different texts by Kierkegaard, and (2) the chapters differ in the degree to which what Mackey calls the “unreadability” of Kierkegaard is presented (that is, what he also calls, following Derrida, “undecidability,”10 and in its earliest formulations in Mackey’s writings, following Johannes Climacus, “indirect communication”).11 Of the seven chapters, only one (Chapter 6) does not offer an extended exegesis of a single work of Kierkegaard’s: Chapter 1 is a reading of The Concept of Irony; Chapter 2, of “Purity of Heart”; Chapter 3, of Fear and Trembling; Chapter 4, of Repetition; Chapter 5, of Philosophical Fragments; and Chapter 7, of The Point of View. Each is what we might—and what Taylor did—call a deconstruction, or deconstructive reading, of the work in question. Once again, we see that, with each chapter addressing a different text, from different points in Mackey’s ongoing reading of Kierkegaard, Points of View can only offer readings—not one, singular reading to bind them all together. Yet, if any chapter manages something akin to such a binding, it would be the final chapter, on The Point of View. There is some irony here that in his reading of The Point of View—the work to which the title of his book is a direct and critical response—Mackey manages to come as close as he will come to reduplicating Kierkegaard’s apparent task therein, presenting a unified view of the Kierkegaardian authorship. The unity Mackey provides here, however, is in the recognition of the disunity inherent in the authorship—the differences between the pseudonyms, and between the pseudonyms and Kierkegaard, and finally, within Kierkegaard. As Mackey writes, “When a man fabricates as many masks to hide behind as Kierkegaard does, one cannot trust his (purportedly) direct asseverations. And when he signs his own name, it no longer has the effects of the signature.”12 In short, Mackey argues, we are justified (if we so choose) to follow Kierkegaard’s brother’s suggestion that even “S. Kierkegaard” might have been a pseudonym,13 one perspective among many. In the absence of a single, unifying point of view for the authorship, one can only

9

11 12 13 10

Ibid., p. xxiii. Ibid., p. xviii. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 160.

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take—as Mackey takes—points of view, multiple different perspectives that are not committed necessarily to agreement with one another. That each and every work in the authorship results, for Mackey, in the same phenomenon for the reader—the divergence into multiple interpretive possibilities from competing points of view— bridges the gaps found by more traditional readers of Kierkegaard, between the signed and pseudonymous works, or the aesthetic and religious, the indirect and the direct, and so on. All of them are the same, in the end, and are the same negatively— by way of the absence of the author. Mackey thus concludes that, throughout the authorship, “Søren himself had always been, absolutely, absent.”14 Joseph Westfall



14

Ibid., p. 190.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Evans, C. Stephen, review in Philosophy in Review (Comptes rendus philosophiques), vol. 7, no. 9, 1987, pp. 359–61.

Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, 437 pp.

Malik’s work Receiving Soren Kierkegaard explores the breadth of influence in Kierkegaard’s own nineteenth-century Danish context. Malik also seeks to explore how Kierkegaard broke through the constraints and general disinterestedness of his contemporaries to becoming a thinker whom many see as the father of modern existentialism. Malik notes that there are some basic questions surrounding the thought of Kierkegaard that have remained unanswered: why did it take a long time for Kierkegaard’s ideas to emerge on the European intellectual scene, and why do many think Kierkegaard was ahead of his time, in effect belonging to the twentieth century? Malik sums up his primary focus as follows: “how did the ‘genius in a market town’ become the ‘father of twentieth-century existentialism’?”1 Malik’s primary focus is thus to clarify the movement of Kierkegaard’s influence beginning with his own contemporary Danish reception and moving towards his international philosophical posterity. Malik highlights early obstacles to the reception of Kierkegaard’s work both in Denmark and abroad. Malik’s methodology is primarily focused on collecting and organizing reactions to Kierkegaard in the works of other thinkers in order to present a overview of the movement of Kierkegaard’s reception within and then beyond Denmark. Malik begins with a discussion of Kierkegaard’s relation to famous Danish contemporaries such as Hans Christian Andersen and Hans Christian Ørsted as well as others who had personal interactions with him. Malik uses the example of these Danish contemporaries to show the general disposition of lack of interest in Kierkegaard at the time. Malik’s assessment of Kierkegaard’s reception among his Danish contemporaries serves as something of a case-study. Malik notes, “They serve as two of the more visible indicators of the indifference that greeted Kierkegaard’s writings when they first appeared.”2 Malik progresses beyond the discussion of Kierkegaard’s Danish contemporaries seeking to highlight any growing influence that Kierkegaard had in neighboring countries in the 1840s and 1850s. Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press 1997, p. xvii. 2 Ibid., p. xviii. 1

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While Chapters 1 and 2 serve as something of an introduction, in Chapter 3 Malik brings the reader into the heart of his exploration. He discusses Kierkegaard’s final attack on the Danish Lutheran Church focusing on the immediate reactions that followed. In regards to the reactions following Kierkegaard’s final attack, Malik writes: “It is here that specific stigmas emerged and attached themselves to Kierkegaard’s posthumous reputation in such a way as to color subsequent views and assessments of him, often to the detriment of a unified and balanced picture of his intellectual and spiritual totality.”3 In the following chapters Malik continues to outline subsequent reactions to Kierkegaard by examining specific cases. For example, Malik examines the relation of both the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes to the thought of Kierkegaard as well as misconceptions of Kierkegaard’s views of faith and knowledge that formed in the 1860s and 1870s. Malik notes that Brandes had for a long time suffered a religious crisis in his own personal relation to Christianity, and this affected Brandes’ view on how to read Kierkegaard’s corpus. Under the influence of Hans Brøchner, Brandes came to the realization “that the only meaningful way he could continue to appreciate Kierkegaard’s genius would be to isolate it from the religious ‘trappings’ surrounding it. He began to experience a strong reaction against Kierkegaard’s religious writings, and the reaction quickly turned into resentment.”4 Malik argues that Brandes’ portrayal of Kierkegaard’s understanding, “by embracing the Kierkegaardian ‘single individual,’ shorn of his Christian mantle, distantly foreshadowed the atheistic existentialists and demythologizers of the twentieth century: Sartre, Bultmann, and others. The Kierkegaardian individual, wrenched from his Christian context, becomes a sure recipe for subjectivism-egotism.”5 Malik also notes that the misconception of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the subjectivity of faith as pure subjectivism was furthered by Swedish philosopher Kristian Claëson (1827–59).6 Such are the explorations and insights Malik seeks to highlight in showing the reader how an oft-ignored and misconstrued genius of a market town became the father of twentieth-century existentialism. Malik offers insightful research, when he explains that the beginning of the German reception of Kierkegaard was due to Christian Molbech’s sending Either/ Or to his friend Dr. Edmund Zoller.7 Malik also notes that in the United Kingdom, an Andrew Hamilton had published a book about his travels to Denmark called Sixteen Months in the Danish Isles.8 As Malik notes, “Hamilton’s sketch of Kierkegaard has significance not only because it was the earliest direct and independent assessment in English…[but] it also presented Kierkegaard to the English-speaking world as the Danish peripatetic philosopher.”9 Ibid., p. ix. Ibid., p. 235. 5 Ibid., p. 281. 6 Ibid., p. 177. 7 Ibid., p. 55. 8 Ibid., p. 77. 9 Ibid. 3 4

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Malik moves on to Kierkegaard’s reception in the German-speaking world prior to and following the First World War. Malik highlights Rudolf Kassner (1837–1959) and his “Sören Kierkegaard—Aphorismen” as very influential in introducing Kierkegaard to the German-speaking world.10 Malik follows the trails and provides examples of the travel of Kierkegaard’s works through Germany. For example, he highlights Peter Forsyth’s education in Germany and his reaction against liberal Protestant theology of the late nineteenth century. Malik writes: Forsyth’s “targets included the ‘Historical Jesus’ school, the diverse manifestations of Kantian and Hegelian infusions into theology, the Unitarianism of James Martineau, Harnack’s liberal Ritschlianism, and all tendencies spurred by Darwinism and positivism to place man rather than God at the center of theological discourse.”11 The secret source that Malik notes Forsyth plugged into was none other than Kierkegaard. Malik explains that Forysth found Kierkegaard via Schrempf’s German translations. Even in this portion of the book Malik continues his theme of emphasis on the interpretive distortion that Kierkegaard’s works were subject to. Throughout the book Malik provides possible explanations for the slow acceptance of Kierkegaard as a great thinker. For example Malik sees Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication being the cause for the initial indifference among his Danish contemporaries. He also notes that during the early years of Kierkegaard’s gradual reception, far too many of his contemporaries began a tradition of viewing his works individually, as opposed to a whole. Malik affirms Kierkegaard’s purpose is to be found by viewing the works collectively. He also notes that subsequent thinkers often tended to see Kierkegaard in a specific context, whether theology, philosophy, aesthetics, or psychology. Malik sees this as another reason for undue stigmas attached to Kierkegaard’s work. In Malik’s view Kierkegaard saw himself as transcending these categories, if not viewing them as artificial in the first place. Malik’s work serves as an important stepping-stone in Kierkegaardian research, since there has been a subsequent renewed interest in Kierkegaard’s reception and the historical development of his thought in recent years. This work also highlights Kierkegaard’s relation to his Danish contemporaries, a theme often overlooked in Kierkegaardian scholarship in years prior to the publishing of this work in 1997. In the years following this work, scholarship on Kierkegaard’s relation to his contemporaries has seen rich growth. Malik can be understood as uncovering or re-emphasizing the often forgotten context of Kierkegaard’s complex contemporary setting as well as correcting unfortunate stigmas surrounding the authorship. Christian Kettering



10 11

Ibid., p. 358. Ibid., p. 350.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Kellenberger, James, review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 4, 1998, pp. 637–9. Kirmmse, Bruce H., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 39, 2000, pp. 6–8. Pattison, George, Kierkegaard, Religion, and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, pp. 178–80. Price, Zachary, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 20, 1999, pp. 316–18. Woelfel, James, review in Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 181–91.

Ronald J. Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press 1977, xvi + 218 pp.

One of the most significant efforts to bring the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard into an educational dialogue is Ronald J. Manheimer’s Kierkegaard as Educator. There had been several attempts at this type of endeavor scattered in the literature of philosophy and education prior to this volume. But it is in this essential text on the subject that a much stronger understanding of Kierkegaard’s “dialectic of education” is advanced. In the volume, Manheimer focuses on the works The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Works of Love; since to the author, these texts are fundamental in “playing a role in [the student’s] development (becoming).”1 And by the conclusion of the volume, Manheimer provides some of the most comprehensive readings of Kierkegaard’s task as an educator, yet articulated with a familiarity with the sources of the Dane as both a philosophical and religious writer. In the context of the literature on Kierkegaard and education, Manheimer’s work represents a high watermark that has not been matched in many of the other works on the subject. Still, irrespective of this, the author’s dialectic of Kierkegaard as educator has shortcomings. In “Part I. Educating Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Three Socratic Postures,” Manheimer traces three movements of Socrates found in The Concept of Irony, that can be used for educative purposes. The first is a lived irony in which Socrates creates a negativity that deprives others of certainty and confidence in knowledge.2 Socrates developed this lived ironic position through his continual admission that he knew nothing at all. The purpose of this negative irony of Socrates is to create an awareness of subjectivity in those who are receptive. According to Manheimer, the next movement is coupled to the relation between the paradoxical nature of subjectivity and the need for passion to become an individual. With this movement, the author redefines Kierkegaard’s “truth as subjectivity” as truth that must be subjectively appropriated. But the author only tentatively develops this connection between subjectivity and passion. The final movement of Socrates is that of “witness to the truth,” which is detailed in his various encounters with the Sophists and other characters in Plato’s dialogues. Maieutic in nature, Socrates’ exchanges in the dialogues reveal or help to give birth to the truth innate in willing and open participants. This educative Ronald Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press 1977, p. xiii. 2 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 1

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interpretation of Socrates is typical. Yet Manheimer does not delineate any clear distinction between Socratic witnessing and the Kierkegaardian concept of “witness to the truth,” according to which truth is not innate but given through the grace of God. As such, Manheimer’s text would have benefited from a supplemental reading of Philosophical Fragments in which Kierkegaard outlines the differences between the two teachers, Socrates and Christ. In “Part II. Either/Or: Allegory of the Educator,” Manheimer develops the assertion using Either/Or that education should include a provocation of subjectivity in students to help stimulate an admiration for the possibilities of life.3 This movement includes an appeal for the equality between the teacher and student in order to assist in overcoming the inherent alienation found in authoritative relationships. Manheimer skillfully presents Kierkegaard’s indirect communication in Either/Or that is typified by multiple voices, irony, and textual disruptions, which disrupt a “quick and easy” interpretation of the text and force the reader to struggle with decisions on a subjective basis. According to the author, Kierkegaardian indirect communication is critical in leading students to the development of true selfhood. In “Part III. Enabling Communication,” Manheimer highlights Kierkegaard’s imaginative stance in the Works of Love, in which Kierkegaard argues that “certain ways of speaking actually transfer us beyond the world of limit.”4 Using this standpoint, the author suggests that through transference a teacher can awaken the student by calling forth the contrasts between magnitudes and meaning, which renews the student’s “concern for what is of ultimate value.”5 This description of Kierkegaard’s mode of communication in Works of Love is very insightful in demonstrating again Manheimer’s perceptive reading of the texts. By the conclusion of the volume, it is obvious that Manheimer has explored Kierkegaard’s writings in relation to education in a thoughtful manner, making it a decidedly important volume on the subject. The work represents a significant improvement compared to earlier studies. The author clearly has a deep understanding of the writings of Kierkegaard with the specificity of his analyses of The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Works of Love that can serve as a model for future endeavors. In this, Manheimer recognizes the centrality of The Concept of Irony to Kierkegaard’s authorship with its emphasis on the Socratic practices of lived irony, subjectivity, and maieutics, while defining Either/Or as a model of indirect communication and Works of Love as a model of imagination to awaken the student to selfhood and ultimate truth. Yet despite Manheimer’s profundity in the reading of Kierkegaard’s texts, his dialectic can be overshadowed by deficiencies from an educational perspective. First, there is insufficient explanation as to why Kierkegaard’s ideas should be applied to educational settings. Manheimer does not advance strong reasoning behind the utilization of Kierkegaard in contrast to the many other philosophers and religious writers who could also be applicable in the development of student selfhood. Of course, it can be inferred that Kierkegaard is relevant to education due to the variety of Kierkegaardian themes that have been

5 3 4

Ibid., p. 62. Ibid., p. 195. Ibid., p. 198.

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related to educational philosophy and praxis in the past sixty years. But Manheimer does not provide the educational “hook” which is needed to foster an engaged dialectic of Kierkegaard in education. In addition, the author does not identify any framework with which to connect Kierkegaard as an educator to education. The question of how the Kierkegaardian concepts detailed in the text actually appear in education is not addressed. A framework of this kind would allow the reader to see more clearly and appreciate the interconnectedness of Kierkegaard’s distinctive ideas found in The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, and Works of Love in an educational setting. These educative “bookends”—reasoning and frameworks—should flank the content of Kierkegaard’s philosophy if it is to be related to education in a meaningful manner. Regardless of the defect in the final result of Manheimer’s “dialectic of education,” his sophisticated reading of the texts resonates throughout to serve as a reminder to any educator and/or scholar of the depth of Kierkegaard’s thought for issues concerning education. Manheimer’s study shows that Kierkegaard has much to offer on this subject if one reads and interprets his texts in a careful manner. Timothy C. Hall

Review and Critical Discussion Stack, George, review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 3, 1981, pp. 398–400.

Gordon D. Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 2001, 124 pp.

Gordon Marino’s Kierkegaard in the Present Age is a collection of seven essays, six of which are (based on) previously published journal articles. The book contains a Foreword, but no Introduction or Conclusion, and Marino does not develop a sustained argument throughout it. What connects the essays is that they represent “a few of the lessons that [Marino has] taken from Kierkegaard.”1 With his book, Marino aims to show how we are “able to learn something from him [i.e., Kierkegaard] in the existential sense of that term,”2 also in the present age. To be clear, in contrast to what the title may suggest, Kierkegaard’s Two Ages: A Literary Review does not receive special attention in Marino’s essays. The first chapters tackle “the present age” as an age that overemphasizes objective, rational reflection. Later chapters use “the present age” in a more general fashion, to refer to our current, twenty-first century times. Chapter 1 is entitled “The Objective Thinker is a Suicide” and is based on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript in order to make the case that for Kierkegaard (Climacus) “existence cannot be thought.”3 Objectivity annuls the passionate selfconcern that is necessary for existing and is therefore suicide. In Chapter 2, “Is Madness Truth? Is Fanaticism Faith?” Marino argues that Kierkegaard would answer “no” on both counts. Whereas both the madman and the religious fanatic have passion, they direct their passion towards something objective (for example, an objectification of God) and lack the personal interest or self-concern that characterize subjective truth and true faith. “The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics” (Chapter 3) tackles Alasdair MacIntyre’s irrationalist reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics. On the one hand, Marino argues that MacIntyre unduly relies on Either/Or only. Moreover, even within that work, the choice between A and B is not “criterion-less.” B (Judge William) gives reasons with which he tries to convince A of the superiority of an ethical existence. On the other hand, Marino gives MacIntyre credit for noting how Kierkegaard fails to acknowledge the role of reason within the moral life, particularly in the present

Gordon D. Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press 2001, p. 13. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 21.

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age with its moral diversity. Kierkegaard does not address the problem of choosing particular ethical precepts over others and the role that reason has to play there. “Did Kierkegaard Believe in Life after Death?” asks the title of Chapter 4. “Yes,” answers Marino, and although Kierkegaard was loathe to speculate about the details of the afterlife, at the very least it involved Judgment to him. Marino takes Harrison Hall to task for claiming that Kierkegaard did not believe in the objective fact of salvation or in objective content to Christianity, more generally. Wishing away objective content to Christianity in Kierkegaard’s views cannot be done, argues Marino, and what is more, it should not be done. For without objective content there would be no objective uncertainty, meaning there would be no risk and therefore no faith. Chapter 5, titled, “Can We Come to Psychoanalytic Terms with Death?” introduces Freud as a dialogue partner to Kierkegaard. Given that Freud admonishes us to give up the idea of the afterlife, Marino would expect psychoanalysis to “have something to say about the meaning of death in life.”4 However, “for Freud the real meaning of our thoughts and expressions comes from within and before—from instinct and personal history.”5 Death does not feature there, and if we want to draw lessons from it, we should rather turn to Kierkegaard than to Freud. Chapter 6 continues the discussion between Kierkegaard and Freud, this time on the topic of the proper scope to our moral aspirations. Marino has Kierkegaard defend a rigorist ethical position, that is to say: no excuses when it comes to doing what is good. Marino’s Freud, by contrast, argues that if the ideals of ethics are too far removed from people’s actual capabilities, people will revolt and/or develop neurosis and unhappiness. “Freud’s formula is clearly, adjust your oughts to your cans.”6 Marino sides with Kierkegaard’s plea against the complacency of “I know I should, but I am simply incapable.” Finally, Chapter 7 considers the distinction between despair and depression in Kierkegaard’s journals. In an entry from 1846, Kierkegaard refers to himself as “an unhappy individuality” and speaks of the “suffering bordering on madness” he is prone to. He speculates that “a misrelation between [his] mind and [his] body” is to blame for his suffering and notes “the remarkable thing as well as my infinite encouragement…[is that] it has no relation to my spirit, which on the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and body, has perhaps gained an uncommon resiliency.”7 On the basis of this entry and others, Marino fleshes out the distinction between depression (melancholy) as an unhappy state that one can be born into vs. despair as a sickness of the spirit not uniquely related to particular emotions, and for which one only has oneself to blame. Throughout, Marino speaks loosely and lively of the issues at hand, issues regarding which he has found Kierkegaard to be an illuminating author. His first concern is with his reader (including himself, the writer) and the relevance of the issue to her (his) existence. “Kierkegaard convinced me that serious and, for 6 7 4 5

Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 87. All quotations in this passage are from SKS 20, 35, NB:34 / JP 4, 3894.

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that matter, scholarly writing need not be synonymous with being objective and impersonal. A serious author is not necessarily one who can support his reading with 133 footnotes.…For Kierkegaard, a serious author is a concerned person who strives to speak to his reader in a meaningful way about meaningful issues.”8 The Kierkegaard scholar who takes the effort to consult Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources to see what secondary literature is most relevant to his or her work will most likely seek more in-depth analyses of the themes than Marino’s brief essays offer, however. Most of all, Kierkegaard in the Present Age offers its readers a view on Professor Marino, the current curator of the Hong Kierkegaard library, as a Kierkegaard scholar at work. Besides having a thorough and thoroughly personal interest in Kierkegaard, he is also an avid yet critical reader of Freud, undoubtedly influenced by his teacher, Philip Rieff, to whom the book is dedicated. Gordon Marino has a keen sense of the important questions that Kierkegaard’s work addresses and of their meaningfulness in the present age, or, really, in any age, for most of these questions are timeless. Annemarie van Stee

Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age, p. 13.

8

Reviews and Critical Discussions Undetermined.

Harold Victor Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, London: Epworth Press 1950, 119 pp.

Kierkegaard was not so much a “melancholy Dane” as much as Harold Victor Martin’s compact summary of Kierkegaard’s life and work is, unfortunately, a melancholy read. Historically, Martin’s 1950 compendium was significant for its time when English speakers were first being initiated to Kierkegaard. Taito A. Kantonen wrote, “To the uninitiated it provides a readable and stimulating introduction to the challenge that is Kierkegaard.”1 Paul Minear wrote, “Prospective students of Kierkegaard will find in Dr. Martin a helpful guide as they enter the labyrinth for the first time.”2 H.W. Thompson wrote, “Dr. Martin has given us the most authentic exposition of the Danish thinker published to date by a British author.”3 Six decades later, though, in comparison to the vast array of excellent Kierkegaard introductions written since, Martin’s Melancholy Dane unfortunately comes off as inexpert, anticlimactic, and dated. The story of Harold Victor Martin’s fortuitous discovery of Kierkegaard is both telling and sentimental. Like many English speakers at the time, Martin discovered Kierkegaard through Karl Barth. After studying for Christian ministry through the lenses of Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl, Martin completed his training with “strong convictions” but also “an antipathy to Modernism and Liberalism.”4 As a British minister and one-time missionary to India, Martin was ministered to by the Neo-orthodox writings of Barth. While Barth was known for eventually moving on from Kierkegaard,5 Martin professes that he moved on from Barth to Kierkegaard, finding in the latter “a man after my own heart.”6 Martin effuses, Kierkegaard’s “thought answered to my own religious needs and problems in a way I had not found elsewhere. It was to me a ‘personalized’ theology, a living theology of Christian life worked out through the agonizing struggles of his own soul.”7 While Martin rouses Taito A. Kantonen, review in Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 4, 1951, p. 502. Paul S. Minear, review in Journal of Bible and Religion, vol. 20, no. 1, 1952, p. 47. 3 H.W. Thompson, review in Christian Century, vol. 68, no. 27, 1951, p. 796. 4 Harold Victor Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, London: Epworth Press 1950, p. 7. 5 Karl Barth, “A Thank You and a Bow: Kierkegaard’s Reveille,” in Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. by Martin Rumscheidt and trans. by Eric Mosbacher, London: Fontana 1971, pp. 100–1. 6 Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, p. 7. 7 Ibid. 1 2

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that Kierkegaard will “open up Christian truth in a strikingly unique and challenging way,”8 Martin’s rendition of Kierkegaard is, regrettably, not very striking. Although Martin’s work evidences some experience with Kierkegaard, it lacks insight for the researcher mining for gems. Taito A. Kantonen warns philosophers: “From a philosophical point of view this work is quite inadequate.”9 Chapters 3–9 attempt to condense some of Kierkegaard’s basic teachings (for example, the stages, subjectivity, the teleological suspension of the ethical, repetition, the offense of Christ, and despair), but these abridgements read like an amateur graduate student struggling through an oral exam, oversimplifying what he does not yet understand. For example, Martin oversimplifies, “God alone can see all things sub specie aeternitatis. We as existing beings in this world can only view reality sub specie temporis. This means that in relation to eternal truth, logical thinking is useless, and that we must resort to existential thinking.”10 H.W. Thompson rightly warns, “Dr. Martin contributes to the misunderstanding of Kierkegaard. The Dane is made to seem not only antirationalistic in metaphysics, which he was, but also antilogical in general, which is not true at all.”11 Thompson also critiques that Martin only read the primary Kierkegaard texts available in English at the time, and not even all of them.12 Kantonen judges that Martin was unacquainted with some outstanding interpreters of Kierkegaard, especially Geismar, Hirsch, and Bohlin.13 Most importantly, Paul Minear critiques that Martin lacks an appreciation of Kierkegaard’s clever style: Martin “does not effectively introduce us to Kierkegaard as a fascinating person who is at once a poet, a ‘mid-wife’ of the spirit, and a witness to the Truth.”14 Thankfully, there are numerous excellent introductions to Kierkegaard, but Martin’s Melancholy Dane is not likely numbered among them. Martin’s short and sympathetic biography of Kierkegaard is striking, though. As a product of the Kierkegaard renaissance, Martin works hard to gain an audience for Kierkegaard. The Melancholy Dane begins (Chapter 1) and ends (Chapter 12) with how misunderstood Kierkegaard was in his own age yet how crucial he is to the present age. Martin begins Chapter 1: Kierkegaard’s “days were spent in laborious writing, in inward struggles, in lonely misunderstanding. Yet never was a life more victorious in the end or more justified by the verdict of posterity.”15 He ends Chapter 12: Kierkegaard “wore himself out in the service of God, but he has left to posterity the inspiration of a brave, courageous soul who in the weakness of the flesh fought through to an eternal victory of the spirit.”16 Given Martin’s heroic and dauntless portrayal of Kierkegaard throughout, The Melancholy Dane seems an odd subtitle. Yet Martin’s Melancholy Dane leaves the reader searching for an expert in Kierkegaard in a state of melancholy. David Coe Ibid. Kantonen, review in Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 4, 1951, p. 502. 10 Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, p. 65. 11 Thompson, review in Christian Century, vol. 68, no. 27, 1951, p. 796. 12 Ibid. 13 Kantonen, review in Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 4, 1951, p. 502. 14 Minear, review in Journal of Bible and Religion, vol. 20, no. 1, 1952, p. 47. 15 Martin, Kierkegaard: The Melancholy Dane, p. 13. 16 Ibid., p. 114. 8 9

Reviews and Critical Discussions Anonymous, review in Times Literary Supplement, vol. 50, 1951, no. 2567, pp. 231. Anonymous, review in Expository Times, vol. 62, 1950–51, pp. 267–8. Anonymous, review in Politiken, May 11, 1954. Barth, Karl, “A Thank You and a Bow: Kierkegaard’s Reveille,” in Fragments Grave and Gay, ed. by Martin Rumscheidt and trans. by Eric Mosbacher, London: Fontana 1971, pp. 100–1. Bierstedt, Robert, review in Saturday Review of Literature, vol. 34, 1951, no. 19, p. 13, p. 29. Collins, James, review in Theological Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 1951, pp. 448–50. Fairbanks, Rollin J., review in Journal of Pastoral Care, vol. 4, nos. 3–4, 1950, pp. 55–6. Harper, Ralph, review in Renascence, vol. 4, no. 1, 1951, pp. 79–81. Heron, Lawrence T., review in Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, January 28, 1951, p. 11. Kantonen, Taito A., review in Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 4, 1951, p. 502. Marcuse, L., review in Personalist, vol. 32, 1951, pp. 411–12. Minear, Paul S., review in Journal of Bible and Religion, vol. 20, no. 1, 1952, pp. 46–7. Thompson, H.M., review in Christian Century, vol. 68, no. 27, 1951, p. 796. Thulstrup, Niels, review in Berlingske Aftenavis, November 15, 1950. Wright, W.K., review in Crozer Quarterly, vol. 28, 1951, p. 185.

Roy Martinez, Kierkegaard and the Art of Irony, Amherst: Humanity Books 2001, 142 pp.

How to interpret Kierkegaard’s work through his concept of irony is the focus of Roy Martinez’s Kierkegaard and the Art of Irony.1 The brief collection of Martinez’s essays on Kierkegaard is organized and arranged by Martinez himself. All of the essays are meant to focus on interpretations of Kierkegaard’s works using irony. Irony is understood in the Introduction as distinct from the irony of the Romantics. This distinction is made not by understanding irony as reflective detachment but instead by understanding it as engaged detachment.2 This is to say that the individual ironist is not at a distance from his or her experience but is always active in experience, while at the same time remaining detached. Using this understanding, Martinez proceeds over the course of seven short essays to give an account of much of the major pseudonymous corpus. The collection of essays builds on Martinez’s understanding of irony in Kierkegaard by looking at the pseudonyms as the locus of irony, from which the ironic distance emerges and in which it is placed. If one is looking for an account of Kierkegaard’s conception of irony in The Concept of Irony and other works, this is not the work they are looking for. The art of irony in the title is a deep literary, conceptual analysis of the ways that the pseudonyms are positioned in relation to the concepts they use. It is not the case that we will glean a definition of irony from Anti-Climacus’ conception of faith in relation to that of Augustine, which is the subject of the first essay, yet we are expected to come away with an understanding of the ironic engagement with irony as Kierkegaard uses it in a literary fashion. This is where Martinez excels in his essays. The pseudonyms are the locus of irony and engagement, and Martinez massages from them an understanding of the various ways irony is at play on a literary level. This understanding of irony allows space for a nuanced understanding of Kierkegaard’s relationship to radical hermeneutics and the way in which Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms relate to a deconstructive project.3 In Kierkegaard’s authorship writing in pseudonyms is necessary to be in an ironic engagement. One of the major themes involved in these essays is reading Kierkegaard along with other philosophical projects. Indeed, the first essay primarily focuses on the

3 1 2

Roy Martinez, Kierkegaard and the Art of Irony, Amherst: Humanity Books 2001. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 51.

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differences of faith in Augustine and Anti-Climacus.4 With this essay, it is much more difficult to see how the theme of irony will appear through the entirety of Martinez’s work due to the emphasis on Augustine and a fairly tight account of faith, even though the concept of irony does appear in the essay. For much of the essay, the focus even seems to be on Augustine and not Kierkegaard. It is a much more straightforward examination of how the two relate and how it is that the self— heart—self relation in Augustine aligns with Anti-Climacus’ relational concept of the self to itself qua spirit.5 This forces the reader to seek another understanding of irony that will pervade this text. Yet, by the examination of the essay, one can find the issue of irony in the pseudonyms since Martinez understands the pseudonyms as the locus of irony. The engagement with faith that Anti-Climacus takes is meant to show a more nuanced picture of how irony is at work in the corpus. Compare to this a later essay which is a much clearer engagement with irony. In his essay on Fear and Trembling and silence in Johannes de Silentio’s conception of faith it is made clear that the conception of the distance of irony is intimately involved in the poetic philosophizing of de silentio.6 Irony works in de Silentio in the play of philosophy and poetry. De silentio is, as Martinez notes, a writer of silence who is trying to understand faith through a literary lens. This enables Martinez to read a deep engagement in de silentio’s writing that is no less ironical in that the latter is writing at all while in the domain of silence, trying to show how he is literally of silence as his name implies. Martinez argues de silentio’s very logic requires silence’s depth of distance for his logic to hold at all.7 The essay on de silentio shows how his conception of silence allows the reader to reconceive him as a pseudonym in the contexts of Kierkegaard’s irony. Despite this, not all of the essays are afforded the same ironic distancing. In a notable turn, Martinez tries to argue that Judge William in Either/Or is a caricature of Socrates.8 Though he defines a caricature as possessing qualities of the original while falling short of accurate representation, the links between William and Socrates are spurious compared to arguments in the other essays. Martinez gives a fair reading of both William and Socrates in the Apology, but neither interpretation seems to support the thesis that William is a caricature of Socrates. Socrates is among the most important figures in Kierkegaard’s irony, making this essay’s understanding of Socrates striking. As Martinez opens this essay, “In Kierkegaard’s authorship Socrates is the paradigm of the human way of living.”9 It seems he undercuts this by showing William as the spokesman for the ethical and thus the most human way of living, itself a rather large claim. Martinez’s argument is built on connections that show more the differences and thus fails to show William as a caricature even in the way Martinez seeks to define it.

Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 35. 6 Ibid., p. 67. 7 Ibid., p. 77. 8 Ibid., p. 81. 9 Ibid. 4 5

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The other essays vary in how they deal with the concepts at hand, yet pervasive throughout is an intensive treatment of the ways the pseudonyms are at work in the text as literary figures. Whether commenting on silence in Fear and Trembling or otherness in Works of Love, Martinez, with the identification of all of his essays with irony, allows them to be read as a conceptual whole, even though the individual essays were published at different points in time. As a literary examination of irony in Kierkegaard, Martinez gives a robust picture of the possibilities of the pseudonyms as they are engaged with one another and the world Kierkegaard builds around them. With a particular type of irony the pseudonyms present us with a way of philosophizing that Martinez, like many commentators before him, sees as unique to Kierkegaard, yet which makes him malleable to other later thinkers. Martinez is clearly sympathetic to the tone of Kierkegaard’s work and seeks to give an understanding of his overall project as it can be read through Martinez’s conception of Kierkegaardian irony as he sees it pervading the entirety of the corpus. Andrew M. Kirk

Reviews and Critical Discussions Undetermined.

Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995, xii + 304 pp.

Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity aims to demonstrate Kierkegaard’s significance not only for religious thought but also for philosophy. This goal has been reinforced in the last five years, for example, by renowned scholar C. Stephen Evans in his brief guide, Kierkegaard: An Introduction, and it indicates an overarching movement in the most crucial interpretations of the last twenty years.1 In many ways, this trend can be credited to the volume of essays under review. The contributing authors position themselves against “the assumption that to be taken seriously a philosopher must either be secular or abstract from his or her religious identity,” an idea the editors “[dismiss] as a prejudice rooted in very dubious Enlightenment conceptions of the autonomy of human thought.”2 When combined, the articles in this anthology evoke a constellation of ideas that advance the trajectory captured by the appellation “postsecularism.” By situating Kierkegaard in between modernity and postmodernity—hence the “ / ” in the title—this collection places his thought in relation to other key figures who have critiqued “the present age” and the era of modern philosophy, as they have been embedded in false notions of objective Enlightenment reason. Hence, the scholarship of Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber, Michel Theunissen, Jacques Derrida, Emanuel Levinas, and Habermas has been incorporated into many of the contributed analyses. While other texts on Kierkegaard had already opened the window to understanding the religious Dane as a social and political thinker,3 this book is distinguished by its shift of Kierkegaard research to include the debates on postsecularism, existentialism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism. See C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009. 2 “Introduction” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Martin J. Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995, p. vii. 3 See Mark Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley: University of California Press 1980. 1

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Several influential interpretations of Kierkegaard early in the last century attempted to pigeonhole his writings as those of an anti-social religious dandy.4 Since the 1980s this caricature has been rendered defunct by many powerful biographical, philosophic, and theological representations of Kierkegaard to the contrary.5 Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity emboldens this ethic by enlisting contributions that substantiate Kierkegaard’s relevance for critical social theory at the turn into the twenty-first century, even if the authors might not label themselves as critical theorists per se. This latter belief additionally unites the focus of the volume in the effort to raise Kierkegaard reception to the level of prominence enjoyed by Nietzsche in the twentieth century. As the editors indicate in their Introduction: Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche, deserves to be a full partner in contemporary philosophical conversation.…In one respect the current situations of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are quite similar, but in another quite different. In both cases there is a continuous flow of scholarly studies throwing fresh light on thinkers we thought we had pretty well mastered long ago. But if we turn from exegetical and interpretive scholarship to current philosophical debates, Nietzsche seems to be a resource drawn upon more easily and more frequently than Kierkegaard. Why is this so?6

The success of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity lies in its answer to this question, or rather in its rebuttal of the conditions that allowed this question to be posed in the first place. The most menacing conditions entail the long-standing interpretation of Kierkegaard as arch-irrationalist. This is an interpretation that eases the difficulty of reading Kierkegaard for any systematic appraisal, and enables an effortless elimination of Kierkegaard from the halls of “serious” philosophy. Therefore, it enjoys a double appeal for detractors of existentialism and its forebears. As Matuštík and Westphal point out: a closer look at Kierkegaard’s critique of Reason has shown that it is not an invitation to believe p and not-p at the same time, and that it does not contain, any more than Nietzsche’s critique of Reason, the theses that sometimes make it attractive to sophomores, such as: 1) Hard thinking and careful conceptual distinctions are unnecessary. 2) Everything is permitted—all beliefs and all practices are equally appropriate.7 See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989. 5 Some examples include Hermann Deuser, Søren Kierkegaard, die paradoxe Dialektik des politischen Christen, Munich and Mainz: Matthias Grünewald 1974; Hermann Deuser, Dialektische Theologie. Studien zu Adornos Metaphysik und zum Spätwerk Kierkegaards, Munich: Christian Kaiser 1980; Elke Beck, Identität der Person. Sozialphilosophische Studien zu Kierkegaard, Adorno und Habermas, Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann 1991; Jørgen Bukdahl, Om Søren Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Reitzels Boghandel 1981; Encounters with Kierkegaard, trans. and ed. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996; Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in the Golden Age of Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990; Martin Matuštík, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel, New York and London: Guilford Press 1993. 6 “Introduction” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, p. vii. 7 Ibid., p. viii. 4

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In the volume’s perspicacious disproval of these claims, Kierkegaard is restored to the arena of those thinkers who challenge us most in the domains of ethics and critical social theory. The essays in this anthology engage with analyses that Mark Dooley in a previous review has grouped into three categories: traditional debates, feminist theory, and postmodern concerns.8 While Dooley’s thematic demarcation is heuristically beneficial to evaluate the text’s analytical import, any linear and discrete separation of these three themes in the included essays should be questioned, since each of the contributions intricately intertwines these rubrics, and productively so. Furthermore, such clear demarcation sets up a false dividing line between “traditional” and “postmodern,” problematizing also the place of “feminism” as lying yet somewhere else. Nonetheless, in the category of traditional debates, Dooley includes the essays by William McBride, Patricia Huntington, Robert Perkins, and Robert C. Roberts on the themes of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Sartre, Heidegger, Buber, and Wittgenstein. However, McBride’s essay shows clearly the ways in which traditional debates on immanence and transcendence interlock with Beauvoir’s feminist phenomenological critique and late modern (poststructural, deconstructive, postmodern, and Marxian) interest in historicism and materialism. In addition to McBride’s article, to feminist theory belong contributions by Alison Leigh Brown, Tasmin Lorraine, and Wanda Warren Berry. These essays have proven to be significant not only for issues in feminism and gender theory, but for Kierkegaard studies across the disciplines. One need only glance at recent developments of Kierkegaard in the domain of queer theory to see proof of the importance of these articles from 1995.9 Under the rubric of postmodern concerns Dooley cites the work of Marsh, Caputo, and Matuštík. I would add that of Westphal and Habermas. As Dooley points out: “If we can draw a single lesson from the Caputo and Marsh schools [including Westphal and Matuštík], it is that Kierkegaard belongs in the streets with that poor existing individual, and not in the safe havens of city halls and college libraries.”10 This is a meaningful achievement of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, which has already made a lasting impression and will continue to do so for decades to come. Marcia Morgan

Mark Dooley, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 34, 1997, pp. 8–11. Some examples include Ada Jaarsma, “Queering Kierkegaard: Sin, Sex and Critical Theory,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 64–89; Ada Jaarsma, “Surviving Time: Kierkegaard, Beauvoir and Existential Life” in Feminist Philosophies of Life, ed. by Hasana Sharp and Chloë Taylor, McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016; Ada Jaarsma, “The Ideology of the Normal: Kierkegaard and Non-Ideal Theory,” in  Feminist Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy: Theorizing the Non-Ideal, ed. by Lisa Tessman, Dordrecht: Springer 2009, pp. 85–104; Céline Léon, The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex: Kierkegaard on Women, Sexual Difference, and Sexual Relations, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2008; Helen Tallon Russell, Irigaray and Kierkegaard: On the Construction of the Self, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2009. 10 Dooley, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 34, 1997, p. 11. 8 9

Reviews and Critical Discussions Connell, George, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, 1996, pp. 374–5. Dooley, Mark, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 34, 1997, pp. 8–11. Jegstrup, Elsebet, review in Teaching Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1, 1997, pp. 88–93. Morelli, Elizabeth Murray, review in Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers, vol. 16, no. 1, 1999, pp. 114–19. Pickstock, Catherine, review in Modern Theology, vol. 13, no. 3, 1997, pp. 402–4. Politis, Hélène, review in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, vol. 193, no. 1, 2003, p. 120.

Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff 1978, ix + 169 pp.

Vincent McCarthy’s monograph, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, was groundbreaking for its time because it is conceived against the grain of many commonly held presuppositions about Kierkegaard’s writings. The author adopts an objective viewpoint that one could describe as a kind of Kantian disinterestedness, bracketing out external influences from others’ renderings of Kierkegaard’s philosophy—including Kierkegaard’s own—and attempting to grasp the philosophy “on its own terms.” McCarthy’s influential text also brings into sharp focus for the first time a systematic overview of Kierkegaard through an analysis of moods or emotive states in Kierkegaard’s literary constructions. McCarthy refuses to accept popularized interpretations of Kierkegaard’s writings as representative of irrationalism, aesthetic dandyism, or mere literary fragmentation, thereby allowing a very insightful, hermeneutically generous, and compellingly cohesive account of Kierkegaard’s thought. The author seeks a middle ground among the more commonly extreme readings in order to achieve a proper grasp of Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy. For example, he rebuts both irrationalism and extreme rationalism in order to arrive at a more level-headed and grounded position. And yet, McCarthy expansively underscores Kierkegaard’s significance not only for religious studies and philosophy, but also for literary studies, psychology and—perhaps as the most crucial foundation of his analysis— philosophical anthropology. For all of these reasons, this text is an important milestone in Kierkegaard studies. McCarthy organizes his monograph around what he calls the four cardinal moods in Kierkegaard’s writings: irony, anxiety, melancholy, and despair. This examination fills a scholarly lacuna, since at the time of the book’s publication there existed no methodical treatment of moods in Kierkegaard. Each of the four moods is paired in McCarthy’s analysis with one or two of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymously penned texts. This approach speaks to McCarthy’s larger framework in ordering Kierkegaard’s thought, which rejects the “canonical” reading articulated by Kierkegaard in his The Point of View for My Work as an Author (in which Kierkegaard excludes, for example, The Concept of Irony, from his collected works proper), and which subsequently contextualizes the pseudonymous works as part of a greater edification process that

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continually progresses toward a higher telos. McCarthy’s own description of his interpretive framework is illuminating: The battle has long raged as to whether one has the right to take what the pseudonyms say as the thought of Kierkegaard himself. The two extreme possible positions are either to “erase” the pseudonyms and take everything as Kierkegaard’s, or else to accept nothing as Kierkegaard’s, as he himself counsels, unless it is published under his name. In our opinion, both extremes must be rejected and a “compromise” struck which is grounded in scholarship, faithful to the intent of Kierkegaard, and representing a realistic reading of the texts. Thus we put to one side the characterizations and “autobiographical” remarks of the pseudonyms, except as contributing to character studies, but we accept the reflections and insights of the pseudonyms as those representing the unfolding thought of Kierkegaard as expressed by pseudonyms with ever-wider perspectives.1

After having explicated the moods enumerated above, McCarthy then recognizes a dialectic among them that constitutes an emerging religious perspective in Kierkegaard modeled on the Christian life-view. The monograph concludes with an “exposure” of the aesthetic life, in which moods that have seemingly victimized the subjective individual become subsequently mastered by means of the subject’s newfound religious existence. McCarthy emphasizes provocatively at the end of the work that In the last analysis, Kierkegaard’s thought is un-apologetically Christian and relies upon Revelation as providing the final perspective toward which the meaning of experience points. Kierkegaard attacks modern Pelagian attitudes, and the parallels with Augustine are readily seen by those familiar with the work of the Fourth Century A.D. Bishop of Hippo. Like Augustine, Kierkegaard flatly denies that the natural man left on his own can “save” himself. Hence his polemic against Romanticism and the hubris of academic philosophy.2

In this manner, through his final analysis of Revelation as that which allows the subjective individual to overcome his own slavery to the moods of aesthetic existence, caricatured by Kierkegaard through a critique of Romantic irony, McCarthy ties all threads of Kierkegaard’s vast writings together, and yet respects their idiosyncratic differences, both fictional and literal, because of their unique and ontologically singular capacity each to contribute to the development of selfhood from “childish illusions about the self to mature understanding which is properly a life-view.”3 In other words, the subject has no self—is no subject at all—without the transitory existence and subsequent overcoming of each stage of emotional development diagnosed in McCarthy’s phenomenology of moods in Kierkegaard. Hence the formative philosophical anthropology at the heart of McCarthy’s interpretive project. Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff 1978, p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 5. 3 Ibid., p. 3. 1

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The influence of the book can be seen widely in its citation and appropriation by scholars working on (1) the concept of irony and the ironic constitution of Kierkegaard’s ethics, aesthetics, and religious philosophy; (2) analyses of the significance of melancholy, anxiety, and despair as a means to understand Kierkegaard’s developmental and psychological account of the self; (3) aesthetics as a domain not extraneous to Kierkegaard’s later “more serious” writings, and the role of Kierkegaard’s literary insight and talent in his overall philosophical achievement; (4) an understanding of Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy as a culmination of “lower” or more “childish” dimensions of rationality that, instead of opposing or contradicting a rational conception of selfhood, or of speaking to an irrationality as the crux of Kierkegaard’s philosophic methodology, serve as key constituent dimensions of any well-formed iteration of ethico-religious selfhood. Marcia Morgan

Reviews and Critical Discussions Delfgaauw, Bernard, review in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 42, no. 2, 1980, p. 392. Gouwens, David, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 17, 1987, pp. 11–12. Taylor, Mark C., review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 11, 1980, pp. 263–6.

David E. Mercer, Kierkegaard’s Living-Room: The Relation between Faith and History in “Philosophical Fragments,” Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001, ix + 207 pp.

David E. Mercer’s book, Kierkegaard’s Living-Room: The Relation between Faith and History in “Philosophical Fragments,” was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2001. The topic of this book, the relationship between faith and history, also served as the topic of Mercer’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Wales.1 The main purpose of Mercer’s book is “to examine the relationship between faith and history” in the “Philosophical Fragments,” an issue that Mercer believes to be “fundamental” for Kierkegaard.2 Mercer affirms other important studies of Kierkegaard—psychological, literary, philosophical, etc.—but it is Kierkegaard’s role as a religious author and his concerns about living the Christian life within Christendom which Mercer upholds as having the utmost importance. For Mercer, Kierkegaard is first and foremost to be viewed as a Christian. Accordingly, Mercer believes that Kierkegaard’s concern with the question of faith and history arises out of a concern that “the divine nature in Jesus has been lost sight of, along with it, belief in who he is.”3 In addition to this primary purpose of examining the relationship between faith and history, Mercer lays out three subordinate purposes. First, he recognizes the difficulty for the reader in understanding all of Kierkegaard’s ideas, and so he attempts to help “in this task by drawing Kierkegaard’s other writings into the discussion.”4 Second, David E. Mercer, Kierkegaard’s Living-Room: The Relation between Faith and History in “Philosophical Fragments,” Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001, p. 6. 2 Ibid. p. 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 5. 1

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Mercer wants to offer the reader an “analysis of the Philosophical Fragments.”5 His third and final purpose is much like his first: to make clear “the elephant in the living-room,”6 by which he means the relationship between “Kierkegaard’s view of the world of ideas and existence.”7 Mercer says that this elephant is ours, not Kierkegaard’s, and is related primarily to “the question of who Jesus is, and how we are to know who he is,”8 a question that returns the reader to the question of the relationship between faith and history. Mercer sees himself as responding in part to the views of Don Cupitt, who Mercer says reads a “modern liberal position”9 into Kierkegaard. By a “modern liberal position,” Mercer means a postmodern view that rejects the importance of history. Such a view holds “that Kierkegaard rejects reason and consequently that faith and his ‘leap’ are irrational.”10 More broadly, Mercer uses the term “liberal” to refer to those who “reject…the doctrine of the Incarnation.”11 Liberalism, for Mercer, has set aside the transcendent to focus on humanity and its problems; however, Mercer tells his readers, “Kierkegaard argues that for ethics to be meaningful the divine nature of Jesus must serve as the starting point.”12 Mercer argues that Kierkegaard’s conservative theological position is relevant today. He designates Kierkegaard as falling within a strictly “conservative stream of thought”13 in opposition to the liberal point of view. Kierkegaard upholds both reason and history, but he argues that faith can take both where they cannot go on their own. The object of faith pertains to something that has happened in history, like the existence of Jesus. However, only faith as a gift of God can make you believe in something like the Incarnation, “that history cannot reveal.”14 Mercer identifies other contemporary scholars addressing the topic of faith and history, and he quotes them throughout his book: Steven M. Emmanuel,15 David J. Gouwens,16 Robert C. Roberts,17 C. Stephen Evans,18 Patrick Gardiner,19 George Ibid. Ibid., p. 6. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 174. 10 Ibid., p. 4. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 182. 13 Ibid., p. 174. 14 Ibid., p. 181. 15 Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation, Albany: State University of New York Press 1996. 16 David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. 17 Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1986. 18 C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1992. See also Kierkegaard’s “Fragments” and “Postscript”: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Atlantic Heights: Humanities Press 1983. 19 Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996. 5 6

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Pattison,20 and Julia Watkin.21 On the one hand, Mercer credits his colleagues with addressing the topic of faith and history “with varying degrees of success.”22 On the other hand, Mercer maintains the importance of his own work by noting that they have “not considered the relation directly.”23 Mercer mentions two other books, which address his topic; however, he decided to not “engage them in a direct way”24 in his own treatment of Philosophical Fragments. They are Louis P. Pojman’s The Logic of Subjectivity25 and H.A. Nielsen’s Where the Passion Is.26 While Mercer states that his views are similar to theirs, he claims that his treatment of the material and the question of faith and history is so significantly different that he wanted to avoid getting “into an argument with these two authors about style and method.”27 The greatest strength of this book is the faithfulness with which Mercer adheres to the text of Philosophical Fragments. Mercer explains a difficult text with a clear and easy-to-read style. This book is a helpful supplement to the text and provides valuable commentary to a new student of Kierkegaard’s works. One potential weakness of the book is that it lacks a critical element. Mercer makes clear from the beginning that his goal is to demonstrate that Kierkegaard is a Christian conservative, and part of his goal in writing the book is to argue for the credibility of Kierkegaard’s conservative Christian perspective. In and of itself, that may not be a negative thing, but anyone approaching this book should know that it does not present a critical perspective on Kierkegaard’s thought. Overall, Mercer presents a very solid and readable, albeit unexceptional, work on Philosophical Fragments. While not revolutionary, this book will provide the reader with clarity regarding Kierkegaard’s perspective and ideas. Matthew Brake

George Pattison, Art, Modernity and Faith, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1991. See also George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith, London: SPCK 1997. 21 Julia Watkin, Kierkegaard, London: Geoffrey Chapman 1997. 22 Mercer, Kierkegaard’s Living-Room, p. 4. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 7. 25 Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity, Montgomery: University of Alabama Press 1984. 26 H. A. Nielsen, Where the Passion Is, Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida 1983. 27 Mercer, Kierkegaard’s Living-Room, p. 7. 20

Reviews and Critical Discussions Barrett, Lee C., “A History of the Reception of Philosophical Fragments in the English Language,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2004, pp. 328–49; see p. 343. — review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 225–8. Friedman, R.Z., review in University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1, 2002– 2003, pp. 455–6. Lotti, Michael, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 44, 2002, pp. 16–17. Polka, Brayton, review in Philosophy Review, vol. 21, no. 4, 2001, pp. 278–80.

Thomas P. Miles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life: A New Method of Ethics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013, ix + 312 pp.

Bentham, Mill, Kant, Aristotle—otherwise known as the usual suspects for Ethics 101. Every year, college students on both sides of the Atlantic carefully examine how each thinker sought to answer the question, “How should I live?” For Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, to live is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. There is nothing inherently wrong, they tell us, in what we do. Rather, an action is only wrong if it leads to harmful consequences. We can call this utilitarianism. Students are then introduced to Immanuel Kant, whose deontological system grounds the morality of an action not on its consequences but on a set of rules and universal duties. The typically astute college professor usually follows this by inviting Aristotle to join the conversation. Instead of asking, “What should I do?,” Aristotle suggests that we ask, “What kind of person should I be?” So begins the discussion of virtue ethics. To be sure, these philosophers are often supplemented (at least we hope) with non-Western perspectives, as well as readings about how race, gender, and class can—and should—inform moral debate. But whether college students find themselves wholly embracing or completely dismissing our “usual suspects,” these four philosophers still form the canon of contemporary normative ethics. Bentham, Mill, Kant, and Aristotle—but what about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche? In his book, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life: A New Method of Ethics, Thomas P. Miles makes a masterfully compelling case for shaking up the normative ethics canon. His argument is not simply that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard reject the traditional approaches described above, but that their bodies of work provide, as the book’s subtitle claims, “a new method of ethics.” This new method, Miles writes, involves a different approach to ethics altogether, one that is both faithful to the best of ancient Greek philosophy and yet wholly original in its approach. Whereas ethics is usually associated with the challenge of determining the rightness or wrongness of a particular action, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche offer us a method of illustrating and evaluating different ways of life that often go unexplored and underemployed in modern moral discourse. “For Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” Miles tells us, “the real challenge for ethical thinking is to be able to

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recognize and diagnose deeper failures within the everyday life of actual people, even people who might be considered blameless or praiseworthy in the eyes of traditional ethics.”1 To make his argument, Miles invites the reader to consider how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche approach ethics in a way that is both broader and deeper than we are accustomed to. Instead of focusing on right actions versus wrong actions, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ask about the central existential stance that one takes towards “oneself, others, and existence as a whole.”2 The first two chapters introduce the various “ways of life” considered and evaluated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and establish what each thinker considers to be the “best” way to live. Chapters 3 and 4 examine Kierkegaard’s notion of despair and Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism to reveal an ethical project rooted in illustrating, analyzing, and evaluating particular ways of life. It is according to what Miles calls an “internal collapse” that we are able to see how a particular way of life fails (or “collapses”) according to its own internal evaluative standards. In Chapter 5, Miles contrasts the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, not in an attempt to offer a conclusive determination of whose way of life is best, but to create “a dialogue about some of the most important issues in ethics, including the source of life’s greatest joy and happiness and the nature and limits of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and autonomy.”3 In Chapter 6, Miles focuses on significant points of agreement between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, examining the role that individual responsibility, joyful life-affirmation, and deep spirituality play in each thinker’s conception of the best way of life. The book concludes by offering fruitful ways forward in thinking about ethics and future comparative studies between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. So why were Kierkegaard and Nietzsche critical of our more traditional “objective” and “universal” approaches to ethics? It is not that principles and rules cannot offer any moral guidance whatsoever, but that we have come to rely on these rules as a substitute for actually having to make moral decisions. If ethics really is only about “doing right” and relying on either our utilitarian or deontological moral calculator, then we do not really make any decisions—at least not in any meaningful or significant way. Rather, we simply type in numbers and wait for our calculator to tell us the right answer. This is the problem with so-called “objective” approaches to morality—it abstracts our particularity and individuality while reducing ethics to an objective rational inquiry like mathematics. But, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche tell us, because ethics consists of so many subjective elements, it is both naïve and presumptuous for ethical systems to appeal to such timeless, universal, rational, and objective criteria. Although Miles shows that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are against the impersonal nature of action and principle-centered ethics, he refuses to see these thinkers as strict moral relativists. Still, the reader might fear otherwise when engaging their work. After all, what kind of ethical guidance can we expect if objective, independent, Thomas P. Miles, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life: A New Method of Ethics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2013, p. 107. 2 Ibid., p. 138. 3 Ibid., p. 210. 1

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and universal principles are out of the picture? It is here that Miles reminds us of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s unique ethical project. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche help us, not by telling us what action is right or wrong, but by examining the ways and goals we have chosen, and subsequently evaluating whether a particular way of life succumbs to an “internal collapse.” In short, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard avoid the charge of moral relativism not by judging certain ways of life against a supposedly objective standard, but by showing that a particular way of life does not do what it sets out to do. Miles admits that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project overlaps with many projects found in virtue ethics, but he sees them as fundamentally distinct as well. To name just a couple of differences, it is, first, important to read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project as offering a compelling case for relativizing virtues in light of how they are manifested in one’s fundamental existential stance. Second, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project is incompatible with strands of virtue ethics that reject a plurality of good lives, as well as versions that claim a universal, objective conception of human flourishing. At the same time, Miles makes clear that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s method of ethics is not meant to replace the virtue approach, any more than it is meant to replace utilitarianism or deontological ethics. The goal is not to line all theories in a row, select a favorite, and toss away the rest. Despite, or perhaps because of, the tensions between (and within) each “method of ethics,” Miles refuses to present Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project as mutually exclusive to other contemporary approaches. Still, Miles’ contribution to the field of contemporary ethics cannot be overstated. Elegant, sophisticated, yet refreshingly accessible in its presentation, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on the Best Way of Life delivers on its promise to show how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project provides “a deeper and more comprehensive analysis of ethical failures than traditional ethics can offer.”4 In what might strike readers as an even more impressive feat, Miles resists the temptation to play favorites with his two subjects. This speaks not only to the integrity and honesty of Miles’ work but also to the seriousness with which he engages in his study. To be sure, if Miles were to champion one thinker over the other, it would compromise his goals rather significantly. After all, most of the book’s persuasive force comes from watching (or reading) Kierkegaard and Nietzsche interrogate and challenge not just each other but themselves (e.g., being attentive to times when Nietzsche “slips into a mood more reflective of ressentiment than of joy,”5 or spotting instances in Kierkegaard’s texts “marked by resignation and despair”).6 Miles’ self-restraint allows us to imagine what these difficult conversations between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche might look like. It is a project far more enlightening and engaging than merely plugging variables into an ethical calculator. This is not unintentional on Miles’ part. Indeed, most of the failure in today’s moral discourse is not a failure of calculation but imagination, so it only makes sense that

6 4 5

Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 167. Ibid., p. 166.

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Miles invites us to explore these philosophers not just critically but creatively. For this and many other reasons, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s ethical project is a hard pill to swallow. Their diagnosis of the “deeper failures within the everyday life of actual, ‘ordinary’ people”7 is hardly ever explored in introductory ethics courses. It is painful, messy, and at times contradictory and inconclusive. It may not be what we want. But it is exactly what we need. Roberto Sirvent



7

Ibid., p. 107.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Webb, Carson, review in Religious Studies Review, vol. 40, no. 3, 2014, p. 144.

Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” Albany: State University of New York Press 1991, xv + 187 pp.

Edward Mooney’s Knights of Faith and Resignation was published by State University of New York Press in July 1991, in both hardcover and paperback editions. The book is part of the SUNY Series in Philosophy and is now out of print, though it remains available for purchase in electronic formats. It is recognized as the first book-length commentary on Fear and Trembling in English,1 and is also notable for the fact that it brings Kierkegaard into dialogue with a range of contemporary analytic philosophers, including Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams. Mooney’s reading of Fear and Trembling is grounded in the thesis that Kierkegaard is not an advocate for irrationality. Rather, Mooney stands in a line of American Kierkegaard scholars who view Kierkegaard as “philosophically akin to Socrates, Kant and Wittgenstein” and not as opposed to “reason as such” but rather opposed “merely to rationalism, i.e. the attempt to extend the domain of reason” beyond its appropriate confines.2 Mooney argues that Kierkegaard’s thought is far more “objective” than “subjective,” particularly when it comes to morality and ontology.3 The kind of objectivity Kierkegaard rejects is the “imperial objectivity” that sets itself up as the sole arbiter of reason.4 But he rejects it for good reasons, according to Mooney, rather than out of mere skepticism or distrust. It follows that if Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist, then neither should we assume that Fear and Trembling is advocating irrationality with regard to ethics or faith. Mooney notes that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes de silentio, does not occupy the “religious sphere of life” within which Abraham is seen as the father of Edward F. Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” Albany: State University of New York Press 1991, p. ix. 2 George Pattison, review in Religious Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 1992, p. 428. Pattison states that such a view “is in opposition to those who take Kierkegaard to be primarily ‘subversive of reason, order, system and objectivity…an all-consuming irony which ends in self-irony and utter ontological scepticism.’ ” 3 Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, pp. 73–8. 4 Ibid., p. 75. 1

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faith.5 The fact that de silentio is an outsider, Mooney submits, is what motivates the pseudonym to describe the movement of Abraham, or the knight of faith, as being on the strength of “the absurd.”6 De silentio cannot see any way to resolve the dilemma because he is—perhaps in a somewhat Wittgensteinian sense—“outside” the sphere of life within which such a dilemma might be reasonably assessed.7 The bulk of Mooney’s book is therefore dedicated to a reading of Fear and Trembling that interprets Kierkegaard not as attempting to dismantle reason, but rather as mapping out its boundaries and suggesting its limitations. Mooney is quick to point out that bounded reason is not irrational: “Though reason may lack sufficient force to settle issues decisively, it is far from weightless in the reflective, deliberative process.”8 Accordingly, Mooney’s primary thesis is that Kierkegaard’s appropriation of the story of Abraham and Isaac is not proposing “an overthrow of ethics” or the embracing of “a wild irrationalism.”9 Instead, Kierkegaard’s purpose in writing Fear and Trembling is to reasonably “raise doubts about his countrymen’s understanding of ethics and faith, to awaken them from spiritual complacency.”10 Mooney strives to show that if de silentio “puts ethics and reason to the test,” then “they survive the ordeal.”11 Mooney utilizes the theme of “ordeals” as the framework for his book. Chapters are primarily developed in terms of the various kinds of ordeals that Mooney takes to be present in Fear and Trembling, and he develops his commentary according to this theme. Chapter 2 deals with “ordeals of meaning,” Chapter 3 with “ordeals of love,” Chapters 4 and 5 with “ordeals of reason and ethics,” Chapters 6 and 7 with

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 56. See SKS 4, 141 / FT, 46. 7 De silentio’s admission that he is “no Abraham” (that is, he does not really have faith) indirectly seems to put a damper on the simple “divine command” interpretation of Fear and Trembling. If, as de silentio points out, there are legitimate ethical reasons to sacrifice one’s child (Agamemnon being the primary example), then to argue that Abraham has faith simply because he follows a higher ethic (God’s command) reduces faith to the appropriate response to a legitimate ethical claim, a response that any reasonable person—including de silentio—would accept if given sufficient justification. Thus faith is dictated by reason, something Kierkegaard explicitly opposes. But Abraham’s faith is found in his assurance that God is good, in spite of the lack of sufficient justification for the command. Thus faith comes in Abraham’s decision to believe even though his belief remains ethically unamenable. Appeals to different cultural norms (e.g., child sacrifices in ancient near eastern cultures) are insufficient here, because if the command is just, what Abraham would have expected from God, then Abraham is merely doing what any ethical person would have done, given the situation. Accordingly, de silentio would have no reason to view Abraham as the father of faith. So, if Abraham really does have faith when he decides to sacrifice Isaac, it must be for some reason other than the mere fact that God commands the action. (See Andrew Cross, “Faith and the Suspension of the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 1, 2003, p. 11.) 8 Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, p. 7, emphasis in original. See also p. 82. 9 Ibid., p. ix. 10 Ibid., p. 2. 11 Ibid., p. 4, emphasis in original. 5 6

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“ordeals and reconciliations,” and Chapters 8 and 9 with “ordeals of silence.” The bulk of the book (Chapters 4–7) is concerned with examining the sections titled “Problema I” and “Problema II.” These are examined in tandem, since they form, on Mooney’s accounting, “a single broad and complex issue”—the issue of whether or not obedience to God’s command constitutes a rejection, or “suspension,” of ethics.12 Perhaps Mooney’s most well-known and controversial point is elaborated in Chapter 5, where he argues that the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ in fact describes “a terrible deadlock where inescapable requirements clash. It depicts an ordeal of reason which leaves an individual without comfort of moral assurance or definitive guidance.”13 Earlier, in the Introduction, he says, “I argue that…the ‘teleological suspension’ does not represent the offensive principle that one must set ethics aside, even kill one’s son, if God so demands. Instead, it describes an unhappy but not uncommon fact of moral-spiritual life. We can undergo a terrible clash of irreconcilable requirements, leaving ethics impotent to point the way.”14 This is worth considering carefully. In describing Abraham’s choice, Mooney says: “if we knew too easily that Abraham’s choice was ‘correct,’ the master theme of Fear and Trembling would be undercut. If Abraham or we could know that he had picked the ‘right’ alternative, then there would be no dilemma—at least not one this intense. But surely Kierkegaard’s aim is not to ease Abraham’s crisis but to amplify it.”15 De silentio’s continual admission that he cannot understand Abraham seems to underscore Mooney’s point; the reason Abraham is such an enigma is that Kierkegaard (as de silentio) has heightened the tension of the decision to sacrifice Isaac to such an extent that the rational, ethical mind is unable to resolve this tension satisfactorily on its own terms.16 Here we have a creative alternative to the traditional reading of Fear and Trembling, which views Abraham as having recognized that the duty to obey God is higher than the duty to follow the universally accepted ethics of a particular culture or group. In Mooney’s view, Abraham recognizes that there is no rational way to adjudicate these competing duties such that ethics will be satisfied. It is intriguing, then, that Mooney, having argued that such intractable dilemmas exist, nevertheless maintains that Kierkegaard offers us a rational basis for making sense of the difficulties raised by the text. Indeed, Mooney does not believe the tension is finally irresolvable: “The most satisfactory and complete reading takes the teleological suspension to describe a moment of transitional conflict.”17 If it is a transitional conflict, then it is reasonable to conclude that the conflict passes once the transition is over.

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 80, emphasis in original. 14 Ibid., p. 15. 15 Ibid., p. 65, emphasis in original. 16 Mooney notes that psychologically we “crave a definitive basis for Abraham’s decision, a guiding light: In cases of conflict, Let God override ethics. But the teleological suspension is not a justifying principle. It describes a brutal fact. There are dilemmas and in such straits, ethics cannot guide, deliver us from wrong” (ibid., p. 81). 17 Ibid., p. 79, emphasis in original. 12 13

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But is the transition ever over, ever complete? This depends, perhaps, on how one interprets the idea of the “double-movement” articulated in Fear and Trembling. De silentio argues that the knight of resignation is absolutely willing to give up the object of love; however, the knight of faith proceeds through a double-movement of giving up and expecting that the object of love will be returned. Such a doublemovement, to ethics and reason, seems only possible by virtue of an absurdity; namely, that one can give something up completely and receive it back nonetheless. As Mooney notes, “What will distinguish the knight of faith…is not obedience. The faithful knight is distinguished by…the spirit with which he gives up the object of his love, believing all the while that he will surely get it back.”18 This is highlighted in its most extreme form with the example of Abraham and Isaac: nothing could be more absurd than literally giving up the life of a child and also expecting that child’s life to be returned. Mooney highlights this attitude, the “spirit,” of the knight of faith. He suggests that the double-movement is best approached in terms of “care.” Although the knight of faith renounces all claims on the object of love, he does not renounce all care for that object.19 In other words, the knight of faith “guarantees that the ultimate obstacle to her return—lack of receptivity—will be absent. He does not by his own strength effect her return, but provides the required condition: He is ready in welcome.”20 The “return” itself is therefore not the responsibility of the knight of faith; his responsibility is to exist in the proper mode of expectation. This, however, may lead one to ask: on what basis does the knight of faith have the assurance that he does, in fact, inhabit the proper mode? If we answer that he can never be sure, but can only offer reasonable justification that might prove sufficient, then we seem either to be slipping into a logical regress or grounding ourselves in a belief that we cannot justify. Perhaps, then, Mooney’s suggestion that the dilemma can be rationally resolved is rather hasty. This is one of the primary criticisms of Mooney’s book. George Pattison, for instance, praises the book for being “a careful and close reading of the text” and says that “[v]irtually every page” provides “a fresh (or freshly formulated) insight.”21 And yet, he remains somewhat skeptical of Mooney’s overall approach: “If, in the face of every Kierkegaardian paradox, ‘a kind of deep structure opens up to ease the logical offence’ (p. 56), I start to wonder quite why Kierkegaard himself took such pains to use the startling and offensive language with which his name is so readily associated.”22 Mooney might perhaps respond that the reasons given by the knight of faith for his spirit of receptivity “derive from a personal and intuitive conviction” that need not be grounded on “articulated theoretical foundations.”23 This is perhaps a reasonable claim, but one wonders whether such a claim leads us to focus on the Ibid., p. 28, emphasis in original. Ibid., p. 54. Mooney uses de silentio’s own example of a princess beloved by the knight, hence the use of the pronoun “he” for the knight and “she” for the object of love. 20 Ibid., p. 55, emphasis in original. 21 Pattison, review in Religious Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 1992, p. 429. 22 Ibid. 23 Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, p. 69. 18 19

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attitude of the knight, rather than the absurd miracle of faith articulated in Fear and Trembling, which is that, by de silentio’s own admission, Abraham does get Isaac back. Is this possibility left open by Mooney’s reading, or is the spirit of receptivity given the final word?24 Another interesting implication of Mooney’s view: his reading of Fear and Trembling may be just as applicable to non-religious knights of faith as to those who are religious. Indeed, if the primary goal for the knight is to inhabit a spirit of receptivity, then perhaps such a spirit is available to any human being, not only those who exist within a particular religious domain. Of course, de silentio’s inability to understand Abraham may count as a reason to be suspicious of such a view, but Mooney seems to maintain it nonetheless. He even considers the possibility of a faithful Abraham who actually disobeys God’s command (Mooney calls him “Maharba”—Abraham backwards) and argues there is no reason to think that the teleological suspension could not apply in such a case.25 This would point again to the idea that faith may not simply be a matter of obeying God’s command. In the final analysis, Mooney’s book stands as a landmark in Kierkegaard studies as an original and thought-provoking piece of scholarship, which deserves to be read not only by academics, but also by anyone who is interested in the themes found in Fear and Trembling and wants to delve more deeply into the possibilities contained in Kierkegaard’s profound little book. Geoff Dargan

Along this line of thought, Hojnowski questions whether this reading is at odds with the “Christian religious motivation which dominates and informs the entire Kierkegaardian corpus” (Peter J. Hojnowski, review in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, p. 634). 25 Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, p. 87. 24

Reviews and Critical Discussions Andic, Martin, review in Choice Reviews Online, vol. 29, no. 6, 1992. Cross, Andrew, “Faith and the Suspension of the Ethical in Fear and Trembling,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, vol. 46, no. 1, 2003, pp. 3–28. Greve, Wilfried, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 17, 1994, pp. 199–202. Hall, Ronald L., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 29, 1994, pp. 5–8. Hojnowski, Peter J., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, pp. 633–4. Pattison, George, review in Religious Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 1992, pp. 428–9. Roberts, Robert C., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 26, 1992, pp. 5–6.

Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology, from “Either/Or” to “Sickness unto Death,” New York and London: Routledge 1996, xiii + 140 pp.

Edward F. Mooney’s Selves in Discord and Resolve provides new perspectives on Kierkegaard’s notion of the self, in its complexity. The book traces the achievement of wholeness from fragmentation. John Davenport heralds the work as “without doubt one of the very best books on Kierkegaard in the last decade,”1 and commends the chapter on Job and Repetition as “unsurpassed.”2 The book contains eight concise chapters that give close readings of central claims in Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s early “Job Discourse,” Repetition, and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Mooney’s readings are rooted in key passages from these texts, and his explications make use of contemporary English-speaking philosophers who explore Kierkegaard’s themes: Frankfurt, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Nagel. In his opening chapter, subtitled “Philosophy, Portraits, and Poetry,” Mooney brings out Kierkegaard’s theatrical use of pseudonyms. Poetic moments in Kant reappear in Kierkegaard: Kant’s positing of aesthetic ideas that exceed conceptual rendition, his provocative account of genius and the sublime, his use of images of an oceanic unknown, and his claim that we are condemned to raise questions we can neither answer nor abandon. Mooney’s second chapter, “Self-Choice or Self-Reception,” distinguishes Judge William’s “self-choice” from Sartre’s “radical choice.” The Judge’s introduction of self-reception as a movement in tension with the familiar concept of “self-choice” is highlighted. In the opening of After Virtue, Alastair MacIntyre holds that transitions between “life-stages” are arbitrary and radically free of reason: they are occasions John Davenport, Notes from a conference paper at the 200th anniversary celebration in Copenhagen, May 2013. 2 John Davenport, Will as Commitment and Resolve, New York: Fordham University Press 2007, p. 656. In personal correspondence he adds: “This book helped set the stage for almost all the connections that have been drawn since between Kierkegaard and work by MacIntyre, Frankfurt, Charles Taylor and others in contemporary moral psychology. It was the first to bridge the analytic–continental gap in Kierkegaard scholarship.” 1

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for “leaps of faith.”3 Mooney challenges this view, arguing that a person occupying one stage can have rational discussions with occupants of another stage, each evaluating the strengths of the other’s position. He also argues that stage shift does not have a single structure. Moving out of the aesthetic does not resemble moving out of the ethical. In subsequent reflection on this issue, MacIntyre credits Mooney with convincing him that Kierkegaardian stage shifts are in fact not arbitrary and non-rational.4 Kierkegaard’s “Job Discourse” was written in the same months as Repetition and Fear and Trembling. In Chapter 3, devoted to these texts, Mooney makes the point that “repetition” is a return of a reanimated world to someone stripped of it, as in Job. It is not just the mechanical reiteration of an original event or the nostalgic and futile attempt to relive something from the past. Two subsequent chapters pursue themes first discussed in Mooney’s Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.5 He counters the charge that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist, and casts the teleological suspension as a moral-religious dilemma rather than an injunction to rank God’s will above ethics. He also pursues the contrast between resignation and faith. Some of these themes are pursued further in Mooney’s On Soren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemic, Lost Intimacy, and Time.6 The thematic structure of the Postscript is constituted by subjectivity, inwardness and the absolute. In the fifth chapter, “Absolutes and Artistry,” Mooney casts these as quasi-Kantian regulative ideals. They are the sort of absolutes defended by Charles Taylor.7 The sixth chapter, “Kierkegaard our Contemporary,” provides incisive discussions of existential matters of current concern. Death, the meaning of life, subjectivity and objectivity in epistemology and ethics, are analyzed. Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere helps focus these themes.8 Mooney argues that the idea that truth is subjectivity does not endorse the arbitrary, the relative or the irrational. Six sorts of objectivity are distinguished, only one of which is incompatible with subjectivity. Subjectivity refers to the activity and receptivity of subjects. It cannot be in general a defect. It is a precondition for moral action and even for good science. It characterizes agents (subjects) who make objective claims and thus is a precondition for delivering objective reports. The musical allusion in the title (“discord and resolve”) animates Mooney’s final chapter, “Music of the Spheres.” There he unfolds Anti-Climacus’ formula for self in

Alastair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1984, pp. 25–56. 4 Alastair MacIntyre, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, ed. by John Davenport and Anthony Rudd, Chicago: Open Court 2001, pp. 339–55. 5 Edward Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation: Reading Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” Albany, New York: State University of New York Press 1991. 6 Edward Mooney, On Soren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemic, Lost Intimacy, and Time, Aldershot: Ashgate 2007. 7 Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, pp. 45–76. 8 Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986. 3

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The Sickness unto Death. The formula models the self as a self-relating relation that relates to another. This abstract formula can model a performing musical ensemble, Mooney suggests. The opposed relata, freedom/un-freedom, temporality/eternity, etc., are presented as opposed voices. These opposed relations or voices constitute the self and are taken as self-ensemble. Thus an ensemble is “a relation that relates to itself, and in that relation relates to another [the composition] in which it is grounded.”9 Beethoven’s Late Quartets are offered as examples of “discord and resolve” in human struggles for self and self-expression. Mooney underlines an ambivalently tragic strain in Kierkegaard’s writing: “The acknowledgment of a paradoxically freeing yet necessary suffering as the way of human life links the composer and Kierkegaard in ways unfathomed. What deep serenities each provide lie in liquid pools sustaining unremitting struggle with threatening, self-saving power.”10 Tamar Aylat-Yaguri

Edward Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology, from “Either/Or” to “Sickness unto Death,” New York and London: Routledge 1996, p. 135. 10 Mooney, Knights of Faith and Resignation, p. 103. 9

Reviews and Critical Discussions Aylat-Yaguri, Tamar, “Kierkegaardian Selves: The Will Transformed,” Existential Analysis, vol. 25, no. 1, 2014, pp. 118–29. Donovan, Michael, review in Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 2, 1998, pp. 275–8. Eriksen, Jan-Olaf, The Reconstruction of Religion: Lessing, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans 2001, p. 81; p. 185. Lippitt, John, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, London: Routledge 2003, pp. 53–61; pp. 145–54. Pattison, George, review in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995, pp. 330–2. — The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press 2005, pp. 131–2.

Edward F. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time, Aldershot: Ashgate 2007, 266 pp.

Mooney’s essays show Kierkegaard’s writing flourishing where theology and philosophy, literature and ethics, poetry and sculpture, artistry and devotion mingle and animate a world we can recognize as our own. Patrick Stokes notes, “the series of meditations…succeeds admirably—not to mention elegantly.”1 And he adds, “Mooney’s prose has always had a refreshingly poetic cast to it, a style that explicitly seeks to overcome the gap between a scholarly understanding of the existential dimension of Kierkegaard’s work and a properly existential grasp thereof.”2 The book contains three parts. The four chapters of Part I, “Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom” make Socrates more religious than we might have thought, and Kierkegaard, more Socratic. This illuminates Kierkegaard’s claim that his life’s task, from first to last, was a Socratic one. In establishing Kierkegaard’s Socratic identity, Mooney highlights Socrates’ endless questioning as resting on a devotion to his gods, an acceptance of martyrdom and an alliance with soaring imagination (for example, as he tells tales of Diotima and of immortality and of men trapped in a cave). Like Kierkegaard, Socrates leaves his thoughts unfinished. As Kierkegaard moves from text to text, from pseudonym to pseudonym, and to various signed works, he initiates an interminable existential dialogue with readers, who are left to struggle with incompleteness and ambiguity. Mooney rejects the thought that Kierkegaard’s proliferation of possible human positions is mere ornament disguising a latent “system” that is ours to discover or reconstruct—for example, a simple theory of stages or a final defense of Christianity. Before his career as a writer had really begun, Kierkegaard sought an “idea he could live and die for.”3 Perhaps Socrates turns out to be that idea. He is presented as a person of piety who consults oracles, respects his daemon and blindly thinks Diotima speaks the truth. He captures an odd mix of piety, ignorance, and provocation that Kierkegaard emulates. The five chapters of Part II, “Love, Ethics, and Tremors in Time,” introduce Kierkegaard’s embrace of love as a hermeneutic principle. In his biography of Patrick Stokes, “On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time,” Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 52, 2007, p. 36. 2 Ibid. 3 SKS 17, 24, AA:12 / KJN 1, 19. 1

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Kierkegaard, Garff says he wants to “find cracks in the granite of genius.”4 Mooney resists this debunking hermeneutics of suspicion. An alternative is a hermeneutics of affirmation, based on Kierkegaard’s claim that “love is a lenient interpreter.”5 A subsequent chapter gives a reading of “Øieblikket,” exploiting an image from The Concept of Anxiety of a woman gazing out over the sea after her lost lover.6 Her personal history is changed by her seaward glance, an Øjeblik where the eternal and the temporal intersect in a moment of renewal. In the next chapter the ethicist Alastair MacIntyre, who opens his book After Virtue with a striking reading of Either/Or is taken to task for misreading Kierkegaard’s conception of choice in Either/Or. As in his previous book, Selves in Discord and Resolve,7 Mooney argues that movement between the aesthetic and the ethical stages of existence, or between the ethical and the religious stages, is not irrational but involves a reflective stepping back to assess life-options displayed in terms of contesting scenarios. Following this discussion, Mooney takes up early lyrical passages of Fear and Trembling. He links the contemporaneously constructed spectacles of Tivoli Gardens, replete with horror shows and animated mock ups of terrifying biblical scenes, to the spectacle of Abraham’s ascent of Mount Moriah. De silentio injects a thrilling shudder of thought at this spectacular venture, not unlike the shudder at high-wire flips of trapeze artists. Mooney ends Part II with a reading of Repetition as exploring the possibility of requited time against the background of Job’s restoration. Part III, “Plenitude, Prayer, and an Ethical Sublime,” takes up themes from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, beginning with its suggestion that personality is the telos of subjectivity, and that this telos is ethical, a matter of improvising the next step toward a new and better self. Guides such as Socrates exhibit a living ethical truth, not a propositional one. Mooney proposes an ethical and anxious sublime where, beyond rules, the ethical-religious subject travels amidst wonder, awe, or mystery. He then moves to discuss communication, arguing that the feel, texture, and mood of a life-option is not a bare fact, and so not the sort of thing that can be directly communicated. Indirection occurs when we impart passion, commitment or affect to a reader or listener, over and above mere fact. There follows a chapter sorting through half a dozen possible understandings (or misunderstandings) of the Postscript’s enigmatic final revocation of itself. In his last chapter, Mooney links the motif of silence in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses to prayerfulness as a quieting of the restless and talkative mind. To inhabit that space is to silence marketplace chatter and also what William James calls “the boundlessly loquacious mind”8—a liability among academics. In that quiet we can appreciate that we exist, that we exist amidst things both strange and wonderful, where the religious, aesthetic, Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005, p. xxi. 5 SKS 9, 291 / WL, 294. 6 SKS 4, 390 / CA, 87. 7 Edward F. Mooney, Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology, from Either/or to Sickness unto Death, New York: Routledge 1996. 8 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, quoted in Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religions Today, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2002, p. 52. 4

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and ethical co-mingle. Reflecting Patrick Stokes’ appreciation mentioned above, Alastair Hannay concludes, “More than scholarly (certainly not less), [Mooney’s] book is enriched by a talent for cogent figurative expression and apt literary analogy that a review can only report.”9 Tamar Aylat-Yaguri

Alastair Hannay, “On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007.

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Reviews and Critical Discussions Carlisle, Clare, review in Religious Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2008, pp. 485–9. Compaijen, Rob, review in Ethical Perspectives, vol. 14, 2007, pp. 354–6. Hannay, Alastair, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2007 (online journal). Law, David R., review in Theology, vol. 112, 2009, pp. 227–8. Rognon, Frédéric, review in Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, vol. 89, 2009, pp. 113–14. Stokes, Patrick, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 52, 2007, pp. 36–8. Welz, Claudia, review in Ars Disputandi, vol. 8, 2008, pp. 156–61.

Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, xii + 448 pp.

Mulhall’s book is different. It explores three major post-Kantian thinkers in one sweep, giving Kierkegaard a key role in contemporary philosophy. Instead of arguing from a Kierkegaardian perspective right from the start, as others have done,1 it tries to get to Kierkegaard through a reading of the other two. This is its greatest strength, but also its Achilles heel. What strikes the reader right away is the listing of authors in the book’s subtitle: Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Why is Kierkegaard (who came first) put last? One flips the page and sees three facing quotations. The first talks about inheritance as an obsession, and the second about human existence as a problem. The strangest thing is the third quotation: It is from the Pope, and it deals with philosophy as the handmaiden—vessel—of the Word of God! Given the theme of threes, one might ask is Mulhall hinting here that there is a dialectical movement, within post-Kantian philosophy itself, from dealing with problems of cultural inheritance (Wittgenstein) and human authenticity (Heidegger) to becoming the living embodiment of God (Kierkegaard)? Given, too, that only Kierkegaard’s works reflect all three concerns, does that make his thought more full-voiced than theirs? Nothing of this is stated, of course, but let us assume it as a hypothesis anyway. Mulhall begins the book itself by inviting us to see philosophy as an act of reading—writing really.2 This is a clue to the book as a whole: the works of other philosophers, he suggests, are a kind of inheritance we must learn to read carefully and reappropriate in our own original way in our own writing. In Mulhall’s telling, philosophy becomes an artwork we are invited to assimilate and then transcend— philosophy as Modernism.3 Anyone expecting puzzle-solving, or even stand-alone arguments, is going to be disappointed for sure. See Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Continental Philosophy, London: Routledge 1994. 2 Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, pp. 1–25. 3 The source of all this is Kant’s Critique of Judgment, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1987. The genius does not seek to slavishly imitate (nachahmen) great artworks of the past but to use them as examples worth pursuing or following (nachfolgen) in order to supersede them (§ 32, §§ 45–8 (pp. 145–7; pp. 173–81). 1

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Wittgenstein, as is well known, goes from dealing with meaning as a representation of reality in his earlier Tractatus to focusing on human practice or language use in his later work. How the two lines of inquiry fit together is far from clear, having drawn a lot of controversy in Wittgenstein circles. Mulhall zooms in on the latter. His exegesis is exemplary: his close reading of the first 140 odd paragraphs of the Philosophical Investigations is really excellent, and anyone looking to get a sense of what the later Wittgenstein is all about should definitely start here. Let us take just one example: Wittgenstein’s quotation from Augustine’s Confessions I.vi (8) in paragraph 1.4 Mulhall really puts this quotation into perspective by showing how the representational-expressivist picture of language Augustine assumes here is inherently linked to the dual themes of linguistic, societal authority (inheritance, culture) and individual autonomy (originality, self-assertion). He then gives us a cross-sectional view of how Wittgenstein builds a whole philosophy (analytic notions, terms of criticism) around these two themes and how they are negotiated in his thinking.5 This is bound to raise a few questions: What is the relation, first of all, between language use and meaning/reality-representation? Wittgenstein himself disavows any universal, necessary link between them.6 But then we cannot just claim meaning is derived from language-use either, much less that the latter fixes—constitutes— the link to reality. It is hard to see how either claim can be made good merely by describing one term of the equation (that is, how we use language). Mulhall has Wittgenstein resort to a lot of “suggests,” “hints,” and “invites,” but that is hardly a better way of answering our request for clarification. This basically means the ties between individual and society in Wittgenstein are left in the dark as well: Does the individual have priority over linguistic or cultural practice, or is it the other way around maybe? Both? Neither? Are they merely irreducible, that is, different and not constitutive of each other at all? The trouble with Mulhall’s “non-argumentative” Wittgenstein is not that he does not have a theory of the link between individual, language, meaning, and reality, but rather that he does not seem to have any clear sense of it at all. The way Mulhall uses the quotation from Plato’s Sophist at the start of Heidegger’s Being and Time is highly illuminating.7 He shows how both these thinkers freely admit that the line between philosophy and sheer sophistry is thin. Plato though went on to forge a correspondence theory of truth,8 both as a complement to his model of mental representation9 and as a way of establishing a boundary between Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. and ed. by Elizabeth Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers 2001, p. 2; Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992, p. 7. 5 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, pp. 38–182. 6 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 18. 7 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, pp. 185–96. 8 Plato, Sophist 240d–241a; 260c–264c. For the original text and an English translation, see Plato: Theaetetus, Sophist, trans. by Harold North Fowler, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2006 (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 123), pp. 350–3, pp. 428–43. 9 Plato, Republic 506e–516b. See Plato: Republic, Books 6–10, trans. by Paul S ­ horey, 4

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philosophical argument (which is concerned with truth, representing real things or Ideas) and rhetoric (which is mere shadow-play). This path is not open to Heidegger since he is convinced Plato does not distinguish sharply enough here between meaning (“Being”) and reality-reference or things (“beings”). His concept of truth as correspondence or representation of reality, taken over by Western philosophy in one form or another after that, makes philosophy too thing-based (“ontic”) he thinks. If anything then, with Heidegger the link between philosophy and sophistry becomes even thinner—the whole philosophical tradition is also sophistical in a way. This is a fairly strong claim. As Mulhall shows,10 Heidegger tries to make good on it by offering a phenomenological description of the most basic, dynamic meaning structures or schema (“Being,” “Time”) open to human beings: (i) Practical engagement with things (“being-ready-to-hand”), (ii) cognitive or perceptual representation (“being-present-at-hand”), (iii) everyday interaction with other human beings (“being-with”), and (iv) relating to one’s own mortality or nothingness (“being-towards-death”). Mulhall’s close reading of these, again, is one of the best there is. He shows how representation (ii) for Heidegger is really a derivation of practical engagement with things (i); and how (i–iii) together are cultural, inauthentic forms of meaning or human existence that must be freely reappropriated by the individual by embracing the real meaning of its existence (iv). The outcome is highly interesting. Heidegger, we might say, affirms with (i–iv) the Wittgensteinian problematic but in a much more clear-cut, schematic way. The priority thesis is now taken up explicitly, as is the constitutive role of human practice vis-à-vis representation. With his stress on nothingness too, Heidegger seems to have left thing-based thinking wholly behind. So he has given us a boundary between philosophy and sophistry after all. There is only one problem: claiming a universal, necessary link between human practice (or language use) and representation, surely, does not make it automatically justified? Just because we have to use language to describe our cognitive representations of the world does not mean it plays a constitutive, reality-fixing role necessarily. Again, it is hard to see how anything follows from mere description and Mulhall gives us nothing more to go on in his reading of Heidegger. The same thing holds true of the relation between inauthentic (i–iii) and real, individualized meaning or being (iv). All that has been shown, really, is that they are different (mutually irreducible). Everything beyond that is just word play.11 But then the relation to sophistry (rhetoric) has not really been cleared up either. To top it all off, Mulhall has a rather strange reading of the movement from inauthentic to individualized meaning or existence (iv).12 For Heidegger, the one Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 2006 (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 276), pp. 94–127. 10 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, pp. 196–284. 11 “Eigentlich”: (i) “my own” (i.e., myself as not related to others or to things) (that is, descriptive meaning; tautology); (ii) “really, truly, genuine—authentic” (that is, normative meaning). As we have known since Hume, there is no entailment-relation between is and ought, and to confuse the two is wrong-headed. 12 Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality, pp. 272–85.

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who is called back to herself (the individual lost in her fixation on culture and things) and the one who calls (using her own voice of conscience) are one and the same. I say “same” instead of “identical,” because no person, obviously, is wholly of one piece. The Heidegger of Being and Time is basically a Kantian: the individual is able to rise above social and cultural mores and become what he originally was meant or ought to be by his own powers (iv)—willingly embracing his better half as it were. Human individuals are autonomous in other words. Mulhall, however, claims to have discovered some kind of contradiction or incoherence in the notion of the self being both called and calling itself. Since the individual needs something or someone external to do the calling, human self-sufficiency (autonomy) is also pre-empted, he thinks. It is hard to see how this follows at all. Even if we grant that Heidegger was wrong about human autonomy, that hardly means he was confused about it or that the concept itself is incoherent or wrong. Either way, Mulhall is making a big claim here, and more should have been made out of it at least. The Kierkegaard part is clearly the book’s strong suit. Having worked through the problematic of individual, society, and reality in Wittgenstein and Heidegger already, Mulhall is in a position to hint at Kierkegaard’s influence on them. He has also freed up space to focus on the strictly religious dimension in Kierkegaard’s works. Where the later Wittgenstein with his stress on the vagaries of human language is mainly an “aesthetic” writer but with an “existential” bent, we might say, the early Heidegger’s more schematic take on human existence (i–iv) clearly marks him out as an “ethical” writer bordering on the religious. Mulhall’s book then does seem to posit a dialectical relation between the three thinkers and on Kierkegaard’s terms too. Mulhall signals the main themes on the first page already: the reliability of authority and the intelligibility of communication—humanly understood.13 These are somewhat weighty matters, but at least he has built a frame for discussing them through his readings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The strategy is quite clever: to allow for divine communication and religious existence as a basic, life-orienting possibility by “exploding” human claims to autonomy and meaning from within. It, in turn, means abandoning philosophy as a human- and reality-centered activity. This was Kierkegaard’s aim too, it might be said, but remember Mulhall has retrieved the Kierkegaardian problematic in light of the two major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. His Kierkegaard is much more relevant in today’s setting. This alone makes his book worth the read. His contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship is not insignificant either. He shows the pseudonymous authors (de silentio, Climacus, Constantius) as inherently unreliable characters—more as human, fallible actors than as real authors.14 We should not take anything they say at face value therefore, not even “the good stuff” (the religious). But that is the whole point, Mulhall hints. For only when the texts are shown to be radically self-conflicted can they be made to point beyond themselves as mere human artifacts. The issue of indirect communication has never been spelled out quite like this before.



13 14

Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., pp. 321–414.

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Still, it does not work. As we saw, even if the link between the basic terms of the analysis (i–iv) is made clear, no straightforward priority or even plausible ordering between them has thereby been argued for or established. It is not that Wittgenstein and Heidegger give us nothing to go on necessarily, much less that no ordering can be justified here, but rather that Mulhall’s Wittgenstein and Heidegger give us no real resources or material to set up the kind of grand dialectics he is clearly aiming for. As already stated, his attempt to have human autonomy self-destruct seems questionable, to say the least. But then the movement Mulhall tries to set up, with basis in Kierkegaard, from the merely human to the divine or religious is broken off as well. Mulhall ends his book with a heady attempt to limit the bounds of human communication as a whole, hoping to establish Christianity as a primary, lifeorienting form of meaning and existence in this way.15 If what has been said here about priority claims and human autonomy is on the right track, this is bound to be a somewhat futile move. I may be charged with lack of charity, or even irrelevance. Then again, since no stand-alone arguments or real reasons for the relation between inheritance and originality seems to have been given in the book itself, basically anything follows. Is there room within philosophy as writing for a public use of language? For normative appraisal, which is not either inauthentic or “aesthetic”? This form of human communication, meaning, and existence, it seems, is rejected a priori or else is not talked about at all. If only for this reason, Mulhall’s case for Kierkegaard and Christianity in post-Kantian thought, though highly engaging for sure, is ultimately unsuccessful. Narve Strand



15

Ibid., pp. 388–438.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Bates, Stanley, review in Ethics, vol. 114, no. 3, 2004, pp. 623–5. Cottingham, John, review in Religious Studies, vol. 39, no. 1, 2003, pp. 115–17. Gustafsson, Martin, review in European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2002, pp. 255–60. Sherman, David, review in Mind, vol. 112, no. 445, 2003, pp. 166–71. Vaughan, William, review in Philosophical Investigations, vol. 26, no. 1, 2003, pp. 73–93.

Harry A. Nielsen, Where The Passion Is: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1983, x + 209 pp.

With a keen analytic voice, Harry A. Nielsen’s Where the Passion Is provides a deep and intense reading of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.1 Though originally a work comparing Fragments to Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,2 Nielsen’s work developed into a deeply probing analysis of the first work of Johannes Climacus; Nielsen never waivers from Fragments being a work by Johannes Climacus. Though the work was originally planned as a comparison of Kant’s reason-focused conception of religion with the radically different faith of Climacus, Nielsen chose instead solely to focus on Climacus’ account of religion. In limiting his scope, Nielsen focuses on making Climacus’ censuring of philosophers for trying to limit Christianity to reason.3 Nielsen focuses on the goal of parsing out the particular nature of Christianity as it is communicated to philosophers as something that breaks apart the philosophical framework. Climacus is a philosopher or at least a student of philosophy himself, yet he is a critic of systematic philosophy like that of Kant. Nielsen emphasizes that Fragments is a work that attempts to explain Christianity to philosophers like Kant who bind Christianity to reason.4 Nielsen’s examination is directly informed by analytic philosophy and the linguistic turn.5 His eye toward a similarity between Wittgenstein and Climacus allows him to read the latter as a grammarian.6, 7 Indeed, it allows for one of the more structurally important turns of Nielsen’s analysis in his reading of the line “God is Harry A. Nielsen, Where The Passion Is: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Tallahassee: Florida State University Press 1983. 2 Ibid., p. ix. 3 Ibid., p. 20. 4 Ibid., p. 203. 5 Ibid., p. 25. 6 Ibid., p. 63. 7 This calls to mind the connection made between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard more broadly as both are considered anti-philosophers as well as Wittgenstein’s admiration for ­Kierkegaard. 1

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not a name but a concept.”8 This allows him to link Climacus’ understanding to a type of plain speech. Nielsen argues this from the grammatical framework for the depersonalization of God that allows Climacus to link God to the Unknown. The use of religious terms is not rigorously philosophical but common. When a mother says to her child, Nielsen explains, that one cannot hear God speak to someone else, the function is grammatical, predicating the expansive qualities onto God, yet leaving the power and mystery alive.9 Understanding religion must come through the plain speech before it is couched in philosophical understanding. In the examination of God, Nielsen focuses first on the linkage between God and the Unknown.10 The Unknown never gives in to human interpretation, but understood as God, humans are able to understand our uses of predication from the plain use of God in speech. To Nielsen, this enables Climacus to make an important turn in positioning himself against both theism and atheism. “If the reader joins Climacus in regarding the God as just a name for that unknown something, then a denial or doubt of the God’s existence will appear precisely as a confusion,”11 Nielsen notes. Thus, atheism and agnosticism are mere confusions that deny the Unknown. Any rational theism is a similar confusion in Nielsen’s reading of Fragments, whereby it denies the Unknown its identity as unknown. Despite Climacus advocating Christianity, Nielsen puts him in an interesting position where his critiques of rational theism are in the same space as atheism. Both are precisely a confusion, yet Climacus deals with the one which is nearer to him, the theistic. Nielsen argues that Climacus even gives a coherent alternative to theism in his belief in God.12 That God appeared on Earth does not follow necessarily from the linkage of God to the unknown. Through the plain-speech understanding, though, our knowledge of God is given some form, but then there is also the Moment where God occasions understanding via the Teacher. This Moment is a historical happening in time. For Climacus, the historical occurrence of the Moment is the figure of the Teacher, who is the eternal and temporal joined as one in the only way God could appear on earth, as a lowly human figure. This is an absurd thought—the absurd thought—but this highlights one of the things Nielsen focuses on, namely, that Climacus describes his project as plagiarizing the New Testament so that a student of philosophy can better understand the New Testament’s content and ideas.13 The Teacher is the Moment and the Teacher is Christ. Nielsen shows that Climacus removes the roadblock of philosophical reason to make that figure more palpable for his stated audience, philosophy students. Nielsen focuses on the way Climacus plays with language in Fragments to juxtapose it with typical philosophical language for the students of philosophy. Nielsen calls attention to the places where language relates to our ability to know and intersects with our ability to understand the things we claim to know in Climacus’ overall project against philosophy. Nielsen, Where The Passion Is, p. 49. Ibid., p. 76. 10 Ibid., p. 65. 11 Ibid., p. 63. 12 Ibid., p. 71. 13 Ibid., p. 21. 8 9

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Nielsen’s reading of the Fragments emphasizes the difference between the Moment and the Socratic. With requisite clarity, Nielsen argues that unlike the Socratic position, the relationship to Truth is not one where we humans are ignorant of the Truth and through the proper interlocutor will be brought to it as a shining beacon. Instead, in the Momentist conception of the Truth, the event of truth happens because God gives it to a consenting subject who has placed faith in the God.14 This changes the relationship to truth entirely and introduces the concept of error. Climacus’ error is not simply not knowing but being incapable of knowing because of the qualitative difference between the truth of God and humanity. In this, Climacus enters the Absolute Paradox.15 The Absolute Paradox cannot be understood under the Socratic notion of truth. It is only through the Teacher that it is even possible for the gulf to be bridged in the Moment. Nielsen’s examination of Fragments is intense and deeply sympathetic. Though at times the work, which is nearly double the length of Fragments, feels longwinded, the depth of his reading of Kierkegaard carries it. His massaging of the text through an analytic lens lays out the complexities of Climacus’ argument and opens to his reader Kierkegaard’s conception of God and the need of faith more broadly. Though he remains focused on Fragments almost exclusively, his reading of the work introduced readers to many of the concepts in Kierkegaard’s overall critique of philosophy and the limits of reason. Andrew M. Kirk



14 15

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 91.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Dunning, Stephen N., review in Faith and Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2 1985, pp. 207–9. Hannay, Alastair, review in Philosophy in Review, vol. 5, no. 2, 1985, pp. 71–4. Khan, Abrahim, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 15, 1986, pp. 3–6. McKinnon, Alastair, review in Dialogue, vol. 24, no. 4, 1986, pp. 786–7. Roberts, Robert C., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 39, no. 4, 1986, pp. 779–81. Schweiker, William, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 67, no. 4, 1987, pp. 563–5. Stack, George J., review in International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 3, 1988, pp. 134–5.

Katalin Nun, Women of the Danish Golden Age: Literature, Theater and the Emancipation of Women, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2013 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 8), xvi + 180 pp.

Originally from Hungary and a with a Ph.D. in German Studies, Katalin Nun is an independent author and scholar, who has lived in Copenhagen for many years and worked in close association with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre. She has made many outstanding contributions to Kierkegaard studies, for example, by organizing conferences and editing a number of major volumes in the series, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, where she is also a member of the executive board. Given this background, it is no surprise that her book Women of the Danish Golden Age: Literature, Theater and the Emancipation of Women,1 despite its title, is in fact in many ways a work about Kierkegaard. This book appeared in 2013 as volume 8 of the series Danish Golden Age Studies, which has as its goal to explore different figures, works and trends of Danish culture during Kierkegaard’s time. Prior to the publication of this study, Katalin Nun had long worked in the field of Danish Golden Age literature and had published numerous articles (in English and Hungarian) on primarily female figures from the period. Therefore, it is no surprise that sooner or later the idea would arise that these earlier studies should be further developed and integrated into a monograph-length work on the topic. The book thus represents the culmination of years of reading and study. Women of the Danish Golden Age does not explicitly aim to be a work on Kierkegaard, but it sheds considerable light on Kierkegaard’s views about women and society from a new perspective. Kierkegaard scholars today are used to seeing works such as the articles in the well-known collection Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, where the authors struggle with the questions of just how much

Katalin Nun, Women of the Danish Golden Age: Literature, Theater and the Emancipation of Women, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 8).

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of a feminist or a misogynist Kierkegaard really was.2 Nun’s book sets aside these kinds of issues with the argument that they are invariably motivated by factors in our modern research world and are in many ways foreign to the way of thinking in the Golden Age. Instead, the author clearly explains her intention to pursue her object by means of source-work research; she wishes to reconstruct of the horizon of meaning of the time instead of imposing one from our modern age. The goal is ultimately to investigate and cast light on the important achievements of some of the leading women of the Golden Age, who have, until quite recently, been largely neglected by the research.3 Most all of the literature on this topic is in Danish, and there is nothing at all available for the international reader interested in the unique contributions of women to Danish Golden Age culture. This is the gap in the research that Women of the Danish Golden Age intends to fill. The work succeeds magnificently at presenting this material in an accessible, didactical, and reader-friendly manner. The work consists of an Introduction and seven chapters. Chapter 1 is dedicated to Thomasine Gyllembourg and her literary works. Together with Hans Christian Andersen, Gyllembourg was one of the founders of the modern Danish novel. The chapter gives a useful overview of Gyllembourg’s novel Two Ages, and then compares this with Kierkegaard’s famous review of it. Many Kierkegaard scholars will be shocked to see how radically Kierkegaard’s review in fact departs from the novel. It is claimed that Kierkegaard never really intended to give a good faith assessment of the work but rather used it as a springboard to develop and present his own ideas. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the Heiberg literary circle and the profound influence of its leading figure Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the son of Thomasine Gyllembourg and the husband of the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg. This is useful since in many ways the work has as its focus the women who surrounded Heiberg and played influential roles in his life. Here the reader is presented with a rich panorama of Heiberg’s multifaceted genius in the different areas of theater, journalism, poetry, philosophy, etc. Chapter 3 explores Johanne Luise Heiberg and her skills as an actress. The author gives a rich account of Kierkegaard’s article “The Crisis and the Crisis in the Life of an Actress.” Here we learn that when Johanne Luise Heiberg read the article she was greatly surprised at how accurately Kierkegaard was able to capture the psychology of people who perform in public, although he himself had no formal training or experience in dramaturgy. Despite the many aspects of Kierkegaard’s character that may be regarded as misogynistic, there can be no doubt that he nourished a great appreciation for the dramatic art of the great actress. Feminist Interpretations of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Céline Léon and Sylvia Walsh, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press 1997. See also David Brezis, Kierkegaard et le féminin, Paris: Cerf 2001. 3 Some of the most important work on this topic has been done only recently by Lise Busk Jensen. See, for example, Lise Busk-Jensen, Romantikkens forfatterinder (vols. 1–3, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 2009), and her edited collection Nordiske Forfatterinder. Fra Leonora Christina til Elsa Gress, ed. by Lise Busk-Jensen, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1990. 2

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Chapter 4 is dedicated to Denmark’s first feminist, Mathilde Fibiger, who wrote an epistolary novel, entitled Clara Raphael: Twelve Letters which was published in 1851. This chapter flows smoothly from the preceding ones dedicated to the leading figures of the Heiberg circle since, as Nun recounts, Fibiger solicited the help of Johan Ludvig Heiberg in publishing her work. He complied and even wrote an introduction to it. The chapter recounts the trials of Fibiger’s life and the ridicule that she was exposed to after the publication of the work. Chapter 5 continues the story of Mathilde Fibiger with a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s critical and dismissive comments about her novel. Chapter 6 is dedicated to an analysis of the views of Hans Lassen Martensen on the question of women’s emancipation in his Christian Ethics. This work was published in 1878 during the so-called Modern Breakthrough in Denmark, when issues of this sort were in vogue for the first time on a larger scale. This discussion paints the picture of Martensen as a hopeless reactionary, who fears all imaginable nefarious consequences involved in allowing women equal rights or access to education. This is a useful analysis that helps to put into perspective some of the negative views in response to Mathilde Fibiger’s work that were presented in the preceding two chapters. Chapter 7 serves as a conclusion to the work, in which the author attempts to trace the legacy of the women of the Danish Golden Age. The study shows that the figures explored here made major cultural contributions and were indeed constitutive in making the period “golden” in this respect. At the end the author demonstrates how their efforts helped to make Danish society what it is today. Women of the Danish Golden Age succeeds wonderfully in its task. It opens up a rarely seen perspective on the period. Its many illustrations also serve the work’s overall didactical purpose. The cover features a detail from a sketch by the great Golden Age painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, which shows the artists’ daughters in his atelier, looking out a window onto the busy square below. There is a sense of melancholy or Sehnsucht as they witness the bustle of activity outside, while being forbidden by custom and law from participating in it. Wearing their long dresses with carefully curled hair, they appear almost as pet birds, who wish to take to the sky but are prevented from leaving their cage. Kierkegaard is present in one way or another in virtually every chapter of this study, and the picture of him that emerges is not always so flattering. We see him here not as he is usually portrayed as the sole figure of the period worthy of interest and study but rather as a thinker in constant contact and interaction with others during this time of rich cultural development. We see him not as a sublime mind above the fray, but rather as a flesh-and-blood human being with views and opinions very much like those of others of his day. It can be argued that this unaccustomed picture of Kierkegaard is in fact much closer to the idea of an existential thinker focused not on abstractions but on lived existence than the usual portrayals that one reads, which tend to place him on a high pedestal far above his contemporary age. Jon Stewart

Reviews and Critical Discussions Allen, Julie, review in Scandinavian Studies, vol. 86, no. 4, 2014, pp. 467–470. Gremaud, Ann-Sofie, review in Nordeuropa Forum, 2014, pp. 40–41. Gyenge, Zoltán, “Kierkegaard és a dán ‘Golden Age’ ” [Kierkegaard and the Danish Golden Age], in Magyar Filozófiai Szemle, vol. 58, no. 4, 2014, pp. 139–144. Nagy, András, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 64, 2015, pp. 2–7. — review in European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–6. Sundquist, J., review in Choice, vol. 51, no. 4, December 2013.

George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, London: Macmillan 1992, xiv + 208 pp.

This is the first major publication on Kierkegaard by one of today’s most recognized and prolific Kierkegaard scholars. George Pattison’s Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious was developed from his doctoral dissertation (Durham University 1983) and first appeared in 1992 in the “Studies in Literature and Religion” series (General Editor, David Jaspers). A second edition of this text was published by SCM Press (London) in 1999, with the only difference being a new Introduction, “On Reading Kierkegaard Religiously,” which responded to criticism of the first edition. The new Introduction makes clear that the central goal of this work is to read Kierkegaard “as an essentially religious author,”1 and that the book’s fundamental thesis is that Kierkegaard’s categories of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious are to be understood “as forms of communication.”2 Pattison’s work thus unfolds from within the historical context of Kierkegaard’s writings while also engaging contemporary discussions of literary theory. What is perhaps most significant about Pattison’s work is the attempt to deal with Kierkegaard’s writings as a whole. Pattison deftly covers the vast distances within the Kierkegaardian corpus in order to disclose “the tension between the aesthetic and the religious—a tension which runs throughout virtually every line of the authorship.”3 Given the arguably irreducible nature of this tension, it may strike readers as surprising to find Pattison stressing “the negative implications of Kierkegaard’s work for aesthetics…such as to demand the final sacrifice of poetry, art and imagination,”4 and thus effectively removing the tension. Even so, Pattison goes a long way in validating the impression that within Kierkegaard’s writings the aesthetic and the religious form a dialectical knot. Consequently, readers may well wonder how it would be possible to read Kierkegaard qua author as untying the George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic ­Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, London: SCM Press 1999, p. xv. 2 Ibid., p. xxii. 3 George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic ­Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, London: Macmillan 1992, p. 155. 4 Ibid., pp. x–xi. 1

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dialectical knot while within the dialectical knot. Such is the difficulty of offering a comprehensive interpretation of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, Pattison’s work carries the discussion of comprehensively interpreting Kierkegaard’s writings further, and it stands out among many narrowly focused studies within Kierkegaard studies. Pattison insightfully treats of both the pseudonymous and the signed writings, from the less commonly discussed “Lectures on Communication” and The Book on Adler to the discourses written for the Friday service of communion. Thus Pattison’s work is both timely and perhaps timeless as hermeneutical questions of reading and rhetoric are central to his work. Yet, while he is well aware of postmodern critical theory, Pattison does not let this knowledge overwhelm his interpretation of Kierkegaard, although he does appear to have appropriated some of the language. As indicated above, Pattison covers a lot of material in this book’s six chapters, only a few of which can be discussed here. In the first two chapters, “Idealism and the Justification of the Image” and “The Genealogy of Art,” Pattison presents a detailed look at the historical and intellectual background of Kierkegaard’s writings. Here he describes the historical movement in Germany from idealism (he starts his study with Fichte) to Romanticism and Hegelianism, and he explains how this development was appropriated by Danish men of letters. Pattison is well acquainted with the original Danish sources, as he penetrates quickly into lesser known sources, and he has interesting things to say about Heiberg, Martensen, Sibbern, and Møller. In Chapters 3 and 6 Pattison’s argument reaches its most interesting peaks. Chapter 3, “The Dialectics of Communication,” is central to this study, since the difference between direct and indirect communication is treated here. Pattison aptly explains how the relationship between direct and indirect communication is much more intimate than is usually perceived. He writes that “the Kierkegaardian apostle…does not occupy a safe house, immune from the complex and problematic dialectics of communication. The situation is, on the contrary, extremely complex and dialectical and his message is disturbingly direct-indirect.”5 Further, he explains that “the communication of the paradox expects and requires the full activity of the freedom and interpretive responsibility of the recipient (as is also the case with the indirect communication contained in the pseudonymous authorship).”6 Pattison is clearly on to something here, for it is important to be made aware of the indirect nature of the signed discourses, so that one may later grasp their deep significance. But Pattison stops short of invalidating direct communication altogether, for he wishes to maintain an element of directness and “a real presence,”7 one which has been called into question by several Kierkegaard scholars. Readers may also be confused by the seemingly awkward, oxymoronic designation “the Kierkegaardian apostle.”8 Given the state of the modern world, a world that Kierkegaard would call “leveled,” the religious apostle cannot directly express himself as such; he cannot be known as an apostle, for the claim to divine authority Ibid., p. 86. Ibid. 7 Ibid., p. 186. 8 Ibid., p. 86. 5 6

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cannot be legitimized. While Kierkegaard does not hesitate when speaking of Paul as a Christian apostle, nowhere does he seem prepared to accept any modern day apostles, although he does not thereby deem it absolutely impossible that such a person could appear. Clearly, Kierkegaard himself is no Kierkegaardian apostle, for there is no direct claim to divine authority within his project. Quite the contrary, Kierkegaard repeatedly denies any possible misreading by strictly maintaining that he is “without authority.” This designation serves as a clear characteristic of a given work’s indirectness, for by claiming his lack of authority Kierkegaard absents himself from his signed texts, such that, to quote a later paper by Pattison, he “is no more directly present in the text of the religious discourses than in the case of the pseudonymous works.”9 Here Pattison seems to take one step closer to abandoning any claim of directness in Kierkegaard’s signed writings: “This paper might contribute to supporting the suggestion that his (Kierkegaard’s) best works and most fruitful insights transcend this duality in such a way that even the direct is indirect, that is, that even the ‘direct communication’ of the religious writing turns out to be somewhat ‘indirect’ after all.”10 Consequently, even when the “vocabulary of authority” cannot be altogether avoided in the signed writings, Kierkegaard makes sure that it gets expressed under the incognito of irony—the jest of earnestness. The subtitle of Pattison’s text is foreboding: “From the Magic Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image.” Ultimately, Pattison wants to argue that the realm of aesthetics, language, and context will have to be sacrificed so that a real presence of meaning can be communicated. Not until the brief closing section of this text’s final chapter, “Reading, Repentance, and the Crucifixion of the Image,” does Pattison raise the question of “a real presence.”11 Now, the fact that Pattison appends a question mark to the section’s title would suggest that the idea of a real presence of meaning is highly questionable. Nevertheless, in Pattison’s brief look at Kierkegaard’s discourses written for the Friday service of communion, the argument seems to be that the sacrament of the communion discloses a real presence for faith (without a question mark), which transcends the limits of language, context, and aesthetics. The “direct communication” in bread and wine goes beyond the limits of communication in language to reveal the presence of diving meaning.12 While Kierkegaard does indicate in Johannes Climacus, or De Omnibus dubitandum est that truth lies outside language, the suggestion that there is a realm of communication beyond language (and everything that we would call language) is highly problematic, if not contradictory, for to communicate is to make something common to another through signs. Moreover, it is not difficult to see how the meaning and significance of the holy act of communion is embedded in the text, in the text of texts if you will, and it is only through its relation to this text that a real presence can be imagined. Pattison is persuasive when arguing that the religious writings are not George Pattison, “ ‘Who’ is the Discourse? A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, p. 42. 10 Ibid., p. 43. 11 Ibid., p. 186. 12 Ibid., p. 187. 9

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direct in the sense of “knowledge-communication,” but he is less persuasive when concluding that “the Communion shows us that neither the limits of language nor the limits of the visual image are the limits of communication.”13 For, is it not easy to view communion as an overtly aesthetic act (involving direct sense perception and a keen sense of imagination) that does not imply the crucifixion of the aesthetic, but rather its resurrection, and the reaffirmation of its intrinsic tension with the religious, such that the question of a real presence is left undecided? In the second edition of Pattison’s work he addresses this criticism by explaining that the comments in the final section of the book are “suggestive rather than dogmatic,” and that speaking of the communion as an experience of a real presence is “necessarily to speak subjectively.”14 But as much as readers would like to understand such an experience and the person who is speaking subjectively, they will necessarily fail, and thus rather than “speaking subjectively” one must remain silent. In conclusion, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious is a highly stimulating book. Despite the few problematic points sketched out above, there is much to recommend Pattison’s work, especially to readers concerned with a comprehensive interpretation of Kierkegaard’s writings. Michael Strawser

Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London: Macmillan 1992, p. 188. 14 Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, London: SCM Press 1999, p. xx. 13

Reviews and Critical Discussions Andic, M., review in Choice, vol. 30, no. 2, October 1992, p. 315. Garff, Joakim, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 17, 1994, pp. 202–6. Martinez, Roy, review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 31, no. 2, 1993, pp. 299–301. Pattison, George, “On Reading Kierkegaard Religiously: A Reply to Michael Strawser,” Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 36, 1998, pp. 11–14. Poole, Roger, “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 63–4. Strawser, Michael, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York: Fordham University Press 1997 (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, vol. 2), pp. 180–2. — review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 30, 1994, pp. 21–3.

George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, xiv + 257 pp.

A man who lives welcoming what his century brings to him is perhaps the first concept we have when we think of someone who lives fully. It is not hard to imagine Kierkegaard among his contemporaries. But Kierkegaard is not someone who welcomes everything without distinction; he is also someone who looks around with a trained eye. At least two of his pseudonyms recall the condition of a spectator: Vigilius Haufniensis and Nicolaus Notabene. And a spectator is not necessarily someone who suspends his commitment to daily life, but, as Ortega y Gasset says, someone who becomes aware of the necessity of reserving a part of himself for contemplation. Indeed, “the individual point of view seems to be the only point of view from which it is possible to see the world in its truth,” even if every observer has his own possible truth.1 George Pattison’s study, called Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture, is composed of chapters of reworked articles and contributions to collections, published under many different circumstances (the information about this is to be found in the acknowledgments). In spite of this, those who feel called to the journey of its pages will realize that they have a strong connection. The book contains a series of references focusing on Kierkegaard’s thoughts concerning the discussions that were present in the Danish press at the time, and this runs like a common thread through the work. It was not possible for Kierkegaard to think or to write about any philosophical subject without getting involved in the aspects of his cultural situation. Pattison wants to present evidence for the critique of culture, both popular and literary culture, issued by Kierkegaard. He shares with Kierkegaard the impression that emptiness of culture and triviality walk side by side, and reveal paradoxically “an echo of the ontological indeterminacy of the freedom in and through which our religion’s destiny is decided.”2 Kierkegaardʼs century was transforming Copenhagen from a provincial town into a cosmopolitan city. Of course, we cannot forget that Copenhagen, with circa one hundred thousand inhabitants, was at that time much smaller than Paris, José Ortega y Gasset, El Espectador, Madrid: Biblioteca Edaf 1998, p. 51. George Pattison, Kierkegaard, Religion and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, p. X.

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the center of nineteenth-century changes. Nevertheless, Pattison believes, and I would say he is right, that “the changes that were taking place in Copenhagen of Kierkegaard’s lifetime and that are reflected in Kierkegaard’s review reveal in miniature something of the larger picture.”3 Pattison’s book is probably not the best option for someone who wants to gain a general overview of the works of Kierkegaard: the author is not concerned with producing a chronologically organized or thematically hierarchical introduction. However, here we can find the advantage of his methodological choice: his study reflects the rebellion against any established system, contained in Kierkegaard’s work. Although it is not possible to explain, in these brief lines, the contents of each of the work’s eleven chapters, I believe that a glance at some of them may help us to comprehend what we could receive from the whole. In those days of the nineteenth century, it was not difficult to see the close relation between the quick, hurried pace of life and superficiality. The two were growing together. That is the reason why Pattison, in the first chapter, relates the sublime (understood as the incapacity of reaction in the face of an overstimulation of the senses and pertaining to the age in a form of the modern urban experience) to the Kierkegaardian anxiety (which is assumed as a kind of sublimity)—a relation that is established by Pattison in both an aesthetic and a religious way. What serves as a motif of discomfort for Kierkegaard is the same thing the modern age requires: the culture of the ephemeral. However, Pattison finishes the chapter by noting that “the sublime and the everyday modern life of the city, the eternal and the merely momentary, are so folded together that each place and each time retains the memory or the possibility of the other.”4 In fact, the study touches on many different themes. The chapters, showing how Kierkegaard is also a fruit of his epoch, or a man of his generation, include some pages on the close relation between his philosophy and the feuilleton literature produced in the early modern city. Here there is also an account of the omnipresent power of the press, as well as the heritage that comes from the novel of Mme. Gyllembourg and its relevance for the Kierkegaardian critical description of the public, which is seen as a sign of disintegration of social life and fragmentation of life. Pattison also enriches his book by exploring the attention devoted by Kierkegaard to important local personalities, such as Heiberg, Carstensen, Møller, and Martensen. He also examines literary figures such as Don Juan, Faust and the Wandering Jew (the last one, the representative figure of despair, of the separation from the substantial ground of religion, of the gesture of diving into empty political movements or philosophical nihilism, and “the condition that belongs to the inner destiny of all who inhabit the condition of modernity”5). The sixth chapter analyzes the reaction of Kierkegaard to the authors of early Romanticism, which was provoked by the discussion surrounding Friedrich von Schlegel’s Lucinde and sensuality. The seventh chapter, instead of situating Kierkegaard in the context of the cultural life of his contemporary Copenhagen, wants to examine how his writings were received 5 3 4

Ibid., p. 53. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 94.

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by his contemporaries, with a particular reference to Either/Or. At the end, other chapters bring us to the reception of Kierkegaard in the twentieth century and to the comparison with the works of Édouard Manet and Fyodor Dostoevsky, in order to “enlarge the picture of Kierkegaard’s distinctive role within the culture of early modernism.”6 One by one, the pieces prepare the path that will lead to the conclusive thesis. Given that the Kierkegaardian analysis of the emergent culture of nineteenth-century modernity was shared by many other thinkers, the last chapter tries to determine what his distinctive element is. The conclusion comes naturally: “we are not going to learn any new facts about the nineteenth century from Kierkegaard, or even any new methodology for interpreting those facts. What he does, perhaps, help us to do is to develop, to refine and to sharpen the way in which we read our cultural situation, the way in which we read the signs of the times.”7 For Kierkegaard, writing cannot be separated from reading. In the way he presents his philosophical reflections, writing is something that comes with the reading and after the reading. And, if the meaning of “reading” is to be extended, beyond the simple fact of taking a book in hand, we might emphasize that a “book” can be both the totality of cultural texts and the culture itself, “as the master-text informing each of its manifold and infinitely varied products.”8 Like this, a good reader does more than interpret texts: he is also improving the ability of seeing more than others, with better penetration. We can learn with Kierkegaard how to be a good reader, to be able to open our eyes and see, beyond aestheticizing reading practices, like self-loss or insensibility: “In order to discover what Kierkegaard regards as good reading, then, we must learn to reflect on how we ourselves are addressed as readers by his works.”9 When we are attracted by the works of Kierkegaard, we dare to dive into unknown waters; we are battered by the waves, without knowing where they will lead us. Because of the movement of the words used by him, our whole vision of the world can change, but not only this. With a sonorous call to action, Pattison adds, Kierkegaard brings us back to our own responsibility. Pattison’s expectation will be fulfilled if Kierkegaard’s critique of culture enables us to reclaim the possibility of a dialogue of persons capable of transforming reality where they are. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard says obstinately that, against all odds, love remains. Recalling his words, we could even go further in saying that, like love which abides, words which attracted us shall last. The words used by Kierkegaard can make the reader fall in love with them, and thus those words can remain. Accordingly, if love “is everywhere present where there is one who loves”10 and if love “at every moment it is acquired, is an active work,”11 then Kierkegaard’s words must have an impact on us, on our work and thinking, and ever produce new fruits. 8 9

Ibid., p. 182. Ibid., pp. 222–3. Ibid., p. 233. Ibid., p. 224. 10 SKS 9, 299 / WL, 301. 11 SKS 9, 300 / WL, 302. 6 7

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It is easy to recommend this book by George Pattison. This work makes a good addition to the research that the author has been publishing over the last several years, exploring the relation between philosophy, theology and literature, without being swallowed by only one of the sides from which we can address the questions approached by Kierkegaard. It must be recognized that Pattison’s book makes a profitable contribution to Kierkegaard studies. Daniel Arruda Nascimento

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 802. Madigan, Patrick, review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 46, 2005, pp. 608–9. Simpson, Chris, review in Stone-Campbell Journal, vol. 7, 2004, pp. 121–2.

George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology, London: Routledge 2002, xii + 228 pp.

“If I have ever been on good terms with the public,” Kierkegaard observed in The Point of View, it was in the spring of 1843, “in the second or third month after the publication of Either/Or” under a pseudonym, on February 20 of that year.1 This idyll lasted until May 16, when Kierkegaard released Two Upbuilding Discourses under his own name—and promptly lost his public following. He never regained it. Judging by the numbers, Kierkegaard was a one-hit wonder: Either/Or, the third of his thirty-odd books, remained his sole commercial success during his lifetime. Kierkegaard later came to portray this fall from public favor as a planned, decisive clash with the world: “With my left hand I passed out Either/Or into the world, with my right hand Two Upbuilding Discourses; but they all or almost all took the left hand with their right.”2 This miscommunication, as it were, a colossal missed handshake, soon recurred at regular intervals, as Kierkegaard released a succession of pairs of pseudonymous and “upbuilding” works. If his account in The Point of View is to be believed, Kierkegaard’s consistent aim was to winnow his readership, sifting for the upbuilding discourses’ true reader, “that single individual” who would accept “with the right hand…what is offered with the right hand.”3 In his masterful 2002 study, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Theology, Literature, George Pattison seeks not so much to grasp Kierkegaard’s right hand with his own as to reveal the continuity of Kierkegaard’s work, left hand and right, as only the upbuilding works show it: “These texts provide a standpoint from which best to see the unity that holds together the whole, including, necessarily and pre-eminently, the extraordinary achievement of the pseudonymous works.”4 This thesis, Pattison knows, needs vigorous defense on a number of fronts. On the one hand, he must reconcile his own talk of “unity” with Kierkegaard’s distinction between “right” and “left” hands (i.e., his insistence that his upbuilding writings SKS 16, 22 / PV, 37. SKS 16, 21 / PV, 36. 3 SKS 16, 21n / PV, 36n. 4 George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology, London: Routledge 2002 (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Philosophy), p. 9. 1 2

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differ radically from his pseudonymous works). On the other hand, and more urgently, Pattison must rescue the discourses from charges dating to the 1840s: that they are boring, dogmatic, and detract from Kierkegaard’s interest to the “philosophy, literature, and theology” of Pattison’s title. Pattison devotes his difficult first chapter to the former task; his remaining chapters attempt—and superbly accomplish—the latter. Chapter 1 combats three Kierkegaardian claims about the signed upbuilding writings: (1) that they represent “direct communication,” as opposed to the pseudonymous works’ “indirect communication”; (2) that they are merely upbuilding, and so do not reflect Kierkegaard’s sense of true Christianity; and finally, a specification of (2), due to Johannes Climacus,5 (3) that the upbuilding discourses reflect only the standpoint of “Religiousness A,” not that of Christianity. Claim (1) occurs prominently in both The Point of View and the unpublished lectures on communication. Pattison has long argued that “even the direct is indirect” in the upbuilding discourses, and that Kierkegaard’s “best works and most fruitful insights transcend this duality.”6 He here presents an elaborate proof of this view, applying the motto de omnibus dubitandum to Kierkegaard’s own pronouncements.7 According to the unpublished lectures, Pattison notes, all ethical communication is “indirect”;8 at the same time, he ingeniously argues, “the concept of ethical communication set out in the lectures is exemplified in the discourses” which “would seem to mark them out as indirect communication after all.”9 Pattison concludes that this reveals, at the very least, a tension between the lectures and The Point of View, and gives us reason to doubt that either is Kierkegaard’s “last word” on the subject.10 Such strong claims may not be necessary: I am not certain that Pattison needs to challenge Claim (1) at all—let alone attack the unpublished lectures and The Point of View—in order to bolster his thesis.11 “Religiousness A” is the topic of some two hundred pages of Climacus’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript; see SKS 7, 352–533; CUP1, 387–586. For Climacus’ comments on the upbuilding discourses, see SKS 7, 233n; CUP1, 256–7n. 6 George Pattison, “ ‘Who’ is the Discourse? A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 28–45; p. 43. 7 Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, p. 14; p. 16. 8 Ibid., p. 18. 9 Ibid., p. 19; p. 21. 10 Ibid., p. 22. 11 While I find Pattison’s sense that the discourses transcend the duality of “direct” and “indirect” appealing, I am simply not certain that his view requires rejection, as opposed to reinterpretation, of Kierkegaard’s claims in the unpublished lectures and in The Point of View. The unpublished lectures insist that “ethical-religious communication,” as opposed to merely “ethical communication,” is always “direct-indirect” (Pap. VIII–2 B 89). Meanwhile, The Point of View declares that, to portray religiousness properly, one “must begin in one swoop with simultaneously being an aesthetic and a religious author,” i.e., one must mix “direct” and “indirect” communicative strategies (SKS 16, 31 / PV, 49). In both the unpublished lectures and On My Work as an Author, moreover, Kierkegaard states that he wrote the upbuilding discourses in order to ensure just such a “concurrence” (Pap. VIII–2 B 88; SKS 13, 14 / PV, 8). To fuse these claims together: on the level of prefaces and bylines—that is, comparing signed and pseudonymous works—the upbuilding discourses may indeed be “direct-indirect” 5

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Claims (2) and (3), on the other hand, plainly warrant Pattison’s protests. Both claims dismiss the discourses as works of an inferior religious character. Against Claim (2), Pattison maintains that no “qualitative distinction” can reliably be drawn between upbuilding and Christian works: “Even the most radical Christian works,” Pattison maintains, “are readable in light of the category of the upbuilding.”12 In particular, Pattison flatly denies Johannes Climacus’ Claim (3). “The apparently rigid schematization of ‘Religiousness A’ and ‘Religiousness B’ and their various subdivisions conceals a far more dynamic picture.”13 And what is this picture? Pattison’s creative answer emerges in the final chapter, which is the book’s great triumph. He begins by taking October 16, 1843—the date Kierkegaard published both Fear and Trembling and Three Upbuilding Discourses— as an occasion to read the former in terms of the latter, so that the upbuilding discourses’ commentaries on love illuminate Johannes de silentio’s confusions about the faith and trials of Abraham. Pattison next examines Kierkegaard’s upbuilding portrayal of “The Woman Who Was a Sinner” as a model of imitatio Christi that befits even the rigorous standards set forth by Anti-Climacus. It is only at this point, having shown the continuity of the upbuilding with writings of both “lower” and “higher” pseudonyms, that Pattison plays his final card: the figure of Socrates, wending his way through works of all three categories. Socrates’ movements offer the ultimate illustration of the continuity that Pattison champions between the upbuilding and the pseudonymous, between what we might otherwise call Kierkegaard’s philosophical and theological texts. “The reappearance of Socrates,” writes Pattison, hints “that the transition to a more overtly Christological understanding of religiousness [is] conceived within a framework erected on the ground of common human experience and understanding.”14 For Kierkegaard, in other words, Socrates signifies precisely what the upbuilding discloses: the juncture of Kierkegaard’s right and left hands, the “point of similarity between irony and radical discipleship,” that is, the “limit” of both philosophical and religious communication.15 This complex, formidable argument is a marvelous contribution to Englishlanguage Kierkegaard scholarship: a book-length interpretation of the upbuilding discourses as the hermeneutic key to Kierkegaard’s corpus. For all its ambition, Pattison’s book is nonetheless careful and reasoned, cleanly written and clearly documented: it testifies eloquently to the richness of the discourses it treats. David D. Possen communication about Christianity. But this is not necessarily incompatible with Pattison’s thesis that, on the level of ethical-religious content, the upbuilding discourses are themselves indirect in important ways. Put another way: Kierkegaard may well have believed that, furnished with the right sort of preface, disclaimer, or revocation, a text containing indirection could nonetheless count as direct. For a possible example of this, see Kierkegaard’s reflections on contemplated revisions to the frame of Practice in Christianity at SKS 14, 211–12 / M, 69–70. 12 Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, p. 12. 13 Ibid., p. 31. 14 Ibid., p. 215. 15 Ibid., p. 219.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 791. Ferreira, M. Jaime, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, (online journal). Perkins, Robert L., review in Teaching Philosophy, vol. 27, 2004, pp. 290–3. Possen, David D., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 47, 2004, pp. 20–2. Thompson, Curtis L., Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 4), pp. 100–1.

George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare (eds.), Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press 1998, xii + 225 pp.

There are two kinds of Kierkegaard scholars: those who side with him, building on what he says; and those who take his words and try to think them through, adopting a more critical stance. Both have value, especially when what is at stake, as here, is something affecting everyone: how to live in society as individuals. This book is made up of papers by scholars of the highest caliber. It is easy to get sidetracked here by the motley collection of different interpretations, topics, and names. This is not by chance: the papers were given back in 1995, at a conference in the UK, by people from many different fields.1 They are, however, all about how the self relates to society. They try to get beyond the image of Kierkegaard as a radical individualist, while staying true (more or less) to the texts themselves.2 This gives them a thematic unity and a coherence of method despite everything. Moreover, since all major pro-Kierkegaard approaches are represented here (their background history is given in the introduction), the book is a perfect overview of this kind of scholarship.3 It is the first anthology to deal with the “post-modern situation.”4 This is its greatest strength, marking it off against anthologies that came before. As far as I can tell, there are two basic claims any follower of Kierkegaard has to make about how the self is related to society: That the self is irreducible to it (“the irreducibility claim”), and that the self enjoys clear priority (“the priority claim”).5 Both must be assumed to have strong textual support in the Kierkegaardian corpus. What is not so clear is how the two claims are related. To say I am not wholly a product of society, after all, is not the same as saying I make myself, much less that I am constituted by something or someone coming before or standing above society in a broader sense. The last two are much stronger claims, and inferring a Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, ed. by George Pattison and Steven Shakespeare, London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s Press 1998, p. 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., pp. 3–17. 4 Ibid., pp. 17–19. 5 Ibid., p. 7; p. 11. 1

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positive from a negative judgment like this is a non sequitur. (There is a third: self and society may mutually influence each other without either having clear priority, keeping my basic irreducibility intact.) The introduction seems to have these two claims mixed up, and most of the papers slip between them too. This gives the book a slightly confusing look, giving the impression that a fully thought-out defense of Kierkegaard has yet to be made. Another thing one notices is the habit of countering structural arguments (“howarguments”) with textual quotations (“what-arguments”). Piety’s paper is a good case in point (Chapter 1). She is responding to Mackey’s criticism of Kierkegaard,6 namely, that since freedom or the self is effectively absolutized in Kierkegaard, others become blank possibilities, losing their ability to bind or even influence the self in a meaningful way. With their reality or actuality gone, there is a complete loss of world here. Talk about stages will not do: the self is always free-standing in relation to society it seems.7 This is obviously a serious charge to make because it would keep talk of sociality or politics from getting off the ground. Piety tries a number of moves to block the argument. They all involve quoting specific passages that say something else, or other authorities who take a different view.8 This is enough on an exegetical plane perhaps, but it will not work against Mackey’s structural argument. Besides, if pressed, he could always quote those texts in the corpus where the priority claim is made. That way too he can explain why freedom is absolutized. This is the gripe many Kierkegaardians have with post-modern thinkers. They do not like what looks like a call for an endless free play beyond any real responsibility or allegiance here. This they—rightly—feel undermines not just social ties but the search for truth, communication itself. Craig’s (Chapter 3), Rudd’s (Chapter 5) and Shakespeare’s paper (Chapter 5) all deal with this. I really liked Rudd’s distinction between stable and absolute irony (Kierkegaard vs. the German Romantics), or between irony as figure of speech and as a stance (or attitude).9 That and how he shows that Rorty’s post-modern liking for the second makes his social thought relativistic, which means he cannot make an honest plea for liberal democracy.10 To draw lines back to the past, making Kierkegaard speak to current issues like this is both important and fitting. I found Shakespeare’s “Heideggerian” take on negativity, death, and “letting-others-be” in Kierkegaard highly interesting.11 I also think Craig is basically right. Stressing freedom and possibility can have a liberating effect in society; it need not go against other-relatedness, and Kierkegaard’s style and play on authority can have a role in this.12 But there is the rub: they do not show you how to guard against an absolutizing of this freedom or negativity. Rudd and Shakespeare mostly take what Kierkegaard says for granted. Craig senses that a She uses Louis Mackey, “The Loss of World in Kierkegaard’s Ethics,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 602–20. 7 Kierkegaard: The Self in Society, pp. 25–6; p. 29. 8 Ibid., pp. 26ff. 9 Ibid., pp. 82–6; p. 93. 10 Ibid., pp. 86–7; p. 90; pp. 92–3. 11 Ibid., p. 97; p. 101; pp. 104–5; p. 108; p. 111. 12 Ibid., pp. 56–7; pp. 59–61. 6

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coherent, tamed defense means the priority of the self has to be given up,13 and she criticizes Kierkegaard towards this end,14 but she does not have a positive, integrated plan for carrying it through. This argumentative lack or forgetting of the structural side of things ought to worry anyone interested in the Kierkegaardian texts and their meaning today—especially in light of Mackey’s argument. The next batch of papers deals with sociality more head-on in Kierkegaard. Peter George’s fine paper (Chapter 4) begins by contrasting love in Works of Love with Either/Or, arguing it is spiritualized or made worldless in The Works of Love in a way it was not before. It is the total denial of preference and twosidedness that makes Christian love (as pictured by Kierkegaard) a negative posture without any real substance or weight for social living.15 George denies the simple equation of preference or two-sidedness with selfishness too, and he has some brief, phenomenological sketches to show this.16 This kind of critique harks back Adorno: how is Christian love not cold—anti-social? Structurally at least it is on par with dissocial personality disorder, with forms of domination in general. Neither George, nor Andic (Chapter 7), nor Pyper (Chapter 8) has a good Kierkegaardian reply ready. Either there is the well-known fallback on negativity; or social relationships get subordinated wholesale to other-worldly love. Again irreducibility and priority are mixed up, or the priority claim and sociality are merely assumed to be coherent. How-arguments are neither made nor dealt with. Adorno’s question still stands. The biggest surprise for me was Dooley’s paper (Chapter 9). I was struck by the similarities he uncovers between Kierkegaard and Derrida and their low view of “this-worldly” justice: they both see this as based on nothing but mere prudence, cold calculation, and they go on to contrast it with a higher calling or justice. I think Dooley has made a good case for Kierkegaard influencing Derrida here.17 What I cannot figure out is why he does not mention the deep criticism Derrida has of Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death. In the third chapter he shows how we cannot avoid preference as finite creatures: having a body or language, being here now, choosing this rather than that. This structural fact about humans is true independent of concretion (who we relate to, what we choose), and this makes the infinite requirement to love every neighbor the same impossible. Again this is a how-argument (phenomenological analysis), an internal criticism that cannot be brushed off by quoting texts alone. In the last chapter, Derrida takes up what Kierkegaard has to say about sacrifice, lowliness and man’s higher calling. By cross-referencing this with places in the New Testament which talk about God seeing and rewarding this kind of behavior,18 he shows how Kierkegaard rejects two-sidedness on a worldly level only to reclaim it for the higher, spiritual world. So Christian love is both preferential and reciprocal to some extent, which means it cannot be different in kind. Dooley does not have a 15 16 17 18 13 14

Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., pp. 66–7. Ibid., pp. 70–5; pp. 78–9. Ibid., pp. 73–4; p. 76; p. 78. Ibid., pp. 141–6. Matthew 5:7.

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word to say about this, nor does Perkinson (Chapter 10) who tries his best to place the suffering Christian in society. This challenge has not been met either. My biggest problem with socio-political readings of Kierkegaard is not that they give us a Kierkegaard who challenges the liberal order (Perkins, Chapter 2), being too risqué for the status quo (Kirmmse, Chapter 11), but one who has not really thought through his stance. So it is unclear how he might answer the normative question about how individuals should live in society. If my downplaying of what-arguments seems unfair, it should be noted that content is existential for Kierkegaard—and this it not something that is publicly accessible. It is to be thought about and appropriated inwardly by the single individual rather than deliberated in public by scholars. Until the how-arguments have been tackled therefore, the wholesale appeal to content does not have much force on its own. Other than that I enjoyed Kirmmse’s sketch of Kierkegaard’s spiraling radicalism and its fate in Denmark after his death, and Nagy’s chronicling (Chapter 12) of Kierkegaard’s run-ins with Lukacs and totalitarianism in Eastern Europe even more so. The anthology by Pattison and Shakespeare is an excellent overview of Kierkegaard scholarship on sociality and politics at the close of the last century. As such, it is the best staging point for further work. Narve Strand

Reviews and Critical Discussions Adams, Noel, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 40, 2000, pp. 7–8. Cain, David, review in Ethics, vol. 111, no. 1, pp. 181–6. Ferreira, M. Jamie, “Asymmetry and Self-Love: The Challenge to Reciprocity and Equality,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 41–59. Martens, Paul, “The Invigoration of Kierkegaardian Ethics,” Religious Studies Review, vol. 29, no. 1, 2003, pp. 29–33.

Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2011, xxviii + 249 pp.

Kierkegaard and the Self before God is part of the prestigious Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Merold Westphal, and thus takes its place alongside numerous other quality works of Kierkegaard scholarship, including Bruce H. Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, and Sylvia Walsh’s translation of Discourses at the Communion on Fridays. The book begins with a confession. When he began work on Kierkegaard and the Self before God, Podmore understood Kierkegaard’s infamous anthropological descriptor—the “infinite qualitative difference” between humans and God—as sin. At the end of his work on the project, Podmore understood this difference in a radically different way; namely, as forgiveness.1 He takes us on a similar journey. We enter Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology through various moods: anxiety, melancholy, despair, and—adding to Vincent McCarthy’s work—spiritual trial (Anfægtelse).2 These moods initiate our human grasp of the infinite qualitative difference between us and God, and set us in an atmosphere of struggle that can end in either faith or despair. Podmore’s patient exposition both poetically draws us into these moods and—especially in Chapters 6 and 7—grants us a good deal of conceptual clarity into the either/or just mentioned. The bulk of Podmore’s work, however, has to do with setting the stage for this clear antithesis (either despair or faith) that is the culmination of his argument. There is a richness and diversity here that is appropriate to a text attempting to be not only a work of Kierkegaard scholarship, but also a constructive treatment of these themes simpliciter.3 Out of this variety, two thematic engagements can be highlighted: (1) the death of God, (2) Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Both of these Simon Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2011, p. xi. 2 Ibid., p. xvii; cf. p. 194n.12, where Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1978, is cited. For McCarthy, anxiety, melancholy, and despair are central; Podmore thus builds on McCarthy by bringing spiritual trial into this triad. 3 Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God, p. xiii; p. xvii. 1

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engagements serve to show how the Kierkegaardian dynamic may be extended to address contemporary concerns. (1) The death of God entails the death of self. As Podmore precisely formulates it: “The melancholy of the absence of God is both a symptom and a cause of the modern turn toward a selfhood that inevitably comes to see itself as unobtainable.”4 With the elimination of God, the ground of the self has been lost. For Podmore’s theological anthropology, the key point here (amongst powerful meditations on Nietzsche) is that the self before God is the only self there is. (2) Yet Podmore does not wish to recover a metaphysical grounding for the self. In agreement with Jean-Luc Marion, he sees the death of God that caused the death of the self as the death of an idol.5 All the same, the self comes to be itself before God. How is this paradox held together? The answer is straightforward: what is needed is a notion of God as Wholly Other. This is not the metaphysical God who is subsumed into our project of self-mastery, serving as the ground for our own selfproductive achievement of self. Rather, this is the God of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, in Otto’s words.6 This is the God whom we encounter across the great abyss of the infinite qualitative difference, whose chasmic separation from us induces fear and trembling. Rather than being a part of a metaphysical construct which can disassemble and eventually die, this is a God whose infinite immensity threatens us with annihilation.7 A numinous awe is birthed by the revelation of this God, inaugurating a difficult journey that inevitably includes the moods of anxiety, melancholy, despair, and spiritual trial. We struggle with this God, as Jacob did in the night hours.8 The journey of the self’s becoming begins with this revelation of God as the Wholly Other, before whom we tremble. This trembling is the awakening of spirit out of spiritlessness.9 In modernity/postmodernity, where God has died, this is the first step toward recovering both God and the self: the coming to an understanding of God as Wholly Other, wherein our spirit is awakened in a struggle that threatens our very existence. The moods of anxiety and melancholy are entirely proper to the beginning of such a journey, and Podmore treats them in the early and middle chapters of the book.10 Yet the endpoint of this journey of the self’s becoming is spiritual trial (Anfægtelse), a testing that is articulated in the struggle between despair and faith. Kierkegaard’s Anfægtelse can be placed in both continuity and discontinuity with Luther’s Anfechtung.11 Like Luther, Kierkegaard conceives of spiritual trial as a 6 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 50; cf. p. 25. Ibid., p. 25. See especially ibid., pp. 71–81. Ibid., pp. 85–6; pp. 109–16. Ibid., pp. 97–100. Ibid., p. 70; p. 97; p. 101; pp. 136–7; p. 139; p. 142. 10 Melancholy is treated in Chapters 3 and 4, pp. 50–89; anxiety is primarily treated in Chapter 5, pp. 104–19. 11 Ibid., pp. 120–3; p. 129; cf. Simon Podmore, “The Lightning and the Earthquake: Kierkegaard on the Anfechtung of Luther,” Heythrop Journal, vol. 48, 2006, pp. 562–78. 4 5

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struggle that takes place before God. Unlike Luther, Kierkegaard sees this struggle as originating from the self, for Luther saw Anfechtung as a suffering inflicted by the Devil (who was, however, under the ultimate control of God). For Kierkegaard, Anfægtelse has essentially to do with the self and its consciousness of sin. How can a sinful being stand before a God whose infinite majesty threatens my annihilation? This—the question of Isaiah12—is the question of spiritual trial. The answer is not in the elimination of the abyss between the self and God, for this is an ontological gap which cannot be bridged. Instead, the answer lies in accepting that the God of infinite qualitative difference has chosen to love the self that I am in an act of unmerited forgiveness. With sin, we realize that relating to the Wholly Other God is an impossibility; with faith, we accept God’s forgiveness as an impossible possibility.13 Some of Podmore’s most powerful meditations are on the self who—just on the brink of such a surrender—turns back in despair to shut itself in (Indesluttethed) with its own sin.14 This is the self who in despair wills to be itself; it is a “presumptuous melancholy”15 that decides that forgiveness for its sins is impossible. In a mixture of pride and despair, this self refuses the impossible possibility and thus refuses to become itself, turning away to grasp its sin in an act of nihilistic defiance. In the end, the self who succeeds in becoming herself is constituted by the gaze of the loving Other. Forgiveness is the ground of the self, and it rewrites the abyssal infinite qualitative difference as blessedness—rather than anxiety, melancholy, or despair.16 Podmore’s anatomy, with its engrossing lyrical character, has allowed his readers to experience the journey that leads the self to the place of accepting forgiveness. With these evocative themes, as George Pattison wrote in a review of Podmore’s subsequent book, Struggling with God, “Simon Podmore is establishing a distinctive place within Kierkegaard studies,”17 and in fact—especially in regard to forgiveness and the ground of the self—he is indeed establishing a distinctive place within contemporary constructive theology itself. Thomas J. Millay

See Isaiah 6:5 and Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God, p. 113; p. 116. Ibid., p. 147; p. 150, p; 155. This acceptance happens paradigmatically in silent prayer, which then pours forth in worship and the concomitant forgiveness of others (cf. p. 150; pp. 176–8; p. 186; p. 192). 14 Ibid., pp. 165–8. 15 Ibid., p. 166. 16 Ibid., p. 176. 17 George Pattison, “Simon D. Podmore, Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial, James Clarke: Cambridge, 2013,” Theology, vol. 117, no. 4, 2014, p. 310. 12 13

Reviews and Critical Discussions Bârliba, Ionuţ, “In Search for Forgiveness,” Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 2, 2011, pp. 510–516. Lévy, Antoine, review in New Blackfriars, vol. 93, no. 1048, 2012, pp. 748–50. Mahn, Jason, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 59, 2012, pp. 9–11. Moser, P. K., review in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 49, no. 8, 2012, p. 1458. Simmons, J. Aaron, “Helping more than ‘a little’: Recent books on Kierkegaard and Philosophy of Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 72, 2012, pp. 233–5.

Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1984, vii + 174 pp.

Louis P. Pojman’s book, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion, was first published by the University of Alabama Press in 1984. Several chapters were published as independent papers in the few years prior to the publication of the book. The historical setting of Pojman’s book has considerable impact on its content. Pojman extensively uses older English translations of Kierkegaard’s collective works by Walter Lowrie and David Swenson.1 Lowrie and Swenson represent a now-outdated understanding of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. Both fail to take the pseudonyms seriously thereby forcing a brute reading of Kierkegaardian literature, “a kind of reading that refuses, as a matter of principle, to accord a literary status to the text; that refuses the implications of the pseudonymous technique.”2 This reading impacts their respective translations and scholarly secondary work, like that of Pojman, who uses those translations. Pojman uses two Climacus texts, Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as his prime objects of research. Given the pseudonymous nature of those texts, he cites The Point of View for My Work as an Author to point out Kierkegaard’s essential authorial concern, “understanding what is involved in becoming a Christian.”3 The Postscript has special significance to Kierkegaard since it is the “turning point. This work deals with and poses the issue, the issue of the entire work as an author: becoming a Christian.”4 This is used as evidence for Pojman’s position that Climacus and Kierkegaard share the same philosophy of religion. He writes that at times Kierkegaard disclaimed the pseudonyms, but this does not mean that he rejected “the ideas therein.”5 He goes on to say that it is his

At time of publication, the Hong translations of Kierkegaard were in their infancy. Only The Sickness unto Death (1980) was referenced in a Hong translation. 2 Roger Poole, “The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1997, p. 60. 3 Louis P. Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1984, p. 2. 4 SKS 16, 17 / PV, 31. 5 Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity, p. 90. 1

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hope that readers will consider the Climacus writings as Kierkegaard’s own view, implying sameness in their thought. This brute reading of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms limits the Kierkegaardian discourse. The conflation of Climacus and Kierkegaard is undertaken to present Kierkegaard as a rationalist, as is Pojman’s provocative thesis: “Kierkegaard is a philosopher, a thinker who uses arguments, develops concepts, and employs ‘thought projects’ to establish conclusions. He is a rationalist, who makes use of reason even if it is to show reason’s limits.”6 The Climacus–Kierkegaard conflation is perhaps the book’s most significant drawback. While great efforts are made to show Climacus as a rationalist through a series of syllogisms derived from arguments implicit in the Fragments and the Postscript, many readers might be unconvinced that it is indeed Kierkegaard who holds such positions. Kierkegaard himself warned against this type of confusion. Included in the Swenson translation that Pojman uses, Kierkegaard writes that anyone who quotes the Postscript should “cite the name of the respective pseudonymous author,” and he thereby implies a differentiation between himself and Climacus.7 While it would not follow that Kierkegaard never agrees with the pseudonyms, it remains problematic to posit that no separation exists. Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, the epistemological appraisal of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion is a welcome addition to the scholarship. Secondary material devoted to Kierkegaard’s epistemology is sparse, despite certain scholars’ currently focusing on this subject.8 From the onset, Pojman examines Kierkegaard differently to scholars prior to him and admits the controversial nature of his interpretation. The examination is highly analytic. The interpretation of Kierkegaard as a rationalist gives way, in theory, to a more traditional model of Christian philosophy of religion—one which uses logical arguments to present Christian faith as reasonable. With this analytic commentary, Kierkegaard is treated more like an Aquinas or Descartes rather than an existential Christian thinker. The underlying theme that Kierkegaard is a rationalist is evident throughout; however, the success of this is nowhere greater than in Chapter 2 where Pojman elucidates Kierkegaard’s use of reason to limit the nature and accomplishments of reason itself. “Kierkegaard’s strategy,” Pojman writes, “uses reason to undermine the sufficiency of reason, to reach the highest metaphysical truth.”9 This interpretation finds its success in the examination of the disjunctive relationship between subjective and objective inquiry that Kierkegaard presents in the Postscript. Pojman correctly notes that Kierkegaard does not deny the existence of absolute truth. Absolute truth exists, and belief in it comes not from rational objective inquiry per Cartesian or Hegelian systems. To the contrary, Kierkegaard’s rationality recognizes that rational Ibid., p. ix. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1971, p. 552. 8 For example, C. Stephen Evans, Subjectivity and Religious Belief, Washington, D.C.: Christian College Consortium 1978; C. Stephen Evans, Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998; and M. G. Piety, Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology, Waco: Baylor University Press 2010. 9 Pojman, Logic of Subjectivity, p. 22. 6 7

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inquiry leaves one with only approximate knowledge, not certainty. Approximation is unsatisfactory in relation to absolute truth. Pojman’s treatment of this subject is lucid and beneficial; it is a nuanced understanding of the complexities of Kierkegaard’s limitations on reason. Analyzing Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion in a rationalistic understanding considerably limits this important discussion. The aforementioned success of Kierkegaard’s use of reason notwithstanding, Pojman’s approach is an awkward manner by which to examine Kierkegaard’s conception of faith and religious belief—categories which Kierkegaard so readily admits are outside the realm of objective inquiry. Consider, for example, Pojman’s etymological exegesis of the Danish word for “faith”: Tro. In addition to “faith,” Tro also means “belief.” From an epistemological perspective, this causes significant contextual and interpretive difficulties that Pojman attempts to reconcile. While the description of several different types of faith/belief is helpful, it oversimplifies the meaningful subjective matter that Kierkegaard connects these concepts to. Oversimplification ought not be understood as Pojman establishing a strawman version of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion. To the contrary, Pojman’s research and analysis is robust. Yet when Kierkegaard calls faith a risk and the acceptance of a paradox in order to obtain absolute truth, it is precisely the type of objective reasoning Pojman uses that Kierkegaard says is a barrier to truth. It thus appears that Pojman’s method of explaining Kierkegaard is precisely the method of reasoning that causes Kierkegaard to object. Given the epistemological methodology that Pojman employs, it could be argued that the Kierkegaard that is portrayed is a Pojman-like-Kierkegaard. That is, Pojman is reading his own epistemic positions into the Kierkegaardian literature. Elsewhere, Pojman is explicit in his rigid rationalist framework of religious belief: “I argue for a rationalist conception of faith within a coherentist framework.”10 And later, Pojman connects such a rationalistic approach to moral living, writing, “any faith that is not rational for a person to hold may also be immoral.”11 Granting this, it is unsurprising that a 15-premise argument in a chapter on the justification of Christian faith results in the conclusion that one is irrational for not choosing Christianity. Drawing every premise from implicit references in the Postscript, Pojman writes, “Christianity is not irrational” and anyone who desires to possess knowledge of absolute truth must “make a leap of faith into the absurd, believing the Paradox of the incarnation.”12 The preceding is interpreted as elements of subjective inquiry that form a rational response to the “absurd conclusion” that Christianity is true. It seems then that The Logic of Subjectivity is a case for Pojman’s narrow rationalist conception of Christian faith using elements from Kierkegaard. In the process, the voice of Climacus (and Kierkegaard) becomes lost. The result is a transformed Kierkegaard, transformed in the sense of Kierkegaard being used as another approach to satisfy twentieth-century debates surrounding the rationality of religious belief. Louis P. Pojman, “Can Religious Belief Be Rational?” in Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. by Louis P. Pojman, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company 1998, p. 483. 11 Ibid. 12 Pojman, Logic of Subjectivity, 141. 10

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Those wanting a robust examination of Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion will likely find disappointment. Contrary to the subtitle, the book is more accurately described as Climacus’ philosophy of religion, to which at some points Kierkegaard might agree. To truly be a Kierkegaardian perspective other texts such as Either/ Or, The Sickness unto Death, Fear and Trembling, and Stages on Life’s Way that explore Christianity ought to be integrated. Lacking that, other texts which employ a methodology that better aligns with Kierkegaard’s understanding of the pseudonyms and appreciation of the plurality of Kierkegaard’s thought should be sought. In the end, acknowledgement must be made of the significance and success of Pojman’s text for Kierkegaard studies. While it might be an overcompensation in response to the fideistic interpretations of Kierkegaard, its analytic approach makes clear the often perplexing nature of the Climacus texts, specifically regarding religious epistemology. Michael D. Stark

Reviews and Critical Discussions Emmanuel, Steven M., review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 136–46. Marino, Gordon D., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 39, no. 2, 1985, pp. 372–4. Perkins, Robert L., review in Faith and Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2, 1985, pp. 209–11. Stack, George J., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 12, 1985, pp. 5–7.

Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1997, vii + 232 pp.

Until recently sustained attention to Kierkegaard as a biblical expositor has been sporadic and scant. In 1953 Paul Minear and Paul Morimoto proposed that Kierkegaard would be remembered as a profound expositor of the Bible,1 and in 1994 L. Joseph Rosas categorized some of different ways in which Kierkegaard used biblical passages in his authorship.2 But no one had devoted sustained attention to the exact nature and significance of Kierkegaard’s implicit hermeneutic practice until Timothy Polk published The Biblical Kierkegaard in 1994.3 Polk’s volume attracted immediate attention, for it raised fundamental questions about Kierkegaard’s assumptions concerning textual meaning, communication, and even the nature of Christianity. As an Old Testament scholar, Polk found Kierkegaard’s use of Scripture to be a refreshing alternative to many of the exegetical approaches that had developed in the academy and in the church since the Enlightenment. Polk sought to distance Kierkegaard both from “conservative” misreadings that identify the meaning of Scripture with the cultural prejudices and biases of its authors, and from “liberal” misreadings that abstract allegedly timeless moral or metaphysical truths from the particularities of the Bible’s literary forms.4 According to Polk, Kierkegaard was unhappy with the tendency of the higher critics to locate the Bible’s significance in a scholarly reconstruction of the historical events behind the text, or in the sources that predated the final, received form of the text. He also was suspicious of historical criticism’s penchant for disregarding traditional devotional ways of reading Scripture, and most critical of the mood of objective detachment that the academy promoted. Polk’s approach to Kierkegaard was informed by his own theological education and religious commitments. Prominent among the influences that shaped him was Paul Minear and Paul S. Morimoto, Kierkegaard and the Bible: An Index, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1953. 2 L. Joseph Rosas, Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Nashville: Broadman and Holman 1994. 3 Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1997. 4 Ibid., p. viii. 1

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the “post-liberal” theology of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck.5 From them he absorbed the conviction that the Christian faith does not need to be understood or justified through an appeal to any form of knowledge alleged to be more foundational or certain than the faith itself. Consequently, the Bible should be regarded as a semantic unit whose meaning is not based in any source of intelligibility outside the text, whether it be the moral consensus of the culture or a popular metaphysical conceptuality. Polk proposed that these same anti-foundational sensibilities pervaded Kierkegaard’s approach to biblical texts. From the influential Kierkegaard scholar Paul L. Holmer, Polk acquired an appreciation of the “performative” aspects of biblical passages in shaping the reader’s passions and dispositions.6 The Bible’s primary function is not to present cognitive propositions that refer neutrally to historical events or supernatural realities. Viewing Kierkegaard from the perspective of rhetorical performance, Polk became very sensitive to the ways in which Kierkegaard’s use of Scripture was intended to evoke certain types of pathos in the reader, and the ways in which certain types of pathos must be present in the interpreter in order for the Bible to be meaningful. According to Polk, the main problem of interpretation for Kierkegaard was not the vagaries of the text, but rather the vices and virtues of the readers. All of these influences were reinforced by Polk’s enthusiasm for Stanley Fish’s description of the role of interpretive communities in any act of textual interpretation.7 Textual meaning is produced by readers who put texts to certain uses for certain purposes. A text does not possess a meaning-in-itself apart from the interpretive conventions and strategies of specific reading communities. Given this perspective, Polk discerned a similar spirit in Kierkegaard’s disdain for putatively objective exegesis and in his tendency to read Scripture according to the liturgical and devotional habits of the Lutheran church. Kierkegaard usually did not confess the extent to which his biblical expositions were indebted to the practices of the church, but his actual use of biblical passages reveals his reliance upon certain traditions of worship and devotion. Polk’s approach to Kierkegaard was also indebted to the work of the Old Testament scholar Brevard Childs, who developed a unique type of canonical criticism.8 Childs privileged the final redacted form of biblical books and assumed that they should be read in light of one another. The crucial factor in interpretation of any biblical book is the role of that text in the canon as a whole. Polk viewed Kierkegaard’s work through this lens, noting how he appealed to the canon as a unified literary entity and showed little interest in a biblical text’s sources or the history of its redaction.

Hans Frei, Types of Modern Theology, New Haven: Yale University Press 1992; George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1984. 6 Paul L. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, New York: Harper & Row 1978. 7 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1980. 8 Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture, Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1979. 5

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Polk concluded that Kierkegaard’s interpretive practice was governed by a dialectic of the objective shape of the text and reader’s faithful imagination.9 On the one hand, a biblical text does impose certain constraints on legitimate interpretation. A passage possesses a semantic range of possible meanings; not any construal is plausible. For Polk’s Kierkegaard, this range was largely determined by a text’s final form and its role in the canonical ensemble of texts. But, on the other hand, certain subjective factors are necessary conditions of appropriate Christian interpretation. Most importantly, the proper passionate concern for the moral and religious quality of the reader’s own life must be brought to bear upon the text. Furthermore, the text must be put to the appropriate purpose of edifying the reader according to the basic norms and values of the interpretive community. Polk was convinced that Kierkegaard recognized that the community of faithful readers did entertain an imaginative construal of the Bible as a whole. In Polk’s view, Kierkegaard read the Bible according to the “rule of faith,” which he understood in terms of the love of God for the individual that should be reflected in the individual’s love for the neighbor.10 In Polk’s terminology, Kierkegaard approached the Bible as a “love sleuth,”11 looking for ways that the text can encourage love in the reader. Polk extended the theme of love to the interpreter’s relation to the Bible itself, for the reader should lovingly forgive the biblical texts’ lapses into such unloving ideologies as patriarchalism and ethnocentrism.12 Scripture is authoritative in so far as it acts performatively to author a life of love. Polk’s book has spawned further explorations of Kierkegaard’s practice of biblical interpretation,13 and has raised vexing questions that require further investigation. The difference between Childs’ canonical criticism, which presupposes redaction analysis, and Kierkegaard’s reading strategies may be greater than Polk admits, for Kierkegaard may not have had any use for historical criticism at all. Also, more work needs to be done on the way in which Kierkegaard could consistently assume the normativity of the church as a reading community, construing the text in the light of its liturgical and creedal traditions, and still severely question the legitimacy of ecclesial institutions. If Polk is right about the communal nature of Kierkegaard’s reading strategies, Kierkegaard must have assumed the continuing existence of a sort of true church that worshipped and prayed rightly, and was defined partly by the proper use of Scripture to upbuild love. The relationship of Kierkegaard’s exegetical practice and his ecclesiology needs a fuller treatment. Lee C. Barrett Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, p. 203. Ibid., p. 9. 11 Ibid., p. 52. 12 Ibid., p. 13. 13 Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible, New York: Fordham University Press 2004; Hugh Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard, Sheffield: Equinox 2011; Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I, The Old Testament, ed. by Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2010 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Receptions, and Resources, vol. 1); Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome II, The New Testament, ed. by Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2010 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Receptions, and Resources, vol. 1). 9

10

Reviews and Critical Discussions Briggs, Richard, review in Themelios, no. 24, 1998, pp. 97–8. Hall, Amy Laura, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 36, 1998, pp. 4–5. Khan, Abrahim H., review in Theological Studies, vol. 59, no. 2, 1998, pp. 337–8. Pattison, George, review in Literature and Theology, vol. 13, 1999, pp. 90–1. Pickstock, Catherine, review in Modern Theology, vol. 15, no. 4, 1999, p. 524. Robinson, Marcia C., review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 231–5.

Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press 1993, xi + 318 pp.

In this widely read 1993 book, British literary theorist Roger Poole (1939–2003) analyzes a variety of Kierkegaardian texts through the lens of postmodern theory. His interlocutors are the classic voices of the (mostly French) genre: Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and, most centrally, Jacques Derrida. As a Kierkegaard scholar, Poole stands in the company of literary and deconstructive critics such as Henning Fenger, Louis Mackey, Mark C. Taylor, John Caputo, and Joakim Garff. Poole shares with these figures an acute sensitivity to the “how” of Kierkegaard’s rhetoric and a preference for ambiguity and polysemy over univocal meaning. Within this context, Poole’s Kierkegaard is distinctive because of its attention to a broad range of Kierkegaard’s works—early and late, pseudonymous and signed—and to the lived context in which he wrote. Further, the book is of particular importance in Kierkegaard’s history of reception because Poole was among the first in his generation to respect the distinctiveness of the individual Kierkegaardian pseudonyms (rather than conflating them all under the mantle of “Kierkegaard”).1 Even among those who take issue with Poole’s postmodern hermeneutics, this practice has become standard today. For better or for worse, Poole’s book bears the marks of the “theory wars” that raged across the humanities at the turn of the last century. Poole’s tone can be adversarial as he condemns what he considers to be the naive and unsophisticated assumptions of theologically motivated scholars such as David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. He laments, “the history of reading Kierkegaard is unfortunately an almost uninterrupted series of attempts to look into the mirrors of the aesthetic texts and to find there Kierkegaard’s view of X.”2 He argues throughout his book that “the aim of the aesthetic texts is not to instruct, or to inform, or to clarify, but on See Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, “Preface” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 17), pp. xii–xvi. 2 Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press 1993, p. 7. 1

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the contrary to divert, to subvert, and to destroy clear biographical intelligibility.”3 Each Kierkegaardian text, he maintains, “is a kind of torso of the unexpressed, a mere pointer to the inexpressible.”4 Predictably, Poole’s book has elicited loud condemnations from Kierkegaard scholars committed to more conventional hermeneutical principles (see especially Evans and Tietjen in the bibliography below). Nonetheless, it is regrettable in my view that the debate surrounding Poole’s book has usually taken place along a familiar but ultimately misleading fault line: on the one side, theologically motivated critics insisting that Kierkegaard’s theology take the form of propositional truth-claims; on the other, aesthetic-postmodern interpreters approaching the religious in Kierkegaard with reflexive hostility because they associate it with such objectivity of truth. At its best, Poole’s book challenges the assumptions underlying both sides of this divide. Wherever one stands in such debates, Poole’s explicit discussions of French theory are likely to be the least stimulating aspects of his Kierkegaard for readers today. The expositions of Derrida, de Man, and others are probably too brief to win many new converts and too superficial to be of great interest to the already disposed. Poole is most compelling when he eschews theoretical jargon and pursues a finegrained analysis of Kierkegaard’s texts in the light of his theoretical insights. His knowledge of the Danish language and of the Danish Golden Age enable him to make scholarly contributions that should be valuable even to those who start from different hermeneutical assumptions. Poole begins by treating works from Kierkegaard’s student days: Kierkegaard’s curious attack on Hans Christian Anderson in From the Papers of One Still Living and his labyrinthine magister dissertation, The Concept of Irony. Poole’s detailed reconstruction of the debates among Kierkegaard’s dissertation examiners is of particular value, as he highlights the anxiety and uneasiness that this Socratic and even “deconstructive” gadfly provoked in the Danish establishment from the very beginning. Poole’s subsequent readings of Repetition, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life’s Way are worthwhile resources for contemporary interpreters of these texts. However, the most enduringly original part of Poole’s book is likely its second half. Contrary to habitual “postmodern” readings of Kierkegaard, which frequently present him as abandoning indirect communication after 1846 (and thus lose interest in him at this point), Poole devotes substantial attention to Kierkegaard’s “second authorship,” especially his Communion Discourses and Practice in Christianity. Poole argues that far from abandoning indirect communication in these texts, Kierkegaard undertakes even more potent and creative forms of it. Emphasizing Kierkegaard’s experience with the Corsair, Poole interprets Kierkegaard’s rhetorical strategy in his second authorship as an attempt to force the Christian theme of the imitation of Christ upon a putatively Christian world that was no longer able to receive it directly. As he explains, “Kierkegaard found that the sign was increasingly failing in its effect. There was not enough cultural resonance in that society for



3 4

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 10.

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his sign to be interpreted as a Christian sign, the sign of the imitatio Christi. Even after all that literature had been produced, the Copenhagen public refused to see the sign of contradiction and insisted on seeing the caricature of The Corsair.”5 Poole argues that Bertel Thorvaldsen’s famous statues of Christ and the twelve apostles in Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke may have provided a kind of subconscious inspiration for Kierkegaard’s new form of indirect communication in texts such as Practice in Christianity. As Poole notes, these sculptures implicitly embody paradox: their postures are tranquil even as they hold the instruments or marks of their martyrdoms in their hands. Poole sees the sculptures as prefiguring the notion of the “sign of contradiction” in Practice in Christianity. Poole’s analysis of the scenes from Kierkegaard’s deathbed as recorded by the friends and family who visited him is equally eye-opening. He examines in detail the narratives provided by Emil Boesen, Troels Lund, Henriette Lund, and Peter Christian Kierkegaard. Poole highlights their reactions of befuddlement, amazement, and frustration—interpreting these responses as evidence that Kierkegaard’s commitment to indirect communication was in force to the very end. Theologically motivated critics of Poole who resist his claims about the radical ambiguity of Kierkegaard’s writing may be surprised to find common ground with him at this point. Poole argues that Kierkegaard’s very death should be interpreted as “the perfectly managed performance, but written and existential, of the Imitatio Christi.”6 Carl S. Hughes



5 6

Ibid., p. 271. Ibid., p. 281.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cain, David, “An Appreciation of Roger Poole,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2005, pp. 471–82. Evans, C. Stephen, review in Religious Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 1994, pp. 531–2. Fendt, Gene, review in Textual Practice, vol. 9, no. 2, 1995, pp. 390–3. Garff, Joakim, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 174–9. Nun, Katalin and Jon Stewart, “Preface” in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms, ed. by Katalin Nun and Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2015 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 17), pp. xii–xvi. Pattison, George, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 30, 1994, pp. 17–20. Tietjen, Mark A., Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2013, pp. 17–32.

Hugh Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader, Sheffield and Oakville: Equinox Publishing 2011, xv + 168 pp.

The Joy of Kierkegaard pulls together a rich collection of essays that were written between 1992 and 2010 by biblical scholar and Kierkegaard expert Hugh Pyper. Nine of these eleven essays have been published elsewhere. However, not only is it helpful to have these essays conveniently in one place (which Pyper tells us was part of his intention in this volume),1 it also contains two previously unpublished pieces. Given Kierkegaard’s extensive engagement with Scripture, it is somewhat surprising that comparatively little has been written on Kierkegaard’s use and interpretation of Scripture. That having been said, immediately prior to the publication of this work, two volumes on Kierkegaard and the Bible (Old Testament and New Testament) came out with the Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources series.2 Jolita Pons’ Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible had been published 2004,3 and Timothy Polk’s The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith came out over a decade earlier in 1997.4 There is also the lesser-known work by L. Joseph Rosas III, Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard.5 The Joy of Kierkegaard is distinctive and breaks new ground, however, by providing Kierkegaard scholarship with a single-author text that explores Kierkegaard’s multifaceted engagement with the biblical texts. Pyper’s volume is striking in the way that it invites questions and stimulates conversation. There is no sense of an agenda or intention to impose a distinctively Pyperian reading of Kierkegaard. Rather, he is concerned to open up new avenues and questions for exploration and consideration. For the researcher who is unsure about whether Hugh Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader, Sheffield and Oakville: Equinox Publishing 2011, p. viii. 2 Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I, The Old Testament, Tome II, The New Testament, ed. by Jon Stewart and Lee C. Barrett, Aldershot: Ashgate 2010 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1). 3 Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible, New York: Fordham University Press 2004. 4 Timothy Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1997. 5 L. Joseph Rosas III, Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard, Nashville: Broadman & Holman 1994. 1

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there is anything left to write about in Kierkegaard studies, there are few books that provide more inspiration than this one. What kinds of avenues does Pyper explore? First, he looks at Kierkegaard’s creative engagement with biblical characters, including, for example, a profoundly insightful essay, “ ‘Sarah Is the Hero’: Kierkegaard’s Reading of Tobit in Fear and Trembling.” Here he considers Sarah as Kierkegaard’s heroine because of a “courage and love of God that allows her to ask for and accept help even when she is a damaged specimen.”6 Second, he engages with Kierkegaard’s relationship to the biblical writers, providing a fascinating discussion of the difference between the theological vision of Kierkegaard and that of the Apostle Paul. Third, he considers some of the key figures that Kierkegaard (and, in particular, his pseudonym Johannes Climacus) had in mind when developing his hermeneutic. For example, he provides a lucid and precise account of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel––a relationship that is crucial for understanding Kierkegaard’s theological understanding of the Scripture. He also has some highly pertinent things to say about Kierkegaard’s relationship to Luther, in particular, with respect to Kierkegaard’s condemnation of Luther’s disregard for the Epistle of James. While The Joy of Kierkegaard pulls its reader in a number of very different directions, the essays successfully manage to complement one another. This clearly reflects the fact that they have been written by a scholar who has maintained a remarkably consistent reading of Kierkegaard over two decades of research. Although they are self-contained essays, the degree to which each essay leads into the next is impressive, especially given the diversity of foci. On first glance, it is not immediately clear how the theme of joy unites the volume, nor how successful Pyper is in challenging Kierkegaard’s caricature as the gloomy or melancholy Dane. However, if the reader pays close attention to the theologically nuanced account of joy that Pyper puts forward in his presentation of Kierkegaard, it becomes evident how the theme of joy integrates the work. So what is the account of joy that holds these essays together? In the Preface, Pyper notes that the aim of this collection is to show “that the Bible is a key to understanding Kierkegaard and that what passionately concerned him was the task of showing how the most troubling, puzzling and offensive passages of the Bible bring a message of good news and of joy.”7 This joy is not an immediate and superficial joy. Rather, it is a joy that is found by acknowledging the despair of our capricious and spiritless lives, and becoming “caught up in a joy that is grounded in the eternal and changeless love of God.”8 As Pyper demonstrates, Christian joy is, for Kierkegaard, the manifestation of being passionately and rightly related to God. Christians rejoice when they live, by grace and choice, in alignment with the grain of God’s creative purposes––and this will require Christians to live and struggle against the grain of the world. The deeper understanding of joy that Pyper associates with Kierkegaard is made particularly evident in Pyper’s decision to conclude The Joy

Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard, p. 121. Ibid., p. vii. 8 Ibid., p. viii. 6 7

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of Kierkegaard with the moving essay, “Forgiving the Unforgivable: Kierkegaard, Derrida and the Scandal of Forgiveness.” Here Pyper considers the scandal of forgiveness and asks provocatively whether we can “forgive God for forgiving the unforgiveable.”9 He responds by affirming that it is the scandal of God’s love that forgives the unforgiveable, and, to accept God’s unconditional forgiveness of sins is to “forgive God…for loving us.”10 How does this relate to joy? For Kierkegaard, joy is found in response to the unfathomable love of God that enables right relationship with God. It is by God’s love that a person receives the strength to rejoice in the midst of this difficult world. It is not only a profound understanding of joy in Kierkegaard’s thought that The Joy of Kierkegaard offers its readers. Pyper also elucidates Kierkegaard’s concern to take Scripture seriously without disregarding its unsystematisable nature. He shows that, for Kierkegaard, there is an insurmountable uncertainty surrounding the hidden God that cannot be transgressed by simply working Scripture out. He also demonstrates that Kierkegaard viewed the Bible as a scandalous collection of writings, which required an earnest humility on the part of its devotees. Accordingly, Kierkegaard continually sought “to recover the sense of the Bible as scandal.”11 Pyper continues, “The very fact that its contents are disputed and disrupted is to him paradoxically part of its power.”12 Reading the Bible faithfully, for Kierkegaard, calls into question the minds, the beliefs, and the pride of its readers. It exposes the inadequacy of their possessive pursuit of understanding. By so doing, it generates “the scandal of uncertainty which,” Pyper notes, “is the condition of faith.”13 Why is it the condition of faith? Because this uncertainty calls readers to turn away from themselves––away from their own understandings––and turn prayerfully to God to enable them to know God in truth. For Kierkegaard, as Pyper makes clear, the other way to read Scripture is to read it with a willingness “to comprehend that one cannot comprehend.”14 This does not mean reading it with a fideism that blindly disregards its discrepancies. For Kierkegaard, Scripture is to be embraced in all its offensiveness, as something that does not bend to the wiles of a modern systematic reading. The faithful interpreter of Scripture is called to engage with the Bible in a way that is true to what it is. For Kierkegaard, this means that the Christian is called to read the Bible as a witness to the living God, as a medium through which God encounters us, transforms us, and draws us to himself. If, alternatively, a person reads Scripture as the locus of God’s Word, rather than a creaturely witness to God, he or she will all too easily end up assigning an objective certainty to their own subjective reading of Scripture. If this happens, they will proceed in a way that invariably confuses God’s message with their own message: proceeding with what Pyper describes as “a lack of faith that superstitiously clings to

Ibid., p. 155. Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 22. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 50. 14 SKS, 21, 68, NB:93 / JP 3, 3704. 9

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an impossible objectivity.”15 As a result, that person will end up idolizing their own subjective reading of the text. At the same time, Pyper also articulates the extent to which Kierkegaard took a more direct reading of Scripture seriously––a reading that enables Christians to know more concretely what it looks like to be a follower and thus to live a life that expresses a decisively Christian joy. In sum, Pyper takes us right to the heart of Kierkegaard’s appreciation of Scripture and also the cogency of his vision. Andrew Torrance

Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard, p. 24.

15

Reviews and Critical Discussions Black, Eric, review in Biblical Theology Bulletin: Journal of Bible and Culture, vol. 44, no. 2, 2014, pp. 109–10. Hunter, A.G., review in Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, vol. 37, no. 5, 2013, p. 150. Podmore, Simon, review in Expository Times, vol. 124, no. 6, 2013, pp. 306–7. Tollerton, David C., review in Relegere, vol. 2, no. 2, 2012, pp. 390–92. Williams, Will, review in Religious Studies Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 2012, p. 151.

Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997, xii + 267 pp.

In Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation, Murray Rae explores Kierkegaard’s and Johannes Climacus’ engagement with the question of how the truth is learned. Focusing on Philosophical Fragments, Rae considers the theological implications of the account of faith that Climacus advances as an alternative to the Socratic way of knowing: an alternative to a way of knowing which presupposes that the truth is inherent within the mind of the knower. In particular, Rae pays close attention to Kierkegaard’s understanding of what it means for a person to relate to the truth that is disclosed in and through the incarnation of God, in the historical person of Jesus Christ. As Rae sets out to show, conversion, for Kierkegaard, does not simply involve a person’s inward commitment to her own idea of Christianity, but involves a life of active relationship with the God who encounters us in human form. Before looking at some of the details of this book, it is important to acknowledge how sensitive Rae is to the specific nature of Philosophical Fragments. As Rae appreciates, the Fragments was written under the pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, whom Kierkegaard describes as being an outsider to the faith. Still further, it was written as a thought experiment that does not for a moment intend to make a direct case for Christianity. Yet, at the same time, Rae reads the Fragments as serving a purpose that aligns with Kierkegaard’s own theological convictions. For Rae, “the logic of conversion,” which Climacus spells out, “is a logic to which Kierkegaard himself assents.”1 Rae also takes seriously the fact that Climacus intentionally plagiarizes some of the key aspects of the Fragments from the Gospel. By so doing, he is able to show that Climacus has much to offer Christian theology, albeit from a perspective that does not, in and of itself, enable Climacus to endorse the Christian faith. In view of the logic of conversion that Climacus proposes, Rae makes it the task of his study “to contrast the counsel of Kierkegaard with the epistemological recommendations of both modernity and post-modernity.”2 In particular, he explores the ways that Kierkegaard challenges some of the theologies that were emerging Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997, p. x. 2 Ibid., p. ix. 1

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in Denmark and which had become subject “to the strictures of rationalism, romanticism, and historical-critical method.”3 He writes: Whether or not Christianity itself is true, Kierkegaard contended that modernity’s claim to have assimilated Christianity within its own “superior” world-view is undoubtedly false. It is false because the reality of the incarnate Son of God who comes among us as a lowly servant confounds our own pretensions to omniscience and resists assimilation to our preconceived notions of what is and is not possible for God. “No philosophy, no mythology, and no historical knowledge” says Climacus, can either replace or be the means to attaining the Truth which is disclosed in Jesus Christ.4

The first four chapters provide readers with a close reading of Climacus’ argument(s) in the Fragments with a clarity that makes this book an invaluable resource not least for those in the early stages of reading Kierkegaard. This is especially the case in Chapter 1, “A Project of Thought.” Drawing on Climacus’ logic, Rae shows how Kierkegaard offers a critique of those theologies that center on the “teaching” of Christianity rather than the divine “teacher” who becomes present with us in time. For Kierkegaard, an essentially Christian faith is not something that a person can arrive at for herself. Rather, faith must be received as a gift of grace in the moment of encountering the person of Jesus Christ. Chapter 2, “No mythology…,” looks at how the Fragments provides a basis for critiquing the Romantic accounts of Christianity that stress the priority of the imagination for coming to faith. This brings him to offer a critique of Feuerbach’s account of religion and Schleiermacher’s Romantic theology. The problem with such positions, for Kierkegaard, is that they disregard “the Christian contention that the actuality of Jesus Christ is the decisive condition of any salvific relation to the Truth.”5 For Climacus, “God’s appearance in the form of a servant is no mere imaginative construction but is the miracle itself.”6 And this miracle is decisive for becoming a Christian. In light of this, Rae explains that the Christian poet is incapable of personally communicating the essential truth of Christianity. The poet can, however, by proclaiming the Gospel, serve as a witness to Jesus Christ: as a witness to the one with whom faith is a possibility that it never could be for the creativity of a person’s own imagination. In Chapter 3, “No philosophy…,” Rae turns to Climacus’ emphasis on the absolute paradox as providing the grounds for a charge against metaphysics. He considers how a Climacean emphasis on the limits of human reason before God exposes the limits of philosophy when it comes to understanding the paradoxical relationship between God and humanity, evident in both faith and the Incarnation. At the same time, Rae defends Kierkegaard against the allegations that his account of the Christian faith is both fideistic and irrational. Chapter 4, “No historical knowledge…,” considers how the final two chapters of Fragments provide a line of reasoning that challenges the view that historical Ibid. Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 36. 6 Ibid. 3 4

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enquiry can provide access to the essential truth of Christianity. While affirming that it is a particular event in history that is decisive for the Christian faith, Rae maintains that, for Kierkegaard, “no amount of historical investigation in respect of that event produces any advantage for the person who seeks to attain faith.”7 In conclusion, he argues that, for Kierkegaard, historical enquiry cannot provide the basis for a faithful relationship with the God who cannot be reduced to a piece of human history. Positively, however, he affirms that a faithful engagement with history can give Christians an opportunity to “better understand the God who, in the form of a servant, is participant in human history.”8 Building on the first four chapters, Chapter 5 considers some of the epistemological implications of the account of transformation that Climacus proposes in the Fragments. In particular, Rae discusses what it means for a person to become a Christian by letting go of human reason in the event of an encounter with the God-Man. This leads him to examine the radical implications of interpreting faith as a response to the transcendent God that is discontinuous with our prior world-views. To do so, Rae compares the Kierkegaardian account of transformation with Wittgenstein’s Gestalt switches (a comparison previously made by M. Jamie Ferreira),9 Thomas Kuhn’s notion paradigm shifts, and the transition to a new plausibility structure (a comparison previously made by C. Stephen Evans).10 While doing so, he considers the limits of using each of these models as analogies for a Christian account of conversion that is enabled by the grace of God. While Rae argues that reason is unable to bring about Christian conversion, he denies that Kierkegaard views conversion as involving the abandonment of reason. Rather, because conversion involves the renewal of our minds, it also involves the redemption of reason. In many respects, Chapter 6, “Metanoia,” is the pinnacle of this work. Here Rae aligns the Kierkegaardian account of Christian conversion (Omvendelse) with a transition of metanoia or repentance: a transition enabled by the miracle of grace, which involves the recognition of sin and the transformation of our knowing. This chapter concludes by acknowledging the central role that the Holy Spirit plays in Kierkegaard’s understanding of conversion. Chapter 7 considers how a Christian account of conversion, based on Climacus’ alternative epistemology, provides the grounds for a critique of John Hick’s metaphorical Christology (driven by modernist concerns) and William Hamilton’s fictional Christology (driven by postmodernist concerns). His critical assessment is grounded on Kierkegaard’s view that the essential truth of Christianity is the entirely unique event of God’s self-disclosure in the incarnation. In Chapter 8, Rae explains how Climacus’ famous claim “subjectivity is truth” relates to Kierkegaard’s critique of immanent Christianity. That is, he assesses the role that human subjectivity plays in a person’s relationship to the essential truth Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 108. 9 M. Jamie Ferreira, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991, passim. 10 C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1983, pp. 264–5. 7 8

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of Christianity. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s conviction that we exist in untruth, Rae again stresses the need for a human transformation that is both epistemological and ontological and that delivers us into an existence in truth. This means becoming immersed in a knowledge of Jesus Christ and participating in the new freedom that Christ creates for us. For Kierkegaard, Rae concludes, this calls the Christian to a new responsibility and action, characterized by obedience and discipleship. Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation stands as one of the foremost expositions of Kierkegaard as a theologian.11 Moreover, it has proved pivotal in stressing the centrality of the objective reality of the incarnation in Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian faith. Despite Rae’s highly persuasive case, this emphasis has not been as widely accepted by Kierkegaard scholars as might be expected. Whatever the state of play, however, it would be difficult to fault Rae’s command of the argumentation that characterizes the Fragments, or, indeed, to question the significance of his analysis of Kierkegaard’s theological vision. Andrew Torrance

Rae’s appreciation for this side of Kierkegaard is advanced further in his superb book, Kierkegaard and Theology, London: T&T Clark 2010.

11

Reviews and Critical Discussions Farrow, Douglas, review in Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, vol. 41, no. 2, 1999, pp. 187–8. Hamilton, Christopher, review in Religious Studies, vol. 46, no. 3, 1999, pp. 106–8. Law, David, review in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2001, pp. 445–52. Loder, James Edwin, review in Theology Today, vol. 56, no. 4, 2000, pp. 638–41. Pattison, George, review in Modern Believing, vol. 39, no. 4, 1998, pp. 55–6. Walsh, Sylvia, review in International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 35, no. 1, 1999, pp. 191–3. Woelfel, James, review in Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 28, no. 2, 2001, pp. 181–91.

Joel D.S. Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love, New York and London: T&T Clark 2005, viii + 198 pp.

Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love, first published in 2005 by T&T Clark, originally grew out of the doctoral thesis of Joel Rasmussen, currently Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought at the University of Oxford. The dissertation was supervised by Professor David Lamberth at Harvard University during the early years of this century. In many ways the “spiritual successor” to Sylvia Walsh’s Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics1 and in some ways to George Pattison’s Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious,2 the book is, as advertised, a critical examination of Kierkegaard’s poetics in the vein of both of these important works. Those two books appeared about ten and fifteen years before it respectively and to a large extent provide the standard description of this field, the former being quoted by Rasmussen frequently, along with Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet by Louis Mackey.3 Rasmussen’s original contribution to the area, however, lies with his identification of the ways in which Kierkegaard’s poetics has what he calls a “Christomorphic” character, how it is contoured by Kierkegaard’s thinking on the Incarnation.4 Especially by use of the quotations “the god poetised himself in the likeness of a human being”5 and “My thought is that God is like a poet,”6 Rasmussen makes a persuasive case for Kierkegaard’s poetics being ultimately theological in character

Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically, University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press 1995. 2 George Pattison, Kierkegaard: the Aesthetic and the Religious: From the Magic of the Theatre to the Crucifixion of the Image, London: Macmillan 1992. 3 Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. 4 Joel D. S. Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard’s Poetics of Faith, Hope and Love, New York and London: T&T Clark 2005, p. 2. 5 Ibid., pp. 55–6. See SKS 4, 242 / PF, 36. 6 Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, pp. 76–7. See SKS 26, 266–7, NB33:24 / JP 2, 1445. 1

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and supremely influenced by his understanding of Christ.7 He further demonstrates how for Kierkegaard the Romantic ideal of “living poetically” becomes transfigured into “letting oneself be composed poetically by God” by use of a quotation to that effect from Kierkegaard’s Magister dissertation.8 As such, the book provides a theological reading of Kierkegaard, but one of its great strengths is that it does not present this as being mutually exclusive of a literary reading (or a philosophical reading), as Rasmussen refuses to cede ground to any kind of false literature/ theology dichotomy, reading Kierkegaard as a writer of theological literature.9 This literary-theological analysis is presented throughout five lucidly and elegantly written chapters, which undertake close readings of the German Romantic Friedrich von Schlegel, Kierkegaard’s mentor Poul Martin Møller, and key Kierkegaardian texts, in particular The Concept of Irony and Either/Or (Chapter 1), Philosophical Fragments (Chapters 2 and 3), Practice in Christianity (Chapters 3 and 4) and Works of Love (Chapter 5), as well as the journals and papers (Chapter 2, and throughout), in order to elucidate the inner structure of Kierkegaard’s poetics. In the process, Rasmussen provides specific insight into how Kierkegaard’s aesthetics both is influenced by and modifies Romantic aesthetics, as typified in particular by Schlegel, and traditionalist aesthetics, as typified in particular by Møller. With regards to these, it is convincingly shown how in Kierkegaard’s aesthetics the person of Christ embodies a poetic reconciliation of the imagined and the actual, being God’s concrete self-expression in his own created world, that is achieved by neither of the alternative approaches. Where Romantic aesthetics escapes into infinite irony, in the end alienating itself from the finite world, Kierkegaard wishes for poetics to remain grounded in the realm of the actual. Rasmussen demonstrates this through an extended analysis of his treatment of Schlegel’s Lucinde in The Concept of Irony and his satirizing of Romanticism in Either/Or. On the other hand, where Møller sees human art as providing a reconciliation of the infinite and finite that imaginatively anticipates eschatological salvation, Rasmussen demonstrates how Kierkegaard, in the wake of his radical view of human sin, modifies this theory to conclude that only divine art is properly able to achieve this reconciliation, since in Christ the infinite poet (God) actually enters into his own finite poem. It is then shown how Kierkegaard’s figuration of Christ foregoes any merely intellectualistic relationship to such a paradoxical event, and that in turn the human poet’s mimetic task now becomes to imitate Christ in his or her own life and to help others to do the same by witnessing to Christ. Because Kierkegaard does not claim to do either of these things completely, being neither an ideal disciple nor a fully-fledged truthwitness, it is explained that although he gets beyond Romantic irony, he does not quite arrive at apostolic martyrdom, and so he ends up “between irony and witness.” As a fluent speaker of Danish, and also well versed in the classical and German Romantic aesthetic traditions, Rasmussen carries out his study deftly, and the book has received unanimously favorable reviews, including from Michael Strawser in Also important is that the divine poet “fulfils” creation “by introducing himself into his work” (Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, p. 3); SKS 22, 177, NB12:63 / JP 2, 1391. 8 Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, p. 26, quoting SKS 1, 316 / CI, 280–1. 9 Ibid., pp. 2–3. 7

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Religion and Literature, Myron Bradley Penner in the Journal of Religion, Janne Kylliäinen in the Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter and Vincent Lloyd in the Heythrop Journal. The book is also mentioned briefly in K. Brian Söderquist’s survey of the English language reception of The Concept of Irony in the 2009 edition of Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook. It is surprising therefore that Rasmussen’s work has not garnered more attention in Anglophone Kierkegaard scholarship, perhaps due to its still relatively recent publication. What is more, none of its reviewers thus far has noted a number of crucial areas where Rasmussen makes significant and unique innovations, as far as I am aware: for example, adopting a hermeneutical posture more akin to the phenomenological approach of Paul Ricoeur, whom he draws upon at key points,10 than to the post-structuralism of Barthes or Derrida; in his opening pages Rasmussen elects to challenge the influential Roger Poole on a number of factual points (correctly) to do with the history of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity.11 It is a shame that Poole died before he was able to re-join Rasmussen in amicable debate on these matters. Another unique perception that Rasmussen offers has to do with the etymology of Kierkegaard’s well-known term, “absurd.” Observing how in the original Latin, which Kierkegaard knew and taught, the term “ab-surd” literally means “from deafness” or “from silence,” Rasmussen demonstrates the ways in which it functions in Philosophical Fragments as a kind of cloaked audial metaphor, connecting it to other tropes such as the “acoustical illusion” of the absolute paradox and the corresponding “optical illusion” of the incarnation in Practice in Christianity.12 Lastly, in Chapter 5 Rasmussen offers a helpful and innovative typology of the term “poet” in Kierkegaard, explicating how when he uses the word at any time he might be referring to one of at least three kinds of “poet”: the secular-Romantic poet, the religious poet (the category in which Kierkegaard locates himself), and the Divine Poet.13 This typology frames an assessment of Kierkegaard as a “religious poet” who in the final analysis exhibits a Christomorphic poetics of faith, hope, and love that situates him “between irony and witness,” with which Rasmussen concludes his work. Points of criticism to be made about Between Irony and Witness are few and minor. As a thematic rather than a chronological study, it does range around somewhat and marry up different elements in Kierkegaard in order to reconstruct his general aesthetic theory by drawing on a variety of sources, for example in its pairing of the quotations from the 1844 text Philosophical Fragments and the 1854 journals mentioned above. However, Rasmussen is always careful to heed Kierkegaard’s request in the appendix to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that commentators quote his pseudonyms using their proper names, and when reaching across time to make his argument he is careful to explain how Kierkegaard’s thought has developed in the respective ensuing period. So, in the case of the 1854 journal entry, Rasmussen shows how it represents the climax of Kierkegaard’s theopoetic meditations by taking the care to quote a selection of other similar journal entries 12 13 10 11

Ibid., pp. 8–9; p. 101; p. 103; pp. 141–2. Ibid., pp. 5–9, especially p. 7. Ibid., pp. 93–5. Ibid., pp. 150–1.

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between it and the time of Philosophical Fragments.14 It must be noted as well that Between Irony and Witness does not make extensive use of texts such as From the Papers of One Still Living, the various upbuilding discourses, the unpublished journal lectures on communication or A Literary Review, which could all be seen as contributing to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic theory, although perhaps this is because they have been handled comprehensively elsewhere.15 Finally, Strawser and Lloyd make the fair point that there is plenty of “love” in Rasmussen’s study but not so much of the eponymous “faith” and “hope.”16 However, this is probably due to a lack in Kierkegaard rather than Rasmussen, since “faith, hope and love” is Kierkegaard’s own religious-poetic formulation in Works of Love (following Paul), and yet he has much more to say about love than faith or hope there himself. Nevertheless, these are indeed minor points, and on the strength of the insights listed above and from the fact that the work is not as well known as it should be, I think it is fair to say that Between Irony and Witness is something of an un- or at least under-discovered gem in the sands of Kierkegaard scholarship, particularly in the area of studies of Kierkegaard’s aesthetics. Luke Tarassenko

Ibid., p. 79; p. 80; p. 83; p. 172. In the works mentioned above, for example, as well as in George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology, London: Routledge 2002. 16 Michael Strawser, review in Religion and Literature, vol. 39, no. 1, 2007, pp. 133–4; Vincent Lloyd, review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2010, p. 157. 14 15

Reviews and Critical Discussions Kylliäinen, Janne, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 50, 2006, pp. 25–6. Lloyd, Vincent, review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2010, pp. 156–7. Penner, Myron B., review in Journal of Religion, vol. 87, no. 2, 2007 pp. 289–91. Söderquist, K. Brian, “A Short Story: The English Language Reception of On the Concept of Irony,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2009, p. 502. Strawser, Michael, review in Religion and Literature, vol. 39, no. 1, 2007, pp. 133–6.

Gregory L. Reece, Irony and Religious Belief, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology, vol. 5), 177 pp.

Gregory L. Reece’s Irony and Religious Belief is an analysis of irony in Kierkegaard and the American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007). This work was a Ph.D. dissertation in Religious Studies at the Claremont Graduate University in California. The author takes as his point of departure the insight that both Kierkegaard and Rorty saw in irony much more than a simple rhetorical tool. Instead, irony can be conceived as a philosophical position that involves a rejection of any final truths or absolutes. But more than this, it can also transcend philosophy and be a life practice. The work is critical of both the early Kierkegaard’s concept of irony as necessarily ending in infinite, absolute negativity, and Rorty’s concept as leading to doubts and lack of stability. The author thus criticizes both Kierkegaard’s and Rorty’s understanding of ironic philosophy and its relation to an ironic life. But yet this work attempts a defense of a philosophical concept of irony that does not lead to the unfortunate consequences that it seems to in these two authors. The first two chapters treat this concept in Kierkegaard’s writings, and this is clearly the most interesting part of the work for Kierkegaard scholars. For this reason these chapters will be the main focus here. Chapters 3–6 treat, among other things, Rorty’s concept of irony and specifically his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.1 The concluding Chapter 7 is concerned with the question of the relation of irony to religious life. Chapter 1 explores Kierkegaard’s book, The Concept of Irony. Here an account is given of Kierkegaard’s hero of irony, Socrates. The author then turns his attention to Kierkegaard’s analysis of Romantic irony in the second part of that book. The treatment given of these topics is quite superficial. The author refers to Friedrich von Schlegel’s discussion of irony in his “Critical Aphorisms,” from The Lyceum, but the analysis does little more than scratch the surface.2 Moreover, Schlegel’s aphorisms are referred to only in an English translation with no reference to the German editions. In this context the author also dutifully discusses Hegel’s comments on

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. 2 Gregory L. Reece, Irony and Religious Belief, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002 (­Religion in Philosophy and Theology, vol. 5), pp. 8–9. 1

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irony from the Lectures on Aesthetics,3 but the analysis there is not much better than the previous one. Despite these attempts to set the stage for Kierkegaard’s account by a brief look at his sources, the real analysis is almost entirely text-immanent. There is almost no mention of any secondary literature on The Concept of Irony, and the discussion amounts to a kind of paraphrase of the main lines of the primary text. At the end of the chapter Kierkegaard’s notion of controlled irony is discussed. It is argued that controlled irony is Kierkegaard’s proposal for a genuine poetic-religious life. The author concludes that this proposal still leaves the reader hanging since it is not clear how to live an ironic life without negating everything.4 Here again there is no mention or discussion of the rich secondary literature on the complex concept of controlled irony. The author rightly claims that the basic issues explored in The Concept of Irony continue to be developed in the rest of the authorship.5 So Chapter 2 purports to continue this analysis and treat the notion of irony in Kierkegaard’s other works. But, despite the author’s claim, the “other works” are only the Philosophical Fragments, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The Point of View for My Work as an Author. While these are, of course, important works, there is much more that could be said about irony in other texts. An attempt is made to connect irony with a number of other well-known Kierkegaardian concepts such as subjectivity, the absurd, the leap, the single individual, and indirect communication. According to the author, these concepts are Kierkegaard’s attempt to develop an answer to the question that we were left with at the end of The Concept of Irony: how can one live an authentic life in irony without collapsing into nihilism?6 The author sees Kierkegaard as making a radical shift in his thinking. While the early Kierkegaard was in danger of using irony as absolute negativity and thus of falling victim to the problems of the Romantics, the later Kierkegaard made use of irony in a controlled way to develop different concepts in the service of Christianity. A brief analysis is also given of elements of irony in Kierkegaard’s life based on the account given in The Point of View for My Work as an Author.7 The author is right to see the importance of Socrates for Kierkegaard as a personal model. Moreover, he is correct in seeing the importance of irony for the entire authorship and not just for the dissertation. While the author has identified a potentially rich and interesting topic, unfortunately it is not explored with the depth that would be required to make an original contribution to the research literature. While what is actually written is not decidedly wrong, the work is very superficial. There are no references to a single work in Danish. The author is thus not able to work with Kierkegaard’s texts in the original or to profit from the new philological and commentary work done on The Concept of Irony in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. No mention is made of the contemporary Danish discussion about irony that Kierkegaard was responding to. Similarly, the author seems also to be ignorant of German, and thus there is no 5 6 7 3 4

Ibid., pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., pp. 42–3. Ibid., pp. 44–8.

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satisfying account of the notion of irony in Friedrich von Schlegel or the school of German Romanticism, which is, of course, crucial for Kierkegaard. In addition, the author seems to ignore even the standard Anglophone secondary literature on Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony. On all these points this work is substantially surpassed by Brian Soderquist’s The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony.”8 Finally, there is no account or even recognition of the fact that Kierkegaard’s notion of irony has been made a major theme in post-modern studies on his thought. This must be regarded as a serious shortcoming given the fact that Rorty’s notion of irony in large part comes from just this tradition. While the general discussion of irony, particularly in Rorty, can at times be interesting, this book cannot be regarded as a novel contribution to an understanding of Kierkegaard’s use of this concept. In this connection this work is vastly surpassed by Brad Frazier’s Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections.9 The book Irony and Religious Belief might be of some minimal use for absolute beginners, but for anyone who has nourished a deeper interest in Kierkegaard’s notion of irony, it will be a disappointment. Due to the subsequent, more substantial studies on the issues treated in this work like the ones by Soderquist and Frazier, this book did not make any real impact on the research literature. Jon Stewart

K. Brian Soderquist, The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony,” Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 1). 9 Brad Frazier, Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment: Philosophical and Theological Connections, New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2006. See also J. Aaron Simmons, “Richard Rorty: Kierkegaard in the Context of Neo-Pragmatism,” in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy, Tome III, Anglophone Philosophy, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2012 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 11), pp. 177–201. 8

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 793.

Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1986, vii + 144 pp.

Robert C. Roberts’ Faith, Reason, and History was published in 1986 by Mercer University Press. At the time of its publication, Roberts was a professor of philosophy and psychological studies at Wheaton College. Roberts is currently the Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University. He has authored a number of articles on Kierkegaard including “Existence, Emotion and Character: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard”1 in the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard. In Faith, Reason and History, the Introduction serves as both a statement of methods and a disclaimer. The disclaimer can be found in the first sentence: “This book is an experiment in reading Kierkegaard. I say ‘in reading Kierkegaard,’ rather than ‘in Kierkegaard scholarship,’ because Kierkegaard intended his book to be read in a sense different from that in which great books like his are consumed in the course of doing scholarship on them.”2 According to Roberts, traditional Kierkegaard scholarship either takes as its object of study Kierkegaard’s thought or attempts to critique or summarize the text. Instead, Roberts claims to “read Kierkegaard as he intended to be read…primitively.”3 Roberts’ book is not about Philosophical Fragments; instead, Roberts’ book is a rethinking of Fragments. Roberts’ book is, so to speak, a walking-through of the author’s own thoughts, as they occurred to him, while reading Fragments. Roberts offers an additional disclaimer: “sometimes when I ascribe to its author one view or another, I shall bracket my statement with an explicit ‘possibly.’ In reality even when I speak, for stylistic felicity, in the categorical mood, my reading should be bracketed by this ‘only possibly.’ ”4 Although Roberts Robert C. Roberts, “Existence, Emotion and Character: Classical Themes in Kierkegaard,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 177–206. 2 Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s “Philosophical Fragments,” Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1986, p. 1. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., p. 3. 1

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repeats his disclaimer often, each time he offers a particular interpretation of the text he offers evidence for that interpretation. In defense of his approach, Roberts cites a later text by the pseudonym AntiClimacus on the topic of indirect communication: [Indirect communication] can be produced by the art of reduplicating the communication. This art consists in reducing oneself, the communicator, to nobody, something purely objective, and then incessantly composing qualitative opposites into a unity. This is what some of the pseudonyms are accustomed to call “double reflection.” An example of such indirect communication is, so to compose jest and earnest that the composition is a dialectical knot—and with this to be nobody. If anyone is to profit by this sort of communication, he must himself undo the knot for himself.5

Roberts believes that Philosophical Fragments is an attempt at indirect communi­ cation. He claims that “Fragments is such a ‘dialectical knot,’ a tangled composition of jest and earnest,” and so he takes “cognizance of the dissonances in the work” and attempts to “resolve them.”6 In order to determine which parts of the text are in jest, and which are in earnest, Roberts makes reference to textual clues and looks at “whether what is said stands up to critical scrutiny.” He then relegates anything that does not stand up to scrutiny “to the jest pile.”7 Beyond sorting out the jest from the serious bits, Roberts aims to “explain in unpedantic detail what [the author of Fragments] does not explain” in order to help the reader “over some of the difficult places.”8 The organizing principle behind the book is the result of precisely what the book is: Roberts’ text is a walking-through of his own thoughts and a walking-through of Fragments; it follows Fragments from beginning to end. As a result, Roberts’ book is a useful tool for both the seasoned Kierkegaardian and the beginner alike. Roberts brings to the surface and explains in detail each of Climacus’ arguments and offers at least one point of view as to their meaning and purpose. As a reading, or a walking-through, of Fragments, Roberts’ book is an analytic one, helping the reader to see with analytic clarity through the spoof and irony in which many of Climacus’ arguments are couched. Following the publication of Roberts’ book, both C. Stephen Evans and Craig Q. Hinkson reviewed the work and drew very different conclusions. While Evans’ praised the text as bringing “what might be termed the analytic approach (using the term in a broad sense) to the study of Kierkegaard to a new standard,”9 Craig Q. Hinkson takes a less favorable view of the text. This difference of opinions is likely owing to the different views Hinkson and Evans take towards Fragments. While Hinkson seems to view Climacus as an irrationalist, Evans takes the opposite stance.

5 Roberts cites Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse Which ‘Accompanied’ It, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1944, p. 132. This corresponds to SKS 12, 137 / PC, 133. 6 Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History, p. 6. 7 Ibid., p. 7. 8 Ibid., p. 4. 9 C. Stephen Evans, review in Faith and Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 3, 1988, p. 330.

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In his 1988 review of the text, C. Stephen Evans commented that he knew “of no other book dealing with the Johannes Climacus pseudonym section of the Kierkegaardian authorship which [did] so much to bring Kierkegaard into a living relationship with contemporary debates in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and theology.”10 In his review, Evans gets it right: Roberts’ treatment of the first chapter of Fragments that contrasts Christian and Socratic forms of knowledge and teaching is incredibly clear and instructive as is his treatment of the discussion of faith and history in “The Situation of the Contemporary Follower” and “The Follower at Second Hand.” Although Evans critiques Roberts’ treatment of the “Interlude” as being “uncharitable” in its reconstruction of Climacus’ own arguments, it is in this section that some of Roberts’ reconstructions are at their clearest. For example, Roberts provides an insightful analysis of Climacus’ claim that in the world “causes are misleading in that the coming into existence appears to be necessary; the truth about them is that they, as having themselves come into existence, definitively point back to a freely acting cause…even an inference from natural law is not evidence of the necessity of any coming into existence.”11 Roberts correctly understands Climacus to be making the point that “even if we ascribed causal necessity to everything inside nature, we would only have the necessity of this or that event relative to other events inside nature…still every event is non-necessary in the sense that God could have actualized other creations—other chains of events—than the one he did actualize.”12 While Roberts and Climacus identify God as the agent behind the bringing into being of the entire natural order, it is an important insight that the existence of this particular natural order, or “chain of events,” is in need of explanation. Since that explanation cannot come from within that order, the relationship of events within the natural world can never rise above “contingent necessity.”13 While Evans praises Roberts’ “extended discussion of three theologians: Schleiermacher, Bultmann, and John B. Cobb” as an illustration of “the toughness and relevance of Kierkegaard’s work,”14 Roberts’ discussion is also a diversion from what is an otherwise continuous logical structure in the text. If this topic is of special interest to the reader it may be as Evans describes it, “worth the price of the [entire] book.”15 However, for the reader to whom this is not a concern, it may be a section best saved for later. In contrast to Evans’ praise of Faith, Reason, and History, Craig Q. Hinkson’s 1988 review in the Journal of Religion takes a less favorable stance. Hinkson dismisses Roberts as a theologian who “has not passed through that ‘fire brook’ that every theologian must if his or her theology is to transcend anthropology.”16 Here Hinkson misses the point: Roberts’ reading of Fragments is not a primarily Ibid. Roberts cites the Hong translation of Philosophical Fragments, that is, PF, 75 ­(corresponding to SKS 4, 275). 12 Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History, p. 107. 13 Ibid. 14 Evans, review in Faith and Philosophy, p. 331. 15 Ibid. 16 Craig Q. Hinkson, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 68, no. 4, 1988, p. 597. 10 11

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theological one, it is philosophical. Hinkson’s warning that “the reader must beware of the rationalizing tendencies of this author”17 is entirely unnecessary. Any reader, upon opening up Roberts’ book, will, even if skipping the Introduction, quickly recognize the text’s analytic bent. Hinkson’s negative evaluation of the book is the result of his refusal to read it on its own terms. Hinkson does offer a substantive criticism of Roberts’ “rejection of ‘absolute unlikeness’ as a qualification of divinity.”18 Hinkson’s critique suggests that he views Climacus as an irrationalist, a possibility driven home by his claim that Climacus really does “intend a logical contradiction as the object of faith.”19 This is in contrast to Evans who gives “special applause” to Roberts’ “treatment of…the absolute paradox.”20 These differing views of Roberts’ text reflect the differing views their authors have of Fragments; Hinkson seems to view Climacus as an irrationalist, while Evans falls into a distinctly different camp. Consider the claim that Evans makes in his book Passionate Reason: “to interpret Climacus’ paradox as a logical contradiction is to give in to [the] temptation” to think of “reason as simply thinking in accordance with the laws of logic,” as opposed to what it really is, “the concrete thinking of human beings, shaped as it is by our basic beliefs and attitudes.”21 On the one hand, if one views Climacus as an irrationalist towards faith, then Roberts’ text, as an analytic reading of Fragments, will sound like a fool’s errand. On the other hand, Roberts’ presentation of the thoughts that “occurred to one man’s mind as he read [Philosophical Fragments]”22 serves as a compelling reason to think that there is a real logic behind much of Climacus’ work. Roberts makes what appear to be generally correct interpretations of Climacus’ arguments, and, where there are opportunities for interpretation, Roberts gives clear reasons for accepting his particular point of view. Throughout, Roberts stays true to the disclaimer and openly admits “I have no firm conviction how seriously Climacus intends his arguments; I shall simply adjudicate them according to the light that is in me.”23 Robert M. Riordan

Ibid. Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Evans, review in Faith and Philosophy, p. 332. 21 C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1992, p. 118. 22 Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History, p. 144. 23 Ibid., p. 100. 17 18

Reviews and Critical Discussions Connell, George, “A Review of Two Recent Commentaries on Philosophical Fragments,” Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 28, 1993, pp. 6–12. Donnely, John, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 17, 1987, pp. 5–7. Evans, C. Stephen, review in Faith and Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 3, 1988, pp. 330–2. Hinkson, Craig Q., review in Journal of Religion, vol. 68, no. 4, 1988, p. 597. Lübcke, Poul, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991, pp. 167–70. Nason, Shannon, “Contingency, Necessity, and Causation in Kierkegaard’s Theory of Change,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1, 2012, pp. 141–62. Patios, Georgios, “Kierkegaard’s Concept of History,” Prolegomena: časopis za filozofiju, vol. 13, no. 1, 2014, pp. 85–106.

Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993, xiv + 175 pp.

Anthony Rudd’s Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (henceforth Kierkegaard and the Limits) was published in 1993 by Clarendon Press. Despite its relatively small size, Rudd’s book can be said to mark something of a milestone in Kierkegaard scholarship. For Kierkegaard and the Limits constitutes one of the first, and indeed still one of the best, attempts to make the case that Kierkegaard can be read not just as a philosopher but also as a thinker with serious and illuminating things to say to contemporary analytic philosophy. As Rudd states in the Preface: One aim of this book is to show analytical philosophers that Kierkegaard is relevant to their concerns, and offers a fertile source of ideas which can be applied to contemporary debates. I hope it will also be of interest to students of Kierkegaard to see, rather than another work of historical scholarship, an attempt to make philosophical use of his ideas.1

In outlining the philosophical application of Kierkegaard’s ideas, Rudd leads the reader through four thematically organized chapters, exploring topics such as Kierkegaard’s conception of existence, his views about skepticism, the truth is subjectivity thesis, ethics, personal identity, and the virtues. In this Rudd seeks to bring Kierkegaard into discussion with such contemporary thinkers as Alasdair MacIntyre, Derek Parfit, Bernard Williams, and Philippa Foot. In these respects Kierkegaard and the Limits is perhaps unique in both the depth and scope of the case it seeks to make for Kierkegaard’s contribution to contemporary analytic philosophy. In the first chapter, “Disengagement,” Rudd suggests that many of the problems of contemporary philosophy arise as a result of what he terms a “disengaged view,” or ideal.2 This, we are told, “is the outlook that is obtained at the end of a process of self-transcendence, of abstraction from what is particular and peculiar about one’s own standpoint.”3 Chapter 1 offers a brief philosophical history of this ideal; and

Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993, p. vii. 2 Ibid., p. 1. 3 Ibid. 1

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traces it through political, ethical, metaphysical, and theological dimensions. In this Rudd suggests that this ideal of disengagement, or abstraction, informs the outlooks of modern scientism and materialism.4 Against this background, Chapter 1 goes on to make the case that Kierkegaard’s thought can answer to this predicament. In making the case for the relevance of Kierkegaard in this respect, Rudd provides a brief sketch of Kierkegaard’s thought in his historical context. Kierkegaard is said to have inherited “Hegel’s concern to find a synthesis in which our rootedness and our capacity for disengagement could be reconciled.”5 We are further told that Kierkegaard rejected Hegel’s own solution to this problem as “a purely abstract one, which failed to connect with reality.”6 For Kierkegaard, by contrast, “the synthesis is to be brought about not on the level of world history, through the transformation of society, but as a task for each individual to achieve for himself, within himself.”7 This synthesis, as Rudd goes onto outline, concerns the relationship of each individual to God, and constitutes a form of “individualism.”8 The subject of Chapter 2 is Kierkegaard’s epistemological views: his alleged critique of Hegelian metaphysics, views on skepticism, and the so-called truth is subjectivity thesis. At the beginning of the chapter, Rudd provides the following useful overview of his argument: Kierkegaard’s conclusion is that the purely disengaged approach to knowledge can eventually lead only to skepticism…which can only be broken by an act of will, a refusal to accept the validity of the disengaged stance. This is true of all claims to substantive…knowledge, but it is particularly important in the case of ethical-religious knowledge, where the stance of disengagement is wholly out of place.9

Beginning with “Kierkegaard’s Polemic against Hegel’s ‘System,’ ” in which “Kierkegaard’s overriding aim is to criticize the ideal of disengagement as it applies to the cognitive realm,” Rudd goes on to examine Kierkegaard’s epistemological views in detail.10 The above considerations set the background for Chapter 3, which begins by outlining Kierkegaard’s ethical argument (which Rudd finds in the views of the Judge in Either/Or, Part Two). Rudd sketches and contextualizes the Judge’s argument before offering a “reconstruction” of it, in which he brings it into relation to issues of selfhood and personal identity (and a discussion of Parfit and Williams).11 Beginning from Kierkegaard’s view that “[t]he ethical task is to integrate the various aspects of human existence into a stable and coherent personality,” Rudd argues that commitments and projects are necessary for achieving an integrated personality, or

Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 23. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., pp. 24–5. 9 Ibid., p. 27. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 81. 4 5

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sense of self, over the course of time.12 Engaging in projects, Rudd further argues, demands “the virtues of courage, self-control…practical wisdom, and…honest perception.”13 In this way, Rudd claims that the “need to cultivate the virtues derives from the need to engage in projects, and this derives from the need to live a coherent and meaningful life.”14 Chapter 4, the final chapter, examines what could provide a basis or justification for the above view, and argues that in order to find such a justification we are forced to move beyond the limits of the ethical to religious premises.15 Rudd’s strategy in this regard is to “show, again by a sympathetic reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s arguments, that there is a rationale for religious commitment which is analogous to, and, indeed, an extension of, the rationale for ethical commitment which I have outlined.”16 In terms of this rational: If…we are to achieve that ultimate coherence and integration of our lives, the desire for which Kierkegaard posits as the force driving us on through the spheres of existence, we must turn from spiritual self-sufficiency in order to relate ourselves to God. Only in this relation can the disharmony in our existence finally be resolved.17

Put otherwise, “[o]nly by turning our backs on the dream of human autonomy and self-sufficiency…can we find fulfillment.”18 In this way, if they are to receive any ultimate justification, Rudd holds Kierkegaard’s ethical views to ultimately ground out in a leap of faith.19 Methodologically Kierkegaard and the Limits takes a presupposition and approach already present in the work of commentators such as C. Stephen Evans, Alastair Hannay, and M. Jamie Ferreira (namely, that Kierkegaard can be read as a philosopher with important things to say to contemporary philosophy), and provides a lucid and concise formulation of it. What was, and continues to be, exciting about Rudd’s book is his diagnosis of both the depth and pervasion of the problem to which Kierkegaard’s work is held to answer, and the breadth of work in contemporary philosophy to which he purports to bring Kierkegaard into relation. In this respect Rudd’s book captured the imagination of those scholars attempting to read Kierkegaard as a philosopher, and Kierkegaard and the Limits continues to occupy a canonical place in this genre. As for critical comment, several of the moves which serve to set up the project of Rudd’s book appear dubious in the light of more recent historical scholarship. Take, for instance, the opening methodological move already quoted, in which Rudd hopes that it will “be of interest to students of Kierkegaard to see, rather than another

Ibid., p. 75. Ibid., p. 108. 14 Ibid., p. 109. 15 Ibid., p. 116. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., p. 140. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 139. 12 13

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work of historical scholarship, an attempt to make philosophical use of his ideas.”20 Yet it is unclear to which historical books Rudd is referring. For while works on Kierkegaard at this time typically sought to place him in a general historical context, precisely what was (and generally continues to be) missing from such scholarship was an understanding of Kierkegaard in his more immediate historical context (specifically, that surrounding the reception of Hegel’s thought in Denmark, and the debates to which it gave rise amongst Kierkegaard’s contemporaries). In this respect it is further interesting to consider the way in which Kierkegaard and the Limits portrays Kierkegaard’s work vis-à-vis Hegel. For instance, as already noted, in the brief historical section we are told that Kierkegaard shared Hegel’s problem of synthesizing our rootedness and disengagement. Rudd further characterizes Kierkegaard as agreeing with Hegel as to what would count as a solution to this problem (that is, that it will amount to a synthesis), even if Kierkegaard is said to disagree with the precise form of Hegel’s answer to the problem.21 Yet four pages later Hegel is simply characterized as representative of the “ideal of disengagement,” and Kierkegaard’s work pitched against it. This sleight of hand enables Rudd to begin playing on a well-entrenched caricature of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel (presumably with the corollary that Hegel is committing a similar philosophical error to contemporary advocates of scientism and materialism), which in turn can be said to be used to legitimize the (mis)interpretation of Kierkegaard he seeks to bring into dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy. The problem is that the approach of Kierkegaard and the Limits to the debate between Kierkegaard and Hegel, or Kierkegaard and the Hegelianism of his contemporaries, in terms of a distinction between “abstraction” and “rootedness,” largely misses the point. For at issue in this debate was the application of a Hegelian logic of mediation to Christian doctrine, and the consequences of that for human nature. For if mediation could be applied to Christianity, then human beings could make their theological natures intelligible to themselves in terms of human reason alone (and as such are not dependent upon coming into a relation of faith and grace to a transcendent God to reveal that nature to them). At issue was the heresy of Pelagianism, widely leveled against Hegelianism at the time, that human beings can make sense of themselves on the basis of their own capacities alone, and without the help of a transcendent God.22 Understood in this context Kierkegaard seeks to make a space for Christianity against philosophical reason; to make a stand against those with Hegelian and Pelagian presuppositions. Rudd begins his interpretation of Kierkegaard from the premises that human beings desire “to live a coherent and meaningful life,” and that the human task is to “integrate the various aspects of human existence into a stable and coherent personality.”23 The first of these assumptions may well be correct, but we have to tread very carefully with respect to the second. For while human beings Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., p. 23. 22 See Jon Stewart, A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, Tome II, The Martensen Period: 1837–1842, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2007, p. 379. 23 Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, p. 109. 20 21

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might desire a coherent conception of their natures, the idea that this is possible for them is not the claim that Kierkegaard is arguing for, but expresses the very Pelagianism he is concerned to take a stand against. Kierkegaard’s concern is not that human beings can make themselves intelligible to themselves, but precisely to point out that (in the wake of revelation and a nature corrupted by sin) they are unable to do this (and so are dependent upon God). The above does not, of course, negate Rudd’s conclusion that (for Kierkegaard) “[o]nly by turning our backs on the dream of human autonomy and self-sufficiency… can we find fulfillment.”24 Yet, with respect to the context of Kierkegaard’s work, we did not need the argument of Kierkegaard and the Limits to come to this conclusion, but simply a little more attention to historical detail. Indeed, that attention renders Rudd’s conclusion less significant and interesting. For, in retrospect, Kierkegaard and the Limits constructs a complex and prolix philosophical argument to report as news what must simply be regarded as a historical detail of Kierkegaard’s intellectual and theological context. The irony is that while he claims to go beyond simple historical interpretation in bringing Kierkegaard into relationship with contemporary analytic philosophy, it is precisely Rudd’s inattention to history which undermines the viability of his own interpretation. There is much more to Rudd’s book than can be captured by a review of it. Moreover, the comments that I have offered in the light of more recent historical scholarship should not detract from the fact that Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical is one of the best books about Kierkegaard ever written. For these reasons, this book is required reading for any serious student of Kierkegaard. Jamie Turnbull



24

Ibid., p. 140.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Evans, C. Stephen, review in Philosophical Review, vol. 104, no. 4, 1995, pp. 592–4. Hall, Ronald L., review in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 37, no. 1, 1995, pp. 57–9. Hare, John E., review in Studies in Christian Ethics, vol. 8, no. 1, 1995, pp. 138–43. Khan, Abrahim H., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 49, no. 1, 1995, pp. 161–4. Lacoste, Jean-Yves, review in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 46, no. 2, 1995, pp. 786–8. Perkins, Robert L., review in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 62, 1994, pp. 208–11. Stringer, Celia J. M., review in Religious Studies, vol. 30, 1994, pp. 533–4. Watkin, Julia M., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 32, 1995, pp. 10–11.

Bartholomew Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2014, xxi + 277 pp.

Bartholomew Ryan’s volume is part of a well-established and vigorous line of research which objects to the stereotypical image of Kierkegaard as the philosopher of the secluded, acosmic self, forever mired in guilt, anxiety, despair, doubt, religious terror, and a ceaseless introspective self-becoming. Thematically, the book tackles several problems in philosophical psychology, political theory, twentiethcentury intellectual history, and the philosophy of culture. Its primary sources are Kierkegaard’s so-called 1848 works—A Literary Review of Two Ages, Christian Discourses, the “Crisis” essay, and The Point of View—while sparse, yet pertinent, references are made to the entire corpus. Ryan’s project hinges on two interconnected theses that render Kierkegaard’s political views not only consistent but also unsettlingly prescient. The first argument states that far from being “a conservative, bourgeois, isolated egotist supporting the monarchy and bemoaning the rise of democracy,” Kierkegaard advanced “a radical reappraisal of the individual that emerges as subversive, critical and dangerous.”1 Inasmuch as he rejected the philosophical fashions of the day, rose against the ecclesiastical state apparatus, and prompted his readers to follow Socrates’ and Christ’s opposition to their alienated societies, Kierkegaard is anything but reactionary. In fact, his thinking is quite avant-garde since it proved momentous during the troubled century that followed it. Hence the second central tenet of the book, which states that Kierkegaard has had a profound, albeit never fully recognized, influence on four prominent, philosophers: Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno. What Ryan aims to show—and fully succeeds—is that “What manifested as full-blown political theorizations in those thinkers…was already latent in Kierkegaard’s thought.”2 Throughout his multifaceted argument Ryan employs a rich conceptual framework that prioritizes the categories of inwardness, marginality, praxis, the Bartholomew Ryan, Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2014, p. 27. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 1

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interval, the moment of decision, and writing, all pointing to what the author duly calls Kierkegaard’s “indirect politics.” The richest and most encompassing notion is interiority, defined as “malleable,…earnestness, passion, subjectivity and action—an expression for living as a socially critical human being.”3 It is by virtue of their own critical capacities that the individual can become a true self when confronted with the uniform, ossified, amorphous, and faceless world of modern industrial capitalism and mass democracy. Viewed thus, Kierkegaard joins a distinct group of “radical writers of inwardness”—for example, Joyce, Kafka, and Beckett—who “[obviate] and [subvert] the available codes of identity—religious, political, national—and… refute all dogmatic and totalising forms of identity which are both failing and oppressive.”4 Furthermore, to the extent that it indirectly seeks “to improve the conditions of the socio-political world,”5 but also because it offers multiple ways out of anxiety and despair, Kierkegaard’s philosophy is genuinely life-affirming. Kierkegaard’s putative existential revolutionary—that is, the concerned and simultaneously dissenting self—has the following onerous tasks: to turn theory or inner convictions into action; “to scrutinise oneself within political society;”6 “to de-deify the established order or society as a whole”7 and “castigate rigorously the vices of the age”;8 and occasionally to become an engaged polemical writer. In sum, the revolutionary should live and act as “the outsider interrupting our preconceptions, disrupting the collectivism and the leveling in the present age, and thus making a space for a particular voice and opening within the socio-political world.”9 In this sense, one need go no further than Kierkegaard’s supreme models, Socrates and Christ, two single individuals with “no sovereign power, preferring to live on the streets, amongst the people, providing the thorn to the establishment and powers that be.”10 Crucial to Ryan’s approach is the insistence not only on the fragmented, incomplete, ambiguous, ironic, and polymorphous character of the Kierkegaardian subject, but also on Kierkegaard’s idiosyncratic writing practices which combine a baroque pseudonymity with the straightforward edifying strategies of religious discourse. These particularities of Kierkegaard’s authorship engender a type of political thought that is both indirect and complex. Specifically, Ryan claims that Kierkegaard’s politics “prioritises the human being…over and above political states and systems.”11 Being built on the principle that “the crowd is untruth,”12 it remains hostile to “both mass-democracy…and the friend/enemy distinction

5 6 7 8 9 3 4

12 10 11

Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 29.

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in dictatorship.”13 While working towards human autonomy and “the connection between a plurality of the self and plurality within a community,”14 this political attitude urges “the reader to remain undeterred by material wishes, or lust for power and supremacy, yet at the same time not to turn one’s back on human existence.”15 In other words, Kierkegaard encourages us to become “indirect political weapon[s],”16 that is, humorous-ironic and partly hidden exceptions who serve society through a sanguine, fearless, and ongoing resistance to its alienating and reifying propensities. For all these reasons, against his classical dismissal as politically inept and morally cavalier, Ryan’s Kierkegaard displays a very cogent sense of sociality, wherein “the individual in its hidden and manifest inwardness nourishes the community, ensuring that the public will not overwhelm the community, and the leveling is unable to triumph.”17 The main bulk of the book consists of an original series of critical comparisons along the lines of ideational genealogy. The first philosophy in question belongs to Georg Lukács, whose road to Bolshevism seems not only to have estranged him from Kierkegaard, but also to metamorphose the latter into his reactionary opponent. Ryan’s achievement is to document the paradox of Lukács’ reification of Kierkegaard’s dynamic self, while seeking to emancipate the individual from the shackles of capitalist domination. In this way, Lukács “destroys any ambiguity of Kierkegaard’s inwardness and turns it into the totality of Marxism.”18 As detailed by Ryan, Carl Schmitt’s reception of Kierkegaard appears no less distorting. That is because Schmitt favors a Macht-Politik that loathes “the democracy of critical doubt, of the polemical sort that sits comfortably with Kierkegaard’s indirect politics.”19 Moreover, the friend–enemy distinction—which lies at the heart of Schmitt’s understanding of all political processes—runs counter to Kierkegaard’s Christian humanism, centered as it is on neighbor love, mercy, and repentance. Whereas Schmitt decides for another totalitarian world-view (Nazism), Kierkegaard’s authorship, by dint of its undecidability, equivocities, and dilemmas, constitutes a persistent critique of any authoritarian political system. As a result, “Kierkegaard’s indirect politics disrupts Schmitt’s concept of the ‘political,’ creating instead a Mellemspil in the political sphere that the ruling power might not be able to pin down or even control.”20 Next, Ryan explains why Schmitt’s sovereign— understood as fearful of otherness and aiming for omnipotence—can be read as a form of Kierkegaardian despair. The disastrous consequences of Schmitt’s political reinterpretation of the category of exception are also carefully analyzed. Here, the difference is that, for Kierkegaard, exception remains fallible and “outside official

15 16 17 18 19 20 13 14

Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 61. Ibid., p. 129. Ibid., pp. 125–6.

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or direct political authority,”21 whereas Schmitt grants it an exclusively positive and authoritative connotation within the political-juridical domain. Walter Benjamin’s case is much more auspicious. According to Ryan, one of Kierkegaard’s key affinities with Benjamin lies in his conflicted urbanity. Both thinkers seem “fascinated and repelled by the emergence of the [modern] city,”22 the site par excellence of “phantasmagoria, arcades, porosity, ruination, fashion.”23 Tellingly, some of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are unrepentant urban rebels, “Dagdrivers who loaf…around Copenhagen’s streets, graveyards and parks, smoking cigars and pondering on how to make things more difficult amidst the nineteenth century philosophies and societies of progress.”24 Kierkegaard’s Dagdriver is thus not very different from Benjamin’s Flâneur, both individuals who “question and invert human progress through interruptions and interludes.”25 In fact, not unlike Socrates and Christ, this “eccentric urban vagabond”26 is the paragon of true individuality. In their turn, since they obsessively dwell on fragmentariness and ruination, and remain a perpetual nuisance to all proponents of progress-driven totality, Kierkegaard and Benjamin embody the “nomadic” or “interruptive” thinker.27 Their severe lesson is that both profane history and politics are intrinsically fallible and potentially nihilistic. The mediator of this realization is, as Ryan aptly puts it, the paradoxical “homeless wanderer who is at home everywhere.”28 A similar paradox seems to fuel Kierkegaard’s overall work which tries to “retrieve the single individual through the combined force of tradition and destruction after the crisis of culture in the nineteenth century.”29 Here an interesting parallel is drawn with Benjamin’s concept of the messianic, which “rediscovers that which might have been lost in the past and makes it new again, simultaneously disrupting world-historical progress.”30 The book ends on a critical note. The closing chapter takes issue with Adorno’s dismissive and reductionistic reading of Kierkegaard, focusing on four points. The first is that Adorno is wrong to deem Kierkegaard’s inwardness as petrified and nihilistic. Actually, inwardness is essentially “mercurial.”31 So, against Adorno’s interpretation, Kierkegaard’s individual is endlessly capable of metamorphosis, that is, of a radical transformation allowing the individual to break out of any existential stasis. Moreover, given his constant call to action and the fact that The Sickness unto Death is fueled by a dialectic “moving the self through oneself, others, society and God,”32 it becomes almost impossible to consider Kierkegaard a proponent

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 21 22

Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., p. 135. Ibid., p. 141. Ibid., p. 142; p. 149. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 163. Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., p. 191. Ibid., p. 200.

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of totality as Adorno urges us. Next, Adorno’s perspective becomes even more problematic if we agree that Kierkegaard’s indirect politics “continually unsettles all socio-political structures in society.”33 Ryan shows why Adorno’s own “negative dialectic,” rooted in an endless insistence on discontinuity and fragmentation, owes a lot to Kierkegaard’s “dialectic of disintegration.”34 It is thus a cruel irony that Adorno ended up being influenced by Kierkegaard “more stridently than the other key figures in this book.”35 In their own way, both thinkers tried to guide us out of the inherent despair of modernity, the only difference being that “In the case of Adorno, the dialectic is directly used for socio-political purposes; [while] Kierkegaard’s dialectic has an indirect impact on the socio-political landscape.”36 This similarity is deepened by Kierkegaard’s fruitful use of melancholy, myths, and fairytales within a philosophical horizon, meant to “expose the inevitable failure of philosophy,”37 an attitude that Adorno endorsed in his own way. Kierkegaard’s Indirect Politics has several noteworthy merits. First, it offers a unique—Levinasian-bohemian—representation of Kierkegaard: “the philosophical loafer with cigar” but also the thinker of socio-political otherness, as well as “the troubled religious poet searching for the purity of heart…and one of God’s spies.”38 Secondly, Ryan succeeds in showing that Kierkegaard’s conservatism was not unambiguous. Under his pen, Kierkegaard appears as a self-subversive conservative, a “provocateur,”39 a temperate admirer of the French revolution unafraid to sabotage the status quo in an existential-spiritual fashion, but also someone who took tradition seriously. Thirdly, Ryan never loses sight of Kierkegaard the thinker of negativity, who insists on the insurmountable incompleteness, undecidability, fragmentation, and polyphony of human existence. Finally, besides the solid parallel—probably the first of its kind—between Kierkegaard and Benjamin, one should also take note of Ryan’s survey of the fundamental differences between Kierkegaard and Karl Marx—whom Adorno, Benjamin, and Lukács embraced wholeheartedly at some point in their biography—in a time when the scholarship remains enthralled with their commonalities. Leo Stan

35 36 37 38 39 33 34

Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., p. 178. Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 186. Ibid., p. 220. Ibid., p. 79.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Burns, Michael O’Neill, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 63, 2014, pp. 21–4. Lazzaretti, Lucas Piccinin, review in Revista de Filosofia Aurora, vol. 26, no. 39, 2014, pp. 905–15.

Anne T. Salvatore, Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1988, xvii + 106 pp.

As the title of her book indicates, Salvatore’s book is focused on the fictions of Graham Greene set against the background of the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. The correspondences she notes and illuminates—how each author makes sophisticated and fluctuating use of irony in dialectical fictional structures, presents characters in a “double-edged” way which takes away from them at least as much as it gives them, and aims (or seems to her to aim) at an idea of the self as a spiritually integrated reality—strike me as reasonable, though that last is, of course, the question which most divides post-modern readers of Kierkegaard from their more existentialist predecessors. The close comparison between Greene and Kierkegaard allows her to make a strong argument for the case that if Greene is a “Catholic novelist,” he is far from hewing to the traditional dogmatic line. As a primary instance of Greene’s kind of non-traditional religiosity, take her opening discussion of irony. In the first chapter she argues that the contradiction between Greene’s very traditional structural forms and the late modern or postmodern vision of the world and people within those structures aims at none of the standard ironic postures—“mediate,” “disjunctive,” or “suspensive,”1 but at something else. It is still irony, but “what is actually being ironized is not only a fragmented human world but, more important, the disjunctive ironic standpoint itself.”2 It might be called—though Salvatore does not name it—redeemed irony. So what lies behind irony is not orthodoxy, but another form of irony. I doubt that there will soon be an encyclical devoted to this theme. And I myself wonder how a person works themselves into the position where one can see such a thing as redeemed irony as both redeemed and irony. Of course, the orthodox will say—as they do of Kierkegaard—that irony is merely the tool the artist uses in the service of orthodoxy, and that faith—the terminus ad quem of each artist—is the positive overcoming of irony. At times in the last chapter (“Toward an Actual Self”) Salvatore seems to step into that view herself, but I think the first chapter’s less positive (in the Hegelian sense) view is more likely the case in Anne T. Salvatore, Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1988, p. 5. 2 Ibid. 1

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both writers. There seems to be a positive element to what could be called redeemed irony, but it is still irony. Querry’s last moments in A Burnt-Out Case illustrate the point. Querry seems to achieve a positive freedom there that overcomes (sublates?) the world of merely negative freedom, which is the highest achievement of the other kinds of irony. Of course, he dies right there, so the worldly effect is the same: nothing. If it is true that out of irony nothing comes, then maybe there is no such distinct thing as redeemed irony, for out of Querry nothing comes. But if there is such a thing as redeemed irony, the difference would be that where the other forms of irony finally make the ironist also into an objective something, redeemed irony personalizes (moves toward an actual self). Does this happen to Querry? This is an open question. To be able to resolve this question is to be something other than a human being. Salvatore links “redeemed irony” with Kierkegaard’s idea of faith as a kind of repetition, repetition being the quintessential movement of the ethical/spiritual life, and shows that it is the narrow gate: Some of Greene’s characters (as some of Kierkegaard’s) pass through it—Querry? and Monseigneur Quixote, some do not—Brown and Scobie. One—Maurice Bendrix—is caught in the act of attempting repetition; he can neither accomplish it nor refuse attempting it, so The End of the Affair is not the end of the affair, nor does the end of the book mark the end of the affair. Bendrix is stuck in the mirrored hallway of reflective life and needs either to give up some baggage or learn to walk backwards. That is to say he must either give up his desire to control the story of the affair or go back and make it unimportant. The latter is impossible (as Johannes the Seducer knows and so contrives that every affair is accidental), and if he gave up the former he would no longer be a writer, and writing is all he has, or knows: so the one is impossible—for the affair was the most important thing in his life (and cannot become unimportant even if it becomes nothing), and the other means to give up himself. Either give up yourself, or give up yourself: Now that is a problem Augustine would appreciate. (And the cure is to die…). Bendrix knows that this is his situation. It is why he calls the story of the affair a record of his hatred, for Sarah’s conversion is a threat to the life to which he has become accustomed, the only life he knows. What I wonder about is not anything in this study, so much as its existence. What is the purpose of such a well-referenced scholarly study? As Aristotle guessed long ago, matter is infinitely divisible though not infinitely divided, and this is certainly true of intellectual matter. It is capable of being divided in an infinite multiplicity of ways. Try to draw an end to this series—Greene and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Shakespeare, Kafka and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Cervantes, Pascal and Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and Kant, and so on. But this is not just a problem of physics. Kierkegaard clearly, and, if Salvatore’s thesis is correct, Greene as well, recognizes this infinite divisibility of matter as the source of a moral problem: It means that there are an infinite number of ways of escape from the one important issue—whether or not you will become spirit. There are an infinite number of wholly intellectual (Kierkegaard would say aesthetic) possible modes of disarming the task both writers have set themselves to take up. Joining that task to some other thing is easy, popular and perhaps even interesting, and therefore precisely the danger. As Kierkegaard himself said:

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If that which one has to communicate is, for example, a conception of something historical or the like, it may be a good thing for someone else to arrive at the same conception, and all one has to do is simply work to get this idea acknowledged. But if the point of a person’s activity is to do what is true: then one additional assistant professor is just a new calamity.3

Several times Salvatore mentions Kierkegaardian condemnations of direct communication and theoretical approaches to “problems” which evaporate the concrete matter of life into abstractions, and she holds that “with Kierkegaard, the novelist [Greene] asks first for self-examination and then for ethical action, for a shift from the theoretical to the existential.”4 Why, then, write a direct communication like this book? For such a book precisely shifts again from self-examination and motive for ethical reflection to the theoretical. If her thesis is right, this book is a mistake. A good book comes at you like an ice pick to the brain, to use an image from Kafka. Studies like this are like helmets—they deflect the ice pick from its path, and there are an infinite number of directions such deflections can take. Even another book on Greene and Kierkegaard is possible. This little piece might be the start of it. Greene has the capacity to write in a way which takes the common reader like lightning would take the common fool who flies kites with metal keys in thunderstorms. At least that’s what The End of the Affair felt like to me when I first read it. When I read it again two years later and it did the same thing, I warned myself never to fly that kite again, in any weather. Now I might be able to; I have an external ground—I can use The End of the Affair to test Salvatore’s thesis. So, the major problem with this book—let it be an emblem of a minor industry—is that if Salvatore’s thesis is correct about Greene’s aims—and Kierkegaard’s—then her book is exactly the wrong thing, for it builds up a defense against the aims of the authors. Direct communication, like low voltage direct current, is harmless. Kierkegaard and Greene are not and do not wish to be harmless. I am not sure that transforming high voltage AC to low voltage DC is a task human beings ought to take up as their own. I may be mistaken; perhaps we should try to make the world safer, tame the lightning. Or it may be that such books do not really succeed in transforming the current entirely: but what is its purpose if not that? It may be that accidents still happen—that even from such a direct communication as this “it is always possible to go a little deeper on one’s own feet.”5 This criticism foregrounds what Salvatore has made background. Early in her book she explains Kierkegaard’s analysis of communication as found in the journals and pseudonymous works. Kierkegaard’s study, in both places, has a constant ethical or religious edge, as Salvatore also knows. But this knowledge is not virtue. Imagination has more ways of escape than a novelist can dream of—philosophy is one of them, literary criticism another. I am not sure what Graham Greene thinks of having a secondary literature dedicated to his work. I know for certain what SKS 21, 206, NB9:15 / JP 6, 6302. Salvatore, Greene and Kierkegaard: The Discourse of Belief, p. 66. 5 Ibid., p. 96. 3 4

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Kierkegaard thought of it. Because Kierkegaard’s authorship is informed not so much by the accidents of the history of his age as by an analysis of the ways of communication, his reflections on the uses to which his authorship would be put by assistant professors is a formally necessary, essential aspect of that authorship. That, at least, is how he would have it. A recent biographer of Greene reports Greene’s feeling of being one of the (minor) characters in his novels.6 I wonder if that is a happier position than being a minor character in Kierkegaard’s drama? Gene Fendt

In “Our Man on Capri: Remembering Graham Greene,” which is partly a review of Green on Capri: A Memoir by Shirley Hazzard, Michael Korda remarks that Greene was apt to seem, from time to time, “like a remote and slightly comic figure” (Harper’s Magazine, January, 2000, p. 69) and praises the author, who “rightly deduces…that Greene lives like a lodger, even in his own house” (p. 71).

6

Reviews and Critical Discussions Breuer, Hans-Peter, review in Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 35, 1989, pp. 337–41. Desmond, J., review in Religion and Literature, vol. 23, 1991, pp. 115–22. Fendt, Gene, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 16, 1993, pp. 152–5.

Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, vii + 213 pp.

In A Confusion of the Spheres, Genia Schönbaumsfeld advances the thesis that Søren Kierkegaard’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of religion and philosophy are crucially alike and crucially different from how they have been interpreted by several commentators. Both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein critique the idea that statements of religious belief are quasi-scientific statements. Their arguments against such a “confusion of the spheres” do not amount to a defense of a fideistic irrationalism, however. Instead, Schönbaumsfeld argues, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein develop a “third way” of conceiving of religious belief, as something intimately tied to a form of life (Wittgenstein) or sphere of existence (Kierkegaard).1 That their philosophies of religion defend parallel, existential conceptions of religious belief becomes particularly clear when taking into account Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s parallel, ethical conceptions of philosophy more generally. Schönbaumsfeld’s first aim with her book is “to trace the extent of Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein.”2 In Chapter 1, she builds up an extensive and convincing historical case for the far-reaching influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein, particularly where the latter’s views on religion are concerned. Beyond earlier studies, Schönbaumsfeld has been able to draw on diaries and other documents by Wittgenstein that have been published relatively recently. This chapter therefore presents the most comprehensive historical argument to date for the influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein. A short section on the topic in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard draws on her work almost exclusively.3 Anyone interested in the historical connection between these authors should read Schönbaumsfeld’s chapter. Here Schönbaumsfeld builds on Stanley Cavell’s parallel reading of these two in his “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” in his Must We Mean What We Say?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969, pp. 163–79. 2 Genia Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007, p. 8. 3 Anthony Rudd, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Wittgensteinian Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, pp. 484–6. 1

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The second aim of the book is “to show how remarkably like-minded the two philosophers are on such important issues as the nature of philosophy and religious belief.”4 Schönbaumsfeld addresses it mainly by focusing on her third aim, which is “to rectify the distortions that Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s views have been subjected to in the philosophical literature and to dispel the illusions that stand in the way of taking their concerted critique of the orthodox conceptions of philosophy and religion as seriously as it deserves.”5 That is to say, Schönbaumsfeld generally proceeds by arguing for symmetries between Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of philosophy and religion by arguing against interpretations that she deems distorted, either because they contend that Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are engaged in very different enterprises (D. Z. Phillips, Chapter 2) or because they view the parallel nature of their thought as consisting of plain nonsense (James Conant, Chapter 3) or fideism (Kai Nielsen, Chapter 4). Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein both hold ethical conceptions of philosophy, Schönbaumsfeld argues in Chapter 2. They wish for the self-transformation of their readers in terms of them shedding self-deception and illusion.6 They “hold up a mirror” to confront readers with their misguided philosophical preconceptions, but do not wish to replace these with other preconceptions.7 This ethical conception of philosophy is also reflected in the unorthodox form their writings take. After making her case, Schönbaumsfeld lets D. Z. Phillips, especially his Philosophy’s Cool Place, provide the counterargument that Kierkegaard is first and foremost a religious thinker who engages in philosophy as an instrument for his religious aims, whereas Wittgenstein is a proper “contemplative” philosopher without any agenda. Schönbaumsfeld invalidates Phillips’ point by demonstrating that Phillips caricatures Kierkegaard based on an unwarranted reliance on The Point of View and little engagement with other works. Her critique against lazily pigeon-holing Kierkegaard as a religious thinker and dismissing the relevance of his philosophy in non-religious contexts is well taken. It does not address a more nuanced version of Phillips’ interpretation of Kierkegaard, however, in which Kierkegaard clarifies “the nature of a path”8 towards Christianity and becoming a Christian. Indeed, the mirror Kierkegaard holds up to his readers reflects their shortcomings in light of an ideal, for example, of being a single existing individual before God. Wittgenstein’s mirror may be less colored in that way, and also be less focused on how we live our lives beyond how we use our language. The longest chapter of the book, Chapter 3, focuses on the revocations at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Johannes Climacus’ Concluding Unscientific Postscript. James Conant argues for a parallel reading of these revocations as indications that Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard deemed these entire works nonsense. He thus extends the “resolute reading” that Cora Diamond and he first of all defend for the Tractatus to include the Postscript. Schönbaumsfeld begs to differ and offers Schönbaumsfeld, A Confusion of the Spheres, p. 8. Ibid., p. 8. 6 Ibid., p. 83. 7 Ibid., p. 41. 8 Ibid., p. 77. 4 5

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tightly argued analyses showing that a resolute reading of the Tractatus cannot hold and a resolute reading of Postscript even less so. Instead, the Tractatus “enacts a performative contradiction by attempting to say what cannot be said.”9 And Climacus revokes the Postscript, amongst other reasons, to clearly distinguish it from merely conceptual (rather than fully existential) endeavors such as Hegelian philosophy. Neither revocation therefore entails the plain nonsense character of the entire work. Paraphrasing Climacus, Schönbaumsfeld sums up: “writing a work and revoking it is not the same as leaving it unwritten.”10 The final chapter treats Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s parallel critique of the “target view” of religious belief, according to which statements such as “God exists” are quasi-scientific statements. First, God is not an empirical object. He differs in kind, not just in scope from ordinary empirical objects. Second, there are more ways of describing the world than scientific description, and adherents of the “target view” thus misunderstand what having a world-view entails. Third, it is therefore an utter mistake to try to prove the existence of God. People’s world-views influence their interpretations of what they encounter. Someone who does not already believe in God, or that Christ is the son of God, will never find evidence in favor of these ideas through the study of nature or history, for they will not interpret what they encounter in this light. Rather than being quasi-scientific, religious belief “requires something much more fundamental than assent to a sum of tenets.…The call to have faith is…an ethical imperative—it is an injunction to repent and transform the self; it is not a demand to change one’s ontology.”11 In Wittgenstein’s words, “although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life.”12 Such an existential conception of belief does not reduce religious belief to emotional attitudes, however, as, for example, Kai Nielsen would have it. Although a statement such as “God’s eye sees everything” can only be understood fully within a religious form of life that gives it meaning, one cannot reach such an internal understanding without understanding the external, everyday meaning of the separate words that make up the statement. Religious belief always retains cognitive content. What this book does, it does very well. Schönbaumsfeld clearly has an excellent command of both Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s works. Structuring a text along the lines of critique of others has its limitations, however. Whereas Schönbaumsfeld’s critiques are developed in detail, the existential account of religion, based on a symmetrical reading of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, does not receive the full attention it deserves and requires. Related to this, Schönbaumsfeld could have scrutinized the differences between Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of philosophy and religion more. It could have deepened her systematic point regarding what an ethical conception of philosophy and an existential conception of religion entail.



Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 119. 11 Ibid., p. 173. 12 Ibid., p. 174. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. by Georg Henrik von Wright, trans. by Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell 1977, p. 64e. 9

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Nevertheless, A Confusion of the Spheres is a significant contribution to Kierkegaard–Wittgenstein studies.13 It may be relevant to Kierkegaard scholars for many different reasons. It is obviously relevant for those interested in the parallels between Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s thought on philosophy and religion. It presents a comprehensive overview of the historical influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein. Furthermore, the book offers sharply argued criticisms of misguided interpretations of Kierkegaard by D. Z. Phillips, James Conant, and Kai Nielsen. Also, it offers a detailed critique of “target views” of religion à la Richard Swinburne’s, that is, views that treat statements of religious belief as quasi-scientific statements. Finally, the book contains the start of a promising existential account of religious belief. Annemarie van Stee

Earlier works are Mariele Nientied, Kierkegaard und Wittgenstein. Hineintäuschen in das Wahre, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 7); and Charles Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality and Philosophical Method, London: Routledge 1989. The former book has a narrower scope than A Confusion of the Spheres, as Nientied investigates indirect communication and the textual and linguistic means by which it is accomplished. Creegan’s book is less up-to-date than Spheres, since it came out before the recently published biographical documents of Wittgenstein were available, as well as before current discussions about the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s and Wittgenstein’s texts commenced. 13

Reviews and Critical Discussions Proudfoot, Wayne, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008 (on-line journal). Turnbull, Jamie, review in International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 16, no. 5, 2008, pp. 787–91. Whittaker, John H., review in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, pp. 690–2.

Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language, and the Reality of God, Aldershot: Ashgate 2001, vi + 249 pp.

In Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, Steven Shakespeare “aims to explore Kierkegaard’s theological language throughout his authorship, published and unpublished, in the light of his more general views on the nature and function of language.”1 Shakespeare argues that Kierkegaard’s view of language is linked “inextricably” to his use of it; his strategy of indirect communication reveals his assumption that all communication is indirect.2 Kierkegaard’s writings illustrate his presupposition that language, while not the origin of sin, at the least presupposes sin and is constrained by finitude. In effect, positing objectivity and subjectivity as distinct alternatives, then, “becomes a little shaky”; indeed, any distinction between them is blurred by the unbearable tension of language.3 Kierkegaard’s understanding of language situates him between epistemological realism and anti-realism in that it “disturbs the whole basis upon which realist and anti-realist conclusions are drawn.”4 Consequently, Shakespeare suggests that “ethical realism” better describes Kierkegaard’s view of language than does “religious realism.” While Shakespeare notes that Kierkegaard still “argue[s] for a real relationship with God,” he suggests that, “The reality of God is known indirectly through the transformation of our own existence, a process in which we are wholly receptive and yet also wholly responsible and free.”5 One might ask why “ethical” is the best descriptor of Kierkegaard’s view of language when, for Kierkegaard, the religious is the highest sphere of existence. But, as Shakespeare recognizes, Kierkegaard’s religious sphere implicates and incorporates the ethical. True religion

Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, Aldershot: Ashgate 2001, p. 1. 2 Shakespeare writes, “Again and again, we have seen the importance of attending to the form of Kierkegaard’s communication. That form might now be seen as primarily performative. His texts do not serve to communicate objective information, but by engaging the reader in their own dilemmas of indirectness and representation, they can perform a therapeutic role, interrupting the monologue of a self-contained reason” (ibid., p. 84). 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., p. 27. 1

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involves action. And while the religious sphere requires some preliminary element of information (i.e., revelatory content), the kind of information, which Kierkegaard understands is required for the religious life, is personal rather than propositional information.6 This means that revelatory content is not akin to that of science, history, or propositional doctrine; rather revelation is “opaque to any rational grasp,”7 but accessible through the mode of analogy.8 Though rejecting “religious realism,” Shakespeare distinguishes his interpretation from readings that emphasize hermeneutical “undecidability” and pervasive irony, such as that of Peter Fenves.9 Shakespeare cautions that Kierkegaard’s view of language must be understood in the context of his view of religious language as presupposing the divine gift of revelation, thus making genuine communication possible.10 For Shakespeare, the “subjunctive mood” of Kierkegaard’s writings operates to propel his readers into higher spheres of existence. Despite his differentiation from postmodern (anti-realist) readings of Kierkegaard, Shakespeare sees in Kierkegaard’s tempered view of language’s potential a parallel in Derrida; Kierkegaard anticipates postmodern warnings against linguistic idolatry in our use of religious language. On this point, however, Shakespeare is critical of Kierkegaard for not being consistently Derridean in his actual use of religious language. Kierkegaard’s unshakably orthodox (religiously realist) Christology undercut his otherwise sensible convictions regarding the constraints of finite language. In a thought experiment Shakespeare wonders whether, had Kierkegaard been able to read Derrida, he might have corrected this incoherence.11 For Shakespeare, religious concepts in Kierkegaard’s thought “function more as limit concepts than descriptive representations” which “point beyond semantics to the need for a practical, existential response.”12 In distinguishing his view from religious realism, Shakespeare contests what he calls “Christian narrativism,” interpretations of Kierkegaard that underscore his Christian orthodoxy.13 He concludes that these readings of Kierkegaard as a kind of narrative Christian theologian do not adequately appreciate the extent to which his view of language (if not always his use of it) upends any interpretation that positions him too close to religious realism. While Shakespeare rightly points up Kierkegaard’s recognition of the frailty and tenuousness of language, he minimizes the extent to which the concept of revelation

Ibid., p. 210. Ibid. 8 Ibid., p. 220. 9 Peter Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1993. Fenves argues that the concept of irony pervades Kierkegaard’s corpus, thereby precluding any attempt to discern determinate meaning in his texts. 10 Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, pp. 225–6. 11 Ibid., p. 238. 12 Ibid., p. 73. 13 Ibid., pp. 227–34. Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation, Albany: State University of New York Press 1996; David J. Gouwens, “Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Doctrine,” Modern Theology, vol. 5, no. 1, 1988, pp. 13–22; David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996. 6 7

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does function for Kierkegaard as a mediator of divine presence, and in a manner that affords the facilitation of genuine communication between God and human beings.14 Divine revelation, while reflecting objective truth, is subjectively oriented and intended for appropriation by the knowing subject. Revelation comes to us primarily through the God-man, but derivatively through the Bible as a form of divine communication. Confronted with, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s recognition of the finitude of language and, on the other, his orthodox (exclusivist) Christology, Shakespeare is compelled to undermine the latter in favor of the former. But one wonders why one must make such a choice? Orthodox Christian traditions have often taken a view of religious language as analogical while also assuming that theological language does refer in a meaningful way to divine reality—even if not without remainder or ambiguity. Thus Christ can be both the absolute paradox (in Kierkegaard’s terms) and the revelation of (the objectively real) God. As one reviewer suggests, perhaps Shakespeare fails to uphold his own tension between realism and anti-realism by rejecting Kierkegaard’s Christian orthodoxy as incompatible with his theory of language.15 Kyle Roberts

For a persuasive defense of this position, see the aforementioned Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation. 15 Benjamin Myers, “Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 45, no. 4, 2002, p. 753. 14

Reviews and Critical Discussions Barlow, Brian C., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 45, 2003, pp. 17–18. Carr, Stephen, review in Theology, vol. 106, no. 829, 2003, pp. 43–4. Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see pp. 795–6. Ferreira, M. Jamie, review in Modern Theology, vol. 19, no. 1, 2003, pp. 156–7. Lincoln, Ulrich, review in Theologische Literaturzeitung, vol. 128, no. 10, 2003, pp. 1086–8. Lippitt, John, review in Ars disputandi, vol. 3, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1–4. Myers, Benjamin, review in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 45, no. 4, 2002, pp. 750–3. Pridmore, John, review in Modern Believing, vol. 44, no. 1, 2003, pp. 67–8. Rae, Murray, review in Journal of Theological Studies, vol. 54, no. 2, 2003, pp. 835–9.

K. Brian Soderquist, The Isolated Self: Irony as Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony,” Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 1), viii + 247 pp.

There are two reasons to appreciate K. Brian Soderquist’s The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony.” First and foremost, Soderquist’s study provides a thorough-going interpretation of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, a work whose semi-canonical status has tended to discourage sustained critical engagement. Secondly, Soderquist’s study is the first volume in the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre’s Danish Golden Age Studies series, a series that has focused renewed interest on the social, cultural, and literary milieu out of which Kierkegaard’s texts emerged. Soderquist’s study is two-pronged. He aims at once to “provide an interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard’s dissertation” and to position On the Concept of Irony as “a prism through which to illuminate Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole.”1 Soderquist differentiates his approach from those who “focus on a single theme raised in On the Concept of Irony…and follow that theme into later works.”2 Against these thematic readings, Soderquist attempts “to trace the logic that organizes the text as a whole,” focusing on the way in which On the Concept of Irony articulates “the problems associated with a ‘differentiation of the self from the other.’ ”3 According to Soderquist, Kierkegaard posits a “double movement of irony” as central to this differentiation.4 This double movement consists first of a rejection of the external as the ground upon which one bases one’s identity. Thus, “the individual discovers his or her own freedom from immediacy and becomes aware of the self as a subject.”5 Insofar as the individual “recognizes that the self is essentiality different from the cultural environment in which it resides,” this awareness is a necessary, but K. Brian Soderquist, The Isolated Self: Irony as Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s “On the Concept of Irony,” Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 2007 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 1), p. 1. 2 Ibid., p. 1. 3 Ibid., p. 2. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 1

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not sufficient, precondition for selfhood.6 This first movement of irony is not without consequences. The ironist, having separated himself or herself from the external cultural environment, loses all criteria for meaningful action. He or she becomes “disentangled…from all ethical restrictions—and all orienting guideposts.”7 Thus the second, more complicated half of Kierkegaard’s double movement of irony: in order “to escape irony and become a self,” one must “move back toward finitude again.”8 Soderquist then introduces the two strategies that Kierkegaard presents as offering a way back toward finitude. On the one hand, one might attempt to regain actuality via one’s own creative powers by trying “to digte or ‘create’ meaningful relationships in the actual world based on one’s own subjective desires and interests.”9 On the other hand, one might turn to a power greater than oneself, accepting those “finite conditions that cannot be authentically reinterpreted by the subject.”10 For Kierkegaard, whereas the former “remains ‘closed’ within itself,” the latter constitutes an “open” acceptance of “one’s own inability to create a believable world of values as well as…one’s ultimate need of a higher power.”11 Having defined the terms of his study, Soderquist then turns to Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socrates in On the Concept of Irony. For Kierkegaard, Socrates is significant “insofar as he represents total negativity, the total destruction of the established order, total nihilism.”12 According to Soderquist, inasmuch as Socrates has “moved out of the world of serious ethical activity,” he “has lost an essential aspect of the self” and is thus paradigmatic of the isolation that comes as a result of an ironic consciousness.13 Kierkegaard’s view of Socrates thus illustrates irony’s status as both truth and untruth. Irony is true insofar as it is “a prerequisite for authentic selfhood”; it is untrue insofar as its attendant isolation from the external world is “a temptation which results in the spiritual death of the self.”14 Ultimately, one cannot achieve genuine selfhood by merely declaring the emptiness of the external world. For Kierkegaard, “personality is only fully achievable if one can regain a meaningful relationship to the very world which the ironist sees as hollow.”15 If Socrates represents an ironic consciousness uninterested in regaining a meaningful relationship to the world, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) represents for Kierkegaard Romanticism’s futile attempts “to digte or ‘create’…meaningful relationships.”16 Soderquist notes that whereas both Schlegel and Kierkegaard believe that an ironic orientation to the external world is a necessary first step toward the development of the self, Kierkegaard is skeptical of Schlegel’s belief in the capability of “artistic genius” to regain actuality.17 Soderquist posits that Schlegel’s Ibid. Ibid., p. 26. 8 Ibid., p. 2. 9 Ibid., p. 3. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 74. 13 Ibid., p. 107. 14 Ibid., p. 108. 15 Ibid., p. 110. 16 Ibid., p. 3. 17 Ibid., p. 120. 6 7

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Lucinde articulates exactly this position: “It offers in the place of a darkened actuality a more perfect one; romantic poetry offers a world that is transfigured and beautiful.”18 In a view that echoes the thinking of Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838),19 Kierkegaard finds fault with such a transfiguration insofar as it is effected “by virtue of the powers he [Schlegel] has in himself alone.”20 The Romantic ironist is thus “closed up in autonomous emptiness” and, ultimately, “closed off from the divine source upon which he should be dependent.”21 Having discussed Kierkegaard’s critique of Romantic irony, Soderquist then situates Kierkegaard’s dissertation in relation to the contemporary Danish discussion of irony and humor. Soderquist introduces Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) and Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–84), writers for whom humor is a sublation of the ironic “into a more comprehensive worldview which accounts for finitude.”22 Soderquist observes that Kierkegaard’s understanding of humor, insofar as it “incorporates irony’s lack of respect for the finite…with a consciousness of ‘heaven and hell,’ ” is similar to Heiberg and Martensen’s definition.23 At the same time, Soderquist notes that Kierkegaard rejects the too easy “reconciliation” with the finite offered by Martensen and Heiberg.24 According to Soderquist, “Kierkegaard… only considers humor to be the first step and thus adds an extra requirement: the individual must open himself or herself to a divinely-transformed finite world.”25 To its credit, K. Brian Soderquist’s The Isolated Self does precisely what it sets out to do; it provides a focused, thorough, and much-needed rereading of Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony. Though Soderquist devotes his final chapter to the double movement of irony as it appears in Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death, his study rarely strays far from Kierkegaard’s dissertation. Given the breadth and complexity The Concept of Irony, Soderquist’s focus is both admirable and necessary. However, there are times when one feels that a slightly broader scope might have allowed Kierkegaard’s dissertation more room to breathe. For example, Soderquist’s study is most compelling when discussing the relation between On the Concept of Irony and the works of Møller, J. L. Heiberg, and Martensen; one cannot help but wish that more time were given to these connections. Considering what Soderquist’s study has added to our understanding of On the Concept of Irony, it is perhaps unfair to ask that it do more. Indeed, that Soderquist’s study provides a comprehensive reading of Kierkegaard’s dissertation while at the same time situating it within the larger philosophical and literary milieu of Golden Age Denmark is an accomplishment. Ultimately the value of Soderquist’s The Isolated Self lies in the subsequent research it has made possible. Devon C. Wootten Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., pp. 147–55. 20 Ibid., p. 137. 21 Ibid., p. 137. 22 Ibid., p. 185. 23 Ibid., p. 193. 24 Ibid., p. 200. 25 Ibid. 18 19

Reviews and Critical Discussions Podmore, Simon D., review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 53, 2012, pp. 166–7. Sondrup, Steven P., review in Scandinavian Studies, vol. 80, no. 2, 2008, pp. 261–5. Stokes, Patrick, review in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 65, no. 3, 2009, pp. 177–82.

Leo Stan, Either Nothingness or Love: On Alterity in Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller 2009, xii + 372 pp.

In his first major work, Either Nothingness or Love: On Alterity in Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings, Leo Stan provides a clear, structured, rigorous, insightful, and original analysis of four differentiated notions of otherness that permeate Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. In contrast to previous scholarship on the role of “the other,” or alterity, in Kierkegaard’s religious-philosophic musings, which focus either on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymously composed aesthetic and ethical writings or on Kierkegaard’s directly authored religious text, Works of Love, Stan postulates alterity as a thread that runs throughout the trajectory of Kierkegaard’s entire corpus. What additionally separates Stan’s reading from that of his predecessors is his primary emphasis on Christological soteriology, the doctrine, in his own words, that “the path to Salighed (eternal happiness) is endless in this life, interspersed with difficulties, terror, and doubts, and continually imperfect.”1 In the present text Kierkegaard’s soteriology is intimately connected with human sinfulness, the prerequisite to the ultimate encounter with otherness—“the human other.” Many prominent theorists have written on the role of the other in Kierkegaard’s writings before. Most conspicuously, both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have been profoundly inspired by the texture of ethical difference internal to Kierkegaardian subjectivity and have directly incorporated this into their own philosophic constellations, albeit each with an idiosyncratic reading of selections from Kierkegaard’s collected works.2 For Jürgen Habermas and Ágnes Heller, Kierkegaard’s magnification of what Stan describes as the “alien reality…attained through ethical volitionism”3 has served as the crux of their respective ethical and Leo Stan, Either Nothingness or Love: On Alterity in Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller 2009, p. 42. A second revised edition of Stan’s book is currently in production at Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland. 2 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1978, pp. 79–153; Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1995. 3 Stan, Either Nothingness or Love, p. 27. 1

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political philosophies since the 1980s in regard to Vergangenheitsbewältigung (working out the past) and memory studies after Auschwitz. This has led to Habermas’ view of post-identitarian consciousness and what Heller calls “ethics of personality.”4 Other figures such as Merold Westphal, who has productively analyzed Levinas’ misinterpretation of Kierkegaard and “the other” and demonstrated what it nonetheless yields productively,5 as well as Martin Matuštík, who has melded Habermas’ reading with Derridean deconstruction,6 have contributed to the progression of Kierkegaardian alterity in the present age. Yet additional thinkers in the traditions of critical theory, deconstructionism, and post-structuralism such as Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva have found their muse in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic, ethical, and religious creations for the ends of radical egalitarianism under the rubrics of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and other categories through reconstructions of what Kierkegaard inherited from Hegel’s “master–slave dialectic” (or “lord– bondsman” relationship) in which “the one” can only be grasped phenomenologically in a relationship of inter-dependency with “the other.”7 Giorgio Agamben has employed Kierkegaard’s concept of the self—as an individual or as a people—and its relation to otherness in the form of an “exception” in the context of legal-political philosophy.8 Slavoj Žižek has formulated his own theory of otherness, according to See, for example, Jürgen Habermas, “Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity,” in his The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, ed. and trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1991, pp. 249– 67; Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. by Hella Beister and William Rehg, Cambridge: Polity Press 2003, pp. 1–16; Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. by Eduardo Mendieta, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2002; Agnes Heller, “Vergessen und Erinnern: Vom Sinn der Sinnlosigkeit,” Sinn und Form, vol. 53, no. 2, 2001, pp. 149–60; Agnes Heller, Ethics of Personality, Oxford: Blackwell 1996. 5 Merold Westphal, “The Transparent Shadow: Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue,” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. by Martin Matuštík and Merold Westphal, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995, pp. 265–81; Merold Westphal, “The Many Faces of Levinas as a Reader of Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion, ed. by J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2008, pp. 21–40; Merold Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2008. 6 Martin J. Matuštík, “Kierkegaard’s Radical Existential Praxis, or: Why the Individual Defies Liberal, Communitarian, and Postmodern Categories,” in Kierkegaard in Post/ Modernity, ed. by Matuštík and Westphal, pp. 239–64; Martin J. Matuštík, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel, New York and London: Guilford Press 1993; Martin J. Matuštík, Specters of Liberation: Great Refusals in the New World Order, Albany: State University of New York Press 1998; and Martin J. Matuštík, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2008. 7 See, for example, Judith Butler, “Can the ‘Other’ of Philosophy Speak?” in her Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge 2004, pp. 232–50 and Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, New York: Columbia University Press 1987. 8 Giorgio Agamben, States of Exception, trans. by Kevin Attell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005; Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 4

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Stan problematically so, in response to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love.9 What unites all of these disparate renderings is that they locate their resource for reflection on the matter in only specific works from selected volumes of Kierkegaard’s collected works, or in one specific volume of his writings. They also do not thematize the otherness embedded in their analyses at all times in an explicit manner. Stan’s approach is different. His account is highly hermeneutical—he identifies his methodology as “hermeneutical reconstruction”—and achieves a close proximity to several of Kierkegaard’s texts by honing the nuances only of Kierkegaard’s literary commitments to alterity, of which he discovers four variations that are discrete and yet upbuilding and interdependent. Stan delineates the following four conceptions of otherness in Kierkegaard’s writings and situates them in what are for him the guiding texts: (1) the other within, which is the self’s inward spirit (2) the other without, or the human other; (3) the infinite alterity of God; and (4) the paradoxical alterity of Christ. The first two notions are first discovered and subsequently maintained by Kierkegaard’s fictional character, Judge William, in Either/Or, Part Two. Together they raise an indirect reference to “the Other above,” the divine Other of God. But it is not until the psychological and ethico-religious texts of The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness unto Death, and Practice in Christianity, that through a Christian analysis of anxiety, despair, and sin via a proper understanding of Christian salvation one can truly grasp the “human other.” Stan summarizes his guiding thesis as such: “genuine and unique others exist solely theo-Christologically (i.e., by virtue of the love expressed by God in and through his incarnate existence) or not at all.”10 Here the title of the book comes into full context. One exists to the extent that one recognizes others, and one countenances others to the degree that one accepts the command of God’s love, which in turn demands the suffering love of God made incarnate as Christ. The conclusion is to claim “either nothingness or love,” and specifically on the terms just elucidated: one loves—therefore, one exists and rises above nothingness—to the extent that one accepts the suffering love of God incarnate. This is Stan’s revised edition of Kierkegaard’s infamous “either/or.” Stan relies on the theo-Christological dimensions in Kierkegaard’s thinking to rebut, for example, Levinas’ accusation of a “facelessness” in Kierkegaard’s grappling with the other. Stan writes: The miracle of Christianity lies in the unmistakable profile of every face, loved before anyone else by an absolute Other (who would have many reasons to fall out of love). Moreover, the duty of every Christian is to assume this loving recognition at all costs, a fact which belies every stereotype regarding Kierkegaard’s arrogant dismissal of human alterity.11

trans. by Daniel Heller Roazen, New York: Zone Books 1999; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press 1998. 9 Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar, Opera’s Second Death, London and New York: Routledge 2002; Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press 2006; Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, London: Granta Books 2006. 10 Stan, Either Nothingness or Love, p. 11, my emphasis. 11 Ibid., p. 11.

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Stan argues that his reconstruction of a “heterology” in Kierkegaard’s writings is philosophical “even if it is rooted…in the Christian soteriological creationism.”12 The philosophical substance of Stan’s analysis rests on Kierkegaard’s faith in the principle of contradiction (counter-evidentially through Kierkegaard’s deploring attitude toward any Hegelian-style cancellation of the principle of contradiction), which Stan uses to find coherence and systematicity in Kierkegaard’s works. To this extent Stan’s book belongs to a recent and thought-provoking movement in Kierkegaard scholarship that places the Danish thinker further from the domain of irrationalism and closer to systematic philosophy, albeit with a religious telos. The teleology in Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious philosophy for Stan revolves around the two main axes of sin and salvation. Without these, in Stan’s perspective, one has neither one’s self nor “the other” that co-constitutes one’s self. It is a double-bind in the most paradoxical Kierkegaardian manner. What Stan has advanced in his detailed account of otherness in Kierkegaard’s writings simultaneously brings to light a shortcoming of Kierkegaard’s specifically Christian point of view. What is achieved through coherence and systematicity comes with the exclusivity of the Christological doctrine of salvation. Stan treats certain dimensions of otherness and community through an analysis of legal-procedural components in the Jewish Bible, drawn from the scholarship of Paul Ricoeur, for example; and at certain moments Stan expands his engagement into a broader JudeoChristian discussion. But otherwise the dialogue is limited to a Christian view of salvific “otherness” in which other human others are not included in the entrance way to salvation—opened by the belief in the paradoxical alterity of Christ as God incarnate—which subsequently precludes them from recognition of human alterity, of the “human other.” In regard to Kierkegaard’s predispositional distaste for authority, including any that his own writings might assume, Stan thoughtfully mentions the following: Critics also miss the fact that the Danish thinker was literally haunted by his authorial responsibility toward the reader—letting alone the repeated warnings about his lack of any spiritual authority—a sign of infinite respect vis-à-vis others, which compelled him to create a whole army of pseudonymous authors and to make an obsession out of the delicate issue of indirect communication, that is, of the reader’s freedom to appropriate or reject the views expressed in his books.13

Perhaps there is a way, as scholars outside the Christian tradition have attempted before, and for which Habermas has recently reiterated hope, to translate religious belief, Kierkegaard’s included, as grounded as it is in Stan’s detailed account of alterity, into a framework that permits an infinite multiplicity of other (non-Christian) voices to come to the table and to enter the gates of “salvific alterity.” This could be among the most rational and coherent accomplishments of Kierkegaardian faith for contemporary times. Marcia Morgan

12 13

Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 3.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Undetermined.

Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003 (Modern European Philosophy), xix + 695 pp.

In recent years, few texts devoted to Kierkegaard have generated as passionate a response from scholars as Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. In the dozen years since its publication, most Kierkegaard scholars have concluded that (a) Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered contains ground-breaking research that invaluably illuminates the many-sided nature of Kierkegaard’s contemporary engagements with Danish Hegelianism while (b) the text is also significantly flawed in some way, whether in its methodology, its use of sources, or its overstated conclusions. Scholars generally have not challenged Stewart’s claim that “Kierkegaard had several different relations to Hegel that evolved over time.”1 Rather, they have energetically resisted some form of the suggestion that Kierkegaard’s polemical exchange with his contemporary Danish Hegelians absolves Hegel of Kierkegaard’s critiques. In the rush to address the latter, however, the logic of Stewart’s argument has not always received the attention it deserves. On the face of it, the purpose of Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered is simple: to narrate historically Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. The logic of the argument is also straightforward, and it entails four crucial steps: (1) sketching the “standard account” of the Hegel–Kierkegaard relation; (2) introducing Kierkegaard’s complex and coded relations to his contemporary Danish Hegelians; (3) critically examining Kierkegaard’s allegedly anti-Hegelian texts to demonstrate (a) how they are coded engagements with Danish Hegelians and not with Hegel directly; (b) that they evidence a developing relation with Hegel that can be chronologically divided into three general dispositions;2 and (c) that they remain deeply indebted Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003 (Modern European Philosophy), p. 33. 2 Stewart identifies three phases in this developing relationship: (1) Early: 1834–43— Kierkegaard is generally positively influenced by Hegel in a straightforward way; (2) Middle: 1843–46—Kierkegaard is ostensibly critical of Hegel, but his polemic is primarily aimed at the speculative philosophy and theology of Hans Lassen Martensen, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and Adolph Peter Adler; and (3) Late: 1847–55—direct engagement with Hegel is largely 1

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to Hegel in terms of content and form; and (4) concluding that the re-examination of Kierkegaard’s texts requires that the “standard account” of the Hegel–Kierkegaard relation be made more complex to reflect the ambiguous and differentiated relations between the two thinkers. The steps in Stewart’s argument that have been contested most hotly are (1) and (3.a),3 and both of these deserve further attention here. As I begin to unpack these elements of the argument, it is also possible to begin to place Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered in its historical context. To begin his argument, Stewart sketches what he perceives to be the standard reception of the Hegel–Kierkegaard relationship, namely, that Kierkegaard is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in tone, argument, and content. It should be noted that Stewart’s version of the “standard reception” is not necessarily the reception in contemporary scholarship nor the only historical position on the matter; rather, it is the widely accepted perception of the relation over the years that was popularized through its presence in works by Eduard Geismar, N. H. Søe, Søren Holm, Gregor Malantschuk, Jens Himmelstrup, Robert Bretall, Niels Thulstrup, and others.4 Therefore, despite the fact that his review of scholarship—particularly the scholarship published since Thulstrup’s Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel5—is not exhaustive, George Pattison rightly affirms Stewart in stating that, especially beyond the circle of specialist scholarship, “Kierkegaard’s opposition to Hegel has been taken to be one of the defining hallmarks of ‘Kierkegaard’ and probably still informs the average undergraduate perception of his significance for philosophy.”6 Moving to another significantly contested element of Stewart’s argument, it should be noted that Stewart’s project, at least initially, is conceived as a history of philosophy.7 Therefore, his focus is on the detailed history of how Hegel’s thought was mediated to and appropriated by Kierkegaard, both through Hegel’s texts and through the teaching and texts of the Danish Hegelians. What Stewart is attempting to sidestep here are ahistorical, thematic comparisons that he perceives to be dictated by “the fantasy of the commentator” rather than the historical material.8 Methodologically, Stewart then virtually limits his examination to assessing Kierkegaard’s own account, to addressing Kierkegaard’s own references or allusions

absent, though Kierkegaard occasionally employs Hegel’s dialectical method and language. For a summary, see Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 597–615. 3 There is also considerable debate about (4), but it is usually dependent upon where one falls in (3.a). 4 See Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 3–32. 5 The title of Stewart’s text is a rhetorical play on Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. 6 George Pattison, review in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, vols. 53– 4, 2006, p.  146. The debate about the precise details of the “standard view” concerns the rhetorical posturing of the text, but the debate is actually somewhat tangential to the subsequent innovative claims of the text which address Kierkegaard’s relations to his Hegelian contemporaries. 7 Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 34. 8 Ibid., p. 37.

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to Hegel. The direct appropriations of Hegel are easily identifiable in Kierkegaard’s earliest texts, while the critical and polemical references are primarily contained in the years between the publication of Fear and Trembling (1843) and the writing of The Book of Adler (1846). In reading these polemical references and allusions as coded criticisms of Danish Hegelians, however, Stewart argues that Kierkegaard’s own account may be anti-Martensen, anti-Heiberg, and anti-Adler, but not necessarily anti-Hegel.9 The weak form of this argument (that is, Kierkegaard’s critique of the Danish Hegelians does not exclude the possibility that Kierkegaard is significantly and diversely influenced by Hegel) has been generally accepted by Kierkegaard scholars and, in detailing this argument, Stewart immensely thickens our understanding of Kierkegaard’s place in the world of Danish philosophy and theology, a topic that is usually ignored by the English-speaking world.10 What has made this text particularly contested, however, is the occasional presence of the strong form of this argument (that is, Kierkegaard’s polemic is directed against the Danish Hegelians and therefore he is not critical of Hegel).11 In response, many have argued that even if Hegel is not the direct target, Kierkegaard’s criticisms frequently reach back to Hegel beyond the Danish Hegelians.12 Perhaps the strongest example that highlights the fragility of the strong form of the argument can be found in Problema I of Fear and Trembling, the example to which Stewart devotes over thirteen pages.13 After very carefully describing the appearance of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right in Fear and Trembling—including identifying similarities between Johannes de silentio’s Abraham and elements of Hegel’s Moralität in “The Good and the Conscience”— 14 Stewart concludes that Hegel and Kierkegaard are at cross-purposes here (to put it simply, Hegel is concerned about the role of moral conscience within civil law; Kierkegaard is concerned about private faith) to the extent that they preclude fruitful comparison.15 And, it is important to note, cross-purposes do not entail criticism. This conclusion, however, depends primarily on an interpretation of the projects of See also Jon Stewart, “Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel and Quellenforschung: Some Methodological Considerations,” Filozofia, vol. 68, no. 1, 2013, pp. 17–26. 10 Perhaps the only other text that has contributed to unpacking the complexity of ­nineteen-century Denmark for the English-speaking world to the same extent is Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990. 11 This interpretation of this line of argument is given further support when Stewart, in his conclusion, qualitatively separates Kierkegaard and Hegel by suggesting that they are involved in profoundly different philosophic enterprises (and it is an open question of whether Kierkegaard should even be considered a philosopher in the modern sense). See Stewart, ­Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 650–2. 12 See, for example, George Connell, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 1, 2005, p. 123; and Arne Grøn, “Ambiguous and Deeply Differentiated: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 185–6. 13 Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, pp. 310–23. 14 Ibid., p. 319. 15 Ibid., p. 323. 9

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both Hegel and Kierkegaard rather than on the textual evidence; instead of allowing that the target of Johannes de silentio’s criticism may be Hegel’s articulation of the transition from subjective embrace of the good to objective affirmation of ethics as civil law (that is, the transition from Moralität to Sittlichkeit, of which “The Good and the Conscience” is at the heart)16—and even in the absence of an obvious contemporary Danish target—Stewart seeks to mitigate the possibility that Kierkegaard may actually be criticizing Hegel.17 Of course, the above example only suggests that a consistent affirmation of the strong form of Stewart’s argument can certainly be disputed. Even while recognizing this, I believe that Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered makes a tremendous contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship, and it lies primarily in its illumination of (a) how and why Danish Hegelians were essential to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel and, therefore, (b) Hegel is not always Kierkegaard’s target—whether intended or not—in his polemics with nineteenth-century Danish Hegelians. Despite and evidenced by its debated reception, it is clear that Stewart’s volume served as a substantial provocation for reconsidering Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. Paul Martens

See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by Allen Wood, trans. by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, pp. 157–86. 17 One piece of the puzzle that would further enrich this volume is a thorough assessment of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel’s texts. Stewart’s facility with Hegel is evident, but it is left unclear whether Stewart’s delineation of Hegel’s position would have been recognizable by Kierkegaard (especially since Stewart has access to many more of Hegel’s texts than Kierkegaard). 16

Reviews and Critical Discussions Binetti, María José, “Hacia un nuevo Kierkegaard: la reconsideración históricoespeculativa de J. Stewart,” La mirada Kierkegaardiana: Revista de la Sociedad Hispánica de Amigos de Kierkegaard, no. 0, 2008, pp. 1–15. Cain, David, review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 58, no. 2, 2004, pp. 469–71. Connell, George, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 1, 2005, pp. 122–4. Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 801. Dunning, Stephen N., review in Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 42, no. 4, 2004, pp. 500–2. — “Response to Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, by Jon Stewart,” in Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group: Papers Presented in the Nineteenth Century Theology Group at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion Conference, ed. by Andrew J. Burgess, David D. Schultenover, Daniel W. Hardy, and Theodore Vial, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock 2004 (Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group, vol. 35), pp. 35–52. Edgar, Matthew, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2004 (online journal). Furtak, Rick A., “Ancient Passion, Modern Abstraction: Kierkegaard on the Hellenistic and the Hegelian Conceptions of Philosophy,” in Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group: Papers Presented in the Nineteenth Century Theology Group at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion Conference, ed. by Andrew J. Burgess, David D. Schultenover, Daniel W. Hardy, and Theodore Vial, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock 2004 (Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group, vol. 35), pp. 53–69. Greenspan, Daniel, review in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2005, pp. 228–36. Grøn, Arne, “Ambiguous and Deeply Differentiated: Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 23, 2004, pp. 179–200. — “Kierkegaard, Hegel og danske hegelianere,” Teol-information, vol. 29, 2004, pp. 37–40. Kangas, David, “Which Hegel? Reconsidering Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group: Papers Presented in the Nineteenth Century Theology Group at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion Conference, ed. by Andrew J. Burgess, David D. Schultenover, Daniel W. Hardy, and Theodore Vial, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock 2004 (Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group, vol. 35), pp. 15–34.

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Kjældgaard, Lasse Horne, “Kierkegaard i kamp,” Politiken, February 28, 2004, section 4, p. 7. Kleinert, Markus, review in Philosophische Rundschau, vol. 54, no. 3, 2007, pp. 255–62. Mjaaland, Marius Timmann, Autopsia; Self, Death, and God after Kierkegaard and Derrida, trans. by Brian McNeil, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2008 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 17), pp. 277–90. Pattison, George, review in Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, vols. 53– 4, 2006, pp. 145–51. Perkins, Robert L., review in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 56, 2004, pp. 55–7. — “Jon Stewart’s Mediated Kierkegaard,” in Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group: Papers Presented in the Nineteenth Century Theology Group at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion Conference, ed. by Andrew J. Burgess, David D. Schultenover, Daniel W. Hardy, and Theodore Vial, Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock 2004 (Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group, vol. 35), pp. 4–14. — review in Owl of Minerva, vol. 37, no. 2, 2006, pp. 199–209. Söderquist, K. Brian, “A Short Story: The English Language Reception of On the Concept of Irony,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2009, pp. 493–508; see p. 500. Sprigge, T. L. S., review in British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 4, 2005, pp. 771–8. Stan, Leo, review in Archaeus, vol. 8, 2004, no. 3–4, pp. 235–62. Westphal, Merold, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 48, 2004, pp. 10–15.

Jon Stewart, The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen and Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2015 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 9), xx + 337 pp.

Jon Stewart’s The Cultural Crisis of the Danish Golden Age: Heiberg, Martensen and Kierkegaard is the latest of his many studies that attempt to gain a better understanding of the rich cultural achievements of this famous period in Danish history. This work appears as volume 9 in the well-known series Danish Golden Age Studies, of which Stewart is the general editor. While it is not a work dedicated exclusively to Kierkegaard, he plays an important role in virtually every chapter. As in Stewart’s other works, Kierkegaard is seen as one participant in the larger context of Danish culture. The work takes as its main motif the idea that there were a series of crises that took place during the Golden Age and that the consciousness of these crises played a defining role in the different spheres of culture. Stewart attempts to show how thinkers as diverse as Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and Kierkegaard all made use of the notion of a crisis to characterize what they took to be wrong with their age. This then stimulated each of them to try to go beyond a mere diagnosis of the problem to develop some kind of solution to it. Despite their different positive proposals, there is a striking degree of similarity in their understanding of the fundamental problems to be resolved. The work thus shows that this period that we are used to associating with great cultural achievements was in fact haunted by the idea of a crisis. This alone would be enough to make this work interesting for anyone who would like to explore the Golden Age from a new perspective or to make new connections among some of its most famous figures. However, it would be a mistake to think that this is a solely historical work that aims exclusively at understanding the past. On the contrary, Stewart takes great care to show that what Heiberg, Martensen, Kierkegaard, and others describe as the crisis of the Golden Age is in fact very similar to what has been described as the crisis of our modern world. Specifically, the problems that we are familiar with today—the breakdown of traditional values and customs, the rise of relativism, nihilism, alienation, and subjectivism—all got their start during the first half of the nineteenth century. Stewart thus shows how the crisis of the Golden Age has much in common with what we often refer to under titles such as the crisis of modernity.

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The work is divided into twelve very readable chapters. In the first of these Stewart sets forth his methodology of Quellenforschung and explains its uses in debunking mistaken views that were once current in Kierkegaard studies. He takes a series of short case studies, showing how specific passages in Kierkegaard’s texts have been mistakenly understood as criticisms of Hegel. Stewart demonstrates, by means of source-work research, that in fact Kierkegaard has other targets in mind with his critique. These examples serve as a justification for the use of this methodology in the present investigation. The next four chapters treat different aspects of the work of Johan Ludvig Heiberg, who in many ways is the central figure in the study as a whole. This is due to the fact that it was Heiberg who loudly declared the crisis of the age in 1833 in his famous treatise On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age. Chapter 2, the longest in the work, gives a detailed overview of the life and philosophical works of Heiberg. While readers are accustomed to associate Heiberg’s notion of crisis with the abovementioned work, Stewart convincingly shows that in fact the idea of a cultural crisis is one that is present not just here but throughout Heiberg’s philosophical corpus. Chapter 3 looks at Heiberg’s biography and tries to understand his personal crisis as a young man, who suffered from distraction and could not focus his energy on a single field for any longer period of time. It is claimed that the young Heiberg was vexed by a feeling of the meaninglessness of his work and thus could not sustain his interest for very long. Stewart then connects this personal crisis with what Heiberg describes as the crisis of the age and shows that they are one and the same. Chapter 4 turns to drama and offers an analysis of Heiberg’s Fata Morgana and the critical reception of it by Poul Martin Møller and Martensen. Here the focus is on the crisis of theater, which Heiberg claims has ceased to fulfill the needs of the day. With Fata Morgana he proposes what he regards as a new genre, which he calls speculative comedy. The debate surrounding the piece concerns to what degree this can be regarded as something genuinely new or not. While Møller is wholly skeptical, Martensen tries to make a case for the originality of Heiberg’s work. In Chapter 5 Stewart gives an analysis of Heiberg’s philosophical poetry in the collection New Poems. Here he shows once again how Heiberg portrays the crisis of the day in terms of lyric poetry, after having failed to gain followers with his dramatic attempt in the form of Fata Morgana. In these poems Heiberg portrays the religious crisis of the age and proposes his Hegelian solution to it. Theology and religion are again addressed in Chapter 6, where Stewart explores the question of the relation of philosophical knowing to Christian faith in Kierkegaard’s early journal AA. The origins of the discussion are traced in the work of Heiberg, Schleiermacher, and the Danish philosopher Sibbern. The issue was how to negotiate the encroachment of scientific or philosophical knowledge on religion, and this constituted a central element in what can be regarded as the crisis of religious faith of the day. One response to this was to attempt to separate the two spheres as Kierkegaard did, following in the footsteps of Schleiermacher and Sibbern. The next three chapters are dedicated to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony. Chapter 7 compares Hegel’s Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History with Kierkegaard’s methodological statements in his master’s thesis. It is argued that despite Kierkegaard’s occasional critical remarks of Hegel in the work,

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he in fact follows Hegel’s methodology in the historical analysis of the development of the concept of irony. While Chapter 7 is concerned with the first few pages of the work, Chapter 8 treats the last few, namely, Kierkegaard’s controversial notion of controlled irony. Stewart argues that Kierkegaard is largely under the influence of Heiberg with this concept, which can be seen as a response to the crisis of nihilism and relativism of the day. A number of subtle references to Heiberg’s works are explored. Chapter 9 treats the much-discussed reference to Martensen in the very last line of The Concept of Irony, where Kierkegaard refers his readers to Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s New Poems. While this reference is usually taken to be ironic, Stewart claims that when seen in context it makes perfect sense. Chapter 10 investigates Hegel’s concept of mediation and the Danish discussion about it. Stewart begins with a detailed analysis of the idea in the Science of Logic, in which Hegel defines key terms such as identity and contradiction. Stewart then gives a brief overview of the subsequent debate about it and in particular Kierkegaard’s critical remarks. It is argued that while Kierkegaard seems to take a polemical stance towards this concept, in fact many of his best-known ideas are based on Hegel’s understanding of contradiction, which would imply a form of mediation. Chapter 11, which represents the last substantive analysis, presents the work of the Danish theologian and pastor Eggert Christopher Tryde. Although he is not well known today, Tryde played an important role in the cultural and religious life of the Golden Age. He is particularly significant for the foregoing discussions since he reviewed both Heiberg’s On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age and his New Poems. He too takes up Heiberg’s critical assessment of the age as being in a state of crisis. Chapter 12 offers a short conclusion to the work, in which Stewart shows how the idea of a crisis had an enriching and stimulating effect on thinkers of the period and that it played an important role in producing what he today know as Golden Age culture. The radicality of this can only be fully appreciated when we take a step back and recall that the period is usually portrayed, primarily via the visual arts, as a serene and pristine one, where artists and writers lived a calm and peaceful existence in a quiet corner of Europe. Stewart’s idea of a profound cultural crisis shakes this old conception to its roots and presents a much more complex, dynamic, and interesting vision. The work challenges us to rethink our preconceived vision of the Golden Age. This work successfully demonstrates the centrality of the idea of a crisis in some of the main figures of the Golden Age. If a criticism can be made, it is that the work does not go far enough in pressing its thesis. There are other interesting examples of the motif of crisis that could have been taken up for exploration such as Martensen’s article “The Present Religious Crisis” and Kierkegaard’s use of the term in connection with the actress Johanne Luise Heiberg. The work also succeeds in making the Golden Age relevant in the sense of showing that the crisis of the day anticipates the issues that are discussed so often by philosophers and thinkers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a compelling argument for returning to the period for insight into problems of our day. K. Brian Söderquist

Reviews and Critical Discussions Møller Jørgensen, Claus, review in historie online, 2015 (online journal).

Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 10), xvi + 437 pp.

In his introduction to Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, Jon Stewart lays out the purpose of the anthology. Its goal “is to familiarize the English-speaking world with Kierkegaard’s diverse relations to the leading figures in Golden Age Denmark.”1 Stewart’s goal responds to a twofold demand. Not only have “the most important personalities of the time…been largely neglected and even forgotten by international research,” but the tendency has been “to place Kierkegaard on center-stage and to read his contemporaries, rather unfairly, only through his eyes.”2 Stewart’s anthology sets out to remedy this situation by presenting essays on a wide variety of Golden Age writers, philosophers, theologians, and artists. Stewart’s project is explicitly historical. Against the ahistorical criticism that would enlist Kierkegaard’s texts in discussions of later philosophical, social, or political issues, Stewart argues for a reading of Kierkegaard that considers him “in his immediate context, i.e., in relation to his Danish contemporaries most of whom he knew personally and with whom he was in constant dialogue.”3 Such a project must attempt a difficult balance. The twenty articles of this anthology aim at once to reassert the originality of such familiar Golden Age figures as Jakob Peter Mynster (1775–1854), Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–84), and Nicolai F. S. Grundvig (1738– 1872), establish the importance of less well-known personalities such as Thomasine Gyllembourg (1773–1856) and Johan Thomas Lundbye (1818–1448) while at the same time positioning these writers, artists, and theologians vis-à-vis Kierkegaard. As with any anthology of this scope and breadth, some essays strike this balance more effectively than others. Stewart’s own “Kierkegaard and Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark” and K. Brian Söderquist’s “Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of ‘Irony’ ” are exemplary. Stewart’s essay takes to task the long-held view that Danish Hegelianism constituted “simply a banal repetition of Jon Stewart (ed.), Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2003 (Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 10), p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 Ibid. 1

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Hegel’s own ideas” by examining the varied reception and promulgation of Hegelian thought during the Danish Golden Age.4 In addition to complicating the positions of both well-known pro- and anti-Hegelians (for example, Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) and Hans Lassen Martensen on the one side, Frederik Christian Sibbern (1785–1872) and Jakob Peter Mynster on the other), Stewart elaborates on the Hegelianism of such less-familiar thinkers as Poul Martin Møller (1794– 1838) and Adolph Peter Adler (1812–69). For Stewart, an understanding of Danish Hegelianism does much to enrich Kierkegaard’s own approach to Hegel. K. Brian Söderquist’s “Kierkegaard’s Contribution to the Danish Discussion of ‘Irony’ ” is also effective. Against ahistorical readings of The Concept of Irony, Söderquist argues that Kierkegaard’s dissertation responds to the contemporary Danish discussion of irony. Thus, Söderquist points out that Kierkegaard’s conception of irony, that is, the “negative freedom which marks the fundamental break with his or her inherited social context”5 has much in common with the aesthetic distance discussed by Heiberg, Sibbern, and Eggert Tryde (1781–1860) as well as the ironic subjectivities examined by Poul Martin Møller and Martensen. Söderquist argues that while Kierkegaard’s dissertation synthesizes much of his contemporaries’ discussion of irony, he offers a unique way out of the ironic world-view by suggesting that “the nihilistic break between subject and world can only be reconciled through personal religious openness.”6 Other essays are less effective. While John Saxbee’s “The Golden Age in an Earthen Vessel: The Life and Times of Bishop J. P. Mynster” is an eminently readable introduction to the biography of J. P. Mynster, it lapses often into speculative psychology. Saxbee attributes many of Mynster’s theological and political choices to the latter’s “sense of insecurity and inferiority which had been with him since his youth.”7 Saxbee’s focus on Mynster’s internal psychology empties Mynster’s actions of any socio-political significance. Thus, Mynster’s attempt to have Baptist children baptized against the will of their parents becomes less about the changing nature of Denmark’s economic, political, and cultural landscape and more about the “insecurity which might be traced back to his [Mynster’s] disturbed childhood.”8 While Saxbee’s assertions concerning Mynster’s psychology are provocative, one cannot help but wish that more attention were paid to the specific socio-political milieu into which Mynster emerged. Katalin Nun’s essay “Thomasine Gyllembourg’s Two Ages and Her Portrayal of Everyday Life” also struggles to find the right balance. The first half of Nun’s essay provides an excellent overview of Gyllembourg’s oft-neglected Two Ages. Unfortunately, Nun’s engagement with the text dwells on the correspondences between the heroine of Two Ages, Claudine, and Thomasine Gyllembourg herself. Thus, Claudine’s “faith in true love” resembles Gyllembourg’s “willingness to sacrifice everything to become the wife of her lover”; the former’s “ability to arrange 6 7 8 4 5

Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 154. Ibid., p. 162.

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everyday life” mirrors the latter’s “attention to arranging her life in the described ideal way.”9 Similarly, while Nun does an admirable job tracing Kierkegaard’s interest in Gyllembourg’s Two Ages, her central assertion, that Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review is not a review at all but rather serves “to explore and develop his own assessment of his own age,” seems needlessly prescriptive.10 Nun’s essay is most interesting when it posits Claudine (and by extension, Gyllembourg) as an alternative model of liberated feminine Dannelse against the status quo of Golden Age Denmark. Considering the scope of Stewart’s project, it is perhaps unfair to criticize individual essays. Though the individual essays have their merits, the real contribution of Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark consists in its ambitious bringing together of a whole host of disparate voices to create a more unified picture of Golden Age Denmark. One has to look back to Bruce Kirmmse’s seminal Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark to find so impressive a project.11 Stewart’s text continues to give inspiration to those interested in the specific social, artistic, and cultural conditions of Kierkegaard’s Denmark. Devon C. Wootten



Ibid., pp. 282–3. Ibid., p. 286. 11 Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard and Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press 1990. 9

10

Reviews and Critical Discussions Houni, Pia, review in Nordic Theatre Studies, vol. 16, 2003, pp. 124–5. Sondrup, Steven P., review in Scandinavian Studies, vol. 67, no. 4, 2004, pp. 562–6.

Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York: Fordham University Press 1997, xl + 261 pp.

Michael Strawser’s Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification seeks, via a holistic reading of the authorship, to establish irony as the central component of Kierkegaard’s methodology, underlying every work, pseudonymous or signed, thereby problematizing any interpretation that would claim that a monolithic and positive philosophy is being developed throughout the authorship. The text was the second volume released by Fordham University Press as part of their Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series, edited by John D. Caputo. This is quite appropriate, as the text is clearly representative of a more general “deconstructive” turn in Kierkegaard scholarship which would come to challenge major assumptions and recalcitrant notions in the secondary literature—such as the place accorded to Kierkegaard’s broken engagement to Regine Olsen, the significance of the existencespheres, and the view that the authorship is strictly religious. The text is divided into three major sections, each exploring a different group within Kierkegaard’s corpus: the early works written during his student years, the pseudonymous works, and the veronymous—that is, the “signed”—works, respectively, while the conclusion is largely dedicated to the posthumously published The Point of View for My Activity as an Author. It is ultimately on the first section and the conclusion that Strawser’s reading most heavily relies. Strawser begins with a discussion of From the Papers of One Still Living, Kierkegaard’s 1838 review of Hans Christian Andersen’s Only a Fiddler. Strawser notes that the main reason why From the Papers of One Still Living, along with The Concept of Irony, are seldom studied is because of Kierkegaard’s exclusion of them in his discussion of his authorship in The Point of View. While this claim is explored in more detail in the conclusion, Strawser here suspends the authority of the exclusion, citing Kierkegaard’s initial desire to publish The Point of View under the pseudonym Johannes de silento as a clear reason to be suspicious of the veracity of the work.1 This early text, From the Papers of One Still Living, allows Strawser to make two important claims that will reverberate throughout the rest of his reading. First, the Michael Strawer, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification, New York: Fordham University Press 1997, p. 94. 1

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importance of a “life-view” for Kierkegaard’s thought as a whole. It is a life-view, a deeper unity or viewpoint behind the work which will prevent it from becoming purely theoretical or purely subjective, that Kierkegaard sees as lacking in Andersen’s work, and which Strawser, in turn, seeks to find in Kierkegaard’s. It is based on this idea that Kierkegaard’s work must contain an overarching unity that Strawser comes to criticize interpretations of the authorship as reducible to events in Kierkegaard’s life, such as his broken engagement or his relationship to his father. Furthermore, the discussion of this early work, the preface of which (ironically) explains that the text was published against the writer’s will, leads Strawser to posit that here, “within the beginning of this beginning…the seed that will bloom into the diverse beautiful pseudonyms is planted, the seed of ‘indirect communication.’ ”2 This early text, Strawser argues, is not an exception easily dismissed by virtue of its place outside of the “official authorship.” Kierkegaard’s texts, even those signed with his name, must be read with the possibility of irony and indirect communication in mind. The chapter dedicated to Kierkegaard’s magisterial dissertation, On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (usually referred to as The Concept of Irony), serves as the basis for the argument as a whole, for the dissertation, according to Strawser, contains within it the “conceptual framework” for everything that would follow, nothing less that Kierkegaard’s own life-view.3 Strawser uses Kierkegaard’s fifteenth thesis as an epigraph to the chapter and continues citing it throughout his argument: “as philosophy begins with doubt, so also that life which may be called worthy of a human being begins with irony.”4 But what is irony? Strawser admits of the difficulty of finding a clear definition but “to try, nevertheless: irony [is] nothing, a nothingness attesting to the split between the ironist and the work, the world and the word, immediacy and language, and more,” and additionally he cites Kierkegaard’s endorsement “of the Hegelian characterization of irony as infinite absolute negativity.”5 Kierkegaard’s conception of irony finds its best illustration in Socrates, whose very existence, it is argued, was irony. Socrates’ ironic methodology is thus characterized as the negativity which constituted his freedom from objectivity. It is this freedom that defines irony as a necessary beginning for any human being, for it ushers in the emergence of subjectivity and truth. This does not amount to an equivalence, for Kierkegaard clarifies that irony is only “the first and most abstract determination of subjectivity”6 and furthermore “not the truth, but the way.”7 In a pre-emptive response to those who would argue that Kierkegaard ultimately develops a positive philosophy, Strawser points to Kierkegaard’s preference of Aristophanes’ conception of Socrates over Plato’s and applies the same distinction to interpretations of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Whereas Plato (and traditional Kierkegaard scholars) present Socrates/Kierkegaard as positing a positive 4 5 6 7 2 3

Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 46. Ibid., p. 31.

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philosophy, Aristophanes and the “Aristophaneses of Kierkegaard scholarship” see them as producing only nothingness, yet an essential nothingness, which, if mastered, “emancipates the individual from the snares of the finite, the chains of relativity” and, should the individual choose to engage with the possibilities thereby presented, “ferries one to the coast of the ethical-religious standpoint.”8 Strawser has convincingly argued that there is no reason to believe that the arguments made in these two early texts have no bearing upon the authorship as a whole and, more importantly, that the very irony of which Kierkegaard speaks does not constitute his own methodology. The Concept of Irony and, by extension, the Kierkegaardian corpus does not merely speak of irony, it is irony. Kierkegaard’s ironic methodology therefore is a means of resisting a positive and easily digestible interpretation and instead forces the reader to engage, to appropriate, to choose. Strawser spends the next two sections delineating this ironic reading of Kierkegaard’s thought through the pseudonymous and “veronymous” works (a term coined by Strawser to refer to the “signed” works without implicitly granting them more legitimacy). For the former, Strawser strategically limits himself to a discussion of the pseudonymous works of the poet-philosopher Johannes Climacus (Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) and those of the adamantly Christian Anti-Climacus (Practice in Christianity and The Sickness unto Death). The concept of irony is developed in relation to the former in terms of the dichotomy of reflection/language and immediacy, which further cements the inability of any text and of any author (even Kierkegaard writing under his own name) to truly express—without necessarily concealing—the inwardness of the individual. In relation to the latter, who responds to the establishment of Socrates and of irony as “the way” by establishing Christ as “the truth,” the concept of irony is developed in terms of the “incognito” nature of Christ, who was similarly unable to present any propositional or definitive truth to his followers, and who instead must be believed by virtue of faith alone. The overarching purpose of Strawser’s meditations on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works is to follow the development of Kierkegaard’s thought and to establish that the pseudonyms are but a “mark” of irony which must nonetheless not be taken as a sign that their arguments are to be dismissed. The reverse is the case in his less detailed explorations of the veronymous works which, despite the signature of the author, cannot be taken as any less ironic than the preceding works. These works represent a further movement towards the edification of the reader, yet this edification is not without aesthetic beauty and can only take place if both author and reader are freed from the authority of the text through irony. There is no necessary dichotomy between irony and edification or aesthetics and religiousness. “Irony,” he states, “edifies.”9 Thus, argues Strawser conclusively, The Point of View for My Activity as an Author, even if it was not published pseudonymously, must be regarded as yet another work within the Kierkegaardian authorship, one which, especially given its



8 9

Ibid., pp. 53–4. Ibid., p. 53.

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pretense to direct communication, must also be received ironically. “The result,” he says of the text and of the authorship as a whole, “is in truth a ‘non-result.’ ”10 Strawser’s greatest omission is Kierkegaard’s late political writings against the Danish church, which are only mentioned briefly. While Strawser has argued that veronymity does not signify that a text should be regarded as direct communication, one must wonder whether these texts could be merely added to the category of the veronymous works or whether these confrontational writings are deserving of a different category and therefore of a more serious discussion. Despite this, Michael Strawser’s Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification remains a compelling and important contribution to deconstructive readings of Kierkegaard that would prevent the thinker’s authorship to be reduced to any given maxim or any strict either/or. Jesus Luzardo



10

Ibid., p. 244.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Heiser, John, review in Theology Digest, vol. 45, 1998, p. 92. Pattison, George, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 185–7. Perkins, Robert, review in International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2004, pp. 309–10. Taylor, Mark Lloyd, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 41, 2001, pp. 9–12. Woelfel, James, review in Nineteenth-Century Prose, vol. 28, 2001, pp. 189–91.

David F. Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House 1941, xi + 259 pp.

This book was compiled by David Swenson’s widow, Lillian Marvin Swenson, after her husband’s death. It contains eight chapters originally meant as standalone pieces for academic publication or public lectures. It was republished in 1945 with two additional chapters: Chapter III, a reprint of Swenson’s “Resumé” of Kierkegaard’s authorship, representing “the first extended critical discussion in English of the great Danish philosopher’s work”;1 and Chapter X, containing correspondence between Swenson and other scholars regarding the proper translation of key Kierkegaardian terms and comparing his ideas with early twentieth-century American philosophy. The book must be understood in relation to the dynamics of Kierkegaard’s wider American reception during the 1930s and 1940s. Swenson, Walter Lowrie, and Alexander Dru had agreed to translate Kierkegaard’s authorship by dividing the titles between them, but Swenson died midway through this process. His work was finished by Lowrie and Swenson’s widow, and the latter’s decision to collate and publish some of Swenson’s earlier essays on Kierkegaard helped disseminate her husband’s distinct interpretations of the authorship even as Lowrie played a progressively larger role in the translations.2 The texts that appear in Something About Kierkegaard were written over several decades, reflecting Swenson’s independent studies of Kierkegaard beginning as a graduate student in 1898. One of Swenson’s themes, most fully developed in the second essay, is his image of Kierkegaard as a “Socratic” philosopher who employed the tools of dialectical reasoning to show the inadequacies of both idealism and materialism. Kierkegaard, in Swenson’s view, instead endorses a program of pragmatic reflection whereby the individual learns to examine his or her own aims and beliefs in order to achieve self-awareness. While interpreting Kierkegaard as a fundamentally religious writer, Swenson emphasizes that his true originality lies in his extensive philosophical knowledge and uncanny ability to demonstrate the strengths or limits of distinct world-views. David F. Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House 1941, p. x. 2 Indeed, the epistolary sampling of Swenson’s more private reflections on Kierkegaard in Chapter X can be read as an attempt to present his positions more fully contra those which were able to more fully shape twentieth-century readers’ introduction to Kierkegaard. 1

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But this point of view makes Swenson embrace interpretations of the authorship which modern scholars may find debatable or misguided. One is to view the Concluding Unscientific Postscript as Kierkegaard’s most important and allencompassing work, since it renders explicit the central philosophical problem (that is, the individual’s relationship to Christianity), which all previous works had dealt with in circumspect or indirect ways. Still, it is for this reason that Swenson finds the pseudonymous works the most intriguing part of Kierkegaard’s literature, and his resumé of its entirety focuses especially on quotations from Either/Or, Repetition, and Philosophical Fragments.3 Perhaps because he prioritizes the Postscript, Swenson also dramatically emphasizes Kierkegaard’s attacks on Hegelian speculation, summarizing the latter as the attempt to collapse the individual under a suffocating unity of thought and being. One problem Swenson confronts in his own interpretation is the question of Kierkegaard’s “anti-intellectualism.” On one hand, he portrays Kierkegaard as warning away from the abstractness of philosophical argument, instead trying tirelessly to ground the reader in his own concrete existence. On the other, Swenson is careful not to conflate this with erroneously interpreting Kierkegaard as a base irrationalist or as one who distrusted “objective validity” in all its forms.4 He emphasizes that for Kierkegaard, what matters is how the individual subjectively appropriates truth in a matter commensurate with his or her existential position. A result of this defense is Swenson’s total emphasis on the existence of Kierkegaardian “stages,” most fully explored in Chapter VI. Swenson writes that Kierkegaard succeeded in showing that “the life of feeling has inherent structure and system” and that “we can be objective with respect to our own subjectivity without losing it.”5 One example Swenson explores is to categorize each of the characters of Stages on Life’s Way within distinct “esthetic types” and idealist subsets. Drawing such a demanding hermeneutic out of Kierkegaard’s works is questionable, but Swenson’s analytic formulation of the stages as a response to those who would dismiss Kierkegaard as a writer whose ecstatic style overpowers his thought encapsulates one of the enduring problems of Kierkegaard’s legacy. Despite these interpretive conflicts, Swenson displays the ability to present original, sustained interpretations of Kierkegaard qua philosopher, unusual for English-language scholars of the time. Chapter IV outlines what Swenson refers to as Kierkegaard’s “existential dialectic,” by which a “wise man…thinking about his own existence” is able to confront the “open possibilities” that lie before him in the world.6 While relying mainly on the Postscript, Swenson’s argument is far-reaching, and he unpacks in detail how Kierkegaard’s dialectics and thematic concerns contrast with those of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Hegel. Elevating the Chapter VIII is titled “An Exposition of Fear and Trembling,” but is only four pages long and is in a highly fragmentary, schematic form. Even here, Swenson argues that a “more essential and universal expression” of Christian consciousness can be found in The Concept of Dread. Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard, p. 183. 4 Swenson, Something About Kierkegaard, p. 237. 5 Ibid., p. 161. 6 Ibid., pp. 112–13.

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“either-or” into a decisive category for the authorship as a whole, Swenson succeeds in re-energizing Kierkegaard for an American audience ignorant of his thought. However, Swenson’s attempts to position Kierkegaard relative to more recent thinkers strike the modern reader as somewhat archaic. Ever mindful of his audience of American philosophers, Swenson contrasts Kierkegaard’s thought with theninfluential philosophers such as William James, Josiah Royce, and Henri Bergson. In Chapter IX, he favorably compares Kierkegaard’s vitriol towards newspapers in the fallout from the Corsair with the views of H. L. Mencken, Upton Sinclair, and Walter Lippmann. These efforts to make Kierkegaard relevant to an early twentieth-century American audience are illuminating if only in consideration of the path Kierkegaard studies may have taken had Swenson further expanded on such juxtapositions. Indeed, Swenson almost succeeds in painting a picture of Kierkegaard as a Danish Mark Twain, whose wit, dialectical skill, penchant for muckraking, and philosophical wherewithal enabled him to defeat any intellectual movement that stifled the individual. Swenson’s own philosophical background allows him to present a far more nuanced view of Kierkegaard’s thought than other early American commentators, presenting both a deeper understanding of the texts in question as well as provocative, original interpretations of their content. That being said, some of Swenson’s hermeneutics—notably his emphasis on Kierkegaard’s absolute dislike of Hegel and his emphasis on the “algebraic clarity” of Kierkegaard’s stages of human existence—have been openly challenged in recent scholarship. Overall, the fledgling and occasionally misguided nature of its investigations limit Something About Kierkegaard to a historical curiosity. Thomas Gilbert

Reviews and Critical Discussions Barrett, Lee C., “The Reception of Philosophical Fragments in the English Language,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 2004, pp. 328–49; see p. 338. — “The USA: From Neo-Orthodoxy to Plurality,” in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, Tome III: The Near East, Asia, Australia and the Americas, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 8), pp. 229–68; see p. 230. Blakemore, W.B., review in Christian Century, vol. 59, no. 4, 1942, p. 282. Löwith, Karl, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 26, no. 2, 1946, pp. 155–6. Riviere, William T., review in Springfield Republican, vol. 9, no. 1, 1942, p. 10. Roberts, Robert C., review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 10, 1984, pp. 9–10. Searles, Herbert Leon, review in Personalist, vol. 31, no. 2, 1950, pp. 191–2. Sheffield Brightman, Edgar, review in Journal of Bible and Religion, vol. 10, no. 3, 1942, pp. 159–60. Sponheim, Paul, “America,” in Kierkegaard Research, ed. by Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1987 (Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15), pp. 9–36; see pp. 10–12. Thomas, John Heywood, “The Influence of Kierkegaard’s Thought on Contemporary English-Speaking Theology,” in Liber Academicae Kierkegaardiensis Annuarius, vol. 1, 1977–78, ed. by Alessandro Cortese, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1980, pp. 41–62. Ward, Leo, review in Review of Politics, vol. 4, no. 2, 1942, pp. 223–6.

Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self, Princeton and London: Princeton University Press 1975, xiv + 391 pp.

Mark C. Taylor’s book on the pseudonymous writings of Kierkegaard focused on his understanding of the relation of time and self. Appearing in the mid-1970s, the book represented advanced scholarship that was much appreciated by many of us Kierkegaard enthusiasts. This book launched what has been a remarkable career for Taylor. While teaching at Williams College and then Columbia University, he has written books in the areas of religion, philosophy, literature, media, technology, and economics. He has also functioned ably as a public intellectual ready to share his expertise on postmodern culture and other topics via contributions to major newspapers and appearances on television programs. Taylor’s study builds on earlier studies of Kierkegaard and advances the discussion by its penetrating analysis of temporality and selfhood as given expression in each of Kierkegaard’s stages of existence. The book’s comprehensive thematic coverage of the nine pseudonymous works, its grasp and use of the secondary literature, and its clearly articulated argument places it among the best volumes on Kierkegaard of its time. Taylor enters creatively into Kierkegaard’s Socratic dialogue, and his monograph’s three parts deal with methodological concerns, the three stages of existence, and his critical responses. Methodologically, Taylors treats his issues in Chapter 1 and Kierkegaard’s in Chapter 2. Of the three main types of books on Kierkegaard—the biographicalpsychological, the historical-comparative, and the descriptive-thematic—Taylor identifies his book as falling into the third category, with it being a thematic work. Taylor has chosen to focus on the pseudonymous writings, because he thinks they are the most important. On the question of pseudonymity, Taylor acknowledges Kierkegaard’s claim that there is not a word in them that is his, and yet in interpreting these writings his usual practice is to refer to Kierkegaard as the one making the statement rather than the particular pseudonym. He argues that Kierkegaard’s writings are coherent but limits that coherence-claim to the pseudonymous works. Taylor differentiates his thematic method from that employed by Paul Sponheim.1 Paul R. Sponheim, Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence, New York: Harper and Row 1968. 1

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The pseudonymous authorship is diverse, but, for Taylor, unifying them is a vision of authentic selfhood and a focused literary purpose. Concerning Kierkegaard’s method, Taylor addresses why Kierkegaard employed pseudonyms and how this choice came to bear on his authorial intention and the structure of his authorship. The choice of method emerges out of his view that religious truth, involving subjectivity as opposed to objectivity, needs to be appropriated within one’s existence. This called, then, for an indirect mode of communication and Kierkegaard’s use of the maieutic method of Socratic midwifery. One communicates in such a way that the reader or listener’s freedom is respected, room is left for consideration, and a response is elicited. The pseudonymous writings present possible ways of regarding the world that can be tried on by the reader. The authorship’s aim, at bottom, is to clarify what it means to become a Christian and thus to reintroduce Christianity into contemporary culture. Taylor considers the stages both as ideal personality types and as levels in the development of the individual self. The dialectical complexity of the stages becomes apparent in the book’s Part II. Chapter 3 provides a general overview of the subjects of time and selfhood. A helpful account of “spatialized time” is given as deriving from Aristotle’s view of time as measuring the movement of objects through space. Kierkegaard counters this traditional, quantitative view of time that is unable to accommodate the place of human purpose, the importance of particular events, and the tenses (past, present, and future) of time. Kierkegaard’s self is identified as the dynamic activity of selfrelating, and the terms spirit, eternal, freedom, and self are regarded as equivalent. The category of the moment of decision is introduced as that through which temporality and eternity are brought together. Apart from human beings, time is an infinite succession, a process with no past, present, or future. However, with the human’s purposeful activity, tensed time emerges; the moment of decision is the call of future possibilities to present freedom shaped by past actualities. Selves are tensed, in that they live in memory, decision, and hope. The aesthetic stage of existence is the topic of Chapter 4. The two poles of immediacy and reflection comprise this stage. Characterizing the aesthetic stage is the absence of decision: in this stage there are no actual selves. In immediacy genuine relationships are not present, for they involve mediating that annuls immediacy. The three stages of erotic desire in immediacy are, in brief, quiet longing, restless questing, and determined movement. In the pole of immediacy, immersing oneself in present pleasure discounts past and future. The reflective pole negates immediacy through language’s mediating. Recognizing possibility brings awareness of future, present, and past. Aesthetic reflection, problematically, directs one away from the self or its purpose. In either its immediate or reflective form, the aesthetic stage lives in the moment of one tense or another without the benefit of a present decision in which future possibilities are related to past actualities. Chapter 5 covers the ethical stage of existence. Engaging the will in purposeful decision allows an actual self to break out of the aesthetic stage. Two decisions involved are choosing oneself and deliberately resolving to strive toward a goal. Moral principles guide the self’s activity, and Kierkegaard values inward resolve over outward result. The ethical life holds together the three tenses of time, and time itself is important as the arena in which the self’s decisions constitute and define it. The experience of dread or anxiety is not unknown to the ethical person because, as

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the possibility of freedom, dread emerges on the boundary of the aesthetic and the ethical. Religiosity is present at the ethical stage, but its purpose is to substantiate moral principles instead of possessing its own autonomous domain. Taylor investigates Religion A in Chapter 6. This stage differs from the ethical stage by a clearer distinction between God and the world (and selves) and by a deeper interest in its eternal blessedness. Religion A’s task is to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. This calls for becoming nothing, or impotent, before God. Elevating the living God of faithful religious relationship above the codified moral law can lead to a teleological suspension of the ethical. Suffering, in an interior sense from the reorienting called for, becomes an ingredient in Religion A. In Religion A, the eternal (God) lives within the self, bestowing an immortal soul that can be recollected immediately without any need for a mediator. Taylor’s final chapter on the stages of existence culminates in the religion of Christianity. For Kierkegaard, Christianity’s distinction resides in its doctrine of sin, which is known through God’s revelations. This occurs, Taylor suggests, in the incarnate Christ who is the absolute paradox. Moving out of sin’s separation from God can only occur by responding in faith to God’s act of forgiveness in Christ. The two key moments are the Incarnation, in which the eternal God becomes present in time, and faith, by which the sinful believer appropriates the holy God’s forgiving love. Taylor carefully delineates the double sacred history, first, of the God-man, and, second, of the faithful individual. These two moments share a number of characteristics. Incarnation’s moment through the atonement brings the forgiveness of sins, and faith’s moment through its appropriation receives forgiveness. The believer experiences repetition by regaining in Christ the self that had been lost in sin: the freedom to realize possibility lost through sin is reopened as the self again acquires the freedom to constitute itself as saved or blessed through its decisions. Part III, “A Corrective,” of Taylor’s book consists of one chapter entitled “The Solitary Self.” Here Taylor calls into question the radical inwardness of faith, which Kierkegaard insists cannot be outwardly expressed and that seems to mean that faith introduces no significant change to one’s life. The result is two fully discrete individual identities, one inner and the other outer. Kierkegaard also maintains that the fullest actualization of selfhood is to be found in the isolated individual rather than in the individual within community. For Kierkegaard, communal existing is more inauthentic than isolated existing. Taylor questions this refusal to acknowledge forms of human community that can enhance individual responsibility. A second serious criticism centers on Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian stage of existence. His view reduces the full temporal process of history to the two moments of incarnation and faith. This salvific process is really severed from the whole process of history since the abstracted “sacred history” of the two moments is dissociated from the fullness of temporality and the historical process. The Incarnation is undercut and the believer is directed to life beyond the world. Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship is a learned account of Kierkegaard’s understanding of time and self. Four decades after its publication, it remains a very important volume to consult for learning more about temporality in the stages of the existing self. Curtis L. Thompson

Reviews and Critical Discussions Marsh, James L., review in Modern Schoolman, vol. 55, 1978, pp. 325–7. P. S., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 29, 1976, p. 561. Pappin III, Joseph, review in New Scholasticism, vol. 58, 1984, pp. 495–9. Perkins, Robert L., review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 15, 1977, pp. 116–18. Raschke, Carl, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 10, 1977, pp. 328–32. Shein, Louis J., review in Dialogue, vol. 15, 1976, pp. 156–7.

Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Self hood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1980, ix + 298 pp.

Mark C. Taylor’s study, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, was first published by the University of California Press in 1980.1 In the same year this work was accepted as a Habilitation thesis (Disputats) by The Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen. The book was reissued in 2000 by Fordham University Press as volume number 14 in the series Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, edited by John D. Caputo.2 The new publication was effectively an identical reproduction of the first edition (with the same pagination). The only difference between the two editions is a 12-page preface with the title “Returnings,” which Taylor added to the second edition (pp. ix–xxi). To put Taylor’s book in its proper perspective, one should recall that at the time Journeys to Selfhood was first published, the standard work on Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel was Niels Thulstrup’s highly influential Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846.3 Thulstrup’s rabid anti-Hegel polemic throughout the work was characteristic of the general understanding of the issue, which had been dominant for years and served to entrench it even further in the research. When Taylor’s study appeared in 1980, it marked a refreshing break from the long series of partisan studies, virtually all of which inevitably concluded that Kierkegaard had nothing but disdain and animosity for Hegel. Taylor’s neutrality and genuine interest in exploring the two thinkers with a comparative study was a

Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1980. 2 Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, New York: Fordham University Press 2000 (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy, vol. 14). 3 Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaards forhold til Hegel og til den spekulative idealisme indtil 1846, Copenhagen: Gyldendal 1967. (English translation: Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. by George L. Stengren, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1980. German translation: Kierkegaards Verhältnis zu Hegel und zum spekulativen Idealismus 1835–1846, Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer 1972.) 1

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positive turn away from the paradigm represented by Thulstrup, who could not suffer any study on the issue that ventured to put forth a view different from his own.4 Instead of merely taking up Kierkegaard’s side on each of the issues as Thulstrup does, Taylor offers a much more balanced assessment in an effort to bring the two thinkers into a genuine dialogue. He writes, “My goal, in sum, is to bring Hegel and Kierkegaard closer together so that their differences can emerge more clearly.”5 Taylor selects what he sees as an underlying theme that he uses throughout the book as a fixed point to compare and contrast the works of Hegel and Kierkegaard. “The central thesis underlying our investigation,” he writes, “is that Hegel and Kierkegaard develop alternative phenomenologies of spirit that are designed to lead the reader from inauthentic to authentic or fully realized selfhood.”6 By this he understands above all the modern problem of creating and discovering oneself in the modern context of fragmentation, estrangement, and alienation. Appropriately, he takes the Phenomenology of Spirit as the paradigmatic text from Hegel in regard to this theme. His procedure is to compare the Phenomenology with a number of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works where, he argues, the same issue is treated. By analyzing everything in terms of this one theme, Taylor has considerably limited the scope and importance of his investigation. Moreover, this theme, even though broadly conceived and having the advantage of providing a measure of continuity to the study, nonetheless tends to force many different analyses into a scheme where they do not always fit cleanly, and thus the continuity that is provided is often only apparent. Perhaps what is most problematic is the way in which this theme hinders the author from treating specific discussions on their own terms. For example, although it might be insightful to view Hegel’s analysis of world history, political theory, or religion as a journey to selfhood, this is clearly not the way Hegel conceived of these discussions himself. The problem of modern self-identity or of the individual’s self-conception, at least so formulated, is more important for Taylor’s philosophical agenda than for Hegel’s. Despite Taylor’s attempt to bring Hegel and Kierkegaard into a genuine dialogue without taking sides or viewing the matter from the perspective of the one thinker or the other, his methodology tends to undermine this goal. In his various discussions, Taylor breaks up his analyses into two parts, one on Hegel and one on Kierkegaard. This sort of procedure, which seems natural enough in a comparative study, does not engender a dialogue but instead gives rise to two different accounts of a given issue. His long Chapter 6 provides a good case in point. There he first summarizes the entirety of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and then goes on to do the same for Kierkegaard’s Either/Or to the ostensible end of demonstrating the similarities between these two works. The summary of the two texts may be interesting in itself, but by breaking up these extended discussions in this way, Taylor leaves open many questions about the actual points of contact. Thus, his treatment of the commonalties See Thulstrup’s embittered “A Ghost-Letter Caused by Mark C. Taylor’s Journeys with Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in Liber Academiae Kierkegaardiensis, Tomus V, 1983, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1984, pp. 94–101. 5 Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, p. 21. 6 Ibid., p. 13. 4

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and differences between the two thinkers is impeded by a procedure that produces what at times seems to be two different discussions with little more than superficial similarities. Taylor is not interested in outlining any sort of development in Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel since he is only tracing a single theme. This leads him to view Kierkegaard’s oeuvre as a monolithic whole and to cite in the same context various passages from different periods and texts without regard to the issues of pseudonymity, periods of development, and the like. This is misleading since by this procedure one is able to create patchwork positions, which it is not clear that Kierkegaard ever actually held. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s thought was not born in a single instant but rather developed over a period of time. But Taylor’s procedure does not allow him to distinguish different positions or periods in Kierkegaard’s development. The relation of Kierkegaard to Hegel is more complex and differentiated than has often been thought due in part to the fact that it changed over time. Thus, to explore the question of Hegel’s influence on Kierkegaard, one must first put the specific subject matter of the study into a determinate context by designating what period or work is at issue. Taylor’s theme-oriented procedure can thus be seen as distorting in individual analyses and does not allow him to take into account the intellectual-biographical development of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel. Given this theme-oriented methodology, it can perhaps be said that Taylor’s work explains more about his own philosophical views on the self and the modern problem of alienation than about the actual historical relation between Kierkegaard and Hegel. The character of Taylor’s study can be gleaned from his own statements about his motivation for reissuing the work after some twenty years. One might imagine a priori that the reason for making a second edition of a work would typically be that there had been some important event in the research that had taken place in the interim since the publication of the first edition, for example, that some new manuscript by Kierkegaard had been discovered where he discusses his views on Hegel’s thought, or that new information had surfaced about the Danish sources of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel, for example, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Hans Lassen Martensen, and others. But Taylor’s motivation to publish a second edition had absolutely nothing to do with new historical or philological research on Hegel or Kierkegaard which had taken place since 1980, but instead it concerned exclusively his own assessment of the current state of philosophy. He explains in his new preface “Returnings” that he believes that the Kierkegaard-inspired poststructuralist movement in philosophy has failed to come beyond a negative critique and to offer any positive solution to contemporary ills.7 By contrast, he claims, “Hegel’s philosophy provides invaluable resources for addressing many of the critical questions we are currently facing.”8 Thus, the reissuing of Journeys to Selfhood is a plea to return to Hegel in search of answers to the problems which have been left open in the wake of poststructuralism. This can be very interesting as a diagnosis of the current state of things in philosophy and literary theory, and for those readers interested in applying

Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (2000), p. xviii. Ibid., p. xix.

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Hegel and Kierkegaard to contemporary philosophy, Taylor’s book will certainly be a fascinating and suggestive piece of work. It will, however, be of less help to those seeking to understand better Kierkegaard’s actual historical relation to Hegel, which would require a different methodology than that used by Taylor. But this is another issue, and it is not Taylor’s primary interest. When all is said and done, it must be recognized that Taylor’s book is and will remain a landmark in Kierkegaard studies. It signals a major paradigm shift from the days of Niels Thulstrup and paved the way for further investigations into the complex relation between Hegel and Kierkegaard. Jon Stewart

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 801. Dunning, Stephen N., review in Owl of Minerva, vol. 14, no. 1, 1982, pp. 6–8. Elrod, John W., review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 1, 1983, pp. 113–15. Gill, Jerry H., review in Theology Today, vol. 38, no. 2, 1981, pp. 270–1. Glebe-Møller, Jens, review in Kristeligt Dagblad, September 4, 1981. Jantzen, Grace M., review in Religious Studies, vol. 19, 1983, pp. 111–13. Kemp, Peter, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13, 1984, pp. 177–9. Mortensen, Viggo, review in Information, June 12, 1981. Patterson, David, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 10, 1984, pp. 4–9. Perkins, Robert L., “Taylor’s Journey to Hegel,” Journal of Religion, vol. 63, no. 1, 1983, pp. 57–63. Shearson, W. A., review in Canadian Philosophical Reviews, vol. 2, 1982, pp. 33–6. Stewart, Jon, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 22, 2002, pp. 247–51. — Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 27–32. Thulstrup, Niels, “A Ghost-Letter Caused by Mark C. Taylor’s Journeys with Hegel and Kierkegaard,” in Liber Academiae Kierkegaardiensis, Tomus V, 1983, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel 1984, pp. 94–101. Wind, H. C., review in Weekendavisen, July 31, 1981.

John Heywood Thomas, Subjectivity and Paradox: A Study of Kierkegaard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1957, vii + 174 pp.

Prior to the debut of Thomas’ specialized study, the English-speaking world had only 10–25 years to wrestle with Kierkegaard’s general thought and primary works. Sensing the time for Kierkegaardian surveys as over, Thomas organizes his discussion of Kierkegaard largely around the question of philosophy’s relation to Christianity and two Kierkegaardian themes: (1) the subjectivity of truth and (2) the absolute paradox. Both Collins and McInerny note that Thomas makes an innovation by frequently employing the linguistic analysis he gleaned from the Cambridge Analysts.1 Over the course of six chapters, it emerges that Thomas has two essential theses: Thesis A: Kierkegaard’s principle of subjectivity and the absolute paradox were not born out of a vacuum; rather, they were the culmination of an intellectually rich climate within which Kierkegaard found himself. Thesis B: Renewed emphasis needs to be placed on Kierkegaard’s ideas of subjectivity and paradox for at least two reasons: (1) so that modern philosophy of religion does not continue on a fool’s errand for an “objective” proof of faith, and (2) conceiving of faith as a matter of abstraction or proof shifts our attention away from the personal existential states involved both in philosophy and in our decisions for religious truths. In his Introduction, Thomas reveals the thinkers that likely influenced Kierkegaard and sketches the contours of the principle of subjectivity. We see here the kernel of Kierkegaard’s new subjective approach to philosophy of religion. Thomas develops these ideas in full in subsequent chapters. Thomas’ second chapter, “The Historical Situation,” details the evolution of Hegel’s theological views for two reasons: first, to demonstrate how Hegel was a Kierkegaardian forerunner and second, to show why Kierkegaard was justified in his critique of Hegel. Hegel’s nascent theological view resembled the Kantian idea of religion; however, Hegel over time could not square slavish moral religion with the purported restoring unity of Christianity symbolized in the Incarnation. In “The Spirit of Christianity,” Hegel developed his concept of Geist to unite both God and man. Philosophy has to create a new religion to reconcile faith and speculation. James Collins, review in Theological Studies, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 286–8. Ralph M. McInerny, review in Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 666–9.

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Christ was but one instance of God’s incarnation. Every man is an instantiation of God, and the skilled philosopher can integrate the seeming disparate events of history and religion to see how God expresses himself temporally through humanity. Via speculation, the philosopher can come to understand God and harmonize things accordingly.2 Thomas reserves Chapter 3 for the influences that helped distance Kierkegaard from Hegel and ultimately precipitate the principle of subjectivity, specifically Franz von Baader, Schelling, Hamann, and Lessing. This overview of the principle of subjectivity’s development could prove a bit dizzying for the uninitiated. Baader is credited with initiating the struggle against Hegel for Kierkegaard with his denial of the idea that God is an object of man’s reason. One can see how Kierkegaard may have derived the idea from Baader that God is the infinite subject, known only in subjectivity, not speculation. Schelling can also be seen as a source of inspiration for the principle of subjectivity, given how Schelling emphasized a real relation to God (contra the abstract theorizing of the Hegelian milieu), choice, and positive freedom. Kierkegaard was likely attracted to the following three ideas from Hamann: (1) faith is non-demonstrable via intellectual reflection, but rather it is an immediate awareness not unlike the faculty of sight; (2) the value of philosophy then is reduced to discrediting scientific hypotheses; and (3) faith, since it is not an operation of reason, is immune to philosophy’s discrediting endeavors. Lastly, Kierkegaard credits Lessing for emphasizing the idea of subjective appropriation. The totality of these influences led Kierkegaard to the position that the person must be reintroduced to philosophy, meaning they have to subjectively relate with passion to a religious truth, against a backdrop of uncertainty regarding the non-demonstrable truths of religion. The certainty sought for via intellection is then found in this act of faith.3 To drive home Kierkegaard’s point that faith has nothing to do with reason’s promise of logical or factual demonstrability, Thomas goes over Kierkegaard’s dissatisfaction with the traditional proofs for the existence of God in Chapter 4. In general, Thomas does an excellent job explaining Kierkegaard’s frustration with the inadequacy of the proofs; however, Thomas gets distracted with a long logicomathematical discussion of the ontological argument that does not serve the book’s larger aims. Further, McInerny disapproves of Thomas’ longwinded and confusing analysis of an already confused footnote.4 To fully understand subjectivity, Thomas, in Chapter 5, shows the role of the absolute paradox in Kierkegaard’s writings. Narrowly defined, the absolute paradox is the God-Man (a contradiction). One can only accept it in faith or be offended at the proposition. The absolute paradox means that faith cannot be equated with philosophical comprehension contra Hegel, and this signals a new and

J. Heywood Thomas, Subjectivity and Paradox: A Study of Kierkegaard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1957, pp. 20–3; pp. 25–6; pp. 31–2; pp. 34–5; p. 37; p. 40. 3 Ibid., p. 48; pp. 50–1; pp. 54–7; p. 69; pp. 72–3. 4 Ibid., p. 79; p. 93. McInerny, review in Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 667–8. 2

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non-speculative life in faith. Once in faith, the meaning of the paradox is revealed and no longer appears absurd.5 Thomas concludes with a return to his second primary thesis. Kierkegaard’s relevance to debates in present day philosophy of religion consists in his views (1) that faith is unlike any kind of proof, be it legal, scientific, or mathematical and (2) philosophy of religion can no longer be an entirely objective enterprise; thus it must take into consideration the emotional attitudes of the individual relating to religious truth. For instance, the despair brought on by sin and guilt nudges us towards living a life of Christian faith.6 Thomas is especially adept at intellectually contextualizing Kierkegaard’s authorship and tamping down the mad rush to apply science to religion. The distinguishing motif of Thomas’ work has to be the employment of linguistic analysis to existential religious philosophy. This is an unusual pairing that has produced mixed reviews. McInerny fails to see the relevance of Thomas’ technique. Though amused by it, McInerny does not understand how Kierkegaardian linguistic analysis is justified apart from being a curiosity. Collins is more complimentary of the notion, specifically in regards to the demonstration of how religious statements are meaningful. This author tends to side with McInerny in that linguistic analysis makes an already difficult thinker more confounding with no obvious intellectual payoff; however, if this methodology formalizes Kierkegaard so he is taken more seriously by analytic philosophers, then we can hardly fault Thomas for that.7 Luke Johnson

Thomas, Subjectivity and Paradox: A Study of Kierkegaard, p. 103; pp. 113–14; pp. 122–3; p. 133. 6 Ibid., p. 134; pp. 139–41; p. 159; p. 167. 7 Collins, review in Theological Studies, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 287–288. McInerny review in The Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, p. 667. I.T. Ramsey review, in Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 135, 1960, p. 367. 5

Reviews and Critical Discussions Collins, James, review in Theological Studies, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 286–8. McInerny, Ralph M., review in Review of Politics, vol. 20, no. 4, 1958, pp. 666–9. Ramsey, I.T., review in Philosophy, vol. 35, no. 135, 1960, pp. 366–7.

Curtis L. Thompson, Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2008 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 4), xvi + 216 pp.

A Professor of Religion at Thiel College, Curtis L. Thompson has had a long-term interest in the debates about Christianity that took place in Golden Age Denmark. He is known for his outstanding work on primarily Hans Lassen Martensen and Kierkegaard. In 1997 he published an English translation of three of Martensen’s works, thus opening up a large amount of new material for Anglophone readers.1 Following the Cultured Public’s Chosen One: Why Martensen Mattered to Kierkegaard appeared in 2008 in the series Danish Golden Age Studies. The book represents a reworked and much expanded version of the article, “Hans Lassen Martensen: A Speculative Theologian Determining the Agenda of the Day,” which appeared in the series, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources.2 Thompson’s work constitutes the most detailed investigation to date of the complex relation of two of the giants in Danish Golden Age theology and can be regarded as a landmark study in many ways. It can be seen as a representative of the growing movement in source-work research that has taken place ever since the publication of Bruce H. Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark.3 Although Martensen was a celebrated figure in Denmark and the German states in his life-time and especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, his work was subsequently neglected until fairly recently.4 During the period when 1 Between Hegel and Kierkegaard: Hans L. Martensen’s Philosophy of Religion, trans. by Curtis L. Thompson and David J. Kangas, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1997. 2 Curtis L. Thompson, “Hans Lassen Martensen: A Speculative Theologian Determining the Agenda of the Day,” in Kierkegaard and his Danish Contemporaries, Tome II, Theology, ed. by Jon Stewart, Aldershot: Ashgate 2009 (Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7), pp. 229–66. 3 Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1990. 4 See Hans Lassen Martensen: Theologian, Philosopher and Social Critic, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 6).

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Kierkegaard’s international reputation continued to grow ever larger, Martensen seemed to disappear over the horizon. Kierkegaard secondary literature was rife with clichés and misunderstandings of Martensen based on an uncritical acceptance of Kierkegaard’s violent, backbiting criticism of him. Thompson’s study returns to the Kierkegaard–Martensen relation with fresh eyes and attempts to give a more nuanced picture of both Martensen and Kierkegaard’s attack on him. His tone throughout is refreshingly sober, and there is no trace of the usual apologetics that one often finds in studies of this kind. He shows that the relationship lasted much longer and was much deeper than the well-known episode in connection with Kierkegaard’s attack on the Danish church and his famous rebuke of Martensen for extolling Mynster as a witness to the truth. Thompson’s goal is simply to understand why Martensen was so important for Kierkegaard, and his study is based on meticulous source-work research. Thompson pored through all of Kierkegaard’s writings and journals and carefully catalogued all of the places where Martensen is mentioned. This work thus represents a great service to anyone who wishes to pursue this relation as an object of research. The thesis of the study is that Kierkegaard in fact had a surprising amount in common with Martensen and that their positions were not always as far apart as the former would have one believe. Martensen in many ways set the agenda for theological discussion that Kierkegaard was also caught up in, and concretely, Thompson argues, Kierkegaard appropriated some of Martensen’s ideas for his own use. This is one of the senses in which Kierkegaard can be said to follow Martensen, as the title of the work hints. The book is divided into three long chapters, which are then subdivided into individual sections. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to Martensen’s life and corpus, and is divided into three periods. Thompson first treats the early period from 1833 to 1841 when Martensen was a popular young instructor at the University of Copenhagen. The author notes a shift in Martensen’s work in the period from 1842 to 1850 when the Danish thinker became more oriented toward the church and less toward an academic audience. Toward the end of this period he published one of his major works, the Christian Dogmatics, which is a sign for Martensen’s movement away from philosophy of religion to dogmatic theology.5 The final period from 1851 to 1884 covers Martensen’s late work and his period as bishop of Zealand and head of the Danish church. This chapter represents an outstanding overview of Martensen’s development and can be usefully recommended as a starting point to students and scholars unfamiliar with him. Chapter 2, “Martensen in Kierkegaard’s Writings,” traces in a chronological manner the numerous mentions of Martensen in Kierkegaard’s journals and published works. Many Kierkegaard readers will be shocked to see the vast number of references that Thompson identifies and discusses. It can indeed be fairly claimed that through the years Kierkegaard developed something of an obsession with Martensen. Thompson demonstrates that in the first period (1834–41) Kierkegaard Hans Lassen Martensen, Den christelige Dogmatik, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel 1849. (English translation: Christian Dogmatics, trans. by William Urwick, Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark 1890.)

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was not necessarily negatively disposed towards Martensen. On the contrary, they had much in common. But his animosity increased through the years and reached its climax with the attack on the church at the time when Martensen was appointed bishop and successor of Mynster. Chapter 3 then uses the information presented in the previous two chapters to work out a highly nuanced interpretation of the nature of Kierkegaard’s use of Martensen. While Chapters 1 and 2 provide a wealth of useful information, this final chapter is a tour de force of critical analysis. Thompson begins with a convincing debunking of the traditional readings of the Kierkegaard–Martensen relation, which invariably end up defending Kierkegaard since his is the only side of the story that is presented. By contrast, Thompson in a very even-handed manner shows how much Kierkegaard actually owed to Martensen. What comes out of this analysis is an entirely new picture of Martensen and Kierkegaard’s famous conflict about the church. Thompson shows that Martensen was not simply a blind parrot of Hegel or follower of the system but also had deep concerns about the existential religious life of the individual. This work makes a major contribution to our understanding of Kierkegaard, Martensen, and the Golden Age in general. It gives us a much richer appreciation of the significance of Martensen for the period than the perfunctory one that we are used to hearing. It must be hoped that this work will inspire future investigations into the different aspects of Martensen’s thought. Moreover, Thompson forces us to see Kierkegaard in a new light. Instead of being a lone genius, working in isolation, Kierkegaard here appears as a thinker who is constantly reacting to Martensen and other thinkers from the time. The famous thoughts and ideas that we know from Kierkegaard’s works arise in this interaction, and an understanding of the background for them is a great help in appreciating what is at stake in his polemics. Thompson’s study is an outstanding work, and it is to be hoped that he will continue to produce future studies along these lines that will further illuminate the great figures of the Danish Golden Age. Jon Stewart

Reviews and Critical Discussions Stewart, Jon, “Introduction,” in Hans Lassen Martensen: Theologian, Philosopher and Social Critic, ed. by Jon Stewart, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2012 (Danish Golden Age Studies, vol. 6), pp. 8–9.

Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1973, xvii + 286 pp.

The story of Kierkegaard’s assorted biographers could be written up as a drama all on its own. There is, indeed, a fitting ambiguity as to what the “correct” interpretation of Kierkegaard’s life actually is, so enigmatic was its plot, details, and main protagonist. When first published in 1973, Josiah Thompson’s radical biography caused more than a few ripples in the unfolding world of Anglophone Kierkegaard scholarship. It remains one of the most important interpretive works on Kierkegaard’s personality ever written, in spite of its controversial construal of Kierkegaard’s life and thought. The original hardback sleeve cover to the first edition includes a subtitle slogan which signals Thompson’s particular intent: “A critical biography of the philosopher who has been called the father of Existentialism.” The zeitgeist popularity of Existentialist philosophy at the time—though certainly not new—was at its height, and Kierkegaard was oft-quoted as one of its household names. It was through this lens that Thompson sought to portray Kierkegaard, the tortured personality behind the influential ideas that had been sweeping through continental Europe over recent decades, from Parisian cafes to Oxbridge lecture halls. Thompson’s biography was preceded by Walter Lowrie’s equally influential Kierkegaard1 and the popular A Short Life of Kierkegaard.2 Lowrie, a Catholic priest and prolific translator of Kierkegaard’s works, had an unprecedented influence upon anglophone Kierkegaard reception up to that point. As such, his biographical portrait of Kierkegaard provided a kind of celebration and apologia for this “exotic” Danish philosopher rather than a critique. His aim was to show the world why Kierkegaard was important, and perhaps why he was worth reading, particularly as a Christian. Despite their influence, many came to view these early portrayals as uncritical and hagiographical. Into this backdrop then, lands Thompson’s Kierkegaard. Where Lowrie sought to open the stage curtain for the great thinker and hero of the Christian faith, Thompson wanted to probe beneath the facade of the enigmatic genius. Thompson’s biography, above all, sought to bring the world closer to the flawed humanity of Kierkegaard, Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, London: Oxford University Press 1938. Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1942.

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complete with all his contradictions, habits and egocentrisms. It is a quintessential effort to dethrone Lowrie’s idolized portrait from the mantelpiece. The book is chronologically structured in three sections: “Childhood,” “Youth,” and “Cloister.” Unlike many depictions of Kierkegaard, as much space is given to the sections on his upbringing as to his writing career. This identifies Thompson’s general approach of wanting to explore the subjective experiences—particularly in Kierkegaard’s home life—that shaped his presuppositions. As a result, the book appears more a work of psychoanalysis than an “objective” narration of a historical life. Thompson highlights themes like recurrent family tragedy, Kierkegaard’s relationship with his father, physical disfigurement, personal guilt, sibling envy, as the factors that lay behind the Dane’s philosophy. It is in this sense that Thompson’s reading remains “existentialist” at its core. Perhaps Thompson’s most dominant thesis throughout the book is that Kierkegaard essentially lived a kind of “fantasy life” divorced from reality. Many facets are funneled into this interpretative framework: Kierkegaard’s perpetual childlikeness,3 “his sense of magic and zest for fantasy,”4 his “penchant for secrecy and deceptiveness,”5 even his “luxurious” lifestyle which kept him “at a distance” from the world.6 This view also extends to the pseudonyms as being a reflection of Kierkegaard himself: “Like their author, all these pseudonyms are cloistered from the world, and in their respective monastic cells they all mimic his life-activity— thinking and imagining.”7 Another definitive theme in Thompson’s portrayal is the “alternative” account of Kierkegaard’s Christian faith. Kierkegaard’s sinfulness and religious apathy are accentuated, whilst personal devotion is relatively minimized. We read of “Kierkegaard’s lifelong ambivalence toward Christianity,”8 and that he “tried to find in philosophy the ‘truth’ he failed to discover in religion.”9 This interpretive move often appears suspect where we see Thompson making claims based on reading between the gaps in Kierkegaard’s writings: “in the autumn of 1835 Kierkegaard was not so much offended with Christianity as simply bored with it; beginning on November 4 all mention of religious topics vanishes from his journal for the next half year.”10 Thompson’s relentlessly critical approach is, in one sense, unsurprising given Thompson’s broader investigative interests. Prior to writing the biography, and in the same year as he published a book on Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works,11 he penned a curious and extremely popular book: Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1973, p. 133. Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., pp. 124–5. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 57. 10 Ibid. 11 Josiah Thompson, The Lonely Labyrinth: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1967. 5 6 7 8 9 3 4

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of the Kennedy Assassination.12 It is rare indeed to find a writer considered to be a leading authority on both Søren Kierkegaard and the assassination of Kennedy at the same time! One reason, perhaps, that Kierkegaard never found itself in a second edition, is not only its indebtedness to the unique philosophical climate of its time, but also the fact that Thompson had, by 1976, left his post as an Assistant Professor of philosophy to become a full-time private investigator. These unusual side-interests highlight the conspiratorial heartbeat to Thompson’s historical evaluations, which we certainly find at play throughout Kierkegaard, through the aforementioned lens of cynicism. What is most memorable about this biography is its literary flair, by which Kierkegaard’s narrated life becomes even more fascinating. Thompson is content to let the prose speak for itself, telling the story as if he is sitting in the corner of each room noting every last detail, expression and emotion. Historical evidence is not ignored by any means—such details are, in fact, well referenced—though they are deliberately left as endnotes. Thompson’s primary interest is not to verify facts but to render Kierkegaard’s life and personality afresh. At times the prose is so gripping and original that one might forget that these events actually happened. Yet this carries a counter-problem; as soon as one is drawn in by this narrative, one is forced to question Thompson’s poetic license. This is a fate also suffered by a subsequent Kierkegaard biography by Joakim Garff, to which Thompson’s is a clear forerunner.13 Both Garff14 and Thompson15 have been widely praised for their unique artistry and equally criticized for their suspicion and authorial audacity. Whilst Garff’s visionary offering is obviously beholden to Thompson in its narratival methodology, Alastair Hannay’s Kierkegaard: A Biography (2001) seems a direct reaction to Thompson’s approach.16 Rather than the bold and assertively interpretative depiction of Kierkegaard’s life, Hannay provides an “intellectual” biography, noteworthy for its focus upon Kierkegaard’s thought and works; it was described by one reviewer as a “tediously expository Josiah Thompson, Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination, New York: Bernard Geis Associates 1967. 13 Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. by Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005. 14 Whilst it is noted that “Garff’s biography reads like a novel” (see C. Stephen Evans, “Kierkegaard Among the Biographers: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Books and Culture: A Christian Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 2007, pp. 12–13; p. 12), it is also noted that Garff is “all too ready to catch Kierkegaard in authorial deceptions, moral blunders, or personal indignities” (see Edward F. Mooney, On Soren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time, Aldershot: Ashgate 2007, p. 91). 15 Crites says Thompson’s biography is “as difficult to put down as a well-strung novel” yet also describes the treatment of Kierkegaard as “pitiless.” Stephen Crites, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 55, no. 2, 1975, pp. 235–46; p. 236. Heywood Thomas also speaks of Thompson’s Kierkegaard as “eminently readable and even exciting” yet an “oddly disappointing” and “simplistic” account of Kierkegaard. John Heywood Thomas, review in Religious Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1977, pp. 101–4; p. 101. 16 Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001. 12

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tome.”17 This is something that, certainly, could never be said of Thompson’s biography, even with its problems. The very final sentence of the book seems to encapsulate Thompson’s unique portrait: “In the cemetery the gravediggers’ spades bit deep into the yellow-grey earth, casting it in narrow arcs to thud wetly on the black-draped casket.”18 No final evaluation of Kierkegaard’s legacy; no last hurrah for what could have been; we are left merely to contemplate the image of Kierkegaard’s sodden casket, his poignant death still ringing in our ears as the image suddenly and sharply halts. In one sense, it is quite brilliant, and extremely effective. There is a dramatic, melancholic tone that brings the tragedy of Kierkegaard’s life-and-death to life, as it were. There is something invigorating, too, in finishing a biography with such poetic vigor. But overall this caps an all-too-pessimistic vision of a figure who—though he certainly had his inconsistencies and severe faults—remains the perennially influential figure he is precisely because of everything else he inspires in all who read him. Thompson’s unparalleled eye for literary and conspiratorial detail, however, means that his Kierkegaard, however dubious, retains an incomparable allure and distinctive quality. For this reason, it will continue to be a benchmark by which future Kierkegaard biographies are judged, whether they assimilate Thompson’s approach or react against it. Aaron Edwards

George Connell, review in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 17, no. 1, 2003, pp. 70–2; p. 70. 18 Thompson, Kierkegaard, p. 238. 17

Reviews and Critical Discussions Anderson, Barbara C., review in Man and World, vol. 7, 1974, pp. 300–6. Crites, Stephen, review in Journal of Religion, vol. 55, no. 2, 1975, pp. 235–46. Hogan, James, review in European Judaism, vol. 8, no. 2, 1974, pp. 45–6. J.D.C., review in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 27, no. 4, 1974, p. 816. Luckett, Richard, review in Spectator, January 12, 1974, pp. 42–3. Malantschuk, Gregor, review in Scandinavica, vol. 13, 1974, pp. 147–9. Plekon, Michael, review in Human Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1981, pp. 87–95. Thomas, John Heywood, review in Religious Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 1977, pp. 101–4. Vinten-Johansen, Peter, review in Scandinavian Studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 1976, pp. 458–62.

Peter Vardy, Kierkegaard, London: Fount 1996 (Fount Christian Thinkers), x + 101 pp.

One cannot underestimate the value of a good introduction to a great thinker, not least a thinker as complex and intimidating as Søren Kierkegaard. Peter Vardy’s Kierkegaard (1996) was originally published as part of the Fount Christian Thinkers series and later revised and minimally expanded as the SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard (2008). In it, Vardy sought to pare down Kierkegaard’s multifaceted thought scheme and offer stimulus for appreciation and engagement with a thinker often avoided by those unfamiliar with him. The book does not seek to cover any particularly new ground but nonetheless holds a key place in Kierkegaard scholarship as an entry point into Kierkegaard’s thought, which inspires further reading of the primary texts and challenges uncritical assumptions. Vardy’s particular focus is to highlight the importance of Kierkegaard’s ideas as a specifically Christian thinker. Those looking for Kierkegaard-the-philosopher or Kierkegaard-the-existentialist in this work will find themselves confronted by a Kierkegaard whose thought cannot—at any point—be isolated from his theology or faith. The mid-1990s, when Vardy’s book first appeared, was itself something of a “golden era” for theological appropriations of Kierkegaard, with important works such as David J. Gouwens’ Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996), Julia Watkin’s Kierkegaard (1997), and Arnold Come’s Kierkegaard as Theologian (1997), among many others, offering a fresh burst of re-Christianized Kierkegaard interpretations. These sought to reclaim the melancholy Dane for Christian thought, in counterreaction to the wealth of philosophical scholarship which had seen Kierkegaard as a relativist, humanist, postmodernist, or existentialist. Vardy’s short work, although not an academic text as such, plays into this burgeoning counter-movement within Kierkegaard scholarship at that time. In his introduction, Vardy states his intentions as follows: (1) to think through what Christianity means today; (2) to reintroduce Christianity to secular modernity; (3) to show the limitations of reason in philosophy; and (4) to show the essential unity of Kierkegaard’s thought. The “unity of thought” is a key characteristic of theological readings of Kierkegaard which seek to bridge the gap between the so-called “first” and “second” authorship. Evidently, Vardy’s reading is not only intended for the sake of interpreting Kierkegaard but for interpreting who God is and what it means to live in relationship with him. To an extent, this lends a certain polemical dimension to the work: “a riposte on behalf of traditional

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Christianity to the modern theologians and philosophers who have transformed eternal truth into a human construct.”1 These overtly theological intentions govern the book’s content and structure. However, Vardy does not ignore Kierkegaard’s aesthetic works, by any means; his aim is to show that all of Kierkegaard’s writings are—at heart—theological. This follows Kierkegaard’s own interpretation of his authorship in The Point of View, which has often been subject to debate, particularly by those of a less theological persuasion who have queried the validity of Kierkegaard’s own authorial perception. For Vardy, however, Kierkegaard’s view clearly plays a key role in his own reading of the authorship, and he is prepared, in that case at least, to take Kierkegaard at his word. As overall editor of the Fount Christian Thinkers series, Vardy also occasionally makes reference to other books within it, showing how other key thinkers in the Christian tradition like Augustine, St. Francis or Luther have been influential upon Kierkegaard’s thought. The book opens with a brief but vivid biographical portrait of Kierkegaard, focusing on the usual key events, followed by the main chapters as expositions of key themes in Kierkegaard’s thought. These are often based upon certain key texts. For example, the chapter on “Socrates and Jesus” uses Philosophical Fragments as its primary source, the following chapter “Truth as Subjectivity” uses the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and another on “Ethics, Sin and the Relationship to God” uses Fear and Trembling. This approach is helpful in giving a sense of how Kierkegaard explicates certain themes more specifically in certain texts. However, the downside of this approach is the lack of clarity and cohesiveness as a whole, with certain texts within Kierkegaard’s “canon” gaining preference over others, which are only alluded to or ignored. This also neglects the fact that many themes span the entire authorship in different ways. In the “Socrates and Jesus” chapter, Philosophical Fragments is referred to as “a work of Christology”—that is, it asks the question: who is Jesus?2 Vardy explores the fundamental difference between Socrates and Jesus as teachers of truth, highlighting Jesus’ otherness to any teacher of wisdom, as the “Absolute paradox.” Here we also read of Kierkegaard’s reordering of the faith/reason dialectic over against the Kantian philosophical climate. In the “Truth and Subjectivity” chapter, Vardy discusses the critical need for personal transformation and the living-out of one’s beliefs. This is evidenced via some witty quotations from Kierkegaard regarding the silencing of academics who do not show the truth with their lives. Three central chapters focus on Kierkegaard’s three “stages” of existence: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. This gradation in such separated terms is often viewed as an insufficiently nuanced assertion in Kierkegaard scholarship today. The stages are often seen as more interpenetrable than is made out here. However, this is still a matter for debate, and is indeed pivotal to Vardy’s overall rendering of the intentions and function of the authorship.



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Another familiar text Vardy covers is Works of Love, which highlights just how declarative Kierkegaard’s theological leanings actually were: “As soon as God is eliminated, all loves become selfish.”3 Vardy highlights well what is certainly a compelling and utterly radical conception of love. Yet, on Kierkegaard’s exhortation that one should find every human being loveable, Vardy offers a criticism on the grounds, ironically, of practice: “Is it practical to love the SS guard if one is a Jewish prisoner who has just had her baby’s brains splattered across a wall?”4 This shows there is more of a sting in the tail of this engagement than a mere likeminded appraisal; here we see a glimpse of Vardy pushing back against aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought in a sharp, visceral manner. Many of the themes dealt with contain corrections to popular caricatures, for example, “Kierkegaard does not reject community, but he does consider that genuine community can only be found amidst people who have first become individuals.”5 Similarly, on the caricature of Kierkegaard’s antagonism to the church, Vardy says: “Kierkegaard is…not rejecting the true Church of Christ” but rather rejecting “the institutional Church which is a travesty of the real thing.”6 For the most part, Vardy is seeking to redress the balance in the interpretation of Kierkegaard for the uninitiated reader. Even as he excavates Kierkegaard’s concepts, Vardy continually brings the question back to the pressing concern of the readers themselves. This is, of course, a very Kierkegaardian trait in itself; the single individual remains the primary focus: The question for faith is, effectively, “Is God at the centre of your life? Are you in a loverelationship to God?”…The answer is to be found only by looking inside yourself and seeing whether God is, indeed, at the centre of your life and whether the whole of your life is determined by and focused on relationship with God.7

It is this unapologetically theological focus that characterizes much of the book’s approach, which eschews the previous generation’s preoccupations with Kierkegaard’s biographical context: “The fact that this book…has not considered Kierkegaard’s motivations and his psychological state is a deliberate policy.”8 The book’s theological focus is not merely Vardy’s preference; rather, he stresses this is the most important way to think of Kierkegaard; indeed, it is the place one should begin. Overall, the book is fairly non-threatening to anyone approaching Kierkegaard for the first time. This is its main strength, as a crystallization of his key ideas and concerns. The fact it is less academic in its scope is evidenced in the apparent scarcity of academic reviews both for the original and revised edition. The book is without footnotes or endnotes, yet written with an authoritative clarity which enables the

5 6 7 8 3 4

Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 72. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 95.

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reader to follow along as Kierkegaard is “narrated” to them. There are also occasional illustrative references to films and literature. Although these now somewhat date the book, they show something of Vardy’s attempts to give Kierkegaard’s ideas a good hearing in a contemporary setting. Although the book does not try to say anything entirely new in Kierkegaard scholarship, it has undoubtedly been of excellent use in its particular genre of the introductory text. There will be countless Kierkegaardians who have, at some point, benefitted from this book in the early stages of their research as they first sought to wrestle with the melancholy Dane. More specifically, Vardy’s book heralds Kierkegaard’s Christian particularity, seeking to give Kierkegaard a place amongst the theologians who would otherwise wish to dismiss him. With this little book, Vardy has less played the role of Kierkegaard’s “scholar” and more as Kierkegaard’s “evangelist.” It is a role for which Kierkegaard himself would no doubt have thanked him. Aaron Edwards

Reviews and Critical Discussions Carlisle, Clare, review of the SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard in Theology, vol. 112, no. 870, 2009, pp. 470–1. Houlden, Leslie, review in Theology, vol. 100, no. 797, 1997, p. 385. Olson, Ray, review in Booklist, vol. 94, no. 2, 1997, p. 182. Watson, Richard, “Book Reviews: Against ‘Ideological’ Criticism,” Expository Times, vol. 108, no. 6, 1997, p. 191.

Jeremy D.B. Walker, To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart,’ Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1972, viii + 167 pp.

Jeremy Walker’s book, To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart’ (1972), was based on an approach that was innovative at the time, namely, that one could engage with a Kierkegaardian “edifying” (opbyggelige, also translated “upbuilding”) discourse as a philosophical work without treating it exclusively as a philosophical treatise. Specifically, Walker sought to address certain philosophical themes in Kierkegaard’s edifying discourse “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing” from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1847), while at the same time fully acknowledging the text as a Christian work meant for public confession. Thirty years later, George Pattison, in a similar reading of Kierkegaard’s corpus of edifying discourses, demonstrated the continued novelty of Walker’s approach when he commented that there exists a “lack of precedence for approaching texts such as these [the edifying discourses] philosophically.”1 However, whereas Pattison’s project was a philosophical engagement “with an eye to their [the edifying discourses] rhetorical character,”2 Walker’s project, as one reviewer appropriately describes it, was “faintly like a work in analytic ethics.”3 Walker’s reading of “Purity of Heart” is not without critics. For example, Anthony Rudd contends that Walker “sees very close parallels between Kierkegaard’s notion of willing one thing and Immanuel Kant’s insistence that one should only will those maxims which are capable of being universally willed.”4 Rudd argues, “to interpret Kierkegaard’s moral philosophy in this [Kantian] way is a radical error.”5 Rudd does, however, admit, “There are real parallels between the two thinkers [Kierkegaard and George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Theology, Literature, Oxford: Routledge 2002, p. 142. 2 Ibid. 3 J. D.C., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 27, no. 2, 1973, p. 415. 4 Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, p. 135. For insight into Kierkegaard’s understanding and relationship to Kant and Kantian philosophy, see Ronald Michael Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Albany, New York: State University of New York Press 1992. 5 Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, p. 135. 1

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Kant].”6 Yet, parallels do not mean equivalency. Rudd correctly points out that the Kantian concept of the autonomous will as the source of morality is incompatible with Kierkegaard’s view that God is the source of morality. Walker opened himself up to Rudd’s criticism by admitting, “It would not be going too far to say that I have superimposed these Kantian concepts [analytical distinctions taken as characteristic of a Kantian ethics] on Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart.”7 However, I concur with George Stack’s important insight that Walker’s ultimate aim was in fact to “show that Kant’s rationalistic universalism is rejected [by Kierkegaard] and that Kierkegaard’s ethics requires the idea of God as its coping stone.”8 Walker identifies the central philosophical theme of “Purity of Heart” as the idea of commitment. He correctly associates the idea of commitment with a Kantian ethical outlook. Walker further argues that Kierkegaard’s pervasive use of the term Good for God, as the absolute object of commitment, also implies an essentially Platonic ethical outlook. Yet, what distinguishes Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian morality from both Kantian and Platonic ethics is that the object of commitment is the Christian God. This understanding, according to Walker, eliminates any sort of opposition between ethical commitment and immediate relationship to God. The first part of Walker’s book (Chapters 1–4) explores several concepts central to Kierkegaard’s view of commitment. Walker contends that, for Kierkegaard, these concepts are based upon the presumption that “willing the Good is willing one thing and, conversely, willing one thing is willing the Good.”9 First, Walker argues that double-mindedness of performing an activity for the sake of a heterogeneous apparent reward results in a conflicted and fragmented self. Willing one thing, by contrast, involves homogeneity between the activity and its true reward. Specifically, the single-mindedness of devoting the self to God as the source of the self’s unity is an act that is homogeneous with its true reward and results in a unity of the self. Next, Walker points out that for Kierkegaard another example of double-mindedness is when an individual wills the Good out of fear of punishment. That is, such an individual has the idea of the Good as well as the idea of punishment before his mind and thus is a conflicted and fragmented self. Finally, concerning justice in morality, Walker contends that for Kierkegaard ethical punishment is both part of the Good and an aid in willing the Good when the one who is a wrongdoer recognizes that they did wrong and gratefully accepts their just punishment. The second part of Walker’s book (Chapters 5–6) develops his central thesis that “Kierkegaard is arguing, on a purely ethical level, that ethics must begin with an acknowledgement of what Kant called the autonomy of the will, but need not and cannot end either with Kant’s own merely formal principle (the categorical imperative), or with the total absence of objective moral principles.”10 With this Ibid. Jeremy Walker, To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart,’ Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1972, p. 115. 8 George Stack, review in Philosophy and Phenomenological Society, vol. 34, no. 4, 1974, p. 608. 9 Walker, To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart,’ p. 21. 10 Ibid., p. 6. 6 7

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thesis, Walker seeks to defend Kierkegaard against the charge of subjectivism implied by Kierkegaard’s contention that one may and should will the Good. Walker does this by showing that Kierkegaard reconciles the contradiction between autonomy-morality and heteronomy-morality through an objectivist autonomyethics. Specifically, Kierkegaard’s concept of “purity of heart” is the basis of his objectivist autonomy-ethics. That is, “purity” corresponds to the objective Good, and “of heart” corresponds to the self’s autonomy. Together these two elements of “purity of heart” manifest in the existential characteristics of love (agape), humility, and self-sacrifice. The third part of Walker’s book (Chapter 7) addresses Kierkegaard’s concept of truthfulness. Walker admits this chapter “represents a different kind of study” from the rest of his work, but argues that Kierkegaard’s concept of truthfulness “may illuminate some of the relations between Purity of Heart and other Kierkegaardian works and themes.”11 Kierkegaard distinguishes between the objective category of truth where the truth of a belief is independent of the believer and the subjective category of truthfulness, where the truthfulness of a believer is independent of the truth-value of the belief. He contends that the subjective ethics of truthfulness (the how of religious belief) carries with it the objective ethics of truth (the what of religious belief). Walker argues that in this way Kierkegaard refutes Kant’s central ethical principle that the free will gives itself the moral law. It is important to recognize the unique nature of Walker’s book. He specifically states that it is “not a commentary on Purity of Heart.”12 Rather, it is “an existential confrontation with just one of Kierkegaard’s major works…the only one of this [late] group which is explicitly devoted to the idea of commitment”13 in the form of a set of reflections on philosophical themes Walker contends are present in “Purity of Heart.” However, admitting this delimitation does not eliminate the problem, given the complexity of Kierkegaard’s writings, of inferring an adequate view of Kierkegaard’s concept of morality from a single text. In other words, not all the themes Walker engages with are helpful to understand Kierkegaard’s conception of ethical existence and not all Kierkegaardian texts that shed light on his concept of morality are considered. Even given these deficiencies, Walker’s brief, clearly written book is important because it is an example of what a personal existential engagement with a Kierkegaardian edifying discourse looks like. This is precisely what Kierkegaard sought from his “reader, that single individual” whom he hoped would receive “Purity of Heart” “as if it had arisen in his own heart.”14 John Louis Haglund

13 14 11

12

Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 2–3. SKS 8, 121 / UD, 7.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Connell, George, “Postmodern Readings of Kierkegaard and the Requirement of Oneness,” in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. by Robert L. Perkins, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 2005 (International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 15), pp. 20–6. J.D.C., review in Review of Metaphysics, vol. 27, no. 2, 1973, p. 415. Rudd, Anthony, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, pp. 131–9. Stack, George J., review in Philosophy and Phenomenological Society, vol. 34, no. 4, 1974, pp. 607–9.

Jeremy Walker, Kierkegaard: The Descent into God, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1985, xii + 233 pp.

Jeremy Walker’s book, Kierkegaard: The Descent into God, sets forth the argument that Kierkegaard’s authorship is centered on the edifying of the self. This places the Dane in rare company. Walker thinks only one philosophical figure, Socrates, preceded Kierkegaard, and only one, Simone Weil, followed him in placing selfexamination at the heart of ethical existence. In the division of contemporary philosophy into Continental and analytic camps, Kierkegaard has been linked more frequently to the Continental philosophers than to the analytic. Walker here operates in the analytic tradition since his monograph engages in a close analysis of Kierkegaardian concepts and terms. Hegel and Kant are mentioned in the text, but we hear much more about Frege and Wittgenstein together with J. L. Austin, Ryle, Tarski, and Popper. Kierkegaard’s theology is given no full-blown treatment by Walker, but the last two chapters do deal with the theological themes of “Ways of Existing before God” and “Christ as ‘the Truth.’ ” Receiving Walker’s primary attention are Kierkegaard’s discourses, which he thinks are full of acute conceptual analyses. In them can be seen Kierkegaard’s whole authorship being held together by the unifying principle of the author’s intention: to bring the reader to the religious. The language of Walker’s book, though, dwells much more on ethics than on religion. His interest in Kierkegaard’s formal ethics, which he declares is not ethics as in the stages of existence, situated between the aesthetic and the religious. The formal ethics Walker finds in Kierkegaard’s works is not set aside by any teleological suspension; formally, on Walker’s view, religion and Christianity must be essentially ethical. Walker’s goal is to show that Kierkegaard has much to contribute to moral philosophy. To edify is to build, to build the moral (and the religious) within the human being. To arrive at such a moral self requires activity of both a theoretical and a practical sort. While this process of development works through the individual’s understanding, its final aim is located in the individual’s action. The process begins with contrite self-examination. Ethical beliefs are critical ingredients in edification; however, these beliefs are not recognizable from the outside but can be grasped only through experience, existence, and appropriation. Grasping and internalizing ethical beliefs allows one to reflect on one’s existence and to strive to actualize oneself in relation to that self-reflection. Deeper entrance into oneself allows the human to learn that not all ethical beliefs are truthful. Walker contends that the criterion for

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identifying error is whether or not it builds up. A major error that becomes a barrier to self-examination is self-deceit. Self-deception points to a self that is deeply divided because part of it genuinely desires to know itself and another part of it is afraid of attaining self-revelation. The inward existential struggle reflects a simultaneous desire for self-transparency and for remaining in obscurity. In recognizing this internal rift, the real, deeper self can move ahead on its self-examination only through a penetrating act of confession, wherein one gives an account of oneself before God but to oneself. Kierkegaard’s prized measure for scrutinizing the self’s continuity is the “eternal.” For Kierkegaard, if repentance is the first step of the ethical, then a more advanced step is the recognition that one can essentially do nothing, including not reaching one’s established ethical goals. One is an agent who makes decisions, and at the same time one is both capable of doing nothing and of being nothing. The human advances in its edification by existing before God, and this assumes many forms. Recognizing one’s nothingness requires humility. It involves existing as a creature before God the Creator. The second level of existing before God finds the human having a conscience, and here the two relevant terms are “silence” and “transparency.” Conscience cannot really exist without stillness or silence, because the voice of the conscience needs to be heard and cannot do so if it is drowned out by the voices of the world. And conscience desires transparency. It calls for penetrating into oneself by way of reflection that seeks truth; it expects the ethical individual to be transparent to itself. Conscience leads to individuality as the human exists in solitariness before God as judge. The third way of existing before God is existing before Christ. The Christ as the God-man leads Walker to a discussion of offense, faith, and being a contemporary. In these considerations he nicely spells out the importance of Kierkegaard’s notion of “the situation.” The deepest form of existing before God Walker thinks takes place in relation to the atonement. The believer is here understood to be both before Christ and within Christ. The key idea is that one’s sins are forgiven and also forgotten. The believer lives in Christ. Walker does not articulate the full contours of Kierkegaard’s metaphysic. He offers interesting comments, though, in identifying the “eternal” and “spirit” as the two central terms of Kierkegaard’s metaphysics. Expressed is the importance of differentiating Kierkegaard’s own metaphysical view from those of his pseudonyms. Here can be seen the sharp, exaggerated distinction the author is operating with between Kierkegaard’s own perspective and the various perspectives of his created authors. On Kierkegaard’s own view as expressed in the many non-pseudonymous writings, the meaning of the concept of “the eternal” is best gleaned from the conceptual context of the words “truth,” “the ethical,” and “love.” Truth, to which Walker devotes multiple considerations in the book, takes on the character of necessity when connected to the eternal. The eternal as tied to conscience in the individual concerns what is right and wrong, just and unjust. As linked to Christian love, the eternal is that which is won or lost in embodying or not embodying love. Concerning “spirit,” Kierkegaard again has his particular meanings. Kierkegaard’s metaphysics cannot be understood in a detached form, severed from the contexts in which his terms assume their concrete meaning. Walker likens Kierkegaard’s metaphysics to a way of arranging words that has parallels to Wittgenstein’s language game.

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The highest reality that the self can reach in the process of edification is love. Walker holds that the beliefs of humans have their ground in certain general a priori “frames.” There are many options to choose from for one’s frame, which then serves as the basis for one’s beliefs. Each of us lives our life within a frame, which is a “faith.” The argument is made that the frame advocated by Kierkegaard was that of love. According to Walker, love is the basis of belief for Kierkegaard. Because he regards love as so central for Kierkegaard, many of Walker’s analyses turn to the topic of love. Kierkegaard is interpreted as claiming that choosing love as one’s frame is choosing indirectly to become a particular kind of person, namely, a loving person. Walker presents Kierkegaard as maintaining that living out of the love frame brings a distinctive happiness: living within any frame other than love is to cheat oneself out of that distinctive happiness. He also regards Kierkegaard as essentially equating choosing the frame of love with believing in the eternal or God. The identification can be made because of the understanding that God is love, for the person who loves. Also, identical with the frame of love is the frame of hope. This is because hope is living in the expectation of the good. In Works of Love, one of the books most frequently referred to by Walker, loving the other includes expecting good for them. In loving the human, God wishes the human to possess the good, and the true good is love or loving, just as the true good is God. The goal of edifying is for the human to embrace the good by loving. The human’s true, deep self is pure loving. In not allowing the discussion to move substantially beyond the moral or ethical sphere, it seems that Walker places constraints on Kierkegaard that prevent his morality-transcending thoughts on religion from being heard. But, overall, Walker’s analytical tools allow him to uncover fresh insights into Kierkegaard’s writings, especially the non-pseudonymous ones. His recounting of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the human’s movement into God through edification potently charts “the descent into God,” even though that phrase receives no complete elaboration. Curtis L. Thompson

Reviews and Critical Discussions Carigan, Maurice, review in Philosophy in Review, vol. 6, 1986, pp. 44–6. Hartley, John J., review in Dialogue, vol. 26, 1987 pp. 331–9. Kahn, Abrahim, review in Toronto Journal of Theology, vol. 2, 1986, pp. 151–3. Stack, George J., review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 26, 1988, pp. 162–7.

Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1994, xiv + 294 pp.

Sylvia Walsh’s Living Poetically is an extensive analysis of the convoluted interactions between aesthetic-poetic existence and religious ideality in Kierkegaard’s corpus. By means of a highly contextualized reading, Walsh sets out―and largely succeeds― to show that religiosity can never fully dispense with the aesthetic determinations of life. On her account, to live poetically is to become aware of and act on one’s personal freedom, historical situatedness, and dutiful religious fulfillment in lieu of an autonomous self-creation. The poetic existence thus entails the interweaving, in one’s unique existence, of given, concrete actuality with the normative, ideal possibilities of Christian fideism. With that in mind, if the ultimate goal of aesthetics is the completion of personality, then the poetic remains a decisive ingredient both in the ethical domain and in the process of religious individuation. The author distills three phases in Kierkegaard’s interaction with the poetic. The opening phase lasts from 1838 until 1844, when, although he makes room for aesthetics in the ethico-religious sphere, Kierkegaard voices harsh disagreements with the Romantic view of art. To exemplify, in The Concept of Irony we witness an unambiguous rebuttal of the Romantics’ exaggerated stress on possibility and fantasy with its consequent restlessness, inner fragmentation, and crippling melancholia. Walsh holds that Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Romantic irony can be read in the same direction. Since he wishes to create himself by imaginatively experimenting with various existential possibilities, the Romantic ironist has a negative relation to actuality. In addition, he lacks inward continuity due to contradictory moods or feelings. So, inasmuch as the earnest appropriation of truth entails patience, discomfort, and an ongoing struggle against one’s immediate desires, irony keeps the individual away from one’s highest vocation which is to become a unified spirit. Walsh also observes that Kierkegaard’s anti-Romanticism coheres with a specifically Christian aesthetics. She surmises that on the Christian paradigm, the poetic stands for the existential singularity attained by deliberately and responsibly actualizing the potentialities implanted in us by God and by appropriating actuality as a divine gift. Thus, religious self-realization incorporates the temporal situatedness of the self and enjoins the latter to acquire a complete, unconditional transparency towards itself and its transcendent origins. Herein Walsh identifies the reason why religious development concurs with artistic creativity and remains anti-solipsistic.

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One comment is in order here. It concerns the fact that for Kierkegaard, the full self-realization is rather a desideratum. The reason is partly soteriological. Even before The Sickness unto Death―where Kierkegaard’s soteriology is in full swing― we have the pietistic finale of Either/Or, in which we discover that “in relation to God we are always is in the wrong.”1 Walsh does not give enough credit to the early pietistic tenor of Kierkegaard’s authorship. As regards Either/Or―memorably called an “arabesque novel”2―Walsh argues that it represents the point of convergence between ethics and a religious poetics. Here, ethics is conceived in terms of spiritual beauty. Walsh uses the example of marriage whose scope eclectically combines the Dionysian facet of eroticism with the orderliness of social morality and the sobering imperatives of religion. With Judge William in mind, Walsh remarks time and again that marriage sublates erotic love without eradicating it. Furthermore, the marital expression of love originates a sense of the eternal which lays the ground for the unification of all spheres of existence into an unrepeatable psychological-spiritual totality. Thus, besides bringing actuality and ideality together, marriage gives birth to continuity, constancy, plus a responsible relation to the community and its particular historicity. Whereas Repetition represents a transitional work, wherein the poet appears as a legitimate exception to the universal, Fear and Trembling is in Walsh’s eyes pivotal. This is due to its elaboration of aesthetic tropes in a fideistic ambiance predicated on the absurd sublation of universal constraints. Disputably enough, Walsh finds traces of aestheticism in Johannes de silentio’s imaginary renditions of faith and the tempestuous, secret, and ineffable crux of Abraham’s ordeal. Aesthetic is also de silentio’s comparison between the knight of faith and an exquisite ballet dancer, not to mention the paradoxical illustration of religious ideality via poetic-mythical analogies. In Philosophical Fragments, Walsh stresses the aestheticism implicit in the pathos of God’s agapeic embodiment in a particular historical individual. In The Concept of Anxiety, the aesthetic potential purportedly issues from anxiety’s intimate link to innocence, freedom, and possibility; the commonalities between existential demonism and the comic; and the spirit’s transformative effect on sensuality and the erotic. As mentioned before, the rather forced extension of the aesthetic into the realm of salvation is not without dangers. Here the risk is to obfuscate the radical break between immediacy and spirit in view of sinfulness, crucifixion, atonement, and especially the infinite qualitative difference between the immanent and the transcendent. The second period in Walsh’s tripartite history begins sometime around 1845 and ends in 1848. That is when Kierkegaard evaluates the poetic in a preponderantly negative fashion. Of concern to him now are the perils and limitations of the poetic imagination, once the individual realizes the relevance of actuality in ethicoreligious matters. By associating the poetic with exteriority Kierkegaard underscores SKS 3, 320–32 / EO2, 339–54; emphasis mine. Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 1994, p. 63 note 1.

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the damning incompatibility between living poetically and existing in accord with religious paradoxes. At the same time, Walsh remarks that despite such negative judgments, Kierkegaard does not entirely dismiss the poetic. For instance, in the Stages on Life’s Way Judge William commends the poetry of marriage and suspects that feminine beauty is indispensable to marital well-being. The equivocities of the poetic seem to persist in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Walsh argues that here a positive existential aesthetics coexists with criticisms of the poet’s abstraction from existence. Walsh reminds the reader that the poetic―despite its proclivity towards derealization and eschewal of ethicoreligious requirements―remains an integral part of both the existing individual and the subjective thinker. In support, Walsh invokes the similitude between artistry and genuine communication, together with Climacus’ thesis that the self’s actuality can be described only as possibility. Furthermore, returning to the ideal of inner wholeness, she points to the artist’s synchronous use of thought, imagination, and emotion. Additional aesthetic elements are Climacus’ emphasis on passionate reflection; the alleged task of turning existence into an artwork; and the use of irony and humor as intermediary stages in relation to the diffuse pantheism of religiousness A and the heterological provocations of Christianity. The list ends with the centrality of concealment, masks, and the incognito motif in the Climacan outline of Christian spirituality. The years 1849–52, which cover roughly the third and last period in Walsh’s thematic history, represent in a sense a return to the auspicious meaningfulness of the poetic. This is when Kierkegaard employs a dialectical-maieutic aesthetics for religious edification, while some Christian categories acquire a poetical quality. Walsh recalls that during these years Kierkegaard consistently called himself a Christian poet, while his edifying output was not incongruous with poetic communication. In this third phase, imagination―the aesthetic faculty par excellence―and possibility also become necessary ingredients in the imitation of Christ. The epilogue of Living Poetically is intended as a scathing dismissal of contemporary postmodern hermeneutics, regarded by Walsh as a revival of the very Romantic aestheticism that Kierkegaard unequivocally rejected. It is suggested that the postmodern appropriation of Kierkegaard is fallacious for two reasons: first, because it identifies him with a proto-deconstructionist thinker; and second, because it tries to harmonize Kierkegaard’s irony and repetition with contemporary attacks against metaphysical foundationalism. Walsh disagrees with this perspective inasmuch as it “rejects the notion of any final, unified, or closed system of truth or self-identity that may be attained in thought or imagination, substituting instead the epistemological principle of undecidability concerning the truth or falsity of anything.”3 Thus, whereas postmodern identity remains open, fleeting, and experimental, in short, non-theistic, Kierkegaard’s selfhood “is freely constituted in its given structure via a relation to the divine.”4 Furthermore, by interpreting



3 4

Ibid., pp. 248–9. Ibid., p. 249 note 10.

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personal identity exclusively within the horizon of sociality, postmodern thought arbitrarily privileges the other’s difference at the expense of the singular subjectivity. In a critical vein, we should note first the very broad and unnecessarily eclectic purview of the aesthetic sphere. Moreover, one cannot miss Walsh’s exaggerations regarding the aesthetic undercurrents of religiosity. Indeed, the latter are a highly efficient weapon against those who take Kierkegaard as just another melancholy, quietist Protestant. However, were we to prioritize Kierkegaard’s soteriology in accord with his express wishes from The Point of View, the gap between religion and aesthetics is rather vast, if not somewhat unbridgeable. Here, Walsh has against her a significant portion of Kierkegaard’s corpus that insists on a dissimilarity of essence between Christianity and poetry.5 Implicitly, then, there exists a religious territory on which poetry cannot ever tread. Otherwise put, within a soteriological mind-frame the numinous core of God and our relationality to it might turn out to be a-poetic. If that is true, then Walsh’s position is debatable to the extent that it attenuates the separateness of the existential spheres, a danger against which Kierkegaard has warned time and again. In a salvation-oriented perspective, the individual’s primary and ineluctable condition is one of psychological fragmentariness, spiritual alienation, self-conflict, and even corruption. By contrast, the attainment of a harmonious totality within oneself is and remains, so to speak, a mere regulative ideal, whose quest is beset with frequent failures. Furthermore, to contemplate the mere possibility of spiritual purity in this life constitutes an act of hubris. Yet, the awareness of the unattainability of religious perfection6 does not deter Walsh from insisting on the feasibility of the inward totalization of all three spheres of existence. Even so, her general approach cannot explain why Kierkegaard stresses our helplessness in salvific matters, the overcoming of which can be fully enjoyed only in the afterlife7 and solely through divine grace. That said, the association of secrecy, ideality, possibility, speechlessness, and even existentiality with poeticity dilutes the distinctly Christian-fideistic flavor of these categories. For instance, the God-man’s incognito has very little, if anything, in common with the seducer’s protean masks. The ideality incarnated by Christ (understood as the redeeming and imitation-worthy exemplar) massively diverges from William’s moral perfectionism and A’s escapist reveries. Further, the “sacred history”8 instituted by Jesus’ worldly existence is far from being identical with Judge William’s sense of societal historicity.9 The same goes for possibility. It is one thing to state that aestheticism regards limitless existence possibilities, or that ethical life is inconceivable without the free and responsible actualization of See SKS 22, 33, NB11:49 / JP 1, 168. SKS 9, 26–7, 37–8, 51–3, 56–9 / WL, 18–19, 29–31, 44–6, 49–52. SKS 11, 191–2 / SUD, 77–8. SKS 22, 315, NB13:68 / JP 1, 819. SKS 23, 263, NB18:99 / JP 1, 821. SKS 27, 269, Papir 277:2 / JP 1, 896. SKS 27, 648, Papir 542 / JP 6, 6850. 6 Walsh, Living Poetically, p. 177. 7 See SKS 5, 15–37 / EUD, 7–29. 8 SKS 12, 44–5, 75–6, 216–17 / PC, 30, 64, 221. 9 SKS 3, 207, 250–1 / EO2, 216, 262–3. 5

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potentialities. But it is a wholly different thing to realize, in tandem with Johannes de silentio and Anti-Climacus, that “with God everything is possible.”10 That is because, as in the case of miracles or Christ’s incarnation, God’s own possibilities―rooted in his omnipotent, free, unfathomable, and love-driven transcendence―remain incommensurable with all aesthetic-ethical human possibilities which are immanent and, we should never forget, endlessly tarnished by sin. Overall, the present book remains a landmark in Kierkegaard studies, first because of its meticulous analysis of the poetic, and second by virtue of its corrective aims. The vistas opened by Living Poetically are no less noteworthy. Walsh’s reconstruction of existential aesthetics could inaugurate a whole range of comparisons between Kierkegaard’s Protestantism and the other traditions of Christianity, particularly in the context of natural theology.11 Leo Stan

SKS 11, 153 / SUD, 38. SKS 4, 131 / FT, 36. See in this sense Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, London and New York: Routledge 1999. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2003.

10 11

Reviews and Critical Discussions Connell, George, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, vol. 31, 1995, pp. 5–7. Emmanuel, Steven M. review in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 41, no. 1, 1997, pp. 63–5. Ferreira, M. Jamie, “Equality, Impartiality, and Moral Blindness in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love,” Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 25, no. 1, 1997, pp. 65–85; especially pp. 71–2. Lippitt, John, review in British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 2, 1996, pp. 194–6. Pattison, George, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 255–8. Stan, Leo, review in Archaeus, vol. 8, nos. 1–4, 2004, pp. 254–62.

Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, xii + 199 pp.

Sylvia Walsh’s Living Christianly was published in 2005 by the Pennsylvania State University Press. A paperback edition was published in 2007. As an expository piece of secondary literature, its purpose is to engage deeply with Kierkegaard’s thought as a whole in order to provide readers with a “more complete and accurate account” of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on Christian living and his respective goals as an author.1 Generally, the book has received high praise and is considered a “substantial scholarly achievement.”2 Walsh focuses particularly on the writings from what she classifies as Kierkegaard’s “second” period as an author. This period is primarily constituted by writings from 1847 to 1851 (though she does include the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was published in 1846). Walsh seeks to show not only that the writings of this second period are in need of further examination, but also that they provide a more compelling account of what Christian living entails for Kierkegaard. To that end, she describes, in her introduction, two types of dialectic that she takes to be at work in Kierkegaard’s writings: the conceptual dialectic (that is, a dialectic of thought) and the dialectic of existence (or a dialectic of coming-to-be). This is not merely a technical point; indeed, the very distinction between conceptual and existential dialectics points to the fact that the latter type, for Kierkegaard, requires a certain lived commitment on the part of the individual. This commitment turns out to be a fundamental feature of Christianity. First, however, Walsh carefully argues for the overall shape of this Kierkegaardian dialectic. It is, as she terms it, an “inverse” (omvendt) or inverted dialectic.3 That is, each of the dialectical relations can only be realized by allowing its opposite pole to be expressed. In contrast to Hegel, whose dialectics are meant to reveal the inherent unity within contradiction, the identity-in-difference of all things, Kierkegaard’s conceptual See Steven Emmanuel, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005 (online journal). 2 M.G. Piety, review in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, p. 248. 3 Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press 2005, p. 7. 1

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dialectic maintains that difference never finds completeness in identity, and thus it inverts Hegelian dialectics.4 This inversion is meant to unsettle our thinking. However, in the dialectic of existence, what is inverted is the sense of the self’s relation to God: “Christianly understood, nearness to God is not direct but indirect, determined not by the apparent forms of closeness but by a sense of, and appropriate attitude toward, one’s distance from God. This sense of distance is inversely a sign of closeness to God.”5 Thus the negative relation actually reveals the positive through its very negativity. To ignore or suppress the negative is to squelch the inverse dialectic and, accordingly, not to reach genuine Christianity. Walsh then develops her proposal that Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic underlies his account of genuine Christian living in the literature of the second period. In four chapters, Walsh elucidates the presence of an inverse dialectic in key areas of Christian life. In Chapter 1, she examines the dialectic between “the consciousness of sin and the forgiveness of sin in faith,” which she considers to be the “central dialectical relationship in Christian existence” for Kierkegaard.6 Walsh provides an effective analysis of the descriptions in The Sickness unto Death regarding despair as sin. We learn that “despair, sin, and the consciousness of sin are all dialectical in nature. That is, they may function either as negative factors or as indirectly positive ones.”7 The recognition of one’s sin and one’s concomitant despair is thus ultimately beneficial for the Christian. However, it is not enough simply to be aware; the person cannot rid herself of despair on her own. In fact, the attempt to do so establishes an even deeper despair out of which the person cannot escape. Nevertheless, “persons who are aware that they are in despair are ‘dialectically closer…to being cured.’ ”8 The willingness to believe that despair can be overcome is a necessary condition for faith, and this requires the prior acceptance of one’s own despair.9 Indeed, all the movements of despair, as well as the consciousness of oneself before God, etc., are “preconditions” for faith. “One must pass through despair in order to come to faith.…Indirectly, then, despair and sin may become dialectical correlates of faith as well as dialectical counterparts or opposites of faith.”10 Walsh then explains that the consciousness of sin, for Kierkegaard, first takes shape as an “existential awareness.”11 This awareness then becomes a “contrite consciousness of sin,” a “second form,” in which the repentant person, humble before God, is both sensitive to the need of forgiveness and genuinely sorrowful for her sin. For Kierkegaard, this is what Christianity finally demands.12 The repentant individual has had their vision of existence inverted. This inversion of vision is an George Pattison, review in Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2006, p. 241. Walsh, Living Christianly, pp. 39–40. 6 Ibid., p. 17. 7 Ibid., p. 29. 8 Ibid. See SKS 11, 142 / SUD, 26. 9 Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 31. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., p. 32. 12 Ibid. 4 5

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expression of the aforementioned “central dialectic” of Christian life, that is, the movement from the consciousness of sin to the consciousness of forgiveness.13 Although, in the final analysis, Christians recognize that forgiveness does overcome sin, genuine Christian living now must not concentrate on one over the other; they must remain in a constant dialectical relation. The inverse dialectic finds further expression in the fact that attaining consciousness of forgiveness “does not necessarily mean that one enjoys happier circumstances in life as a result of that transformation. Suffering and misfortune remain, but one’s attitude toward them is significantly changed.”14 This acknowledgment informs the discussion of inverse dialectics in subsequent chapters. In Chapter Two, Walsh focuses on the dialectic between the possibility of offense and the possibility of faith. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s well-known category of “offense” is employed in relation to sin: it is offensive to assert that sin reveals the infinite qualitative difference; it is offensive that the self is presented by Christianity as both exalted and sinner; it is offensive that humans stand in need of forgiveness, and it is finally offensive to think that a human being presumes to be God and claims to forgive sins.15 Again, an inverse relation is discerned. While offense is contrary to faith, it dialectically provides the opportunity for faith, and, in its turn, it is faith that makes possible the overcoming of the offense. Chapter 3 examines the dialectic between the Christian themes of self-denial (“dying to the world”) and new life. Kierkegaard’s definition of “worldliness,” which emphasizes success, esteem from others, and worldly possessions, places it in direct opposition to the Christian life: Christianity “holds that it is more blessed to do without than to get, to suffer than to enjoy life, to lose than to win the world. Its concepts of life, honor, and value are just the converse of those held by the world.”16 We see that although Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian life includes a “strongly positive dimension…it is informed by the negative and must be defined in relation to death and self-denial.”17 This theme continues into Chapter 4, where Walsh discusses the dialectic between suffering and joy/consolation. She emphatically states, “Suffering constitutes the crowning mark of Christian existence in Kierkegaard’s thought.”18 While this might lead some to conclude that Kierkegaard’s vision of Christian life is essentially a kind of masochism, Walsh points out that the inverse nature of Kierkegaard’s dialectic must be kept in mind. She asserts: “One cannot have a true conception of the magnitude of grace if one does not have a true conception of the magnitude of the Christian requirements.”19 This becomes vital when one considers the debate between those who, on the one hand, would argue that the requirements of Christianity are an impossible ideal meant to drive home the necessity of divine grace, and those who, on the other, respond that if we are not responsible in some 15 16 17 18 19 13 14

Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 91. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 113. Ibid., p. 153.

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sense for our own faith, then there is no need for any effort at all. Kierkegaard’s solution is to argue that holding to either one of these positions without the other is to neglect one half of the dialectic, rendering genuine Christianity impossible.20 As M. G. Piety notes, the harshness of Kierkegaard’s Christianity is not meant to be proscriptive tout court, but only in a corrective sense.21 Religious maturity, on Kierkegaard’s view, is thus both a recognition of how far—infinitely far—one is from achieving the ideal that Christianity demands and at the same time by faith recognizing that the infinite divine grace given to the forgiven Christian makes possible the continued striving toward that ideal. Thus, says Walsh, the imitation of Christ, as the prototype for Christian existence, “comes after grace, by grace, as the fruit of gratitude and faith.”22 In Chapter 5, Walsh’s expositions of the inverse dialectic are then applied to contemporary Christian living. Here, her writing takes on a more speculative tone, and it is notable that Walsh makes a couple of key concessions. As George Pattison points out, “she concedes that Kierkegaard does not perhaps always live up to his own rigorous dialectical standards, and that the negative is sometimes in danger of breaking loose.…She also questions whether Christianity is as unique as Kierkegaard maintains with regard to its promulgation of an inverse dialectic.”23 It is perhaps the case that Judaism, for instance, also contains this type of dialectical structure. However, Walsh does affirm that, with regard to Christian living, Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic provides both “a corrective and a challenge to modern as well as postmodern optimism and pessimism.”24 There has been some question as to whether Walsh’s portrayal of Kierkegaard is consistent with his writings. It is certainly the case that, even within the literature of the so-called second period, there is quite a bit of room for debate as to precisely how the writings ought to be interpreted.25 Walsh also neglects the works from this period where Kierkegaard himself describes the goals of his authorship, and some might consider this a significant oversight. Further, Steven Emmanuel questions Walsh’s claim that Kierkegaard is primarily concerned with describing the “qualifications of Christian existence.”26 Emmanuel notes that, in texts such as For Self Examination, Kierkegaard appears to offer more than mere description—he is attempting to provide a means of transformation for his readers, so that they might have the opportunity to genuinely live as Christians.27 Nevertheless, the general consensus, even among the critics, is that Walsh’s book remains extremely valuable to Kierkegaard scholarship. Geoff Dargan 20 Ibid., p. 154: “While the absoluteness of the Christian requirement makes it impossible to fulfill and therefore necessitates grace, the converse is also true that grace makes fulfillment of the law possible for the first time.” 21 Piety, review in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, p. 248. 22 Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 158. 23 Pattison, review in Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2006, p. 244. 24 Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 163. 25 Pattison, review in Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2006, p. 244. 26 Walsh, Living Christianly, p. 4. 27 See Emmanuel, review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005.

Reviews and Critical Discussions Carlisle, Clare, review in Religious Studies, vol. 46, 2010, pp. 270–4. Emmanuel, Steven M., review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005 (online journal). Handford, John, review in Heythrop Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2007, pp. 661–2. McCreary, Mark L., review in Philosophy in Review, vol. 26, 2006, pp. 74–6. McFadden, William C., SJ., review in Religious Studies Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2006, p. 29. Nelson, Christopher A.P., review in International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, vol. 62, 2007, pp. 115–17. Pattison, George, review in Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2006, pp. 240–5. Piety, M. G., review in Scottish Journal of Theology, vol. 63, no. 2, 2010, pp. 246–8. Turchin, Sean, review in Expository Times, vol. 121, 2010, pp. 419–20.

Julia Watkin, Kierkegaard, London: Geoffrey Chapman 1997, xxi + 120 pp.

Julia Watkin’s Kierkegaard is a volume in the Outstanding Christian Thinkers series, edited by Brian Davies OP. Previous titles in the series include Anthony Meredith SJ’s The Cappadocians, David Fergusson’s Bultmann, and Rowan Williams’ Teresa of Avila, among others. According to Davies’ editorial foreword, the aim of the series is to offer introductions to various thinkers with the following type of questions in mind: “what have the greatest Christians said? And is it worth saying? Does it engage with modern problems? Does it provide us with a vision to live by? Does it make sense? Can it be preached? Is it believable?”1 As a member of this series, Watkin’s text focuses on the specifically Christian aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship. The Outstanding Christian Thinkers series sets the overall agenda for Watkin’s text and helps to give it its particular shape. Yet there is also a more specific interpretive context for this introduction, which has to do with debates within Kierkegaard scholarship. Watkin herself outlines some of this context in her first chapter, “The Approach to Kierkegaard.” Here she sets herself against a number of perspectival readings of Kierkegaard, including the existential, psychological, and non-realist or atheist approaches.2 Watkin’s approach, in contrast, attempts to interpret Kierkegaard more within his own context. Consequently, it is best to see the theological emphasis of the text not simply as a result of its place in a book series, but as integral to the effort to properly contextualize Kierkegaard.3 Though she is less explicit about the interpretive group she is a part of than the ones she is against, such a commitment to Kierkegaard’s context places Watkin in a broad movement encompassing scholars such as Sylvia Walsh and Bruce Kirmmse, the latter of whom is the most frequently cited scholar in the text.4 Watkin’s Kierkegaard does have some affinities to Kirmmse’s Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, in Julia Watkin, Kierkegaard, London: Geoffrey Chapman 1997, p. vii. However, Watkin does allow a certain validity to these approaches, as she makes clear (ibid., p. 4, note 7): “Kierkegaard can of course be fruitfully presented as philosopher, psychologist, or novelist, to name but three approaches, but he would have seen none of these as being the driving force behind his authorship.” Watkin also resists the “three stages” approach to Kierkegaard (ibid., p. 3, pp. 53–4). 3 The necessary confluence between contextualization and explication of theological assumptions is asserted (ibid., p. 2). 4 Kirmmse is cited eight times (ibid., p. 117). 1 2

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that both are attentive to Kierkegaard’s Danish context and the theological content of Kierkegaard’s writing. However, Watkin’s text differs from Kirmmse’s in some of its contemporary aims. Watkin explicitly answers Davies’ question about Kierkegaard’s work—“Does it engage with modern problems?”—through a number of different topics, from fideism and Jim Jones to ecumenical concerns and Kierkegaard’s place in modern theology,5 thereby distinguishing hers from a purely historical work. It should also be mentioned that significant elements of Watkin’s introduction to Kierkegaard can be found in her earlier writing (such as her 1979 dissertation, Kierkegaard: Dying and Eternal Life as Paradox),6 and thereby predate this scholarly movement of growing popularity. What is most striking about Watkin’s text is the manner in which she goes about explicating Kierkegaard’s particular version of Christian theology. Curiously, as Watkin sets herself the task of bringing Kierkegaard’s theology to the fore, what occurs in the accomplishment of that task is primarily an exegesis of the implicit theological presuppositions of Kierkegaard’s authorship. To put it simply: though there may be a relative paucity of dogmatic theological development in Kierkegaard’s writings, Christian doctrine nevertheless informs all of Kierkegaard’s works, standing in the background whilst also making the particular shape of the texts possible. This background level of theological doctrine is entirely appropriate to the aims of Kierkegaard’s authorship, for—as Watkin notes—Kierkegaard saw the importance of his writings not in terms of doctrinal novelty,7 but in intensive exploration of the existence-relations one has to the various doctrines already established.8 Kierkegaard assumes a shared knowledge of the content of these doctrines before his authorship really begins; his particular contribution builds off these shared doctrinal assumptions, constituting a kind of second-order reflection on a common cultural heritage. As an introduction to Kierkegaard as a Christian thinker, Watkin quite correctly sees the need to supplement the contemporary reading of Kierkegaard through a

For fideism and Jim Jones, see ibid., p. 88; p. 111. For ecumenical concerns, see ibid., Chapter 8, “Kierkegaard in an Ecumenical Perspective,” pp. 106–12. For Kierkegaard’s place in modern theology, see ibid., pp. 97–105. 6 Julia Watkin, Kierkegaard: Dying and Eternal Life as Paradox, Ph.D. Thesis, University of Bristol 1979, v + 279 pp. See especially Chapter  4, “God and the Eternal,” pp. 162–97. In his review of Watkin’s Kierkegaard, Merold Westphal emphasizes the long and sustained reflection that preceded this book (see Westphal’s review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, p. 218). 7 Watkin, Kierkegaard, p. 106. 8 Ibid., p. 2; p. 24; p. 26; and especially p. 82: “Belief in propositions, however, is distinct from the existential faith-commitment to an ethical-religious lifestyle, and the propositional form of belief can distract from the existential commitment in a number of ways that can seriously blinker the individual in the endeavor to enter into and deepen the God-relationship.” Watkin does insist that this doctrinal minimalism is meant to describe a general tendency in Kierkegaard, rather than an absolute exclusion of theological debate (ibid., p. 97). 5

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brief outline of what doctrines Kierkegaard assumed he shared with his audience: for it is entirely probable that we no longer unthinkingly share these assumptions and thus miss the context for Kierkegaard’s second-order style of writing about Christian truths.9 Watkin’s elucidation of the theological background assumed throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship is notable both for its brevity and for its explanatory power. For Watkin, this doctrinal background has essentially to do with eternity and temporality: Kierkegaard’s Christian universe is dualistic in the sense that he sees the entire realm of existence as divided into the temporal world, time, and the eternal world, eternity. Temporality consists of space-time as we experience it in the succession of moments making up the days and years of our lives. Eternity is the everlasting realm of God, transcending temporality.10

By continually returning to this basic presupposition throughout her introduction, Watkin demonstrates how such an understanding pervades the works of Kierkegaard, from the critique of Bishop Mynster and the establishment as dedicated to “temporal well-being and prosperity,”11 to the increasing sharpness of Kierkegaard’s Christology, and even including his particular view of the psychological development of the individual.12 Watkin thus extracts this background commitment from a number of different works. The most remarkable—because least expected—instance of this type of presuppositional exegesis is found in Watkin’s lapidary summary of Either/ Or, Part One: “The young aesthete attempts to extract the eternal from temporality; this is the source of his despair.”13 From this brief quotation, one can see the whole shape of Either/Or, Part One arising from Kierkegaard’s implicit commitments concerning temporality and eternity. By these and other such demonstrations, Watkin shows how the separation between temporality and eternity thoroughly suffuses Kierkegaard’s authorship,14 providing a background that is visible only occasionally, but present continually. If Kierkegaard is an outstanding Christian thinker, he is so within the context of a commitment to this particular understanding of temporality and eternity, and it is the merit of Watkin’s book to establish such a claim. Thomas J. Millay



Watkin notes this gap in ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 24. 11 Ibid., p. 31. 12 Ibid., pp. 26–7. 13 Ibid., p. 64. 14 Watkin provides a similar demonstration in her powerfully argued essay, “The Logic of Kierkegaard’s Misogyny 1854–1855,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 15, 1991; see especially p. 88. 9

10

Reviews and Critical Discussions Rudd, Anthony, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 202–4. Sigurdson, Ola, review in Svensk teologisk kvartalskrift, vol. 75, no. 2, 1999, pp. 96–7 Westphal, Merold, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 218–19.

Julia Watkin, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press 2001, x + 411 pp.

Few who enter into Søren Kierkegaard’s prose have not felt some sympathy with Woody Allen who cheerfully wrote of a dense chapter in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “The concept brought tears to my eyes. My word, I thought, to be that clever! True, the passage was incomprehensible to me, but what of it, as long as Kierkegaard was having fun?”1 He first wrote that in 1978, but things are different now with Julia Watkin’s 2001 publication of a dictionary of Kierkegaard’s key concepts and contributing influences. “Fun” still may not be the operative word here, but “helpful” is when describing Watkin’s reference work. Watkin has summarized and reduced vast primary and secondary material in Kierkegaard studies into a handy resource that includes maps, life chronology, an ample dictionary, an extensive bibliography, a pseudonym index/biography, and an historical appendix. Aside from the dictionary, the accompanying material speaks for itself, as it were. The dictionary part of the book is the major contribution, as the title indicates. Again, this resource is helpful, particularly for the Kierkegaard novice and for those who do not read Danish. Extensive time, research, and organization mark the author’s effort. It is an impressive and detailed compilation containing nearly all the important references one would need to situate Kierkegaard’s vocabulary, as well as community and even geographical influences. To be honest, I cannot think of anything that is missing. If anything, the author, perhaps, covers too many ancillary figures (for example, eight other Kierkegaards have separate entries, aside from Søren Aabye). But who would really criticize her for being too comprehensive? The philosophy entries are written excellently—accessible for beginners and still interesting for professors. For example, the biographical material on wellknown philosophers, such as Hegel or Schelling, is as elementary as it for more obscure ones like Magnus Eiríksson, while providing coherent précises of their theories and influence. Additionally, I found the philosophical entries, even those outside of Kierkegaard studies directly, to be concise and accurate; Heidegger is well summarized in four pages!

1

Woody Allen, The Insanity Defense, New York: Random House 2007, pp. 24–5.

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Creating as a reference work a Kierkegaardian lexicon is bound to generate cries of infidelity to Kierkegaard’s project. This criticism is substantial given Kierkegaard’s method of employing different strategies (indirect communication, pseudonymity, etc.) to disorient the reader. Watkin’s dictionary is subversive to this method given that it tries to help the reader with objective, cross-references, which define the term, thus effectively relieving the reader of their own responsibility to engage the text subjectively, authentically. I am sympathic to such a criticism but I think there are two obvious replies. The first is basically the free speech argument. We are always free to turn off the television, to close the book. As Kierkegaard himself would agree, no one should be imperious enough to hide truth another may find meaningful. Secondly, Kierkegaard’s texts are memorable for their incomprehensibility; a balanced and thoughtful guide, which I believe Watkin has written, rather than a fiat dictionary is a welcome addition to the Kierkegaard library. This dictionary is helpful for deciphering, rather than defining, Kierkegaard’s thought in all of its incarnations, including those precious passages where Kierkegaard is, indeed, having fun. Dean W. Lauer

Reviews and Critical Discussions Cain, David, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 45, 2003, pp. 13–14. Cruysberghs, Paul, Johan Taels, and Karl Verstrynge, “Descriptive Bibliography: Recent Kierkegaard Literature: 2000–2004,” Tidschrift voor Filosofie, vol. 67, no. 4, 2005, pp. 767–814; see p. 770. Desroches, Dominic, review in Laval théologique et philosophique, vol. 61, no. 1, 2005, pp. 216–18. Olesen, Tonny Aagaard, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 22, 2004, pp. 243–7. Perkins, Robert L., review in International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2004, pp. 346–7.

Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge 1994, x + 200 pp.

Since the age of Kierkegaard, Continental philosophy has tended to take on a postmetaphysical guise. Whether it be in the form of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Levinas, modern philosophical thought has seen the need to move beyond metaphysics, with its attempts to define the nature of the human being and thus prescribe proper human ends. One might reasonably ask, then: does Kierkegaard’s critique of philosophy, given such vivid form in the Climacian works, still apply to this new mode of thought? Considering their concern to avoid predefined essences, do post-metaphysical thinkers escape Kierkegaard’s existential critique of philosophical thought on the human? Michael Weston’s answer to the last question is a resounding “no.” The aim of Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy is to show that post-metaphysical thinkers still share several of the “aspects of the philosophical enterprise” that Kierkegaard is concerned to expose and reject in his authorship.1 In other words, Kierkegaard’s objections to the philosophy of his age still apply to post-metaphysical thought, and Weston’s purpose is to demonstrate this continuing application. The text follows an introductory method: the approach to philosophy of each of the above post-metaphysical thinkers is introduced by summary, then placed into critical conversation with Kierkegaard. Though Weston respects the variety of positions taken by post-metaphysical philosophers, his introductory summaries show these thinkers to be united in the fact that they propose intellectual solutions to the problem of human existence. Yet it is precisely the intellectual nature of these solutions that Kierkegaard would critique, as Weston cogently demonstrates. Rejection of intellectual solutions to the problem of existence can be observed textually in Kierkegaard’s treatment of Plato and Hegel, and this is where Weston begins.2 Utilizing the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Weston shows that Kierkegaard considers Plato’s and Hegel’s answers to the meaning of human existence to be unintentionally comic.3 According to Kierkegaard, both Plato and Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge 1994, p. viii. 2 Ibid., pp. 11–27. 3 Ibid., p. 28. 1

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Hegel believe the human being can define its own essence and thus determine for itself what the meaning of any human life may be. It is the misplaced hubris of such a position that is comical to Kierkegaard, for the human being has no such ability: insofar as the human is a living being, it cannot somehow get outside its existence in order to reflect objectively upon it and thus determine its meaning.4 Insofar as post-metaphysical thinkers do not attempt to define the essence of the human being, one might justifiably think they escape Kierkegaard’s rather devastating broadside. Take the later Heidegger, for example. In works like “The Turn,” “The Letter on Humanism,” and “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” Heidegger departs from understanding God as the causa sui who guarantees the intelligibility of the universe and man’s place within it. Instead, he wishes to place humanity before the call of Being as it addresses us in our particular place in history; our salvation consists in identifying and following this call.5 Here is where Weston brings Kierkegaard forward to say: let us not be fooled. This philosophy, though decidedly post-metaphysical, still proposes an intellectual solution as the way forward. Weston synthesizes his observations as follows: Nevertheless, there is a fundamental continuity here with the metaphysical project, since it is never doubted that an intellectual inquiry is necessary in order to see what is required of us, one no longer directed towards apprehending the absolute truth of metaphysics, of course, but rather at diagnosing our historical situation and its demands at the moment where the pursuit of truth undermines itself. But it is just this presupposition that appears comical to Kierkegaard: “to let the ethical become something which it needs a prophet to discover, a man with a world-historical outlook upon world history—that is indeed a rare and ingeniously comical conceit.”6

For Kierkegaard, the solution can never be intellectual in this way; the problem of the meaning of a human life can only be solved by decision, by “unconditional commitment.”7 As Kierkegaard puts it, “ ‘there is only one thing to say: venture everything.’ ”8 The key is in renouncing “the presumption…of the human to determine its own significance”;9 we must resign such a hubristic ambition10 and recognize that such a significance could only come from the Transcendent, the

Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., pp. 93–106. See ibid., pp. 188–9; p. 196 for bibliographic information on the abovementioned works of Martin Heidegger. 6 Ibid., p. 107; citing Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1968, p. 129 (SKS 7, 134). Weston does not use the Hongs’ translation, which was available to him; nor does he utilize any secondary scholarship on Kierkegaard. The latter is perhaps excusable on account of the introductory aim. 7 Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy, p. 109. 8 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 382 (SKS 7, 389); cited in Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy, p. 110. 9 Ibid. 10 See ibid., Chapter 6, “Philosophy as Hubris,” pp. 136–55. 4 5

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Absolute—from God.11 For any resolution not made before the Absolute is only partial, and cannot give meaning to the whole of our lives (which are not, after all, entirely intellectual).12 The meaning of life cannot be registered in the intellect alone, and neither metaphysical nor Heideggerian post-metaphysical philosophy recognizes the force of this basic claim. Lacking this recognition, these philosophies also fail to see that the significance of human life cannot come from humans themselves: wrapped up in an intellectual delusion, such philosophies are a distraction from the true source of holistic meaning.13 The above argument against Heidegger is repeated, with appropriate variations, for Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Levinas.14 The applicability to Derrida is clear enough, as his solution to the problem of existence lies in the intellectual recognition that there is no center, which allows a liberating play of differences.15 Yet the inclusion of Wittgenstein and Levinas initially strikes one as strange since both attempt to relativize the claims of philosophy. The arguments here are more subtle. Wittgenstein does ratchet down the claim of philosophy to determine meaning by showing that language is based in the actions of our animal body and is always ultimately in service to action. This is opposed to Heidegger, for whom language is based in a pre-understanding of Being, a pre-understanding always “already, although implicitly, conceptual and linguistic,” that needs language for explicit thematization.16 Though avoiding the pitfall of intellectualizing the significance of human life, Wittgenstein concomitantly departs from the question of the meaning of life altogether, which falls into making the same mistake Kierkegaard diagnoses: namely, thinking that this question is an intellectual one.17 We can and should preserve the question of life’s significance, yet we should also recognize that such question is not an intellectual matter. Much like Kierkegaard, Levinas argues that the ethical precedes any intellectual project. The call of the Other occurs before ontology;18 thus philosophy always comes too late.19 But recognizing this precedence is an intellectual maneuver that elicits logical assent; thus Levinasian ethics is based on intellectual recognition rather than commitment.20 As with the other post-metaphysical thinkers, Levinas’ Ibid., p. 113: “Religion alone, Kierkegaard argues, proclaims the kind of authority desired here.” 12 Ibid., p. 112. 13 Ibid., p. 140. 14 I do not include Nietzsche here, for the applicability seems less relevant. As Weston himself notes, intellectual debate and argumentation are only preparatory for Nietzsche: it should eventually lead to new human beings who simply and instinctively act in creative affirmation (ibid., pp. 74–5). It does not seem that Weston grasps that his perceptive reading of Nietzsche makes his subsumption into Weston’s larger argument problematic. 15 Ibid., pp. 116–23. 16 Ibid., p. 133. 17 Ibid., pp. 148–50. 18 Ibid., p. 161. 19 Ibid., p. 170. 20 Ibid., pp. 171–3. 11

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thought still “repeats the structure of philosophical reflection.”21 Again, this is an unacceptable privileging that makes intellect and logical argumentation essential to human life, when what really matters is a total venture of resignation that allows any and all significance for human life to be given by the Absolute. Though the work is occasionally marred by poor writing,22 Weston drives his central point home with clarity: Kierkegaard’s critique of metaphysical philosophy applies equally to postmetaphysical philosophy, for such philosophies never make the leap into seeing the whole of human life as an absolute venture before the Absolute. Thomas J. Millay

Ibid., p. 153. This is difficult to show except by using extensive quotation, but see, for example, ibid., p. 54: “Perhaps this requires a fictional form within which the author asserts nothing in his own voice and which involves the reader in the expression of the possible views of life from the aesthetic to the religious and thus leaves her or him with the subjective reflection about their own life,” and ibid., p. 45; p. 177. 21 22

Reviews and Critical Discussions Colette, Jacques, review in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, vol. 100, no. 4, 1995, pp. 573–4. Cupitt, Don, review in Religious Studies, vol. 30, no. 4, 1994, pp. 529–30. Frandsen, Henrik Vase, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 18, 1996, pp. 258–61. Lippitt, John, review in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, vols. 9–10, 1995, pp. 181–4. Reé, Jonathan, review in Radical Philosophy, vol. 75, 1996, pp. 42–4. Sondrup, Steven P., “Kierkegaard: New Readings,” Scandinavian Studies, vol. 70, no. 4, 1998, p. 511.

Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press 1987 129 pp.

Merold Westphal’s Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society is a collection of seven essays written between 1971 and 1985, and published in 1987. All of these texts have already appeared in academic journals and edited collections or presented at conferences, and are gathered together by the author in a single publication in virtue of their thematic unity. In these essays Westphal puts forward the thesis that Kierkegaard’s philosophy, far from being reducible to an expression of irrationalism or religious existentialism, elaborates a multi-layered critique of history and society which can be correctly labeled a form of ideology critique. Such a critique defines the so far overlooked and unremarked social-political import of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. Hence the essays focus on themes and topics that contribute to shedding light on the issue of a critical Kierkegaard, by examining selected pseudonymous texts and contrasting the Danish philosopher with thinkers of different traditions, such as Marx, Freud, Habermas, and Nietzsche. The first two essays function as an introduction to a Kierkegaardian theory of the political, while the middle essays deal with the specific content of Kierkegaard’s critique from the social-political point of view, while the final two pieces engage with the epistemological implications of Kierkegaard’s social critique. The selection of primary texts utilized focuses mainly on the Philosophical Fragments, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, and the Literary Review of Two Ages. Written between 1970 and mid-1980s, the book offers a novel and timely interpretation of Kierkegaard as a critic of ideology, to be numbered amongst the traditional masters of suspicion such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In doing so, Westphal argues that even prior to Marx, Kierkegaard had already developed a specific post-Hegelian language to address the problem of false-consciousness and its ramifications with regard to social legitimation, historical perspectivism, and the sociology of knowledge. Westphal puts forward the thesis that Kierkegaard’s critique of reason and society should not be reduced to an expression of irrationalism and existentialism but should be placed squarely within the tradition of the hermeneutics of suspicion and ideology critique. With this, Westphal purports to rescue philosophical critique from the monopoly of atheistic philosophers and to demonstrate that a religiously motivated philosopher such as Kierkegaard can make

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a significant contribution to the above domain. In a similar vein, Westphal aims to dispel the misconception that emphasizes Kierkegaard’s individualism at the expense of any political engagement; on the contrary, Westphal sets out to demonstrate that Kierkegaard’s philosophical critique opens the way to a radical form of politics which is future-oriented and prophetic. It is precisely in Chapters 1 and 2 that Westphal outlines what he means by Kierkegaard’s prophetic philosophy and in what way such an outlook addresses the political consequences. Chapter 1 focuses on Kierkegaard’s critique and rejection of the scientific ideal as a model for philosophy. Such an ideal, according to Westphal, has been embraced also by important strands within philosophy of religion, which seek to place objectivity at the heart of their endeavor. In such a way the philosopher’s personal engagement with and interest in the religious question is set aside in favor of a presumed disinterestedness. To this flawed myth of objectivity Westphal opposes the notion of the prophet as model for the philosopher of religion. The four features that characterize prophetic speech are its personal quality, its untimely nature, its political orientation, and its eschatological direction. In short, the prophetic philosopher of religion addresses his or her interlocutors as existing individuals, his or her message runs against the dominating opinions and political interests and his or her philosophy is oriented towards a future where salvation awaits. In Chapter 2 Westphal goes on to explain how the above four features are present in Kierkegaard’s own prophetic philosophy and critique of Christendom. Specifically, Kierkegaard’s argument concerning the limits of human reason does not simply appeal to its intrinsic finitude but, even more importantly, lays bare its social and historical character and thus its inescapable perspectivism. Westphal’s compelling interpretation stresses the fact that Kierkegaard’s ideology critique uniquely combines the denunciation of reason’s defense of the established order with the acute awareness of sin. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 engage with the pivotal issue of the Kierkegaard–Hegel controversy in order to shed light on Kierkegaard’s politics. In Chapter 3 Westphal acknowledges Kierkegaard’s Hegelian debt, arguing that the Danish philosopher adopts his negative-dialectical method and, contrary to widespread interpretations, embraces the idea that the relation between individual and society should be understood in terms of mediation. However, Kierkegaard parts ways with his German predecessor in wanting to remain true to the notion of dialectical individuality that Hegel merges into the collective We of the social whole. According to Westphal, Kierkegaard sees in this preponderance of society over the individual a quasideification of the We as embodied in the age, the race or the universal and, as such, a rebellion against God. Having rejected the Hegelian conclusions or outcomes, Kierkegaard retains Hegel’s negative-dialectical method, insofar as his own political conclusions emerge precisely, not unlike Marx, by way of critique. In Chapter 4 Westphal explores the topic of Kierkegaard’s sociology from the point of view of his critique of society’s self-deification, which produces what is described in the Literary Review of Two Ages as the phenomenon of mass society and the amoral herd mentality that continues to characterize contemporary society. Similarly, in Chapter  5,

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in reading Fear and Trembing, Westphal investigates Kierkegaard’s rejection of the Hegelian priority of the ethical as yet another example of the absolutization of society as the mediator between the individual and God. According to Kierkegaard, however, faith can only take place in fear and trembling and knowledge of God can be neither conceptually nor socially mediated. In Chapter 6 Westphal reflects on the criteria of the definition of insanity from the point of view of self-absolutized reason: Kierkegaard demonstrates that what goes by the name of reason is in fact the assumption of the established order and hence an ideological, historical product. Faith does not run counter to reason by violating the law of contradiction, but by believing in virtue of the absurd, that is to say, by embracing the possible over against the sensible evidence and data. Hence, faith is grounded in presuppositions that are chosen by the individual through a leap that overcomes a tension, an opposition, not demonstrated within a shared intersubjective discourse, whose criteria are established by the majority. Finally, in Chapter 7, Westphal offers a reading of the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript which challenges three existing preconceptions about Kierkegaard’s thought: (1) the claim that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist, (2) the claim that his appeal to inwardness is apolitical, and (3) the claim that ideology critique is essentially hostile to religion. Westphal does so by arguing that Kierkegaard should be numbered amongst the masters of suspicion, insofar as he integrates the concept of sin within ideology critique. In doing so he follows the path opened up by Luther who sees reason as an enemy within, an expression of the flesh. This prompts him to be suspicious of our immediate belief-disposition and of the self-deception of the modern age’s trust in and commitment to objectivity. The latter is nothing but the self-absolutization of society, where the good becomes relative to the demands of the time and the historical moment. To this Kierkegaard opposes the priority of the individual as ethical subjectivity, which is defined by interestedness, existential pathos, and inwardness. Westphal’s collection of essays connects Kierkegaard’s work with contemporary themes and issues as well as situating it within its historical dimension. It is the first critical assessment of the Danish philosopher that points to his possible belonging to the tradition of ideology critique and fruitfully connects him with thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Habermas. In doing so Westphal argues in favor of a type of religiously informed ideology critique, in which the consciousness of sin shapes the suspicion of the presumed absoluteness of reason. This suspicion equally permeates mass society and public opinion, but also institutionalized religion. In delineating Kierkegaard’s critique of reason and society, in line with a widespread interpretative tendency, Westphal identifies in Hegel one of his main polemical targets. However, Westphal also recognizes Kierkegaard’s indebtedness to the German philosopher in relation to his negative-dialectical method, that is to say, he remarks how Kierkegaard’s own positions, far from embodying a merely dogmatic religious stance, emerge out of the very practice of critique. In recognizing Kierkegaard’s philosophical kinship with the tradition of critical theory, Westphal’s approach opens the way to other studies on the Danish philosopher’s influence on political and social theory, such as Martin Matuštik, Postnational

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Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel (1993),1 Martin Matuštik and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post-Modernity (1995) (Chapters 10, 11, 12, 14)2 and Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (2001).3 Margherita Tonon

Martin J. Matuštik, Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel, New York: Guilford Press 1993. 2 Martin Matuštik and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post-Modernity, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1995. 3 Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility, New York: Fordham University Press 2001. 1

Reviews and Critical Discussions Dewey, Bradley R., review in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 26, no. 3, 1989, pp. 189–91. Evans, C. Stephen, review in Christian Scholar’s Review, vol. 18, no. 4, 1989, pp. 397–9. Miller, Paul J.W., review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 3, 1989, pp. 489–90.

Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press 1996, vii + 254 pp.

In Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was published in 1846 as a companion work to Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, its pseudonymous author, reflects on the great theme of faith and reason and the complex and unsettling relation between the two with respect to the idea of transcendence. There Climacus recaptures the spirit of transcendental reflection with his innovative hypothetical approach to thinking about the eternal, based on humans’ both objective and subjective experience of it. Merold Westphal’s Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was published in 1996, is a book that tries best to put the Postscript in its proper context. It does so by presenting it essentially as a polemic against Hegel. In the preface of Becoming a Self Westphal writes: “Because Postscript is rightly seen as an anti-Hegelian text, I have tried to focus on its confrontation with Hegel.”1 When Westphal’s book first appeared in 1996 it more or less marked a continuation of the standard theme of anti-Hegel and anti-Hegelianism in Kierkegaard scholarship with respect to both Kierkegaard’s signed and pseudonymous authorship. It can be said that Westphal’s interest in interpreting Postscript mainly as a comparative study between Hegelianism and religion, namely, Christianity, reveals his partisan spirit to the long held tradition of generally seeing the corpus of Kierkegaard’s writings as polemical works against Hegel and his philosophy. In Chapter 4 of Becoming a Self Westphal makes this remark in discussing the problem of dialectic in Postscript: “Since Climacus immediately puts dialectic in opposition to ‘speculative thought,’ it appears that the anti-Hegelian polemic for which Postscript is famous is already under way, as indeed it is.”2 Westphal uses this idea throughout the Postscript as a fixed theme to interpret the book as a polemic against Hegel and his speculative philosophy. Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press 1996, p. vii. 2 Ibid., p. 36. 1

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A rather recent development in Kierkegaard research comes to a quite different conclusion. For example, in his Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Jon Stewart argues that Kierkegaard did not write Postscript as a polemic against Hegel but actually had Danish theologians, such as Hans Lassen Martensen and Johan Ludvig Heiberg, among others in mind. Stewart argues that the Postscript as a whole was aimed at attacking these theologians and thinkers who spread a false conception of Christianity in Denmark, especially Martensen, who held an esteemed position in Danish society as a university professor and pastor that mixed “secular philosophy and Christianity.”3 This unholy mixture of secularism and faith compromised and corrupted “the true nature of Christian faith.”4 There are references in the Postscript to Hegel and terms associated with him. For this reason, its tone seems at first glance to point to Hegel as its target. However, the new research shows that this was not Kierkegaard’s intention. Rather, Stewart argues that the book is circumscribed within the larger domain of Kierkegaard’s contention with speculative thought as formulated and advocated primarily by Danish theologians who represented Hegelianism. Stewart explains: The Postscript constitutes a crucial text in the present investigation since it is generally perceived as Kierkegaard’s most extended criticism of Hegelianism. The very title of the book as “unscientific” seems to be intended as an ironic reference to Hegel’s conception of philosophy as a system. Here terms such as “the system,” “the method,” “speculative philosophy,” “and the objective view,” all seem to stand for Hegel and Hegelianism.… Despite all this I will argue that the standard interpretation of the Postscript as a polemic with Hegel is, generally speaking, a misunderstanding. When one examines the text carefully, one finds that although a great deal of it purports to be about Hegel, little of Hegel’s actual thought is present. The picture of Hegel presented here is not based on his primary texts but is rather simply a position, in many ways arbitrary, which Kierkegaard has Climacus use as a contrast to his own view. In this sense, the Hegel of the Postscript has more to do with Kierkegaard than with the actual thought or writings of the German philosopher himself. I wish to argue that the polemic here is in fact primarily with Martensen and Heiberg, who stood for a certain picture of Hegelianism in Kierkegaard’s eyes.5

One proof that Postscript was not written as a polemic against Hegel and his philosophy, according to Stewart, is the fact that it is Martensen and not Hegel who is referred to by Kierkegaard in the drafts of the Postscript as his target. These drafts apparently reveal that Martensen was the hidden figure in the Postscript that Kierkegaard was targeting. According to Stewart: Although Martensen’s name does not appear in the text of the Postscript itself, it does appear in drafts, both alone and along with the names of other Hegelians. The direct references to Martensen himself were later changed and replaced by more anonymous formulations, such as “a Hegelian.” Moreover, Kierkegaard refers to Martensen several Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, New York: Cambridge University Press 2003, pp. 456–7. 4 Ibid., p. 457. 5 Ibid., pp. 451–2. 3

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times in his later comments about the Postscript. For these reasons Martensen makes a much better candidate than Hegel as the true, albeit veiled, target of the Postscript.6

Another reason, according to Stewart, is based on what Kierkegaard wrote in a journal some years later after the Postscript was published, namely, that (1) the book targeted “modern speculation” in general, and (2) Kierkegaard admires Hegel as a thinker.7 Stewart writes: Kierkegaard indicates that the polemic in the Postscript is with certain “exaggerations” made in the name of speculative philosophy. At first it sounds as if he understands this as a criticism of Hegel, but then it is clear from the final sentence that he in fact admires Hegel himself and values his scholarship. Thus, the criticism is not of Hegel himself but of specific Hegelians, who make an inappropriate use of certain aspects of Hegel’s thought. I take this to be an important interpretive clue to understanding the Postscript.8

This new research in Kierkegaard studies seemingly contradicts that claim of Westphal, and others for that matter, namely, that the Postscript is a polemic against Hegel. It is true that Westphal offers readers a rather accurate take on the relation between faith and philosophy as assessed by Climacus in the Postscript, namely, that they are irreconcilable categories of human thought. However, what he seems to offer as the whole theme of the book, namely, that it is a polemic against Hegel, in the light of Stewart’s research, contradicts the book’s true intention. By interpreting the book in terms of a singular theme of anti-Hegel and Hegelianism, Westphal seems to limit the scope of Kierkegaard’s book. He does so in two ways. First, Westphal, as we have said, obscures Kierkegaard’s intention behind writing the Postscript by directing its polemic against Hegel and Hegelianism instead of the Danish Hegelians, that is, Martensen, Heiberg, in almost every section of the book. Second, by attempting to essentially fit all of his analysis about the book into this single theme of anti-Hegel and Hegelianism, Westphal’s book fails to discuss many aspects of the Postscript in their proper context as polemics against those Danish theologians and others who followed Hegel and incorporated and practiced his thought in nineteenth-century Denmark. What Westphal’s book seemingly fails to provide is a kind of carefully researched outline of historical development with respect to Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel that, for instance, Stewart sufficiently provides in his book. Therefore, it risks misrepresenting the essential theme of the Postscript and other works by Kierkegaard as being a singular confrontation of Hegel and Hegelianism, which the new research contradicts. That research reveals that the ultimate target of Kierkegaard’s Postscript was not Hegel or Hegelianism, but those who followed Hegel and imitated his system in Denmark, such as, Martensen, Heiberg, and others.

Ibid., p. 457. See Pap. X–6 B 128, p. 171 / CUP2, Supplement, pp. 162–3. For Stewart’s reference to this see Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, p. 466. 8 Ibid., pp. 465–6. 6 7

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Even though Westphal’s theme of anti-Hegel and Hegelianism with respect to the Postscript is contradicted by Stewart’s research, this nonetheless does not undermine the fact that a key issue discussed in the book by its pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, concerns speculative philosophy and how he presents the book as a comparative study between speculation and faith in which he concludes that speculative thought and faith oppose each other. Westphal concludes that speculative thought, according to Climacus, cannot accurately grasp the reality of the world for the reason that philosophical ideality as found in Hegelianism is inconsistent with the actuality of the world. For Climacus, says Westphal, “Christianity stands in tension with all forms of human understanding, that it exceeds every human system of intelligibility, ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern.”9 Tony Kim

Westphal, Becoming a Self, p. 183.

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Reviews and Critical Discussions Evans, C. Stephen, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 1, 1999, pp. 93–4. Ferreira, M. Jamie, review in Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 1998, pp. 144–6. Grøn, Arne, review in Kierkegaardiana, vol. 19, 1998, pp. 205–6. Jegstrup, Elsebet, review in Teaching Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 4, 1998, pp. 404–8. Kirmmse, Bruce, review in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 66, no. 3, 1998, pp. 716–18. Lippitt, John, review in Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, no. 40, 2000, pp. 8–9. Morelli, Elizabeth Murray, review in International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4, 2000, pp. 497–505. Perkins, Robert L., review in International Studies in Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 4, 2001, pp. 149–50.