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Søren Kierkegaard is an outsider in the history of philosophy. His peculiar authorship comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter, including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian dogmatics, satirical prefaces, philosophical "scraps" and "postscripts," literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of rhetoric includes irony, satire, parody, humor, polemic and a dialectical method of "indirect communication" - all designed to deepen the reader’s subjective passionate engagement with ultimate existential issues. Like his role models Socrates and Christ, Kierkegaard takes how one lives one’s life to be the prime criterion of being in the truth. Kierkegaard’s closest literary and philosophical models are Plato, J.G. Hamann, G.E. Lessing, and his teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen Poul Martin Møller, although Goethe, the German Romantics, Hegel, Kant and the logic of Adolf Trendelenburg are also important influences. His prime theological influence is Martin Luther, although his reactions to his Danish contemporaries N.F.S. Grundtvig and H.L. Martensen are also crucial. In addition to being dubbed "the father of existentialism," Kierkegaard is best known as a trenchant critic of Hegel and Hegelianism and for his invention or elaboration of a host of philosophical, psychological, literary and theological categories, including: anxiety, despair, melancholy, repetition, inwardness, irony, existential stages, inherited sin, teleological suspension of the ethical, Christian paradox, the absurd, reduplication, universal/exception, sacrifice, love as a duty, seduction, the demonic, and indirect communication.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)
That Single Individual, My Reader
Kierkegaard’s edifying discourses are addressed to "that single individual, my reader." When he first used this address he meant it to apply to Regina Olsen. But he came to see that it had a wider application. He had polemicized from his earliest writings against the press, and against cultural and political tendencies to "level" individuals into homogeneous masses. His term of loathing for the depersonalized, de-individualized instrument of leveling was "the crowd." It corresponds to Nietzsche’s notion of "the herd" and to Heidegger’s notion of "das Man." One subset of "the crowd" that especially attracted Kierkegaard’s ire was "the reading public." This was the anonymous mass, consumer of the secondhand literary opinion of "reviewers." Most reviewers, in Kierkegaard’s opinion, were hasty, ill-informed panderers to public opinion, so that reviewers and public fed off each other in a vicious circle. Reviews were even written without the reviewer having read the book, then circulated through gossip by "the reading public" as final judgment on the book. The anonymous circulation of public gossip is the antithesis of serious engagement with truth on a personal level.
THE "SECOND AUTHORSHIP"
Anti-Climacus catalogues various ways in which we might take offense at someone claiming to be the "God-man." In the process he discusses the necessity for God, as transcendent, to use a method of indirect communication. The God-man needs to be "incognito" - to arrive in the unrecognizable form of a servant. He needs to suffer, to be spurned, to avoid any possible direct revelation of His exalted status. Only by means of indirect communication, rather than by direct revelation, will the individual come to relate to the God-man through faith. The possibility of faith is the obverse of the possibility of offense. Offense is underscored by means of the Almighty’s lowly incognito and indirect method of communication.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kierkegaard’s Writings Breve og Aktstykker vedrørende Søren Kierkegaaard, ed. Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1953-4. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. P.A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr & E. Torsting, second edition Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968-78. Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, ed. A.B. Drachmann, J.L. Heiberg & H.D. Lange, second edition, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag, 1920-36. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N.J. Cappelørn, et.al., Copenhagen: Gad, 1997-.
Another important part of the "second authorship" consists in the self-reflections Kierkegaard wrote on his own work as an author. In 1851 he published On My Work as an Author, but had also written several other works that were only published posthumously. These include The Point of View for my Work as an Author: A Report to History (1859), Armed Neutrality, or My Position as a Christian Author in Christendom (1880), and "Three Notes Concerning my Activity as an Author" (1859). He also withheld from publication The Book on Adler, an extended study of Adolph Adler, a prominent Hegelian and pastor in the Danish People’s Church. Adler claimed to have received divine revelation, but Kierkegaard’s analysis of his writings tries to demonstrate Adler’s confusion. Adler becomes, in Kierkegaard’s words, "a Satire on Hegelian Philosophy and the Present Age." Kierkegaard also used Adler’s case to distinguish between "a genius" and "an apostle." Another work, also published posthumously, was "The Ethical and Ethico-religious Dialectic of Communication" (1877). Kierkegaard agonized over whether to publish these direct communications about his own strategies of communication and how he saw his activity as an author. Of particular concern was how these direct writings would affect the complex dialectic of direct and indirect communications he had set up in his "authorships." Ultimately he relied on the guidance of "Governance" [Styrelse] to decide whether or not to publish - much as Socrates had relied on the warnings of his daimonion about whether to engage people in philosophical cross-examination. Retrospectively, Kierkegaard regarded his activity as an author to have been under the direction of Governance. He had not had a clear view at the outset about the structure of his authorships, but had come to see that what he had been directed to write was what was required for a religious poet in the present age. He was a writer who overflowed with ideas - far too many to write down. Therefore Governance had to sit him down like a schoolboy, and make him write as though he were writing "a work assignment." In much the same way as he disappeared under the dash in works of love, Kierkegaard "disappears" in these accounts of his own activity as a writer under the sign of "Governance."
Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen, Hermann Deuser, et.al. (eds), Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1996-, Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996-
Ferreira, M. Jamie, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Oxford University Press, 2001
Garff, Joakim, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: en biografi, Copenhagen: Gad, 2000
Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge University Press, 2001
Hannay, Alastair & Gordon Marino (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge University Press, 1998
Kirmmse, Bruce, Encounters With Kierkegaard, Princeton University Press, 1996
Kirmmse, Bruce, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990
Mackey, Louis, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard, Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986
Malantschuk, Gregor, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. & trans. H.V. Hong & E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, 1971
Pattison, George, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992
Perkins, Robert L (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, Macon: Mercer University Press (this is a series of anthologies of essays, with each volume designed to accompany the volumes comprising Kierkegaard’s Writings, op.cit.)
William McDonald
Author Information:
Email: wmcdonal@metz.une.edu.au
University of New England, Australia