Review of Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63, no. 4 (1995) 890–93. (original) (raw)
Related papers
I want to address Kierkegaard's relations to literature and then his relations to philosophy. In addition, I want to address the relation of Socrates, or a Socratic philosopher, to individuals and to a wider community. It proves difficult to keep these matters entirely separate in Kierkegaard's case. Each of these relations bleeds into the others. Nevertheless, there is a pivot around which each revolves, the pivot of disruption or anomaly. As a literary figure, and as a philosopher, Kierkegaard is anomalous. He stands against the rules, or disrupts them. He makes a kind of disordered or hybrid status for himself, outside the law. Furthermore, his hybrid cultural status as a literary-philosopher (or philosophical-litterateur) is precariously poised in Copenhagen in a way that is anomalous. It resembles the way Socrates-the-interrogator is precariously poised in Athens: obeying the law yet challenging the law, a good citizen yet not a good citizen. I travel back and forth across these three unsettling relations: Kierkegaard's relation to literature, his relation to philosophy, and his relation, expressed in his writing, to his city-to a general audience, and to unique, particular readers.
Evading the Issue: The Strategy of Kierkegaard's Postscript
Philosophical Investigations, 1999
Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1 is a pseudonymous work written by Johannes Climacus which claims to raise and respond appropriately to the question 'How do I become a Christian?' Following Climacus's text there is 'A First and Last Explanation' signed by Kierkegaard himself in which he says that 'My pseudonymity. .. has. .. an essential basis in the production itself ', that the pseudonymity of works like Postscript (hereafter CUP) is essential for the kinds of work they are. And in denying that one can attribute anything the pseudonyms say to him, Kierkegaard says that what 'has been written, then, is mine, but only insofar as I, by means of audible lines, have placed the life-view of the creating, poetically actual individuality in his mouth' (p. 625). At the end of the 'Explanation' he adds that the importance of the pseudonyms is 'in wanting to have no importance, in wanting, at a remove that is the distance of doublereflection, once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existencerelationships' (pp. 629-30). These remarks invite us to ask in relation to CUP 2 what the 'life-view' of the 'poetically actual individuality'
On Søren Kierkegaard: dialogue, polemics, lost intimacy, and time
Ars Disputandi, 2008
As the readers get to know in the Preface, the chapters assembled in this book are a record of wrestling with Kierkegaard's central themes: passion, irony, subjectivity, ethics, prayer, repetition, Augenblick (Øieblikket), poetry, self-articulation, words, responsibility, the restless heart, requited and unrequited time, love. Mooney's investigation reviews a panorama of themes and a plurality of approaches to Kierkegaard's vast work. As he rightly remarks, there are many Kierkegaards (or many of his inventions) one might meet here, where theology and philosophy, literature and ethics can mingle in mutual attractions and interanimations. The book is divided into three Parts, containing thirteen Chapters altogether. Part One (Chapters 1-4) is entitled 'Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom.' It focuses on the central role that Socrates and his thought have played for Kierkegaard's own way of thinking. In Part Two (Chapters 5-9) on 'Love, Ethics, and Tremors in Time' Mooney unfolds his hermeneutics of charity by analyzing two recent Kierkegaard biographies and the early pseudonymous writings from 1843-44. Part Three (Chapters 10-13) is dedicated to 'Plenitude, Prayer, and an Ethical Sublime'-with special consideration of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. The initial chapters circle around Socrates, who is presented as Kierkegaard's exemplar first to last, a figure who embodies and testifies to a way of becoming at once poetic, ethical, and religious. The vista of Mooney's attention in Part One is the 'broad setting or ambiance of Kierkegaard's conspectus' (8). Chapter 1 introduces Kierkegaard as a new Socratic midwife, mentoring us in the interest of setting free. His literary experiments and sketches of contrasting ways of life provoke and puzzle us. 'As we allow Kierkegaard to engage us existentially, scholarly Kierkegaard-interpretation becomes interlaced with the intimacies of self-examination.' (6) He is guiding us through the trajectories of our own becoming, through the pain and joy and danger of transformation, in search for the self or soul, the vital core and confluence of the virtues, moods and passions that give life. We are underway, a labyrinth in flux, as Mooney puts it poetically: 'Like an ever-changing riverbed, the self's terrain is constantly under reconstruction' (9). 'Knowing' myself seems as impossible as catching myself in motion, as stepping
Essays in Philosophy, 2005
Søren Kierkegaard is the preeminent nineteenth century philosopher of fragments, a fact that has made him particularly important for several strands of philosophical resistance to “total” philosophies that left indelible marks on the twentieth century and continue to reverberate in the twenty-first. It is most appropriate to devote substantial attention to the fragments he left, including the “journals, notebooks, booklets, sheets, scraps, and slips of paper” that are the objects of this study, which originally appeared in Danish (as Skriftbilleder) in 1996. The authors write that their intention is “to recount the story of the peculiar fate that lay in store for Søren Kierkegaard’s literary remains when they fell into the hands of a small group of men who, in an effort characterized by roughly equal portions of good will and ignorance, took upon themselves the task of publishing the most important portions of that material” (7). And it is a story engagingly told--certainly reason enough for anyone interested in Kierkegaard to read it, probably also reason enough for others interested more generally in literary remains and their fates. Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 2005
Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique, Oxford: OUP 2013, xiii + 344 pp
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2018
The choice of these works is defensible. Unfortunately, the basic thesis of the book is not.1 The first chapter, entitled "Kierkegaard's Intellectual Context," looks at the history of theological thought, focusing primarily on Lutheranism, from the period of the Enlightenment until the first part of the nineteenth century, the period of Kierkegaard's authorship. Hampson rightly points out that insufficient attention is given to the Lutheran context in which Kierkegaard 1 Several of the points in this review were made earlier in posts to the blog Piety on Kierkegaard.