The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard. Jacob Sawyer
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an inability to make oneself understood is what Kierkegaard himself claims to have experienced in his authorial task. See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 75.
137. E.g., Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 124, 187; and Part II in ch 10: “Silence, Obedience, and Joy,” in Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, 196–213 originally published in 1849 as The Lily of the Field and the Bird Under Heaven.
138. “To know God requires that we become ‘Godly.’ We must learn to fear him, to be observant in his presence, and then we also realize what he is. For the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and of our Lord, Jesus Christ, is not truly known if he is not feared. This is why Kierkegaard said, and I believe truly, that Christianity requires inwardness. For fearing God means that the fears of others and of the world are cast out; but more, it becomes plainly silly to defy the Almighty God in any respect whatsoever” (Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 211).
139. C. Stephen Evans rightly argues that Kierkegaard advocated for a selfhood being relational, but only through the God-relationship: “Not only is God the ontological foundation of the self; God is also the highest ethical task, in the sense that the highest form of selfhood requires a conscious relation to God.” This then forms the basis for a healthy relating to others: “. . . though the God-relation is not merely a means to bettering human social arrangements, it ultimately must be seen as functioning so as to humanize those arrangements.” It is in this way that Evans successfully deals with the critique of individualism so frequently leveled against Kierkegaard, such as that by Buber and others (Evans, “Who Is the Other?,” 272–73).
140. “ . . . when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 31).
141. This is most particularly the case in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
142. See part 2, chapter 7: “Mercifulness, a Work of Love, Even if It Can Give Nothing and Is Capable of Doing Nothing,” in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 292–305.
143. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 25; also: “Being religious is, however, being involved, being concerned, being a qualitatively different person. If a language claim, even about God, is believed to be true, there is nothing in that kind of assent to its claim that is productive of religiousness” (Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 69).
144. Many scholars now see that the primary target of Kierkegaard’s satire are Danish Hegelians, not so much Hegel himself. For instance, see Poole, Kierkegaard, 2; and Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations.
145. See Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 100.
146. See Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 124–25.
147. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; see also Antony Aumann on the work of the Danish Hegelian H. L. Martensen in “Kierkegaard’s Case,” chap. 2: “The Speculative Project.”
148. There are innumerable parallels here with Michael Polanyi’s thought, though he does not refer to Kierkegaard in his major work: Personal Knowledge. Such a link could be made via the thought of Bernard Lonergan, who shares affinities with both Polanyi and Kierkegaard. See Fitzpatrick, “Subjectivity and Objectivity,” 64–74; Morelli, Anxiety.
149. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 120.
150. Holmer, The Grammar of Faith, 25. “In so far as Christianity can be ‘said’ at all, theology and Scripture say it. But what is therein said, be it the words of eternal life, be it creeds, or be it the words of Jesus Himself, we must note that like grammar and logic, their aim is not that we repeat the words. Theology must also be absorbed, and when it is, the hearer is supposed to become Godly.”
151. As a negative example: “Therefore an understanding of evil (however much one tries to make himself and others think that one can keep himself entirely pure, that there is a pure understanding of evil) nevertheless involves an understanding with evil” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 266, emphasis author’s own).
152. Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 46.
153. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1, my emphasis.
154. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 4.
155. Kierkegaard’s use of “passion” is articulated by C. Stephen Evans as being akin to the notion of “value”: an enduring care that “must be developed and acquired,” rather than a fleeting feeling. “The individual does decide for himself, but he cannot value what he knows is valueless; there must be a basis or root for his caring concern. Passions must be ‘called forth’” (Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 39).
156. Hence Kierkegaard’s repeated repudiation of the attempt to view humanity sub specie aeterni (“from the aspect of eternity”). See also Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 196: “Here it is not forgotten, even for a single moment, that the subject is existing, and that existing is a becoming, and that truth as the identity of thought and being is therefore a chimera of abstraction and truly only a longing of creation, not because truth is not an identity, but because the knower is an existing person, and thus truth cannot be an identity for him as long as he exists . . .”; this necessity of choice is also the big idea behind Kierkegaard’s first key work Either/Or.
157. Just as mistrust is “a misuse of knowledge . . . Love is the very opposite of mistrust, and yet is initiated in the same knowledge. In knowledge the two are, so to speak, not distinguished from each other (in the ultimate understanding knowledge is indifferent); only in conclusion and decision, in faith (to believe all things, to believe nothing), are they directly opposite to one another” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 214–16).
158. However, as we shall see, this is not a demonstration of a Christian use.
159. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 194–95.
160. As voiced by De Silentio: “Faith is the highest passion in a human being” (Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 151).
161. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 3.