The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard. Jacob Sawyer
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Kierkegaard could be critiqued along the lines of his thought being a Westernized preoccupation with the individual, and one that does not take into account non-Western, communal ways of thinking. Even the New Testament could be cited in the recorded events of mass conversion, such as that of the Philippian jailer’s family in Acts 16:33–34.
78. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 23.
79. I assume that Kierkegaard is through-and-through a religious author, that the main concern of Kierkegaard’s authorship is Christianity, and that there is no good reason for not accepting Kierkegaard’s direct accounts of his authorship—particularly those given in the collection of Kierkegaard, Point of View. Views which attempt to argue otherwise are at best unhelpful. I believe I am in good company in making such an assumption; see also Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 1–2; Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation, 1 n. 1; Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 22 n. 10; cf. Garff, “Eyes of Argus.” I will give a critique of Garff’s article further below.
80. This is similar to the thesis expounded by Joel Rasmussen, who convincingly demonstrates that Kierkegaard undertakes a “Christomorphic poetics,” that is, that Kierkegaard’s emphasis of the correlation between form and content is derived from Christ embodying the ideal sought after in human attempts at the poetic. See Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, e.g., “The theological heart of Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation and harmonization of the Romantic ideal of ‘living poetically’ and the traditionalist understanding of ‘true art,’ therefore, is that the reconciliation of the actual to the ideal to which poetry purportedly attests finds its fulfillment not in any human art, but in God’s poem” (ibid., 10–11).
81. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 102ff.
82. The significance of such distancing we will explore below in Part II and III.
83. This view, as we will explore below, is part of Climacus’ “thought project” which contrasts the Socratic view of truth and the conditions through which it is “acquired,” and a view that is presented as logically derived in opposition to the Socratic, which is easily recognized by the reader as an articulation of the gospel of Christianity.
84. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 101. Also, “[t]he poet’s task is to find a solution, a point of union where there is true understanding in love,” (ibid., 104).
85. Ibid., 104.
86. Ibid., 106–7, cf. Phil 2:7.
87. Two brief examples of Kierkegaard conveying (in his own name) a similar understanding of the gospel are Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2/1389, X1 A 408, n.d., 1849 and ibid., 1/301, IV A 33, n.d., 1843.
88. See Phil 2:6–8 especially.
89. Craig Hinkson suggests that there was an “affinity” with Luther’s thought in Kierkegaard during the time of the writing of Philosophical Fragments, and direct influence only came three years afterward in 1847. See Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard,” 29–30. Hinkson uses the following journal entry in support of this: Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 3/2463, VIII1 A 465, n.d., 1847. A key difference is that for Luther, hiddenness is related to Christ crucified rather than the wider event of the incarnation, which Kierkegaard emphasizes. See McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 161–75.
90. As Murray Rae helpfully articulates: “Kierkegaard insists that ‘the surroundings of actuality’ are not incidental to but constitute the truth itself” (Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 63).
91. See Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 100–101.
92. Ibid., 119; cf. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 125–36, etc.
93. Chapter 3 in Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 111–25.
94. Hinkson, “Luther and Kierkegaard,” 32, cf. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 107, 131–34.
95. E.g., Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 95–96.
96. This is the main subject of the latter part of Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 125–73; see also Anti-Climacus’ discussion in Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 62–66 especially.
97. Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 20.
98. Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 91.
99. “. . . they were equal but their roles quite different: Møller as a Socratic deliverer of ideas that seemed perhaps to be there already, and Kierkegaard developing them further” (Jensen, “Poul Martin Møller,” 116–17).
100. I do not have space to defend this suggestion here or to look into it further, but I put it forward as a helpful view for further research. A good place to start would be ibid., section C: “Fragments on Irony and Nihilism,” starting on p. 128.
101. The influence of Møller on Kierkegaard’s authorial form is one that I regret I have not had the time to investigate further.
102. “Form” and “content” relate to Kierkegaard’s categories of “actuality” and “ideality,” used well by Joel Rasmussen in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s “Christomorphic Poetics,” in Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, e.g., 48: “If poetry reconciles an imperfect actuality to its perfect ideal in a merely imaginative fashion, then a reconciliation between an individual’s imperfect actuality and the divine ideal for that individual should be achievable not through writing poetry but by living poetically.”
103. Kierkegaard, “Two Discourses,” 418–26.
104. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 202–7.
105. Ibid., 206, cf. John 14:6.