Kierkegaard: a collection of critical essays

479 Pages·1972·23.812 MB·English

by  Josiah Thompson

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APlS BOUND TO PLEAS!
Modern Studies in Philosophy
KIERKEGAARD
A Collection of Critical Essays
Edited by Josiah Thompson
A Doubleday Anchor Original
Modern Studies in Philosophy
Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, General Editor
KIERKEGAARD
A Collection of
Critical Essays
EDITED BY
JOSIAH THOMPSON
1972
ANCHOR BOOKS
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
Modern Studies in Philosophy is a series of
anthologies presenting contemporary interpretations and
evaluations of the works of major philosophers.
The editors have selected articles designed to show the
systematic structure of the thought of these philosophers,
and to reveal the relevance of their views
to the problems of current interest. These volumes
are intended to be contributions to contemporary
debates as well as to the history of philosophy; they not
only trace the origins of many problems important to
modern philosophy, but also introduce major philosophers
as interlocutors in current discussions.
Modern Studies in Philosophy is prepared under the
general editorship of Amelie Oksenberg Rorty,
Livingston College, Rutgers University.
JOSIAH THOMPSON is Associate Professor of Philosophy
at Haverford College. He previously taught at Yale
University where he received his Ph.D. in 1964.
He is the author of Six Seconds in Dallas (1967), a
study of the Kennedy assassination, and of two books
on Kierkegaard: The Lonely Labyrinth (1967) and
Kierkegaard: A Biographical Essay (1973).
Modern Studies in Philosophy
KIERKEGAARD
This anthology has been especially prepared for Anchor Books
and has never before appeared in book form.
Anchor Books edition: 1972
ISBN: 0-385-01978-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-175420
Copyright © 1972 by Josiah Thompson
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
PREFACE
In 1944, eighty-nine years after Kierkegaard's death
and nearly one hundred years after the publication of
his most important works, the University of Copen
hagen sponsored a prize competition on the topic
"The History of Kierkegaard Studies in the Scandi
navian Countries." Aage Henriksen won the compe
tition with an incisive account of Scandinavian criti
cism up to that time. "A point of view," he concluded,
"which neither violates the totality nor the separate
parts [of Kierkegaard's authorship] does not seem to
have been attained by anybody. The core of the author
ship has not been penetrated."
Much the same thing could be said of Kierkegaard
ian eriticism outside Scandinavia. There are a wealth
of popularized introductions to him as the "father of
existentialism," enough abstruse readings of his al
leged conflict with Hegel to fill many a philosophical
journal, and a surfeit of elerical attempts to pitch his
tent within one or another religious camp. But the
number of books or essays in any language that show
a sensitivity to the enormous range and complexity of
his work can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Henriksen's conclusion easily can be generalized to
encompass the totality of Kierkegaardian critieism
"The core of the authorship has not been penetrated."
Why is this the case?
The problem of translation may play a minor role
here. Although many of Kierkegaard's works were
translated into German during the nineteenth century,
it was 1940 before any sizable number had been trans
lated into French and English; he has been aceorded
critical attention in the French- and English-speaking
vi Josiah Thompson
worlds for only thirty years. But surely this must be
only an incidental factor, since it fails to explain
the paucity of successful criticism in German and in the
Scandinavian languages. The source of the difficulty
must lie deeper-most likely in the strange and com
plex character of the works themselves.
In an essay included in this volume John Updike
points out that "duplicity was the very engine of Kier
kegaard's thought," that he was a "man in love with
duplicity and irony and all double-edged things." Up
dike's judgment is most emphatically confirmed in that
series of pseudonymous works that flowed from Kier
kegaard's pen during the years 1842-46. Although
often the last to be translated, these mercurial and
puzzling works have become the basis of Kierkegaard's
modern reputation. Yet it is precisely here that the
critics have so often been frustrated by Kierkegaard's
unwillingness to speak directly. The world of the
pseudonyms is a world of stratagem and illusion, a
world of trap doors and hidden panels, where one is
never quite sure where one is or to whom one is lis
tening. In this questionable territory the critic must
proceed with great caution, for the persona he at one
moment identifies with Kierkegaard may in the next
turn out to be only the author's foil. Even worse, a
false step or wrong turn may expose the critic himself
to the author's derision. The very duplicity of this
literature, then, is both its essential quality and also its
surest defense against critical penetration.
But these works are not duplicitous and difficult
simply because Kierkegaard was a "man in love with
duplicity and irony and all double-edged things." To
Kierkegaard's mind, their content dictated their form.
Their terrain is the terrain of individual human con
sciousness, and their single theme is the impossibility
of locating any firm reference points in the quick
sand of that terrain. On occasion after occasion he
tells us what a desperately difficult thing it is to
be a human being-difficult because we seem to se-
Preface vii
crete illusion from our very pores; desperate because
we cannot stop yearning for the replacement of illu
sion by a reality so unknown it can only be called di
vine. For Kierkegaard, human consciousness is du
plicitous; "double-mindedness" (tvesyndethed) is both
its essential character and most private cross. Since
illusion and pretense, image and ambiguity, are for
Kierkegaard the very ambience of consciousness, he
quite naturally turns to duplicity as a means of com
munication. Direct communication, he believes, is
suited only for unimportant matters-grocery bills,
logical truths, taxonomies. To talk about ourselves and
what makes our lives ebb and flow (what Kierkegaard
called "the ethico-religious"), we must use language in
a different way, letting metaphor replace literal sense,
and ambiguity fertilize the private spaces of our imag
ination. Hence the inordinate difficulty of Kierke
gaard's works. He uses pseudonyms so as not to speak
directly, convinced that the formal indirection of his
style is dictated by the content of his utterance.
One final point. There may be no "core" of Kierke
gaard's authorship to be "penetrated." Henriksen's
metaphor suggests that the essential meaning of Kier
kegaard's work still lies hidden, to be revealed by an
as yet unidentified critical approach. But if the earlier
discussion of duplicity and indirect communication is
to be taken seriously, we may have to construct a new
metaphor for talking about Kierkegaard. Instead of
thinking of his authorship as having a single core of
meaning, we might think of it as having (like a multi
faceted jewel) many different meanings depending on
the angle from which it is illuminated.
Viewing his work in this way, I have tried to choose
essays for this volume that light up Kierkegaard's work
from many different directions. The selections offered
here are in no way definitive. They are intended only
to give the reader some sense of the shape and direc
tion of recent Kierkegaardian criticism. They are ar
ranged in order of their generality, moving from
viii Josiah Thorn pson
fairly long accounts of Kierkegaard's thought as a
whole to shorter essays on specific topics. A biblio
graphical supplement brings the international bibliog
raphy (published in 1962) up to date for the English
language, and an Index Locorum provides the ref
erences needed to use this collection as a rough com
mentary to many of Kierkegaard's works.
I am particularly grateful to Louis Mackey and
Stephen Crites for providing unpublished essays. Ame
lie Rorty, the general editor of this series, was ex
tremely generous with suggestions and encouragement.
Paul Drymalski and Ronnie Shushan of Doubleday
were patient and ever helpful during the three long
years this book has been in preparation.
May 1972 Josiah Thompson
Haverford, Pennsylvania
CONTENTS
Preface v
Chronology xi
The Poetry of Inwardness 1
LOUIS MACKEY
The Master of Irony 103
JOSIAH THoMPsON
The Fork 164
JOHN UPDIKE
Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and as Act 183
STEPHEN CRITES
The Singular Universal 230
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
The Loss of the World in Kierkegaard's Ethics 266
LOUIS MACKEY
Christianity and Nonsense 289
HENRY E. ALLISON
Kant and Kierkegaard on Duty and Inclination 324
GEORGE SCHRADER
Kierkegaard and Scepticism 342
RICHARD H. POPKIN
Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation 373
STANLEY CAVELL