Kierkegaard's Writings, VII: Philosophical Fragments, or a acus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est. (Two Books in One Volume)

371 Pages·1985·2.62 MB·English

by  Kierkegaard

PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS
JOHANNES CLIMACUS
KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS, VII
PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS
JOHANNES CLIMACUS
by Søren Kierkegaard
Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 1985 by Howard V. Hong
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855.
Philosophical fragments, or, A fragment of
philosophy ; Johannes Climacus, or, De omnibus dubitandum est.
(Kierkegaard’s writings ; 7)
Translation of: Philosophiske smuler; and of:
Johannes Climacus.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Religion—Philosophy. I. Hong, Howard Vincent,
1912- . II. Hong, Edna Hatlestad, 1913-
III. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. Johannes Climacus.
English. 1985. IV. Title. V. Series: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855. Works.
English. 1972 ; 7.
BL51.K48713 1985 201 85-3420
ISBN 0-691-07273-6
ISBN 0-691-02036-1 (pbk.)
Preparation of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the
Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
an independent federal agency
Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the
guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production
Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources
http://pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
Second Printing, with corrections, 1987
16 17 18 19 20
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02036-5
ISBN-10: 0-691-02036-1
CONTENTS
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
Philosophical Fragments, or A Fragment of Philosophy
PREFACE
I Thought-Project
II The God as Teacher and Savior
III The Absolute Paradox
APPENDIX
Offense at the Paradox
IV The Situation of the Contemporary Follower
INTERLUDE
Is the Past More Necessary than the Future?
V The Follower at Second Hand
The Moral
Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est
PLEASE NOTE
INTRODUCTION
PARS PRIMA
INTRODUCTION
I Modern Philosophy Begins with Doubt
II Philosophy Begins with Doubt
III In Order to Philosophize, One Must Have Doubted
PARS SECUNDA
INTRODUCTION
I What Is It to Doubt?
SUPPLEMENT
Key to References
Manuscript Title Page and Original Printed Title Page of Philosophical
Fragments
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to
Philosophical Fragments
Manuscript First Page of Johannes Climacus
Selected Entries from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers Pertaining to
Johannes Climacus
EDITORIAL APPENDIX
Acknowledgments
Collation of Philosophical Fragments in Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s
Collected Works
NOTES
Philosophical Fragments
Johannes Climacus
Supplement
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INDEX
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
It is a very strange experience for me to read the third chapter of the
third book of Aristotle’s De anima. A year and a half ago I began a
little essay, De omnibus dubitandum, in which I made my first
attempt at a little speculative development. The motivating concept I
used was: error. Aristotle does the same. At that time I had not read a
bit of Aristotle but a good share of Plato.
The Greeks still remain my consolation. The con-founded
mendacity that entered into philosophy with Hegel, the endless
insinuating and betraying, and the parading and spinning out of one
or another single passage in Greek philosophy.1
In this journal entry from late autumn 1843 or early winter 1844, Kierkegaard
offers clues to the dating of the composition of Johannes Climacus, or De
omnibus dubitandum est,2 and to an understanding of the nature of the work. The
editor’s preface to Either/Or was completed in November 1842, and the work
was published February 20, 1843. On May 16, 1843, Two Upbuilding
Discourses, by S. Kierkegaard, was published. Five months later, on October 16,
1843, three works appeared, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and Three
Upbuilding Discourses, by Johannes de Silentio, Constantin Constantius, and S.
Kierkegaard, respectively. Although earlier journal entries give some hints to
aspects of Johannes Climacus,3 the sketches and perhaps the draft of this
unpublished work were most likely written between November 1842 and April
1843, the period between concluding work on Either/Or and the intensive
writing of the four subsequent publications.
Having completed the writing of Either/Or, Kierkegaard became preoccupied
with Greek and modern philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political
philosophy, and esthetics. The first two issues figure in Johannes Climacus.
Reading notes in a notebook entitled Philosophica4 (dated December 2, 1842)
and in another notebook called Æsthetica5 (dated November 20, 1842) primarily
concern works by Aristotle, Descartes, and Leibniz and W. G. Tennemann’s
history of philosophy.6 One section of the reading notes (written on the back
pages of the notebook) is entitled Problemata7 and comprises issues (designated
a through p) such as necessity and freedom, past and future, the nature of a
category, being, the positive and the negative, experience, the self, collateral
thinking, transition, mediation, paradox, quantity and quality, thought and being,
logic, interested and disinterested knowledge, thinker and thought, and pathos
and dialectic. Problemata became the provisional title of Fear and Trembling8
(published October 16, 1843), and some of the issues became the themes of
Johannes Climacus and especially of Philosophical Fragments.
Doubt, the central issue of Johannes Climacus, also appears among the
themes of writing contemplated or initiated earlier by Kierkegaard. The other
subjects of his earliest interest include the master thief and the legends of the
Wandering Jew, Don Juan, and Faust. In the published works, the master thief
motif found expression only in scattered allusions to criminals and in the more
significant appellation “secret agent” or “spy.”9 The Wandering Jew is
mentioned only once, in the first volume of Either/Or.10 The interest in Don Juan
appears especially in extended treatments of Mozart’s Don Giovanni,11 as well as
in references to Don Juan as an idea and as a character in the works of Byron,
Galeotti, Grabbe, Hauch, Heiberg, and Molière.12 Also projected were lectures
on communication,13 which were sketched and partially written but not delivered
and not printed until the posthumous publication of the Efterladte Papirer
(1869-1881) and the Papirer (1909-1948). Lectures on poetry were
contemplated in 1842-1843 but were not begun.14
The fascination with Faust emerges as early as 1835 in a journal entry in
which Faust is characterized as “doubt personified.”15 Scattered entries from
1835-1837 constitute the core of what Emanuel Hirsch has appropriately called
“Letters of a Faustian Doubter.”16 This series, Kierkegaard’s first writing plan,
was not completed, but he picked up the theme again in Johannes Climacus.
Furthermore, he followed the early plan of casting the ideas in the form of a
character, even though “‘Johannes Climacus’ was actually a contemplative
piece”17 and was intended as the first of a series, with Descartes’s Meditations as
the prototype: “For the most part Descartes has embodied his system in the first
six meditations. So it is not always necessary to write systems. I want to publish
‘Philosophical Deliberations’ in pamphlets, and into them I can put all my
interim thoughts. It perhaps would not be so bad to write in Latin.”18 Despite the
avoidance of a system, Johannes Climacus itself is systematic in the sense of
coherent contemplation, because to Johannes “coherent thinking was a scala
paradisi [ladder of paradise].”19
The tone and the intention of Johannes Climacus are highly polemical versus
speculative philosophy in both substance and practice. A residue of the
polemical approach can be found even in the Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843)
published shortly after Kierkegaard completed the writing of Johannes
Climacus: “It is very curious. I had decided to change that little preface [in Two
Upbuilding Discourses] . . . because it seemed to me to harbor a certain spiritual
eroticism, and because it is extraordinarily hard to devote myself so irenically
that the polemical contrast is not clearly present.”20
The polemical tone of the warning note in the text of Johannes Climacus (p.
117) is expressed more specifically in a paragraph appended to the draft:
The plan of this narrative was as follows. By means of the
melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on
the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life, by means of the
profound earnestness involved in a young man’s being sufficiently
honest and earnest enough to do quietly and unostentatiously what
the philosophers say (and he thereby becomes unhappy)—I would
strike a blow at [modern speculative] philosophy. Johannes does what
we are told to do—he actually doubts everything—he suffers through
all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad
conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go
and wants to come back, he cannot do so. He perceives that in order
to hold on to this extreme position of doubting everything, he has
engaged all his mental and spiritual powers. If he abandons this
extreme position, he may very well arrive at something, but in doing
that he would have also abandoned his doubt about everything. Now
he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these
deliberations. Life has not acquired any meaning for him, and all this
is the fault of philosophy.21
This explanatory paragraph ends with a parenthetical sentence stating that a draft
contains the following concluding lines:
Then the philosophers are worse than the Pharisees, who, as we read,
impose heavy burdens but themselves do not lift them, for in this they
are the same, but the philosophers demand the impossible. And if
there is a young man who thinks that to philosophize is not to talk or
to write but in all quietness to do honestly and scrupulously what the
philosophers say one should do, they let him waste his time, many
years of his life, and then it becomes clear that it is impossible, and
yet it has gripped him so profoundly that rescue is perhaps
impossible.22