Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy
Published in Acta Kierkegaardiana, Vol. 2, 2007.
This paper considers several recent attempts to account for the nature of Kierkegaard’s intellectual project: namely those proposed by postmodern, pragmatist, and Wittgensteinian commentators. I argue that each of these approaches fails to account for key claims Kierkegaard makes about his own project.
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Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy
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Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy
Abstract This paper considers several recent attempts to account for the nature of Kierkegaard’s intellectual project: namely those proposed by postmodern, pragmatist, and Wittgensteinian commentators. I argue that each of these approaches fails to account for key claims Kierkegaard makes about his own project.
Introduction The question of whether Kierkegaard is to be counted philosopher or theologian is, of course, intimately connected to that of whether his thought is to be regarded philosophy or theology. Throughout his reception Kierkegaard has been read as both, although in more recent times it is perhaps fair to say that the emphasis has shifted to reading him as a figure with an important contribution to make to contemporary philosophical debate in ethics and the philosophy of religion.1 This paper takes several key claims Kierkegaard makes about the method of his own project as a starting point. Claims that, I hold, any satisfactory account of Kierkegaard’s thought needs to be able to do justice to. Using these claims as a benchmark, I turn to briefly examining three recent interpretative approaches to which Kierkegaard’s work has been subject. What I term a post-modern approach, as undertaken by the late Roger Poole; a pragmatic interpretation, as found in the work of Peter J. Mehl; and a Wittgensteinian reading, as proposed by James Conant. All three of these approaches, I shall argue, fail to do justice to one or more of the key claims Kierkegaard makes about his project, and so must be rejected as furnishing a satisfactory account. I shall close by suggesting that a theological account can provide what the above approaches fail to. It is perhaps unrealistic of me to expect the critical reader to be wholly convinced by the arguments that follow, certainly given the length of this paper. With this in mind, it is perhaps more useful to think of what follows as a survey. My additional, and more modest, aim is to provide the reader with an overview of several recent interpretations of Kierkegaard’s work. This, I hope, will be of benefit to readers coming to Kierkegaard for the first time, and beginning to address the question of the significance of this figure to philosophy or theology. My end, minimally, is thus to provide the reader with a notion of the most important issues upon which reading Kierkegaard hinges; a sense of where the points of contention lie.
The Project of Indirect Communication Getting clear about a historical figures approach to philosophy or theology is typically a matter of elucidating his or her methodology: of determining how the figure in question conceives of his or her own intellectual project. The work and thought of Søren Kierkegaard is no exception. In approaching Kierkegaard it is important to pay
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The following books, for instance, attempt to make this case., Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and The Limits of The Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Rick Anthony Furtak, Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2005); and Tom Angier, Either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a New Key (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
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attention to the claims he makes about his own method, that of indirect communication. In this section I shall outline and comment upon three claims that Kierkegaard makes about his project. These are, I think, claims that any serious account of Kierkegaard’s methodology, and thereby his philosophy or theology, needs to be able to do justice to. The problem in coming to terms with Kierkegaard’s methodology is that he makes several, at least prima facie, contradictory claims about it. Examples of these claims as they figure in Kierkegaard’s texts are as follows. First, in distinguishing direct and indirect communication in terms of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective thinking’, and the notion of a ‘double-reflection’, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, ‘ordinary communication, objective thinking, has no secrets; only doubly reflected subjective thinking has secrets; that is, all its essential content is essentially a secret.’2 In commenting upon this passage Climacus further states that, what has been said in a privy council is an accidental secret as long as it is not publicly known, because the statement itself can be understood directly as soon as it is made public … On the other hand, when Socrates, on account of his daimon, isolated himself from any and every relation and, for instance, posito [as a supposition] presumed that everyone had to do it in that way, such a life-view would essentially become a secret or an essential secret.3 The distinction drawn in this passage is between what is accidentally and what is essentially secret, or private, and so the claim is that what is indirectly communicated is essentially private.4 Second, Kierkegaard appears concerned to point out that a text or utterance’s being an instance of indirect communication does not negate its having a determinable content. For example, in commenting upon a review of his earlier work Philosophical Fragments, a text Climacus explicitly holds to be a work of indirect communication,5 he claims that what the review misses out is the contrast of form, the teasing resistance of the imaginary construction to the content, the inventive audacity (which even invents Christianity) … the indefatigable activity of irony, the parody of speculative thought in the entire plan, the satire in making efforts as if something ganz Auszerordentliches und zwar Neues [altogether extraordinary, that is, new] were to come of them, whereas what always emerges is oldfashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity.6 Despite being a work of indirect communication Philosophical Fragments has a content, namely that of ‘old-fashioned orthodoxy’. Third, Kierkegaard claims some sort of necessity on behalf of his project. For example, Climacus states that ‘[i]nwardness cannot be communicated directly,
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Søren Kierkegaard, Hong and Hong (trans.), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 79, emphasis mine. 3 ibid., pp. 79-80. 4 On this point see Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1996), p. 62. 5 Kierkegaard, Concluding, p. 274. 6 ibid., p. 275, emphasis mine.
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because expressing it directly is externality (orientated outwardly, not inwardly)’.7 Similarly, in regards to the notion of ‘the leap’ we are told that ‘[Jacobi] is not dialectically clear about the leap, that this cannot be expounded or communicated directly, precisely because the leap is an act of isolation, since it is left to the single individual to decide whether he will by virtue of the absurd accept in faith that which indeed cannot be thought.’8 In addition, Climacus writes of actuality, ‘[j]ust because his actuality is a matter of indifference to me, the learner, and conversely mine to him, it by no means follows that he himself dares to be indifferent to his own actuality. His communication must be marked by this, not directly, of course, for it cannot be communicated directly between man and man (since such a relation is the believer’s paradoxical relation to the object of faith), and cannot be understood directly, but must be presented indirectly to be understood indirectly.’9 Such things cannot be directly communicated, only indirectly communicated. Problems with the above three claims might be said to be as follows. As regards the first claim, the idea that the end of Kierkegaard’s intellectual project is to communicate something not simply contingently but necessarily private would appear discordant with the very notion of communication. As James Conant notes on this point, if we take this claim literally it would result in our being unable to count indirect communication an instance of communication at all.10 The second claim, that Kierkegaard’s project consists in relating what is representable in common conceptual and linguistic form, is more intuitively plausible. Yet, the first and second claim in conjunction appear problematic. For we are now being asked to hold that Kierkegaard’s project consists in relating both what is public and essentially private. Kierkegaard’s third claim, like his first, might strike one counter-intuitive, on the grounds that there would appear to be a certain plasticity between the content and form of natural languages. (For it is clearly possible for me to say the same thing in different ways, and so the particular form of words or literary style I happen to adopt is not evidently a mater of necessity). When placed in conjunction with the first and second claim, the third gives birth to a wealth of complexity. Perhaps one thing is clear, to try and determine how all three of these claims can hold true of one and the same project is no simple matter. Nevertheless, I think that in attempting to furnish an account of Kierkegaard’s project we need to take all three of the above claims seriously. Unfortunately, as we shall see in the sections that follow, the strategy in approaching Kierkegaard is all too often that of rejecting one of more of these claims in order to hold what remains consistent. To do this, I fear, is to fail to do justice to Kierkegaard’s method. That Kierkegaard’s claims are apparently contradictory is not in and of itself a reason to refrain from trying to read him as taking those claims seriously. If we can arrive at a reading in which we can understand why Kierkegaard is concerned to make all of these claims, and how he takes them to cohere, then this is all the better. I shall not be so ambitious as to try and present such a reading, but will be concerned with how several contemporary approaches to Kierkegaard’s thought stand on the above three claims.
7 8
ibid., p. 260, emphasis mine. ibid., p. 101, emphasis mine. 9 ibid., p. 325, emphasis mine. 10 James Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors”. In Tessin, Timothy and Von der Ruhr, Mario, (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief: (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 310.
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The Postmodern Approach One of the major interpretative movements with respect to Kierkegaard in recent times has been that of reading his texts in terms of the work of Jacques Derrida.11 Such postmodern commentators, as we might term them, have sort to establish Kierkegaard as a precursor of their own views of thought and discourse. One of the general tenets of this interpretive approach is that all language is, not just in principle but in fact, ambiguous: and so the possibility of any language having a determinate content is ruled out a priori. Such commentators read Kierkegaard’s claim that indirect communication relates what is essentially private as an affront to generality and totality, as it undoubtedly is, and from this conclude that Kierkegaard is a kind of early postmodernist. This is the approach adopted by the later Roger Poole in his book Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. Poole envisages Kierkegaard’s project qua indirect communication as an attempt to interrupt, refract, and refuse meaning. However, Poole does not take this claim to deny that Kierkegaard’s works are meaningful, but simply holds that there are as many meanings to a work of indirect communication as there are readers.12 The result of this is that there is said to be no meaning to an instance of indirect communication over and above its ability to disseminate meanings.13 While this postmodern approach to Kierkegaard can be held an attempt to do justice to the first of the claims he makes about his project, it clearly has difficulty in accommodating the second. For, as already outlined, Kierkegaard claims that his project has a determinable content. Yet to claim, as Poole does, that Kierkegaard’s project consists in generating readings as multifarious as his readers is the very antithesis of Kierkegaard’s second claim. For to hold that a texts function is to produce as many readings as there are readers is precisely to deny that is has a determinable content of which all readings must partake.
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For example, see: Elsebet Jegstrup (ed.), The New Kierkegaard, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004); Martin Matuštík and Merold Westphal (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); and the book I consider here Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). 12 As Poole tells us: “I trace possible ways of deciphering the rhetorical interlacings of the supplement through which Kierkegaard deliberately occludes, rather than clarifies, his meaning. The greater part of the secondary literature has tried to thrust aside the play of the supplement in order to come at “the meaning”. I work on the opposite assumption. It is the constant play of the supplement that is the meaning; or at least it is as much of the meaning as the reader is going to be allowed to deduce. The aesthetic texts certainly have meanings, but they do not have a meaning. The meanings that are available exist at the level of the displacements, the deferrals, and the supplements” (Poole, Kierkegaard, p. 5). 13 Poole writes: “[T]he aesthetic works of Kierkegaard are not only not meant to deliver a clear univocal communicatum, but they are positively meant to refuse meaning and to disseminate doubt” (Poole, Kierkegaard, p. 9; cf. p. 11).
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The Pragmatic Approach The second approach I wish to consider is that of Peter J. Mehl, who in his recent book Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in A Pluralistic World, advocates reading Kierkegaard as a Jamesian pragmatist.14 Mehl claims to find two epistemological strains in Kierkegaard’s thought: a Cartesian view of knowing ones own mind and a Jamesian pragmatist position, and Mehl’s project plays these strains off against each other with the aim that the latter triumph over the former. In outlining what he terms ‘Kierkegaard’s Cartesianism’ Mehl holds that we can read Kierkegaard as attempting to find an irrefutable basis for his beliefs, and appealing to his subjectivity or introspection to do so.15 Against such a position Mehl claims that, just as Descartes’ appeal to his own thought before him, Kierkegaard’s appeal to his own subjectivity results in solipsism.16 On the basis of this argument Mehl attempts to purge Kierkegaard’s thought of its Cartesianism, and the negative consequences that he thinks result from it. Having drawn attention to the untenable consequences of Kierkegaard’s Cartesianism, Mehl seeks to develop the more positive epistemological views he finds in Kierkegaard. In doing this Mehl claims that Kierkegaard “is best seen as an edifying hermeneutical philosopher using a pragmatic approach”.17 Indeed, we are to envision Kierkegaard as moving “towards a radically empirical and edifying or pragmatic hermeneutical posture, a stance where practical rationality and judgements about reasonableness take centre stage”.18 The upshot of this argument is that Mehl can read Kierkegaard, á la Louis Pojman’s The Logic of Subjectivity, as offering pragmatic arguments as to why it is more rational that not to be a Christian. The subjectivity that Mehl finds at the heart of Kierkegaard’s Cartesianism is thought to be essentially first-personal, non-generalisable and non-articulable, and as such incapable of playing a role in publicly justifying our beliefs or actions. It is, I claim, the same notion of subjectivity, as essentially private, referred to in the first of the claims Kierkegaard makes about his project. Mehl thereby admits that such a notion is to be found in Kierkegaard’s thought, but rejects it on what he takes to be its philosophical untenability. Mehl maybe right to reject such a notion, but he does so without any regards as to why Kierkegaard should hold it or what role it can be said to play in his thought more generally. Are we to take it that Kierkegaard himself came to give up on such a notion? Without a more detailed story it might all to readily appear that Mehl is simply picking and choosing which facets of Kierkegaard’s thought he wishes to defend, and which reject, on the basis of his own philosophical commitments. Prima facie Mehl’s position would appear compatible with the second of Kierkegaard’s claims, that his project has a determinable content, but there is a further problem waiting in the wings at this point. This problem does not concern the claim that Kierkegaard’s method advances a determinable content per se, but the nature of that content: that what always emerges from Kierkegaard’s work is “oldfashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity”. Mehl appears to claim that, for Kierkegaard, there is a pragmatic advantage to being Christian. That the justification,
14
Peter Mehl, Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For more on Mehl’s book, see my review in The Review of Metaphysics 61 (1) (2007): pp. 144 – 145. 15 ibid., p. 46. 16 ibid., p. 60. 17 ibid., p. xi. 18 ibid., p. 122.
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or truth, of Christian beliefs lies in the practical advantage they afford the believer in making sense of his or her life. This view appears in stark contrast to the “old-fashioned orthodoxy” presented by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. In terms of which Christianity might, in principle, demand that one sever all familial and social relations, give up all one’s possessions, and if required become a martyr for Christ. Requirements such as these may be thought to be practically advantageous if they result in an eternal happiness but, for Kierkegaard, this cannot be foreseen because it is a matter of faith. In this life such actions cannot be pragmatically justified, but must appear as madness. Pace Mehl, Kierkegaard is not offering pragmatic arguments as to why it is rational to have faith in Christ. For Kierkegaard, Christ is the point at which reason must stop and faith start.
The Wittgensteinian Approach Another of the major interpretative movements in approaching Kierkegaard has been that of reading his work in terms of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.19 Amongst the most sustained efforts of these commentators is that of James Conant, who holds that Kierkegaard’s project is to be understood as a Wittgensteinian method of grammatical investigation.20 Conant holds that both Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’s thought contain similar conceptions of the subject matter of philosophy as concerning “what is open to everyone’s view”.21 The suggestion being that philosophy deals with our common responses on which we cannot help but find agreement. Conant views Kierkegaard as confronted by a reader who suffers from a sort of amnesia about the circumstances in which it is sensible to use certain words to express particular concepts: specifically religious, Christian, concepts.22 Against this background Conant thinks that Kierkegaard offers us the following “grammatical remarks”: “religious faith excludes doubt,” “one must become a Christian,” “a Christian does not believe on evidence”, and “Christianity is not plausible”.23 The point of offering these remarks is, in part, thought to be to remind the reader of the circumstances for using certain words sensibly, in an attempt to move him from a confused usage of those words to a sensible one. Against this
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For examples of this approach see Charles Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality, and Philosophical Method (London, Routledge, 1989); D. Z. Phillips, Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); and most recently Gena Schönbaumsfeld, Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 20 See James Conant, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?”. In R. Fleming and M. Payne (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), pp. 242-283; “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense”. In T. Cohen, P. Guyer and H. Putnam (eds.), Pursuits of Reason. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), pp. 195-224; “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors”. In T. Tessin and M. Von der Ruhr (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 249-331; and “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility”. In D.Z Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality. (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), pp. 250-298. 21 Conant, “Must We Show”, p. 246. 22 Conant remarks that “[t]he emphasis on ‘forgetfulness’ is a pervasive theme of the Postscript. It is as if Climacus [Kierkegaard’s pseudonym] saw the speculative philosopher’s fundamental malady to be a form of amnesia and his task in the Postscript to be one of assembling certain sorts of reminders” (Conant, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense”, p. 203). 23 Ibid., p. 209; cf. “Must We Show”, p. 255; “Putting Two and Two Together”, p. 276.
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background Conant casts Kierkegaard’s project as one of treating the person who “tends to deprive himself of a clear view of what is otherwise ordinarily visible to anyone”,24 by attempting to get him to recognise what it is that “we otherwise all already know”.25 On this point Conant holds that Kierkegaard’s method, like that expounded in Wittgenstein’s later thought, is to be thought of as one of “assembling reminders”.26 In this spirit Kierkegaard’s problem is said to be “not one of teaching the reader something he does not know but rather one of showing him that, with respect to the activity of becoming a Christian, there is nothing further he needs to know”.27 From the above it is evident that Conant thinks that there are substantial similarities shared by the method prescribed by Wittgenstein in his later work and that employed by Kierkegaard. Conant challenges what he terms ‘traditional’ readings of Kierkegaard’s work, as engaged in a metaphysical or theological project, by holding that its point is to espouse ideas that are literally nonsensical and should be read as an attempt to get its reader to recognise that this is the case. For Conant, Kierkegaard’s method is that of getting his recipient to realise the nonsensicality of what it at least provisionally presents as theses, in an effort to return them to the basic notions of common sense. Conant diagnoses what he takes to be the problem with traditional ways of thinking about Kierkegaard’s method as follows: Kierkegaard’s writings have been subjected to catastrophic misunderstanding because commentators have failed to realise that the terms ‘the objective’ and ‘the subjective’ represent pieces of terminology for distinguishing the relative priority of subject and object within each of the categories. Virtually all of the secondary literature on Kierkegaard assumes that the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ have roughly the meaning in Kierkegaard’s work that they have in traditional epistemological discussions which distinguish between objective and (merely) subjective forms of knowledge. The objective in this sense is that which can be intersubjectively known, the subjective that which can only be known by me. This leads to the unhappy assumption that when Kierkegaard characterises the categories of the ethical and the religious as ‘subjective’, he means that they concern a kind of truth which is (epistemically) [i.e. logically] private and hence incommunicable.28 Conant’s overall point which is that if we assume that Kierkegaard’s terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ are synonymous with usage in “traditional epistemological discussions”, á la Cartesianism, what is subjective will be thought to be “(epistemically) [logically] private and hence incommunicable”.
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Conant, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense”, pp. 205-06. Apparently calling on Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘perspicuous representation’ Conant writes, “if provided with a perspicuous overview of the category of the religious, he [Kierkegaard] thinks, they themselves [his countrymen] will be in a position to acknowledge their confusions as confusions” (Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together”, p. 267; cf. “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe”, p. 264). 25 Ibid., cf. p. 210. 26 Ibid., p. 210. 27 Ibid., p. 205. 28 Conant, “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe”, p. 287; cf. “Putting Two and Two Together”, p. 310, my parenthesis).
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On the basis of this point Conant comments upon a particular way of approaching the subject of indirect communication “[f]astening upon the claim ‘that which can be indirectly communicated cannot be directly communicated’, this [approach] goes on to assign much too drastic a sense to talk about that which ‘cannot be directly communicated’ – one which obliterates the possibility of communication altogether and leaves no room for (a coherent version of) talk about ‘indirect communication’. (Thus Kierkegaard is usually saddled with a flagrantly incoherent notion of indirect communication)”.29 The problem with the way of understanding Kierkegaard’s method to which Conant is drawing attention is said to be that it inadvertently takes Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘what can be indirectly communicated cannot be directly communicated’, as equivalent to ‘what can be indirectly communicated cannot be communicated at all’. As Conant apparently rightly notes, this has the consequence of “obliterating” any sense in which one can talk about indirect communication. Conant recognises that Kierkegaard is commonly read as holding the first claim true of his project, that his end is to relate something essentially private. Yet, Conant rejects this on that grounds that to attribute such an idea to Kierkegaard is to misread him. For to attribute such a notion of subjectivity to Kierkegaard is said to be a “catastrophic misunderstanding”, and is held to be ‘to saddle’ him with a particular conception of indirect communication. However, Conant’s reason for rejecting the first claim is not exegetical but conceptual. Like Mehl, Conant thinks that such a notion of subjectivity needs to be rejected on the basis of its own internal consistency alone, and as such does not have to be regarded as a claim that Kierkegaard took seriously. Conant thereby rejects the first claim as one that Kierkegaard scholars need to take seriously, and with no explanation as to why Kierkegaard should apparently make this claim or why, according to him, “virtually all the secondary literature” should have felt justified in attributed it to Kierkegaard as well.
Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Method: From Philosophy to Theology Above I have made the case that Kierkegaard’s method is not to be understood in terms of the approaches I have considered, on the grounds that they fail to do justice to one or more of the key claims he makes about his own project. What I have termed the postmodern approach celebrates the first of Kierkegaard’s claims, whilst ignoring the second and third. The pragmatic approach of Peter J. Mehl, and the Wittgensteinian approach of James Conant, both openly reject the first claim on conceptual grounds, whilst failing to provide an adequate account of the second or third claims. To come afresh to Kierkegaard’s method, I propose, we should refrain from reading him in terms of Jacques Derrida, William James, or Ludwig Wittgenstein, and trying to make the tenets of their work fit Kierkegaard’s own. Rather, we would be better of paying attention to the details and particularities of Kierkegaard’s own work and what he says about it. As we have seen, the strategy when approaching Kierkegaard is all to often to overlook, ignore, or reject the claims he makes about his own project without trying to determine why he might take them seriously, and how he might hold them to be consistent. The approach would rather appear to be: given that Kierkegaard’s claims are evidently self-contradictory, there is no point in trying to generate an account of his work on all three. We should, rather, reject one or more of these claims in order to
29
Conant, “Putting Two and Two Together”, p. 310.
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make what remains consistent, and understand Kierkegaard in these terms. This strategy, I fear, is adopted far too quickly. As Kierkegaard scholars what we need to do, I propose, is to extend a principle of hermeneutical charity, and spend some time considering the question of why Kierkegaard might have held his claims to be sound ones. If it is possible to generate an account of Kierkegaard’s method on this basis, it is surely preferable on exegetical grounds to the strategy tacitly adopted by the above approaches. So, what might such an account of Kierkegaard’s method look like? In what remains of this paper I shall attempt to sketch a theological account of Kierkegaard’s method that, I believe, can accommodate all three of the claims he makes about his project. Kierkegaard’s method can be outlined as follows. Kierkegaard’s project consists in the clarification and presentation of Christ’s words: the Christian message as it is passed down through history. The Christian message, so presented, has a determinable content (claim two). Yet Kierkegaard’s aim is not merely to present the Christian message but to draw out the absolute paradox that it was presented by Christ, who claimed to be God, and this with a view to getting his recipient to respond to Christ in faith. If the recipient responds in faith he is touched by God’s grace, and reborn. The subsequent life of the Christian believer, for Kierkegaard, involves a personal relationship to Christ as divinity, and this relationship is held to be essentially first personal (and as such is essentially private to the individual) (claim one). Finally, outlining the absolutely paradoxical nature of Christ is held to be the only means to achieving this end. For Kierkegaard Christ is not accidental to one’s having a relationship to God, but the unique and individual means by which one can do so. Only by employing such a method can Kierkegaard hope to get his recipient to life in Christ, and as such this method is necessary to Kierkegaard’s end (claim three). In this way, I suggest, such a theological account of Kierkegaard’s method can take all three of the claims he makes about his project to be advanced both seriously and consistently.
Conclusion Starting with several key claims Kierkegaard makes about his method, I have argued that his project is not a philosophical one. At least not in the sense that we have been asked to believe that he is a proponent of postmodern, pragmatist, or Wittgensteinian philosophies. I hope to have fulfilled the modest aim outlined in the beginning of this paper: to give the reader new to Kierkegaard an overview of the debate surrounding his work and a sense of where the point of contentions lie. However, I also hope to have been persuasive with regards to my more ambitious end. To suggest that a theological account of Kierkegaard’s method, such as I have sketched, can do greater justice to the claims he makes about his own work than its naturalistic counterparts. The details of that case must, however, wait for another occasion.
Kierkegaard and Contemporary Philosophy Bibliography
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Angier, Tom. Either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a New Key (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Conant, James. “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?”. In R. Fleming and M. Payne (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell. (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989). Conant, James. “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense”. In T. Cohen, P. Guyer and H. Putnam (eds.), Pursuits of Reason. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993). Conant, James “Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors”. In Tessin, Timothy and Von der Ruhr, Mario, (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief: (London: Macmillan, 1995). Conant, James. “Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility”. In D.Z Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality. (London: Macmillan Press, 1996). Creegan, Charles. Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard: Religion, Individuality, and Philosophical Method (London, Routledge, 1989). Furtak, Rick Anthony. Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2005). Jegstrup, Elsebet. (ed.), The New Kierkegaard, (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004). Kierkegaard, Søren. Hong and Hong (trans.), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Matuštík, Martin and Westphal, Merold. (eds.), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Mehl, Peter. Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005). Mulhall, Stephen. Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Kierkegaard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Phillips, D. Z. Philosophy’s Cool Place (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Pojman, Louis, (1984), The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion. University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa. Poole, Roger. Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). Rudd, Anthony. Kierkegaard and The Limits of The Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Schönbaumsfeld, Gena. Confusion of the Spheres: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Turnbull, Jamie. Review of Peter J. Mehl’s Thinking Through Kierkegaard: Existential Identity in a Pluralistic World. In The Review of Metaphysics 61 (1) (2007). Turnbull, Jamie. Review of Tom Angier’s Either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche: Moral Philosophy in a New Key. In Philosophy in Review 27 (2) (2007). Turnbull, Jamie. Review of Jacob Howland’s Kierkegaard and Socrates: A Study in Faith and Philosophy. In Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (3) (2007). Westphal, Merold. Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1996).
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