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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
At The end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in the Appendix entitled “For an Understanding with the Reader,” Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author, renders the following verdict:
So then the book is superfluous; let no one therefore take the pains to appeal to it as an authority; for he who thus appeals to it has eo ipso misunderstood it.
1 Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. Swenson, David F. and Lowrie, Walter (Princeton, 1941), p. 546.Google Scholar Hereafter cited as CUP.
2 CUP, 547.
3 Thompson, Josiah, “The Master of Irony,” in Kierkegaard: A Collection of Essays, ed. Thompson, Josiah (Garden City, 1972), pp. 155–56Google Scholar. The collection hereafter cited as Kierkegaard; the Thompson article hereafter cited as Thompson, Irony.
4 I happen to be one of those who believe that it is not possible, in reckoning with Kierkegaard's production, to speak holus-bolus of Kierkegaard, at least not when the pseudonymous writings are under the microscope. I adhere to what I call the pseudonymous strictures laid down by Kierkegaard in “A Final Declaration” (in CUP) (and followed by him in his own journal and paper entries) in which he asks the reader to refer, when quoting a pseudonymous work, to the appropriate author. This is the only approach which has even made any sense to me, although it is not a unanimously shared hermeneutic assumption. (Elrod, Cf. John, Being and Existence in the Pseudonymous Authorship (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar for a recent work which does not take the strictures seriously.) McKinnon's work with the computer seems to me to provide rather dramatic, if only probabalistic, evidence that there is ample reason for abiding by the strictures. The results show, McKinnon wrote in 1969, that “Kierkegaard's warnings concerning his authorship are entirely justified and that there can no longer be any excuse for not taking them seriously.” McKinnon, Alastair, “Kierkegaard's Pseudonyms: A New Hierarchy,” American Philosophical Quarterly, VI (1969), 116–126Google Scholar. To which I can only add: Amen!
5 Thus the translator of the Postscript, David S wenson, thought - according to his wife - that “the Fragments and the Postscript constitute Kierkegaard's chief contributions to philosophical thought” (CUP, viii). Arbaugh, and Arbaugh, , in Kierkegaard's Authorship (London, 1968)Google Scholar, refer to it as “S.K.'s great philosophical treatise” (p. 199). Mackey, Louis, one of the most active American scholars, devotes an entire chapter of Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar to “The Philosophy of Johannes Climacus.”
6 CUP, 188–224.
7 CUP, 216, 223, 19–20.
8 CUP, 493–519.
9 CUP, 182.
10 CUP, 216, 223. This is the claim I took as my target in The Concept of Existence in the CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT (The Hague, 1972). Hereafter cited as COE.
11 CUP, 118–19.
12 CUP, 169–224; 248, 250, 251.
13 CUP, 276.
14 CUP, 176.
15 CUP,273.
16 CUP, 299 ff.
17 CUP, 279, 284,307, n. Cf. also COE, 79.
18 CUP, 282-84. Climacus certainly would have had something in common philosophically with the pragmatists. He would have shared Peirce's distrust of the Cartesian conception of doubt. Comparisons have been drawn between Kierkegaard and James on the question of faith, and James makes implicit reference to Kierkegaard (cf. Pragmatism (Cleveland, 1955). P. 46).Google Scholar Climacus would probably agree with Dewey's critique of rationalistic metaphysics in Experience and Nature: “Idealism fails to take into account the specified or concrete character of the uncertain situation in which thought occurs; it fails to note the empirically concrete nature of the subject matter, acts, and tools by which determination and consistency are reached;… The conversion of the logic of reflection into an ontology of rational being is thus due to arbitrary conversion of the eventual, natural function of unification into a causal antecedent reality; this in turn is due to the tendency of the imagination working under the influence of emotion te carry unification from an actual, objective and experimental enterprise, limited to particular situations where it is needed, into an unrestricted, wholesale movement which ends in an all absorbing dream.” Cf. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Kurtz, Paul (New York, 1966), p. 176Google Scholar. Climacus calls pure thought “a phantom” (CUP, 279), for his part. To carry the point about the break with modern philosophy one step further, we might say that Climacus is one of the first philosophers not to have felt or succumbed to the temptation to systematize. His style may rightly be called aphoristic, and he makes his proclivities evident in the title of CUP, and in the quote from Hippias Major: “What is this? It is only scrapings and parings of systematic thought, divided into bits.” That is not to say that there is no order in CUP. There is. However, it is loose, held together chiefly by the author's insistence on keeping a certain question (what does it mean to become a Christian?) and certain concerns (existence) in view at all times. As we read, a host of considerations are brought forth, some obvious enough, some less so, and they are piled one on top of the other, or arranged, if you will side by side. There is also humour, sarcasm, irony (not as much as some believe), experiments, illustrations, and occasionally, when it fits the purpose, argument and disputation and theses.
19 CUP, 281: “The real subject is not the cognitive subject, since in knowing he moves in the sphere of the possible; the real subject is the ethically existing subject.” Cf. COE, 92–94.
20 CUP, 163.
21 Thompson,Irony, p. 156.
22 CUP, 223.
23 CUP, 324.
24 CUP, 152, n.
25 CUP, 245, n.
26 CUP, 404. For a fuller treatment, cf. COE, 29–32.
27 CUP, 341–42. For a fuller treatment, cf. COE, 27–29.
28 CUP, 378.
29 CUP, 548.
30 CUP, 548.
31 The relevant passage is 6.54: “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as non-sensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) “Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, trans. Pears, David and McGuinness, Brian (London, 1961).Google Scholar Neither Climacus nor Wittgenstein has been particularly successful in getting his point through-not if we are tojudge by the number of books and interpretations of their efforts.
32 It is only in recent years that Kierkegaard scholars have attended to the Revocation. There are explicit treatments of it in Mackey, , Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia, 1971), pp. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar ff., and in Thompson, , Irony, pp. 155Google Scholar ff., and in Crites, “Pseudonymous Authorship as Art and as Act,” in Kierkegaard, pp. 220-25. Implicit references to the Revocation are made by Bernstein, Richard, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia, 1971)Google Scholar, by Allison, Henry, “Christianity and Nonsense,” in Kierkegaard, by Garelick, Herbert, The Anti-Christianity of Kierkegaard (The Hague, 1965)Google Scholar, and by Mackey in some of his earlier writings (cf. Bibliography in Kierkegaard for references). Most of the classic discussions of Kierkegaard's thought, when they deal with the Postscript, do not mention the Revocation at all. For example, see Thomas, J. Heywood, Subjectivity and Paradox (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar and Collins, James, The Mind of Kierkegaard (Chicago, 1953)Google Scholar.
33 Kierkegaard, Søren, The Point of View for my Work as an Author, trans. Lowrie, Walter (New York, 1962), pp. 25–26.Google Scholar
34 CUP, 323–40.
35 CUP, 192, 216, 262, 264.
36 CUP, 247.
37 The word “refraction” comes to mind here to describe the kind of understanding which emerges from a proper reading of the Postscript, as well as to describe its inherent intelligibility. “Refraction” means “a bending of a ray of wave of light, heat or sound as it passes obliquely from one medium to another of different density, in which its speed is different; the ability of the eye to refract light entering it, so as to form an image on the retina.” If the reader will think about this definition in connection with the Postscript he will see why the author is inclined to refer to it as refractory, though the adjective has another meaning which, it turns out, is also appropriate. In light of this, we can understand also what led Climacus to dub the Postscript “a mimic composition”. The word “mimic” has twofold significance. First, it is descriptive. Climacus, using himself by way of illustration, is acting out or miming the difficulties involved in existing and in becoming a Christian. Second, the term is also an admonition to the reader whose attention and interest have come to rest on the Postscript. Climacus' goal, we have seen, is to get his reader to focus on his own existence, a goal jeopardized to some degree by the Postscript itself. Climacus was not unaware of the hazards here, and sought to minimize and compensate for them in the ways we have noted. He declares the work superfluous, and revokes it. He labels it a mimic composition. He has done what he can to warn the reader that the problems and difficulties taken up in the Postscript are really but pale imitations of the real ones, which are, after all, located in the reader's own existence. He is thus saying to his reader: “Do not mistake all this talk and rhetoric for the real thing.”
38 In the literature, this mode of interpretation has been the most prominent.
39 CUP, 171.
40 CUP, 265.
41 Thompson, , Irony, p. 163.Google Scholar
42 CUP, 110. Swenson and Lowrie translate three different words by the English “philosophy”: Speculationen, Philosophic, and Videnskaben. Customarily, when Climacus criticizes philosophy, the Danish word is “Speculationen.” It might be conjectured that, had he been more conversant with the Aristotelian or medieval traditions, Climacus would not have held philosophy in such reproach. There are passages in CUP,and entries in his journals and papers, which seem to bear this suspicion out, but how far this thought can be pushed is another matter. The word translated “philosophy” in this text is “Philosophie.”
43 Cf. p. 6 above, and CUP, 152, n.
44 CUP, 120, 312, 317.
45 CUP, 192.
46 CUP, 275–76.
47 CUP, 271–72, for example.
48 Kierkegaard has some interesting things to say about philosophy as a profession. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, trans, and ed. Hong, Howard V. and Hong, Edna H. (Bloomington, 1975) Vol. III, #3309Google Scholar, #3316, #3317.
49 CUP, 291. Cf. also 292, 297.
50 CUP, 291. Cf. also 292, 297.
50 Philosophical Fragments, trans. David Swenson (Princeton, 1962), p. 13.
51 CUP, 295.
52 This article is a slightly changed version of a paper originally given at the colloquium on Current Canadian studies on Kierkegaard, held at the University of Windsor, June 23–24, 1976. That conference was supported in part by a grant from the Canada Council.