Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

For all his influence upon twentieth-century philosophy and theology, the ambition of SØren Kierkegaard (1813–55) recalls a much older tradition. It is less the centrality of religious concerns that relates him to Muslim and Jewish philosophers such as Averroes and Maimonides than the policy Kierkegaard shares with them to shape and measure an authorship by a religious purpose. “The category of my whole authorship,” Kierkegaard explains in a retrospective essay of 1848, The Point of View for my Work as an Author , is to “ make aware ” of the religious, the essentially Christian.” While recognizing that he cannot “compel” a reader to “judge” in favor of Christianity – “Perhaps he judges the very opposite of what I desire” – Kierkegaard thinks not only that he can compel the reader “to become aware and judge,” but that unless the reader's verdict goes as “I desire,” something has gone wrong. For the intended “movement of the authorship” has been to “get hold of‘the single individual,’religiously understood,” of “single individuals before God” ( PV , p. 452ff. (E)). In the same essay, Kierkegaard explains that it is due to this religious purpose that many of his writings, such as Either/Or , take the form of an “indirect communication.” These are the pseudonymously published “aesthetic” works in which, Kierkegaard warns, the views expressed by the “authors” are not to be equated ... log in or subscribe to read full text