The Hidden Authorship Of Soren Kierkegaard

In this book, Jacob H. Sawyer explores the concept of hiddenness as a means to unlock the intriguing, and oft misunderstood, authorship of Soren Kierkegaard. By understanding the melancholy man as first and foremost a Christian thinker, this work gives special attention to how the form of Kierkegaard's authorial task complements its content, giving particular attention to his use of pseudonyms. The first part of the book addresses the explicit content of the authorship, the second addresses the implicit form in which it was communicated to Kierkegaard's reader, and the third addresses how these can help us understand Kierkegaard's own "hidden inwardness." Through this investigation, Soren Kierkegaard is recognized as an example par excellence of a communicator. He is seen to have attempted to only speak what his own life could uphold, striving to be one who was in Christ the truth.

In this book, Jacob H. Sawyer explores the concept of hiddenness as a means to unlock the intriguing, and oft misunderstood, authorship of Soren Kierkegaard. By understanding the melancholy man as first and foremost a Christian thinker, this work gives special attention to how the form of Kierkegaard's authorial task complements its content, giving particular attention to his use of pseudonyms. The first part of the book addresses the explicit content of the authorship, the second addresses the implicit form in which it was communicated to Kierkegaard's reader, and the third addresses how these can help us understand Kierkegaard's own "hidden inwardness." Through this investigation, Soren Kierkegaard is recognized as an example par excellence of a communicator. He is seen to have attempted to only speak what his own life could uphold, striving to be one who was in Christ the truth.

As a spiritual autobiography, Kierkegaard's The Point of View for My Work as an Author stands among such great works as Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua. Yet Point of View is neither a confession nor a defense; it is an author's story of a lifetime of writing, his understanding of the maze of greatly varied works that make up his oeuvre. Upon the imminent publication of the second edition of Either/Or, Kierkegaard again intended to cease writing. Now was the time for a direct "report to history" on the authorship as a whole. In addition to Point of View, which was published posthumously, the present volume also contains On My Work as an Author, a contemporary substitute, and the companion piece Armed Neutrality.

Authorship is a complicated subject in Kierkegaard's work, which he surely recognized, given his late attempts to explain himself in On My Work as an Author. From the use of multiple pseudonyms and antonyms, to contributions across a spectrum of media and genres, issues of authorship abound. Why did Kierkegaard write in the ways he did? Before we assess Kierkegaard's famous thoughts on faith or love, or the relationship between 'the aesthetic,' 'the ethical,' and 'the religious,' we must approach how he expressed them. Given the multi-authored nature of his works, can we find a view or voice that is definitively Kierkegaard's own? Can entries in his unpublished journals and notebooks tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought? How should contemporary readers understand inconsistencies or contradictions between differently named authors? We cannot make definitive claims about Kierkegaard's work as a thinker without understanding Kierkegaard's work as an author. This collection, by leading contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, is the first to systematically examine the divisive question and practice of authorship in Kierkegaard from philosophical, literary and theological perspectives.

Richard McCombs presents Søren Kierkegaard as an author who deliberately pretended to be irrational in many of his pseudonymous writings in order to provoke his readers to discover the hidden and paradoxical rationality of faith. Focusing on pseudonymous works by Johannes Climacus, McCombs interprets Kierkegaardian rationality as a striving to become a self consistently unified in all its dimensions: thinking, feeling, willing, acting, and communicating. McCombs argues that Kierkegaard's strategy of feigning irrationality is sometimes brilliantly instructive, but also partly misguided. This fresh reading of Kierkegaard addresses an essential problem in the philosophy of religion—the relation between faith and reason.