Illusion and satire in Kierkegaard's Postscript

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 451-466

  Lippitt, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 53149146726     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010015026374     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Søren Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus], Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 133. Anti-Climacus is the pseudonymous author of this text, and The Sickness Unto Death.
2. See Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and modern continental philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994) e.g. pp.viii, 9, 28-30, 43, 52-53.
3. Weston, 1994, p. 43. The term 'ethical' here needs to be understood in a broad sense, incorporating the religious; the term 'ethical-religious,' often used by Kierkegaard, would perhaps be better.
4. This idea owes much to the reading of Climacus developed by James Conant, in the following three articles: 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?' in R. Fleming and M. Payne (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell (Lewisbury PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989),
5. 'Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense' in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam (eds.) Pursuits of Reason (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993),
6. and 'Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for Their Work as Authors' in Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (eds.), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
7. Elsewhere, I have disagreed with aspects of this reading (see John Lippitt, 'A funny thing happened to me on the way to salvation: Climacus as humorist in Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript,' in Religious Studies Vol. 33-2 (1997), pp. 181-202,
8. and John Lippitt and Daniel Hutto, 'Making sense of nonsense: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein,' in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Vol. XCVIII Part 3 (1998), pp. 263-286). But on this central idea of 'dispelling illusions,' we are in agreement.
9. David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as religious thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1.
10. For this reason, 'Hegelianism,' for our purposes, should be taken to refer to the broad cultural movement influential on the Denmark of Kierkegaard's day. The primary issue is not the extent to which Kierkegaard's picture of Hegelianism is, or is not, a fair and accurate representation of the thought of Hegel himself. As several commentators have argued, Kierkegaard's interest in 'Hegelianism' is less in the details of Hegel's philosophical system than in the ramifications of the attitude fostered by 'speculative philosophy' on ethical and religious subjectivity.
11. All page references to the Postscript will be to this translation: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) hereafter CUP.
12. That both 'metaphysical' (e.g. Plato, Hegel) and 'post-metaphysical' philosophy (e.g. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) are culpable in this regard is argued at length by Weston, 1994.
13. Merold Westphal, Becoming a self: a reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1996), p. 54.
14. Westphal, 1996, p. 54.
15. Westphal, 1996, p. 55.
16. Ibid. Merold Westphal, Becoming a self: a reading of Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1996, p. 54.
17. Like Hegel, Climacus uses the term 'contradiction' very broadly. Far more often than not, a formal contradiction is not intended. As several commentators have pointed out, the word 'incongruity' better captures his meaning.
18. On this topic, see Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel, trans. George L. Stengren (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
19. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 493.
20. Westphal, 1996, p. 86.
21. Merold Westphal, 'Kierkegaard and Hegel,' in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 116.
22. Søren Kierkegaard [Anti-Climacus]. The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 31. For the reasons already given, Climacus will not accept the possible Hegelian response that 'absolute knowledge' is self-knowledge.
23. Henri Bergson, 'Laughter,' in Wylie Sypher (ed.) Comedy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 71.
24. Søren Kierkegaard, 'The Point of View for my Work as an Author,' in The Point of View, trans. Walter Lowrie (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), hereafter PV All page references are to this translation.
25. I am thinking of Climacus's extensive use of humour, together with such entertaining apparent digression as his description of how he came to try his hand as an author (CUP, 185-188). I have argued elsewhere, however, that such apparent light relief and digressions are important to understanding the significance of Climacus's self-description as a humorist, which is in turn important for an overall understanding of the Postscript (see Lippitt, 1997).
26. See, for instance, Henry E. Allison, 'Christianity and nonsense,' in Review of Metaphysics 20 (1967), pp. 432-460.
27. See my 'Laughter: a tool in moral perfectionism? in John Lippitt (ed.) Nietzsche's futures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 99-125.
28. For the picture of moral perfectionism to which I refer, see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: the constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially the Introduction and chapter 1.
29. Cavell, 1990, p. 2. For a more detailed discussion of the moral perfectionist dimensions of the Postscript, see John Lippitt, Kierkegaard's Humorist: Climacus and the Comic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, forthcoming), chapter 3.
30. I borrow this phrase from M.E. Orellana-Benado, 'A philosophy of humour,'; unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985. I have said more about this in Lippitt, 1999. However, I do not know to what extent Orellana-Benado would approve of the use to which I put his term, either in that article or the present one.
31. Hub Zwart, Ethical consensus and the truth of laughter (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1996).
32. Zwart, 1996, p. 10.
33. Ibid. Hub Zwart, Ethical consensus and the truth of laughter, 1996.
34. David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard's dialectic of the imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), p. 113.
35. For a fuller elaboration of this argument in relation to Nietzsche, see Lippitt, 1999, pp. 112-115.
36. The 'zealous Hegelian' referred to is H.L. Martensen, one of the most influential Danish Hegelians of Kierkegaard's time.
37. Cf. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 164-166.
38. Jonathan Swift, 'The battle of the books' (Author's Preface), in A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works (New York: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 2.
39. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978), vol. 1, entry 650, sect. 15.