Evading the issue: The strategy of Kierkegaard's postscript

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 35-64

  Weston, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949339466     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00083     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. All references are to S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, edited and translated by H. Hong and E. Hong, Princeton, 1992
2. What follows is indebted to the account of the nature of Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship James Conant has developed in a series of recent papers. I hope to further the cause of its acceptance by offering a description of the strategy of CUP in rather more detail than Conant, for the purposes of his papers, needed to do, although I do not know to what extent he would agree with what I say. Cf.: 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?', in R. Fleming and M. Payne (eds), The Sense of Stanley Cavell (Bucknell, 1989)
3. 'Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard and Nonsense', in T. Cohen, P. Guyer, H. Putnam (eds), Pursuits of Reason (Lubbock, 1994)
4. 'Putting Two and Two Together', in T. Tessin and M. von der Ruhr (eds), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief (London, 1996). I would like to express my gratitude to my colleague Stephen Mulhall for bringing these papers to my attention and for his forceful advocacy of the position they propose
5. This is why Kierkegaard uses the pseudonyms. To dispel an illusion, it must first be assumed. But Kierkegaard himself does not live in the illusions, and so they must be assumed in another guise. 'One will perceive the significance of the pseudonyms and why I must be pseudonymous in relation to all aesthetic productions, because I led my life in entirely different categories and understood from the beginning that this productivity was of an interim nature, a deceit, a necessary process of elimination' (The Point of view for My Work as an Author, ed. B. Nelson, Harper, 1962, pp. 85-6)