Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript': A Critical Guide (Cambridge Critical Guides)
Rick Anthony Furtak
Language: English
Pages: 274
ISBN: 1107411408
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript has provoked a lively variety of divergent interpretations for a century and a half. It has been both celebrated and condemned as the chief inspiration for twentieth-century existential thought, as a subversive parody of philosophical argument, as a critique of mass society, as a forerunner of phenomenology and of postmodern relativism, and as an appeal for a renewal of religious commitment. These new essays written by international Kierkegaard scholars offer a plurality of critical approaches to this fundamental text of existential philosophy. They cover hotly debated topics such as the tension between the Socratic-philosophical and the Christian-religious; the identity and personality of Kierkegaard's pseudonym 'Johannes Climacus'; his conceptions of paradoxical faith and of passionate understanding; his relation to his contemporaries and to some of his more distant predecessors; and, last but not least, his pertinence to our present-day concerns.
the murder victim in this “criminal case,” serves as a warning to readers about what can happen to a person who becomes too taken up with speculative philosophy (cf. the young Johannes of De Omnibus). The grandson represents the future generation. If he is to retain his religious faith, he will need help. Tradition, as found in the grandfather, will seemingly not be enough. He seems to require something more if he is to protect himself from the corrupting influence of speculation, especially if,
pause would be part of the progress. Still another possibility deserves consideration: irony and humor as pervasive attitudes that straddle the border-lines to which Climacus gives these names. They could be border areas where tensions that are potentially edifying emerge between what lies ahead and what lies behind. Even if left unanswered, these questions help to point the way to still another explanation of the revocation, one that captures what is plausible in the proposals already discussed,
favors is fairly widespread and well represented in ancient philosophy, so that we can grasp his meaning when he praises Trendelenburg as a “Greek thinker” (CUP 93); or when he says that to “live like a Greek philosopher” in the contemporary age would be a matter of “expressing existentially” a “life-view” (CUP 295–296), an achievement which would presumably be exceptional in the context of modern philosophy. As a case in point, he observes that even an ancient philosopher who sought skeptical
with how they appear outwardly than the state of their inwardness.27 I read Climacus as saying that the ethicist’s use of irony has a double role. First, it protects an “inward” space in which he can continually appropriate what the ethical demands: “In order not to be distracted by the finite, by all the relativities in the world, the ethicist places the comic between himself and the world, and ensures thereby that he himself does not become comic through a naive misunderstanding of his ethical
brings out the difference between the ethical and the aesthetic’ is: ‘It is every human being’s duty to become revealed [at blive aabenbar]’” (CUP 212–213). Climacus says that what makes the ethicist an ethicist, the way he “puts his life out there together, inwardly, with the ethical’s infinite requirement . . . is not seen directly” (CUP 423). But that is perfectly consistent with it being seen indirectly. Humor and irony in the Postscript 157 ironic incognito as someone for whom “nothing