Читать книгу The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard - Jacob Sawyer - Страница 5

The published works of Søren Kierkegaard are endlessly fascinating, profound, witty, deeply moving, and enigmatic. While the individual works present numerous hermeneutical challenges for the reader, so too does the corpus as a whole. Kierkegaard published a good number of his works under the names of pseudonymous authors. Sometimes he named himself as “editor” of these works, while at other times he published under his own name. Although there are very clear thematic relationships across the whole corpus, and while the works sometimes refer to each other, Kierkegaard was adamant that nothing published under the name of a pseudonym should be attributed to him. And yet his Journals give evidence of his own agreement with many of the things penned by his pseudonyms, and reveal that on more than one occasion he decided only at the eleventh hour whether to publish particular works pseudonymously or under his own name. What is the reader to make of this complex mix of disclosure and concealment?

Scholarly practice and opinion on this matter has diverged widely. For over a century, virtually no heed was paid to the pseudonymity of Kierkegaard’s works. The views expressed in pseudonymous works were assumed to be Kierkegaard’s own. Then, in 1993, Roger Poole declared that this tradition of reading Kierkegaard had produced only “a useless corpus of secondary comment.”1 While that is far too harsh a judgement, and while not all have agreed with Poole’s insistence that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous literature be viewed as a forerunner of deconstructivism, few scholars now deny that the pseudonymity is a matter of considerable hermeneutical importance. There remains, nevertheless, much dispute over the nature and content of Kierkegaard’s works, and over the purpose that Kierkegaard’s “indirect communication” serves.

Informed, quite rightly in my view, by the conviction that Kierkegaard’s project is, above all, a theological one, Jacob H. Sawyer charts a course through the turbulent waters of Kierkegaard scholarship and offers a compelling account of what theological purpose is served by the pseudonymous concealment of Kierkegaard himself. The content of the authorship itself, Sawyer contends, directed as it is toward the edification of the reader through a personal encounter with God, requires of Kierkegaard that he “hide” himself as author. His intent as an author is not to win admirers for himself; nor is it to encourage attention to his own struggles; his intent rather is to provide opportunity for his readers to recognize that they exist before God and to respond to that reality with appropriate contrition, obedience, and joy. In service of that goal, Kierkegaard must hide away and leave his readers alone with God.

The evidence in support of Sawyer’s reading of Kierkegaard’s works is carefully assembled in this volume and is presented in a way that is consistent with the case made. Readers of this work too will be encouraged to consider anew their own existence before God, and to ponder again what may be required of them in response. Sawyer thus provides us with an astute and faithful reading of Kierkegaard’s works, a reading that serves well the great task to which Kierkegaard devoted himself, the task of making clear what it is to be a Christian.

Murray Rae

University of Otago

1. Poole, Indirect Communication, 7.