Читать книгу The Hidden Authorship of Søren Kierkegaard - Jacob Sawyer - Страница 9

This section gives an overview of some key concepts of Kierkegaard’s that are common themes throughout the authorship. I will survey the concepts of outwardness, “the single individual,” and truth in particular, giving special emphasis to how the concept of hiddenness relates to each. Because Kierkegaard valued the congruence between form and content, we cannot understand the form of Kierkegaard’s authorship apart from its content. Like the analogy of the “circle” or “spiral” in hermeneutics where there is an ongoing interaction between pre-understandings and encountering a text, the student of Kierkegaard must constantly go between what is said and how it is said in order to approach a full understanding.107 Firstly, we will briefly explore these concepts themselves in order to illustrate how they impact Kierkegaard’s authorship of hiddenness.

107. In this way, what the student engages with is not only the subject matter, but also the form in which it is presented. For a critical engagement with the concept of “hermeneutical circle” in relation to Friedrick Schleiermacher, see Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 103–14; see also Gadamer, Truth and Method, 292–93; though such an understanding needs to be broadened to include considering language as a “form of life,” where the entire communicative act is considered. For instance, see Wittgenstein, Investigations, 19, §11; and Wittgenstein, “Philosophy of Psychology,” in Philosophical Investigations, 327, §235, as well as the field of pragmatics and speech-act theory. This matter is far beyond the scope of this work.