Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification

Notes

135 notes introduction 1. See the preface to his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1973). 2. aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b27–1103b29. 3. henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (london: macmillan and Co., 1874), vi–vii (microfilm ). Kierkegaard’s primary philosophical interlocutor, g.W.f. hegel, similarly writes, “philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying” (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. a. V. miller [oxford: oxford university Press, 1977], 6). 4. Kierkegaard wrote several, though by no means most, of his works using different pseudonymous authors. We will discuss the pseudonymous technique in detail. When referring to a pseudonymous book, i will credit the pseudonym, not Kierkegaard, per his request: “if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine” (CuP, [627]). 5. i emphasize the adverb primarily to indicate that i affirm that Kierkegaard’s interests are also at times academic and entertaining. my point is simply that when they are thus, these intentions are secondary to the aim of edification. 6. marie mikulová Thulstrup, “Kierkegaard as an edifying Christian author,” in Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana: Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. niels Thulstrup and marie mikulová Thulstrup (Copenhagen: C. a. reitzels Boghandel, 1978). 7. i see no reason to prefer one translation over the other and shall use the terms interchangeably. 8. murray rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (new york: t & t Clark, 2010), 5–6. 9. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms inhabit and represent different life-spheres, and so it is significant when quoting one to recognize the different perspectives they offer relative to one another and to Kierkegaard. 10. in Kierkegaard’s journals and on the original title page of Fear and Trembling, he spells the pseudonym’s name with a lowercase “s.” following the english convention of capitalizing names, the hongs have capitalized the “s” in their translations. i will follow Kierkegaard’s practice. 11. he has in mind not all philosophical reflection but the sort of reflection characterized by the speculative philosophy of his day. 12. robert C. roberts, “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and a method of ‘Virtue ethics,’” in Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. martin J. matuštík and merold Westphal (Bloomington: indiana university Press, 1995), 146. i follow roberts here because his comparison with Wittgenstein yields helpful results, not because i read or wish to read Kierkegaard as a Wittgensteinian fideist or as having Wittgensteinian views of the nature of truth, etc. 13. roberts, “Kierkegaard,” 163. 14. ibid., 143. 15. ibid. 16. emphasis mine. for an excellent discussion of Kierkegaard as poet-dialectician, see roberts, “Søren Kierkegaard,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. Paul Copan and Chad V. meister (new york: routledge, 2007), 160–69. Kierkegaard’s concept of dialectic will be 136 | Notes to Pages 10–19 explored further in chapter 2, as a response to Poole’s advice to read Kierkegaard through the lens of différance. 17. it should be noted that a poet-dialectician’s style is compatible with both direct and indirect communications. Kierkegaard’s poetic-dialectical activities are not confined to one group of writings. 18. These distinct notions and their respective pathos-filled responses apply only to ethical-religious truths, not universal human experiences. Thus there is no category of “Christian erotic love” but only erotic love transformed through loving the beloved with Christian neighbor love. 19. Kierkegaard conveys the idea of Christian truths being “existentially realized” in the discourse “Watch your Step When you go to the house of the lord”: “What is honesty before god? it is that your life expresses what you say” (Cd, 167). We will return to the themes of essential truth or truth existentially realized in a human life throughout the book, especially in the discussion of dialectic in chapter 2. 20. george Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (new york: routledge, 2002), 32. 21. ibid., 33. Chapter 1 1. Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 4. 2. roger Poole, “The unknown Kierkegaard: twentieth Century receptions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. alastair hannay and gordon marino (new york: Cambridge university Press, 1998), 48. 3. roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: university Press of Virginia, 1993), 7. 4. ibid., 9. 5. ibid., 9–10 (emphasis mine). 6. ibid., 14 (emphasis mine). 7. See PC, 133. See also CuP, 80–93. it might appear that by supporting...