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Preface
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PREFACEI The reader will find here a commentary on the whole ofConcluding Unscientific Postscript, along with that famous portion of the text that deals with truth as subjectivity. My hope and expectation is that some readers will be interested in this interpretation of the entire work and that others, especially in classroom situations , will want to focus on such smaller themes as truth as subjectivity , both in the text and in the commentary, or the distinction between Religiousness A and Religiousness B. Which other portions of the commentary will be most helpful to these latter groups will probably vary from case to case. Some might want to situate their discussion in the theory ofthe stages (chapters 3 and 14), while others might find the discussion of Lessing (chapter 6) most helpful. Because Postscript is rightly seen as an anti-Hegelian text, I have tried to focus on its confrontation with Hegel. In doing so I have not concerned myself with questions about what Hegelian texts Kierkegaard read and which Hegelian themes he knew only secondhand. Where there is a relation to Hegelian texts that we should notice today, regardless of whether and in what form Kierkegaard may have noticed it, I have pointed to it. . I have also sought to trace some of the interesting relations between Kierkegaard and contemporary postmodern philosophies . Those interested in this way of reading Kierkegaard will want to pay special attention to the notes, where much of this theme is developed. Just as the existentialist appropriation of Kierkegaard often involved filtering out or watering down his deepest religious concerns, so those who today allow Kierkegaard to be party to postmodern discussions usually require him to check his faith at the door. My own view is that he is a much more I vii viii I PRE F ACE interesting participant when he is allowed to be himself and to introduce a little alterity into otherwise overwhelmingly secular conversations. If Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is a kind of postmodernist, he is not just another pea in the po-mo pod. Today's postmodern authors usually presuppose a world without God and without immortality . Climacus shatters the widespread assumption that there is any conceptual, as distinct from biographical, link between postmodern insights and atheism. The emphasis on "usually" in the previous paragraph is meant to signify that neither postmodernism nor postmodern readings of Kierkegaard are monolithic and without variety. The tendency to see postmodernism as a new Nietzscheanism is not without foundation, especially for thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. But Jacques Derrida is surely more than his Nietzschean dimension (especially as he becomes more and more Levinasian); and if one speaks of a postmodern ethical reflection in Emmanuel Levinas or a postmodern theology in Jean-Luc Marion, the image of peas in a po-mo pod signifies little more than the wish of some postmodernists for a world free of moral obligation and divine grace. The title, Becoming a Self, touches on both ofthese linkages. Hegelian speculation is presented as a variation on the Platonic flight from temporality to eternity, a flight to be fled just because it involves the loss ofone's self. And what shall it profit me to gain the whole world in a presuppositionless Logos or an all-encompassing world history and lose my own self? In this text we are confronted with the claim that the only way to be a self is to be in the process ofbecoming a self. This translates into the surprising charge that Hegelian speculation is insufficiently dialectical, since it flees the tensions oftemporal existence for the relaxation of premature resolution. Conceptual repose gives rise to the illusion that ethical tasks have been fulfilled. Postmodern philosophies today are as little enamored with ontotheo -logical speculation as are Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms. They operate in a world that does not welcome either Platonic souls or Cartesian egos. Even the transcendental grandchildren ofthe latter in Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Edmund Husser ! are dismissed as dogmatic. Postmodernists have learned from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger that even Kant's affirmation ofhuman temporality is insufficiently radical. Here, too, there is the danger of a loss of self. Does the death of long-honored philosophical paradigms of the self entail the [3.88.211.227] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:21 GMT) ix I PREFACE death of the self itself? In a world where "it gives" and "language speaks," is it possible that...