Kierkegaard: East and West (review)

Several years ago, the much-mourned closure of Reitzel's publishing house and bookshop in Copenhagen also meant the demise of Kierkegaardiana. However, nature abhors a vacuum, and the series Acta Kierkegaardiana,getting under way at the about the same time as Kierkegaardianacame to an end, goes some way toward filling this particular gap. Of course, it is not a journal as such and it does not carry reviews. Moreover, the volumes are themed in a way that Kierkegaardiananever was. Yet the contributions are, mostly, of a comparable range and quality—indeed, not a few familiar Kierkegaardianacontributors are to be met again in Acta Kierkegaardiana. This is true also of volume 5, Kierkegaard: East and West. As the first part of the volume title indicates, this includes "a set of Kierkegaardian studies representing South and East Asia" (7) and these, correspondingly, constitute the first half of the collection itself. The second half is made up of essays that "continue the attempt to better situate and understand Kierkegaard in the Western intellectual, theological, and philosophical tradition" (7).

The editors and many of the contributors are appropriately cautious about what can and cannot be achieved in the comparative studies relating Kierkegaard to South and East Asian traditions and authors. Yet despite the acknowledged limitations of any such work, they are confident that useful ground can be covered, and this reviewer believes they are right. The notion of comparative studies is, of course, intrinsically controversial. Reacting against some of the overly facile "all-religions-are-expressions-of-one-universal-religious-experience" approach that was popular in the early twentieth century and mindful also of post-colonial criticisms of Western appropriations of non-Western traditions, several generations of scholars in religious studies simply abandoned the comparative project. One now-retired colleague in Oxford persistently slapped down any attempt to introduce the term comparativeinto any course literature. However, a younger generation seems to be returning to the project and in a range of interesting ways. The increasing coalescence of the global village must necessarily be undermining attempts to regard cultures or civilizations as self-enclosed entities, and even if this was true in the past, those who are the living heirs of ancient traditions must live, and work, and communicate together about their beliefs, values, and existential goals in ways that require an attempt at mutual understanding—in other words, "comparisons." In any case, as the essays on Iqbal and "Kierkegaard in Japan" make clear, we are in fact heirs to an already lengthy tradition of tradition-crossing. Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938), for example, was (in terms of the then extant political borders) an Indian poet and philosopher, writing in Persian, who had studied in Cambridge and Germany and who spoke of Hegel, Goethe, and Wordsworth as among the most important influences on his re-interpretation of Islam (60)—two of whom were, of course, also figures of great importance to Kierkegaard.

Seung-Goo Lee's introductory essay on how Johannes Climacus can help "teach us differences" is a stimulating essay that, while not engaging directly in comparative work, gets the collection off to a stimulating start. Climacus is also the focus of the next contribution, Min-Ho Lee's "Religiousness as Inwardness," which explores how Kierkegaardian Religiousness A, involving as it does inwardness, earnestness, and renunciation—including the renunciation of the desire to dominate the other—might provide a useful preparation for inter-religious encounter. Kierkegaard himself appears only briefly in Jon Stewart's characteristically thorough not to say magisterial essay on Hegel's treatment of Islam, interestingly involving an analogy between Islam and Enlightenment Deism. Abrahim H. Khan's essay on "Iqbal and Kierkegaard's 'Judge William"' is the most substantial essay of the first part and provides a fascinating introduction to Iqbal himself as well as to the possibilities for bringing his work into dialogue with Kierkegaard. As already indicated, Iqbal was something of a Renaissance man whose work drew on exceptionally complex cultural sources—a phenomenon...