Search for a Method: Deliberation

Understanding the reasonable methodology behind the apparent fideism

In 1968, Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist thinker and infamously questionable Kierkegaard interpreter, published his Search for a Method. In it, he held up three great thinkers who had inspired him and pushed him towards the search for a new way to understand the world, a way for his “first-period” existentialist thought to become a social theory that escaped the accusations of quietist individualism in abstracto. These three great thinkers: Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard. A thoroughgoing rogue’s gallery of philosophical mavericks who have left their fingertips on the history of humanity. But how did he reflect on S. K.?

What Kierkegaard opposes in Hegel is the fact that for Hegel the tragedy of a particular life is always surpassed. The lived fades away into knowledge. Hegel talks to us about the slave and his fear of death. But the fear which was felt becomes the simple object of knowing, and the moment of a transformation which is itself surpassed. In Kierkegaard's view it is of no importance that Hegel speaks of “freedom to die” or that he correctly describes certain aspects of faith. What Kierkegaard complains of in Hegelianism is that it neglects the unsurpassable opaqueness of the lived experience.¹

This actually isn’t the worst beginning of an exploration of S. K.’s work. Yet, it is not all positive:

Compared with Hegel, Kierkegaard scarcely seems to count. He is certainly not a philosopher; moreover, he himself refused this title. In fact, he is a Christian who is not willing to let himself be enclosed in the system and who, against Hegel's “intellectualism” asserts unrelentingly the irreducibility and the specificity of what is lived.²

Kierkegaardian existence is the work of our inner life resistances overcome and perpetually reborn, efforts perpetually renewed, despairs surmounted, provisional failures and precarious victories and this work is directly opposed to intellectual knowing.³

The relationship between Kierkegaard and Sartre is both closer and further than we initially imagine, which seems apt for two of the great dialecticians of the last 150 years.

Despite there being no obvious untruth in these snippets, there is an air of dismissal in them that shows Sartre’s bizarre intellectual trajectory of rejecting Hegel in favour of Kierkegaard before rejecting Kierkegaard in favour of Hegel in Marxian clothing. The truth of the matter, as best as I can tell, is that the Kierkegaardian anti-systematic view of a philosophy of history led Sartre into a blind alley: in broaching the problems of “the single individual” attempting to construct a philosophy of history whilst not losing their individuality or falling into absolute superstition. This is especially confusing considering that for “Sartre... contra Hegelianism, ideas do not change men, but rather, a passionate response to a need produced by a particular situation is what has the capacity to actualize change in an individual.”⁴ In short: he was a seemingly faithful (if only in this particular regard) Kierkegaardian in his understanding of the individual. Still, in the view that Marx could account for both the best of Hegel and of Kierkegaard⁵, he was ready to dismiss the Melancholic Dane.

I believe, to a rather large extent, this was because Sartre did not understand S. K. and neither did he understand his methodology. By exploring the corpus in full, I aim to show that there is a consistent approach to philosophical-theological thought in the writings of S. K. - both pseudonymous and signed - that gives us the tools to “go beyond” Kierkegaard in the manner of Karl Barth as opposed to Craytlus⁶.

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Kierkegaard was and remains one of the most misunderstood writers to have ever graced the Earth. Not only has he undergone periods of fascination within the far-right⁷, his work has also largely been understood as fideistic, an irrational assault on the reasonable basis of Hegelianism that shook up Europe in the early 1900s⁸. At face value, it is somewhat understandable how this misunderstanding could come about: not only do we have the winding praise of Abraham’s leap in Fear and Trembling, but we also see S. K. criticize Pascal and other thinkers for their overly rational, overly apologetic approach⁹ to understanding the Word “not of this world” which, in a way, denigrates the very thing they were trying to exalt. From this “faith-first” position, we might be justified to point to S. K. as someone who is - at least - open to fideist solutions to the problems of existence, especially if someone is already of the faith and simply desires upbuilding as opposed to critique that might jeopardize their steadfast commitment to God.

However, from an early age, it was plainly apparent to S. K. that genuine fideism could never be justified or even desirable - as evidenced in this scoffing journal entry concerning the superstitious “God done it” attitude of his fellow Danes:

He therefore snatched at what I noticed to be a common expedient: those concerned had been healed by the use of such means “under Providence.” It is quite typical of people like that, however, to arrive at this conclusion, for when they cannot themselves explain the healing through these means, they push it away onto something more remote, just to be rid of it, but make the matter curious by doing so. It is indeed curious, after all, that God’s assistance should have fastened on this path. Consistency with their intellectual point of view would require them either to deny the whole thing and insist upon incontrovertibly factual evidence or, if they were very modest, postpone the explanation until further notice.¹⁰

A speculative release of reason into general and unfounded appeals to “providence” here is dismissed (with a mild air of classism) on the grounds that the appeal is only appealing inasmuch as it disposes of the problem at hand. The grounds for faith can be neither speculative nor fideistic because, in either sense, it requires the self to abandon itself - and without a self, there is no possibility for faith. Contra the popular imagination’s image of Christianity, we must acknowledge that S. K. had a far more rigorous approach to faith than his many nay-sayers (and, hilariously, some of his proponents) have led us to believe. As astutely put by M. G. Piety, “most specialists know that Kierkegaard was a very rigorous and systematic thinker” in reference to her own work, the insights of C. Stephan Evans, and Alastair Hannay.

Of course, this is not to say that S. K. was in the habit of writing dry, technical tracts that presented particularly excruciating analyses of varied minutiae in varied ways. Instead, he wanted to “space apart” a variety of ideas in order to get a better look at them - and, in doing so, he made the most incredible discovery that perhaps the entirety of modernist philosophy was completely wrong in its most basic assumptions about how it should approach the self-appointed task that lay before it.

Method-reacting

This is, in part, due to S. K.’s particular “unscientific”¹¹ approach to philosophical writings: adopting the subjective stance of his characters such as “A”, Judge Wilhelm, Constantin Constantius, H. H., and, most (in)famously, Johannes Climacus and his opposite, Anti-Climacus, he attempted to explain a “form of life” from within the perspective of that character. These forms of life, however, are always united in the goals: to explore the relation of the individual to faith in a way which exposes the eternal problem of explaining how anyone could possibly have faith in an absolute truth when the absolute truth must always be filtered through a particular subjectivity. In summary: we are breaking down the subject-object divide in order to show that the German Idealist position is no longer tenable for the current era.

Taking Either/Or as an example, this can be explored through the basis of the Judge’s approach: presenting “the real” allows for more to be transmitted to the reader. By attempting to express the existential, the existential dialectic must form the basis of the analysis; but this analysis cannot become a simple plan that is imposed onto the agent’s life in the same fashion as a mathematical formula or a logical deduction, but rather only in offering something which unsettles the reader. But this unsettling is far superior to the “poetic portrayals plucked out of thin air [that] have, through the generality, no particular power to convince”¹². In this way, there is a conscious decision to adopt the first-person perspective (or, as in Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and The Sickness Unto Death, the third-person perspective of the religious agent in order to explain their lives almost via negativa, as if presenting an incorrect understanding of the religious allows us to potentially find an apophatic concept to yoke ourselves onto) is entirely intentional and sets the tone for S. K.’s doubtful approach to what philosophers in his contemporary European society were overreaching for. I can’t tell you how to live your life, starts Kierkegaard, because you will not listen; but I can show you how lives are lived and force you to recognize yourself in comparison. Or, in the more technical language of Johannes Climacus:

In order to clarify the divergence of objective and subjective reflection, I shall now describe subjective reflection in its search back and inward into inwardness. At its highcst, inwardness in an existing subject is passion; truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in itsrelation to an existing subject. In this way the one corresponds to the other. In forgetting that one is an existing subject, one loses passion, and in return, truth does not become a paradox; but the knowing subject shifts from being human to being a fantastical something, and truth become a fantastical object for its knowing.¹³

This is key and will become essential to S. K.’s hermeneutics and faith later on.

In essence, these exaggerated figures who took up the role of writer, editor, or “finder” of works are meant - at least in part - to present us with a different contingency which can relate itself to the eternal. As we are restricted to our particular subjectivity, there is a certain unknowability about the lives of the other - something that plays an important part in Climacus’ pseudo-ontological argument in Philosophical Fragments¹⁴. For a short assessment of the argument, I will turn to Kulak’s summary:

“In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard offers a corresponding demonstration of God’s existence: the idea of being helped by the god to come into existence – to be reborn – can have come only from the god incarnate in time; that is, the idea of coming into existence or being reborn could not have occurred to the one who has not yet come into existence or who has not yet been, and thus does not know what it means to be, reborn;

I have indeed come into existence;

[T]herefore, God necessarily exists.”¹⁵

In this argument, Cliamcus sweeps away one of the main problems that haunt commentaries on ontological arguments: the problem of where precisely this innate knowledge of God is. Only the faithful individual can accept this argument as only they have the knowledge that is required in order to see what is being said: by being born again with the faith delivered from God (or, “coming into existence”), there is a fundamental ontological and epistemological change within the individual; this change could not have come from nowhere, therefore it must have been delivered to us by God; ergo, God exists. This argument requires some unpacking and analyzing in the context of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, but my reader, you will have to wait a little longer for that.

Because of the unknowability about the lives and knowledge of the other, there is always a possibility that whatever proof we might have for God is actually something restricted to our own particular subjectivity - indeed, this played an important part in S. K.’s commentary on Anselm of Canterbury:

“Anselm prays in all inwardness that he might succeed in proving God's existence. He thinks he has succeeded, and he flings himself down in adoration to thank God. Amazing. He does not notice that this prayer and this expression of thanksgiving are infinitely more proof of God's existence than - the proof.”¹⁶

In producing the ontological argument in the Proslogion, Anselm seems to be unaware that the proof that he produces is only proof to him - it is the gift of faith delivered to him by God, inaccessible to others and yet obvious to him. By zooming out to what we consider necessary for a priori proof in the modern age, we should remember that no new information should be broached when reaching our conclusion: we should be able to justify the conclusion simply from the premises. When we refuse to be sloppy with the form of the argument (as the Melancholic Dane had a razor-sharp eye for noticing within the arguments of his interlocutors), we can see that the definition of God as the greatest, etc. must already be held by the individual prior to the argument; we are not presuming that God exists, says Climacus, but opening ourselves up to the world in an attempt to communicate the necessarily incommunicable gift of faith to the unfaithful¹⁷. In this way, Anselm’s fantastic realisation that God is truly the greatest of all things and exists is restricted to the boundary of Anselm’s own skull - he cannot share this revelation with others in a way which instantly imparts faith to them as only he has been gifted faith by God, thereby only he has the mode by which to recognize faith and understanding his being born again. From this particular subjectivity, this particular form of life that Anselm was living out, we find him relating himself to the eternal in a way that cannot be explained - hence the controversy over the argument within nontheistic circles and the almost passive acceptance of the same argument by the faithful.

But this leads us to the method that S. K. was laying out: in the context of the Christian believer, it becomes quite obvious what can be identified as necessary and what can be identified as contingent. The necessary knowledge of God (which S. K. refers to as “dogma” in his journals¹⁸) is the cornerstone for all thought: when we understand that God is infinitely qualitatively different, then there is no possible comparison to make between the temporal and the eternal. If S. K. had been more interested in the saints, he may have echoed St. Teresa’s earnest cry for eternity! eternity! that has inspired so many. But, eternity cannot be understood in abstracta because then it is not understood at all. Eternity qua God and that related to God must be earnestly and passionately held by the individual qua individual, thereby delivering them the knowledge of the divine that sits in relation to the other side of the dialectical: the self.

This is Kierkegaardian deliberation: the relation between the subjective agent and the objective infinity of reality. When held at a distance from one another ( or “spaced apart” to avoid sloppy ontological conflation, as S. K. saw it), this provides us not only the proof that God exists but also the impetus for action, for change: to live out a life as born again¹⁹.

The ironic stance

Irony, for Kierkegaard, is when something is encountered in a way other than it is, i.e., when an obfuscation or our perspective intercedes between our perception and the thing-in-itself. This, for S. K., is "the comical" - a place of epistemological confusion where we "collide" with reality. These "collisions" are what set off a reaction in the coherence of our epistemologies of reality and allow for changes in perspectives or "leaps" between spheres. See this quote from his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony:

Just as scientists maintain that there is no true science without doubt, so it may be maintained with the same right that no genuinely human life is possible without irony.²⁰

To carry on the analogy, the scientist is constantly in doubt as to whether theory a accurately represents reality A as such - they have to approach theories sceptically, test them, etc. in order to refine their understanding of reality (or, rather, their conception of reality). For S. K., this is the same as with the process of existence: the individual is in an ironic condition where the way they perceive the world is out of accordance with the way it is - reality is necessarily filled with the comical because there is always something we don't know and possibly can't know. We are limited against the limitless, finite against the infinite, etc. Taking this sceptical position, S. K. saw it as necessary to understanding the Christian idea of forgiveness: because we are always limited in our perspective of the world, we could always be incorrect in our assessment of the perceived wrongs of the other - therefore, we should be willing to offer love and forgiveness to all, on the off chance that our doubt about the wrongings of the other should really be treated with trust.²¹

Later in his career, S. K. would see irony as the very basis of making value-explanations clear to others: by presenting something as "other than what it is", the individual can't dismiss it out of hand like a fact - they bring themselves into comparison with it. This, then, becomes central to S. K.'s understanding of the divine incognito of Christ: He came as a man, yet was God.²² It was an ironic "knot" in history that we cannot explain - something which no other religion or idea can compete with.

Outlining the necessary

The most problematic aspect of Kierkegaardian deliberation and dialectical analysis is understanding what “necessary” means in S. K.’s mind. Although the dialectic is relatively straightforward, understanding the actual thought process behind it and how it relates to S. K.’s approach to his work requires a little eccentricity and a little peek into his journals. To begin with, let’s look at S. K.’s strange understanding of what Aristotle meant by “science”:

“The definition of science which Aristotle gives [in the Nicomachean Ethics 6.3.] is very important. The objects of science are things which can be in a single way. What is scientifically knowable is therefore the necessary, the eternal; for everything that is absolutely necessary is also absolutely everlasting.”

Almost in direct opposition to what science means today, S. K. draws on the Nicomachean Ethics to suggest that genuine a priori conceptual reflection is science in the meaningful sense. In the context of the Eleatic denial of movement, S. K. correctly said that “things which can be in a single way” could only possibly apply to things which are both eternal and necessary; if they were not eternal or necessary, they would be capable of “not being in a single way” because they were constantly at threat of changing or being changed. For example, a chair’s leg could fall off, a young man could break off an engagement, a loved one could perish, or a wanton young man could “leap” into choosing himself in a way that allowed for problem development of the self. That is, there is always the possibility of some sort of irony emerging.

Considering that S. K. is now largely remembered as a courageous and controversial ethicist, we might find it more relevant to suggest that particular moral principles that “float free” of metaphysical backing offer us no real insight into the world as moral principles, in real terms, are subject to a great deal of temporal relativism: at any given time, a dreaded moral imposition might appear to be demanded by God (such as in Abraham’s almost-sacrifice of Isaac, illustrated in Fear and Trembling) that places us in contradiction with the perceived demands of the universal morality. S. K. sees the challenging and terrifying possibility that there are no knowable moral truths - or, in a stronger sense, no moral truths at all - that we can draw upon to act as the foundation of our thought. Championing the Lutheran notions of sola fide and sola scriptura, S. K. holds ardently to the idea that “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26) - which extends even to moral choices which sit in contradiction to our perceived moral universality and beyond in the future. The problem here is that this doesn’t seem to be very practical advice: we are left with a criterion that tells us that possibly everything and nothing is ethical. Is this the fate of Christianity? A radical antinomianism that can justify anything and everything?

Hopefully, for those of you who have been exposed to S. K.’s thought, this idea should be met with a resounding “no!”: he was not an antinomian in any sense of the word as antinomianism implies that instead of the potential expansion and progress of our human understanding of the divine, we are wiping the slate clean. Instead, we must anchor ourselves to the necessary at all times - because we are subjective agents who are limited in our finitude, we can always presume that the infinite truth of God extends beyond our ability to actually understand Him outside of snippets. If we follow S. K. into a logical conclusion of his ideas, we might even say that this is best reflected in the Barthian view of Christianity²³: not a religion, but faith; but because of our finitude and the brutal evidence that the saviour is not yet here, we can only recognize our failure in comparison to Him and must remain religious until the time we are truly liberated by the Lord²⁴.

Because the logically necessary is absolutely necessary and absolutely everlasting, this provides a “ground” of sorts for S. K. to erect an unconventional science upon the basis of this thought²⁵. However, this “ground” cannot be mistaken for a moral foundation - we are still necessarily unsure of the nature of extra-biblical revelation and God’s hand within time as necessarily mysterious. In a sense, we are left in a double bind: we both wish to know God’s will and fail to understand it fully. However, “Kierkegaard’s Aristotle” does not get away with a reversion to antiquated forms of rationalism:

“Insofar as all philosophy is able to conceive of the relationship of the divine to the human, Aristotle has already expressed it felicitiously when he says that God moves all things but himself is [unmoved]... It is really the abstract concept of unchangeableness, and his influence is therefore a magnetic charm something like the siren's song. Thus all rationalism ends in superstition.”²⁶

High rationalism does not lead us to secure answers because we, as a species, have a bad habit of getting lost in “imagination”: we are in constant danger that the imagination incites the construction of an identity - and, subsequently, the abstraction of the other²⁷. In a sense, S. K.’s anti-identity anthropology is undergirded by a universalism which acts as the basis of a politics that leads us away from the very things that set up identity tribal-formation - the necessary for us with in a particular form of life²⁸. The notion of necessity acts as a “skeleton” for us to hang things upon; like our bones, they provide very little information about the “us” that gives them life, but they are necessary in order to actually do anything at all. The metaphysical, very much in the fashion of the times, must underlie the ethical properly - when there is a mismatch of metaphysics and ethics, we descend into the nihilism of either acting without thinking or thinking without acting. Neither notion can be separated from the other, neither thinking nor acting; neither metaphysics nor ethics.

Kierkegaard in the Salon

The (non)system of existence

But, if there is only a skeleton of a worldview in metaphysics, how do we proceed? What takes us from the position of abstraction into real life? This is a problem which has puzzled many Kierkegaardian scholars, so varying responses have emerged - but there is always the denial of a clean link between abstract thought and reality.

This process is demanding as “[c]haracter traits are formed over time through repeated actions that steam from the agent and over which the agent must maintain a level of control”²⁹. By picking out philosophically interesting problems and integrating them into a system of scepticism, we can make philosophy a way of assessing views of life, not simply being another view³⁰. There’s no guarantee that the very things the individual carries out are necessary (this would imply that the existential is reducible to or programmable as a “system of existence”, the very thing S. K. was denying) and therefore philosophy cannot guide us out of the abstraction it brings us into. The revitalized job of philosophy, or, more specifically, metaphysics is “not produc[ing] reality concepts; instead, it is, in large part, the study of such concepts as they occur in more primitive, even non-learned circumstances.”³¹

Instead, we must understand that abstraction is only a highly disinterested tool that we can wield to understand the logical aspect of reality; but this will eventually require us to understand the limits of metaphysics when we encounter the Hegelian problem: how, precisely, a single individual can become more real than the abstractions of the totality of creation. If we are to hold fast to metaphysical speculation, then we find that it renders “individuals [as if they] were conceived to be less “real,” less “concrete,” and somehow more "abstract,” somewhat artificial and lacking historical being apart from the wholes of which they are a part”.³² By making a leap from the immediate, existential reality of “what I want” to the logical “what I ought to do”, there is a constant danger of the self being replaced (or attempting to be replaced) by an abstract system of thought that “hangs above” reality. No, says S. K.: no system of existence can be presented that can be used as a guide for life, a logic of the existing individual - instead, we must make the logical appropriate to us and understand that our lives must be lived forwards. The leap into the “what I ought to do” is then pulled back into the reality of the existing individual by the dialectical realization of the “ethical-religious”: we are not either “what I am” or “what I ought to do”, but a tension between the two, a creature held in the balance of finitude and infinitude in the process of upbuilding. And only when we are in that balance of self-awareness and earnestness do we actually have the platform to build ourselves up in the image of God, towards the flesh-and-blood example of Christ in a way which recognizes that no system can tell us how to act and that the gospel does not deliver us a pre-packaged set of specific normative values to carry out. Instead, we are in a constant loop of passionate, reasoned action towards the telos of becoming a Christian, teetering on the edge of heresy in order to define what is both “the good” and also the correct for us. There is no essence to unfurl within ourselves, but rather an existence that must explode out in the act of being alive.

“How foolish, then, is the modern seeking after system upon system, as though help was to be found there...”³³

In a sense, we return to our previous point: there is no system that will provide us answers about how best to live our lives. Instead, we are tasked to find ourselves within life, understand the metaphysical in abstracta, and then navigate a path between the two. There is a limit to what philosophy can tell us about our existence, but the most staggering problem that speculation can never tell help us overcome is the “gift and task” of becoming “that single individual” - it can, however, remind us that we do exist. And against this, “the Crowd”, the pretension of systematic thought that undermines the very thing which grants us freedom.

“The pretensions of philosophers and aesthetes, on the one hand, and the ineptness and religious grossness of the Church, on the other, were both a reflection of a forgetfulness of what human life really is, and consequently also a misuse of concepts and propositions about religious and ethical matters.”³⁴

1. Search for a Method, p. 9n. J. P. Sartre

2. Ibid., p. 10

3. Ibid., p. 12

4. "Jean-Paul Sartre: Between Kierkegaard and Marx", M. O'Neill Burns, from Kierkegaard's Influence on Social-Political Thought, p. 163, ed. J. Stewart

5. Ibid.

6. “One must go further, one must go further." This urge to go further is an old story in the world. Heraclitus the obscure, who deposited his thoughts in his books and his books in Diana's temple (for his thoughts had been his armor in life, and therefore he hung it in the temple of the goddess), Heraclitus the obscure said: One cannot walk through the same river twice. Heraclitus the obscure had a disciple who did not remain standing there but went further—and added: One cannot do it even once. Poor Heraclitus, to have a disciple like that!” from Fear and Trembling: a Dialectical Lyric, p. 123, J. de Silentio

7. Particularly with Heidegger, Hirsch, and Schmitt - each of them sloughing off key aspects of S. K.’s thought in order to deliver the passionate Christianity of the Danish Prince of Misery to an aesthetic movement of genocidal despair.

8. Indeed, this played a major part in Lukacs’ critique of Kierkegaard, despite his early admiration of the Great Dane. Ironically, his own “fideistic” loyalty to the Bolsheviks was rooted in the Kierkegaardian either/or choice that allowed him to give up his own moral worries in the context of Soviet totalitarianism.

9. "Christian Hate: Death, Dying, and Reason in Pascal and Kierkegaard", A. Buben, from Kierkegaard and Death, p. 72, edited by P. Stokes and A. J. Buben

10. “Gilleleje”, from Kierkegaar'd’s Journals and Notebooks: Journal AA, p, 4, tr. A. Hannay, ed. B. H. Kirmmse

11. Such as in the infamously bizarre title Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments - as explained by Hannay to his introduction to 2009 edition:

12. "The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage" from Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, p. 385, edited by V. Eremita (A. Hannay version)

13. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 73, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

14. Philosophical Fragments, p. , J. Climacus

15. “Between Kierkegaard and Descartes: faith, reason, and the ontology of creation”, A. Kulak, from Inscriptions 4, no. 2, p. 131, formatting mine for clarity

16. Papers 1:11, no. 20

17. Repeated jokes about this litter the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, including Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition - An Existential Contribution, p. 73, J. Climacus, tr. D. F. Swenson, ed. W. Lowrie

18. E.g., JP I A11

19. "1834-1836: The First Journal Entries" from Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 18, S. Kierkegaard, ed. A. Hannay

20. The Concept of Irony, p. 326, S. Kierkegaard

21. Works of Love, p. 228, S. Kierkegaard

22. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 130, Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard

23. “Karl Barth: The Dialectic of Attraction and Repulsion”, Lee C. Barrett, from Kierkegaard's Influence on Theology - Tome I: German Protestant Theology, p. 27

24. Epistle to the Romans, p. 60, K. Barth

25. Dear reader, please be sure not to conflate S. K.’s thought here with either classical Cartesian foundationalism or Camus’ lumbering half-way house between Kierkegaardian subjectivity and an objective, knowable ontological truth. I use the term “ground” nervously because of the philosophical baggage that it carries - unlike an epistemology which corresponds to reality an sich, we are proposing a theory of coherence which makes different “thought objects” valid only in as much as they correspond to other “thought objects” in the mind of the individual. The “ground” that we tread on here is truly no ground at all; we venture out on the “70,000 fathoms of the deep” and hold ourselves aloft by our subjectivity in relation to the coercion of reality around us.

26. Quoted in “Essential Thinking in Kierkegaard's Critique of Proofs for the Existence of God”, C. J. Kelly, from The Journal of Religion, vol. 59, no. 2, p. 149

27. "The Danish Cartoon Controversy as Viewed by Kierkegaard and Appadurai: The Social Imagination and the Numerical", J. E. Veninga, from International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. XXIII: The Moment and Late Writings, p. 265

28. Kierkegaard: Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World, p. 75, A. Hannay

29. Taking Responsibility for Ourselves: A Kierkegaardian Account of the Freedom-Relevant Conditions Necessary for the Cultivation of Character, p. 198, P. Carron

30. "A New Way of Philosophizing", from On Kierkegaard and the Truth, p. 53, P. L. Holmer, ed. D. J. Gouwens and L. C. Barrett III

31. Ibid., p. 193

32. Ibid., p. 45

33. JP VI A102

34. "The Bible and Christianity", from On Kierkegaard and the Truth, p. 57, P. L. Holmer, ed. D. J. Gouwens and L. C. Barrett III