Jon Stewart (Soren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Koppenhága) előadása

Soren Kierkegaard has been difficult to pin down with respect to the nature of his academic project. Claimed with equal zeal by philosophers, theologians and literary scholars, his authorship seems to defy any clear-cut, unambiguous characterization. His pseudonymous works appear to be an unidentifiable hybrid with elements from many distinct literary types. In this paper it is argued that some of the confusion surrounding this issue is the result of a failure to recognize the reasons for his way of writing.

As is well known, Kierkegaard was, at least for a period, in a polemical relation to German speculative philosophy. This represented the standard paradigm for philosophical research at the time. It also represented a fixed form of scholarly writing that was more or less standard in both Denmark and the German-speaking states during his age. Kierkegaard was thus confronted with the problem of how to combat what he conceived as this philosophy's misunderstandings. He realized that he would be undermining himself if he were to write a philosophical treatise along the lines dictated by the German philosophical tradition. Since the content of his arguments was also intimately connected to the form, he needed to find a new kind of literary genre by means of which he could articulate his criticisms. In the course of his pseudonymous authorship, he can be seen as constantly experimenting with new literary forms and rhetorical tools in order to issue his criticisms of German philosophy.