ABSTRACT
Even the most inexperienced or superficial reader will invariably feel overwhelmed, if not humiliated at some point, while skimming through the pages of Kierkegaard’s works, and here, in particular, the pseudonymous writings: not only by the wealth of philosophical insights, authorial viewpoints and literary genres exposed in these writings, but also by Kierkegaard’s obvious erudition, the depth and scope of his knowledge about and his masterful use of the philosophical, theological and literary tradition of the Western world. Any dedicated Kierkegaard scholar who sets out to dig a little deeper, though, in order, namely, to determine and evaluate the different forms and the actual extent, in which other authors and their ideas have made their way into the Kierkegaardian corpus, may end up with a somewhat different, in any case more sober and partly critical picture: quite often Kierkegaard seems to have known and quoted from other authors only second hand, while his firsthand expertise was either based on a very selective and/or sloppy reading of the pertinent texts or impaired by a tendency to what I would call “appropriation by productive misunderstanding.” This attitude towards and this way of dealing with other sources can neither be done away with as merely idiosyncratic nor simply be attributed to common nineteenth-century hermeneutical practices (for example, the almost exclusive reliance on secondary sources). Rather, it appears to be a facet and integral expression of Kierkegaard’s genius as such. An early journal entry thus states: “great geniuses couldn’t really read a book. While they are reading, they will always develop themselves more than understand the author.”1 It does not seem all too far-fetched to suggest that here the master is also, if by implication, speaking about himself.
