ABSTRACT
Writing an article on the reception of Søren Kierkegaard in the Dutch-speaking world is difficult for two main reasons. The first kind of difficulty will be shared by every author who sets himself the task of mapping and measuring the reception of Kierkegaard’s thought in any area or age. More than that, the problem seems to be rooted in the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. For how should one interpret the term “reception” when one knows that Kierkegaard meticulously paid attention to the way he communicated his thoughts and when one is aware that, more than anyone before him, he tried to steer the effects his writings caused among their reading public. The Dane distanced himself on several occasions from the writings he produced and meticulously judged his readers’ relevance according to the way they existentially appropriated the underlying message of his “pia fraus.”1 If one of Kierkegaard’s main purposes is to reveal the reader to himself, thereby establishing an inwardness in him that “does not interest the world,”2 then the intended outcome of this enterprise is eo ipso hidden from anyone who looks upon it from a merely historical point of view.
