ABSTRACT
Some of Kierkegaard’s writings do look a bit like philosophy of religion. Fear and Trembling, which examines the story in which the biblical patriarch Abraham undertakes obediently to sacri ce his son Isaac, is a critique of a Hegelian construal of faith. The Concept of Anxiety is a rather philosophical and psychological examination of the background for original sin. Philosophical Fragments is a (largely covert) comparison of Socrates as a teacher with Christ as a ‘teacher,’ and is a critique of philosophically in uenced accounts of faith like Friedrich Schleiermacher’s. It even contains brief discussions of two of the classical arguments for the existence of God, a staple topic in the philosophy of religion. The Concluding Unscientifi c Postscript (postscript to the Philosophical Fragments) continues the critique of the Hegelians and indulges in a mouth- lling vocabulary worthy of the opponents who provoked it to arms. But even these most philosophy-like productions are written in styles that are rare in the history of philosophy. (The works of Plato and Nietzsche diverge in somewhat similar ways from the historical norms.) Owing to Kierkegaard’s unconventional styles, the diversity of his pseudonymous personae, the prominence of his pseudonymous works, the sheer volume of writing, and his sometimes impenetrable prose, Kierkegaard has made interpretation dif cult. Because of particular comments that he puts in the mouths of some of his personae, he came to be associated, early in the twentieth century, with such existentialists as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. He was regularly designated ‘the father of existentialism,’ and interpreted as holding that we human beings have no normative nature but must create our own values by an act resembling choice. Serious Kierkegaard scholars no longer promote this idea, but it persists in textbooks and classrooms, partly under the potent in uence of Alasdair MacIntyre. More recently, Kierkegaard has been co-opted by the postmodern deconstructionists and taken to be a thoroughgoing ironist, a writer who simply plays with viewpoints without having one of his own, taking back what he says in one place by what he writes in another and in the nal analysis saying nothing at all: he is the unsubstantial, indeterminate, forever disappearing ghost behind the pseudonymous writings. Others have interpreted Kierkegaard as a demythologizer or Wittgensteinian deist. Partially in reaction to the existentialists, deconstructionists, and deists, some Christian philosophers have tried to assimilate Kierkegaard’s work to more traditional theories. Some have read him as proposing a divine command theory of obligation, a ‘reformed’ view in the epistemology of religion, or a virtue theory in ethics. Such interpretations are, in my view, preferable to the existentialist and deconstructionist ones, because they do pick up substantive themes to which Kierkegaard would assent. But the assimilations of Kierkegaard to the kinds of theories that are the usual stock-in-trade of philosophers of religion are also misleading, inasmuch as they translate Kierkegaard’s practices and ideas into an academic world that is not their natural habitat, and re ect concerns that diverge signi cantly from his own. In the present essay I explore in what sense Kierkegaard is a philosopher of religion.
