ABSTRACT
As Kierkegaard moves from text to text, from pseudonym to pseudonym, and to various signed works, he initiates an interminable existential dialogue with readers, who are left to struggle with incompleteness and ambiguity. Kierkegaard, Garff says he wants to "find cracks in the granite of genius." Edward F. Mooney rejects the thought that Kierkegaard's proliferation of possible human positions is mere ornament disguising a latent "system" that is ours to discover or reconstruct—for example, a simple theory of stages or a final defense of Christianity. Before his career as a writer had really begun, Kierkegaard sought an "idea he could live and die for." An alternative is a hermeneutics of affirmation, based on Kierkegaard's claim that "love is a lenient interpreter." In establishing Kierkegaard's Socratic identity, Mooney highlights Socrates' endless questioning as resting on a devotion to his gods, an acceptance of martyrdom and an alliance with soaring imagination.
