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How to Speak the Truth According to Kierkegaard

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Abstract

In this article, I examine Soren Kierkegaard’s existential critique for truth-speaking. My contention is that this is more than a mere quest for sincerity in religious profession. Kierkegaard, rather, is concerned with the existential position that is inherent in the way a person confesses the doctrines of the Christian faith. I show how Kierkegaard uses his pseudonyms to problematise the issue of making religious truth claims and then I explain how Kierkegaard’s notion of truth-speaking operates within his definition of the self as a process of relating. To speak the truth one must inhabit a particular existential situation and one’s speaking must become part of an authentic process of becoming that is itself truth.

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Notes

  1. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1967, II A 178.

  2. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992, 216.

  3. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1941, 327.

  4. Or “honest earnestness.” Claudia Welz, ‘Conscience, Self-Deception and the Question of Authenticity in Kierkegaard.’ Appearing in Adam Buben, Eleanor Helms and Patrick Stokes (Editors), The Kierkegaardian Mind (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2019). Ch.23.

  5. This is how David Law summarised the debate over Kierkegaard’s notion of truth in Kierkegaard as a Negative Theologian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 91ff.

  6. I argued this point in ‘Kierkegaard on Truth,’ Religious Studies 38, 27–44, 2002.

  7. As in Pojman, Louis, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Religion, University of Alabama Press, 1984, 54ff.

  8. Mark A.Tietjen. Kierkegaard: A Christian Missionary to Christians, Downer’s Grove, Il: IVP Academic 2016.

  9. See also John Tallach, ‘In order there to find God’ Tyndale Bulletin 45:1: 1994.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Journals and Papers, 5 5100 (Pap. I A 75).

  12. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 134.

  13. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 135.

  14. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 142.

  15. Anti-Climacus is Kierkegaard’s regenerate pseudonym, coming from a more committed state of spirituality than even Kierkegaard thought he possessed personally.

  16. A. J. Rudd, ‘Kierkegaard and the Sceptics,’ The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 6, no. 1 March 1998. 72.

  17. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 271. Cf. with Exodus 3:13-14.

  18. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980, 13.

  19. Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A kind of poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, 136.

  20. Ibid.

  21. The Sickness unto Death, 13–14.

  22. “the earnestness of life is to will to be, to will to express the perfection (ideality) in dailyness of actuality” (Practice in Christianity 189–90). See discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of earnestness in Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart (eds), Volume 15, Tome II: Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Classicism to Enthusiasm (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 219–227.

  23. Jamie Turnbull, ‘Kierkegaard and the Limits of Philosophical Anthropology’ appearing in Jon Stewart (editor), A Companion to Kierkegaard, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, Ch. 31.6.

  24. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 74.

  25. The Sickness unto Death, 13.

  26. Exodus 3:14.

  27. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 79–80.

  28. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, London: MacMillan, 1993, 97. Or “the conformity of our concepts with the object” Critique of Pure Reason, 532.

  29. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 189.

  30. “The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” The Sickness unto Death, 14.

  31. Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, in Philosophical Fragments/ Johannes Climacus, translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985, 168.

  32. Reference is to the title and subtitle of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript: A Mimical-Pathetical-Dialectical Compilation. And Existential Contribution.

  33. Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991, 205.

  34. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 106.

  35. Anthony Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 30.

  36. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 278.

  37. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 98.

  38. Johannes Climacus, 168.

  39. Rudd, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, 31–32.

  40. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 273.

  41. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Swenson), 33.

  42. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 195.

  43. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Hong), 202–203.

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  1. Melbourne School of Theology, 5 Burwood Highway, Wantirna, VIC, 3152, Australia

    Matthew Jacoby

  2. Ceres, Australia

    Matthew Jacoby

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Jacoby, M. How to Speak the Truth According to Kierkegaard. SOPHIA 62, 275–291 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00947-2

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