Abstract

This collection of six essays, three of which have appeared elsewhere, concentrates on revising popular interpretations of Kierkegaard’s thought. Among the counterpositions developed is the claim that Johannes Climacus, pseudonymous author of the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, was not a theist and the suggestion that Kierkegaard may not have been one either—a paradox worthy of the Dane. Klemke’s argument implies that Climacus anticipated an immanentistic approach to religious faith which leaves its propositional nature in abeyance, if not rejected entirely. For the Christian to assert "Christ is God," for example, "is not to say something about a certain historical person’s having possessed a nonworldly attribute, etc.," but is rather "to say something primarily about one’s self, the utterer, that one’s self has been reorganized, reintegrated in a certain way". Kierkegaard’s infamous credo quia absurdum is thus shorn of irrationalism. In fact, Klemke insists that "absurd" and "paradox" have a very special meaning for Kierkegaard. Both terms refer not to logical contradiction but to the existential paradox of thought in relation to existence, viz., that existence is a limit which reflection cannot reach, and especially to the behavioral paradox, the lived contradiction between another vital set of values and one’s own, e.g., the challenge of "encounter" with Christ. The notion of behavioral paradox is central to Klemke’s text, figuring in three of the six essays.