Where the Truth Lies

Pseudonymity, Complicity, and Critique in Fear and Trembling

Shane R. Cudney

• Éditeur: Pickwick Publications
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781498241144
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Philosophy of Religion

Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, concludes that faith is "absurd" (irrational), and therefore lies beyond the scope of reason. But if we ascribe authorship ultimately to Kierkegaard, as is common practice, we must conclude that he himself is an irrationalist. Given the myriad of competing voices throughout Kierkegaard's writings, this seems highly questionable at best.If, however, we take the pseudonymous author strictly at his authorial word, it changes the shape and dynamic of the text inviting us to read it, instead, as a "thought experiment." In this way, the text demonstrates both the absurdity and sin of reason in its bid to fully grasp the mystery of faith on its own rational terms.

Part I

Pseudonymity

1

Authorship as Authority in C. Stephen Evans’s Reading of Fear and Trembling

I am just as far from being Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling as I am from being the Knight of Faith whom he depicts.

After all, I always have a poetic relationship to my work, and therefore I am pseudonymous.

—Søren Kierkegaard

In this chapter, I want to show that by questioning conventional assumptions about what the text of Fear and Trembling communicates, how it communicates, why, and on whose authority, a space is created that allows it to be read differently, thus enabling it to speak differently, which is to say, in ways that exceed both modern, received readings, and late modern, more transgressive renderings.

As for the former, by exploring the relationship between authorship and authority in the context of Evans’s reading of Fear and Trembling (in his monograph Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love) I will emphasize the importance of keeping the tension alive in order to prevent the easy collapse of that distinction along with the closing of the text in particular. I contend that taking the author, Johannes de Silentio, strictly at his authorial word, is an important first step toward preventing that collapse and keeping the text open.21 If the bulk of twentieth-century scholarship tended to dismiss the pseudonymous voices, in effect reducing them to Kierkegaard’s own voice, I maintain that the counter move in the latter part of the last century to make a clear distinction between those voices—and the connected, interpretive division of the texts along the lines of authorship—blurs the relationship between authorship and authority, effectively repeating a similar problematic. As for the latter, by paying close attention to Derrida’s reading of the pseudonym in The Gift of Death, I will show, in chapter 2, that because he too collapses the distinction between Kierkegaard’s voice and de Silentio’s voice he misses the critique at work in the corners of the text. In so doing he misses its critical import.

If, as a representative of the orthodox hermeneutical tradition, Stephen Evans argues that “Kierkegaard” holds to a “meta-ethical” position that metaphysically links (finite) moral obligations to (infinite) divine commands, it is important, nay crucial, to recognize that this first assumes a particular reading of Kierkegaard’s texts.22 In order to explore and evaluate precisely what kind of reading that is, I need to accomplish at least two things. Firstly (1.1.), I will consider the relationship between authorship and authority and its significance for a fair treatment of the text. Secondly (1.2.), I will explore Evans’s reading of Fear and Trembling with special attention being paid to (1.2.1.) his interpretation of the pseudonymous author, and then (1.2.2.) his reading of Johannes de Silentio’s reading of faith, understood in the context of a discussion of “infinite resignation” and “faith.” Thirdly, and lastly (1.2.3), I find my way back to the beginning of Evans’s text in order to display, evaluate, and question the philosophical assumptions that condition his hermeneutic methodology. I conclude that while Evans subscribes to a more faith friendly rationality, his allegiance to objective logic and the twin metaphysical pillars that support it, unduly narrows the text by inflating the name “Kierkegaard” to a universal principle of authority. In so doing he simultaneously deflates the significance of the pseudonym and thereby erases its specificity.23

On my reading then, the very fact that Evans’s hermeneutical approach necessitates the division of Kierkegaard’s texts along the lines of authorship entails hermeneutically problematic assumptions that carry with it implications that the text of Fear and Trembling puts its critical finger on.24 Importantly, though Evans argues to the contrary, this reading provides him with a principle of authority, or master key, that unlocks the door to “Kierkegaard’s” true intentions, allowing him to establish what “Kierkegaard” meant by how he signed his works. In this way, the name “Kierkegaard” becomes the self-evident and final authority over/behind the texts, and therefore the authoritative guide for those texts.25 I argue that intrinsic to this hermeneutic is a metaphysics that links these assumptions to an ontological anchor without which “everything would be permitted.”26

Although Evans recognizes the importance of the pseudonymous voice,27 my reading questions the extent to which he honors that voice and ultimately the critical function of the text.28 While Evans wants to be tolerant of other readings, the fact that he calls upon the name “Kierkegaard” to secure the intelligibility and meaning of each of his texts specifically, and all of his texts generally, indicates a collapse between authorship and authority. If this collapse in turn signals the closing of the text, rather than its opening, it also highlights the limits of that hermeneutical toleration. Fundamentally I will show that Evans’s orthodox posture reveals a commitment to a principle of authority that, in effect, pre-exists the text’s finite, temporal occurrence. In other words, that Evans effectively ignores the singularity of each pseudonym invariably turns “Kierkegaard” into a veritable master signifier, enabling him to side step the complexities of the pseudonyms themselves and their disruptive presence in the texts. As such, I will conclude that his reading does not escape the metaphysics that Fear and Trembling itself is critical of and ultimately exceeds.

With these weighty things in mind, it is imperative to revisit our basic approach to one of Kierkegaard’s most popular and accessible texts, particularly as it relates to, not only our fundamental assumptions about that text, but to the crucial connection between authorship and authority. Indeed, the question of ethics, as responsibility itself,29 is brought to bear on how language is wielded, and how, by extension, the texts themselves are treated in the name of Kierkegaard and his so-called true intentions.30

1.1. Which Interpretation, on Whose Authority, and Why?

Before we can explore and evaluate Evans’s reading of Fear and Trembling in a more thoroughgoing way it is important to first consider the relationship between authorship and authority, especially since assumptions about what the text of Fear and Trembling communicates, how it communicates, and why, are inextricably linked with the question of authority, one often taken for granted and therefore seldom addressed.

In the face of the tension between the reader and the text/author, arguably the task of interpretation—if there is such a thing—rests squarely on the shoulders of the former. Not without much risk, it is up to the reader, in relationship with the text/author, to help point the way toward a responsible rendering. If early scholarly efforts tended to collapse the divide between Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, as Evans points out, assuming as it did that the pseudonymous voices were, in the end, Kierkegaard’s own voice, the question of how to negotiate that hermeneutical strait is now answered by making a clear distinction between the two, which is to say, between the early pseudonymous writings and the later signed or veronymous works (E.KEL, 48). In this way, as common sense apparently dictates, the later texts, signed by Kierkegaard himself in his own name, are considered to be a reasonable, interpretive “baseline” by which the early, pseudonymous texts are to be interpreted (ibid., 40).31 Thus, the later works are said to be direct, faith focused, religious expressions of the early, indirect, poetically inspired writings. In order then to understand Kierkegaard’s texts, in order to know what he meant by what he said, we need to first know who wrote the text. The idea is that dividing the texts along the lines of authorship preserves the integrity of the author as the singular, and therefore authoritative voice behind the cacophonous plurality of the pseudonymous voices and their respective orientations, religious or otherwise.

But to argue, as the received tradition now does, that the later writings provide “the decisive, mature view of Kierkegaard” (ibid., 41), through which the early writings are to be hermeneutically filtered, assumes, it would seem, the promise of direct access to the author’s true intentions. By conferring final authority on the name “Kierkegaard” as the sole author, ultimate responsibility is placed on that name to determine the meaning of his texts based on how he ostensibly divided and signed them. In this way, the signature, as a means of accessing the truth of Kierkegaard’s texts, therefore, mediates the space between the reader and text/author, thus resolving, for all intents and purposes, the hermeneutical tension. But if this is the case, whose authority are we talking about here, and what principle is at work?

Geoffrey Hale suggests that while this straightforward approach to Kierkegaard’s texts has common sense appeal, “it amounts to nothing less than the refusal to recognize the problem of authorship altogether” (H.KEL, 1). If, in the name of “Kierkegaard,” an...