Marta Ferreira

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Merold WestphalM. Jamie FerreiraMerold Westphal. Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript.” West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii + 261. Cloth, $32.95. Paper, $16.95.The Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy describes itself as attempting to provide insight into a philosopher by means of a focus on a single major text. Such a focus is unusual for a series in the history of philosophy, and Westphal’s [End Page 144] accomplishment in this study is a fine example of how fruitfully this can be done. Commentary on over six hundred pages of Kierkegaard’s Postscript is presented in ten manageable chapters, which follow the order of the Postscript and deal with segments of it ranging from as few as twelve pages to as many as one hundred and seventy-five pages. The result is a commentary which can wonderfully guide students through the Postscript in its entirety, or through the assignment of individual chapters to accompany discrete reading selections. Westphal’s discussions are informed by an unusually wide-ranging knowledge of the history of philosophy—he considers the text not only in relation to Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Hegel, as others commentators have, but also brings to this work his clear strengths in phenomenological, existential, and postmodern thought (so we get useful comparisons with Gadamer, Derrida, Levinas, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others). Lying behind Westphal’s entire approach to the book is his desire to address the two most common major criticisms of Kierkegaard’s thought, namely, that it is individualist and irrationalist. Thus, the major perspective from which everything is approached is the tension between the fallible yet responsible self—more precisely, the tension between individual and society, and the tension between irrationalist (voluntarist, blind) and rationalist. Westphal does a superb job of laying out the diversity of protests Climacus is registering in the Postscript—against Platonic intellectualism, against systematic philosophical speculation, and against the rhetorical compromising embodied in the “priest-orator.” There are, of course (as one would expect), sensible, suggestive, illuminating, and detailed exegeses of passages concerning all the significant themes associated with Climacus (approximation, appropriation, leap, direct communication, second reflection, dialectic, etc). Westphal examines the Postscript in the light of the distinction between Socratic religion and the non-Socratic (Christian) alternative found in the earlier Philosophical Fragments, to which this Postscript is an admittedly peculiar postscript, and employs material from much of Kierkegaard’s other work, including journal entries. With respect to the (in)famous category of leap, Westphal incorporates contemporary discussions of volitionalism and presents a fine summary of ways in which willing (decision) can be viewed as indirect, yet allowing the relevance of an ethics of belief. In fact, regarding even the commentary on “Truth Is Subjectivity,” where one might feel nothing new could be said, he manages to be innovative, by identifying “four moments” in the presentation of a theory of subjectivity (a satire, a parable, a definition, and a portrait) which make the chapter much more manageable for teaching. After considering Climacus’s presentation of the relation between Religiousness A and Religiousness B, Westphal appends a discussion of his own creation, Religiousness C (Chapter XIV). But all of this discussion would be unhelpful to a reader who does not fully appreciate the role of pseudonymity and indirect communication in Kierkegaard’s works; so Westphal prefaces his entire discussion with a fine chapter on pseudonymity which can be used even in courses where the entire book is not required reading. This chapter, relating pseudonymity to twentieth-century discussions of themes such as the effacement of the author of a text and the forfeiture of the privilege of authorship, is part of a three-chapter introduction setting the Postscript in relation to Kierkegaard’s biography, pseudonymity, and the familiar theory of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages. This entire introduction is written in a remarkably [End Page 145] engaging style which will surely seduce readers new to Kierkegaard and his creation, Johannes Climacus. For example, Westphal announces that “the flow of Regina’s...

Much has been made of the Kierkegaardian flavour of Wittgenstein's thought on religion, both with respect to its explicit allusions to Kierkegaard and its implicit appeals. Even when significant disparities between the two are noted, there remains an important core of de facto methodological agreement between them, addressing the limits of theory and the dispelling of illusion. The categories of ‘nonsense’ and ‘paradox’ are central to Wittgenstein's therapeutic enterprise, while the categories of ‘paradox’ and the ‘absurd’ are central to much of Kierkegaard's attempt to dispel religious illusion. Writing of how the ‘urge to thrust against the limits of language’ yields ‘nonsense’, Wittgenstein explicitly appealed to Kierkegaard: ‘Kierkegaard, too, recognized this thrust and even described it in much the same way ’. 1 I want to consider whether Kierkegaard's category of paradox of the absurd is assimilable to Wittgenstein's view of nonsense and paradox. I shall argue that a consideration of Wittgenstein's view of paradox can highlight contrasting strands in Kierkegaard's writings on religious faith, strands which take paradox more or less strictly – in particular, it can clarify several different opinions concerning the status of religious claims. My exploration will bring to the fore some implications of the attempt to make room, in the religious employment of language, for a ‘higher understanding’ of truths which we are said to be able to grasp but cannot express

What has become known as the ‘faith/history’ problem for historical religions like Christianity centres on the attempt to combine the ontological decisiveness, for faith, of an historical event characterized as an actual Incarnation of God with the epistemological indifference, or irrelevance, of historical information about that event which is decisive for faith. Without the former there is nothing to be related to or personally appropriated; without the latter faith is rendered vulnerable to the vagaries of historical research. Soren Kierkegaard's Climacus writings – the Philosophical Fragments and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript – provide a classic formulation of the inherent tension. Twentieth-century variations on the same theme are found in the writings of Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann, among others. In what follows I want to highlight an element in Kierkegaard's Climacus account which crucially distinguishes his attempt to deal with the faith/history relation from other attempts to deal with it, and thus offers what I suggest is a novel approach to overcoming the tension. This element – effectively a kind of a priori or conceptual proof – has been neglected, and whatever one's final judgement on its contribution to the problem as a whole, a consideration of it and its implications is, at the very least, integral to a full understanding of the thought-experiment in the Fragments . Moreover, in the process, useful light can be shed indirectly on twentieth-century attempts to deal with the faith/history problem

Levinas’s ethics of other‐centered service has been criticized at the theoretical level for failing to offer a conception of moral agency adequate to ground its imperative and at the practical level for encouraging self‐ hatred. Levinas’s explicit resistance to the incorporation of the phrase ”as yourself“ in the Judaeo‐Christian love command might seem to validate the critics’ complaints. The author argues, on the contrary, that Levinas does offer a strong and compelling conception of moral agency and that his ethics, properly understood, does not entail self‐abnegation. Levinas’s attempt to counter excessive and manipulative self‐concern and self‐inflation by insisting on the dependent and situational position of the self has been wrongly overinterpreted as an abandonment of the self and its just claims. The author seeks to establish a more balanced understanding by focusing attention on the “ethics of welcome”, on Levinas’s distinctive conception of passivity, and on the role of the “third” in all human relations.