Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and Self

by Mark C. Taylor

The description for this book, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous A Study of Time and Self, will be forthcoming.

405 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Mark C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Religious Studies, Harvard University, 1973; B.A., Wesleyan University, 1968), is a philosopher of religion who chaired the Department of Religion at Columbia University 2007–2015. Previously, he was Cluett Professor of Humanities at Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where he began his teaching career in 1973.

Reviews

[0:50 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Both the title and the plan of this book are somewhat misleading because Taylor ultimately approaches Kierkegaard's work from a pretty ordinary author-oriented vantage point. The only part where he addresses the pseudonyms as personalities are with regards to Johannes and Judge Williams of Either/Or and even then doesn't relate the text to the editorship of "Victorious Hermit". The relation between Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death, for example, isn't analyzed through the lens of the relation between Vigilius Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus. Instead, the themes of those books are related directly to Kierkegaard's authorship. What follows is that the contents of the books become stand-ins for the variation between the pseudonyms even though in reality the pseudonyms themselves relativise even those parts of the texts that suggest transcendence of their themes. For example, even though Concept of Anxiety is about anxiety, it is not correct to say that Vigilius Haufniensis represents the stage of anxiety in a progression to Christianity because Concept of Anxiety involves considerations of sin in the analysis of a lower-order phenomenon of anxiety which is supposed to be something of a condition of perceiving sin. If the authors were truly taken into account, this would already provide a massive interpretive leap: the separations within Kierkegaard's oeuvre are not about stage of thought in-themselves but rather they are about the variable methods of reflecting on what was supposedly the last endpoint of the progress according to the stages of life-scheme, faith. Given these problems, the book is actually pretty good as a systematisation and mental refreshments of all the different classifications Kierkegaard uses but it doesn't really live up to its promise.