ABSTRACT
The influence of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on the course of philosophical debate in the 1960s and 1970s was predictably less than the burgeoning literature on this profound and complex thinker would ordinarily suggest. Those acquainted with Kierkegaard’s writings could appreciate the reasons – not least the complexity of the thought, the difficulty of reducing it to a systematic or at any rate consistent locutionary series, or even to a string of clearly defined and independently contestable claims. There is also the apparently insoluble problem of the illocutionary force to be attributed to the various works themselves, individually or in their appointed categories (aesthetic, dialectical, religious) – the difficulty, among others, that the works in the two former categories may not be intended to express Kierkegaard’s own claims, or even to claim assent at all, but, as Louis Mackey’s Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet1 proposes, to address the reader’s intelligence in some less direct way. On top of that is (to what is for the most part a studiously agnostic professional public) the apparent parochialism of the announced principal theme of the work taken to be most philosophical, ‘how to become a Christian’ – or even more narrowly, ‘how to become a Christian in Christendom’. Not necessarily finally, but surely most decisively, there is the absence of any clear connection between the highly interesting claims Kierkegaard or his pseudonyms seem to make and the problems occupying the centre of the wider philosophical stage in the 1960s and 1970s.
