Illusion and offense in Philosophical Fragments: Kierkegaard’s inversion of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity

Abstract

The article shows the "Appendix" to Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments to be a response to Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of Christianity. While previous studies have detected some influence by Feuerbach on Kierkegaard, they have so far discovered little in the way of specific responses to Feuerbach's ideas in Kierkegaard's published works. The article first makes the historical argument that Kierkegaard was very likely reading Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity while he was writing Philosophical Fragments, as several of Kierkegaard's journal entries from that period discuss Feuerbach in relation to central ideas in Fragments. The article then shows how Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus inverts Feuerbach's projection theory, turning it against critics like Feuerbach. At the heart of Feuerbach's critique of Christianity is the claim that religion is a conceptual illusion, whereby the individual projects his or her personal limits onto the species and then projects the unlimited onto a supposed divine being. Furthermore, Feuerbach sees Christianity as rife with absurdities that tell against its reasonableness. In exploring a hypothetical transcendent avenue toward the truth, Climacus inverts both of these philosophical moves. He argues that on the transcendent hypothesis, the immanentist critic is himself a victim of an "acoustical illusion": the absolute paradox of the appearance of the god in time is in fact not judged by, but rather judges, the critic as absurd. In inverting and not repudiating Feuerbach's critique, Climacus reveals the critic as a Socratic figure who displays the heights-and ultimately, the limits-of secular philosophy's capabilities.Keywords Alienation · Feuerbach · Illusion · Kierkegaard · Offense · Paradox · Projection theory of religionThe relation between the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach and Søren Kierkegaard remains insufficiently understood despite the rapid growth of Kierkegaard studies in recent decades. Only a few commentators have gone into any depth at all in exploring this relation, and there is little consensus as to what exactly Kierkegaard thought about Feuerbach. One commentator claims without further explanation that "the perceptive reader could find evidence of J. Malesic (B)

Learning to live with doubt: Kierkegaard, Freire, and critical pedagogy

“…At the time of its publication in 1844, Philosophical Fragments ‘remained unnoticed, un-reviewed, unmentioned anywhere’ (Kierkegaard, 2009: 4). That is not the case today, with interest in the work growing substantially over the last two decades (see, e.g., Carreño, 2007; Cockayne, 2015; Evans, 2004; Hale, 2002; Harrison, 1997; Howland, 2006; Kim, 2012; Malesic, 2007; Mercer, 2001; Nowachek, 2014). Philosophical Fragments concerns itself not so much with Descartes specifically but more with what Kierkegaard refers to, somewhat vaguely, as ‘philosophy’ and ‘modern philosophy’.…”