Philosophical Fragments - Reviews and Assessments

Reviews and Assessments

Kierkegaard was criticized by his former teacher and pastor Hans Lassen Martensen, he concludes from Kierkegaard's writing, here and in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that he's saying an individual can be saved without the help of the Church. Martensen believed 19th century Socialism would destroy individuality, but regarded Kierkegaard's emphasis on the single individual as too one-sided. Kierkegaard was responding to Hegelian writers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss who emphasized the objective nature of God. God is just man's idea.

Man is an object to God, before God perceptibly imparts himself to man; he thinks of man; he determines his action in accordance with the nature of man and his needs. God is indeed free in will; he can reveal himself or not; but he is not free as to the understanding; he cannot reveal to man whatever he will, but only what is adapted to man, what is commensurate with his nature such as it actually is; he reveals what he must reveal, if his revelation is to be a revelation for man, and not for some other kind of being. Now what God thinks in relation to man is determined by the idea of man – it has arisen out of reflection on human nature. God puts himself in the place of man, and thinks of himself as this other being can and should think of him; he thinks of himself, not with his own thinking power, but with man's. In the scheme of his revelation God must have reference not to himself, but to man's power of comprehension. That which comes from God to man, comes to man only from man in God, that is, only from the ideal nature of man to the phenomenal man, from the species to the individual. Thus, between the divine revelation and the so-called human reason or nature, there is no other than an illusory distinction; – the contents of the divine revelation are of human origin, for they have proceeded not from God as God, but from God as determined by human reason, human wants, that is, directly from human reason and human wants. And so in revelation man goes out of himself, in order, by a circuitous path, to return to himself! Here we have a striking confirmation of the position that the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology – the knowledge of God nothing else than a knowledge of man! The Essence of Christianity, Ludwig Feuerbach, 1841

Otto Pfleiderer wrote an assessment of Kierkegaard's views in 1877. He called his work "ascetic individualistic mysticism."

Robert L Perkins wrote a book about Kierkegaard's books which used Johannes Climacus as a pseudonym. and Kierkegaardian biographer, Alastair Hannay, discusses Philosophical Fragments 36 times in Soren Kierkegaard, A Biography. Jyrki Kivelä wonders if Kiekegaard's Paradox is David Hume's miracle. Which comes first existence or essence? Richard Gravil tries to explain it in his book Existentialism. Kierkegaard says God comes into existence again and again for each single individual. He didn't just come once for all.