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The 10th International Kierkegaard Conference

The 10th International Kierkegaard Conference took place at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN this past June. The conference lasted an entire week from the 15th to the 19th and was one of the most fun and intellectually stimulating conferences I have ever attended. There were scholars from more than 25 countries across the globe and from some very prestigious universities including Oxford, Georgetown, Tübingen, Toronto, and St. Andrew’s, among many others. 

The conference began with a sumptuous dinner and my keynote address immediately afterward. I was really grateful for that, going at the very beginning of the conference, I mean, because that way I could relax and enjoy the rest of the papers without worrying that I might need to incorporate some of the points others had made earlier in my own presentation. I had enormous fun with my presentation. Like most philosophers, I generally read papers at conferences, rather than give them extemporaneously. Philosophical papers tend to be pretty conceptually complex and so presenting them extemporaneously, can be dangerous in that one risks inadvertently omitting some important details. This time, though, knowing that I was going after dinner (and after the standard cocktail reception before dinner), I decided I should make my presentation fun. I put together some slides to help listeners to keep track of the important points, and that left me free to be more spontaneous in my delivery.  

Anna Söderquist, the Curator of the Kierkegaard library explained to me in advance of the conference that my talk would be videoed and posted online. I was actually required to sign a release so they could film me. That said, the video does not appear to be up yet, which leads me to believe that there might have been some technical problem with the video. I will keep you posted, however. And please do the same for me. That is, if you happen across the video of my talk, let me know so that I can include a link to it on this blog. 

I plan to post a summary of my talk at a later date. Here I just wanted to give some general information about the conference and what a wonderful opportunity it was to reconnect with people, such as Andy Burgess, whom I hadn’t seen in years and to learn what other Kierkegaard are up to these days. 

There were far too many speakers to list here. But you can view the list of speakers, and the titles of the talks, on the attached 10th International Kierkegaard Conference Program. One of the highlights of the conference for me was a talk entitled “K-Philosophy and Kierkegaard: Asian Readings on Faith, Suicide, and the Hope of Love,” by Robert Oh, of the Kierkegaard Research Center in Korea. Oh, who is an ordained minister, and others in Korea are doing really incredible work using Kierkegaard to combat depression among young people in Korea. Oh even has a book with the same title as his presentation, that is available as both an ebook through Amazon at a very modest price of $5.35 (the paperback is $9.91). Depression is rife among young people in the U.S. as well, and particularly among college students, so I’ve purchased a copy of Oh’s book myself. 

The conference concluded with a talk by Brian Söderquist, of St. Olaf, entitled “Kierkegaard and Words,” and a series of translation workshops based on language families. I attended the “German languages group” and enjoyed the very spirited discussion among those present, including Heiko Schulz, one of my favorite Kierkegaard scholars because of his deep sympathy with Kierkegaard’s thought and the unsurpassed rigor of his conceptual analyses. 

There were lots of great talks, though, as you will see from the program, and Brian and Anna could not have been more gracious hosts. If I am not mistaken, this is the first international Kierkegaard conference since Brian and Anna took over the reins of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf. The wonderful job they did bodes well for future conferences! 

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Pulling Ourselves Together

I gave a paper entitled “Pulling Ourselves Together: Kierkegaard and the Catechesis of Contagion” at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion last month. Several people told me I should try to publish the paper, but I fear that might be difficult because it is not a traditional academic paper, but actually contains edifying elements. So I decided that rather than racking my brains trying to think of an appropriate journal, I would simply post it to this blog. I haven’t posted the whole paper, though, because while it is short, at ten pages, it is still considerably longer than the average post to this blog. What I’ve done instead is simply posted the first part and then provided a link to the pdf of the entire paper at the end in case you are sufficiently intrigued by the beginning and decide you would like to read all the way to the end.

Vær så god!

“You may have heard,” writes Kierkegaard in “To Preserve One’s Soul In Patience,”

“how someone who had thoughtlessly frittered away his life and never understood anything but wasted the power of his soul in vanities, how he lay on his sick bed and the frightfulness of disease encompassed him and the singularly fearful battle began, how he then, for the first time in his life, understood something, understood that it was death he struggled with, and how he then pulled himself together in a purpose that was powerful enough to move a world, how he attained a marvelous collectedness for wrenching himself out of the sufferings in order to use the last moment to catch up on some of what he had neglected, to bring order to some of the chaos he had caused during a long life, to contrive something for those he would leave behind. You may have heard it from those who were there with him, who with sadness, but also deeply moved, had to confess that in those few hours he had lived more than in all the rest of his life, more than is lived in years and days as people ordinarily live” (Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 181).

Not since the flu pandemic of 1918, which took more lives than WWI, has an illness aroused so much anxiety and fear as the COVID-19 pandemic. And yet this global tragedy is also an opportunity for us to understand, perhaps for the first time, how we struggle with death from the moment we come to understand our mortality, even if we spend most of our lives in denial concerning this struggle. Our current crisis provides us, according to Kierkegaard, with an opportunity to reevaluate our lives, to catch up on what we have neglected, to bring order to some of the chaos we may have caused during our lives, to contrive something for those we will eventually leave behind, to live more than in all the rest of our lives, “more than is lived in years and days as people ordinarily live.”

This paper argues that the confrontation with our mortality that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced upon us can, according to Kierkegaard, be a means of powerful spiritual instruction, instruction on what is truly meaningful in existence and how we may live our lives, however long or short they may be, so fully, so completely enfolded in the embrace of Grace that even the specter of death is no longer frightening.

“Pulling Ourselves Together,” delivered at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.

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“The Poet and the Reader”

Kierkegaard’s intellectual gifts and literary talents were vast and humbling to aspiring thinkers and writers. Yet the accounts we have of him from contemporaries paint a picture of a man who was far from arrogant. He was, by those accounts, an affable and sympathetic person. He had a particular fondness for children, was a favorite of his nieces and nephews, and enjoyed talking with people from all walks of life that he would encounter on the streets of Copenhagen.

There’s an intimacy to Kierkegaard’s writing that goes along with his lack of pretension. This is evinced in his frequent references to his “reader” in the singular. This sort of authorial intimacy was captured in the poet Louise Glück’s Nobel lecture. The lecture was published under the title “The Poet and the Reader” in the January 14, 2021 edition of The New York Review of Books. Glück explains there that the poems to which she is most drawn “are poems of intimate selection or collusion, poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution.” 

Kierkegaard also preferred writing with respect to which “the reader himself is to a certain degree productive” (Either-Or, Princeton, p. 110). He clearly had what Glück describes as “a temperament that distrusts public life or sees it as the realm in which generalization obliterates precision, and partial truth replaces candor and charged disclosure.” 

“If one assumes,” writes Kierkegaard

that everyone who reads a book for some contingent reason having nothing to do with the book’s content is not a genuine reader, then there would not be many genuine readers left, even for authors with a large readership, because to whom would it occur in our day to waste an instant on the ludicrous thought that to be a good reader is actually an art, let alone to spend time to become such a reader? This unfortunate situation naturally influences an author, who according to my opinion does well to write after the fashion of Clemens Alexandrinus, in such a way that heretics cannot understand it. (Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, 76.)

Kierkegaard did indeed write in such a way that “heretics” could not understand his writing and that fact has generated incalculable confusion in philosophical and theological circles. It’s not that Kierkegaard’s writing is particularly difficult to understand, it’s that it requires a certain mindset. It required a contribution from the reader: an ear for humor, a suspicion of easy answers and of what Kierkegaard sometimes referred to as “the crowd,” but what we would more likely refer to these days as “group think.” 

More than anything, though, understanding Kierkegaard’s writing requires a tendency to double reflection, which is to say a tendency to measure what one reads against one’s own life and experience, to see if it coheres with that experience, and when the writing in question has a prescriptive, or normative dimension, to measure the extent to which one’s life both validates those prescriptions and conforms to them. 

Kierkegaard wrote for this sort of rare, doubly reflected reader. He explains in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, that he introduced a “formula” in the preface of Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843), “that later was repeated unchanged: ‘It seeks that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader’” (Princeton, p. 9). 

“Those of us who write books,” explains Glück, “presumably wish to reach many. But some poets do not see reaching many in spatial terms, as in the filled auditorium. They see reaching many temporally, sequentially, many over time, into the future, but in some profound way these readers always come singly, one by one.”

That’s how Kierkegaard’s readers come to him, the ones who stay anyway, the genuine readers —one by one.