The Humanity of Faith: Kierkegaard’s Secularization of Christianity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

It is a brilliantly written and, therefore, highly engaging paper that contributes a great deal to the scholarship on Kierkegaard. I would like to congratulate the Author on her/his profound understanding of the matter and unambiguous presentation of a compelling argument. The Author (already in the abstract and even more precisely in the introduction) specifies the research problem, outlines the status quaestionis and proposes his solution. The Author then conducts a convincing demonstration of her/his argument, which s/he structures appropriately into paragraphs and sections. A precise and comprehensively conducted conclusion also deserves acknowledgement. 

 

Although the article does not represent a breakthrough in the scholarship on Kierkegaard and does not bring much new, it does present a well-grounded in the source material study of his thought and therefore deserves attention and appreciation.

 

The only thing that could be pointed out is the Author's tendency to frame parts of the argument in the first person. It is advisable to avoid such practices in academic writing, as such phrasing gives the impression that the Author is expressing personal opinions. Meanwhile, a scholarly paper is not a place to express personal preferences but rather to formulate arguments based on rational reasoning. The author obviously does the latter, so I have no objections here, but only make a small suggestion. 

 

The article has no major linguistic or formal errors, so no significant corrections are necessary.

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer

I want to thank you for an acute and generous review. I am grateful for the time and effort that you have spent on the argument that I have tried to articulate in this manuscript.

I completely agree with you objection to my tendency to frame my argument in the first person. It is a habit that I struggle with, and which I try to avoid or at least minimize. I have tried to change the first person into third in the text, but I aborted this attempt, since it proved impossible without writing a new paper. I hope that you can accept this choice. I truly appreciate that you have made me aware of this bad habit, and I have taken your advice to heart. I will do my best to avoid first person formulations in my future work.

Thank you once again for your careful review.

Sincerely

The author

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article provides a serious engagement with issues that are found at – and that form – the very core of Kierkegaard’s (and Kant’s) authorship. The author demonstrates a wonderful facility to capture complex concepts of humanity, faith, reason, ethics, the secular, and the religious in simple, yet arresting terms. At times, the author puts her (his, their) formulations in philosophical terms; at other times, they put them in exegetical or more common, ordinary terms. At all times, however, the author is committed to doing their best to capture, in their own writing, the dialectical tension that is central to these concepts and that Kierkegaard makes central to his presentation of them. For example, the author has full command of the dialectic between the individual and the whole that is at play in the work of becoming the self one is – in one’s relationships with others – in and through the recognition of the despair of mis-relationship and misfortune, which the author articulates, in summarizing a number of points she’s introduced, through Kierkegaard, on pg. 12: “We are similar to each other in and through the temporal sinfulness that makes us individuals, our radically different beings, and this human similarity demands an eternal equality that we can only achieve through love that is more than human, namely the eternal good of neighborly love[, to which] Kierkegaard dedicates one of his major works, [ ] Works of Love.” (I include a minor edit as a suggestion in this sentence, to avoid the dangling participle and the repetition of ‘namely.’)

The author’s thesis is thoughtful and nuanced (and sustained throughout the article), arguing that, as they put it on pg. 12, “The secularizing drive of Kierkegaard’s existential approach is an intensification of the Enlightenment insistence on human autonomy that articulates the subjective challenges of human self-determination to show how ‘religious categories’ such as faith, sin, salvation find their existential reality in our becoming subjective, that is, becoming the individual self that each of us is.” This thesis enables the reader to probe, along with the author, both the strengths and the limitations of Kant’s project and presentation without relegating Kant to the caricature that he becomes when he and his project are wrongly placed in opposition to the existential philosophy (theology) of Kierkegaard. It is this thesis – the author’s overall argument – that enables her to explore and to take steps toward exposing the relationship between reason and faith and so between the secular and the religious. And the author formulates their thesis in a number of ways that include these terms and that truly help the reader to understand what, from their point of view, constitutes both the difference and the relationship between the critical, Enlightenment philosophy of Kant and the “existential dialectics” (the concerns) of Kierkegaard. I would also add that the author provides helpful and fruitful notes on Danish terms that Kierkegaard uses and demonstrates a wide knowledge of the works of both authors.

Finally, let me note that I was touched, moved, inspired, and challenged by a number of the author’s formulations. (I like the author’s style of writing, lapsing, at times, into more colloquial, friendly, or imaginative language that – because it is couched in the midst of philosophical and academic terms of discourse – does not detract from but adds variety and richness to one’s understanding of the material.) One of these brilliant formulations is the following: “I am not merely who I think I am, nor can I simply become who I want to be” (p. 6) precisely because my self is not mine alone (if I may paraphrase what follows here on pg. 6).

I have only two notes to share with the author (thoughts that occurred to me as I was reading the paper), which are meant not as criticisms of the author’s work but as food for thought:

1.      1. I find your insistence that “We need the good to live with ourselves” or that we “experience the need to believe in the good in an otherwise disenchanted and unjust world” truly upbuilding, in the spirit of Kierkegaard (and Kant). As you write, “How can we live in a world like this without believing that our reasonable appraisal of the world and human beings is mistaken, and that there is another and life-giving meaning along with the inevitable suffering that haunts and all too often destroy[s] human life.” (11) I wondered what you thought this other “life-giving” meaning was. It is clear from your astute commentary on “sin” (despair) that you are not suggesting that we are mistaken (or that it is unreasonable) to identify and to call out the injustices of the world, or that it is unreasonable to be deeply wounded (pained) by the misfortune that one experiences or witnesses others experience over the course of life. For, as follows from and within your presentation, it is precisely the principles by which faith and reason stand that reveal these injustices (as injustices) and these misfortunes (as misfortunes). In other words, it is precisely our commitment to this other, life-giving (life-affirming) meaning that paradoxically exposes for us the suffering in the world. But I would have been curious how you would have articulated what this “eternal good” is that we do not know, see, or understand, as you point out. That is, I would have been curious about this until I reached pg. 12 when you connect the “constitutive ambiguity” of being human (our subjectivity in relationship with others who are also subjects) with love and critically distinguish faith from the yearning for “another world” or a dreamworld. It seems to me to follow then, as an implication here, that what we need to believe is that what we do will be meaningful for others whom we do not know, whom we do not see, and whom we do not understand—and whom we will never know, see, or understand. (I wonder if the fact that your essay has become meaningful for me, this reader, is the practical proof of the existence of this “eternal good” that you mention.)

2.      2. At times, I wondered how a reader who didn’t share your depth of understanding of Kierkegaard might follow some of your moves and arguments here (for example, on the transformation of “ethics”). As I mentioned above, however, this is not a criticism: rather, I would merely encourage you to continue to think about the capacity of your reader. How can you show them how they could master the material for themselves? (Still, I acknowledge that this is an essay/short article and that this might not be the job of an essay but that of the teacher in a classroom.)

      In sum, the true value of this paper is that it provides readers interested in studying Kant and Kierkegaard with notes that will aid them as they return to the eternal task of interpreting these difficult works. In addition, the article promises to add to the conversation on the relationship between Kant and Kierkegaard’s works by disrupting some of the conventional ways in which this relationship has been understood. In short, I strongly recommend this paper for publication.

Below I include a list of some very minor typos I found (minor edits easily changed):

-        Line 21, delete the “of” after “Kantian” in the abstract

-        Line 36, change “This” to “The” at the start of the paragraph

-        Line 96, delete “that we can only make sense of”

-        Line 112, change “an” to “a” before “Kantian”

-        Line 128, add an “it”: “We need to make sense of it through…”

-        Line 173, add an “as” before “he puts it himself”

-        Line 179, cut “is the religious” at the end of the sentence

-        Line 189, change “identity” to “identify”

-        Line 255, cut the “in” before “at the conclusion”

-        Line 272, potential addition (at the discretion of the author): “And vice versa, I am not simply who I am or who I think I am becoming.”

-        Line 299, “appropriates,” add the “s”

-        Line 394, change “possibly” to “possible” and “at less” to “at least”

-        Line 408, delete the “s” in “shares”

-        Line 445, add “s” to first word “wants”

-        Line 450, delete “concept of”

-        Line 509, change “simply” to “simple”

-        Line 518, add a comma after ‘a second ethics,’

-        Line 529, change “destroy” to “destroys”

-        Line 549, delete a “true”

-        Line 557-58, change “experiencing” to “experience”

-        Line 568, add “s” to “destroys”

-        Line 659, add a “to” before “instantiate”

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer

I want to thank you for a careful and generous reading of my paper. I am deeply grateful for the time and effort that you have spent on my argument. I have rarely, if ever, received a more attentive and intellectually acute reading of a manuscript of mine. I want to express my admiration for the unique combination ofprofessional skill and human warmth that charcaterize your review. I am especially impressed (and touched) by your first note about "the eternal good". You are completely right in pointing out my reluctance to articulate what "the eternal good" consists in. It is a problem that I have struggled with for many years in my work with Kant and Kierkegaard. I am leery about defining or even describing it in fear of sliding into moralism or dogmatism. I am therefore all the more surprised and grateful for your argument that the fact that the text became meaningful for you might very well be that "eternal good". This is, in my opinion, a very strong argument that I will take with me in my future work. Regarding your second note, I agree that the weakness of my argument is its entangled character that I have yet not managed to disentagle or clarify. Your brilliant and generous review has given me inspiration and energy for trying to find less convoluted ways of stating my argument. Thank you also for your attention to the several typos and mistakes. They have all been corrected.

Thank you so much once again for your review, which has also taught me to be a better reviewer myself.

Sincerely

The author