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1 results

  • 3 - Johannes Climacus' revocation

  • Edited by Rick Anthony Furtak, Colorado College
  • Book:
    Kierkegaard's 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript'
    Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    29 July 2010, pp 45-63

  • Summary

    The revocation can easily be confused with a phenomenon that Johannes Climacus and Søren Kierkegaard both share with many another writer with something to impart. Several commentators have, quite to the contrary, understood humor to be the key to the revocation. An alternative explanation of the revocation is that what Climacus says about absurdity and the paradox is itself absurd, that is to say nonsensical. If that were literally the case, there would be no need to appeal to some later disregard on Kierkegaard's part of Climacus' "exaggerated" claims; Postscript could be considered nonsensical on the basis of its own notions of what makes sense. This brings Climacus within analogical range of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ladder metaphor. Wittgenstein's Tractatus famously describes its own core sentences as "nonsensical". Climacus calls humor a confinium and he portrays it as a special kind of vantage-point.