John the Baptist as exemplar for the understanding: Reading Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments alongside an upbuilding discourse

Abstract

In the appendix to Chapter 3 of Philosophical Fragments, Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus describes a fictional encounter between personified versions of the understanding and the paradox. Although Climacus provides an extensive account of the unhappy result of this meeting, what he calls offence, he offers little by way of concrete description concerning the alternative to offence, namely, the happy meeting that leads towards faith. My purpose in this paper is to fill out in greater depth the happy meeting in Philosophical Fragments, and I do so by drawing on the concrete image of John the Baptist and his relation to the Messiah that Kierkegaard develops in his 1844 discourse ‘He Must Increase; I Must Decrease’. I argue that John, with his disposition of humble self-denial and his task of preparation, can serve as an exemplar for the understanding in its relation to the paradox. Not only does this reading provide us with a more concrete picture of the happy meeting that is compatible with Climacus’s own account but, as I suggest in the concluding section, it also affords us a manner by which to conceive the relationship between faith and reason in Kierkegaard that need not lead to the conclusions of the irrationalist or radical fideist interpretations.