Linguistic aspect of Søren Kierkegaard’s “Indirect communication” with continual reference to romantic irony

Abstract

The subject of this article is the language of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The article presents a classification (based on the material of the treatise Repetition) of rhetorical devices specific for this author. This classification relies on the thesis that Romanticism was the cultural and historical context of Kierkegaard’s background which influenced his language and style, and that Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication became in a certain sense a legacy of romantic irony defined by Friedrich Schlegel as “the form of paradox”. Categorizing Kierkegaard as a descendant of Romanticism makes it possible to classify his main stylistic techniques under the term “contradiction”, which means a conscious and even intentional use of different stylistic and conceptual oppositions in the collision of which the author’s thought is revealed. Three types of contradictions can be distinguished in the text of Repetition. (1) The first one is intertextual contradiction between two works. Publishing his books under different pseudonyms, Kierkegaard creates such a situation as though two authors argue with each other. (2) The second one is conceptual contradiction within one work. Kierkegaard confronts in the treatise two opposite characters and two opposite concepts of repetition. (3) And the last type of contradiction are linguistic contradictions consisting of all the stylistic devices that Kierkegaard uses to activate his method of indirect communication and which can be defined as “wordplay” in the most general sense: as playful and witty use of words. Kierkegaard uses puns, different figures of repetition and parallelism, and these stylistic devices take form of contradiction in order to express the fundamental contradictory of life in an ironic and witty form. In such a “struggle” of oppositions, not only an ironic intonation is created, but also the meaning of concepts is revealed in their true-life fullness.