Kierkegaard’s amphibolous conjunction of joy and sorrow and his literary theory

Kierkegaard’s literary theory is above all a theory of communication, and the primarily religious author Kierkegaard has developed a complicated theory regarding communication the task of which consists in “making” the hearer “aware of the religious”, and, in fact, to make of him a genuine Christian believer. To achieve this goal Kierkegaard uses the Christian traditional conjunction of spes et timor Dei, but he formalizes it. This formalization is accomplished, first, by taking the theological hope (spes) as a label for all passions that somehow imply joy as liking for something (“sympathy”, attraction), while theological fear (timor Dei) is taken as the corresponding label for all passions that somehow mean sorrow as dislike of something (“antipathy”, repulsion); the formalization is accomplished, second, by Kierkegaard’s reinterpretation of the conjunction “hope and fear” as a self-referential structure: hope concerns oneself insofar as it is related to one’s own salvation, while fear concerns oneself again insofar as it is related to one’s own condemnation. This self-referentiality is then maintained as the primary issue of the formalized structure “liking and disliking”. In this way Kierkegaard attains the formula for the passional concern with oneself, and this is at once the formula or structure of “existence”. In fact, a very important feature of the formalized structure lies in its potential to represent different intensities and qualities of passions and, thus the different “stadia” or “spheres of existence”. Seen from the literary theory, Kierkegaard systematically applies the aforementioned structure to obtain a whole series of personae, e.g. the “ironist”, the