Kierkegaard and 'The Leap of Faith" Alastair McKinnon
any literate people assume that Kierkegaard is the author of the phrase “leap of faith”1, some scholars appear to regard it as a fair summary of his thought and many though not all as evidence of his “irrationalism.” In this brief study I show that this phrase does not occur even once in his published wri tings, that the number of co-occurrences of the relevant words and their variants in these writings is very much smaller than one would expect and that the lists of words most closely asso ciated with these two words contain at most a single word in common. In short, I show that Kierkegaard never used this phrase and that, given all we now know about his use of these words, that it is almost unthinkable that he should have done so. Finally, and very briefly, I show that this phrase is incohe rent and meaningless, speculate about its possible origins, sug gest some areas for further study and note the significance of these findings for the interpretation of his thought.
M
believe and have been assured that the only possible counterpart of “leap of faith” is “Troens Spring” and that I there is no other way of expressing this phrase in the Danish language. I therefore begin by noting that this phrase does not occur even once in Kierkegaard’s published writings. Of course it is extremely difficult for even the most careful reader to establish the absence of a word or phrase in any large corpus but it is an easy and simple matter to have a computer do so. In fact I have searched my own corrected machine read able version of the third edition of Kierkegaard’s Samlede Vaerker and can report that this phrase simply does not occur in any of the thirty five works in that edition. More precisely, I can report that these works do not contain a single instance of Tro ens Spring or, indeed, of any expression consisting of variants of these words. This seems to me to settle this particular question quite decisively and I add only that it illustrates one obvious