「判定基準」から何が導き出されるのか? : キェルケゴール『アズラーについての書』をめぐって

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In the manuscripts entitled The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard dealt with the case of Adolph Adler, a Danish pastor, who had claimed to have had a revelation. Doing so, Kierkegaard paid a lot of attention to the fact that Adler's claims as a whole lacked internal consistency demanded of them. I will, in this paper, make clear what conclusions Kierkegaard was able to draw out from this fact, which is often regarded as one of the most conclusive "criteria" he used to determine whether someone's claims of revelation are justified or not. In chapter 3 of these manuscripts, Kierkegaard required that the claims concerning religious authority and revelation should be internally consistent, because they should be claimed in accordance with the Christian "category", the specially religious from of life. But from the fact that Adler's claims as a whole lacked such consistency, Kierkegaard was only able to arrive at the conclusion that we have no reason enough to think that Adler had a revelation nor to think that he didn't. If no other premise is added, then we have to suspend judgment with regard to Adler's claims. After saying so, in chapter 4, Kierkegaard showed an explanatory hypothesis that when a Hegelian has an individually subjective religious experience, he tends to call it (away from the Christian use of words) a "revelation". Not until the accepted this hypothesis could Kierkegaard arrive, by applying the "criteria", at the conclusion that Adler didn't have a revelation.