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Søren Kierkegaard in History

Isaiah Berlin famously commented on Leo Tolstoy’s authorship as being one of “a fox trying to be a hedgehog”—that is, one who saw the infinite value in being about “one thing,” but could not himself be like this because he was constantly attempting to chase many diverse ideas at the same time, attempting to write a complex pluriform of social commentary in a single work.1 On the surface (the outward appearance), Kierkegaard could be accused of the same thing. In fact, Kierkegaard’s pluriformity is so outwardly overwhelming that it seems that one would be hard-pressed to see any kind of big idea behind it. His construction of multiple layers of pseudonymity, genre, and subject matter is so diverse that it makes finding explicit links between them difficult. However, according to Kierkegaard himself, there is indeed unity, one big idea: becoming a Christian.2 This is a hidden unity, and this hiddenness will be the main theme of this paper. Firstly, a brief introduction to Kierkegaard is in order.

The Melancholy Dane

Søren Kierkegaard was brought up in the midst of a bleak home life. In particular his father Michael was the source of much anguish for young Søren, as in his strict pietism he enforced high demands on his children. The guilt that came from Michael cursing God as a poor shepherd boy followed him to his grave. He “continued to be haunted by the suspicion that a curse lay upon his family,”3 seeing evidence for this curse in the death of his first wife, along with five out of his seven children, all in his lifetime.4 This fear seemed to have been passed onto Søren, who, after an “aesthetic” period in his youth, took up his life with determined vigor in the belief that his life would be short.5 He was determined to find a direction for his life beyond his own worldly success, and realized that the mere acquisition of knowledge was not enough:

. . . the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.6

Such thinking is indicative of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity and his critique of his society’s obsession with objectivity. These are key themes that Kierkegaard adopted throughout his authorial task, and in a sense, they became the very “life-view” for which he was looking. He came to name his calling in life to be one that was evangelistic: to reacquaint his society with the truth of the gospel of Christianity, since he perceived that his entire age had lost the understanding of what it meant to be a Christian.7 Armed with a considerable inheritance from his father, it was to this task that Kierkegaard applied himself unreservedly and without worldly constraint.8

Kierkegaard claimed that to be a Christian, a believer must be a “single individual.” “The single individual” is a key concept in the authorship of Kierkegaard. It was the first step in achieving his task of “reintroducing Christianity to Christendom.”9

The single individual—this category has been used only once, its first time in a decisively dialectical way, by Socrates, in order to disintegrate paganism. In Christendom it will be used a second time in the very opposite way, to make people (the Christians) Christians. It is not the missionary’s category with regard to the pagans to whom he proclaims Christianity, but it is the missionary’s category within Christendom itself in order to introduce Christianity into Christendom. When he, the missionary, comes, he will use this category . . .10

Kierkegaard saw himself as the Socrates of Christendom, the “gnat” of his home town of Copenhagen, Denmark, in the first half of the nineteenth century.11 Influenced by his family’s dual involvement with the mainstream Danish state church alongside the fringe anti-institutional Moravian church, Kierkegaard saw his fellow Danes as being oppressed with the illusion of Christendom.12 He believed that his neighbors thought themselves indeed and unquestionably Christian by default, and so would not see themselves in need of Kierkegaard’s evangelistic “task.” Kierkegaard understood this obstacle and took up the illusion of being an aesthetic writer through employing various pseudonyms in order to gain an audience with his neighbors.13 It was by this deception that he was able to be an effective witness, in an attempt to subvert and circumvent the illusion of a Christian identity in his readers.14 Specifically how he was able to accomplish this is a key part of the concern of this book.

Because Kierkegaard understood Christianity to be primarily an inward relation to God, he saw the kind of automatic nominalism in Danish culture and its institutional church as an evil that must be challenged. Such thinking to Kierkegaard was a powerful obstruction that inoculated his neighbors against the gospel which spoke to the individual15—that is, that each person is at all times “directly before God.”16 Kierkegaard sought to upset and disarm the comfortable presuppositions and clichéd understandings of Christianity possessed by the everyday Dane, in an effort to push them into taking responsibility for their own faith and not rely on outward factors such as the faith or the intellectual systems of others. Kierkegaard labeled the oppressive, one-size-fits-all hegemonic system of Danish Christianity, “Christendom.” He spent the final years of his life in a vehement offensive against this religious empire, publishing a series of tracts which were posthumously compiled as Attack Upon Christendom.17

Kierkegaard’s theology was largely in accord with the orthodoxy of the Western church.18 Its distinctive lay in its emphasis on lived life; hence his work is often regarded as the foundation of existentialism. He did not seek to develop a systematic theology that was abstract, exhaustive, and objectively certain (thereby irrelevant to life), but was instead concerned with the lived life of “the single individual.”19 Thus his articulation of the role of a believer (and his definition of a self) was one of continual evolution—that of striving after Christ, who was seen as both the prototype and savior of the Christian.20 Being a Christian was a becoming which necessitated an ongoing balance between many extremes.21 It is for this reason (among others) that Kierkegaard did not focus on developing theology as a comprehensive system, since what mattered was life. For instance, it was less important for him to explain faith as both a gift and a responsibility than it was for him to communicate how faith was taken up and used in the life of a Christian.22

Much of what Kierkegaard was responding to in Copenhagen was his view of the public being dominated and easily swayed by the intellectual fashions of the day. He frequently labeled the phenomenon of this collective tide as “the crowd” in contradistinction to the individual,23 and this evil was directly opposed to the realization of “the single individual.”24 A key feature of Kierkegaard’s thought was the dimension of choice and responsibility, which “the crowd” removed from the individual.25 Kierkegaard understood that this abdication of responsibility could be either intentional or unintentional, and outlines this via his pseudonym Anti-Climacus in Sickness Unto Death.26

In Kierkegaard’s view, the most notable intellectual influence on the Danish public was the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel’s task was so vast that it included a summary of history up to that point, setting forth his contemporary German culture (including German Christianity) as the apogee of human civilization.27 His analysis of the development of philosophy and schools of thought claimed to incorporate all intellectual and cultural shifts into his great “system,” as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus has called it.28 Climacus claims that Hegel had arrogantly drawn a line around the world, reducing life to an innumerable number of cogs in a cosmic machine, leaving no room for freedom, choice, the individual, and therefore for life itself. Hegel carried this out through a dialectical form which worked two opposite concepts (thesis, antithesis) into a synthesis, thus eliminating contradiction.29 Kierkegaard argued that such an approach worked from the assumption that nothing was beyond its grasp, but its fundamental weakness was its own impossibility, since it only survived in the fantastic realm of objectivity and thus had no traction in actual existence. The irony was that Hegel had effectively philosophized himself out of existence, thus creating an impossibility which completely negated his work, for how can such an author see or speak (let alone with any authority) if he himself does not exist?30

In such fashion, Hegel and his followers negated existence for the sake of “pure being” and “pure thinking.”31 Kierkegaard understood these ideas as illusory (and at the very least useless) for a human being. A person’s condition is always constituted by existence in time which is a process that eludes finality (hence Kierkegaard’s emphasis on becoming and striving as opposed to static being).32 So Kierkegaard sought to remove such illusions that enslaved his fellow Danes to untruth in the form of a kind of intellectual mob mentality, and instead sought to re-emphasize the responsibility and spiritual reality of every person as an existing “single individual.” It would not do for him to mimic the systematic and coolly logical form of Hegel (or much of modern scholarship for that matter), for he would just be replacing one illusory system for another (fighting fire with fire)33 and would be at risk of becoming a victim of Hegelian synthesis himself. Instead, he sought to subvert the formal conventions of writing in order to help realize his task of awakening “the single individual” in his reader. He achieved this through hiding himself in his authorship.34

This hiddenness was undertaken in the hope that his reader would, as we presume of Kierkegaard himself, meet God in the hiddenness of her own heart. Therefore, my thesis is this:

It was through Kierkegaard’s understanding of the gospel that his authorship took the form of hiddenness.

The underlying question that has driven me in this research of Kierkegaard and his work is to do with the appropriate relation between form and content: How does the nature of truth affect or impinge on its communication? In particular, how does the Christian claim of Jesus as truth affect a person who attempts to speak truthfully? What does it mean to speak as a Christian? If Christ is the truth, how is a believer to speak (or write) of him? Through examining Kierkegaard’s authorship, I will present him as one who understood this tension and attempted to embody Christian truth in his own authorship.

Although the writing of this book is undertaken in the pretense of demonstrating a level of “mastery” over the subject material (that being the work of Søren Kierkegaard), I will attempt to undertake this work in truth by inverting this expectation, instead demonstrating its mastery over myself and this book. As has been noted most gracefully in the foreword and preface to the recent posthumous publication of Paul Holmer’s work Kierkegaard and the Truth,35 Holmer recognized the existential difficulty in attempting to write about Kierkegaard. Such anguish is indicative of a Kierkegaardian commentator’s faithfulness to Kierkegaard. As one attempting to be Kierkegaard’s reader, and therefore more than this—a penitent before God,36 I myself am wrestling over the writing of this book. So in light of this, I will attempt to communicate Kierkegaard’s form of communication in a way that is likewise “in truth.”

This work is not written in an attempt to summarize Søren Kierkegaard’s life or thought, nor to dissect him as an object of interest on the altar of objective, universal knowing. Rather, it is an attempt to learn from Kierkegaard’s works as they addressed his context and to present him as an example of a Christian communicator. Through demonstrating Kierkegaard’s literary genius on behalf of the gospel, I hope that we may learn how to communicate “in truth.”

Methodology

The beginning is not what one begins with but what one arrives at, and one reaches it by going backward.37

This book will not employ a systematic description or definition of terms and ideas used by Kierkegaard. To do so would be to import a philosophical or academic system that is foreign to his work.38 Instead, as a demonstration of my mastery “over” the “subject matter” of Kierkegaard’s authorship, I will seek to emulate (in the fashion also adopted by Ludwig Wittgenstein)39 Kierkegaard’s tendency to demonstrate a term’s meaning by its use.40 In this way, I will attempt to read Kierkegaard according to his own terms.41 However, in saying this, an outline of my own pre-understandings of the following terms could be helpful:

• “Hiddenness” and its derivatives are being used in this work in a sense similar to Kierkegaard’s use of these words, especially in his concept “hidden inwardness.” These words carry the sense of something being kept from direct observation or understanding.

• “Authorship” is typically in reference to Kierkegaard’s “authorship proper”: those works outlined in Point of View,42 along with the works of Anti-Climacus, which contribute to Kierkegaard’s task.

• “Believer,” “learner,” “reader,” “hearer,” “student,” etc. have been used throughout as interchangeable terms for a person engaging with either Kierkegaard’s works, truth, or a matter presented to them by another.

• “Truth” is largely being used throughout as a reference to essential truth—that is, truth concerning ethics and religion.43

Much of what is written here presumes Christian faith, and Kierkegaard argues that a true depth of knowing Christianity requires the passion of faith. I therefore hope to demonstrate here the importance of an inside reading of Kierkegaard.

The reader will also come to notice the layered and repetitive form of this book. The themes we will explore cannot be easily argued in a linear fashion but must be approached by many different routes.44 This is a common characteristic of Kierkegaard’s work, and I will employ such repetition also. This approach carries the advantage that it fosters a greater understanding in the reader, for by going too quickly we can miss something.45 My book therefore is less a linear argument, and more of an exploration that paints a picture, the parts of which are interdependent and cannot be accurately understood apart from the whole.

Structure

In this work I attempt to pay closer attention to the how of Kierkegaard, rather than the what.46 I therefore explore and emphasize the communication strategies and out-workings of Kierkegaard’s writings, working from what is said in his own explicit articulation of his authorial task in Point of View.47 In order to do this, I touch on many key concepts found throughout the content of the authorship in order to elucidate the overall form of his authorial task. The focus will be on form rather than content, but will proceed through the content in order to get to the form.48

Another way of understanding this is to see Kierkegaard’s authorship as consisting of three layers. The first layer is what is said explicitly (content). The second is how it is said, in terms of the use of pseudonyms or its veronymity along with its literary form,49 in order to elicit a response in the reader—that is, the outward dimension. The third is a deeper how; that which pertains to Kierkegaard himself; the inward dimension. This layer also involves the issue of pseudonyms, along with connections to Kierkegaard’s own life, both literary and otherwise. It is vital to understand Kierkegaard’s authorship as a multifaceted venture in communicating the gospel through being hidden “in the truth.” It is a matter involving not only concepts, but also the embodied relation of such concepts to the reader and the author. In this work we will give primary consideration to Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms in order to come to understand this layering.50

We begin with a brief explication of my thesis statement by way of introducing Kierkegaard’s task, and will propose a christological understanding of “hiddenness” as the basis for the form of his authorship. This will then be the foundation for demonstrating such hiddenness being outworked in the authorship in a multilayered fashion. Three sections correspond to those layers mentioned above, each contributing to a progressively deeper demonstration of Kierkegaard’s hidden authorship:

Part I outlines some key concepts that are explicit throughout the authorship and are important in understanding Kierkegaard’s task. Chief of these are “the single individual” and essential truth, and the concept of hiddenness is discussed throughout.

Part II discusses how the very form of the writing was an attempt to awaken such concepts within the reader herself through indirect communication.51 Here we will particularly focus on how Kierkegaard’s works were designed to impact his reader, looking at how the concepts of “the single individual” and “indirect communication” were outworked in the form of his writing. It is here that we will come to see how understanding Kierkegaard’s authorial form as hidden becomes apparent and useful.

Part III considers Kierkegaard as an example of a Christian communicator and evaluates his authorship against his own critique of Hegel, the author who wrote himself out of existence. This section seeks to address how Kierkegaard overcame the problems inherent in the work of Hegel and his followers through hiding himself. We then discuss Kierkegaard’s concepts of existence-communication and reduplication, and how they can be understood to relate to Kierkegaard himself, as well as how his own explanation of his authorship impinges on his task.

This book will demonstrate the presence of hiddenness throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole, and how this was derived from his understanding of the gospel of Christianity.

My Use of Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous and Signed Works

In this essay I regard Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works as expressing views that he himself often agreed with and found useful as representative of his own words.52 I will give hermeneutical priority to Kierkegaard’s signed works, seeing these as the authoritative works through which to understand his pseudonymous works. I will do this in light of his warning that “in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me.”53 However, we must keep in mind that the goal is not merely to understand Kierkegaard’s view, since this would risk objectivizing his work and reducing it to “a paragraph in the system.”54 Instead we will attempt to engage with his works on their own terms.55

These pseudonymical voices are understood to be various points of view, each carrying an important function (particularly as demonstrations) in the overall task to which Kierkegaard employed them: That is, “to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.”56 This will become clearer as we explore these matters further.

Primary Works Consulted

Because of the limited amount of time rather than the limited scope of my work, it was necessary for me to limit the number of works written by Kierkegaard with which I engaged. In this work, I have found it crucial first to consult the collection of Kierkegaard’s direct works on his authorship compiled in Point of View.57 I will also assume this veronymous,58 posthumous work as the hermeneutical key for understanding the strategies employed in his authorship.59

From there I have sought to include a range of Kierkegaard’s books from his own analysis of what he understood to be his “authorship proper.”60 These include, from the first division (aesthetic writing): Fear and Trembling,61 Philosophical Fragments,62 and portions of Either/Or,63 additionally I examine a limited selection of the concurrent Upbuilding Discourses which accompanied such works.64 Concluding Unscientific Postscript65 was consulted as the bridge between the aesthetic and religious works, and from the third division (“only religious writing”), Works of Love,66 as well as a selection of other Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and Christian Discourses.67 Furthermore I have also consulted both Practice in Christianity68 and The Sickness Unto Death,69 which were written after “The Point of View for My Work as an Author” and therefore not included in Kierkegaard’s divisions above, but can be understood to fit with the religious works. I have also engaged with portions of Concept of Irony70 and various entries from his Journals71 as other direct sources for understanding Kierkegaard’s authorship. References to other works by Kierkegaard are largely derived through secondary sources, and will be referenced accordingly.

My Use of Personal Pronouns in Relation to God

Regretfully, there is no unisex personal pronoun in the English language by which I can refer to God that retains the warmth and gravity of personhood. Thus, I will use masculine pronouns in referring to God where I feel that it would be too inappropriate to use the cold and detached “God” or “Godself,” instead opting for “him” or “himself.” I have simply chosen the masculine for the sake of my own preferred language in speaking of and to God without intending to offend. I hope that my reader will afford to me the goodwill of which Joakim Garff speaks.72

1. Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” 436–98.

2. Kierkegaard, “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,” 23; Holmer’s emphasis of “subjectivity” over “objectivity” and the reworking of both is the central theme of the complex and varied authorship is complementary to my view, since they are effectually the same issue. See his On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 24–26, and ibid., 57: “Almost all of Kierkegaard’s writings are both an occasion for, as well as an illustration and kind of defense of the thesis that ‘truth is subjectivity.’”

3. Barrett, Kierkegaard, 8.

4. Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 7–8.

5. Ibid., 8–10; Barrett, Kierkegaard, 12.

6. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 5/5100, 1 A 75, August 1, 1835, emphasis author’s own.

7. This is most clearly the case in Kierkegaard, The Point of View; see also Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, 113–14 etc.

8. “Few men have been motivated by such evangelical zeal as Kierkegaard” (Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 16).

9. See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 6/6271, IX A 390, n.d., 1848; cited in Evans, Kierkegaard, 2 n. 2; also Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 36.

10. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 123–24, emphasis author’s own.

11. Ibid., 24 and the translator’s footnote on 314–15.

12. Barrett, Kierkegaard, 9–10.

13. “Aesthetic” being that which pertains to the senses, so an “aesthetic author” is one who resembles a poet, and writes beautifully and popularly for the sake of moving readers.

14. “. . . Thus in a certain sense I began my activity as an author with a falsum [deception] or with a pia fraus [pious fraud]. The situation is that in so-called established Christendom people are so fixed in the fancy that they are Christians that if they are to be made aware at all many an art will have to be employed. If someone who otherwise does not have a reputation of being an author begins right off as a Christian author, he will not get a hearing from his contemporaries. They are immediately on their guard, saying, ‘That’s not for us’ etc.” (Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 6/6205, IX A 171, n.d., 1848; cited in Kierkegaard, Point of View, 161–62).

15. “. . . when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual” (Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 31).

16. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 111.

17. Kierkegaard, Attack.

18. Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, esp. 166; see also Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 142–43.

19. E.g., the concept of “pure thinking” in relation to essential truth: Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 310–11, etc.

20. Ibid., 80.

21. Kierkegaard, Sickness.

22. “Kierkegaard’s overriding interest in what it means to be a Christian means that we do not find in him anything remotely resembling a systematic presentation of Christian doctrine” (Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 3).

23. Holmer comments on the theology of Kierkegaard’s day: that “the homogeneity becomes almost overpowering,” i.e., a crowd mentality (On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 38).

24. “[A] crowd . . . is untruth, since a crowd either makes for impenitence and irresponsibility altogether, or for the single individual it at least weakens responsibility by reducing the responsibility to a fraction. See, there was no individual soldier who dared to lay hands on Caius Marius . . . [but a] crowd is an abstraction, which does not have hands . . .” (Kierkegaard, Point of View, 107–8).

25. Crabtree and Gutenberg College, Kierkegaard.

26. See 1.2: “The Single Individual: A Dialectic of Being” below.

27. Crabtree and Gutenberg College, Kierkegaard.

28. In particular, see Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

29. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 32.

30. See especially Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 301–18. For instance: “But abstraction does not care about whether a particular existing human being is immortal, and just that is the difficulty. It is disinterested, but the difficulty of existence is the existing person’s interest, and the existing person is infinitely interested in existing. Thus abstract thinking helps me with my immortality by killing me as a particular existing individual and then making me immortal and therefore helps somewhat as in Holberg the doctor took the patient’s life with his medicine—but also drove out the fever” (ibid., 302); “pure thinking, in mystical suspension and with no relation to an existing person, explains everything within itself but not itself . . .” (ibid., 313); “But for an existing person pure thinking is a chimera when the truth is supposed to be the truth in which to exist” (ibid., 310); “To think existence sub specie aeterni and in abstraction is essentially to annul it, and the merit of it resembles the much-heralded merit of canceling the principle of contradiction” (ibid., 308).

31. Ibid., 304, 308.

32. For instance, see Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 205–7.

33. “Within the realm of pure thinking many, many objections can perhaps be made against Hegelianism, but that leaves everything essentially unchanged” (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 309–10).

34. Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel is very complicated and my brief treatment here is no doubt incomplete. My particular interest here restricts me to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Hegel and his followers, and then how he counteracts or circumvents what he sees as the weaknesses of Hegel’s approach. I have attempted to refrain from making judgments as to the fairness of Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel (or “Danish Hegelians”), and Hegel’s influence on Kierkegaard (not an exclusively negative one) is worth investigating. However, this is beyond the scope of this work. Those interested should consult the influential book: Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations; and also the following: Aumann, “Kierkegaard’s Case,” 221–48.

35. By Stanley Hauerwas, David J. Gouwens, and Lee C. Barrett III in Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ix–xxii.

36. As Kierkegaard named himself. See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 62.

37. Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, 184.

38. See Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 3; and Barrett, Kierkegaard, 5.

39. See especially Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; Creegan, Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard.

40. See also Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology, 3.

41. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 42.

42. See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 29 and its accompanying footnote by Kierkegaard and endnote by the translators.

43. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 199 and its footnote.

44. C. Stephen Evans also shares this difficulty due to the interrelation of many of Kierkegaard’s concepts, though I would not go as far as he does in linking Kierkegaard’s concepts of “indirect communication,” the “spheres of existence,” “subjectivity” and his pseudonymity. I would argue that the “spheres” in particular are not as central in Kierkegaard’s thought, since “subjectivity” in the God-relationship is primary. The “spheres” are helpful in elucidating such subjectivity under God, but are not necessary for “subjectivity” to be used in an effort to understand Kierkegaard’s work. See Evans, Kierkegaard’s Fragments and Postscript, 6.

45. Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs,” 94 n. 1.

46. See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 3/3684, X3 A 431, n.d., 1850; and Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 202.

47. Ironically, this is similar to Climacus’ confession as to how he is “reviewing” the other pseudonymous works. See Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 283.

48. As we will find throughout, though, such a dichotomy between form and content is a false one, and is used here only as a preliminary understanding in order to eventually make clear the error of such an understanding.

49. Such as the pathetic (in the sense of “pathos,” or passion) tone, argumentative structure, etc.

50. This leaves unexplored how exactly this takes place in the more detailed factors regarding literary form. I have unfortunately no space to give enough attention to factors such as the use of genre, argumentative styles, formatting, etc. in this work. I will instead restrict my discussion to Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms.

51. In this book, I will use the feminine singular in reference to “the ideal reader.” It is singular in keeping with Kierkegaard’s concept of “the single individual,” and feminine for the sake of the link to Regine Olsen. See Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 6/6388, X1 A 266, n.d., 1849. See also section 3.3: “That Single Individual, My Reader” in McDonald, “Kierkegaard, Søren.” It can also be seen to be in keeping with the New Testament use of the feminine in regard to the Christian church (e.g., Eph 5:25).

52. This is made possible through the correlation between the themes in the pseudonymous and veronymous works, including the journals, as is common practice amongst Kierkegaardian scholarship.

53. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 626.

54. Ibid.; see also Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker, 1.

55. I will discuss this in my critique of “psychoanalytic interpretations” of Kierkegaard in 3.1 below.

56. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 23.

57. Kierkegaard, Point of View.

58. I am following Joel Rasmussen in his use of “veronymous” in reference to Søren Kierkegaard’s signed works. See Rasmussen, Between Irony and Witness, 9; he states here that he gained the term from Strawser, Both/And.

59. I will address Joakim Garff’s critiques on the historical reliability of this work further below (“The Eyes of Argus,” 75–102).

60. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 29 n.

61. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.

62. In the body of the text and in the footnotes I will refer to the better known title “Philosophical Fragments,” and will reference the version translated by M. G. Piety, who chose to translate the title “Philosophical Crumbs.” Kierkegaard, “Philosophical Crumbs.”

63. Kierkegaard, Either/Or.

64. Chapters 1–4 and 11–12 compiled by George Pattison in Spiritual Writings were originally from 1833–34’s Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Chapter 10 of this work was originally published as The Lily of the Field and the Bird under Heaven in 1849 to accompany the second edition of Either/Or.

65. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

66. Kierkegaard, Works of Love.

67. Kierkegaard, Spiritual Writings, chapters 5–7 were originally from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits of 1847, chapters 8–9 were originally from Christian Discourses of 1848, chapter 13 was from 1850’s An Upbuilding Discourse, chapter 14 was from 1849’s The High Priest, the Tax Collector, and the Sinful Woman, and chapters 15–6 were originally from Two Upbuilding Discourses in 1851. Also Kierkegaard, “Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,” 418–26. All of these works appear to have been stand-alone religious works, rather than accompaniments for the aesthetic works.

68. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity.

69. Kierkegaard, Sickness.

70. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony; This work also lies outside the above list since it was his university thesis, and not part of his “authorship proper.” See Kierkegaard, Point of View, 315 n. 9.

71. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers.

72. See 2.3 below.