Historical Introduction
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
Either/Or was published pseudonymously February 20, 1843. Two Upbuilding Discourses was published under Kierkegaard’s name May 16, 1843. For seven years thereafter, two series of writings continued, pseudonymous works and signed works.1 Of the eight pseudonymous and seven signed books published (in editions of 250 to 525) by 1846, only Either/Or was sold out by 1849.2 The publisher, Carl Andreas Reitzel, wanted to print a second edition in 1847, and another publisher, Philip Gerson Philipsen, was also very interested.3 On May 14, 1849, over three years after Either/Or had gone out of print, Reitzel published the second edition.
Usually a writer welcomes subsequent editions of a work, and preferably without much delay. To Kierkegaard, however, it was of crucial importance to maintain the distinction between the two parallel series of pseudonymous (esthetic) works and signed (ethical-religious) works, those offered, as he said, with the left hand and those offered with the right,4 and at the same time to document the dialectical coherence of the authorship as a whole. In 1848 he had maintained the two parallel series by publishing The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, by Inter et Inter (in Fædrelandet, July 24–27),5 and Christian Discourses (April 26), and now he was faced again with the task of keeping the two series parallel.
It will never do to let the second edition of Either/Or be published without something accompanying it. Somehow the accent must be that I have made up my mind about being a religious author.
To be sure, my seeking an ecclesiastical post also stresses this, but it can be interpreted as something that came later.…
But the second edition of Either/Or is a critical point (as I did in fact regard it originally and wrote “The Point of View” to be published simultaneously with it and otherwise would scarcely have been in earnest about publishing the second edition)—it will never come again. If this opportunity is not utilized, everything I have written, viewed as a totality, will be dragged down mainly into the esthetic.6
This time, however, the task was agonizingly complicated by protracted reflection on indirect communication (pseudonymity) and direct communication and by a concern for his readers’ understanding of his authorship as a whole, issues that impinged on his need to decide what should be done with all the writings of 1848–49 that lay finished, “the most valuable I have produced.”7 The thought of imminent death gave special urgency to these issues.8
Kierkegaard’s views on both indirect and direct communication were predicated on his conception of his task. “It is Christianity that I have presented and still want to present; to this every hour of my day has been and is directed.”9 With the Socratic method of indirection, he used a pseudonymous, esthetic approach because of what he regarded as the illusion of “Christendom.”
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.
I began as an estheticist—and then, although approaching the religious with perhaps uncustomary alacrity, I denied being a Christian etc.10
Within an illusion, the maieutic is the maximum,11 and it also leaves the reader alone with the work, free from extraneous interest in the author’s personality and personal life.12
Although indirect communication is not inferior to direct communication, it has limits defined by the communicator and the nature of the communication. There is “something daimonic—but not necessarily in the bad sense—about it, as, for example, with Socrates.”13 Socratic indirection presupposed that the learner was in possession of the truth and needed only to be prompted to recollection, but with regard to Christianity the method is properly only provisional.
Yet the communication of the essentially Christian must end finally in “witnessing.” The maieutic cannot be the final form, because, Christianly understood, the truth does not lie in the subject (as Socrates understood it), but in a revelation that must be proclaimed.
It is very proper that the maieutic be used in Christendom, simply because the majority actually live in the fancy that they are Christians. But since Christianity still is Christianity, the one who uses the maieutic must become a witness.
Ultimately the user of the maieutic will be unable to bear the responsibility, since the maieutic approach still remains rooted in human sagacity, however sanctified and dedicated in fear and trembling this may be. God becomes too powerful for the maieutic practitioner and then he is a witness, different from the direct witness only in what he has gone through to become a witness.14
In addition to acknowledging that the requirement of witness (direct communication) is intrinsic to Christianity, Kierkegaard had a concern for the eventual interpretation of the authorship as a whole. His situation in Copenhagen was scarcely encouraging; “I am regarded as a kind of Englishman, a half-mad eccentric, with whom we jolly well all, society people and street urchins, think to have their fun.”15
He also realized that the “poetical” works of the pseudonymous writers lent themselves to myriad uses and misuses.
Anyone with just a fragment of common sense will perceive that it would be ludicrously confusing to attribute to me everything the poetized personalities say. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, I have expressly urged once and for all that anyone who wants to quote something from the pseudonyms will not attribute the quotation to me (see my postscript to Concluding Postscript). It is easy to see that anyone wanting to have a literary lark merely needs to take some quotations higgledy-piggledy from “The Seducer,” then from Johannes Climacus, then from me, etc., print them together as if they were all my words, show how they contradict each other, and create a very chaotic impression, as if the author were a kind of lunatic. Hurrah! That can be done. In my opinion anyone who exploits the poetic in me by quoting the writings in a confusing way is more or less either a charlatan or a literary toper.16
The felt need to communicate directly his conception of the entire authorship was heightened by his own deepened understanding of the inner coherence of the whole. The task had been to present “one idea, this continuity from Either/Or to Anti-Climacus, the idea of religiousness in reflection.”17 The fulfilling of this task was “also my religious upbringing and development,” and therefore what he could now say about the authorship was a “little by little subsequently acquired understanding” expressive of his nature, “which essentially is reflection and therefore never proclaims, prophesies, but essentially understands itself first in what has gone before, in what has been carried out.”18
Having decided that something about the authorship as a whole should be said directly, Kierkegaard considered at length what it should be and how it should be done. In 1847 he made a brief beginning on a defense [apologie], but he quickly dropped it because his accusers were gossip and rumors and because what would please the elite would displease the commoners and vice versa.19 Then he contemplated giving “a little series of lectures on the organizing theme throughout my entire work as an author,” and in a draft invitation warned that the auditors, limited to twenty, would find it to be hard work, at times boring, and, if they understood, their lives would be made more difficult.20 In January 1848, he wrote a proposal for a series of small quarterly publications on a subscription basis,21 but this idea, like the others, was soon abandoned.
The remaining possibility was a publication to accompany the second edition of Either/Or, but this involved the question of what it should be, a question with a number of possible answers. The first one was to publish “The Point of View for My Work as an Author,”22 “as good as finished” in November 1848.23 But of all the things that in 1849 were ready for publication, “The Point of View for My Work as an Author” worried him the most.24 Did it say too much about him so that he would appear as an extraordinary?25 With his sense of guidance in the whole complex authorship, did he even have the right to use “I” in the book?26 Was the idea of publishing it the fruit of melancholy impatience, as if he were to die tomorrow or had decided to stop writing? Would it be arbitrariness on his part to enter into conflict because of the publication?27 The decision was simply that it could not be published: “And what melancholy impatience! It was written historically after a whole intermediate series of writings, which must be published first if there is to be any question at all of publishing it while I am alive.”28
But the decision to postpone publication of “Point of View” was flawed: “... now for the first time I understand and comprehend the whole ... if I do not do it myself, there is no one who can present it, because no one knows it the way I do. No one can explain the structure of the whole as I can.”29
Therefore the old way was considered as a middle way: to use a pseudonym. A journal entry from early 1849 begins with: “‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author’ must not be published, no, no!”30 and at the end it reads: “The book itself is true and in my opinion masterly. But a book like that can be published only after my death.” The penultimate conclusion was that a pseudonym (“the poet Johannes de Silentio”) must be used, but that in itself demonstrated the soundness of the opening line of the entry, because then it would no longer be the same book, since “the point of it was my personal story.”
After abandoning the idea of a Johannes de Silentio publication, Kierkegaard once again, ten months later in November, entertained the idea of publishing “Point of View” under a pseudonym, A-O, wrote an A-O preface, and discussed the merits of this ingenious idea.31 Kierkegaard’s wrestling with the yes-and-no of publishing anything direct about the authorship is again illustrated by another entry from the same month. “But it is not necessary to publish them [“Point of View,” “Armed Neutrality,” “A Note” (“The Accounting”),32 and “Three Notes”33] pseudonymously; it is not even right to do so, inasmuch as the matter does not become sufficiently simple.”34
For Kierkegaard, however, the publication of “Point of View” was not the only subject of persistent pondering. What should be done about the publication of all the other writings of 1848 and early 1849, “the most valuable I have produced”?35 There were not only the additional writings on his authorship, “Three Notes,” “A Note,” and “Armed Neutrality,” but also “The Sickness unto Death,” “Practice in Christianity,” and a variety of other pieces, including versions of “The Book on Adler.”36
The question is: When should all the latest books be published! Again I cannot adequately thank God that I have finished them, and if I had not had the tension with the addition of new pains I perhaps would never have completed them, because once I have come out of the momentum of writing, I never get into it again in the same way. This time I succeeded, and for me it is enough that they exist, finished in fair copy, containing the completion and the entire structure of the whole, going as far as I in fact could go in my attempt to introduce Christianity into Christendom—but, please note, “poetically, without authority,” for, as I have always maintained, I am no apostle or the like; I am a poetic-dialectical genius, personally and religiously a penitent.
But when should they be published? If I publish them while I am still in the position of heterogeneity maintained up till now—that is, independent, free, unrestricted, floating—if I publish them while still maintaining this mode of life, all the extremely exact dialectical categories and determinations in the books will be of little help in defending myself against unhappy confusions, and I will nevertheless be confused with such a one.
But if I had gotten myself a position in the established order first of all, then my life would be a hindrance to a misunderstanding like that. But if I had held such a position I would not have written the books; of that I am sincerely convinced, and it is really easy to understand. But now it is done and the delay is simply a matter of publishing.
By being situated this way, I myself, like everyone else, will be placed under the “judgment,” if you please, the judgment upon Christendom contained in these books. It is precisely this that will prevent my being confused with an apostle or someone like that. The books are poetically written, as if by an apostle, but I have stepped aside—no, I am not the apostle, anything but, I am the poet and a penitent.37
With all the finished writings on hand, Kierkegaard pondered another publication possibility in 1849: to publish everything, “the fruit of the year 1848,” in three volumes under his own name and with the common title “The Collected Works of Completion.” Volume I would be “The Sickness unto Death,” with “Armed Neutrality” as an appendix; volume II “Practice in Christianity” in three parts; and volume III “On My Work as an Author,” consisting of “Point of View” (“N.B. perhaps not yet”), “Three Notes,” “A Note” (“The Accounting”), and “The Whole in One Word.”38
My intention was to publish all the completed manuscripts in one volume, all under my name—and then to make a clean break.
This was a drastic idea, but I suffered indescribably in persistently wanting to cling to it; I penciled notes here and there (especially in the books about the authorship), and at the same time I continually overtaxed myself on the whole project, especially on the added point that I should existentially alter my course and yet in a way conceal that there was something false about my stepping forth in character on such a scale—by withdrawing entirely.…
Then the idea came to me again that it might be unjustifiable for me to let these writings just lie there .... Then I tackled the matter again—sent the first part of the manuscript to the printer under my name, so it would now be possible to arrange the whole project.… —I realized also that it was rash and excessive to instigate a coup of that nature—with the result that The Sickness unto Death was made pseudonymous.39
The new pseudonym Anti-Climacus, used for The Sickness unto Death (July 30, 1849) and again for Practice in Christianity (September 25, 1850), not only made possible the publication of two of the 1848 works, but it also took care of Kierkegaard’s scrupulous concern lest he seemed or might seem to claim to represent the ideality presented in these works. “Anti-Climacus” means not “against Johannes Climacus” but “above Climacus.”40
Another possibility had been considered for publishing the other manuscripts. Six of them had been intended for a volume planned under the title “A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays.” When this idea had been set aside and two essays were published as Two Ethical-Religious Essays (May 19, 1849) under another new pseudonym, H. H., the other writings, related to “The Book on Alder,” remained unpublished.41
There was still the persistent question of what should be done with the writings on the authorship: “Point of View,” “Three Notes,” “A Note,” and “Armed Neutrality.” Kierkegaard continued to think that he should say something directly, and yet he still hesitated. A journal entry from April 1849 reads:
I have made one final attempt to say a word about myself and my whole authorship. I have written “An Appendix” that should be called “The Accounting” and should follow the “Discourses” [The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, published on the same day as Either/Or, 2 ed., May 14, 1849]. I think it is a masterpiece, but that is of no importance—it cannot be done.
The point is that I perceive with extraordinary clarity the infinitely ingenious thought present in the totality of the authorship. Humanly speaking, now would be just the right time, now when the second edition of Either/Or appears. It would be splendid. But there is something false in it.
For I am a genius of such a kind that I cannot just directly and personally assume the whole thing without encroaching on Governance. Every genius is preponderantly immanence and immediacy, has no “why”; but again it is my genius that lets me see clearly, afterward, the infinite “why” in the whole, but this is Governance’s doing. On the other hand, I am not a religious person of such a kind that I can directly assign everything to God.
Therefore not a word. If anything is to be said, then just that. Or if the world wants to extort a statement and explanation from me, then this.
I suffer indescribably every time I have begun to want to publish something about myself and the authorship.42
Over two years passed before Kierkegaard finally published On My Work as an Author43—on the same day, August 7, 1851, when Two Discourses for the Communion on Fridays appeared (and with part of the third of the “Three Notes” as the preface). After this very truncated version of “Point of View” was published, Kierkegaard held back “Point of View” and the remaining two notes. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, with an appendix of “Two Notes” and a “Postscript” to the “Two Notes,” was eventually published posthumously (1859) by Kierkegaard’s brother Peter Christian. Armed Neutrality remained unpublished until it appeared in 1880 in volume V of Efterladte Papirer (the first edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers).
Quite apart from the questions of whether or not and, if so, when to publish, Kierkegaard sensitively pondered for a long time the dedication of On My Work as an Author. All his life he cherished his Dante-Beatrice, Petrarch-Laura, Novalis-Sophie kind of relationship with Regine Olsen. Therefore when it seemed to be the time to say something direct about the authorship, he thought that the relationship should be acknowledged. On September 10, 1849, eight years after the termination of the engagement, Kierkegaard wrote a letter to Regine (and sent it with a covering letter to her husband, Johan Frederik Schlegel) with the opening quotation, “‘There is a time to be silent and there is a time to speak.’” He thanked her for “everything I owe to you.”44 Schlegel returned the letter unopened and with an indignant reply. Besides journal references to an “enigmatic dedication”45 to Regine, there are versions of such a dedication.46 Because of possible misunderstanding and journalistic misuse, the plan was abandoned. The intention was fulfilled, however, by the dedication, “To One Unnamed … the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning,”47 in Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays.
Presumably the ordinary edition of 525 copies of On My Work was printed. The second printing was made, together with the second printing of Point of View, in the first edition of the collected works (1901–06). The reception of On My Work in 1851 was rather quiet and meager. Himmelstrup’s bibliography48 lists only three items: an anonymous brief laudatory announcement,49 a reprinting of the same in another paper,50 and Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s publication in 1856 of Kierkegaard’s letter51 that accompanied his gift of the work to the actress Luise Heiberg. The little announcement called the work “an overview of this highly gifted man’s work as an author” and stated that the work and the preface of the simultaneously published Two Discourses indicated that the author seemed to have ended his writing career. A later anonymous piece in Flyve-Posten warned readers against being confused by the book.52
Bishop Mynster was a more important audience, and Kierkegaard sent him copies of On My Work and Two Discourses. When he visited Mynster on August 9, 1851, Mynster had read the first but not the second. His response was, “‘Yes, it is a clue [Traad, literally “thread”] to the whole, but spun later, but, after all, you do not say more than that yourself” To which Kierkegaard replied that “the point to bear in mind was this, to have been so devoted, over many years and in much writing, to one thing, that my pen had not made one single deviation.”53
Reviews of Point of View (1859) were more numerous and more substantial. Two are of particular interest because of their authors, Andreas Gottlob Rudelbach and Jørgen Victor Bloch, both of whom had been polemically involved with Kierkegaard.54 Readers of the works, said Rudelbach, know that Kierkegaard was a “poetic and religious genius.” “But there are two things we certainly would like to know about and which only the writer himself can present in an adequate way: It is the life-key to his authorship and its internal coherence; it is what could be called his dedication and his plan, and it is this that he has given in the present work.…” The value of the work will depend on “the extent to which he, the very subjectively disposed author, succeeds in making himself the object.”55 Kierkegaard did succeed in this regard, Rudelbach thought, but in reviewing the work he maintained that Kierkegaard’s indirect method was Socratic enough but not Christian, that his emphasis on the individual amounted to “absolute isolation,”56 and that his dismissal of apologetics was a mistake. We should, he concluded, read these works of “true inwardness, ethical energy, psychological perspicuity, everything that on the whole manifests itself in these writings as great, noble, sublime .... But on the other hand we will not ignore what Luther testifies, ‘that one drop of poison spoils the whole cask of wine.’”57
Bloch’s long review article58 years later centered on For Self-Examination and Point of View. Most of the article was a synopsis, with occasional critical comments, of the works. Of Point of View, Bloch had mixed opinions, and of the following observations Kierkegaard had expected the first, most likely would have felt that the postponement of publication was vindicated by the second, and would have rejected the third as a misrepresentation of his basic position and as a mistake in judgment.
What is interesting in the eyes of the world, the interesting, is lost through this “direct communication.” The riddle is solved; the author’s part is disclosed to the eyes of all; the movement “from the interesting to the simple, to what it means to become a Christian,” the world finds boring.59
Yes, the author undeniably knows how to compel his reader to “become aware.” The above-named work is one of his most engaging and captivating and as a real “Report to History” can be most warmly recommended to everyone who wishes to gain an insight into S. Kierkegaard’s personality and an overview of the coherence in his great authorship, to which it certainly is ... a “primary key.” If it had been published while he was living, he no doubt would have found deeper understanding and sympathy in his contemporaries, although the general interest in 1848 was bent in another direction. But conditions now are more favorable for understanding and evaluating him without overvaluing him.60
How good it would have been if this melancholy disciplinarian, in whom the human had died, had come into a living association with Grundtvig, who more than anyone else had emphasized the humanity of Christianity, and if this penitential hermit, who, without a confidant on earth, sought only the single individual as his reader, had been led into the Lord’s congregation that was the homestead of all Grundtvig’s discourse and song.61
When Kierkegaard’s writings had been discovered by the larger world, some readers compared, mutatis mutandis, On My Work as an Author and Point of View to Augustine’s Confessions and Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua.62 Kierkegaard most likely would decline any exalted literary association, although he did call “Point of View” “masterly.”63 To him it was, like “On My Work as an Author,” not a literary work but an act, and his characterization of the “significance of this little book” applies also to the larger work published later.
The state of “Christendom” is as follows: the point of view of Christianity and of what Christianity is has been completely shifted, has been cast in terms of the objective, the scholarly, and differences such as genius and talent have been made crucial.
This little book reverses the whole thing. It says (precisely because this enormous productivity preceded it): Forget genius, talent, scholarship, and all that—Christianity is the existential, a character-task. And now it is turned that way.
For that reason this little book is not a literary work, a new literary work, but an act, and therefore it was important that it be as short as possible, that it not mark a new productivity that people could then discuss. This little book is μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος [a shifting from one genus to another] and makes clear the extent to which it was already present in my total work as an author.64
KIERKEGAARD’S PUBLISHED WORKS65
Pseudonymous 1843
Signed 1843
Feb. 20
Either/Or, I-II, ed. Victor Eremita
May 16
Two Upbuilding Discourses
Oct. 16
Repetition by Constantin Constantius
Oct. 16
Three Upbuilding Discourses
Oct. 16
Fear and Trembling by Johannes de Silentio
Dec. 6
Four Upbuilding Discourses
Signed 1844
June 13
Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard
March 5
Two Upbuilding Discourses
June 17
The Concept of Anxiety by Vigilius Haufniensis
June 8
Three Upbuilding Discourses
June 17
Prefaces by Nicolaus Notabene [written: Writing Sampler]
Aug. 31
Four Upbuilding Discourses
1845
1845
April 30
Stages on Life’s Way pub. by Hilarius Bookbinder
April 29
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions
May 19–20
“A Cursory Observation Concerning a Detail in Don Giovanni" by Inter et Inter
1846
1846
Feb. 28
Concluding Unscien tifie Postscript by Johannes Climacus, with an appended "A First and Last Explanation" by S. Kierkegaard
Signed 1846
March 30
Two Ages: A Literary Review [written: fair copy of version I of The Book on Adler]
1847
1847
March 13
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
Sept. 29
Works of Love
1848
1848
April 26
Christian Discourses
July 24–27
The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress by Inter et Inter
November
[The Point of View for My Work as an Author “as good as finished”]
1849
1849
May 14
Either/Or, 2 ed.
May 14
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air
May 19
Two Ethical-Religious Essays by H. H.
[written: Armed Neutrality]
July 30
The Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard
Nov. 14
Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays: “The High Priest”—
Signed 1849
Nov. 14 cont.
“The Tax Collector”— “The Woman Who Was a Sinner”
1850
1850
Sept. 25
Practice in Christianity by Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard
Dec. 20
An Upbuilding Discourse
1851
1851
Aug. 7
Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays
Aug. 7
On My Work as an Author
Sept. 10
For Self Examination [written: Judge for Yourself!]
1854
1854
Dec. 18, 30
Articles I-II in Fædrelandet
1855
1855
Jan. 12–
Articles III-XXI
May 26
in Fædrelandet
May 24
This Must Be Said; So Let It Be Said
May 24–
The Moment I-IX
Sept. 24
[written: X]
Signed 1855
June 16
What Christ Judges of Official Christianity
Sept. 3
The Changelessness of God
Posthumously Published Works
1859
The Point of View for My Work as an Author
1872
The Book on Adler (Efterladte Papirer, II)
1876
Judge for Yourself!
1880
Armed Neutrality (Efterladte Papirer, V)
1881