Learning Along With Søren Kierkegaard: A Personal Reflection In his 1977 book, Kierkegaard as Educator, Ronald J. Manheimer does an excellent job of analyzing the way in which Søren Kierkegaard viewed the educative process and his implicit educational theory, as demonstrated by his various pseudonymous writings and verified by comments in his papers and journals. He shows how this implicit educational theory is built upon the three developmental stages (aesthetic, ethical, religious), indirect communication, and the use of dialectic, and is integrated with subjectivity, faith, and the other aspects of Kierkegaard‘s total philosophy. Manheimer also describes Kierkegaard‘s literary dependence upon Socrates, a relationship that was first fully manifest in his dissertation at the University of Copenhagen. One aspect of this relationship, as noted by Manheimer 1 and described by Kierkegaard himself in his Point of View 2 , is that, like Socrates, Kierkegaard considered that a teacher must also be a learner. He extended this belief to his work as an author, which he felt was essentially a process of self-education. 3 This paper picks up on this belief and will attempt to look at the educational process from the standpoint of the learner who is reading Kierkegaard‘s works and learning from Kierkegaard as he does so. More specifically, I will attempt to analyze how learning is facilitated by Kierkegaard‘s writings, based on concrete experiences from my own learning and from my 46 years as a professional educator. In this analysis I will use examples from the ways in which I have learned, the ways in which my students have learned, and descriptions of the learning process found in other places. From these foundations, I will attempt to show how Kierkegaard artfully enhances the learning of the reader by bringing the reader actively into the learning 1 Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator, 5. 2 Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 47-47. 3 Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 90.
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Learning Along With Søren Kierkegaard:
A Personal Reflection
In his 1977 book, Kierkegaard as Educator, Ronald J. Manheimer does an excellent job
of analyzing the way in which Søren Kierkegaard viewed the educative process and his implicit
educational theory, as demonstrated by his various pseudonymous writings and verified by
comments in his papers and journals. He shows how this implicit educational theory is built
upon the three developmental stages (aesthetic, ethical, religious), indirect communication, and
the use of dialectic, and is integrated with subjectivity, faith, and the other aspects of
Kierkegaard‘s total philosophy. Manheimer also describes Kierkegaard‘s literary dependence
upon Socrates, a relationship that was first fully manifest in his dissertation at the University of
Copenhagen. One aspect of this relationship, as noted by Manheimer1 and described by
Kierkegaard himself in his Point of View2, is that, like Socrates, Kierkegaard considered that a
teacher must also be a learner. He extended this belief to his work as an author, which he felt
was essentially a process of self-education.3
This paper picks up on this belief and will attempt to look at the educational process from
the standpoint of the learner who is reading Kierkegaard‘s works and learning from Kierkegaard
as he does so. More specifically, I will attempt to analyze how learning is facilitated by
Kierkegaard‘s writings, based on concrete experiences from my own learning and from my 46
years as a professional educator. In this analysis I will use examples from the ways in which I
have learned, the ways in which my students have learned, and descriptions of the learning
process found in other places. From these foundations, I will attempt to show how Kierkegaard
artfully enhances the learning of the reader by bringing the reader actively into the learning
1 Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator, 5.
2 Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 47-47.
3 Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 90.
2
process. While I have become well acquainted with most learning theories that have been
promoted at universities and in schools over the past 50 years and have found many of them
useful, I have found that most of them are only partial in the learning they address. This paper
will focus on one particular type of learning: that which involves understanding the meaning that
exists in complex contexts. This type of learning may be the most significant type there is.
Kierkegaard continually involves himself and his reader in this kind of learning. A recent article
in the Atlantic4 describes the increasing interest among the developed nations of the world in the
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This instrument, which assesses
critical thinking rather than the retention of isolated facts or mastery of routine procedures,
promises to measure readiness for ―knowledge worker‖ jobs and the ability to solve real-world
problems. In developing these abilities, the teacher must also be a learner.
In this paper I will first describe what I learned about this type of learning in my years as
a student and during my career as an educator. Following this section, I will introduce the reader
to several of Kierkegaard‘s pseudonyms and explore various topics that Kierkegaard and his
pseudonyms explored and with which they struggled. Finally, I will present a synthesis that
brings the various topics we have explored into a single message. Most important, I will try to
get the reader to struggle along with Kierkegaard in approaching some crucial issues of human
existence. The learning that takes place will be shared by the reader, by the author of this article,
and vicariously with Kierkegaard as he struggled with the same issues.
Teaching and Learning over a Lifetime
Between kindergarten and graduation from high school I can‘t remember a single
instance when I was asked a question or presented with a problem that was not satisfactorily
addressed either by listening in class, reading assigned material, applying a concrete formula, or
4 Ripley, The World‘s Schoolmaster, Atlantic 308, 1, 109-110.
3
locating the proper repository of information. The answer existed somewhere in concrete form,
and all I had to do was find it. The notion of solving a problem that was unique or for which
there was no clear answer was completely foreign to my educational experience.
The first two years of college were really no different. Although I went to a four year
liberal arts college that was well recognized for its academic excellence, I found, for these first
two years, that it was more of the same as high school, only at a more intense level (i.e., longer
reading assignments, longer papers to write, more facts to memorize, etc.). I simply had to learn
what was taught in order to do well on the tests and write papers in clear prose that were mainly
based on the facts that I could obtain from secondary sources. With this effort I could easily
attain the course grades I desired. I wanted to get good grades in the courses I was taking, but
good grades at my college were also tied to another motivator. A student who could maintain a
2.2 average (based on a 3 point scale) for a particular semester was allowed unlimited ―cuts‖
from classes in the semester that followed. (Without this privilege a student was allowed only 2
or 3 unexcused classes per course.) This was a great motivator for me. If I wanted to use the
time to ―sleep in,‖ to prepare for a test in another class, to write a paper, to engage in some social
activity, or, for some courses, simply to avoid another boring class, I felt free to do so. The
system seemed to be working well for me.
Then, in my junior year, after I had declared a major in political science, my major
professor, who was not only an accomplished scholar but also a skilled teacher, turned my
academic life around. In my junior and senior years I took four courses from him: United States
Constitutional History, Political Philosophy, American Diplomatic History, and a senior seminar.
Overall, my grades in these four courses were no better than what my grades had been in
4
previous courses: two A‘s, one B, and one C. But the difference was that I really didn‘t care
about grades: I was too excited about what I was learning.
The instruction and discussion in class was much more centered on exploring questions
and subjects that were not entirely clear, topics upon which experts in the discipline disagreed.
The research papers required original student investigation into original sources and independent
conclusions from them. If secondary sources were used, they were compared with the student‘s
gleanings from the original sources and other secondary sources. I found myself taking the train
into Chicago to get at the original documents in the Newberry Library. I also found myself
continuing to take advantage of the unlimited cuts I had earned, only now my purpose in taking
them was different. Now I was using them primarily to spend whole days in the Newberry
Library to do the exciting research in which I was engaged.
What is perhaps surprising was that my new attitude toward learning now spilled over
into my other courses. I was no longer satisfied to get an A. I wanted to find out answers to
many questions that were raised but not answered in class. Learning had become a whole new
experience for me. I have never lost the love for learning that I gained during my last two years
in college.
I had planned to go to law school after college, and though I was accepted into the law
school which I had chosen, I did not receive the fellowship I needed to attend. With the draft
board breathing down my neck (though I didn‘t know exactly when I would be called), I enlisted
in the Marine Corps. By the time I had completed my tour in the Marine Corps, I was married
and had two children and could no longer afford to go to law school. After looking at several
opportunities I stumbled into teaching, even though I was only eligible for a provisional
certificate. But there was something of a teacher shortage at the time, and I found a job teaching
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language arts and social studies in a suburban Chicago junior high school. Unfortunately, what I
had learned about learning in my undergraduate work did not immediately transfer over into my
classroom teaching. I pretty much taught my classes the way that I had been taught when I was
in junior high and high school.
However, sometime in the spring semester of my second year as a teacher, the principal
of the school invited me into his office to discuss a possible teaching assignment for me for the
following year. In that junior high school we used ability grouping of all students and ordinarily
had a student population that was divided into six groups at both the seventh and eighth grade
levels. Each teacher would teach a two-hour block of studies (either Language Arts/Social
Studies or Mathematics/Science) to two of the six groups. However, the incoming students from
the two elementary schools that year presented a scheduling problem for two reasons. First, it
was a very small group, and only five seventh grade classes, rather than the customary six, could
be justified. Second, by the report of the elementary school teachers and principals, there were
an inordinate number of ―problem‖ students in the group. The principal asked if I would take
this group of students and teach them all four of the core subjects. He said I was his choice for
this assignment because I was highly organized in my work (and could handle four preparations)
and because I had no trouble in maintaining discipline in my classes. It appears that my time in
the United States Marine Corps had made a significant contribution to my teaching career.
I was probably too ignorant at the time to ask what was meant by ―problem students,‖ but
it didn‘t take me long to find out when the fall semester began. Some of the students were
wonderful, well behaved students who were just very weak academically. Some of the students
were totally undisciplined and real threats to the safety of their classmates. And then there were
one or two of those students whose only problem I could determine from my post hoc analysis
6
was that they were too inquisitive (and perhaps too smart) for some of their previous teachers.
These were the students who, when the teacher presented something in class, had the audacity to
ask the teacher ―Why?‖ or to tell the teacher that there was an alternative explanation for
something that the teacher had explained in class. I loved these kids and realized soon that I
could use them as my co-teachers. At least one of these kids was a true independent thinker and
an independent researcher. Several times during the school year, he pointed out flaws in what I
had said or the way I had said it. That was wonderful! He had created a classroom learning
atmosphere for his fellow students.
One thing I had to do in preparing to teach that class during the preceding summer was to
strengthen myself in the disciplines of mathematics and science. My greatest concern was with
teaching them mathematics because this was one of the two areas (the other was in language arts)
where these students had shown themselves to be notably weak, as evidenced by their scores on
the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. One of my fellow teachers at the junior high school was using the
materials from the School Mathematics Study Group (SMSG), one of the curricula known as
―modern mathematics‖ or ―new mathematics,‖ that had been created in the aftermath of the
successful launching of Sputnik into space by the Soviet Union. As my colleague explained
SMSG, I saw that what it involved was an entirely different way of looking at mathematics.
Examining my own educational background I realized that I had never really learned
mathematics. I had learned arithmetic, algebra, and geometry; but these, for the most part, had
been treated as separate subjects that could be mastered by learning the rules associated with
each and carefully applying them. I had always considered the various shades of mathematics
with which I was acquainted as extremely dull. Now, as I began to look at mathematics more
like a true mathematician would, I began to become excited, and I began to envision ways in
7
which I could make learning for students exciting. In addition to borrowing ideas from my
colleague, I obtained a number of little booklets from a series identified as ―Exploring
Mathematics on Your Own.‖
At about the same time I came across Jerome S. Bruner‘s The Process of Education,5
which was published in 1960 and was built on the work of thirty-five scientists, scholars, and
educators who had come together at the Woods Hole Conference in 1959 to discuss how
education in science might be improved in the nation‘s primary and secondary schools.
Although the chief emphasis was on education in mathematics and the sciences, their work had
implications for effective, continuing learning in every field. A first principle articulated by
Bruner was that learning must be based upon a thorough understanding of the structure of the
subject being studied. In the years immediately following the Woods Hole Conference and
Sputnik, including the period while I was beginning to teach my class of ―problem students,‖ the
main applications were in science and mathematics. But I saw this as a principle that could be
extended to the language arts and social sciences as well. By the mid-1960s various national
―new English‖ and ―new social studies‖ materials had come into existence. A second principle
emphasized by Bruner was that ―any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually
honest form to any child at any stage of development.‖6 Together, these two principles became
active working hypotheses as I eagerly took on my new teaching assignment.
That academic year exceeded my highest expectations. Learning in our classroom
became a joint teacher/student project. I had the students actively experiment with different
strategies for reading in order to determine what was best for them, both in terms of time it took
to read a piece of writing and their comprehension of what they had read. I used what I had
5 Bruner, The Process of Education.
6 Bruner, The Process of Education p. 23.
8
learned about linguistics from a course I was taking toward my Master‘s degree to help them
understand the relationship between sentence structure and intended meaning. We used these
same skills to systematically examine mathematics word problems to determine what steps
should be taken to solve those problems. I asked the students to create experiments that they
thought would confirm or invalidate principles they had learned in science. The students loved
the experience, and I enjoyed them and the opportunity to work with them. Of my 46 years of
teaching at the junior high school, senior high school, and university levels, I consider that this
was my most successful year of teaching.
I think the principal and the central administration would have been happy if I had merely
kept the lid on in the classroom and the students had made some progress on the Iowa Test of
Basic Skills. As it happened, we exceeded everyone‘s expectations. On the Iowa Test of Basic
Skills in the spring semester, the students as a group showed two years of growth across the
board, except in spelling. In spelling our group score showed a gain of eight-tenths of a year.
No student showed an average gain of less than a year across the categories. One student (the
one who most frequently refused to take my word for something and constantly asked ―Why?‖)
gained so much in every category that for the following year he was assigned to the top ability
group in the eighth grade.
What did I learn about learning? I rediscovered what I had learned in my last two years
of college: that the student (at any grade level) must be integrally involved in his own learning
and that learning is enhanced when the student and teacher are jointly working together to
uncover something that they hadn‘t previously known. Further, learning is most effective and
efficient when the student is involved in devising the methodology by which he or she best
learns. Only then can the student become an independent learner. It was probably fortunate that
9
I hadn‘t yet learned more about existing learning theories and research findings. If I had, I‘m
afraid that I may have tried to apply that knowledge to the students‘ learning without getting
their help in shaping the learning process. I may know a lot about the learning process, but there
is always a lot that I don‘t know about how any individual student learns. I need that student‘s
help. Since I realized that my own teachers in school didn‘t fully understand how I best learned,
what would make me so arrogant as to think that these ―problem students‖ didn‘t know things
about how they best learned that I, as an outsider, didn‘t know and which I could use in helping
them improve their own learning processes? We learned best when both the student and I were
faced with a problem to which neither of us had the sure answer. That group of ―problem
students‖ stands out in my experience because of the particular nature of the students and
because I was given carte blanche to teach them in whatever way that worked. Nevertheless, in
every subsequent class that I taught, whether in secondary schools or in university graduate
courses, I have attempted to incorporate the same principles of learning into the classroom.
In 1963, while I was teaching Language Arts and Social Studies in a junior high school in
Champaign, Illinois, I was invited to join a team of teachers/researchers at the University of
Illinois who were developing a ―new‖ English curriculum for junior high and high school
students. I split my days between the campus of University High School in Urbana and my
junior high school in Champaign. In the mornings I would be at ―Uni High,‖ teaching a course
and working with the team to develop curriculum materials, and in the afternoons I was back in
Champaign teaching Champaign junior high school students, using the materials we were
developing. I learned a lot about teaching and learning that year; but probably the most
important thing I gained was a reinforcement of what my problem students had taught me: that
students must be in charge of their own learning. I also had my understandings extended into the
10
study of literature. A central strategy in fostering understanding of any good piece of literature
(whether sonnet, novel, epic poem, or short story) was to get the student to ask the question:
―What‘s the real story here?‖ Students learned to use varieties of clues from the text itself to
understand the essential meaning of a piece of literature— a meaning that would have been lost
if the author had tried to express it directly in prosaic words and phrases. I began to more fully
understand the dynamic relationship between the text of the work and the student‘s active
involvement with that text, an understanding that could be extended to other areas of the
curriculum (e.g., grammar) and presumably to all fields of significant study. Instructive in
developing my understanding was the experience of Samuel Scudder, who relates his own
learning under the great scientist, Louis Agassiz, in the article, ―Look at Your Fish.‖7 Scudder
describes in detail how his instruction began with a three day exercise of observing a dead fish,
an exercise which required him to observe, draw out meaning, form hypotheses, test those
hypotheses, and draw the various parts of his learning into a comprehensive account of what he
derived from the experience. I would recommend Scudder‘s story to anyone who wants to
obtain a renewed insight of what is involved in the learning process.
The following year I took a position for a year as an instructor of English at the campus
school of the State University of New York College of Buffalo. I was hired for the specific
purpose of introducing the materials and methods of the University of Illinois English
Curriculum Project into the school‘s curriculum. During that year the campus school decided to
bring Junior Great Books into the school‘s curriculum and sent two of us to receive training as
leaders. A major part of the training was to learn how to ask various questions of a group of
students whom we were leading. What we were taught reinforced what I had learned as part of
the University of Illinois English Curriculum Project; but there was one key additional element
7 McCrimmon, Look at Your Fish, in McCrimmon, From Source to Statement.
11
that I found very practical in my future teaching. Each discussion with students should be
initiated by asking a question (called a ―basic question‖) about the piece of literature being
discussed, to which the leader himself did not have a clear answer. This question would be
followed by supplementary questions that sought to clarify the group‘s grasp of factual material
or were aimed at restating comments that had previously been made by group members. But the
basic question still remained as the guide for the discussion until the leader felt that he had it
satisfactorily answered. At this point it ceased to be a useful basic question and the leader would
ask another basic question. This was essentially the strategy I had learned in the English
Curriculum Project, but it provided a concrete technique that I found extremely useful in future
years—both with public school students and with graduate students, not only in examining works
of literature, but also in other fields, where the answers to important questions were not entirely
clear.
Also during that year I took some courses at the University of Buffalo that would
enhance my teaching skills and also could be used to support my doctoral work at the University
of Illinois. During one of my trips to class, I happened to wander past one of the campus
bookstores and saw a display in one of the windows advertising the works of Kierkegaard. I was
intrigued by a sign in the display window that asked the question: ―Was Kierkegaard a
Christian?‖ This aroused my curiosity. Why was this question even being asked? I had learned
a little about Kierkegaard in my undergraduate days, but had never read any of his works. Since
I considered myself a Christian, I was intrigued by the question and went into the bookstore and
bought an anthology of selected writings from Kierkegaard.
Reading Kierkegaard was a whole new experience for me. His pseudonymous works
raised some questions that I hadn‘t really considered in depth before. Furthermore, I learned that
12
the pseudonyms typically raised these really important questions, but often answered them
obliquely. Also, the questions they raised and the answers they provided raised all sorts of other
intriguing questions. For instance, if the paradox of the Incarnation is true (which I believe it is),
does this really make the gospel story a contemporaneous experience for me? And if it indeed
does, what does this imply for my other Christian beliefs and the way I live my life. Reading
portions of Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, A Concluding Unscientific
Postscript, and Practice in Christianity made me rethink many things about what I believed and
to consider their extensions into my whole life. As I graduated from the selections in the
anthology to the larger works from which they were extracted, I found myself on an intellectual
journey that was not too different (though much more extensive) from the experience of Samuel
Scudder, the student of Louis Agassiz. But the journey was not only intellectual; it was also
spiritual. My beliefs were being challenged, shaped, and extended in ways that they never had
been prior to that time. I was engaged in a personal, private learning experience that raised my
learning to a whole new level.
When I returned to Champaign the following year, I found myself involved in the state
sponsored gifted program, first as a classroom teacher and later as the director of the school
district‘s gifted program and the state supported demonstration center that operated in the
district. The gifted program in Champaign focused on fostering the learning process in students,
using the work of J.P. Guilford, as presented in his 1959 Structure of Intellect8 model, to give
direction to its efforts. This model emphasizes how the individual recognizes relevant data,
stores it in memory, and applies that stored data to solve problems through productive thinking.
Productive thinking is of two types: divergent and convergent. Most individuals attempt to go to
8 Guilford, “Three Faces of Intellect.”
13
convergent thinking as rapidly as possible in order to arrive at a satisfactory solution to a
problem in the minimum amount of time. The danger is that the satisfactory solution chosen is
often not the optimal solution. To avoid this danger, divergent thinking is necessary to generate
alternatives that enable the individual to carefully evaluate the merits of each and select the best
solution or combination of solutions from among them. My job was to help teachers within the
Champaign district, as well as visitors who came to the demonstration center from other school
districts, to incorporate methodology that would help their students establish habits of truly
productive problem solving. We experienced considerable success; but when I took time to
analyze what was happening, I realized that this process was essentially the process that I had
implemented with my ―problem students‖ some years earlier. This, in turn, made me realize that
this process was not only good for ―gifted‖ students, but was beneficial for all students. I was
reminded of what I had learned earlier from Jerome Bruner: ―Any subject can be taught
effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.‖ This
apparently also applied to ways of thinking.
From that point on in my career, for every complex learning experience in which I was
involved, whether it had to do with my own learning or that of my students, I was guided by a
few basic principles that I learned in those first years as a teacher. These principles may be
summarized: (1) seek to understand the entire context of the situation that is trying to be
understood, (2) ask, and keep re-asking, a few basic questions (e.g., ―What‘s happening here?‖)
until they cease to extract further information from the context being studied, (3) form
hypotheses, (4) test and modify these hypotheses, (5) check new understandings against credible
outside sources, (6) tentatively adopt and apply a solution but continue to test it and make
modifications as necessary.
14
In 1971 I left the public schools and spent the next 35 years as a professor of educational
administration, first at Queens College of the City university of New York for six years and then
for another 29 years at Texas A&M university. During those years as a professor I spent a major
portion of my time working with principals and other school administrators in their schools,
helping them deal effectively with the problems they encountered. I found that most of the
available research on schools, and on school leadership particularly, was not very useful for
them—at least not for dealing with those complex problems that were keeping them awake at
night. I began working with them on strategies to solve these complex, usually interpersonal,
problems that were, in many cases, tearing them apart emotionally and, in a few cases, causing
them health problems. To my basic strategy of problem solving I added strategies from other
sources, particularly those that I gleaned from the models proposed by Argyris & Schön.9 From
their work I learned that tough interpersonal problems, like those faced continually by school
leaders, were best addressed by creating an environment that encouraged the flow of valid
information among the persons involved in the problem situation, encouraging the active
involvement of all persons involved in the problem situation, and openly testing hypotheses for
addressing the problem. Unlike most of the theory that I encountered and tried to use, I found
that the strategies proposed by Argyris and Schön worked in practical situations—and more
important, principals and superintendents also found them useful.
During my career I was the major advisor for 66 doctoral dissertations. In approaching
the formation of a topic for their dissertations and in their dissertation investigations, I proposed
the same problem solving approach to understanding difficult problems that I had begun to use
with my ―problem students.‖ Each of them was presented with a copy of Scudder‘s Look at Your
Fish and encouraged to use it as a model for approaching their dissertation topic. In 1993, with
9 Argyris & Schön, Theory in Practice, Increasing Professional Effectiveness.
15
the aid of three of my former doctoral students, I published a book, Doing Naturalistic Inquiry,10
which describes how this basic problem solving strategy could be used in writing a dissertation.
Kierkegaard’s and His Pseudonyms: The Art and Craft of Teaching
Are good teachers born or are they made? Throughout my career as a teacher, at both the
public school and university levels, I have heard the question addressed vigorously on both sides
of the matter, and I think most serious observers would conclude that both sides make a
contribution. Closely related to this is the question or whether teaching is an art or a science.
My own take on the matter is that art and science are so integrally interwoven in the teaching act
that the two cannot really be separated.
Most good teachers develop their skills over a lifetime. Teaching is an exhilarating
experience for the good teacher, and the good teacher wants to extend and enlarge the experience
by improving his teaching skills. I think that for most teachers this personal professional
development is most robust when they have meaningful, continued access to the best research on
teaching and learning, have, at the same time, access to a group of students whom they can use to
experimentally apply their knowledge to their teaching practice, and, through the achievement of
these students, receive feedback on their knowledge and practice.
Kierkegaard‘s chief external impetus for developing his teaching style was Socrates. But
it was not simply an adoption of the Socratic Method, but an adaptation based upon his
university studies that culminated in his dissertation: The Concept of Irony, With Continual
Reference to Socrates. Although he continued to make reference to Socrates and the Socratic
Method throughout his writings, he made significant adaptations and extensions that built a style
that was uniquely his own. Perhaps the Socratic strategy that he incorporated most completely
into his own work was getting his reader actively involved in the learning process. One of the
10
Erlandson, Harris, Skipper, and Allen, Doing Naturalistic Inquiry.
16
chief ways for getting his reader involved in his or her own learning was through the
personalities that he created to author his chief philosophical works.
Although Kierkegaard addressed a large number of Christian topics directly under his
own name (e.g., Works of Love and his many Christian discourses), his most creative, thought
provoking, and reader engaging writings were delivered indirectly through various pseudonyms.
At the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard formally declares himself the
author behind his various pseudonyms:
My pseudonymity or polyonymity has not had an accidental basis in my person…but an
essential basis in the production itself, which, for the sake of the lines and of the
psychologically varied differences of the individualities, poetically required an
indiscriminateness with regard to good and evil, brokenheartedness and gaiety, despair
and overconfidence, suffering and elation, etc., which no factually actual person dares to
allow himself or can want to allow himself in the moral limitations of actuality. What
has been written, then, is mine, but only insofar as I, by means of audible lines, have
placed the life-view of the creating, poetically actual individuality in his mouth, for my
relation is even more remote than that of a poet, who poetizes characters and yet in the
preface is himself the author.11
He goes on to emphasize his distance from his pseudonyms:
Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion
about them except as a third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not
the remotest private relation to them, since it is impossible to have a doubly reflected
communication.12
Then he further distances himself from his pseudonyms with a request for those who
would quote his works:
Therefore, if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the
books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective
pseudonymous author‘s name, not mine….13
Over the scope of his writings Kierkegaard presents a number of key themes and
relationships that are interrelated in his understanding, but often not in obvious ways. Further,