THREE On Pseudonyms and ‘Style’ I. Pseudonyms What does it mean to sign one’s name, or withdraw it, at the close of a piece of writing? Librarians dedicate a yard of shelf space to an author they name ‘Kierkegaard,’ but opening the books shelved there, we find that they are written by a motley crew sporting names like ‘Johannes Climacus,’ ‘Johannes de silentio,’ ‘Vigilius Haufniensus,’ and many others. We could find the anonymous ‘A’, the enigmatic ‘Anti-Climacus’, one ‘Constantine Constantius,’ and so forth. Few in Copenhagen were fooled by these pseudonyms, nor are we fooled today. So why indulge Kierkegaard’s hide-and-seek? Is there a literary, moral, or religious rationale to this amusing veiling, unveiling? Are these phantom authors, instead, mere flourish, like a book’s front illustration or back cover blurb? OTES Parts of this chapter lean heavily on previous studies: On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time. Burlington VT: Ashgate. (2007: Ch. 11) and ‘What is a Kierkegaardian Author?’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 35, no 7. Pseudonyms are, to be sure, an attention-grabbing flourish but that’s hardly the end of the story. These flourishes make us ask what it means to be an author, what in a book’s impact is an impact of its author, and what ‘essential’ moral or religious truth (if any) authors and books can convey. At the very least, the pseudonymic flourish directs us away from pondering the street conversations, polemics, or broken engagements of an eccentric resident of 1840s and ‘50s Copenhagen. Yes, there is a tax-paying citizen found walking about town, possessed of an acerbic wit, fine gastronomic tastes, and a monstrous intelligence. Yet immediately before us is not citizen-Kierkegaard but Johannes de silentio (or Johannes Climacus), who buffers the citizen from our gaze. We wonder about Homer’s link to the Odyssey, Plato’s link to Socratic dialogues, an unknowable poet’s link to the biblical Book of Job, Shakespeare’s link to an actor-director named Hamlet. But this wonder can disappear. Captured by the world of Socrates, Homer, Job, or Hamlet, the question of authorship can vanish. Our attention is absorbed by the old nurse who recognizes Odysseus’ scar, or by Socrates incautiously requesting free meals as punishment, or by the Whirlwind’s display of vultures feasting on human blood, or by Hamlet’s deft staging of a play before the murderous King (and his wife). Wonder about who writes the story of the nurse, or of Socrates, or of vultures, for the moment disappears. The part played by writer-Kierkegaard (not exactly the citizen) in literary production, his importance and authority, might intrigue us. Yet immersed in the portrait of the taxpaying knight of faith, the wonder about who writes Fear and Trembling easily disappears. On the other hand, it also can become urgent to know who writes what. As we ponder a text, its pseudonym can become a key to interpretation. For if we declare that Johannes de silentio (of Fear and Trembling) is an autonomous author, then his accounts of faith are not necessarily Kierkegaard’s. And if Johannes Climacus (of Concluding Unscientific Postscript) is not ‘Kierkegaard-the-writer,’ then the Postscript distinction between religiousness A and religiousness B is not necessarily a Kierkegaardian distinction. On the other hand, we might revert to the stance of the good librarian. All works shelved under ‘Kierkegaard’ are the work of a single writer, and the pseudonyms, no more than a cocky flourish. We might consider, as a third option: just bypass any concern with authorship. Texts are primary and always trump (more or less superfluous) issues of authorship. We take up the account of faith in Fear and Trembling and set it beside the account in Postscript, and set both beside accounts in the Discourses. We develop a deep appreciation of these texts without caring who wrote them. If each washed up in a bottle by the sea, lacking an author’s signature, we would still have in hand texts worthy of a lifetime’s attention. Like the Dead Sea scrolls, the writing would be primary. Say I learned that a committee of twenty, with shifting membership, worked diligently over centuries to compile and revise the Book of Job. My admiration for the text will be neither diminished nor enhanced. Of course Job belongs originally to an oral tradition, where authors are typically unknown, and singers of stories are constantly revising ‘the text’ in endless recountings over time. Yet at some point, oral traditions begin to compete with literary ones. The literary challenge brings with it signed authorships. With the emergence of writers and signed works, as readers we discover that we have what amounts to a metaphysical need for identifiable authors. Kant posits an inescapable need of reason (or need for reasons) that merges with a need to know origins. ‘[T]he expectation of being able some day to . . . derive everything from one principle—the undeniable need of human reason, which finds complete satisfaction only in a complete systematic unity of its cognitions’, see Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Akademie ed. Vol. 5. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1902-: 91). We crave knowledge of fathers and mothers, of first causes, of first settlers of the land. We want narratives to be truthful, and at some point we link this to a need for truthful narrators. It is not enough that in the beginning was waste and welter; we crave the good God who creates a viable world from welter and waste. Creation (so we think) requires a creator. The Hebrew tohu wabohu is given as ‘welter and waste’ (rather than ‘formless void’) in Alter, Robert, Genesis, trans and commentary. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. We posit authors even when we know absolutely nothing, biographically speaking, about them. Homer must be more than a librarian’s filing device. We’d be crushed if ‘Kierkegaard’ turned out to be a storytelling troupe. Our biographical instincts point to Copenhagen, journal records on file, a weathered headstone with chiselled words provided by the author himself. Yet our philosophical instincts aren’t easily quelled. Perhaps Kierkegaard is a citizen and also a storytelling troupe or its theatrical director. We have the stage names of his players: among others, ‘Inter et Inter’ and ‘Vigilius Haufniensis’ (Watchman of Copenhagen, whose Freiburg reincarnation kept anxious watch over Being). Vigilius Haufniensis is the pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety. His vigil (or anxious watch) foretells Heidegger’s ‘watch over being.’ Heidegger’s Augenblick is also taken from Anxiety. The plot thickens when we realize that granting a metaphysical or literary multitude at work, this creative ensemble pens a part for an author named ‘Kierkegaard.’ Then he can seem single, legion, and even self-creating. ‘S. Kierkegaard’ and others are stage names the ensemble puts forth. For a path-breaking study, see Westfall, Joseph, The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007. A creative genius named Kierkegaard creates an ensemble only a few of whom will answer to the name ‘Kierkegaard.’ Yet without the skill and talent of a pseudonymous (and veronymous) ensemble, we’d lack any figure history would remember as ‘Kierkegaard.’ In Fear and Trembling, de silentio says that the person of faith ‘gives birth to his own father.’ Fear and Trembling, Hongs trans.: 27 Could the ensemble ‘give birth to its own father’? The span of books that librarians innocently (and properly) shelve under ‘Kierkegaard’ is a city of troubles and wonders, a hydra headed set of biographical, literary, and philosophical enigmas. Self: Single or Legion Melville wrote to his neighbour Hawthorne, ‘This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will mis-send it – for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper.’ Melville, Herman, Tales, Poems, and Other Writings, ed, intro. John Bryant. New York: Modern Library. Melville 2001: 44. Melville suffers a lack of felt-identity through time. It disturbs him. He writes: ‘Lord, when shall we be done changing?’ (Ibid.) Heraclitus wrote that one couldn’t step in the same river twice. Melville seems to doubt, that he, or anyone else, can encounter the same Melville twice. When Melville gets immersed in Ahab, Ishmael, or Starbuck, one by one he becomes the players in this performance, and so vanishes as a enduring, authoritative presence. Does Kierkegaard become a new author each time he starts a new book (under a new pseudonym, or non-pseudonym) -- the new author only problematically related to predecessors and successors? But surely Kierkegaard-the-writer is an inescapable presence in European, American, Asian and other cultural histories. His monumental status as the source of an oeuvre remains. Here are four lines of sight on ‘Kierkegaard’ that don’t easily converge. ‘Kierkegaard’ appears 1) as a familiar object of biographies of the Copenhagen citizen and writer. But perhaps instead he will appear 2) as a useless phantom: like Melville, he disappears or evaporates behind texts. More metaphysically, ‘Kierkegaard’ might appear 3) as an implied author, as a posited transcendental subject that unifies an array of texts, functioning not unlike ‘Homer’; he would be a Kant-like ‘transcendental unity of authorial production’ presupposed in reading Postscript or Fear and Trembling. Finally, far less metaphysically, ‘Kierkegaard’ appears 4) as a cultural figure without whom we would have far less grasp of Heidegger, Rilke, Ortega, Barth, Auden, or the Kyoto School. Lacking Kierkegaard, none of these would exist exactly as we know them. Spans of the familiar texture of twentieth century thought would be altered. Hamlet Harold Bloom holds that Shakespeare’s consummate invention is Hamlet, who embodies – he says, ‘invents’ -- our modern notion of the human (Bloom 2003: 8). Although there is no shrine to mark the bones of an historical Prince of Denmark, worthy of biographies, Prince Hamlet, Shakespeare’s invention, has an incredibly powerful poetic and cultural actuality, as Bloom avers. Johannes de silentio and Johannes Climacus will never be subjects of biographies, but they have a powerful poetic and culture presence, in undergraduate classes – a presence reinforced through the artistry of Ibsen, Kafka, Walker Percy, Derrida, Ingmar Bergman, and endless others. Hamlet’s play within the play, ‘Mousetrap,’ will flourish in the flow of cultural history, as will de silentio’s multiple Abraham scenarios. Hamlet directs that play before his mother and the King to test them. Climacus casts Socrates in a solo dance before God to test our credulity. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hongs, V. 1: 89. See Climacus dances with death in Preface of Crumbs (2009), last sentence). He gives lines to a figure named ‘Kierkegaard’ in Postscript’s ‘A Contemporary Effort.’ CUP1 251 ‘S. Kierkegaard’ makes a late intervention at the close of Postscript. CUP 1: 617-23. The final inserted sheets, initialed ‘S.K.’, are unpaginated. This extraordinary nesting of texts within texts, authors within authors outshines even the endlessly inventive Hamlet – Hamlet does not insert ‘Will Shakespeare’ in his play before the King, nor let ‘Shakespeare’ comment sotto voce from the stage on Hamlet’s inventiveness. Climacus lets himself explain the authorship of which he is a member (as if Hamlet’s play, Mousetrap, were to explain the play Hamlet, or perhaps, all of Shakespeare). A Copenhagen citizen and literary genius adopts an authorial strategy, darting forward and back as ‘Kierkegaard,’ and as this pseudonym or that. He seduces, then abandons, his readers, playing a kind of fun and dangerous hide and seek. The problem of the Kierkegaardian authorship is ultimately our own. We have an obsessive desire for the real, single Kierkegaard: Will he please stand up! Sublime Unsettling What can we make of these antic authorial proliferations and imbrications? As it dodges stable representation, the sublime unsettling that we call ‘Kierkegaard’s works’ nevertheless has a halting, mobile, ever changing sense. A carnival’s confusion makes some sort of sense, even though it can overwhelm in its spectacle, noise, disorientation, chaos, and colour. Fear and Trembling is a sublime spectacle that parallels the new Tivoli Gardens (Mooney 2007: Ch. 8). Call that moment of excitement and fear the ‘carnivalesque’ sublime (Bakhtin 1984: 107). It shimmers a many-sided kind of sense that emerges as we escape the immediate crush and glitter of arcades. As we escape (if we do), the flickering sense we can carry away is not like a well-focused snapshot or clearly drawn map. It comes despite unsettled disorder, as a sigh of relief -- as we achieve safe distance. A taste for the everyday is revived. We might relish a nostalgic calm, having ridden a large wave without mishap. And we suppress the intimation that at any moment a swirl can reappear. The sea has its rogue waves, but for the moment, the last word is not sound signifying nothing. Who determines identity? Tax collectors know how to nail down a tax liable resident of Copenhagen, and librarians know how to shelve an author whose books arrive in the mail. When it comes to full authorial identity, however, they don’t have a clue. They duck all interest in Johannes Climacus, humorist and author of Concluding Unscholarly Postscript, for he has no tax-liable, shelf-location status. Nevertheless, Climacus demands that we determine an identity for him as source of a book or two whose shelf location is ‘Kierkegaard.’ Do we hold a pseudonym responsible for what’s said in his book? Kierkegaard-the-writer might or might not be responsible for the opinions of Climacus, who in turn might or might not be responsible for what he says about Johannes de silentio. Is writer-Kierkegaard responsible for opinions inserted at the end of Postscript, signed ‘S. Kierkegaard’? Is Climacus responsible for letting S. Kierkegaard glue unnumbered pages to the end of his tome? Each instance of alleged responsibility cries for testing, one by one, and the jury may remain hung. Do the opinions of S. Kierkegaard from the end of Postscript trump opinions voiced from the body of Postscript? Why accept remarks that purport to give a retrospective assessment of a Postscript authored by Climacus? If I avow that I believe in God, or that I believe love should hold sway here, or that from now on I will support my son, then (in the right settings), my saying so to some open extent will make it so. My avowals work on the model of a promise, of a performative. In apt settings, my saying ‘I promise’ makes a promise happen, changes the world. A judge’s saying ‘you can go free’ makes me free in the very saying. My identity is based partially on my avowals (‘I am -- I will be -- a good parent!’) and partially on how others take me (they may well reject my self-avowals). And importantly, my avowals of care and commitment can be embodied non-linguistically in gesture and responsiveness as I lovingly play with a grandchild. My identity in that setting is locked into how I avow, express, or enact, my care. In The Point of View of my Work as an Author, Kierkegaard avows that he has always been a religious author. The Point of View of my Work as an Author, Hongs trans. 41-42). Does his saying so make it so? The jury is out. ‘S. Kierkegaard’ declares that he takes responsibility for Climacus’ Postscript. Can he usurp responsibility from Climacus by mere declaration? The implied author of the Kierkegaardian oeuvre transfers authorial powers to Climacus. Some time later ‘S. Kierkegaard’ seems to renege. Does ‘S. Kierkegaard’ have the authority to strip Climacus of authorship? He says he is the ‘author, as people would call it,’ of eight major works from Either/Or through Postscript. CUP1: 623 ff.). Does his saying so make it so? Perhaps no one has authority to strip Climacus of his authorship – once granted. In Melville’s great book, Ahab has authority to cast judgment on Starbuck. In Postscript, Climacus casts judgment on de silentio. CUP1: 261f.). Although Ahab can’t cast judgment on Melville, the infinitely clever Climacus casts judgment on Kierkegaard, feigning annoyance that someone in Copenhagen is stealing his lines and publishing his ideas in books with titles like Either/Or and Fear and Trembling. Plato is the classic precursor here: he authors Socrates, yet Socrates speaks Plato’s lines and even upstages him, just as Climacus can upstage Kierkegaard, ribbing him. Ahab can’t comment on Melville, and Hamlet can’t comment on Shakespeare. Climacus, however, can come alive and talk back, a version of Pygmalion, who makes a statue that comes to life. Kierkegaard dreams up Climacus who is dreamily amused at the dreamer who dreams him. Veronyms, Pseudonyms It’s natural to think that texts signed ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ minimize doubts about authorial responsibility. Those signatures ought to point to ‘the true Kierkegaard’, apart from the masks. Yet some years after Søren’s death, his brother Peter suggested, in effect, that works signed by Søren should be treated as if written by a pseudonym Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard, a Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2001: 422-3). Peter wanted to have a high opinion of his brother. He also wanted to reject his brother’s well-circulated polemics against the Danish church hierarchy and against a godless Danish society. Peter was a high-ranking Bishop in the Danish State Church, the very church Søren relentlessly ridiculed. As his brother was dying, Peter might have sought to forgive, but didn’t. Years later he had every reason to wish that his brother’s attacks on the Church did not represent Søren’s real views. Perhaps his brother’s now famous polemics were just another mask. I reject the premise that the variety of masks Kierkegaard presents betray a penchant for deception --Mooney, Edward F. (2007, ch 5). Then Peter could despise the mask and embrace the brother. Peter’s hypothesis has some plausibility. ‘Kierkegaard’ might be just another pseudonym. An only implied author of an oeuvre has some of the irreality of a pseudonym. Peter’s flesh and blood brother walked the streets, attended church, and paid taxes. Peter’s brother stands to Climacus and the author of the excoriating ‘attack literature’ as a flesh and blood Copenhagen judge might stand to ‘Judge William.’ The gap between ‘Judge William’ and any factual Judge might be as large as the gap between a ‘Kierkegaard’ (whose books librarians shelve), and a resident of Copenhagen whose brother was Peter. In the long run, Peter is almost right. It is the implied author of the oeuvre, rather than any particular resident of Copenhagen, who will (or will not) have made an indelible mark on the times and beyond. Peter’s younger brother can be freed from the irascible critic we call Kierkegaard just as Shakespeare can be freed from the agony and madness of King Lear. Or so it seems. Against Peter’s view, Climacus and the author of the ‘Attack Literature’ are Kierkegaard, in the way Lear and Hamlet are Shakespeare. The Shakespeare who did or didn’t pay his taxes is of no more interest than the Kierkegaard who did or did not put his brother to shame, but of enormous interest are Shakespeare taken as Lear and Hamlet, and Kierkegaard, as Climacus and de silentio. Difficult Reality Have we volatilized Kierkegaard? Does Kierkegaard perform a kind of self-volatilization? If Melville has authority to say to Hawthorne that his identity seems volatilized, who is the Melville who can thus undo himself? If he is volatile, he has no position or authority from which to speak of his undoing. Without a position, he can’t write, ‘the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper.’ Perhaps Kierkegaard can’t fashion himself as ephemeral, shifting with each new voice, lacking a stable identity. He surely changes, yet he must just as assuredly not change (too radically). If an author is like a speaker, she must have enough permanence to promise, avow, take something as her own, and enough permanence to hold her future self responsible for her present or past declarations. Otherwise, no declarations or promises can be made. (Yet Hamlet can promise!) Melville’s Copenhagen counterpart writes a carnival of creations that seems to volatilize its director and producer and performer -- yet logically that venture can’t quite succeed. The conundrum is rooted in what Cora Diamond aptly calls ‘difficult reality’. On “difficult reality” see Cavell, Stanley, Diamond, Cora, et.al. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. We must hold steady two (or more) conflicting views. Sitting up from the steady side of the bed, we know that Kierkegaard knows that it is the same ‘he’ who sips coffee, who gives lines to Climacus, who sincerely writes signed religious discourses -- who takes back Climacus’ status as author, who gives Johannes de silentio such a loud and raucous voice. Sitting up from that assuredly non-metaphysical, practical, and everyday side of the bed, however, does not foreclose our sitting up from the unsteady side. As in an all-too-real dream, we fall into the mix, glitter and darkness of the oeuvre, wherein the author and others (including myself as awakening reader) float eerily – float within an elusive, ghost-like multitude. There is no ‘right side’ from which to sit up. Reality is difficult. The existential-literary worries about permanence that Kierkegaard and Melville present are not to be dismissed as frivolous, ill-founded, or hysterical. We must resist the temptation to conclude that on pain of contradiction, one or the other of these standpoints must be rejected. We are simultaneously old and young, happy and sad, single and legion. We are, and inhabit, a rather anomalous reality that suspends tensions not easily resolvable, and are sometimes irresolvable. A young woman holds the hope of the world in her smile; we see simultaneously the hope of the world shattered in her smile, for she has but minutes to live. A young writer holds the hope of a strong and resilient identity in his pen; we see simultaneously that this hope is shattered as his pen moves in ways that are self-volatilizing. The writer both laments and celebrates puzzles and anxieties about who he really is, and by implication, about who anyone really is. And as I read with empathy, indeed, I celebrate and lament the puzzles of who I am at last. Reality resists a comforting seamlessness. Genres Kierkegaard pens his way into history as master of an incredibly varied number of genres. These should catch our attention even more than his neon-lit pseudonyms. He resists, even scorns, a standard philosophical or theological prose. He is in turn a dreamer, fabulist, and diarist; a publicist, dramatist, and dialectician; a sermonizer, satirist, and lyricist; a conjurer of pseudonyms, an ironist, humorist, and poet; a polemicist and aphorist. And he invents works that defy all known genres -- that are one of a kind: we are offered a so-called ‘book’ of nothing but prefaces. Prefaces. Perhaps the key to Kierkegaard’s multiple identities is not the varied signatures. Mixed genres signal mixed identities. Johannes de silentio calls Fear and Trembling a ‘dialectical lyric.’ What sort of genre is that? Climacus identifies the genre of Postscript as ‘unscholarly’ -- in the manner of a ‘postscript’ to some ‘philosophical crumbs.’ And the genre is further specified as a ‘mimic-pathetic-dialectic compilation,’ and an ‘existential contribution.’ We can only applaud such framing clarity! We’ve asked how authorial prerogative pervades a text (or doesn’t). Now we ask how genre exerts its prerogatives (or doesn’t). Genre provides a subtle, intimate frame to lead us to appropriate ways of reading. We read a discourse in one way, a set of aphorisms in another, and a book of nothing but prefaces in yet another. Issues of authorial identity shift to issues of genre identity, and issues of multiple authors retreat as we take up issues of multiple genres. Fear and Trembling, for instance, is claimed by but a single pseudonym, but the genres within that slim text are amazingly varied. The panoply includes the carnivalesque and bawdy, the fairy tale or fable, the satirical, burlesque, or farcical, the tragic, the labyrinthine unfathomable, the grotesque and the sublime, the dialectical and lyrical, the fantastical and dreamlike, the antinomian, apophatic, and eucatastrophical (an unexpected finish that’s marvellously good). Local history gets written up in one genre (we might call it factual), and local poetry gets written up in another. The genre of Judge William’s letters differs from the genre of a sermonic discourse. The implied author of Johannes de silentio’s ‘Speech in Praise of Abraham’ is slightly different from the implied author of the earlier section, ‘Attunement.’ Judge William may not speak from the factual, but he is surely not speaking from the neighbourhood of Batman or Snow White. Poetic actuality is as varied as factual actuality. Beyond the familiar (and flawed) fact-fiction duplet, taking up a multiplicity of genres can be taking up multiple metaphysical possibilities. Authors of the non-factual aren’t thereby captive of the fictional. Are my dreams my fictions or my intimate facts? Hamlet is neither ‘merely fictional’ nor ‘poetic.’ Our sensibilities outstrip our lexicons. Dialectical writing (say, Philosophical Crumbs or Unscholarly Postscript) implies an author in philosophical space – not exactly poetical or fictional space. The genre of The Point of View of my Work as an Author is contested: it’s too simple to say we have a factual Copenhagen resident reporting the facts about a writer who is also a local resident. We’ve said Kierkegaard can write as a dreamer or fabulist, diarist or publicist, dramatist or dialectician, sermonizer, satirist, and more. There are not just one or two metaphysical slots (say the poetical-fictional and literal-factual) within which to sort this marvellous array. The burlesque is suggested as a Kierkegaardian genre in Jordan, Mark D., ‘The Modernity of Christian Theology or Writing Kierkegaard Again for the First Time,’ Modern Theology, Vol. 27: 3, 442-451. Polonius reports the variety of genres in a Kierkegaardian spirit when he promises ‘the best actors in the world / either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral / pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical / tragical-comical-historical-pastoral / scene individable, or poem unlimited.’ (Hamlet, Act 2, Sc. 2, 405; see Bloom, Harold, Hamlet, Poem Unlimited. New York: Penguin 2003. On the carnivalesque as a genre, see Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Looking at the variety of writing spaces might be like looking at a variety of places where action and reception occur: spaces of confession, for exhortation, of song, for exposition, of thanksgiving, of critique, of history lessons, of story-telling, of quiet listening -- and so forth. Genres would pair up with sorts and styles of action and reception. The spaces where Kierkegaard writes then proliferate as varied as these spaces are. At these sites of action and reception and communicative exchange are the items just listed (thanksgiving and story-telling, for instance) and also oratory, monstrosity, circus, the ridiculous-academic and the political harangue – in endless variety, all in a carnival whirl. Change and Changelessness An outpouring of genres, an ongoing motley of the carnivalesque and more didactic or prayerful writings, carries an existential lesson, a determined refusal to stop time. The onrush of genres marks an exhilarating embrace of temporality. This is an embrace of the endlessly surprising – the newness, sufferings, and restorations of time. Melville cries out to Hawthorne, ‘Lord, when shall we be done changing?’ He’s desperate as he is gripped by Ahab, then Ishmael, and loses his centre, just as Kierkegaard is gripped by Johannes de silentio, then Climacus, and so opens the issue of an ever-changing centre. As if frightened by ephemerality, Melville hopes that Hawthorne’s friendship will be saving. ‘Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.’ (Melville 2001: 44). In contrast, Kierkegaard is exhilarated. Change is a bracing condition to live out and replicate in literature. Opposed to the sense of endless change is the presumption of a minimal stability. Existential stages combine the stability of a stage with the instability of stage-shift. Because each stage-heading oversees many genres, however, stability is diluted. Melville did not create Ishmael, Ahab, or Starbuck to make readers wonder where, or who, or whether he, Melville exists now and tomorrow. But I suspect Kierkegaard created Climacus and Anti-Climacus (and a dozen other figures) to disrupt stability, to vex readers. The texts of the oeuvre set us wondering where (and whether) a character or writer was and will be; and where and whether I, as a reader, exist and will be. To exist and own a life parallels performing a character and owning the performance -- enacted here or there -- and to be invested in how that performed life fared yesterday, and fares now, and will fare tomorrow. Thus a now-familiar tension: it matters where, when, and how a writer and reader stand, changing yet changeless. Writers give their work a kind of imperishable existence or immortality (Westfall 2007: 51). Death and resurrection are in play as tax-liable Kierkegaard dies, and implied-author Kierkegaard, a cultural presence, gradually rise up from the grave. As we read, we find an author alive post-burial. There is yet another way to think from the far side of the grave. Kierkegaard writes looking back on past thoughts and intuitions that were his and are now past, left behind by time. It’s as if he places himself beyond the grave, and looks back. The true poet, we may think, is engaged in ‘posthumous production.’ Kierkegaard gives as a subtitle to one of his treatises, ‘A Posthumous Work of a Solitary Human Being’ (SKS11: 57/WA: 51). Posthumous work is work of one who has died and is now alive, resurrected, beyond bones marked by a headstone. Any praising or deflationary biography addressing the mortal taxpayer and flawed suitor becomes superfluous on this view. ‘The freedom of literature – its true immortality – is its absolute distance from the factual’ (Westfall 2007: 135). And flight from the factual is not flight to the fictional. As I dream of tomorrow, recollect my early childhood, or get my life in view as if it were done, I think neither fact nor fiction. And a text’s immortality also means that readers are equal over time in addressing it. No nineteenth century Danish writer has privilege in fixing the meaning of a part or the whole of the authorship. Kierkegaard is dead, and hence disabled from giving the ‘incontrovertible last word on Kierkegaardian authorship’ (Westfall 2007: 77). As a visitor to Copenhagen, I want to meet Kierkegaard to get him to sign my copy of Concluding Unscholarly Postscript. I ring his bell. Noting the tome and divining my purpose, he says, ‘I’m sorry, there is no Johannes Climacus at this address – you’ve been misinformed.’ I try to match wits. ‘Ah! But Mr. Climacus has added a few pages at the end -- they declare that S. Kierkegaard, not Climacus, is the author!’ He retorts, ‘Young man, I wouldn’t believe everything you read in books, especially in books that are dialectical and unscholarly, written by fanciful and humorous authors, full of dubious mental exercises and imaginative travels! Neither S. Kierkegaard nor Climacus reside here!’ Although Kierkegaard is clearly cagey and elusive, I reject the premise that he is therefore deceptive. And insofar as he is alive, he gives multiple, unsettling answers. Whirl and Sudden Centre Subjects reside in inter-subjective relations, not in isolated Cartesian mental substances or Cartesian-Sartrean centres of choice and action. They reside, as Kierkegaard stages things, often in a street theatre or carnivalesque whirl. That’s the way it can feel from the inside as we face the array of ‘Kierkegaardian’ texts, and the way it may feel as we enter any one text. No doubt there are days when our own lives have the excitement and anxiety of whirl – no reassuring anchor of identity to grip. All that notwithstanding, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity can appear not only from the inside in the midst of moments of whirl, but also from some relatively more distant vantage of composure. Stepping back, say in retrospect, I may reflect that the carnival scene that sweeps me up is put together by the vision, execution, and managerial skills of CEO Jones, CEO Kierkegaard. He is its heart and soul, what holds it together. So although Kierkegaard-Jones is from one angle just another subject in inter-subjective space, from another he is boss, inspiration, and source of power -- however artfully he may hide this fact, and deflect attention away from himself toward the multitude performing and caught up in the whirl. Similarly, I can be caught up in the whirl, and seem to myself to be as centreless as my surround. But the spell can be broken. Suddenly a small child darts toward the Ferris wheel. Without losing a beat, I grab her hand. I may not have been aware of a centre for myself apart from the engulfing whirl. But after my action, I know there was a ‘me’ at the ready, prepared to take charge, alert to practical emergency, ready to act from a singular centre, from an identity, a strong integrity. Being a self in a mobile world presents a ‘difficult reality’ for philosophy. There are tensions between at least two senses of our existence. We have subliminal confidence (usually) that a centred self is at the ready. It will spring into action and forestall doubts. Yet we admit that we may lose even the confidence of a self at the ready. This may occur because of inattention, carelessness, or despair. But also, more sanguinely, a dependable identity can be swept away in a fluid mood of love, in a rising arc of music or poetry or dance, in being swept out of ourselves by majestic seas or landscapes, or swept up in the crush of Mardi Gras. Difficult realities make for difficult philosophy. Kierkegaard was polemical and cagey enough to revel in the changing shadows of a self and in the difficulties others would have in finding him. And he was sharp enough to see a moral and religious advantage in elusiveness. He continually intimates that only where radical openness to change is present – that is, only where a solid self can’t be pinned down -- can there be hope of real transfiguration. The apparent ‘solid self’, often enough, is only a social shell, a convenient surface for others, lacking a personal heart. Melville avowed that knowing Hawthorne persuaded him of ‘our immortality.’ Kierkegaard saw writing itself working toward an eternal transfiguration. In a moment of prophecy, he declares that Fear and Trembling will make his name immortal. And if he were persuaded of immortality, it would not be (as with Melville) through a glimpse of undying friendship. He craved, we suppose, the glimpse of a God who would acknowledge his authorship, and furthermore, place him beyond all change and corruption. Communications Kierkegaard writes in his journals, ‘Real ethico-religious communication is as if vanished from the world.’ Journals and Papers 1: 656. In the Postscript he writes, ‘In its inexhaustible artistry, such a form of [ethico-religious] communication . . . renders the existing subject’s own [inexhaustible] relation to the idea. CUP 1: 80 I take these words to mean that an ethical-religious status or posture or bearing can be communicated by mentors, writing, or events in a medium of infinite artistry, and be received by a subject whose relation to a proper ethico-religious aspiration [‘the idea’] will itself be a medium of infinite artistry, an ongoing and inexhaustible receiving and making-real. We crave the specificity of a particular life that, in its vivid detail, can exemplify one that could be ours. Kierkegaard brings moral knowledge and its art, the lively artistry of the soul, down to earth, letting it speak in its varied plenitude, in its alluring, halting, terrifying energies. Having pseudonyms present various viewpoints and embody various stances encourages our free responsiveness across a range of affect. We can take Kierkegaard’s works (the pseudonymous ones, at the very least) to be works of art that address us. They appeal to and activate our interpretative sensibilities, and nicely detour around an argumentative essay’s explicit propositional outcomes, or a preacher’s imperious or intimidating (or quite gentle) exhortations. These works of art (as I’ll call them) have pedagogical aims. Their aim, for instance, might be to show how an Abrahamic stance, or a Socratic or Christian one, might animate one’s life. Accordingly, Kierkegaard artistically displays, or enacts, the ‘dialectical lyric’ of a Johannes de silentio (as he mulls through multiple versions of the Abraham story in Fear and Trembling). He artistically sketches out the ‘comic-pathetic- dialectic’ of a Johannes Climacus in the Postscript, a figure who might as well be a voluble Socrates. We see thinking on the go, improvising, exploratory, as art can be mobile, improvisatory, exploratory -- sketching a possibility of action or understanding, but not spelling it out in the way a treatise or lecture in morality would. We can ask what happens or is communicated as one is overtaken by a work of art, or overtaken by a pseudonymous work, or some portion of it? This brings us to Kierkegaard’s contrast between direct and indirect communication -- what I prefer to call the contrast between objective and subjective communication. Objective and Subjective Communication ‘Information-only’ communication contrasts with subjective communication -- communication of affect or virtue or ‘existential status.’ When I take in an ‘objective communication,’ I take in information, doctrine, or creed, delivered in explicit propositions or argument. On the other hand, when I take in a ‘subjective communication’ I take in an affect, virtue, or status (I’m a new man!) – I take in an existential orientation, mood, or disposition. A mentor, piece of literature, or an event can present an occasion of transforming reception. We might receive generosity or courage, cunning or playfulness, honesty or outrage, imaginative freedom, combative intellect, or surpassing kindness. If these lodge in the soul, it is not as new information. Religious or ethical writing, and religious or ethical acting, found in exemplary lives, and in stage, cinematic, or street performance, or in liturgical ceremonies, can have deeply transformative, non-propositional impact. see Aumann, Antony, ‘Kierkegaard on Indirect Communication, the Crowd, and a Monstrous Illusion,’ in R. L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Point of View. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010: 295-324. Kierkegaard correctly stresses the importance in a life of the transfer of ‘existential,’ or ‘subjective’ significance. But he fails to see that communication of ‘facts-only’ can be indirect, and that the communication of affect or virtue can be direct. His oppositional ‘direct/indirect’ can’t do the job he wants done. If I read a medical journal’s account of pulmonary embolism, the medical writer intends to transfer bare bones, objective-only content. Under Kierkegaard’s rubrics, this is direct communication. But for me, a lay reader, the delivery is indirect, for I must detour through dictionaries and other articles to get the simple facts straight. (Of course, this is not what Kierkegaard means by ‘indirection,’ but that’s my point: what he has in mind does not coincide with our ordinary intuitions about ‘indirection.’) Coming at this awkward rubric from the other side, some of what Kierkegaard labels ‘indirect communication’ -- the transfer of subjective affect or virtue (say) rather than objective-only content -- has an unequivocally direct impact. If I express my rage by yelling ‘No!’ in your hearing (or express my joy by yelling ‘Yes!’), an existential or subjectively experienced fear or alarm, or an existential delight or affirmation, will arc from my voiced-body and enter yours – directly. Thus Kierkegaard’s contrast must travel under new names. A relay of something objective can happen indirectly; and a relay of something subjective can happen directly. Simultaneously Subjective-Objective Utterances are not definitively one or the other, subjective or objective. Some are neither (say a policeman’s asking me to pull over). Many are both. If I yell ‘Watch out for the truck!’ I convey objective information: the truck approaching presents an objective danger. I also want my words to startle you, to arrest your motion, to transfer passion or fear that (I hope) will be like a physical push to get you out of the way. I need both subjectivity and objectivity to be directly conveyed in my ‘Watch out!’ In my intensely vocalized ‘Yes!’, I convey something subjective -- that I’m utterly enchanted. But I’m enchanted about an objective fact, a ‘bare fact,’ if you will: we share a magical view of surf through the Pacific mist. My ‘Watch out!’ or ‘Yes!’ release affect and subjectivity aimed in your direction in the hope that my subjectivity is imparted to you. That imparting can be as immediate and as direct as a blow to the chest or a touch of a hand. What gets imparted is not just objective information but my passion, my orientation, perhaps even my freedom. My ‘Yes!’ is my release, my freedom, my unabashed delight that if successfully imparted invites you to share in this unrestrained delight. Paraphrase Propositional or information-transfer can easily be paraphrased. ‘It’s raining in California’ might be paraphrased, ‘if you go to California, you’ll discover a downpour.’ On the other hand, the expression of mood, affect, or freedom, resists paraphrase. The launch of affect or mood is not the launch of a string of words to interpret with other words. When we hear Lear’s anguished ‘No! No! No! No!’ the bulk of what’s conveyed is a kind of desperate agony and anger. You can’t paraphrase a ‘No!’ If you hear it you’re moved. King Lear transmits not a proposition, but some mix of despair, rage, deep refusal, desperation. The affect is a ‘what’ that requires a proper ‘how.’ The rage can’t be voiced casually, flippantly, in a monotone. He must cry, cry out – ‘No! No! No!’ How that cry arrives, inflected at its apt degree of passion, will make all the difference in what arrives. Voiced properly, we have nothing like data for a log. Imagine the bland entry: ‘Tuesday, 12:01 pm. King said ‘No’ five times. Bad weather.’ A cry reduced to data is no longer a cry. Everything subjective about Lear arrives in an anguished ‘No!’ Everything subjective about Molly Bloom arrives in an ecstatic ‘Yes!’ No fact or piece of creed, no ‘objectivity-only’ expresses her ecstasy or his anguish. And these passions are imparted to me, rend my heart, opening the felt possibility of a passion that might just be mine – is, for the moment, mine. Any single utterance can simultaneously transfer a mix of objective content and subjective disposition. And the objective-subjective contrast does not exhaust the types of interpersonal communication. If I am a policeman I may order you to stop. That will not be an ethical-religious communication, but more like grabbing your arm. As a cop, your action matters to me, and you should heed my imperative. But I have no aim to alter your ethical-religious constitution. There need be nothing indirect about our commonplace capacities to share a sense of confidence, a mood of terror, a spirit of playfulness, a passion for truth. Yet it’s not easy to understand how these conveyances work. You communicate your phone number. If asked how I got it, I say, ‘you spoke clearly, I wrote it down.’ End of story! Socrates imparts his allure – I’m shattered. Asked how I got seduced, I stumble: ‘That turn of phrase . . . you know, that gentle wit, his touch, his intelligence!’ -- I’m inarticulate and blush. Socratic Subjective Communication In Postscript, Climacus ponders how Socrates can teach while withholding objective content. Something gets transferred from mentor to student, but it’s hard to pin down exactly what. Let’s say that to be won over by Socrates is to fall in love as he asks questions, to fall in love with his orientation toward inquiry. Socrates does not pass on a doctrine or creed to shout from the rooftops. We receive (through Plato’s rendition) a transfer of allure. Socrates is a master at drawing us into his net (which is not teaching us the truth of a proposition). And the impact of his allure can be as direct as a lover’s touch, or the intimate gaze of his eyes – just ask Alcibiades, who falls directly, madly, in love. When Kierkegaard addresses me in his discourses, ‘My dear reader . . .’ he is directly inviting an intimacy, directly transferring his subjective openness in a way he hopes we will accept. When Dostoevsky has Christ kiss the Grand Inquisitor on the lips, the intimacy and subjective impact is deep and striking – even as we struggle with the hermeneutical question of what, objectively speaking, that kiss is supposed to mean (is it acquiescence, approval, forgiveness, resignation, pity . . . ? ). We will quickly sound foolish trying to say what (objectively) it is, exactly, in the person who steals our heart, that dispossesses the mind, that allows the theft. Take Socrates. Is it the look in his eye, the slight hesitancy in his rough speech, a melting in his shoulders as they turn slightly to one side? Is it the sensation that he sees through me, and is close enough to touch me? In the case of Kierkegaard, is it his sparkling wit, his intimate address, his sense of the great pain of love and devotion, his capacity to have Christ walk hand in hand with Socrates? I propose that Kierkegaard accords Christ and Socrates a collaborative identity in (Mooney 2007: Ch. 3). Theatre and Freedom Perhaps what steals our hearts is Kierkegaard’s exuberant launching of street theatre -- a young swain in love with a princess, an ex-alcoholic seeing a friend (a suicide) drawn from the Seine, a barefoot dancing Socrates, a mother weaning her child with Abraham’s knife over her shoulder. Sometimes Kierkegaard’s array of books, each book an array of unexpected drama, can operate like a theatre-troupe in waiting. Now one ensemble of actors steps forward, now another, pseudonym by pseudonym, signed work by signed work, this section of Either/Or, now that section of Either/Or. Now we see the knight of faith as a dancer – now, the knight as a woman knitting – now, the quixotic knight as a jaunty burgher whistling all the way home. This artistic troupe can be shifting and elusive in its address, but at the level of individual subjective impact, it can be as direct as can be. Improvising political street theatre, antic troupes in a beleaguered and melancholy city can communicate politics (or an ethico-religious truth, as in a medieval mystery play) without placards or requisite chants from the crowd or mandatory parades or riotous sweeps into battle (or rushes to conversion). One by one our hearts can be affected. How the transfer of political or ethico-religious affect will play out in our subsequent thought and comportment is an open question. Kierkegaard and Socrates leave us in a space of responsive freedom. Our ethico-religious imaginations have been invaded by a wondrous, even sublime, allure that leaves us ripe for change or consolidation. And a wide range of objective uncertainty or ignorance accompanies this ‘subjectivity transfer.’ Socrates says with a wink, ‘I know nothing!’ (yet speaks on); Johannes de silentio says with a wink, ‘I am silent!’ (yet writes on). With a wink (after 500 pages of tome-like disquisition) Climacus writes ‘I take it all back’ (yet leaves us a jewel). Finding a Life If one aim of spiritual or moral communication is ministering to others in their existential need, then Kierkegaard insists that renewed examination of old creeds or propositions, or the conveyance of new ones, is way off the mark. What is needed is change of affect, orientation, virtue, or enablement. Kierkegaard’s great insight is that we don’t always need more discussion of facts or revision of theories. Our need is to find a life, say of Socrates or Christ, of devoted knitting or dancing, of inspired writing or talking, of holy walking or comforting, a life that exemplifies what’s best – morally, spiritually, religiously. This happens as an exemplar’s power enters our lives, or as the artistry of the written word enter our lives, or as the allure of street theatre enters our lives -- to be taken up and expressed in whatever way seems fitting (or not) -- from my point of view, in a life that is mine. Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms opens our frustrations, apprehensions, curiosities, alert interests. There is more to this than being coy, exhibitionist or secretive, more than being perverse or provocative, teasing, wicked, or deceptive, more than being playful, jesting, experimental or evasive. We’re forced to figure what’s going on, to at least partially resolve the whirl, to gather our imaginative capacities and focus them on the matter at hand, the difficult reality impinging. Perhaps entering the field of pseudonyms and varied genres creates the tension between representation and what exceeds and defies representation so familiar in encountering the sublime. And the sublime, in eluding our grasp, sets us free. Pseudonyms create an aperture for freedom, for realization of an interpretative existence that sloughs off the automation of direct data absorption or creedal transfer. Like a good metaphor, the shocking interruption of a pseudonym spawns an abundance of thought, feeling and images. I experience my mind-body-soul at sea, thrown into the labyrinth of freedom -- not just told about it. Without a proper distance between a pseudonym and its creator, a reader will mistake Kierkegaard for an authority on some matter of fact or doctrine, an authority charged with communicating in objective address – with all urgency. However, Kierkegaard’s task is to awaken our subjectivity. Accordingly, he must partially veil or disguise his seriousness, for authorities can intimidate or overpower, as well as inspire and command. Yielding to his charisma, our freedom is at risk. Climacus brings out the contrast between Socrates’ outwardly unfavorable appearance and his inner beauty. Through the repellent effect exerted by the contrast, the learner understands that he has essentially to do with himself: Inwardness or wholeheartedness is not fusion with a common truth but a separation in which each exists in the truth. Socrates must hide to protect his students from too easy a seduction, and of the wrong sort. Kierkegaard must hide so that his reader may come to ‘exist in the truth.’ If I tell you that I’ve just become a grandfather, I may find myself overtaken by the wonder and fear crystallized in the advent of a child, the fragile abundance of its coming to pass – of my passing, and of the passing of a world that both pulls me forward and leaves me behind. More dramatic is the pathos of Socratic encounter, the passion of Lear’s cries, the subtle irony of pseudonyms, are relatively dramatic cases of subjective (or existential) communication. They are also instances of the connection between encounter with the sublime and the freedom of the interpreter. Yet the sublime can appear in the relatively pedestrian. Mentioning I’ve become a grandfather is one of those moments of sharing and everyday transfer of subtle affect, mood, passion, and orientation that make up rich and fragile lives. For a good discussion, see Aumann, ‘Kierkegaard on Indirect Communication, the Crowd, and a Monstrous Illusion.’ No authority, but a pseudonym speaks. With that, anxiety is conferred, but also essential freedom. Freedom In Postscript, Climacus tells us, ‘The secret of communication [or imparting] specifically hinges on setting the other free.’ CUP1: 74 In line with this, Climacus appends to the very end of the Postscript a revocation of all he’s so far asserted. In the tome’s ‘final explanation’ to make matters worse, under the signature ‘Kierkegaard,’ an author of that name distances himself from the entirety of the pseudonymous works (including Postscript). Creating distance between texts and authors reduces their looming authority. The printed word is released to speak on its own, a word addressed from a subjectivity to a subjectivity, who in turn can speak (or remain silent). Veiling a word’s authority promotes a reader’s freedom from an author’s pressure or coercion. Kierkegaard is not a policeman shouting ‘stop!’ The space between reader and text is aesthetically maintained. As Climacus puts it, Kierr Wherever the subjective is of importance . …communication is a work of art; it is doubly reflected, and its first form is the subtlety that the subjective individuals must be held devoutly apart from one another and must not be left coagulating together in objectivity. CUP1: 79 We don’t parrot slogans. Artistry protects subjective freedom to enable another to become ethical, Socratic, or Christian. If Kierkegaard’s only thrown a bone to a bored intelligentsia who coagulate in a crowd chanting objectivities, then he’d rather take the book back. Exemplars and Artistry If I teach ‘Thou shall have no disciples’ in such a way that disciples gather around, or if I teach ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ as a random truth for mindless duplication on exams, then I have failed to communicate an appropriate concern. The outcome, as Climacus would say, is comic. I will not have exemplified the relevant truth in the telling. To fail in this regard is to have failed to convey decisive subjectivity, a capacity for living in a certain way. ‘The thinker must present the human ideal . . . as an ethical requirement, as a challenge to the recipient to exist in it’. CUP 358 With regard to the human ideal, “the simple as well as the wise must be so obliging as to exist in it.” CUP 367 Showing or exemplifying truth is distinct from stating truth. If an ethical or religious individual wishes to convey the truth she inhabits, she must avoid the appearance and the reality of reducing it to a telling or a statement, even a roundabout telling. Socrates would dodge telling if he thought his interlocutors were just looking for a slogan or principle to run with. If a Christian should communicate compassion, that can’t be by saying ‘be compassionate,’ or ‘I’m compassionate, follow me.’ Perhaps an ‘existence communication’ of compassion is most salient in silence, taking no part in what William James calls the chatter of the boundlessly loquacious mind. James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Centenary Edition. New York: Routledge, 2002: 62. See also Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Charles Taylor 2002: 52; and Mooney 2007: Ch. 13. Kierkegaard fears for our souls because he knows our susceptibility to street gossip, celebrity and political chatter, to academic vanguardism, news-speak and newspeak. Ethico-religious communication is ‘vanished from the world.’ Teaching Subjectivity and Freedom Socrates can turn a soul, unleash a life. There is no simple statement that says how he or a Christ or an ethico-religious teacher might turn a soul, how they impart necessary passion. ‘I only wish,’ Socrates confesses in the Symposium, ‘that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.’ The Symposium of Plato, The Shelley Translation, ed and intro by David O. O’Connor. South Bend Indiana: St Augustine’s Press, 2002, 175d. This translation captures the visceral immediateness of being touched by ‘wisdom-in-Socrates’: ‘It would be well, Agathon, if wisdom were of such a nature that when we touched each other it would overflow of its own accord . . .’ Grant that wisdom is in fact conveyed in the way a lover’s touch conveys love. As I read this passage, that doesn’t mean it will simply flow of its own accord, like water gravitationally pulled. The flowing touch will be much more subtle, delicate and complicated, like conveying extreme delicacy in musical phrasing, requiring interpretative delivery and attuned interpretative reception. An exemplar’s life administers independence even as it bequeaths a pattern and swerves away from doctrine -- of rights or sin, of rituals for birth, marriage, or death, of catechism or creed. Accepting the allure of a Socrates is a commitment to him and to the path he lights up. But the path he lights up will be (and become) my own. As Climacus puts it, no one is so resigned as God; because he communicates creatively in such a way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself. The most resigned a human being can be is to acknowledge the given independence in every human being, and to the best of one’s ability do everything in order truly to help someone retain it. CUP1 260 The independence necessary between persons and the divine is maintained by the artistry of the divine, who on pain of stealing freedom withdraws as creator from creation. Just so, the independence (and dependence) necessary between persons is maintained by a reciprocal respect, artistry, and reserve or withdrawal. Pseudonymity, Genre, Communication, for Freedom In Kierkegaard’s practice, the matters of pseudonymity, genre, and communication are interlocked, joined in the service of bringing an ethico-religious individual to life, joined in the service of increased freedom from a stifling onslaught of false authority, pervasive gossip and sloganeering, of objective-only measures of truth rather than measure of truth that radiates from exceptional artistic, dialectical, ethical, religious persons like Socrates. His is the vocation of an ethico-religious individual, which centrally involves communicating an identity, a life. Kierkegaard said at the end of his life that his task had always been Socratic. The best way to frame his proliferation of style, genre, artful communication, and pseudonymity, is through the light of the Socratic: dialectic and eros in the service of goodness, beauty, and the divine. The subjective thinker is not a scientist-scholar; he is an artist. To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is esthetic enough for his life to have esthetic content, ethical enough to regulate it, dialectical enough in thinking to master it. CUP1: 351 The subjective thinker’s form … is his style … His form must first and last be related to existence, and in this regard he must have at his disposal the poetic, the ethical, the dialectical, the religious. CUP1: 357 h 3 11:03:022011-12-20T19:44:00Z PAGE 94