Accordingly, what is to be shown here is that there is such a duplexity from beginning to end. It is not, then, as is ordinarily the case with a supposed duplexity, that others have discovered it and it is the task of the person concerned to show that it is not. By no means, just the opposite. Insofar as the reader might not be sufficiently aware of the duplexity, it is the author’s task to make it as obvious as possible that it is there. In other words, the duplexity, the equivocalness, is deliberate, is something the author knows about more than anyone else, is the essential dialectical qualification of the whole authorship, and therefore has a deeper basis.
But is this really the case, is there such a sustained duplexity? Can the phenomenon not be explained in another way, that it is an author who was first an esthetic author and then in the course [XIII 522] of years changed and became a religious author? I will not now discuss the point that if this were so the author certainly would not have written a book such as the present one, would scarcely, I dare say, have taken it upon himself to give an overview of the writing as a whole, at least would not have chosen to do so at the very time he meets his first work again.10 Nor will I discuss the point that it would indeed be odd that such a change would occur in the course of so few years. Ordinarily, when it is seen that an esthetic author becomes a religious author, at least a considerable number of years intervenes, so that the explanation of the change is not implausible, so that it is consistent with the author’s actually having become significantly older. But I will not discuss this, since even if it were odd, almost inexplicable, even if it might make one inclined to seek and find any other explanation, it would still not be impossible that such a change could occur in the course of three years. On the contrary, I will show that it is impossible to explain the phenomenon in this way. If, namely, one looks more closely, one will see that three years are certainly not allowed for the occurrence of the change, but that the change is concurrent with the beginning, that is, that the duplexity is there from the very beginning. Two Upbuilding Discourses is concurrent with Either/Or. The duplexity in the deeper sense, that is, in the sense of the whole authorship, was certainly not what there was talk about at the time: the first and second parts of Either/Or. No, the duplexity was: Either/Or—and Two Upbuilding Discourses.
The religious is present from the very beginning. Conversely, the esthetic is still present even in the last moment. After the publication of only religious works for two years, a little esthetic article follows.* Therefore, at the beginning and at the end, there is assurance against explaining the phenomenon by saying that the writer is an esthetic author who in the course of time had changed and had become a religious author. Just as Two Upbuilding Discourses came out approximately two or three months after Either/Or, so also that little esthetic article appeared about two or three months after two years of exclusively religious writings. The two upbuilding discourses and the little article match each other conversely and conversely show that the duplexity is both first and last. Although Either/Or attracted all the attention and [XIII 523] no one paid attention to Two Upbuilding Discourses, this nevertheless signified that it was specifically the upbuilding that should advance, that the author was a religious author who for that reason never wrote anything esthetic himself but used pseudonyms for all the esthetic works, whereas the two upbuilding discourses were by Magister Kierkegaard. Conversely, whereas the exclusively upbuilding books of the two years may have attracted the attention of others, perhaps no one in turn has noticed in the deeper sense the little article, what it signifies—that now the dialectical structure of this whole authorship is complete. The little article is an accompaniment precisely for documentation, for the sake of confrontation, in order at the end to make it impossible (as the two upbuilding discourses do at the beginning) to explain the phenomenon in this way—that it is an author who in the beginning was an esthetic author and then later changed and thus became a religious author—inasmuch as he was a religious author from the very beginning and is esthetically productive at the last moment.
The first division of books is esthetic writing; the last division of books is exclusively religious writing—between these lies Concluding Unscientific Postscript as the turning point. This work deals with and poses the issue, the issue of the entire work as an author: becoming a Christian. Then in turn it calls attention* to the pseudonymous writing along with the interlaced 18 discourses11 and shows all this as serving to illuminate the issue, yet without stating that this was the object of the prior writing—which could not be done, since it is a pseudonymous writer12 who is interpreting other pseudonymous writers, that is, a third party who could know nothing about the object of writings unfamiliar to him. Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not esthetic writing, but, strictly speaking, neither is it religious. That is why it is by a pseudonymous writer, although I did place my name as editor, which I have not done with any purely esthetic production**—a hint, at least for someone who is concerned with or has a sense for such things. Then came the two years in which there appeared only religious writings under my name. The time of the pseudonyms was over; the religious author had extricated [XIII 524] himself from the disguise of the esthetic—and then, then for documentation and by way of a precaution came the little esthetic article by a pseudonymous writer: Inter et Inter. In a way it at once calls attention to the whole authorship; as said previously, it calls to mind conversely Two Upbuilding Discourses.