A few years after the publication of his six small volumes of upbuilding1 discourses (1843-1844), Søren Kierkegaard was faced with the question of whether to publish The Point of View for My Work as an Author.2
If I do nothing at all directly to assure a full understanding of my whole literary production . . . then what? Then there will be no judgment at all on my authorship in its totality, for no one has sufficient faith or time or competence to look for a comprehensive plan [Total-Anlæg] in the entire production. Consequently the verdict will be that I have changed somewhat over the years.
So it will be. This distresses me. I am deeply convinced that there is another integral coherence, that there is a comprehensiveness in the whole production (especially through the assistance of Governance), and that there certainly is something else to be said about it than this meager comment that in a way the author has changed.3
Part of the evidence that there is a comprehensive plan or structure in the whole variegated authorship and that the author was not one who changed essentially as he became older is the publication pattern of the six volumes of discourses.
Signed Upbuilding Discourses |
Pseudonymous Works |
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Either/Or . . . February 20, 1843 |
Two Upbuilding Discourses . . . . . . May 16, 1843 |
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Three . . . . . . October 16, 1843 |
Fear and Trembling and Repetition . . . October 16, 1843 |
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Two . . . . . . . . . March 5, 1844 |
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Three . . . . . . . . . . June 8, 1844 |
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Philosophical Fragments . . . . . . . . . . . . . June 13, 1844 |
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The Concept of Anxiety and Prefaces . . . . . . . . June 17, 1844 |
Four . . . . . . . . August 31, 1844 |
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Postscript . . . February 27, 1846 |
Christian Discourses . . . . . . . . . . . . . April 26, 1848 |
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The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress . . . . . . . . July 24-27, 1848 |
At the heart of the coherent, comprehensive plan, despite many differences among the published works and within the types of writings, is a common intention: to make aware.4
The category for my undertaking is: to make persons aware of the essentially Christian, but this accounts for the repeated statement: I am not that, for otherwise there is confusion. My task is to get persons deceived—within the meaning of truth—into religious commitment, which they have cast off, but I do not have authority; instead of authority I use the very opposite, I say: the whole undertaking is for my own discipline and education. This again is a genuinely Socratic approach. Just as he was the ignorant one, so here; instead of being the teacher, I am the one who is being educated.5
Although there are a comprehensive plan and a common aim in the published writings, there is also a great variety in theme, form, and tone. Indeed, the preface to The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, after particular reference to the pair Either/Or and Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843), quotes the preface to Two Upbuilding Discourses (1844), which states that the work “‘is offered with the right hand’—in contrast to the pseudonyms, which were held out and are held out with the left hand.”6 The distinction is reiterated in Point of View: “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 by no means that about which there was talk at the time: the first and second parts of Either/Or. No, the duplexity was: Either/Or and Two Upbuilding Discourses.”7
The distinction between two series of published works—the pseudonymous works and the upbuilding discourses—is not incompatible with the stress upon a comprehensive plan and a common aim that embrace the variety of kinds, levels of development, and modes of approach. An analogous variety is evident also within the range of each of the two series. The essential commonality and the particular differences between the upbuilding discourses and the pseudonymous works, and also between the early and late works in each series, are epitomized by certain characteristics and emphases found in the discourses.
The most obvious difference is that whereas the pseudonymous works from Either/Or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript are indirect communication, the signed discourses from first to last are direct.8 But the two modes of communication have ultimately the same aim: “to make aware of the religious, the essentially Christian.”9 To accomplish this, Kierkegaard used two procedural modes in the Total-Anlæg. In “The Accounting,” in On My Work as an Author, he describes the relation of the two approaches:
But just as that which has been communicated (the idea of the religious) has been cast entirely into reflection and taken back again out of reflection, so also the communication has been decisively marked by reflection, or the form of communication used is that of reflection. “Direct communication” is: to communicate the truth directly; “communication in reflection” is: to deceive into the truth. But since the movement is to arrive at the simple, the communication in turn must sooner or later end in direct communication. It began maieutically with esthetic works,* and the whole pseudonymous production is maieutic in nature. Therefore, these works were also pseudonymous, whereas the directly religious—which from the beginning was present in the glimmer of an indication—carried my name. The directly religious was present from the very beginning; Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843) are in fact concurrent** with Either/Or. And in order to safeguard the concurrence of the directly religious, every pseudonymous work was accompanied concurrently by a little collection of “upbuilding discourses” until Concluding Postscript appeared, which poses the issue, which is “the issue” ϰατ’ ἐξοχήν [in the eminent sense] of the whole authorship: “becoming a Christian.”***
* The maieutic lies in the relation between the esthetic productivity as the beginning and the religious as the τέλος [goal]. It begins with the esthetic, in which possibly the majority have their lives, and then the religious is introduced so quickly that those who, moved by the esthetic, decide to follow along, are suddenly standing right in the middle of the decisive qualifications of the essentially Christian, are prompted at least to become aware.
** This also serves to prevent the illusion that the religious is something one turns to when one has become older. “One begins as an esthetic author and then when one has become older and no longer has the powers of youth, then one becomes a religious author.” But if an author concurrently begins as an esthetic and a religious author, the religious productivity certainly cannot be explained by the incidental fact that the author has become older, inasmuch as one certainly cannot concurrently be older than oneself.
*** The situation (becoming a “Christian” in “Christendom,” where consequently one is a Christian)—the situation, which, as any dialectician sees, casts everything into reflection, also makes an indirect method necessary, because the task here must be to take measures against the illusion: calling oneself a Christian, perhaps deluding oneself into thinking one is a Christian, when one is not. Therefore, the one who introduced the issue did not directly define himself as being Christian and the others not; no, just the reverse—he denies being that and concedes it to the others. This Johannes Climacus does. —In relation to pure receptivity, like the empty jar that is to be filled, direct communication is appropriate, but when illusion is involved, consequently something that must first be removed, direct communication is inappropriate.10
Within the series of signed direct discourses, there is a distinction between the initial six volumes of the first period (terminated by the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846) and the writings of the second period. The eighteen discourses Kierkegaard calls the indication of the directly religious. The second period was a time of exclusively religious productivity11 (the review of Two Ages he regarded as writing without involving him as an author12). The exception was his piece on the actress Luise Heiberg titled The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, which nevertheless also had and has its place in the Total-Anlæg.
But in order inversely to recall the beginning (corresponding to what Two Upbuilding Discourses was at the beginning, when the larger works were esthetic), there appeared at the end (when for a long period the productivity was exclusively and voluminously religious) a little esthetic article by Inter et Inter in the newspaper Fædrelandet, 188-91, July 1848. The flash of the two upbuilding discourses at the beginning meant that it was actually this that should advance, this at which it was to arrive; the flash of the little esthetic article at the end was meant, by way of a faint reflection, to bring to consciousness that from the beginning the esthetic was what should be left behind, what should be abandoned.13
Other distinctions are made at the beginning of the preface14 in each of the six volumes that make up the eighteen upbuilding discourses: “this little book (which is called ‘discourses,’ not sermons, because its author does not have authority to preach, ‘upbuilding discourses,’ not discourses for upbuilding, because the speaker by no means claims to be a teacher).” The first distinction, between discourses and sermons, rests primarily on the absence of the authority of ordination. “I am only a poet,” Kierkegaard writes. “. . . I have continually repeated that they are not sermons or have pointed to ‘the sermon’ as something higher.”15 Furthermore, according to Johannes Climacus, the discourses are distinguishable by their use of the “ethical categories of immanence, not the doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox.”16 Therefore, the sermon not only is distinguishable from the upbuilding discourse on the basis of authority and content but is something higher.
The distinction between “upbuilding” discourses and discourses “for upbuilding” rests first on Kierkegaard’s understanding of his writing as his own education. Therefore, he was also without the authority of a teacher, and the discourses themselves had the same intrinsic relation to him as to any other reader.
From the very beginning, I have stressed and repeated unchanged that I was “without authority.” I regard myself rather as a reader of the books, not as the author.
“Before God,” religiously, I call my whole work as an author (when I speak with myself) my own upbringing and development, but not in the sense as if I were now complete or completely finished with respect to needing upbringing and development.17
“For upbuilding” pertains to the nature of the content of a work as well as to Kierkegaard’s own relation to that content. Therefore the expression is used in the subtitle of The Sickness unto Death, a work of the second period. Just as Anti-Climacus, the author of that work, is above Johannes Climacus, the author of Fragments and Postscript, or before him in rank, so also the content of that work is more rigorous and more authoritatively Christian.
It finally came to bear the inscription:
For upbuilding and awakening.
This “for awakening” actually is the “more” that came out of the year 1848, but it is also the “more” that is so much higher than my own person that I use a pseudonym for it.
I use only the poetic designation: “upbuilding,” not even “for upbuilding.”18
The phrase “for upbuilding” is also used in the title and text of “Thoughts That Wound from Behind,” Part Three of Christian Discourses (1848). The use of “for upbuilding” in the text bears out Kierkegaard’s distinction between levels of content and the presence or absence of authority. “Watch out, therefore, when you go to the Lord’s house, because there you will come to hear the truth—for upbuilding.” “What is spoken of, therefore, and truly for upbuilding, is that there is a deliverance for sinners, comfort for the repentant.” “. . . for ‘all things must serve for good those who love God.’ Oh, how often these words are said and repeated again and again, explained and expounded for upbuilding, for comfort, for reassurance.” “. . . but it is blessed—to suffer mockery for a good cause, in order that for upbuilding we might become aware of the comfort, or rather, the joy, that Christianity proclaims . . . .”19
There is an additional distinction not mentioned in the repeated opening preface sentence but worthy of notice here in order to clarify the conception of “upbuilding discourse” and to indicate its relation particularly to Works of Love in the second period of writing. In a journal entry from 1847,20 Kierkegaard points out “The Difference between Upbuilding Discourse and a Deliberation.”
A deliberation [Overveielse] does not presuppose the definitions as given and understood; therefore, it must not so much move, mollify, reassure, persuade, as awaken and provoke men and sharpen thought. The time for deliberation is indeed before action, and its purpose therefore is rightly to set all the elements into motion. A deliberation ought to be a “gadfly”; therefore its tone ought to be quite different from that of an upbuilding [opbyggelig] discourse, which rests in mood, but a deliberation ought in the good sense to be impatient, high-spirited in mood. Irony is necessary here and the even more significant ingredient of the comic. One may very well even laugh once in a while, if only to make the thought clear and more striking. An upbuilding discourse about love presupposes that people know essentially what love is and seeks to win them to it, to move them. But this is certainly not the case. Therefore the “deliberation” must first fetch them up out of the cellar, call to them, turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy with the dialectic of truth.
The most apparent single common element (from the perspective of the reader) among all the works, whether pseudonymous or signed, is that they are addressed to “the single individual [den Enkelte].”21 The centrality of “the single individual,” a characterization of Kierkegaard’s understanding of it, and a designation of who that one is are compacted in a passage in “The Accounting.”
At the very same time that the sensation Either/Or created was at its peak, at that very same time appeared Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843), which used the formula that later was repeated unchanged: “it seeks that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader.” And precisely at the critical moment when Concluding Postscript, which, as stated, poses “the issue,” was delivered to the printer so that the printing could commence as soon as possible and the publication presumably quickly follow—at precisely that moment a pseudonym, most appropriately in a newspaper article,22 made the greatest possible effort to alienate the public,* and after that began the decisively religious productivity. For the second time I religiously affirmed “that single individual,” to whom the next substantial book** (after Concluding Postscript), Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, or the first part of the same book, “Confessional Address,” was dedicated. Perhaps nobody paid much attention to the category “that single individual” the first time I used it, nor was much notice paid to its being repeated unchanged in the preface to every volume of upbuilding discourses. When I the second time or in the second potency repeated the message and stood by my first message, everything was done that I was able to do to make the whole weight of emphasis fall upon this category. Here again the movement is: to arrive at the simple; the movement is: from the public to “the single individual.” In other words, there is in a religious sense no public but only individuals;*** because the religious is earnestness, and earnestness is: the single individual; yet that every human being, unconditionally every human being—which one indeed is—can be, yes, is supposed to be, the single individual.
* Just one thing more, the press of literary contemptibility had achieved a frightfully disproportionate coverage. To be honest, I believed that what I did was a public benefaction;23 it was rewarded by several of those for whose sake I had exposed myself in this way—rewarded, yes, as an act of love is usually rewarded in the world—and by means of this reward it became a truly Christian work of love.
** For the little literary review of the novel Two Ages followed Concluding Postscript so closely that it is almost concurrent and is, after all, something written by me qua critic and not qua author; but it does contain in the last section a sketch of the future from the point of view of “the single individual,” a sketch of the future that the year 184824 did not falsify.
*** And insofar as there is the “congregation” in a religious sense, this is a concept that lies on the other side of “the single individual,” and that above all must not be confused with what politically can have validity: the public, the crowd, the numerical, etc.25
The two phrases “that single individual [hiin Enkelte]” and “the single individual [den Enkelte]” have distinguishable meanings that ultimately become indistinguishable. Initially, hiin Enkelte denoted a particularization that soon became absorbed in the universal singular of den Enkelte, an example of Kierkegaard’s practice of transmutating the particulars of experience into the universally human.26 In a journal entry from a few years after the publication of the discourses of 1843 and 1844, he writes of the universalizing of the hint to Regine27 contained in hiin Enkelte.
On the whole, the very mark of my genius is that Governance broadens and radicalizes whatever concerns me personally. I remember what a pseudonymous writer28 said about Socrates: “His whole life was personal preoccupation with himself, and then Governance comes and adds world-historical significance to it.” To take another example—I am polemical by nature, and I understood the concept of “that single individual” [hiin Enkelte] early. However, when I wrote it for the first time (in Two Upbuilding Discourses), I was thinking particularly of my reader, because this book contained a little hint to her, and until later it was for me very true personally that I sought only one single reader. Gradually this thought was taken over. But here again Governance’s part is so infinite.29
In an earlier journal entry, he emphasizes the universality of den Enkelte.
This is how it is used. The subject of the single individual appears in every book by the pseudonymous writers, but the price put upon being a single individual, a single individual in the eminent sense, rises. The subject of the single individual appears in every one of my upbuilding books, but there the single individual is what every human being is. This is precisely the dialectic of “the single individual” [changed from: the particular]. The single individual can mean the most unique one of all, and it can mean everyone. . . . The point of departure of the pseudonymous writers is continually in the differences—the point of departure in the upbuilding discourses is in the universally human.30
The accent on the single individual in the pseudonymous works is embodied also in the indirect method, the purpose of which is to make the author of the authors31 irrelevant and to leave the reader alone with the works and the various positions presented. In the upbuilding discourses of the first period,32 the accent on the single individual is heightened by the mode of reading that is invited and encouraged—reading aloud. In a journal entry on punctuation, Kierkegaard says: “I always have in mind a reader who reads aloud. . . . Above all, I must repeat that I have in mind readers who read aloud.”33 For example, in the eighteen upbuilding discourses, the frequent absence of question marks in long interrogatory sentences with a descending inflection because of the concluding phrases and clauses is in conformity with the way the portion would be read aloud. There is also the explicit invitation to reading aloud in the Preface to Three Upbuilding Discourses (1843):
Small as it is, it probably will slip through . . . until it finds what it is seeking, that favorably disposed person who reads aloud to himself what I write in stillness, who with his voice breaks the spell on the letters, with his voice summons forth what the mute letters have on their lips, as it were, but are unable to express without great effort, stammering and stuttering, who in his mood rescues the captive thoughts that long for release—that favorably disposed person whom I with joy and gratitude call my refuge, who by making my thoughts his own does more for me than I do for him.34
The invitation is repeated in another form and the purpose of reading aloud is also stated in the preface to the three discourses of 1844. The book seeks only that reader who “gives an opportunity to what is said, brings the cold thoughts into flame again, transforms the discourse into a conversation.”35
According to the usual ways of reckoning the impact of a book—reviews and sales—the six small volumes of upbuilding discourses were scarcely a smashing success. Jens Himmelstrup36 lists only one review, little more than an announcement, of Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843). Thereafter, Himmelstrup lists no review or announcement other than Bishop Mynster’s article “Kirkelig Polemik”37 (1844). The article is Mynster’s reply to observations38 critical of the approach of the Church to the “more educated.” In two pages of the eighteen-page article there are only brief approving references to the dedication by Kierkegaard (“with his rich education”) of the discourses to his father, whom Mynster knew intimately, and to Kierkegaard’s having learned well from his father, as was manifest in the discourse on Job (the first discourse in Four Upbuilding Discourses [1843]), which Mynster calls “a sermon.”
The sales of the six volumes matched the paucity and brevity of the reviews of the discourses. Frithiof Brandt and Else Rammel state that by January 1, 1845, the sales of editions of two hundred copies ranged from 139 of Three Upbuilding Discourses (1843) to 92 of Three Upbuilding Discourses (1844).39 Kierkegaard, as his own publisher, remaindered the unsold copies to P. G. Philipsen, who then issued the eighteen discourses in one volume with the common title page Atten opbyggelige Taler, 1843-1845. Later, when he ran out of the first two discourses, he bound the sixteen discourses in a volume under the common title Sexten opbyggelige Taler. Inasmuch as Brandt and Rammel state that 78 copies of the two discourses (1843) and 61 copies of the three discourses (1843) were remaindered,40 a copy of Sexten opbyggelige Taler must be the rarest Kierkegaard book in existence. Perhaps the editions were somewhat larger than two hundred, and perhaps the editions were not all of the same size, but in any event the sales were meager.
Given the scant critical and public reception of the eighteen discourses at the time, they and later discourses were obliged to wait a hundred years for the acclaim given to them by Martin Heidegger, who distinguishes between the two series in Kierkegaard’s Total-Anlæg and asserts that “there is more to be learned philosophically” from his upbuilding writings “than from his theoretical ones—with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety.”41