Kierkegaard’s Insight into the Daunting and Unavoidable Task of Self-Authorship

We are all continually drafting, writing, and revising the story we call the “self.” Therefore, every individual is an author. not always an author in the strictest sense of writing essays or articles that express distinct ideas, but they are authors of themselves. Kierkegaard proposes that to be a self is an unavoidable authorship assigned from the outset of human existence. 

A twofold objective is presented by Kierkegaard of “finding the kingdom of heaven” and finding a “truth that is true for me” (EK 9) so that one might live a “completely human life” (pg 8 EK). These two objectives appear not only to be related, but they share an implication for every person reading this essay, and for myself writing it: No greater essay to be written and no more strenuous an authorial program can be undertaken than to author one’s self. Furthermore, Kierkegaard identifies a problem in this tremendous, daring undertaking. Every individual finds themself in a state he calls despair, that desperate realization that one is misrelated to oneself. What it means to resolve despair into a “completely human life” does not boast of being a system or an exact process, step-by-step, with an almost scientific result. Kierkegaard understands his quite different process of becoming a “completely human life” under the assumption that it is best known by participation in the process of becoming a self.

How could participation in self-authorship be conveyed to a reader? Kierkegaard’s prime example as a prolific author can show the way. Therefore, this essay will focus on the salient aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorial method. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship models self-authorship as an analog to a dialectical process with multiple, authored selves while drawing the reader into a dialectic with Kierkegaard himself so that the method or medium of authorship invites the reader into an enacted process of self-authorship. Engagement with Kierkegaard through his writings becomes a powerful way of enacting self-authorship for the reader.

Outside of his pseudonymous authorship, Kierkegaard makes plain his intention behind his process of writing through various stages of self-development. In On My Work as an Author, he clearly articulates his maieutic approach (The Essential Kierkegaard 450). A maieutic approach clarifies and brings to the surface of one’s attention ideas that would otherwise be left implicit, unexamined. That is, Kierkegaard has an implicit shift from the pseudonymous authors (not bearing Kierkegaard’s name) to the religious writings (bearing Kierkegaard’s name) ( 451). The religious writings made explicit what could only be discovered behind a bare reading of the pseudonymous texts. By this maieutic pedagogy, I interpret Kierkegaard to be revealing how the multiple selves that he authors in his pseudonymous writings are analogous to the process of any individual who continually drafts a new self and dialogues with it until the hopefully eventual culmination into the religious self, the “completely human life” (8). Lest the reader is left to wonder about this, Kierkegaard says that “all pseudonymous writings are maieutic in nature,” and he clarifies his meaning behind maieutic in a footnote: “The maieutic lies in the relation between the esthetic writing as the beginning and the religious as the τέλος [goal]” (451). The maieutic process, therefore, is the Socratic one wherein the latent, underdeveloped, or unexamined psyche (esthetic, in despair) is interrogated through dialectic so that the self might become more truly a self. 

Therefore, I will begin my analysis by examining Kierkegaard’s description of despair and the task of selfhood in Sickness Unto Death to establish the basic context in which pseudonymous authorship might make more sense. From there, I will proceed by exposing the problem of interpreting the various pseudonymous authors as “Kierkegaard’s thoughts'' in the sense of them being his stated opinions. This disruption will do the work of showing that selfhood and relation to other selves cannot be a relation like a relation to an ideal or an object, but rather must account for inwardness, the subjectivity that is necessarily dialectical. Finally, I will demonstrate how the absence of Kierkegaard in the pseudonymous works draws the reader into dialectic with Kierkegaard; not only exemplifying but also enacting the process of self-examination in the reader by internalizing the dialectic leading to a (potentially) religious life. The framing of this analysis relies heavily on understanding the various ‘authors' in dialogue with each other because a self is not stable or definable in an absolute sense but must be understood as a continually varying synthesis. 

THE TASK OF SELFHOOD

Kierkegaard is often disabusing the reader, and himself, of false apprehensions pointing to a deeper and fuller experience of reality. Our illusions, although inevitable, demand our attention just as Kierkegaard realizes his own need for deeper selfhood. “Like a child calling itself ‘I’ in its first consciously undertaken act, be able to call myself ‘I’ in a profounder sense” (EK 11). Though it may seem as if the self spontaneously appears on the stage of life, Kierkegaard’s maieutic pedagogy calls for self-examination through activity. It is simply not enough to reflect on the task of selfhood, it must be enacted. Yet, such an enactment seems to require a jolt from beyond the individual psyche, indeed a teacher or interlocutor. The individual’s encounter with the world is often an illusory one where what seems to be is not what really is. More specifically, Kierkegaard disrupts the common conceptualization of the human self in relation to itself and others by exemplifying in writings the various states of selfhood in a free individual as a unique subject. 

The Sickness Unto Death disabuses its readers of the givenness of the self. If it were the case that we simply “discovered” our selfhood as if it were whole and complete, ready to be unearthed from the depths of the psyche, then perhaps there would never be existential problems like fear, loathing, repression, or disappointment. Yet, we know it is the case that we often find a mismatch in ourselves, between what we are and what we could be. We confront abruptly our limitations, and our possibilities, physically, mentally, or emotionally. And if we are misrelated, then surely we are something that is “not yet.” The individual does not wake up in the consciousness of the world having a self, ready-made or prefabricated. The self is a relation that relates itself to itself. The most fundamental relation is the expression of activity, a movement that is maintained between the oppositional poles “of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis” (SUD 13). All of these dyads represent absolute extremities between which the human person finds his or her existence. Understood psychologically, any kind of action requires that there was a “before state” and an “after state,” or at least the possibility of priority and posteriority, and the human self occupies the space between.. Yet, Kierkegaard will go further to distinguish another relation that relates itself to the basic relation of finitude and infinitude. 

This relation, if it relates itself to itself properly, is the self. The self then, even before a conscious effort, acts in a particular manner or thinks a particular thought, is in a dialectical relationship with itself. The first dialectic is between the twin polarities of givenness and potential, and the second dialectic is the awareness of the dialectic between givenness and potential. We might here take a simple analogy. When one is keen on making a meal, the food contents of the refrigerator or the pantry represent the givenness or the already present stuff with which we have to work. We also want the best possible meal, considering all the potential variations of the ingredients given. The meal will exist between those twin poles. Understood in another way more pertinent to Kierkegaard’s style, while authoring a text like a dialogue between two interlocutors, the author is the third person that is aware, and the author intentionally constructs the narrative between the interlocutors. Analogously in the human psyche, this awareness occupies a superordinate relationship to the dyad of givenness and potential named by Kierkegaard the “positive third” (SUD 13). This is the self.  Even further, a complete self must be in proper relation to itself and to That Which established it, but this line will be addressed later. But now return to the problem of illusions or improper relations that could hinder the process of authoring a self.

The individual has the ability, “man’s superiority over the animal,” to represent himself to himself, and therefore has the possibility of misrepresenting (The Sickness Unto Death 15). Consciousness is the reflexive awareness of the individual’s possibility and necessity. It is the awareness of being between a state of potentiality and actuality. And because the self is not absolutely infinite (since it is a relation between the infinite and the finite), then it cannot have established itself and therefore requires a prior power to establish it (14). I have already established the necessity of dialectic in the self in the first place, and now we come to the second dialectic. When the self attempts to author itself, it finds itself in an infinite regress where the self is equating itself with its task. Much like an author beginning an essay without a context that goes beyond, gives place to, and yet transcends the essay, the self requires an analogous fixed point of reference in order to define itself. 

The keen reader may be aware that this is a description, psychologically, of God or God’s relation to the psyche. The problem of despair, then, lies in the fact that the individual begins the task of self-authorship in a state where it seems impossible to become a self on one’s own. The givenness of the human psyche holds us back and the possibility of the psyche beckons us forward, and yet we are aware that this tension is impossible in isolation, that it requires an explanation that is outside it. In a work written on the influence and interaction between the thought of Plato and Kierkegaard, one writer aptly notes that “For Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and Kierkegaard, the world is not adequate to itself. That is, the world can never exhaustively account for itself. Human dialectic requires an end beyond itself for completion of its task of scrutiny, examination, and inquiry.” (Plato and Kierkegaard in Dialogue 189). Therefore, there are two dialectics already necessary for a self to be a self in its most basic sense (a synthesis) and to be a self in its fullest sense (related to God).  Relating to God then not only provides stability to the self representing itself to itself, but also implies that the continuing growth of the self is directly proportional to a growing relation of inwardness to God (The Sickness Unto Death 80). 

RELATING TO OTHERS: A THIRD DIALECTIC

Recognition must also be given to a third dialectic that is not insulated from the relation of the self to the self or the self to God, but rather intimately intertwined with them. This third dialectic is the relation to others as an external movement. The Sickness Unto Death, another pseudonymously written text, warns that a self can also relate externally to objects, persons, or ideas, establishing a dialogue with them, and the potential to be defined by them. An unassuming cattle driver may find himself defining himself in relation to his cattle. A slave may only define himself in relation to his master (The Sickness Unto Death 79). 

The esthete relates to individuals only in a remote and arbitrary way. In Either/Or, A lives an esthetic existence that treats relationships as opportunities to avoid the boredom of “dying death.” The character A describes his personal interaction with a boring man who is made interesting by focusing on the arbitrary sweat drops, a brief interlude of passion for novelty divested of its connection to the prior or subsequent moments (The Essential Kierkegaard 61). A uses persons as objects, as arbitrary tools of his own pleasure and displeasure. Distinct from A, Judge William has a relationship with the eternal amidst the ephemeral. Judge William, however, is married (unlike Kierkegaard) and he distinguished an ideal marriage from a marriage of faithfulness over time. An ideal marriage cannot account for the temporality, the actions over time that are involved in continually striving for faithfulness to one’s spouse. An ideal marriage is abstract. A married man of fifteen years, one who is in an embodied relationship with his wife, expresses the initial love in faithfulness year in and out (70). He preserves eternity in time: “Marital love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time, its eternity in time” (71). Judge William is interacting and providing a buffer to the concerns and determinations of A. The dialogue between Judge William’s response to A shows a critical, perhaps slightly self-righteous, engagement with another person that seeks the benefit of the interlocutor. The movement of the relation can also be reversed to show how A helps us as the reader to define Judge William insofar as the inner life of Judge William is provoked to the surface because A has elicited a response from the judge. Without A, Judge William would not otherwise expose his inner, ethical worldview. 

There are other ways to be in dialogue with reality that are not so radically conflicting. I cite Repetition, authored under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius, in which the individual relates himself to the world with an almost stoic delight, not hostile to the world of glories and pleasures, but not overeager “like a boy chasing butterflies” (Repetition 132). This approach is duplicated in the relation Constantius has toward other persons as “an observer” who is carefully aware of the possibility (the danger?) of deeply moved, inward concern for other persons (134). This appears to be a more mitigated dialectic; not direct opposition, but a more remote approach to the “other.”

Danger lurks, indeed “sin is crouching at the doorway,” for the one who would idealize or distance themselves from their relation to the “other” (Genesis 4:7). Constantius warns the reader that a lover can idealize his beloved. The result is unfortunate, even tragic because the lover cannot fall in love with the beloved if he has idealized her (Repetition 141). One can never fully actualize an understanding of another person. The idealization of another person is to surrender that person to eternity, and in that surrender, he or she is crystallized and immobile. This is a far cry from the free individual caught in the middle of the task of becoming a self. The crystalized beloved is circumscribable and definable like a theorem. The person that God has called to be a self cannot be bound by human knowledge of this sort. “I would have to make myself into the other person, the one acting, to make the actuality alien to me into my own personal actuality, which is impossible” (The Essential Kierkegaard  217). It is impossible to definitively know which is still in a state of becoming. Contact with other persons should be cautious to never rigidly frame our encounter with individuals in strict categories, but should instead continually acknowledge the infinite possibility of a deeper and richer experience of unique persons. The pseudonymous texts, therefore, have subtly injected into the reader a categorical concern about how one could mistakenly relate to another person. 

THE ILLUSIVE KIERKEGAARD: PROBLEMATIZING the TEXTS

As Plato was almost entirely absent from his dialogues, so too was Kierkegaard often absent from his writings. Our encounter with Kierkegaard is similar. Pseudonymous authorship is a pedagogical tool, but a perplexing one that could lead to a dismal charge leveled against Kierkegaard that his writings serve the cause of confusion, not betterment. Pseudonymous authorship is indeed aporetic, leading to a state of confusion about prior conceptions as Elsebet Jegstrup argues in Kierkegaard on Tragedy: The Aporias of Interpretation. Jegstrup’s primary concern is with finding an overarching textual coherence in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works.

 There are many authors, and many characters developed by those imaginary authors. For example, Judge William and A in Either/Or are two characters authored by the pseudonym Victor Eremita. Not only is Judge William not Kierkegaard, though some may argue his ethics are most appropriately Kierkegaard’s ethics (see Jegstrup, 231), but Victor Eremita is also not a straightforward representation of “Kierkegaard’s stated opinions.” Similarly, Johannes De Silentio speaks of faith as one who does not believe, a strange and contradictory position for Kierkegaard to hold. None of these characters are Kierkegaard. And yet they all contain intimations of Kierkegaard’s inner dialogic life of self-examination. Jegstrup goes so far as to argue that works like Either/Or can only be interpreted in conjunction with later pseudonymous works (240).

Why the deception? Mark McCreary elucidates the problem of irony in Kierkegaard following the Socratic model (The Essential Kierkegaard 232). Irony cannot be taken lightly, as McCreary explains since it begets a first inclination of ire for the difficulties it causes for interpretation. Socrates can only seduce through irony because the truth is only true for an individual self. Therefore, the “author” absents himself as authority over the ethical to beckon the reader to understand their own inward relation to truth. McCreary notes that:

Kierkegaard maintains that there are times when someone should, out of love, consciously deceive another person. This deception typically involves weakening one’s impression by making oneself appear different or worse than one really is in order to meet the other on his or her own level. The goal is to help the other, via deception, to recognize the truth and, ultimately, to help the other establish or deepen a loving God-relationship (McCreary 44). 

This kind of deception only shares a likeness to a lie in that irony has a different intention from what its surface reading would indicate. Socrates draws the individual into a properly existing conversation with truth, but Kierkegaard is attempting to draw us into a properly existing relationship with one’s self and with others. There is a certain requirement for deception, but this interpretation leads me to believe that Kierkegaard’s irony in pseudonymous authorship is ancillary to the philosophical content of the text. The method could have been otherwise with the same effect. I argue that Kierkegaard’s method and process of authorship form essential aspects of understanding the philosophical content of the text. Therefore, I may conclude that Kierkegaard’s method is not antagonistic to the purpose of teaching the reader, yet Kierkegaard’s purpose is more than deceiving to meet the reader “at his or her own level.”

JUSTIFYING KIERKEGAARD’S ABSENCE: A DIALOGICAL SELF, an EXISTING SELF, and the POSITIVE THIRD

Kierkegaard’s absence requires further examination as the primary irony in the pseudonymous texts. Kierkegaard’s dual concept of memory and forgetting can be useful to describe the function of irony. The poetic antidote to boredom is the renewal of each moment in the immediacy of each experience through recollecting and forgetting (The Essential Kierkegaard 56). By recollecting and forgetting, the aesthete is able to play “shuttlecock with existence,” to bounce back and forth between disconnected moments in the desperate avoidance of boredom (57). The aesthete breaks through moments of boredom for pleasure. While the esthete uses memory and forgetting as a tool of arbitrary renewal of the moment, the ironist uses irony to rupture the typical processes of evaluating human persons as objects or ideations. There is a need for a deeper dialectic; irony is the wake-up call. Yet, the rupture is not with the intention of thrusting the reader (and here we must also read Kierkegaard as in dialogue with himself) into an inescapable doubt about what the self is or what an individual’s relation to other selves might be. The initial doubt gives way to the possibility of coming into contact with a free and dialogical self.  

Consider the elements of recollecting and forgetting and understand that Kierkegaard is using irony of his own absence from authorship as a way of breaking our prior conceptual framework that would engage with our own selfhood as another kind of object, or even as a standardized concept which can be accessed via logical inference or deduction, and can be known as such (The Essential Kierkegaard 56). There is little need for speculation on our own part on this matter. Kierkegaard writes in his appendix to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “I am impersonally or personally in the third person a souffleur [prompter] who has poetically produced authors, whose prefaces, in turn, are their productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books, there is not a single word by me” (243). And yet they are his words! If the reader makes the mistake of thinking they have totally encompassed and cognized the rich inner life of Kierkegaard, then his various authored selves disrupt this naive assessment. The conclusion is not an illusory self. It is an illusive self characterized by its subjectivity. The unavoidable conclusion is that great caution must be applied when trying to comprehend one’s own self or other selves because of this subjectivity. 

In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climachus would have his reader distinguish well that the “subjective thinker” is different from the esthete who is mere passion, the poet who idealizes experience, or the ethicist who springs into the eternal via a commitment to the universal.  Rather, the subjective thinker combines all of these aspects as embedded in the dialectical task that is “to understand himself in existence” (The Essential Kierkegaard 226). Subjectivity is the uniqueness of conscious experience. Persons must be understood in existence, even if that person is one’s representation (authored self) of oneself, “to shake off ‘the crowd’ in order to get hold of ‘the single individual,’ religiously understood” (452). Existence situates the self in dialogue, even if only with the world of experience. “The subjective existing thinker is aware of the dialectic of communication,” and while dialectic is about contact with some “other,” subjectivity is still leaning toward isolation; it is unique, one of a kind (191). Communication then provides a powerful stumbling stone between objective thinking that would be universally communicable and subjective thinking that appears to be entirely incommunicable. Pseudonymous authorship forces us to come to terms with both as a kind of deception.  

Pseudonymous authorship is a way of enacting this loving deception without the guile of manipulation. This pedagogical tactic invites the reader to address the meaningfulness of the text without the baggage of the author. But such a method cannot be merely about presenting an objective account since there are seemingly contradictory ideas leveled in different pseudonymous texts. Indeed, an individual may contain contradictions within themselves as is evident in the concept of despair, but Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms are simply not Kierkegaard in that Kierkegaard has imaginally constructed these characters to facilitate his own thinking as a dialogic process. 

To merely tell the reader a method for becoming a self would discount or even delete the subjective nature of becoming a self as an existing thinker. However, the tactic turns on itself as a double irony wherein Kierkegaard’s attempt to remove himself from the text can prompt the reader to respond to Kierkegaard in a profound dialogue and self-examination. 

 If I must encounter myself as “in existence,” then Kierekegaard’s pseudonymous authorship completes three tasks: first, the work of understanding himself through examining his own thinking in action. Second, by drawing the reader into a dramaturgic relationship with Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard sets a stage in which we can enact the relationship that is described with Kirkegaard as an interlocutor. Third, the reader can then internalize the process of imaginally dialoguing with his or her own possible selves. Unsurprisingly, there is a return to Socrates in that “Socrates’ infinite merit is precisely that of being an existing thinker,” one who is constantly in dialogue with himself and others (EK 208). Much like Socrates, Kierkegaard has attempted to express inwardness, a state that is indescribable definitionally. And therein lies the problem. If Subjectivity is an inwardness that, understood purely and in isolation, would threaten a caged and closed-off human psyche from the outside world, then objectivity or speculation poses its own unique problem of extracting the knowing subject outside of the world known. Pure subjectivity would be the imprisoned mind in the windowless, doorless room where the individual is entirely convinced of his or her self existence, but is in a constant, plaguing doubt regarding the veracity of the world beyond the inward idiosyncrasy. Kierkegaard’s authorial message and method are vehemently set against this static and rooted isolation.

I have already discussed how the dialogue between A and Judge William can be understood as an example of how selfhood necessitates dialectic that goes beyond one’s own subjectivity. Now, the relationship of Kierkegaard to his variously authored selves like A and Judge William, can be analogously interpreted as the relationship between the synthetic self (actuality and temporality) and the “positive third” (The Sickness Unto Death 13). If the positive third represents the self-awareness over and above the opponent “interlocutors,” then Kierkegaard as an author is the positive third that uses imagination to construct characters (other, authored selves) to imaginally assemble a dialogue that enhances self-examination. The reader can also internalize this process of authoring imaginary selves in order to nurture a healthy dialectic with one’s own possibility and necessity under the positive third of the existing subject. 

Objectivity is a stance from nowhere. Objectivity demands that the thinking subject renounce his or her own unrepeatable, existential stance to evaluate the world without “bias.” Try as we might, inwardness can never be totally escaped because “as soon as I want to make my thinking teleological in relation to something else, interest enters the game” (The Essential Kierkegaard 215). Kierkegaard’s interest has entered the game in his texts; he has exposed the existing thinker in action and engendered the reader’s relationship with himself. The reader is provoked to be in contact, touch, dialectic, and communication as necessary elements of knowing oneself. Self-authorship is not self-definition since it demands representing the self to the self with an interrogative relation with others, and then more profoundly with the fixed point of reference that is God. Hence, Self-authorship is exemplified by the dialogical relation with the other at multiple levels of analysis, as I have shown. 

CONCLUSION: FINAL THOUGHTS and a RELATIONSHIP with GOD

Has the task been about understanding ourselves or about coming into a relationship with God? What does the structure of the process that led to discovering the solution to despair look like? It has taken on the dramatic form of irony, already so prevalent throughout Kierkegaard’s texts. Like a Greek drama, the ending was known from the beginning of act one. The solution to the problem of despair and becoming spirit is the proper relation of the self to the self “before God” (The Sickness Unto Death 53).  Therefore, by coming into an authentic relationship in the representation of the self to the self, the task of becoming a self in relation to others has ironically led us back to the fundamental arbiter and guarantor of the possibility of becoming spirit. This relation is faith, and it is the unrepeatable “absolute relation to the absolute” (Fear and Trembling 93). Relation to God is an act of faith whereby all ethical concerns are subjected to the superordinate relationship with God. God is not a concept or a universal among others, even if that universal is the highest universal. He is radically and qualitatively different. Kierkegaard’s method is uniquely equipped to accommodate and acclimate a reader to such a relationship of faith, a truly religious life.

Because God is the Absolute, an encounter with God does not fit into conceptual frameworks, and therefore cannot be related to in the calculus of the ethical or scientific. A straightforward description is then impossible. Kierkegaard’s absence from the pseudonymous texts functions also as a slowly ebbing evacuation of Kierkegaard from the mind of the reader so that God may fill that void. Though he is the catalyst, Kierkegaard would become yet another idol if an absolute relation to God was not the final and ultimate goal of his work.    

By entering into a contemplative, often puzzling, relationship with Kierkegaard especially in his pseudonymous works, the reader can be energetically engaged in the practice of dialectically authoring his or her own selfhood. Though this may not always be the case for the reader of Kierkegaardian, maze-like texts, the pedagogical method provides the possibility for both understanding and enacting a humble and strenuous movement toward a proper synthesis of the self in relation to God. 

A FINAL DISCLAIMER

This final note will serve as a warning to anyone who may be inclined to understand the development of the self as a “self-help” project. It is decidedly not. By this, I mean that becoming a self is not something we chose and by force of our dauntless wills we arrest or construct. The concept of Despair teaches us that we are in no position to do such a thing. Furthermore, Kierkegaard follows the modern movement in philosophy (ala Descartes) and theology (according to the Protestant Reformers) which begins not with God, but from the inner life. The reader might think that Kierkegaard is highly individualistic, but as I have tried to show in this essay, dialectic implies that to become a self we require other interlocutors—-a community. If Kierkegaard leans toward the possibility of simulating such a conversation in the dialectic of the self to the self, I would depart from Kierkegaard at that point. The self is not a self except in relation to real, distinct others, not mere simulations of the mind or dramaturgic creations. Ultimately, and I will simply drop this nugget here without elaboration, the self is most fully itself when it is bound to and nested in Communion, the Body of Christ.

Works Cited

McCreary, Mark L. “DECEPTIVE LOVE: Kierkegaard on Mystification and Deceiving into the Truth.” The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 39, no. 1, 2011, pp. 25–47, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9795.2010.00464.x. 

Torrance, Andrew B. “Beyond Existentialism: Kierkegaard on the Human Relationship with the God Who Is Wholly Other.” International Journal of Systematic Theology, vol. 16, no. 3, July 2014, pp. 295–312. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.gonzaga.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/ijst.12067.

HOWLAND, JACOB. “THE EXPLOSIVE MAIEUTICS OF KIERKEGAARD’S ‘EITHER/OR.’” The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 71, no. 1, 2017, pp. 107–35.

JEGSTRUP, E. “KIERKEGAARD ON TRAGEDY, THE APORIAS OF INTERPRETATION.” Philosophy Today (Celina), vol. 40, no. 2, 1996, pp. 289–300, https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday199640224.

All works by Kierkegaard are from The Essential Kierkegaard, or they are from the other works translated by Howard V. Hong (Editor), Edna H. Hong (Editor).

Image used from https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-nihilism/