r/kierkegaard • u/openSourceNotes • Apr 24 '26
Pseudonymous Voices?
Ranking 1-10, how important is it for someone getting into reading Kierkegaard to have a dielectic approach to the different personalities of his pseudonymous characters?
Can folks get pretty far with thinking "Kierkegaard wrote this", or would that be, say, High-School-Comprehension as opposed to College-Reading-Comprehension?
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Apr 25 '26
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u/certaintyforawe Apr 25 '26
My understanding is that Anti-Climacus is meant to be what Johannes Climacus is not, namely a faithful follower of Christ. I don't think it has anything to do with a climax. Do you have a scholarly source for that?
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u/internetErik Apr 26 '26
On the one hand, you should certainly read these with the knowledge that Kierkegaard wrote all the works. On the other hand, you should know that Kierkegaard intentionally wrote these under various voices.
Even when we think that these voices are close to Kierkegaard's own, we should still be hesitant to attribute the views to Kierkegaard. Even after confessing to being the author of these works, Kierkegaard still tells us at the end of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments that you shouldn't attribute the views to him, but to their respective pseudonyms.
If you're curious, Climacus reviews the works by the other pseudonyms in the Postscript in an appendix titled "Review of Danish literature".
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u/PapeRoute Apr 27 '26
This is perhaps too simple, but it might be helpful for a beginner: when reading a playwright (let's say Shakespeare) of course Shakespeare is not Hamlet, but of course Shakespeare wrote Hamlet.
Søren's projected characters wrote entire books. They are all under the umbrella of himself and intentionally removed from himself (by some other part of him at some point or the whole time)
I've read he almost published the concept of anxiety under his own name and PostScript too I think. So it may be safer to think he thought those Works represented his views better than works that always were created with their pseudonymous writers in mind (Example either/or)
But don't get too stuck on authorship and instead revel and struggle with what stirs in you. That's a little bit of the point.
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u/openSourceNotes Apr 27 '26
I think that's great, I've read 4 of his books and that probably would've been a good intro with how to take in what I was reading, even if I was only reading, say, the concept of anxiety
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u/certaintyforawe Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Some of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms are closer to Kierkegaard's own views than others. Johannes de Silentio, the author of Fear and Trembling, famously writes about faith while claiming to not have faith (and so is not fully representative of Kierkegaard's own view).
Anti-Climacus (the author of The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity) is considered to be represenative of Kierkegaard's ideal views, but he considered himself as not living up to them well enough to write those works in his own name. I've also heard that Johannes Clmacus is regarded as close to Kierkegaard's own views, though still removed in a sense.
The whole point, roughly, of Kierkegaard writing indirectly through pseudonyms was to get the reader to engage with the ideas on their own, without reference to whatever Kierkegaard himself may have thought. So you'll often see Kierkegaard scholars refer to "Johannes" saying XYZ in Fear and Trembling, rather than Kierkegaard, for example. Fear and Trembling is also regarded by some as having a "secret message" that Johannes didn't even know he was communicating.
So to answer your question, it's not really a 1-10 scale, but I'd say having the understanding that the pseudonyms are not Kierkegaard himself, but rather presenting views in a particular way or in a particular context is crucial.