Who is the author of The Point of View ? Issues of authorship in the posthumous Kierkegaard

Abstract

Kierkegaard scholars have made much of Kierkegaard’s posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and the work does seem to provide a key to interpreting Kierkegaard’s infamous authorial difficulties – not the least of which is the meaning of pseudonymity in his work. Considerations of the book’s authorship itself are, however, exceptionally rare. In this article, I open an inquiry into issues of authorship that arise within the work, both in terms of what The Point of View has to say about the Kierkegaardian authorship, and also in terms of how (and by whom) the book is itself authored. I propose that The Point of View brings authorship to the fore as a philosophical issue and, contrary to the consensus view, I argue that – despite the fact that the book was clearly written by Søren Kierkegaard – the book’s author cannot be identified.

Keywords

authority authorship Søren Kierkegaard point of view pseudonymity style writing

On 27 February 1843, an article by the anonymous author A. F…appeared in the Copenhagen feuilleton, Fædrelandet [The Fatherland], in response to certain interpretations and readings of the recently published, pseudonymously authored book, Either/Or. The article, ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’, introduces the reader to the ongoing debate about the ‘true’ identity of Either/Or’s author with a lengthy, hyperbolic expression of A. F. . . .’s wish that Danish torture laws be significantly revised. A. F…writes:

This question has already engaged a portion of the reading public for some days. Despite all the acumen applied, there is no certainty or agreement concerning the clues. So the matter is still adhuc sub judice and perhaps will never go further unless on the occasion of this authorship they complain that the legal right to use flogging during inquiry has been abolished and are able to get it reinstated. In that case, I would not be the sinner against whom they have sufficient moral evidence; even less would I be his back. But the legal right to use flogging during inquiry certainly remains a pium desiderium, which in fact every friend of literature must desire, for it would, after all, be a very rigorous way to discover who the authors are.¹

No doubt contemporary readers of Kierkegaard – and perhaps especially readers of the posthumously published The Point of View for My Work as an Author – can sympathize with A. F. . . .’s wish, even if only a little. Addressing the question of authorship in the Kierkegaardian corpus, ‘discovering who the authors are’ and with whom authorial responsibility should ultimately lie, is no easy task.

‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ seems designed, if for nothing else, to distance Either/Or from those readers intent on identifying Søren Kierkegaard as its author. Scholars often identify A. F…with Victor Eremita, the pseudonymous Udgiver (editor/publisher, ‘out-giver’) of Either/Or and author of its preface, and his nominal initials are on such readings taken to stand for ‘Af Forfatteren’ (‘by the author’).² Whether A. F…is a pseudonym/anonym of Victor Eremita, or he is another Kierkegaardian author distinct from all the others, however, is less important than the fact that ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ is one of the first attempts in the Kierkegaardian authorship to address the question of the relationship between a pseudonymous author (or authors) and the identity of the author of that author (or authors).³ It is unique in its attempt to close the issue of authorship by leaving the question of the ultimate identity of the author open. As A. F…concludes, after considering a wide variety of methods for attempting to discern the author’s ‘true’ identity, ‘Most people, including the author of this article, think it is not worth the trouble to be concerned about who the author is. They are happy not to know his identity, for then they have only the book to deal with, without being bothered or distracted by his personality.’⁴

While it would be convenient to read this statement as a more general recommendation about how to understand Kierkegaardian anonymity and pseudonymity, the conclusions of ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ differ considerably from those of the two most widely read statements on pseudonymity in the Kierkegaardian authorship: Kierkegaard’s ‘A First and Last Explanation’, published in Kierkegaard’s name as an appendix to the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript; and The Point of View, ascribed to ‘S. Kierkegaard’ posthumously by Kierkegaard’s brother. This makes whatever lessons we might have to learn from these statements on authorship much more difficult to accept. ‘A First and Last Explanation’ maintains that Kierkegaard is not the author of the pseudonymous books from Either/Or to the Postscript, and that those works ought to be ascribed to their pseudonymous authors alone.⁵ While The Point of View’s claims about authorship are under consideration here and have yet to be finally determined, from the beginning it seems safe to say that, in this unpublished book, Kierkegaard claims authorship of the pseudonymous and veronymous books and articles for himself. That is to say, in both ‘A First and Last Explanation’ and The Point of View, it matters very much who the authors are. In ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’, on the other hand, we are told that the identity of the author of Either/Or (and, by extension, other pseudonymous books) ought to be a matter of indifference to the reader.

There have been numerous attempts by readers of Kierkegaard to sort out the argument of The Point of View, as well as the book’s proper role in the reading and interpretation of Kierkegaard. Some readers argue that we ought to take Kierkegaard at his word, either that Kierkegaard is as the author in a privileged position to determine the meaning of the works he authors, or that, while Kierkegaard’s view does not have absolute authority over readers, it is nevertheless Kierkegaard’s view, and is thus deserving of special consideration. Some readers maintain that the view set forth in The Point of View is the correct one, regardless of its origin and author, and that this can be established by means independent of reference to the author. And yet other readers argue that precisely because The Point of View was authored by Kierkegaard, we must read the book with a high degree of suspicion that the author is trying to pull one over on us, his readers.⁶ What these views all share, however, is the firm belief that Søren Kierkegaard is the author of The Point of View, and in light of A. F. . . .’s fascinating article, it is this belief that I wish to question in this article.

In what follows, I intend to examine the general question of my title: Who is the author of The Point of View? Although I do not wish to be limited by unnecessary specificity, it is nevertheless the case that, throughout most of the article, I will treat another, related question as functionally equivalent to the title question, namely: Is Kierkegaard the author of The Point of View? In the first section of the article, I will examine the nature of authorship and authors as they are presented in The Point of View. In the second section, I will examine how The Point of View uses the notion of a point of view, and how the book parses the difference between a point of view and the point of view for Kierkegaard’s work as an author. Finally, in the third section of the article, I will address the question of Kierkegaard’s authorship of The Point of View directly, attempting to open the question whether it makes sense for readers to read Kierkegaard as the author of The Point of View. In the end, I will argue that we are left with an undecidable choice between at least four different ascriptions of authorship for The Point of View, all based in Kierkegaard’s points of view on The Point of View and his authorship both in The Point of View itself, and also in other unpublished and published Kierkegaardian writings. It is the undecidability of this choice, I think, in addition to the multitude of compelling possibilities that is The Point of View’s – and Kierkegaard’s – lasting contribution to thought about authorship and the nature and function of the author.

What is an author?

The Point of View presents the general question of authorship in one of two ways: on the one hand, the author is presented as a social or literary institution that has largely been corrupted in the present age but for which one can still hold out some hope for the occasional genuine author; and on the other hand, the author is an individual human being presented almost as inherently unknowable in his or her entirety, about whom anything can only be said from the admitted limitation of the specific perspective of a single reader. In The Point of View, the first way of discussing authorship predominates in the later parts of the book; the second way, in the earlier parts. Moreover, the first way draws an essential distinction between the communicator and what is communicated; the second way draws an essential distinction between an author’s ‘private character’ and his or her ‘author-character’. The first distinction seems to rely in part upon the distinction in The Book on Adler between ‘premise-authors’ (for whom what is communicated is the only matter of importance) and ‘essential-authors’ (in whose case what is communicated matters far less than the identity and perspective of the person communicating, the author).⁷ The second distinction, between the ‘private character’ and the ‘author-character’ of an author, is somewhat allied with the notion of hidden inwardness as it appears in Either/Or and other of the early, pseudonymous books, but in the form in which it is presented in The Point of View, this second distinction – and the way of discussing authorship for which it is the basis – is substantially new to the Kierkegaardian authorship.⁸

What I have called ‘the first way’ of discussing authorship in The Point of View rests essentially upon the criticism of authorship as it was commonly practised in the Copenhagen of the 1840s and 1850s. One must read almost halfway through The Point of View, however, before encountering a satisfying presentation of this criticism. To this point in the book, the matter under consideration is exclusively the Kierkegaardian authorship and the Kierkegaardian author, not the contrast between such authorship and the contemptible modern Danish practice of authorship. In a very long but important passage, Kierkegaard writes:

In these days and for a long time now we have utterly lost the idea that to be an author is and ought to be a work and therefore a personal existing…[T]hat anonymity, the highest expression for abstraction, impersonality, impenitence, and irresponsibility, is a basic source of modern demoralization; that on the other hand anonymity would be counteracted most simply, that a very beneficial corrective to journalism’s abstraction would be provided if we turned back once again to antiquity and learned what it means to be an individual human being, no more and no less, which also an author certainly is, no more and no less – this is self-evident. But in our day, when that which is the secret of evil has become wisdom – namely, that one is not to ask about the communicator but only about the communication, only about ‘what’, about the objective – in our day what does it mean to be an author?⁹

In a fascinating turn of events, we see here the demonization of the point of view on authorship and authorial identity set forth by the Kierkegaardian anonym A. F. …, and his argument on behalf of the view that Kierkegaard here calls ‘the secret of evil’, namely, ‘that one is not to ask about the communicator but only about the communication’. This is a view set forth first, not in ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’, but in the preface to Either/Or itself, where Victor Eremita proposes that what matters in the book is neither A nor B but the views each of their respective volumes of the book attempts to communicate.¹⁰ For Victor Eremita as for A. F.…, authors are out, and what is authored is in. Not so for The Point of View, however.

Two views of the author, and of the author’s proper role in a reader’s understanding of a text, are opposed here. A. F…maintains (à la Roland Barthes, or the New Critics) that the author’s identity is totally irrelevant to the interpretation of the authored work.¹¹ It does not matter who the author of Either/Or ‘really’ is, according to A. F.…, since what matters is Either/Or itself and not its author. Contrariwise, Kierkegaard argues in The Point of View that nothing matters so much as the identity of the author of Either/Or; in some sense, The Point of View is an attempt to reconcile the pseudonymity of Either/Or and the other ‘aesthetic writings’ with the view that it is a matter of essential importance that the ‘real’ author of all of the aesthetic, pseudonymous books had a religious intention for the authorship from the very beginning.¹² The contrast between two views of authors and authorship could not be starker. A. F…understands the identity of the author of Either/Or to be so tenuously connected to Either/Or itself that the book stands alone as if unauthored, or what amounts to the same thing, as if anonymously authored. The author of Either/Or is without authority because the author of Either/Or is too insubstantial (ultimately, too fictional) to ground any such thing as authority.

In The Point of View, however, great pains are taken not only firmly to establish the identity of the author of Either/Or – S. Kierkegaard is the author – but also to show that the author of Either/Or is a genuinely religious author, for whom there was some correspondence between the literary-philosophical project of producing the authorship and what he calls his ‘personal existing’. Kierkegaard may also be without authority as the author of Either/Or, but his lack of authority is related directly to who he is as an author. He is not an anonym, and his personal identity is not the ephemeral thing an author’s identity is for A. F…According to The Point of View, the author of Either/Or is a named person, Søren Kierkegaard, and to understand what Either/Or means a reader must know something about him.¹³ Thus, we have the anonymous author of ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ arguing that authors are essentially anonymous and do not matter to the reading of a work; and we have the self-naming author of The Point of View naming himself as the author of Either/Or, and arguing that an author, in order genuinely to be an author, must present himself or herself and his or her own name to readers for examination alongside the works he or she authors.¹⁴ In opposing what he takes to be the prevalent (and mistaken) view and practice of authorship in modern Denmark, Kierkegaard brings his authorship into apparent opposition to itself. This, of course, is not a very serious problem – from a certain point of view.

What I have called ‘the second way’ of discussing authorship in The Point of View makes a fundamental distinction between two ways of knowing an author, a distinction that it seems highly unlikely anyone – including any author – would be in a position to deny. In the concluding paragraph of the Introduction to The Point of View, Kierkegaard writes:

And then just one more thing. It is self-evident that I cannot present completely an explanation of my work as an author, that is, with the purely personal inwardness in which I possess the explanation. In part it is because I cannot make my God-relationship public in this way, since it is neither more nor less than the universally human inwardness, which every human being can have without any special call, which it would be a crime to suppress and a duty to stress, and to which I could not lay claim or make an appeal. In part it is because I cannot wish (and no one, I am sure, could desire that I do so) to press upon anyone something that pertains solely to my private character, which of course for me contains much of the explanation of my author-character.¹⁵

This closing distinction – between the author’s private character and his author-character – is the one that seems to me to matter most in these early portions of the text. Without belaboring the point, I think it is important to see very clearly here that Kierkegaard maintains that there is – there must be – a difference between the way he understands his work as an author, and the ways in which readers of his books understand that work. Even if every reader could be brought to understand the authorship in the very same way, that way could never be the way in which Kierkegaard understands it. More will be said on this issue in the next section of this article, but it seems worth noting at this point that, at least in the Introduction to The Point of View, Kierkegaard admits that there must be room in readings of Kierkegaard for at least two legitimate points of view on his work as an author; which of them we are supposed to believe is the point of view is a different matter.

For now, it is worth returning our attention to the ‘mechanics’ of the distinction between an author’s private character and his or her author-character, with regard to authorship generally instead of in the specific case of the Kierkegaardian authorship. Throughout The Point of View, Kierkegaard makes clear his view that there are aspects of his personal, subjective understanding of himself, his experience, and his work as an author that cannot be communicated to others. With regard to the Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1843, for example, he notes: ‘On the whole, the first preface had and has for me an utterly unique intimate meaning, which of course cannot be communicated as such.’¹⁶ Addressing the impetus driving the beginning of his becoming an author, he is similarly cryptic:

Prior to the real beginning of my work as an author, there was an event, or rather a fact; an event most likely would not have been enough; it was a fact – I myself had to be an acting agent. I cannot give further particulars about that fact, its nature, how frightfully complex it was dialectically even though in another sense quite simple, and where the collision actually lay, but only ask the reader not to think of revelations and the like, since with me everything is dialectical.¹⁷

The impulse, I think, is to regard such claims to a private understanding of and relation to the authorship and his work as an author as perfectly natural, the normal state of affairs between an author and his or her authorship. I cannot disagree that there is something altogether ordinary about such claims. But such provisos and qualifications do not exist in an authorial vacuum. In the case of The Point of View and the Kierkegaardian authorship, these claims appear as part of a general movement in the direction of a kind of authorial secrecy, a kind of impenetrable privacy surrounding the author that prevents the author from ever really being known by the reader.

This, again, may be an altogether normal state of affairs for an author and his or her readers. But such secrecy, such privacy, such hidden inwardness (however limited) on the part of the author results in an important limitation on the reader’s reading of the author’s work, as well as – and perhaps more importantly – the author’s self-presentation as an author. Having already established that, on his understanding, he has been a religious author from the very beginning of the authorship (at least, from Either/Or forward),¹⁸ and that the meaning of the authorship taken as a totality is ‘becoming a Christian’, Kierkegaard writes:

It might seem that a simple declaration by the author himself in this regard is more than adequate; after all, he must know best what is what. I do not, however, think much of declarations in connection with literary productions and am accustomed to take a completely objective attitude to my own. If in the capacity of a third party, as a reader, I cannot substantiate from the writings that what I am saying is the case, that it cannot be otherwise, it could never occur to me to want to win what I thus consider as lost. If I qua author must first make declarations, I easily alter all of the writing, which from first to last is dialectical.¹⁹

Here, Kierkegaard takes his earlier distinction, between his private character and his author-character, to a hermeneutical extreme: although he admits that there are (at least) two legitimate points of view on his work as an author – his own private point of view, and the point of view available to any other reader – he claims to be dissatisfied with a mere declaration of his own point of view as the point of view for understanding the authorship. Rather, he maintains that the only point of view acceptable to him as sufficiently able to establish the meaning of his authorship is a point of view that ‘a third party, as a reader’ can substantiate from the writings. This echoes his claim in ‘A First and Last Explanation’, that he comes to the pseudonymous books only ‘as a reader’.²⁰ More significantly for our purposes, however, it forces us to return to the claims Kierkegaard makes about himself and his personal existence throughout The Point of View and elsewhere, claims that, as we have already seen, are highly conditioned by the nature of communication and what sorts of personal claims can and cannot be communicated to others – claims that, as we will see in the next section, are often at the very center of Kierkegaard’s argument for the point of view he calls the point of view for his work as an author.

What is the point of view?

Kierkegaard is very clear in The Point of View as to what he understands the point of view for his work as an author to be. On the first page of the work, he writes:

The content, then, of this little book is: what I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.²¹

While this introductory statement remains within the bounds of self-description, making claims about the object of interpretation (the text or the author of the text) rather than the interpreters (Kierkegaard’s readers), later in the book Kierkegaard certainly makes explicit the applicability of the specific way in which he understands himself as an author to other readers’ interpretations of his work. After discussing the pseudonymous books prior to the Postscript, and then (in a brief but separate section) the Postscript itself, Kierkegaard turns to ‘the religious writing’ – the veronymous works of his authorship, from the Upbuilding Discourses through some of the later books. He writes:

As early as Concluding Postscript, I could be very brief when the point of view for all the work as an author is that the author is a religious author; what needed explanation was how the esthetic writing is to be interpreted on this assumption. And what needs no explanation at all on this assumption is of course the latter part, the purely religious writing, which specifically provides the point of view.²²

The point of view for Kierkegaard’s work as an author is that the author (Kierkegaard) is a religious author. It would seem difficult to communicate one’s understanding of an author or an authorship more directly than this.

If we accept Kierkegaard’s division of the authorship into three uneven (and only illusorily chronologically sequential) pieces – the aesthetic writing, the Postscript and the religious writing – then the proper point of view for Kierkegaard’s authorship, according to Kierkegaard in The Point of View, is to adopt the unified and unifying perspective of the various veronymously authored religious works and from that perspective – or through those works – to read the remainder of the authorship. Thus, Kierkegaard maintains a strict hierarchy in the hermeneutical value of the points of view set forth by at least two of the different sorts of works that constitute the authorship, namely, the aesthetic and the religious writings. With reference to an imagined reader who ‘found some enjoyment’ in reading the pseudonymous books, Kierkegaard concludes:

If it is assumed that such a reader perfectly understands and judges the particular esthetic work, he totally misunderstands me, since he does not understand it in the religious totality of my work as an author. If, however, it is assumed that someone who understands my work as an author in its religious totality perhaps does not understand a particular esthetic work, then this misunderstanding is only incidental.²³

Kierkegaard seems to assert rather strongly that the only appropriate point of view for his work as an author is the (Christian) religious point of view, and it would be wrong to say that this is not the dominant attitude of The Point of View. Yet Kierkegaard does remain aware of the distinction we observed earlier, between his private character and his author-character, and so it will not be enough for him simply to assert that he is and has always been a religious author.

The character terminology – ‘private character’ and ‘author-character’ – shifts almost immediately to what I think is a more philosophically interesting vocabulary for discussion of the competing legitimate points of view on an authorship, a discussion not of an author’s private and author-characters, but of the individual ‘qua author’ and ‘qua human being’. The competing legitimate points of view are entailed necessarily by the fact that, as was noted above, the presumed existence of both an author and at least one reader, coming to the authorship each in his or her own manner, implies the possibility of two different legitimate conceptions and experiences of the author. On the one hand, one can conceive of an author as an author (the manner customary for readers of an author’s work), a conception that is deprived of access to the author’s personal understanding of himself or herself and his or her authorial work. On the other hand, of course, one can conceive of an author as a particular, peculiar, unique human being existing in the world at least in part as an author, but also in all the other ways typical of human individuals (the manner customary for the author himself or herself, whose experience of his or her work as an author is primarily a personal – rather than impersonal or readerly – experience). Naturally, readers can attempt to think of an author as they imagine that author might think of himself or herself, or can (perhaps more easily) try to conceive of an author as another real human being, rather than exclusively as the origin of a written work. Likewise, authors can attempt to conceive of themselves and their works as they imagine readers might conceive of them, indifferent to their own personalities, beliefs, or personal circumstances. It is in the latter vein that Kierkegaard writes ‘A First and Last Explanation’.

It is also in this latter vein that Kierkegaard stays himself from making his argument in The Point of View – that his authorship is essentially religious and that he is essentially a religious author – on the basis of a simple declaration in the text of his own religiousness. Although there are certainly appropriate circumstances under which religious individuals are called upon to testify to or declare their own religiousness, and witnesses to such a declaration may be justified in believing the declaration is true on the basis of the declaration alone, Kierkegaard does not think that the production of a religious authorship is such an appropriate circumstance. He writes: ‘In other words, qua human being I may be justified in making a declaration, and from the religious point of view it may be my duty to make a declaration. But this must not be confused with the authorship – qua author it does not help very much that I qua human being declare that I have intended this and that.’²⁴ Thus, according to Kierkegaard, the only valid elements of any argument about or interpretation of his work as an author are those accessible to and verifiable by any reader of the works constitutive of the Kierkegaardian authorship. That Kierkegaard says something is so is, according to Kierkegaard, an insufficient basis for believing it to be so.

The task The Point of View sets for readers of Kierkegaard, then, is a formidable one: to demonstrate on the basis of the authorship alone that it is an essentially religious authorship, rather than an aesthetic one.²⁵ Kierkegaard reads these two possibilities, the aesthetic and the religious, to be the only two possibilities for understanding the authorship, and thus only seriously considers these two possibilities in his argument in The Point of View. The heart of the experience of reading the Kierkegaardian authorship is, according to Kierkegaard, fundamentally an experience of a duplexity (or a duplicity) in the authorship. There are aesthetic books in the authorship, and there are religious books in the authorship, and the first problem of any hermeneutics of Kierkegaard – again, according to The Point of View – is to decide between the two. Do we have here an aesthetic author who also wrote religious works? Or do we have, in fact, a religious author who also wrote aesthetic works? Kierkegaard thinks the answer is clear:

Although Either/Or attracted all the attention and 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.²⁶

The duplexity of the authorship – that there seems to be a basic difference in the authorship between two fundamentally different kinds of writings, and that this difference is a difference in point of view – is on some level indisputable, although this is not to say that the significance of that duplexity is as Kierkegaard says it is.

Much scholarly work has been done to show the tenuousness of any claim to a strict and stable difference between the aesthetic and the religious works in the Kierkegaardian authorship; perhaps the most influential for Kierkegaard’s readers today are the works of Henning Fenger, Louis Mackey, Roger Poole and Joakim Garff, chief among the so-called ‘postmodern’ readings of Kierkegaard.²⁷ I do not wish here to re-tread old ground, nor do I wish to make one more version of the argument that one cannot once and for all distinguish between the aesthetic and the religious in the writings of Kierkegaard. Although I find especially Garff’s reading of The Point of View rather compelling on this issue, in this article I am willing to grant to the author of The Point of View that the duplexity he proposes at the basis of the authorship does in fact exist, and more or less exactly in the fashion The Point of View describes. My disagreement with The Point of View on this key point in the interpretation of Kierkegaard lies not in the realm of disputing the structure of the authorship, but instead in disputing the purported meaning of that structure.

If we take as granted that there is a duplexity to the authorship, and that this duplexity sits atop the aesthetic–religious divide, then to find ‘the point of view for Kierkegaard’s work as an author’, and thus a critical clue in coming to understand the meaning of the authorship, we must determine (as The Point of View attempts to determine) whether it is the aesthetic or the religious that best characterizes the authorship’s author, whether the best point of view from which to read the authorship is an aesthetic or a religious point of view. Kierkegaard dismisses – rightly, I think – any approach that relies upon direct declarations from Kierkegaard himself as to what the authorship is or what it means. Whatever the point of view for the authorship is going to be, it must be a point of view at which a reader could reasonably arrive in a reading of the authorship. As we saw in the last section, such a point of view also cannot rely upon certain aspects of the author’s personal understanding or experience, not only of the authorship, but of anything. The author’s inner world is hidden from readers, at least insofar as they are readers, and remains out of bounds for interpretations of the author’s work.

One is thus left with a very real question about what could constitute evidence one way or the other in an investigation into the possible religiousness or aestheticism of an authorship such as the Kierkegaardian. If we can admit into our inquiry only the books themselves, and the books establish there is a difference between the aesthetic and the religious but nothing more, then we must admit that any attempt to identify the point of view for the authorship is doomed to fail. The closest The Point of View comes to a compelling and necessary argument for one point of view on the authorship as superior to any other is in the attempt to show that there is good reason to believe that, if an author were essentially religious, and if that author wished to produce an authorship the goal of which was to communicate the task of the religious life (according to Kierkegaard, becoming a Christian) to his or her contemporaries who might be living in the aesthetic stage of existence, then that author would have to do so by means of aesthetic writings – a deception designed to deprive them of any obstacles or illusions to which they subscribed that prevented them from seeing, understanding and accepting the task (again, becoming a Christian). There are two essential elements to Kierkegaard’s point here: that the aesthetic writings of such an author would constitute a deception, and that in order for the deception to succeed, the aesthetic and religious writings of such an author would have to be produced and published concurrently, rather than as chronologically sequential or independent strands within the authorship.

Kierkegaard famously maintains that the aesthetic writings – by which, at this point in the book, he means exclusively the pseudonymous writings – are a certain sort of deception. He writes:

But from the total point of view of my whole work as an author, the esthetic writing is a deception, and herein is the deeper significance of the pseudonymity. But a deception, that is indeed something rather ugly. To that I would answer: Do not be deceived by the word deception. One can deceive a person out of what is true, and – to recall old Socrates – one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, in only this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true – by deceiving them.²⁸

The Socratic deception of the pseudonymous authorship – Socratic, it seems, insofar as it is ironic, and ironic insofar as the pseudonymous authors, like Socrates, remain substantially hidden – is not a deception in the ordinary sense. That is to say that, although Kierkegaard is deceptive by way of his pseudonymity, that deception is not intended to create a delusion, a mistaken view of self and world, in his readers. Rather, it is a deception intended by way of taking seriously his readers’ delusion (specifically, that in Christendom all are Christians) to remove that delusion, to assist his readers to their own discovery of the truth. This, too, is reminiscent of ‘old Socrates’.

The removal of the delusion – or, as it is called elsewhere in The Point of View, the illusion – requires more than an aesthetic authorship, however. One cannot simply remove the obstacle to discovery of the truth and expect that the truth will be found; in addition, there had to be a directly religious component of the authorship, a reminder of the Christian task and an indicator of the direction in which newly undeluded readers might begin to move. Kierkegaard maintains that the religious writings could not simply appear after the aesthetic writings, since this would send the message that the author might just have become religious as he aged, that the aesthetic writings were in some sense essentially aesthetic when they were written but that the author then had a change of heart, and began to write religiously. Rather, The Point of View insists that the aesthetic and the religious writings had to appear together throughout the authorship, to ward off the notion that the religious came later, but also to prevent aesthetic readers from attempting to interpret the authorship entirely aesthetically – from the aesthetic point of view – a task Kierkegaard seems to think is impossible, but one that nevertheless might occupy more than one deluded aesthete of a reader.²⁹

Thus, he writes: ‘How can this illusion be removed – whether it will succeed is something else, but it can be removed by concurrent esthetic and religious works. Here no dubiousness is possible, because the esthetic production testifies that youth is present – then the concurrent religious work cannot be explained on some incidental basis.’³⁰ This seems to accomplish the goal of demonstrating that the religious writings were not the product of incidental maturity and old age, and it is a striking fact that the author (of the authors) of Either/Or is also the author of Two Upbuilding Discourses. But it proves neither that the author is an essentially religious author, nor that the point of view for any reading of the authorship ought to be the religious. As Kierkegaard goes on to note:

Perhaps it will not succeed at all in this way, perhaps; the damage cannot be great. At most the damage can be that one does not really believe in the religiousness of such a communicator. Well, then! Often enough a communicator of the religious can be too anxious about being regarded as religious himself. If so, this simply shows that he is not in truth religious.³¹

He goes on to condemn ‘that religious person who, if worst comes to worst, could not endure being regarded as the only one who was not religious. To be able to endure this is in reflection the most accurate definition of essential religiousness.’³² Admitting that a concurrently aesthetic and religious authorship of the Kierkegaardian sort might be understood by some readers as the work of an accomplished aesthete, rather than the product of an author who was religious through and through, Kierkegaard seems to say that the matter is not so important – or, at least, that it cannot be of such importance to the (possibly religious) author, whose chief concern must be the production of his or her work as an author, not the prevention or limitation of alternative interpretations of that work.

With or without this admission of an alternative interpretive possibility, however, the argument of The Point of View is in trouble, at least from a strictly logical perspective. While the initial premise of the Kierkegaardian argument may be true, that ‘if an author were religious and wished to disabuse the reader of an illusion, then that author could (or, to strengthen the argument, we might substitute: “then the author would have to”) produce an authorship concurrently aesthetic and religious’, and while it is certainly true that the Kierkegaardian authorship is concurrently aesthetic and religious, it does not follow from these claims (as Kierkegaard seems to say it follows) that the religious is the point of view for his work as an author.³³ In fact, nothing at all follows from those two claims alone, since those two claims alone can only establish that, if the author were religious, then he or she could/would produce an authorship like Kierkegaard’s. On this basis alone we are not justified in concluding that the hypothesis is in fact biconditional – that given the Kierkegaardian authorship, Kierkegaard is a religious author and, therefore, that the point of view for his authorship is only properly understood to be a religious one, as well. What is missing – what Kierkegaard denies he needs to provide qua author, and yet he claims ‘can lyrically satisfy me qua human being and is for me qua human being my religious duty’³⁴ – is a direct declaration of the author’s religiousness. Without conclusive evidence of the author’s personal religiousness, even Kierkegaard admits that readers remain justified in interpreting the author’s work as an author as possibly purely aesthetically motivated. Kierkegaard would not be the only aesthete in literary or philosophical history to produce apparently religious writings which, despite appearances, are only properly understood as aesthetic writings. We might believe the Kierkegaardian authorship to be essentially religious, and its author likewise, as a matter of faith or trust, but there is no reason to believe it, not on Kierkegaardian grounds, at any rate. Without a reason, we are left – as A. F…left us in ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ – with disparate texts and a mysterious, hidden author. Nothing more.

Is Kierkegaard the author of The Point of View?

Very briefly, in closing, I wish to address a question that at this point may seem rather unnecessary and not a little strange: is Kierkegaard the author of The Point of View for My Work as an Author? Kierkegaard’s name certainly appears on the title page of the work, as it does throughout the book; page after page identifies Kierkegaard as the author of The Point of View (and the author of The Point of View as the author of the Kierkegaardian authorship entire). The ‘My’ in My Work as an Author seems undoubtedly to refer to one man, Søren Kierkegaard, and as I have already shown, one does not need to consider the authorship of The Point of View to be in doubt in order to see the argument of The Point of View as a problematic one, at best.

On a more fundamental level, however, assigning authorship of The Point of View is an important matter for readings and understandings of the Kierkegaardian authorship, and one worth at least a brief examination. And it was important to Søren Kierkegaard, who in his unpublished journals seems to have wrestled not only with The Point of View’s publication, but with its proper authorship, as well. In the end, I think that there are four distinct possibilities with regard to the authorship of The Point of View, all of which have some basis in the work and in Kierkegaard’s journals, and none of which rests authorial responsibility exclusively with Kierkegaard (or with Kierkegaard in the ordinary way) – one of which I favor, naturally, but any of which is a better explanation of the authorship of the book than the one provided on its title page: ‘A Direct Communication, Report to History, by S. Kierkegaard’.³⁵ I will address each of these four possibilities briefly in what follows.

Before I do so, however, it is important to note that I use the terms ‘author’ and ‘authorial responsibility’, as Kierkegaard and the Kierkegaardian authors do, to indicate something very different from the terms ‘writer’ and ‘writerly activity’. ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’ and The Point of View both seem to establish that uncovering the author of a work is not as simple as identifying who wrote that work. The writing of a book is the historical event of its construction: the selection of individual words and phrases, the recording of the developing text on paper or some other such medium, and so on. It can in addition be held to include the reflective and deliberative process of producing and refining the idea of the work over time, the research involved, and the like. Writers are the historical persons responsible for having produced written works. By all accounts, then, Søren Kierkegaard is the writer of every element within the Kierkegaardian authorship. But he is not every element’s author.

With this distinction in mind, Kierkegaard notes of the pseudonymous books at least as early as ‘A First and Last Explanation’: ‘Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me. I have no opinion about them except as a third party, no knowledge of their meaning except as a reader, not the remotest private relation to them . . .’³⁶ Kierkegaard here denies authorship of works he has only a page earlier confessed to having written. As has been the case throughout the present work, and as likely ought to be the case in all discussions of authorship in Kierkegaard, the terms and corresponding roles, ‘author’ and ‘writer’, must be kept absolutely separate in our minds. Although there are no doubt many cases in which both the author and the writer of a work can be identified by the same name (hence, the term ‘veronymous’ to identify such cases), even in those cases the reader is wrong to think of authorial responsibility for the work as adhering to the author on the basis of his or her having written the work in question. Insofar as one individual is both the author and the writer of a work (in those cases where such language seems appropriate), he or she is those things separately. This is a distinction that is taken up later in different ways by such philosophers and theorists of authorship as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Alexander Nehamas.³⁷ For now, it is enough for us to note that, before any of these 20th-century thinkers, Kierkegaard was theorizing and practising authorship very much in this way – and in so doing, leaves us with only four possibilities in the reading of his posthumously published treatise on authorship, as noted above.

(1) The first possibility, as I see it, and the one closest to the standard reading of the authorship of the book, is that The Point of View was written by Kierkegaard, but that Kierkegaard is not its (or is not its only) author. As The Point of View makes very clear, an essential component of the author’s work is the authorization, and to a certain extent the timing, of publication. The Point of View, various other unpublished writings, and some published works about the authorship (such as Johannes Climacus’ ‘A Glance at a Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature’)³⁸ chronicle Kierkegaard’s attempts to mastermind not only the contents of his writings, but also the time and manner in which they were presented for public consumption. Kierkegaard did not publish The Point of View, and there is reason to believe that, despite the fluctuations in his opinion of the work, he did not think it could be published – at least not by him. Turning to Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals and papers, we even begin to see that, the closer we try to come to Kierkegaard himself as author of The Point of View, the less seriously we can take him as its (only) author. In the journals, he notes that ‘“The Point of View for My Work as an Author” must not be published, no, no!’, and further, in the same passage: ‘And this is the deciding factor (never mind all those ideas I had about endangering my future and my bread and butter): I cannot tell the full truth about myself.’³⁹ On this basis, and contrary to the conclusion of The Point of View itself, he writes: ‘The fact that I cannot give the full truth in portraying myself signifies that essentially I am a poet – and here I shall remain’,⁴⁰ a triumph of the aesthetic point of view over the religious one.

This would leave The Point of View without an author – since Kierkegaard seems to believe that publication of the piece cannot be accomplished, and that therefore, as far as the Kierkegaardian authorship and Kierkegaard qua author are concerned, The Point of View is wrong (‘essentially I am a poet’). But Kierkegaard does not leave the matter there. In what is perhaps a less humble but nevertheless telling addition to the same journal passage, Kierkegaard lays out what seems to be the accepted view of Kierkegaard’s view on the publication of The Point of View:

The book itself is true and in my opinion masterly. But a book like that can be published only after my death. If my sin and guilt, my intrinsic misery, the fact that I am a penitent are stressed a bit more pointedly, then it will be a true picture. But I must be careful about the idea of dying, lest I go and do something with the thought of dying in half a year and then live to be eighty-two. No, one finishes a book like that, puts it away in a drawer, sealed and marked: To be opened after my death.⁴¹

Despite the alternative possibilities raised by Kierkegaard in the journals, it is this account of what ought to happen that comes closest to what does happen: after Kierkegaard’s death, The Point of View is found among his posthumous papers and, years later (in 1859), it is published by Kierkegaard’s brother, Peter Christian Kierkegaard, with Søren Kierkegaard’s name on the title page. There seems to be nothing unusual about this – the posthumous writings of deceased authors are published all the time – but given the significance of publishing this work, of bringing this work to public attention, I think we must consider Peter Christian Kierkegaard’s role here as more significantly authorial than perhaps we are accustomed to considering the roles of editors, publishers, or executors of literary estates.

Peter performs an authorial task that his brother, Søren, never could: in authorizing publication of the work, Peter makes Søren say ‘I’ in The Point of View. While Søren did in fact write the book, it is Peter and not Søren – given the writings in the journals, specifically not Søren – who makes the connection between ‘the point of view for my work as an author’ and Søren Kierkegaard’s work as an author.⁴² Perhaps productively thought of as a performative utterance, Peter Christian Kierkegaard’s decision to publish The Point of View is at least in part the work of an author. Again, this is not to say that Peter was the one to write the book, or to contribute to its writing in any way. But, following Kierkegaard, we must recall: to author a book and to write it are not the same thing. Since so much of the meaning and significance of The Point of View depends upon its author being the person who makes the claims the book makes, it seems that either Kierkegaard is not (at least not clearly) the author of the work, or if he is that, then he is that only insofar as his brother makes him so. Peter Christian Kierkegaard is at worst a ventriloquist, speaking through his brother’s voice as if it were his brother speaking, and at best a co-conspirator, putting into final motion events his brother conceived but chose never to carry out. In either case, Peter Christian Kierkegaard is as important a figure in the authorship of The Point of View as is the named author, Søren Kierkegaard, and readers of The Point of View should be advised to take Peter’s (co-)authorial role into account in their readings.

(2) The second possibility, much discussed but only rarely explored in readings of The Point of View, is a possibility Kierkegaard raises in the closing passages of the very same unpublished journal entry referenced above. There, Kierkegaard writes:

Moreover, what I have written can very well be used – if I do indeed continue to be an author – but then I must assign it to a poet, a pseudonym.

For example – by the poet Johannes de Silentio, edited by Søren Kierkegaard.

But this is the best proof that ‘The Point of View for My Work as an Author’ cannot be published. It must be made into something by a third party: A Possible Explanation of Magister Kierkegaard’s Authorship, that is, so it is no longer the same book at all. For the point of it was my personal story.⁴³

The suggestion that The Point of View might be ascribed to a pseudonym – and to Johannes de Silentio, of all the pseudonyms from whom to choose – seems to be a fascinating and pregnant one, but the explanation of the potential pseudonymity of The Point of View (or, what would have to have become A Possible Explanation) adds little to the examination of what I have called the first possibility for identifying the authorship of the book.⁴⁴ Whether the third party is the fictional Johannes de Silentio or the altogether too real Peter Christian Kierkegaard is in some sense irrelevant to readings of the book; if Kierkegaard does not present the claims himself and directly, then ‘it is no longer the same book at all’. The argument here mirrors my argument earlier, however, with regard to the argument of the book itself. If Kierkegaard cannot be understood to contribute the argument of The Point of View himself, directly, then the argument of The Point of View cannot hold. It is either a direct declaration of Kierkegaard’s religiousness and religious authorial intentions in the authorship, or it is little more than an unsubstantiated hypothesis as to the meaning and structure of the Kierkegaardian authorship⁴⁵ – and Kierkegaard has ruled out the use of direct declarations.⁴⁶

(3) The third possible author of The Point of View for My Work as an Author – a possibility at which Kierkegaard hints throughout the book, but which he never presents as his final interpretation – is God.⁴⁷ As Kierkegaard notes in a different passage from the journals:

For I am a genius of such a kind that I cannot just directly and personally assume the whole thing without encroaching on Governance. Every genius is preponderantly immanence and immediacy; he has no ‘why’; but once again it is my genius that lets me see clearly, afterwards, the infinite ‘why’ in the whole, but this is Governance’s doing. On the other hand, I am not a religious person of such a kind that I can directly assign everything to God.

Therefore not a word.⁴⁸

This possibility is a dangerous one for Kierkegaard to entertain, of course, since Kierkegaard cannot claim to know directly the mind of God – unless he is claiming to have received a direct revelation from God, as did the ill-fated Bishop Adler. Hence, Kierkegaard’s reminder that he is ‘not a religious person of such a kind’, and the conclusion – that he cannot publish the argument made in The Point of View. In fact, in this passage, Kierkegaard goes further than that: here, he maintains not only that he cannot publish The Point of View, but that on an important level – on a religious level – he cannot even believe it. He cannot believe he knows that God works through him without believing that he has a special knowledge others do not possess (that is, that he is an apostle), and he cannot believe that the authorship was entirely his work and his alone (that is, that God or Governance played no role in his authorship). He is stuck in between two unacceptable options, and for that reason, must remain silent (and agnostic) on the structure, purpose, meaning, and ultimately the author of ‘his’ authorship.

Kierkegaard’s published writings maintain that silence remarkably well, especially for someone so compelled by the idea that God is the author of his written works – and that God is his own Author. Elsewhere, Kierkegaard muses on this possibility:

The difficulty in publishing anything about the authorship is and remains that, without me knowing it or knowing it positively, I really have been used, and now for the first time I understand and comprehend the whole – but then I cannot, after all, say: I. At most I can say (that is, given my scrupulous demand for the truth): this is how I now understand the productivity of the past. The flaw, again, is that if I do not do it myself, there is no one who can present it, for no one knows it the way I do. No one can explain the structure of the whole as I can.

But this is my limitation – I am a pseudonym. Fervently, incitingly, I present the ideal, and when the listener or reader is moved to tears, then I still have one job left: to say, ‘I am not that, my life is not like that.’⁴⁹

As a pseudonym, Kierkegaard can open up possibilities, but he cannot close them. Like Johannes de Silentio or Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard-as-pseudonym – as a pseudonym of God – can neither claim to know his own author nor to understand the purpose or meaning of his own life or work as an author. Once again, we are confronted with the fact that, for Kierkegaard, no reader can have good reason to believe that God is the author – but the possibility remains open nonetheless, at least for a faith for which all things are possible.⁵⁰

(4) The fourth and final possibility for ascription of the authorship of The Point of View is, following A. F…and ‘Who is the Author of Either/Or’, to maintain that the ‘real’ author of The Point of View cannot and could never be finally identified – and that this is a matter of little import to readings and interpretations of The Point of View. I do not agree with A. F…that ‘it is not worth the trouble to be concerned about who the author is’,⁵¹ but at the same time, A. F. . . .’s inconclusiveness on the issue of authorship is both refreshing and, I think, merited. The Point of View is a book about authorship, about competing possible interpretations of a single authorship, much as Either/Or was a book about the notion of a life-view, and about competing possible life-views. Such a book, unpublished during its writer’s lifetime, left to be published – if ever – by another, after that writer’s death whether that writer would have willed it or not, is perfectly situated to open up questions about and possibilities of authorship, questions and possibilities it cannot and could never close. Whether it was the author’s intention or not – whether it was Kierkegaard’s intention or not – it seems right not to close them.