Kierkegaard's Seductions: The Ethics of Authorship

A man who cannot seduce men cannot save them either.

Kierkegaard, Journals²

I am convinced that seldom has any author employed so much cunning, intrigue, and shrewdness to win honor and reputation in the world with a view to deceiving it, as I displayed in order to deceive it inversely in the interest of truth.

Kierkegaard, PV 49³

In 1843, at the age of twenty-nine, Søren Kierkegaard published Either/Or, a nearly eight-hundred page book (the first of six published in 1843) written largely during a several month visit to Berlin where Kierkegaard had ensconced himself to escape the complications of an impossible love affair. The work was published pseudonymously, "edited" by Victor Eremita, and consists of two volumes of papers discovered accidentally by Victor in the secret drawer of a desk he had bought at auction, the first volume by an aesthete ('A'), the second by an ethicist ('B,' Judge William). My concern in this article is with the last (and longest) entry of volume one, the transcription of the diary of a "Seducer." I will argue that the account of the exploits of Johannes the Seducer is in part only the pretext of the text of Either/Or, as much a disguised commentary on Kierkegaard's early experimentation with a style of "indirect communication" and the nature of seduction as a strategy of authorship as it is about the strange, troubling, and fascinating diary of a master eroticist.

Faithful to Deception

If, as Nietzsche claims in Beyond Good and Evil, "Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood" (Nietzsche 419), then surely Søren Kierkegaard was a truly profound thinker, for a fundamental commitment of Kierkegaard's authorship was to develop an experimental art of communication in which misunderstanding and deception play a central role. "I give you advance notice," he tells an imaginary reader in his private journal, "that there will come moments . . . when I . . . must set between ourselves the awakening of misunderstanding" (JP 1: 662). Another journal entry puts it even more bluntly: "To deceive belongs essentially to [my method of] communication; . . . and the art consists in . . . remaining faithful to . . . the deception [throughout]" (JP 1: 653).

Kierkegaard's most usual explanation of his inclination toward indirection and deception is his resolve to distance himself as author from the authority of the teacher. He explains in his journal that one reason "all direct communication" makes him "uncomfortable" is that "what I have to say may not be taught" (JP 1: 646). So he remains "silent," and writes "as if I would keep the truth to myself" (JP 1: 646). This is one of the motives for his adoption of the method of pseudonymous authorship, as an aid in this project of self-removal. By being scrupulous in "never ventur[ing] to use quite directly my own 'I'" (JP 1: 656), and rather producing a whole world of "poetic 'I's" (JP 1: 650) and "poetized personalities"—his many pseudonyms (chronologically, Victor Eremita, Constantin Constantius, Johannes de Silentio, Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, Nicolaus Notabene, Hilarius Bookbinder, Inter et Inter, and Anti-Climacus), along with the entire cast of imaginary characters the pseudonyms themselves create—he denies the reader the comfort of locating an author who will take responsibility for their education. Kierkegaard, after all, insists that he is "only a reader" of his own works, a relationship he suggests ought to be true of all authors: we should beware of behaving "as if an author were . . . the best interpreter of his own words, or as if it could help a reader [to know] that an author had intended this or that" (CUP 225).

The importance of revoking the authority of the author is one of many things Kierkegaard expresses his debt to Socrates for, "the man to whom I have been inexplicably related from my earliest years" (JSK 1291). Of course, there are differences between Socrates's and Kierkegaard's practices of the maieutic method. Most importantly, Kierkegaard says that indirect communication in the age of Christendom requires certain considerations that Socrates, living...