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33 2 alternatives to différance the reader new to Kierkegaard will find remarkable the diversity of discussions of concepts such as love to be found in his writings. The pseudonym a’s view of love in Either/Or I is based on popular erotic conceptions drawn from mozart’s Don Giovanni and augustin eugène Scribe’s Les Premières Amours ou Les Souvenirs d’enfance, both of which he reviews. in the companion volume Either/Or II, another pseudonym, Judge William, contrasts the erotic portrait of love with one rooted instead in a strong sense of duty and commitment to ideals, exemplified by the institution of marriage. in the signed book Works of Love, Kierkegaard offers yet another depiction of love that is distinctly Christian in nature. roger Poole understands such multifarious conceptions as a sign of Kierkegaard’s employment of différance, and he advises his reader to be careful to keep apart the various versions of concepts one finds, especially in the pseudonymous literature: “Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works are heterogeneous thought-worlds in which although the key concepts may share some ‘family resemblances’ those key concepts achieve their efficacy and yield their meanings by being read in terms of their differences , not in terms of their similarities.”1 in the previous chapter i raised objections to this “principle.” in this chapter i will expand on the concerns that underlie these objections, concerns motivated by an interest in asking what purpose there might be in looking at concepts like love in so many different ways and from so many different angles. in the first and largest section, i will explore in detail the teleological scheme of the existence-spheres, thereby lending support to my objection to Poole that the “thought-worlds” of the pseudonyms can and ought to be placed side by side in 34 | Jest and/or Earnestness conversation with one another. my analysis of the spheres, as well as the discussion of Kierkegaardian dialectic in the section that follows, will demonstrate how the spheres can be viewed as contributing to the edification of Kierkegaard’s reader, whom he hopes will be led through them finally to Christian existence.2 i conclude by returning to Kierkegaard’s The Book on Adler to show how his distinction between an “essential author” and a “premise author” might afford one last objection to the picture of Kierkegaard Poole offers. Climacus and the existence-Spheres Kierkegaard refers to the aesthetic, ethical, and religious as both stages and spheres of existence. “Spheres” conveys the sense in which they represent “existential possibilities a person can remain in for a lifetime.”3 however, as stages, Kierkegaard also understands them developmentally: “in some sense it is natural for human beings to begin as children in the aesthetic stage and progress to the ethical and eventually the religious stages.”4 in other words, for Kierkegaard as stages they are teleological—their end is Christian existence. This appears compatible with accounts where he claims the goal of his authorship is to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom and to assist individuals in becoming Christians. But this view of the stages also has implications for a Poolian reading of Kierkegaard, which would deny such teleology. Thus, although “sphere” and “stage” connote different meanings, i will nearly exclusively use the term “sphere” to avoid question-begging—so that the argument i make to defend the teleology or natural movement through them is not informed by the idea of a stage, which is more suggestive of progression. one of Poole’s worries about blunt readings concerns an approach to Kierkegaard that seeks to draw out of the pseudonymous works what one might call absolutist or ultra-serious theories or philosophical doctrines. even worse would be a claim that Kierkegaard himself viewed one of his own theories or concepts as such. according to C. Stephen evans, “The scheme of categories is not absolutized. he [Kierkegaard] does not deny the possibility of other helpful ways of categorizing existence. . . . [t]he scheme is not a ‘system’ but a conceptual tool that is treated differently in different contexts. nevertheless, Kierkegaard sees his stages as both helpful and in some sense fundamental.”5 Thus the spheres should not be interpreted reductively, as the final word on the possibilities of human existence, but as one scheme through which one can make observations about a human life in ways that both attend to general features of human existence and allow for different instantiations based on the uniqueness and...

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