Writing as a work of love? The relationship of form and content in Kierkegaard

In the last few decades, Kierkegaard's specific style of writing has been the subject of great discussion. However, scholarship on Kierkegaard does not always give attention to the philosophically peculiar way in which Kierkegaard writes on the topic of love in Either/Or, Stages on Life's Way, and Works of Love. Scholarship on Kierkegaard's early works, such as Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way, can at times fail to separate Kierkegaard from his pseudonymous characters, and critics can fall into the deception that the pseudonyms represent Kierkegaard's own views. Those who write on Kierkegaard's later texts penned in his own name, such as Works of Love, do not often pay attention to the form or change in form from his early works. Why does he make this switch from pseudonymous to veronymous communication on love? Is Works of Love as much of a direct discourse as it is taken to be? These are questions to which I have not found sufficient answers to in secondary literature on Kierkegaard. There is a need to better understand both the pseudonymous and veronymous writings on love, why Kierkegaard makes this shift in communication, and what remains consistent in the communicative style of the veronymous works.;This dissertation, Writing as a Work of Love? The Relationship of Form and Content in Kierkegaard, investigates how Kierkegaard's "indirect communication" on the topic of love in Either/Or, Stages on Life's Way, and Works of Love is the required mode of communicating on love in a truly loving way. Kierkegaard's early, pseudonymous writings on love, Stages on Life 's Way and Either/Or, embody his understanding that love is relational and a task, since the writing itself requires the reader to perceive love through the eyes of the characters, determine if the characters' vision is trustworthy or untrustworthy, and decide with whom she may identify and how she will embody love herself. In order to help his reader win through to true self-giving love, Kierkegaard indirectly awakens the reader to the awareness that her present understanding and way of loving is flawed. Kierkegaard's indirect discourse is an appropriation of the Socratic method, which seeks to dispel illusions by bringing the individual to self-awareness. Throughout his journals and writings, Kierkegaard praises and imitates the pedagogical method of Socrates for its emphasis on the individual interlocutor.;Yet, while Kierkegaard begins writing indirectly on the topic of love, he later moves to what some consider "direct communication" on the same topic in his seminal book on self-giving love penned in his own name, Works of Love. This is a curious move, since Kierkegaard explicitly holds that indirect communication is preferred and superior to direct communication in Point of View and in his journals. In Works of Love it is Kierkegaard, in his own voice, who writes on self-giving love as the task of awakening and "up-building" another to love others and God. It is my position that in his pseudonymous writings on love, Stages on Life's Way and Either/Or, Kierkegaard indirectly awakens his readers to build them up to bear what he presents in Works of Love, a paradigm of how to love others in a self-giving and indirect way.;Works of Love, Kierkegaard's presentation of self-giving love, is not Kierkegaard's attempt to directly communicate his own personal success in loving authentically or to directly communicate a conception of divine love. Works of Love acts as a work of true love in that it "reduplicates" Kierkegaard's understanding of how the eternal loves the individual and commands the individual to love another, and yet we are unable to conclude with certainty that Kierkegaard is himself a true self-giving lover or the Works of Love is a work of true love. Works of Love is an indirect discourse in that Kierkegaard obscures his own motivations for writing Works of Love, in order to redirect the reader towards love itself, and the text disavows itself as being an attempt to communicate divine, infinite Love, which can never be expressed directly in a finite context. It is important to being to light the indirect quality of Works of Love, so that first, Works of Love is not viewed as a departure from Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings, but rather a continuation of his authorial mission to indirectly seduce his reader towards becoming a true self and lover, and second, Kierkegaard is not viewed as assuming a position of ultimate authority on self-giving love.