Corrections and convergences: The ethical and the religious in Kierkegaard's signed and unsigned works from 'Either/Or' through the 'Postscript' (Soren Kierkegaard)

This dissertation examines Kierkegaard's understanding of the relationship between the ethical and the religious, as this is presented in his “esthetic” and “religious” works (as he named them) through the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Two Ages. That is, I examine major pseudonymous works together with the discourses Kierkegaard published to “accompany” each one. Each pseudonymous work is more complicated and esoteric by design than the accompanying discourses, so exegesis and interpretation of these must occupy the bulk of the dissertation. However, I also give due attention to the discourses, using them to clarify important themes from the pseudonyms and to discover new themes not presented in the indirect works. By examining Kierkegaard's authorship in published chronological order, rather than the more usual approach of separating out the pseudonyms from the discourses, I attempt to facilitate a dialectical treatment of the two tracks of the authorship, so that each comments on the other, highlighting important elements which might be missed otherwise. I discuss in particular his attempts to distinguish the ethical from the religious, his understanding of how the self moves into the ethical, and then out again into the religious, and finally his presentation of how the ethical continues, “transfigured” by the religious, to play its part in the life of the religious individual.; Through this reading I develop an understanding of Kierkegaard's thought in which the ethical and the religious are indeed conceptually distinguishable, though practically inseparable if either is to be complete; and I develop an understanding of Kierkegaard's ethical and religious writings in which the pseudonyms depict (both dramatically in their characters and theoretically in their writing) the exaggerations and dysfunctions which occur when the individual pursues a particular life-view to the exclusion of other essential elements of the self, while the accompanying direct writings depict the themes of their pseudonymous adjuncts as they should be lived in healthy integration within the religious life.