Evading the Issue: The Strategy of Kierkegaard’s Postscript

Concluding Unscientific Postscript is a pseudonymous work written by Johannes Climacus which claims to raise and respond appropriately to the question ‘How do I become a Christian?’ Following Climacus’s text there is ‘A First and Last Explanation’ signed by Kierkegaard himself in which he says that ‘My pseudonymity . . . has . . . an essential basis in the production itself ’, that the pseudonymity of works like Postscript (hereafter CUP) is essential for the kinds of work they are. And in denying that one can attribute anything the pseudonyms say to him, Kierkegaard says that what ‘has been written, then, is mine, but only insofar as I, by means of audible lines, have placed the life-view of the creating, poetically actual individuality in his mouth’ (p. 625). At the end of the ‘Explanation’ he adds that the importance of the pseudonyms is ‘in wanting to have no importance, in wanting, at a remove that is the distance of doublereflection, once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existencerelationships’ (pp. 629–30). These remarks invite us to ask in relation to CUP what the ‘life-view’ of the ‘poetically actual individuality’