Søren Kierkegaard, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The pseudonymous works are not my views directly; they are existence-positions constructed for the reader to inhabit, examine, and outgrow. Climacus is a humorist who is "not yet a Christian"; Anti-Climacus speaks from a Christianity higher than I myself attain; de Silentio cannot understand Abraham; Vigilius Haufniensis is the psychological- experimental observer; Eremita and Constantius are aesthetic ironists.
The signed works — the upbuilding discourses, Two Ages, Works of Love, the late polemics — speak in my own name. Indirect communication is for what cannot be directly told (existence is not a doctrine but a task); direct communication is for what edification requires.12345
X B 4:15 n.d., 1851 From first page proofs; see 87:35: Changed from: again show what a person is capable of when he is well driven! —Pap. X B 6:26 n.d., 1851 [X B 145 202] Occasioned by and concerning a recently published little book.... As is well known, my authorship has two parts: one pseudonymous and the other signed.For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself, pp. 253–262
This, in 'Christendom', is the Christian movement: one does not reflect oneself into Christianity; but one reflects oneself out of something else and becomes, more and more simply, a Christian.The Point of View for My Work as an Author, pp. 160–161
For my relation is even more external than that of a poet, who poetizes characters, and yet in the preface is himself the author. For I am impersonal, or am personal in the second person, a souffleur who has poetically produced the authors, whose preface in turn is their own production, as are even their own names.Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 551–552
That I was 'without authority' I have from the first moment asserted clearly and repeated as a stereotyped phrase. I regarded myself preferably as a reader of the books, not as the author.The Point of View for My Work as an Author, p. 168
But nothing about my personality as a writer; it is false to want to anticipate during one's lifetime-this merely converts a person into the interesting. x• On the whole, I must now venture in quite different direc- A 330 510 tions. I must dare to believe that through Christ I can be saved from the power of depression in which I have lived; and I must dare to try to be more economical.-JP VI 6431 (Pap.Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 483
The most distinctive Kierkegaardian methodological commitment. The First and Last Explanation is unambiguous; the contemporary debate is over how seriously to take the indirection. Garff stresses the personal stakes; Poole pushes the indirection to its limit; Evans and Westphal hold a middle.