Abstract

To Be One Thing traces the theme of unity throughout Kierkegaard's journal entries, pseudonymous authorship, and late religious writings and in the process shows the centrality of this idea in Kierkegaard's thought. After examining in the introduction a particularly striking manifestation of Kierkegaard's identification of selfhood and oneness, we trace in chapter I the early development of Kierkegaard's interest in the theme of unity. There we find that Kierkegaard takes up but fundamentally recasts basic philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic principles of German romanticism as the vehicle, both conceptually and methodologically, for his original contributions. In chapter II, we use our main thesis, the foundational role of the concept of unity in Kierkegaard's thought, to uncover the hidden structure of Either/Or I, thus giving a strong indication of its truth by demonstrating its heuristic value. In our final chapter, we examine the various existence-forms in Kierkegaard's "phenomenology" from the vantage point of our thesis and find that a coherent and enlightening account of the stages may be developed by describing the form of unity or disunity characteristic of each