This chapter focuses on Soren Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms. Some of the names he used include Johannes Climacus, Johannes de silentio, and Vigilius Haufniensus. The chapter evaluates the rationale and significance of using pseudonyms, suggesting that Kierkegaard used different names because of the varied genres of his works and in order to communicate or send specific message to a particular group in society.

The paper argues that the question of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms has been largely misconceived. Referencing comparable devices such as anonymity, noms de plume, and heteronyms, and drawing on Heidegger’s discussion of Kierkegaardian pseudonymity in the lectures on Parmenides, the paper further distinguishes between fictional characters (e. g. the Seducer and Assessor Vilhelm), noms de plume (H.H.), fictional editors, and pseudonyms proper. It is argued that in the first authorship only Constantin Constantius and Johannes Climacus approximate to the criteria Kierkegaard himself (...) lays down for pseudonymity. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s anxieties regarding the form of publication of his works in the late 1840s reveals the whole project of pseudonymity collapsing into incoherence. By means of a comparison with Nietzsche, it is argued that Kierkegaard’s work is less a manifold of different literary personalities and more a play of revealing/concealing voices. In these voices there is nevertheless a literary watermark that makes Kierkegaard’s work as a whole distinctively Kierkegaardian. (shrink)

The blogosphere is full of personalities with masks, or pseudonyms. Although not a desired state of public communication, one could excuse the use of pseudonyms in blogs and social media, which are generally unregulated or weakly regulated. However, in science publishing, there are increasingly strict rules regarding the use of false identities for authors, the lack of institutional or contact details, and the lack of conflicts of interest, and such instances are generally considered to be misconduct. This is because these (...) violations of publishing protocol decrease trust and confidence in science and bring disrepute to those scientists who conform to the rules set out by journals and publishers and abide by them. Thus, when cases are encountered where trust and protocol in publishing are breached, these deserve to be highlighted. In this letter, I focus on Neuroskeptic, a highly prominent science critic, primarily on the blogosphere and in social media, highlighting the dangers associated with the use of pseudonyms in academic publishing. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 329-355.

This book deals with a central problem in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, the themes of time and the self as developed in the pseudonymous writings. Arguing that a most effective way to grasp the unity of Kierkegaard's dialectic of the stages of existence is to focus on the dramatic presentation of time and the self that appears at each stage, Mark C. Taylor pursues these themes from the viewpoints of theology, philosophy, psychology, and related areas of study. The author (...) works from the original texts and makes much use of untranslated primary and secondary material. His concluding evaluation offerse a critical perspective from which to view Kierkegaard's interpretation of time and selfhood and indicates the importance of Kierkegaard's work for our time. Mark C. Taylor teaches religion at Williams College. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Was there such a person as Lewis Carroll? An affirmative answer is suggested by the thought that Lewis Carroll was Charles Dodgson, and since there was certainly such a person as Charles Dodgson, there was such a person as Lewis Carroll. A negative answer is suggested by the thought that in arguing thus, the two names ‘Lewis Carroll’ and ‘Charles Dodgson’ are being inappropriately treated as though they were completely on a par: a pseudonym is, after all, a false or (...) fictitious name. Perhaps we should say instead that there was really no such person as Lewis Carroll, but that when Charles Dodgson published under that name, he was pretending that there was, and further, pretending that the works in question formed part of the literary output of this pretendedly real individual. Whether or not this is correct for the case of ‘Lewis Carroll’, I will be suggesting that an account of this second style–a fictionalist account, for short–is appropriate for at least a good many pseudonyms. We shall get to reasons why it might nonetheless not be especially appropriate in the present case in due course: one advantage of the ‘Lewis Carroll’/‘Charles Dodgson’ example, such qualms notwithstanding, is that everyone is familiar not only with both names but with which of them is the pseudonym. Another is that, as we shall have occasion to observe below, Dodgson himself had some interesting views on this particular case of pseudonymy. (shrink)

Anonymity promotes free speech by protecting the identity of people who might otherwise face negative consequences for expressing their ideas. Wrongdoers, however, often abuse this invisibility cloak. Defenders of anonymity online emphasise its value in advancing public debate and safeguarding political dissension. Critics emphasise the need for identifiability in order to achieve accountability for wrongdoers such as trolls. The problematic tension between anonymity and identifiability online lies in the desirability of having low costs (no repercussions) for desirable speech and high (...) costs (appropriate repercussions) for undesirable speech. If we practice either full anonymity or identifiability, we end up having either low or high costs in all online contexts and for all kinds of speech. I argue that free speech is compatible with instituting costs in the form of repercussions and penalties for controversial and unacceptable speech. Costs can minimise the risks of anonymity by providing a reasonable degree of accountability. Pseudonymity is a tool that can help us regulate those costs while furthering free speech. This article argues that, in order to redesign the Internet to better serve free speech, we should shape much of it to resemble an online masquerade. (shrink)

The essay emphasizes the unsolvable tension between activity and passivity implied in Kierkegaard’s reduplication as an author of authors. To characterize the different approaches to pseudonymity, I will use the term Halvbefaren [the inexperienced seaman] to refer to a reading that appeals only to Kierkegaard’s or to the pseudonyms’ authority over the authorship, and Helbefaren [the experienced seaman] to refer to another interpretation that recognizes that unsolvable tension between them. Recurring to the sailing metaphor implicit in these terms that (...) appear in Climacus’ Postscript, I defend the thesis that the pseudonyms open the authorship from within, overcoming Kierkegaard as a usual author, as the only captain of the entire authorship. The mutiny performed by the pseudonyms cannot be resolved by simply transferring the authority to the pseudonyms themselves, and it creates a subjective space in the authorship so it becomes a matter of the experience of the reader. (shrink)

The first topic of concern is anonymity, specifically the anonymity that is available in communications on the Internet. An earlier paper argues that anonymity in electronic communication is problematic because: it makes law enforcement difficult ; it frees individuals to behave in socially undesirable and harmful ways ; it diminishes the integrity of information since one can't be sure who information is coming from, whether it has been altered on the way, etc.; and all three of the above contribute to (...) an environment of diminished trust which is not conducive to certain uses of computer communication. Counterbalancing these problems are some important benefits. Anonymity can facilitate some socially desirable and beneficial behavior. For example, it can eliminate the fear of repercussions for behavior in contexts in which repercussions would diminish the availability or reliability of information, e.g., voting, personal relationships between consenting adults, and the like. Furthermore, anonymity can be used constructively to reduce the effect of prejudices on communications. Negative aspects of anonymity all seem to point to a tension between accountability and anonymity. They suggest that accountability and anonymity are not compatible, and they even seem to suggest that since accountability is a good thing, it would be good to eliminate anonymity. In other words, the problems with anonymity suggest that individuals are more likely to behave in socially desirable ways when they are held accountable for their behavior, and they are more likely to engage in socially undesirable behavior when they are not held accountable. I am not going to take issue with the correlation between accountability and anonymity, but rather with the claim that accountability is good. To examine this problem, let's look at a continuum that stretches from total anonymity at one end, and no anonymity at all at the other end. At the opposite extreme of anonymity is a panopticon society. The panopticon is the prison environment described by Foucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle with the side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guard tower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can see everything that goes on in every cell. In a recent article on privacy, Jeffrey Reiman, reflecting on the new intelligent highway systems, suggests that we are moving closer and closer to a panopticon society. When we contemplate all the electronic data that is now gathered about each one of us as we move through our everyday lives- intelligent highway systems, consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medical records, financial records, and so on- we see the trend that Reiman identifies. Electronic behavior is recorded and the information is retained. While actions/transactions in separate domains are not necessarily combined, it seems obvious that the potential exists for combining data into a complete portfolio of an individual's day to day life. So it would seem that as more and more activities and domains are moved into a IT-based medium, the closer we will come to a panopticon society. A panopticon society gives us the ultimate in accountability. Everything an individual does is observable and therefore available to those to whom we are accountable. Of course, in doing this, it puts us, in effect, in prison. The prison parallel is appropriate here because what anonymity allows us is freedom; prison is the ultimate in lack of freedom. In this way the arguments for a free society become arguments for anonymity. Only when individuals are free will they experiment, try new ideas, take risks, and learn by doing so. Only in an environment that tolerates making mistakes will individuals develop the active habits that are so essential for democracy. In a world without information technology, individuals have levels or degrees and various kinds of anonymity and consequently different levels and kinds of freedom. Degrees and kinds of anonymity vary with the domain: small town social life versus urban social life, voting, commercial exchanges, banking, automobile travel, airplane travel, telephone communication, education, and so on. Drawing from our experience before IT-based institutions, we might believe that what we need is varying levels or degrees and kinds of anonymity. This seems a good starting place because it suggests an attempt to re-create the mixture that we have in the physical, non-IT-based world. Nevertheless, there is a danger. If we think in terms of levels and degrees of anonymity, we may not see the forest from the trees. We may not acknowledge that in an electronic medium, levels and kinds of anonymity mean, in an important sense, no anonymity. If there are domains in which we can be anonymous but those domains are part of a global communication infrastructure in which there is no anonymity at the entry point, then it will always be possible to trace someone's identity. We delude ourselves when we think we have anonymity on-line or off-line. Rather, what we have both places is situations in which it is more and less difficult to identify individuals. We have a continuum of situations in which it is easy and difficult to link behavior to other behavior and histories of behaviors. In the physical world, we can go places and do things where others don't know us by name and have no history with us, though they see our bodies, clothes, and behavior. If we do nothing unusual, we may be forgotten. On the other hand, if we do something illegal, authorities may attempt to track us down and figure out who we are. For example, law enforcement officials, collection agencies, those who want to sue us may take an active interest in removing our anonymity, ex post facto. Think of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols-the men who apparently bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Much of what they did, they did anonymously, but then law enforcement officials set out to find out who had done various things, e.g., rented a car, bought explosives, etc. The shrouds of anonymity under which McVeigh and Nichols had acted were slowly removed. Is this any different than behavior on the internet? Is there a significant difference in the kind or degree of anonymity we have in the physical world versus what we have in an IT-based world? The character of the trail we leave is different; in the one case, its an electronic trail; while in the other it involves human memories, photographs, and paper and ink. What law enforcement officials had to do to track down McVeigh is quite different from tracking down an electronic law breaker. Also, the cost of electronic information gathering, both in time and money, can be dramatically lower than the cost of talking to people, gathering physical evidence, and the other minutia required by traditional detective work. We should acknowledge that we do not and are never likely to have anonymity on the Internet. We would do better to think of different levels or kinds of identity. There are important moral and social issues arising as a result of these varying degrees and kinds of identity. Perhaps the most important matter is assuring that individuals are informed about the conditions in which they are interacting. Perhaps, even more important is that individuals have a choice about the conditions under which they are communicating. In the rest of this paper we explore a few examples of levels and kinds of identity that are practical on the Internet. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages that we see for these "styles" of identity for individuals, and we examine the costs and benefits of these styles for society as a whole. (shrink)

One of the elements that many readers admire in Kierkegaard’s skill as a writer is his ability to create different voices and perspectives in his works. Instead of unilaterally presenting clear-cut doctrines and theses, he confronts the reader with a range of personalities and figures who all espouse different views. One important aspect of this play of perspectives is Kierkegaard’s controversial use of pseudonyms. The present volume is dedicated to exploring the different pseudonyms and authorial voices in Kierkegaard’s writing. The (...) articles featured here try to explore each pseudonymous author as a literary figure and to explain what kind of a person is at issue in each of the pseudonymous works. The hope is that by taking seriously each of these figures as individuals, we will be able to gain new insights into the texts which they are ostensibly responsible for. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of pseudonymous publication of nonfiction by examining what and why an author might hide behind the veil of pseudonymity, when this is and is not appropriate, and when it is deemed appropriate what measures should be taken to ensure accountability despite the veil. The argument begins by assuming that the sole duty an author has qua author is to his audience and centers on issues in both ethics and philosophy of language.

Drawing on frame semantics as a framework, the current article studies metaphoric and metonymic pseudonyms. The corpus is made up of 128 pseudonyms produced by Saudis over mass and social media. The argument runs as follows: Pseudonym Bearers use metaphor and/or metonymy as an Instrument to construct a pseudonymous frame to mask their identity. Sociocultural reality, which is called the Trigger of the frame, is the motivation behind conceptualizing the self via a pseudonym. The Goal of the pseudonym is to (...) change the Trigger and Benefit psychologically from this change. To measure this change of reality, the researchers submit the pseudonyms under study to Lakoff and Turner’s Great Chain of Being Metaphor. The findings of the article point to a scaling of the Bearer down the Chain, thus re-categorizing the self as less than human. These findings will be shown to occasion possible theoretical implications for the contemporary theory of metaphor. (shrink)

Because Kierkegaard so stubbornly personalizes all of his corpus, and because he so engrosses reviewers in the structural subtleties of his works, he has tended to resist serious placement within the larger contexts of philosophical tradition and our own social world. In this book, the author attempts to remedy these deficiencies. Consistently, he evades preoccupation with Kierkegaard’s pervasive personality to grapple intellectually with the problems that he raised. Taylor studies Kierkegaard’s notions of self and temporality, relating S. K. both to (...) thinkers as dear to him as Plato and Hegel, and as distant from him as Augustine and Freud. His book is intensive and rigorous: he breaks down, clarifies, and attempts to trace the furthest implications of Kierkegaard’s thought. Yet, in dismissing the problematic nature of Kierkegaard’s self-presentation to speak of his study of "the self," Taylor perhaps understates Kierkegaard’s significant point: that such study is, in itself, problematic. At times his logical reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s renderings tends to negate aspects of their compelling ambiguity. (shrink)

In this study John W. Elrod demonstrates that Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings have an ontological foundation that unites the disparate elements of these books. The descriptions of the different stages of human development are not fully understandable, the author argues, without an awareness of the role played by this ontology in Kierkegaard's analysis of human existence. Kierkegaard contends that the self is a synthesis of finitude and infinitude, body and soul, reality and ideality, necessity and possibility, and time and eternity. Each (...) of these syntheses reveals a particular and unique aspect of individual being not disclosed in the others. Part One shows that ontology is central to the discussion of the self in the pseudonyms. The author notes that spirit, as a synthesis of the expressions of the self, develops as consciousness and freedom. In Part Two he indicates the relationship between notions of being and existence. He notes that existence, in Kierkegaard's thought, grows out of the life of the spirit; the different stages of existence are concrete modes that develop in the spirit's striving to unify the self as a synthesis. These existential expressions of spirit are dialectically related, in that each step requires the preceding stages of spiritual development. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Examines the work of Kierkegaard as an ironist, reevaluating the works he penned under pseudonyms to show both their ironic character and the serious purpose that informed the deception Kierkegaard carried out.

The Lonely Labyrinth winds the suggestion that "Kierkegaard was a profoundly sick man, and that the character of his sickness established a privileged perspective for the understanding of his work." In the light of this thesis, his "works turn out to be, not abstruse theologico-philosophical treatises or mysterious aesthetic essays, but successive moves in a complicated dialectic of therapy." They are "efforts... to find not truth but health." Part One of Thompson's book sketches the biographical, psychological, philosophical, and literary background (...) of Kierkegaard's authorship. Part Two--the major division of the book--offers readings of the pseudonymous works from Either/or through Concluding Unscientific Postscript. (shrink)

In spite of the relevance of Aurelius Augustine (354-430) for the intellectual environment in which Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) lived, the studies concerning the relations between these two thinkers are still incipient. In this field of investigation, one of the most intriguing questions is the fact that Kierkegaard apparently changed his view of the Bishop of Hippo, going from admiration during the decade of 1840 to disapproval during the decade of 1850. This paper intends to examine how the problems of truth (...) and of the relations between time and eternity, as approached by Augustine in his works Confessions and The Teacher, are strongly related to the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, and how the arguments developed in these Augustinian books can be read as presuppositions of the arguments that support the Kierkegaardian idea of Absolute Paradox developed centuries later by the Danish philosopher in his book Philosophical Fragments, published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in 1844, when the thinker of Copenhagen still seemed to express a great admiration for the Roman-Berber priest of Late Antiquity. Keywords: Kierkegaard, Augustine, time, eternity, truth. (shrink)

This book studies the use of biblical quotations in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, as well as Kierkegaard’s hermeneutical methods in general. Kierkegaard’s mode of writing in these works—indeed, the very method of indirect communication—consists in a certain appropriation of the Bible. Kierkegaard thus becomes God’s “plagiarist,” repeating the Bible by reinscribing it into his own texts, where it becomes a part of his philosophical discourse and relates to most of his conceptual constructions.The Bible might also be called a gift, but a (...) gift that does not belong to Kierkegaard, one he merely passes along to his reader. The invisible omnipresence of God’s Word in the pseudonymous works, as opposed to the signed ones, forces us to revisit the entire distinction between the religious and the aesthetic. (shrink)

Around 1700 collective efforts arose throughout Europe and in Germany in particular to compile dictionaries of anonymous and pseudonymous works. Why this sudden urge to "unmask" the hidden identities of authors? This essay seeks to establish a relationship between these efforts to identify potential heresy and emphasizes the ambivalent aspects of the learned guardians of order as a "police force of learning." It connects the reconstruction of practices of learning with reflections about the development of a critical public sphere and (...) it strives to combine the History of Scholarship with newer research on the establishment of a clandestine underground during the Enlightenment period. At the same time, the subject matter presents itself as relevant for contemporary discussions about anonymity and authorship, as well as pseudonymity, intellectual property, and the protection of privacy. (shrink)

This chapter examines Kierkegaard’s critical accounts of aesthetic and ethical stages of existence, arguing that on Kierkegaard’s view, both life-views incorporate distorted accounts of human agency. The criticism of the ethical stage is tied to the criticism of Kant’s approach to freedom for evil examined in chapters 2 and 4.

By analyzing prefaces and other short excerpts written by different pseudonyms, this paper explores the pseudonymous authors’ relation to their spouses. It assumes that recurring motifs in the prefaces, such as ‘voice’ and the metaphor of ‘fertility,’ reveal, often in ironic tones, general gender-related aspects of identity in Kierkegaard’s works. The paper thus explores how the seemingly stereotyped and archaic conception of gender in the prefaces, such as the pseudonymous author’s assertion of superiority of reasoning through writing over the immediacy (...) represented in voice, reflect aspects of the individual’s disposition before God. (shrink)

Elrod has produced a serious and comprehensive examination of Kierkegaard’s ontology in which he takes the study of the self as the unifying ground for philosophic and theological thought. Unification is Elrod’s consistent theme. Although the title of his work acknowledges Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus as an independent body within the authorship, any such assertion of autonomy—which would effectively subdivide the religious and the secular—is finally denied. Elrod, in fact, mediates all distinctions between the aesthetic and religious modalities of Kierkegaard’s thought (...) by finding within the aesthetic corpus a development of selfhood utterly consistent with Christianity’s quest for self-fulfillment. (shrink)

This is essentially what I take to be Kierkegaard's ontological foundation of human existence. It is the structure which both makes possible and unifies the different modes of existing which he so fully describes in his pseudonyms. The further task is one of demonstrating concretely the relation of these modes (stages) of existing to his ontology.

Name der Zeitschrift: Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 179-200.