How to Avoid Writing

Abstract

It is, in the literary world, customary to take a holy vow. ceremony is less definite. In olden times one swore, as is known, by Freyr's boar; Hamlet swears by the fire tongs; the Jews are even said to have done it in an indecent manner. However, the ceremony is unimportant; the vow is the main thing. Accordingly I swear: as soon as possible to realize a plan contemplated for thirty years to publish a logical System, as soon as possible to honor my vow taken ten years ago concerning an aesthetic System; furthermore I promise an ethical and dogmatic System, and finally the System. As soon as this has been published, future generations will not even need to learn to write, for there will be nothing further to write, but only to read.he System. (P 30-31/N 14) main question raised by Point of View for Work as an Author is why Kierkegaard bothered to write it. pseudonymous works that started in 1843 with Either/Or were brought to a conclusion very ef festively by the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was attributed to a writer whose very name signaled that this was to be the climax, the end of the road, the final rung on the ladder that Kierkegaard started climbing three years earlier. As if that wasn't enough, the conclusion of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript takes the form of a First and Last Explanation in which Kierkegaard himself finally steps out from behind the curtain and announces, as directly and explicitly as possible, that the show is over: For the sake of form and order, I hereby acknowledge, something that can scarcely be of interest to anyone to know, that 1 am, as is said, the author of Either/Or (Victor Eremita) . . . Fear and Trembling (Johannes de Silentio). (C 625) opportunity seems to invite an open and direct explanation, yes, almost to demand it even from one who is reluctant-so, then, I shall use it for that purpose, not as an author, because I am indeed not an author in the usual sense, but as one who has cooperated so that the pseudonyms could become authors (C 628). With this I take leave of the pseudonymous authors with doubtful good wishes for their future fate, that this, if it is propitious for them, will be just as they might wish. Of course, I know them from intimate association; I know they could not expect or desire many readers-would that they might happily find the few desirable readers. Of my reader, if I dare to speak of such a one, I would in passing request for myself a forgetful remembrance, a sign that it is of me that he is reminded, because he remembers me as irrelevant to the books (C 629). Oh, would that no ordinary seaman will lay a dialectical hand on this work but let it stand as it now stands (C 630). Given the unequivocal language here, it comes as quite a surprise that just two years later Kierkegaard thought it necessary to supplement this First and Last Explanation with another explanation. And not just one, in fact, because after writing Point of View for Work as an Author he decides not to publish the main text in his lifetime, and instead spins offa smaller pamphlet called Activity as a Writer (also translated as On Work as an Author), which he publishes in 1851. Both of these works also have several supplements which accompany them: Point of dew is supplemented by a piece called The Individual: Two Notes Concerning my Work as an Author, and Activity as a Writer is supplemented by a short article called My Position as a Religious Writer in `Christendom' and my Tactics. So in the end we have not just one, climactic, definitive, first and last conclusion to the pseudonymous works, but three (or, depending on how you count, five): the first explanation, which was supposed to be the first and the last explanation, has been upstaged by the last explanation (and its supplement), which the author asserts is now both the first word and the last word, even though some of its words are also repeated in the other explanation, (and its supplement), that came between the first and the last, and although the author suppressed his last report to history- which has now become the first-until he himself was history. …