Abstract

This dissertation deals with Kierkegaard's treatment of self-deception in his early writings, from the Gilleleje journals of 1835 to The Concept of Anxiety . ;It is my thesis that Kierkegaard's philosophical anthropology presents a portrayal of the forms of self-deception by which the individual seeks to confine existence within the bounds of immediacy. Immediacy may be conceived as that which is unqualified by reflection, decision, or dependency upon an Other. For Kierkegaard, the attempt to exist immediately in any of these senses involves the distortion of the nature of selfhood. Rather than presenting a typology of stages in the development of religious consciousness, Kierkegaard's authorship mirrors those configurations of self-deception which stands in the way of such development. ;Hitherto, Kierkegaard scholarship has viewed his understanding of immediacy as restricted to the forms of life portrayed in the aesthetic stage. Immediacy then appears either as the attempt to avoid reflection through sensual abandon, or the attempt to shirk decision and ethical responsibility. When immediacy is understood in these senses, the ethical stage seems essentially opposed to and free from the "vices" of the aesthetic. But the ethicist's attempt to gain moral autonomy and transparent self-knowledge may itself be viewed as an attempt to return to immediacy, to secure an existence unmediated by external agency. On this interpretation, the ethicist shares in the central flaw of the aesthete and is himself engaged in an illegitimate pursuit of immediacy. If this is in fact the case, then Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings can be regarded as challenging an essentially unitary phenomenon. ;Kierkegaard's own understanding of the method of his authorship, particularly the accounts of indirect communication presented in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and The Point of View for My Work as An Author may be criticized for manifesting the same desire for autonomy as the aesthetic and ethical stages. In spite of the shortcomings of his descriptions of his method, Kierkegaard's technique of mirroring self-deception provides the reader with a figure for an understanding of the self which remains uncoerced by the desire for certitude concerning the moral status of the self