SOURCE: "On Reading Kierkegaard and Johannes Climacus," in Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 1-12.

In the following excerpt, Evans uses Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, written under the Johannes Climacus pseudonym, to demonstrate that of the three basic approaches to Kierkegaard's writings (a straight, philosophical approach; a literary approach; and a literary-philosophical approach), the literary-philosophical approach provides the best means for making sense of Kierkegaard's indirect discourse.

Philosophical Fragments is generally agreed to be one of Kierkegaard's most significant works. There is, however, no general agreement about the nature of the book's significance. It is a short book, only a little over a hundred pages in length, attributed to a pseudonym, one Johannes Climacus. It is in one sense a simple book. Though Climacus himself says that it is not a book which every divinity school student could write,¹ this is, I think...