ABSTRACT
Johannes the Seducer is certainly one of the most fascinating of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, and without doubt one of the most troubling. The view of woman that emerges in “The Seducer’s Diary,” Johannes’ carefully cultivated and calculated record of his seduction of Cordelia Wahl, and the one more directly articulated in the speech he gives at the banquet in Stages on Life’s Way, is, as many have claimed, arguably sexist and misogynistic. The endgame of Johannes’ seduction of Cordelia is not only sexual conquest, but her psychological and spiritual transformation into someone resembling in fact Johannes himself. Certainly Kierkegaard’s pseudonym was bound to be provocative. Early reviews of Either/Or were captivated by the diary section of the volume, with some even focusing almost exclusively on the diary at the exclusion of the rest.1 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the cultural arbiter of Denmark’s Golden Age, in his review of Either/Or commented on Johannes by claiming “one is disgusted, one is sickened, one is enraged.”2 Heiberg even extends his disgust to the author, asking “if it is possible that a writer can be so formed as to find pleasure in studying such a character and working at perfecting him in his quiet thoughts.”3 Johannes may well be a repellant figure, but he is also a fascinating one and one that deserves the close attention that Heiberg found distasteful. This is true especially if one is to understand Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage. Johannes is a central personality in Kierkegaard’s development of his conception of the aesthetic, perhaps even essential. Johannes’ troubling views of women and the world he lives in have made him the aesthete par excellence of Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, with both Johannes and his diary seemingly accorded special place as the epitome of the aesthetic stage.4
