ABSTRACT
The concept of appropriation extends almost throughout Kierkegaard’s corpus, beginning in 1841 with The Concept of Irony through to 1850 with Practice in Christianity. Although the term is found in numerous other works in this period, such as in Either/Or, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, the various upbuilding discourses, Stages on Life’s Way, and Works of Love, it appears most often in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Overwhelmingly, “appropriation” is used to denote the way in which the human subject ought to relate to ethicalreligious truth. Kierkegaard maintains that “if inwardness is truth…[then] truth is the self-activity of appropriation.”3 If the individual is to make this truth his or her own, then it must be appropriated with subjective passion rather than being related to in some abstract fashion.
