ABSTRACT
This threefold concept occupied a key place among the intellectual furniture of Kierkegaard’s everyday world. He spent much time laboring to understand the new speculative development of the day centered in German philosophical thinking; he possessed more than a passing awareness of and appreciation for the unfolding achievements of the sciences; and as a graduate student of many years and a writer who wrote in dialogue with the thinking of ancient and contemporary authors he was surely a gifted scholar. Thus, the three notions clustered under this concept deserve attention so that their importance in Kierkegaard’s world-view can be grasped. We will see that despite his immersion in these three, he found plenty to criticize about each of the three notions. Few of Kierkegaard’s books are completely absent one or more of these notions. The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, The Book on Adler, The Sickness unto Death, Practice in Christianity, For SelfExamination, and Judge for Yourself! include significant references to these notions. However, since the Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Johannes Climacus far and away outstrips other books in dealing with these interrelated notions, that book will receive the closest consideration in this overview.3
