Just as we speak of a calculus of infinitesimals, so also the state is a calculus of egotisms, but always in such a way that it egotistically appears to be the most prudent thing to enter into and to be in this higher egotism. But this, after all, is anything but the moral abandoning of egotism.42

In his dissertation, Magister Kierkegaard was alert enough to discern the Socratic but is considered not to have understood it, probably because, with the help of Hegelian philosophy, he has become super-clever and objective and positive, or has not had the courage to acknowledge the negation. Finitely understood, of course, the continued and the perpetually continued striving toward a goal without attaining it means rejection, but, infinitely understood, striving is life itself and is essentially the life of that which is composed of the infinite and the finite.43

The last entry above is from a provisional draft of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. It is noteworthy that the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus not only omits reference to Irony in the final copy but does not mention Irony at all in the section on the writings by Magister Kierkegaard and the pseudonymous writers.44 Irony (as well as From the Papers of One Still Living) is also omitted from consideration in On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author.45

Although Kierkegaard regarded Either/Or,46 rather than From the Papers or Irony, as the beginning of his authorship, there are lines of continuity between them and later works. On a large scale, there is the formula of categories. In Part One of Irony, the Hegelian pattern is followed: possibility, actuality, and necessity. In Part Two,47 Kierkegaard introduces his own pattern (noted also in a journal entry48 from July 4, 1840) of the relation between possibility-actuality and concept (necessity). Existence as actuality combines two opposing factors, possibility and necessity, and thereby has a paradoxical character. This view is embodied in all of his subsequent writings.

The works most closely related to Irony are those closest in time, From the Papers (1838) and Either/Or (1843). In the first, the epic poet (novelist) is distinguished from the lyric poet by the role a comprehensive philosophy of life plays in giving organic coherence and depth to his epic productions.49 In the dissertation, irony, controlled irony, is designated as the instrument of the poet who has gone beyond the first stage. “The more the poet has abandoned this [the immediacy of genius], the more necessary it is for him to have a totality-view of the world and in this way to be master over irony in his individual existence, and the more necessary it becomes for him to be something of a philosopher.”50

If Part One of Irony is somewhat akin stylistically to From the Papers, Either/Or is a vast extension of the greater freedom in the style and in the play of ideas in Part Two of Irony. Either/Or as a whole and in its parts is clearly related to Irony also in substance. The first volume of Either/Or is the non-dissertation writer’s sardonic development of the esthetic nihilism of romantic irony. The second volume and Judge William are the response of the ethical consciousness and the truly poetic. If Schlegel’s Lucinde is regarded as the prime literary expression of romantic irony, Either/Or is in a sense Kierkegaard’s Vertraute Briefe contra Lucinde,51 with volume one as a witty, insightful, many-sided embodiment of the Lucinde stance52 with a disclosure of its underlying despair, and volume two as a constructive approach that rescues the esthetic and the poetic from their self-anesthesia and destruction by transcending them and catching them up in the ethical consciousness.53 Certain themes in Irony are developed in particular sections of Either/Or: Don Juan’s sensuousness54 in “The Musical Erotic,” living poetically55 in “The Seducer’s Diary,” and the relation between substantiality and subjectivity56 in the introduction to “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.” Certain important concepts embodied in a single word or phrase (for example, “transparency”57 and the “absolute and eternal validity”58) are also developed further in Either/Or.

The theme of the first thesis (on the relation of Christ and Socrates) is the entire subject of Philosophical Fragments (1844), in which Socrates is presented as the highest representative of the relation between man and man with regard to essential truth and the teaching and learning of essential truth. Johannes Climacus then works out implications of the “if/then” question of going beyond Socrates or the relation of Socrates’ recollection of eternal truth and eternal truth in time.

Similarly, the ramifications of other themes in Irony—immediacy, reflection, selfhood, subjectivity, objectivity, the esthetic, the ethical, the religious, and the transcendence of the human, individual and universal—are developed variously in the pseudonymous and the signed works. Thus the dissertation, although a work undertaken by Kierkegaard to some degree under external compulsion, was the seedbed of the entire authorship. This is emphasized in the comment Kierkegaard’s friend Emil Boesen wrote to Hans Peter Barfod, an early editor of the Papirer: “It was only later that he really became clear about what he himself wanted and was able to do, and this breakthrough of the spirit occurred while he was writing The Concept of Irony and later during the engagement.”59

Within the fortnight following the public defense of the dissertation, Kierkegaard conclusively terminated his engagement to Regine Olsen (October 11, 1841; Regine’s ring had been returned on August 11, 1841), and the day before the official royal authorization for the conferring of the degree was issued (October 26, 1841), he was on his way to hear Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph v. Schelling’s lectures in Berlin.

For Kierkegaard, the Berlin episode was of threefold importance: the travel, the occasion, and the bracketed time for writing. Twice before, Kierkegaard had made a journey after crucial events had occurred: the Gilleleie journey and sojourn after his mother’s death in 183460 and the Saeding pilgrimage after his father’s death in 1838.61 And now came the journey to Berlin following the rigors of the dissertation writing and defense and the tensions of the engagement. The first two journeys were “inland journeys,”62 times of reflection. The Berlin journey and sojourn were more a time of instruction and production.

The occasion was the long-awaited “positive philosophy” of Schelling. In the Papirer there are only two early journal references to Schelling,63 but Kierkegaard knew of Schelling’s thought from H. L. Martensen’s university lectures during the winter semester of 1838-1839,64 and the auction catalog of Kierkegaard’s library lists two Schelling works65 published before 1841. The second journal entry indicates an estimate of Schelling66 that must have heightened Kierkegaard’s expectations for the Berlin lectures.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had died in 1831. In 1841, Schelling was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin with the task of combating Hegelianism. Schelling regarded his own earlier philosophy as “negative” philosophy, the philosophy of “what,” of essences. In Erlangen during the 1820s, Schelling had lectured also on “positive” philosophy. In the 1841-1842 lectures in Berlin, he proposed to consummate his philosophical program by developing positive philosophy, the philosophy of “that,”67 a philosophy of nature, history, art, mythology, and religion, a philosophy of freedom, of existents, under the title Philosophie der Offenbarung [manifestation, revelation].68

Kierkegaard’s high expectation for the lectures was shared by many throughout Europe.