“So I turn off the tap; that means the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, a halt,”54 he wrote in July, while The Sickness unto Death was being printed. The “halt” refers to a qualitative shift in the authorship and to the halt he was brought to under the critique of the writings, not simply to the termination of writing and publishing.

My task was to pose this riddle of awakening: a balanced esthetic and religious productivity, simultaneously.

This has been done. There is balance even in quantity. Concluding Postscript is the midpoint….

What comes next cannot be added impatiently as a conclusion. For dialectically it is precisely right that this be the end.55

The dialectical halt is further clarified in an entry from October 1849: “one points to something higher that examines a person critically and forces him back within his boundaries.”56 At the time that The Sickness unto Death was published, Kierkegaard stated the levels of the authorship in relation to himself: “there is a stretch that is mine: the upbuilding;57 behind and ahead lie the lower58 and the higher pseudonymities;59 the upbuilding is mine, but not the esthetic,60 not the pseudonymous works for upbuilding,61 either, and even less those for awakening.”62

Obviously the pseudonym Anti-Climacus has a special relation to the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the author of the early De omnibus dubitandum est, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The prefix “Anti” may be misleading, however. It does not mean “against.” It is an old form of “ante” (before), as in “anticipate,” and “before” also denotes a relation of rank, as in “before me” in the First Commandment.

Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in common; but the difference is that whereas Johannes Climacus places himself so low that he even says that he himself is not a Christian,63 one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he considers himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level… I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus.64

The shift to Anti-Climacus as author and to Kierkegaard as editor was made to preclude any confusion of Kierkegaard himself with the ideality of the book. As a further precaution, Kierkegaard contemplated an “Editor’s Note” at the end and wrote a number of drafts.65 None was used, for a number of reasons: possible misinterpretation, the presence in The Sickness unto Death of references to the religious poet (which allude to Kierkegaard himself), a deeper understanding of the new pseudonym, and a contradiction of such a note by a portion of Practice in Christianity on making observations.66

In December 1848, some months after the basic writing of The Sickness unto Death and six months before the decision to print it, Kierkegaard sketched a plan and even wrote an introduction67 for “a few discourses dealing with the most beautiful and noble, humanly speaking, forms of despair.…”68 Although one of the themes came to be developed in Practice in Christianity,69 the plan was never actualized. If it had been fulfilled, it would have been the counterpart of The Sickness unto Death.

1 JP VI 6361 (Pap. X1 A 147).

2 JP V 5100 (Pap. I A 75).

3 JP I 737 (Pap. I A 181).

4 JP III 3994 (Pap. II A 63).

5 JP IV 4001–2 (Pap. II A 310).

6 KW I (SV XIII 46). See Four Upbuilding Discourses (1844), in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, KW V (SV V 94–99).

7 JP I 739–40 (Pap. II A 484–85). See also JP I 745 (Pap. V A 33).

8 JP I 37 (Pap. III A 3).

9 JP IV 3915 (Pap. III C 1).

10 The Concept of Anxiety, p. 61, KW VIII (SV IV 331).

11 Supplement, pp. 144–47 (Pap. VIII2 B 168:6).

12 Pp. 14, 16.

13 See Supplement, p. 156 (Pap. VIII2 B 166).

14 Pp. 101, 120.

15 P. 89.

16 See note 6. Ibid. (SV V 81–105).

17 JP I 53 (Pap.