Abstract Seduction is not solely a matter of literary history (anymore). In the 1980s a community has emerged that, up to the present day, developed practical methodologies applicable in any public venue and social gathering. Nonetheless, the leading figures of this PickUp community strongly acknowledge their predecessors as they can be found in literary history. Prominently, Kierkegaard, in his “Seducer’s Diary,” has introduced such a predecessor. As part of Either/Or, the diary meticulously unfolds and portrays the interactional dynamics of seduction. To analyze this process sociologically is the main objective of the present article. In order to achieve this goal, the essay comments on how fictional literature can become material for social science and, after pointing to the multiple layers of the reader/writer/editor-relation, focuses on two questions crucial to seduction as a micro-interactional procedure: (1) What is the effect of seduction, in particular for the seduced? Arguing that seduction involves a form of empowerment, the article finds an explanation for Cordelia’s letters being displayed before Johannes’ narration begins. (2) What are the concrete techniques of seduction? Isolating three of them-including the gaze-the essay concludes that Kierkegaard was not only a theologian, religious author and philosopher, but he was also a social theorist.

Abstract Fundamental in Kierkegaard is passion for equality among persons, and this in a double sense: passion-“desire”- for equality, but also passion for-“for the sake of”-equality. Now, if the ethical and religious are of inestimable importance in human life, then justice demands that potential for them be equally accessible to all. But how? All are so differentiated. In what can equal potential be rooted, if not in passion? Enter the Christian faith, however, and an enormous problem, anchored precisely in Kierkegaard’s concern to take seriously the specificity of Christianity, arises: No passion can produce Jesus; so how can Jesus and equality be brought together? Can they be brought together?

Abstract In the Works of Love Kierkegaard answers the question what love is not by distinguishing types of love or by outlining cases or instances of how love occurs in human life (a descriptive approach) but by exploring what must be true for love to be at all (normative approach). Thus, he offers not a descriptive or conceptual but rather a hermeneutical and orienting account of love. Love as an orienting ought is sheer activity, always present, and therefore a mode of life rather than one particular activity among others. Living in this mode means loving others as a selfless self-but this can only be done when we are enabled to see ourselves and our neighbors not only as selves and other selves but as we are seen by God: as God’s neighbors. The upshot of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutical account of love is that love cannot be fully understood as a (reciprocal or onesided) I-you-relationship. Rather, such a relationship is a relationship of love only if and insofar as love-and therefore God-as the middle term enables two selves to fully relate in a you-you-relationship, a relation of true love.

Article Puzzles of Self-Deception and Problems of Orientation: Kierkegaard and the Current Debate in the Philosophy of Psychology was published on November 16, 2011 in the journal Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (volume 2011, issue 2011).