A Kierkegaard quiz
I read a lot of Kierkegaard last year. At some point you start trying to sum up what he wants from a reader, and at some point after that you want to know how much of it you share. So I built a quiz.
It’s 35 statements, and you rate your agreement with each on a five-point scale. The items group into seven subscales, each anchored to one voice in the authorship and the book where that voice speaks: inwardness (Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript), anxiety (Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety), despair (Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death), commitment (Judge William, the second volume of Either/Or), faith (Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling), the single individual (Kierkegaard under his own name, in Two Ages and “That Single Individual”), and aesthetic immediacy (A, the anonymous essayist of Either/Or’s first volume).
That last subscale runs backward. Kierkegaard wrote the aesthete as a diagnosis: a life spent rotating pleasures to hold off boredom, which A calls the root of all evil. Agreeing with him lowers your overall score while still counting toward your closest voice. Out-agree the aesthete on his own terms and the quiz will tell you so, then send you to Either/Or and let Judge William argue with you directly.
You get an overall percentage, a ranking of the seven subscales, the voice your answers most resemble and a book to read next. A forced-choice quiz is the wrong format for Kierkegaard, whose whole project turns on how you hold a position more than which one you hold. The subscale ranking still does something useful. It surfaces which of his concerns you respond to, and that is real information about your reading.
I wrote the items myself. Nothing here is psychometrically validated. Results compute in your browser and go nowhere else.