 Kierkegaard’s tactic in undermining Hegelianism was to produce an elaborate parody of Hegel’s entire system. The pseudonymous authorship, from Either-Or to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, presents an inverted Hegelian dialectic which is designed to take away readers’ presumed knowledge rather than add to it. This authorship snipes simultaneously at German romanticism and contemporary Danish literati (with J.L. Heiberg receiving much acerbic comment). However, it also draws heavily on the work of these authors, especially by taking seriously their framing of philosophical and theological problems. For example, Kierkegaard engaged with the early German romantics’ notion that modernity is to be understood primarily by contrast with antiquity, which in turn is to be understood mainly in terms of classical Greek thought. Classical Greek art, in particular, is taken to be the gold standard by which artistic perfection is to be measured. However, Kierkegaard and the German romantics and German idealists share the view that classical Greek art lacks inwardness or subjective spirit. Modern art, by contrast, while unlikely to match the formal perfection of classical Greek art, contains the potential to explore subjective spirit. One crucial dimension of subjective spirit is freedom, which becomes a distinctive preoccupation of modern art and post-Kantian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s concept of individual freedom, ultimately understood in terms of becoming as nothing before God, engages critically with the concepts of freedom in Kant, Hegel and Schelling, as well as with the theologies of Jacobi, Lessing and Schleiermacher. Kierkegaard presents a distinctive phenomenology of freedom by means of fictional case studies in a method he calls “experimenting psychology”. He uses narrative points of view, pseudonyms, vignettes, character sketches and case studies from life and literature to illustrate how dialectics of moods, emotions and spirit can both disable and enable individual freedom. Moods such as melancholy, boredom and irony can become demonically self-perpetuating, but they also have the potential to lift the individual to a state of self-reflection that amounts to higher order consciousness, thereby enabling the individual to see his or her former existence as what Wittgenstein called a limited whole. The highest order of consciousness for Kierkegaard is God-consciousness, which enables the individual to see himself or herself as both a sinner and as open to divine grace. The path to this ultimate freedom requires will, imagination, faith, love, penitence, patience and a humble kenosis, whereby the self is emptied of will to become receptive to God’s will.