This book is divided into four parts, each with their own fictitious author, each complete with their own backstory and persona, in the style common to Kierkegaard. The first section is titled “In Vino Veritas” and it is an account of a decadent banquet held in an exotic locale, in the depths of the woods, outside of Copenhagen. It is attended only by a small group of men, who have all pledged to get drunk and give soliloquies on the nature of love. “For anyone who has once understood what recollection is has been captured for all eternity and is captured in it; and anyone who possesses one recollection is richer than if he possessed the whole world.”
The first to speak is an unnamed young bachelor. “I have renounced all erotic love, for my thought is everything to me. If love is the most blissful desire, then I renounce the desire without wishing either to offend or to envy anyone; if love conditions the highest benefaction, then I reject the occasion for it, but my thought is saved. Not that I am without an eye for beauty, not that my heart is unmoved when I read the poets’ songs, not that my soul is without sadness when I indulge in that beautiful representation of love, but I refuse to be unfaithful to my thought, and what would be the use of it, because for me there is no bliss where I have not saved my thought…. I do, of course, perceive that if anything may be sacred, then it is love, that if faithlessness is debased anywhere, it is in love, that if any deceit is abominable, it is in love. But my soul is pure; I have never looked at any woman to desire her.” Johannes, known to readers of “Either/Or” as the seducer, responds thus, “For what else is woman but a dream, and yet the highest reality…. With man the essential is the essential and thus always the same; with woman the accidental is the essential and in this way an inexhaustible heterogeneity. Brief is her glory, but the pain is also quickly forgotten, and when the same glory is offered to me again, it is as if I had not even felt the pain.”
The second section was written by the devoted Judge, again from “Either/Or”, titled “Some Reflections on Marriage in Answer to Objections.” He opines, “A married man who is that with his whole life and soul is certainly the one who has ventured and ventured most of all. He ventures out of infatuation’s hiding place with the beloved one…. He does not know what would happen, but this he does know—he can lose everything; and this he does know—he cannot evade a single thing, for the resolution holds firmly there where his love imprisons him but also holds him undaunted there where falling in love laments.” He goes on to expound on his conception of the internal versus the external. “From a purely external point of view, there certainly are hundreds and hundreds more who have risked more than a married man, risked kingdoms and countries, millions and millions of millions have lost thrones and principalities, fortunes and prosperity, and yet the married man risks more. For the person who loves risks more than all these things, and the person who loves in as many ways as it is possible for a man to love risks most of all.” He concludes on the love of the married man versus the lust of the poetic lover, “A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing—no, like for like, he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly is also an idyll…. Marriage is the fullness of time.”
By far the longest section of Kierkegaard’s book is ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, in which a gentleman, who has broken off his engagement to the sweetheart he still desperately loves, debates within his diary the consequences of his actions. (One should, of course, keep in mind Kierkegaard’s actual personal history when reading this section, particularly.) The diary entries alternate between his reflections during the day, which look back on his thoughts in the immediacy of his decision to separate, and those written at midnight, which reflect back through time on the separation with the benefit of months of hindsight. He begins with sorrow, “To want to proceed jointly along this path will produce again that dreadful misrelation that I already feared in that two-month period: that we would jointly sorrow over an unhappy love affair. It cannot be. What similarity is there between her sorrow and mine, what solidarity is there between guilt and innocence, what kinship is there between repentance and an esthetic sorrow over life, when that which awakens repentance is that which awakens her sorrow? I can sorrow in my way; if she must sorrow, she must also do it on her own account.”
Writing in his dairy by the light of day, the gentleman immerses himself in the moments just before the affair was broken off. “Happy with me she will never be—no, never! It is possible that she can make herself believe it, but I do not understand it, and that, too, certainly belongs to her happiness. And if we are united, it will eventually come to the point where she will someday sense with terror what I ought to have prevented…. What to me is the vital force of my spiritual existence—equality in the essentially human—she destroys. She does not care at all about the infinite passion of this freedom; she has erected an illusion, and she is satisfied with that. I, too, believe that one can love, can sacrifice everything for one’s love, but whether I am going to see good days or am going to risk my life, the deepest breathing [Aandedraet] of my spirit-existence [Aands-Existents] I cannot do without, I cannot sacrifice, because that is a contradiction, since without it I indeed am not. And she feels no need for this breathing.”
At heart, the difference in the two lovers is their conceptions of the meanings of the finite and the infinite. “One may die, one may become unhappy, but one can still preserve meaning in one’s life and faithfulness to the idea. Now that is at an end. And who is to blame for that? Someone else would perhaps say: It is she, to whose apron strings you still are tied. But I would not say that, for I usually refrain from such nonsense, that someone else is to blame when I do something wrong. I prefer to say that I myself am at fault. The fault is mine, is my weakness, and the difficulty is that my understanding guarantees me that it can be beneficial to her in the finite sense, whereas my sympathy would rather love her in the infinite sense. This relationship has humbled me.”
The gentleman describes an internal faith, well beyond public professions. “A skipper can go on swearing all day without giving it a thought, and in the same way an enthusiast can be solemn all day long without a complete or sound idea in his soul. That Gothic king refused to be baptized when he learned that he would not be together with his forefathers. The natives in America feared heaven more than hell and wished to remain pagans lest they be together with the orthodox Spaniards in heaven.” Faith and prayer must be about more than wishing and hopeful dreams. “Although I have the most inspired conception of God’s love, I also have the conception that he is not an old fussbudget who sits in heaven and humors us, but that in time and temporality one must be prepared to suffer everything…. The person who wills religiously must have receptivity precisely for the terrible; he must open himself to it and needs only to take care that he does not stop halfway, but that it leads him unto the security of the infinite.”
The gentleman knows that by breaking off the engagement he looks horrible to the outside world and, most of all, to his beloved. That is not his concern. “Even if I fall where no one dreams that a field of honor can be, even if I am buried in the graveyard of the dishonorable, if there nevertheless is one individual who, passing by my grave perhaps thinking other thoughts, suddenly stops and delivers this funeral oration to me, “How did this person come to lie here? Can one then lie without disgrace among the dishonored—and he certainly lies here with honor”—then I ask no more.”
Kierkegaard is a master of embedded fictions within fictions. In the coda to this book, he writes a “Letter to the Reader”, which is a fictional account of the writing of ““Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?””, where he reveals that the diary entries are fictional, but were written by the person of Frater Taciturnus, another fictional character himself. Taciturnus writes of the gentleman in his story, “His affront was not breaking the engagement but, with such a life-view, to want to fall in love.” Taciturnus then debates the merits of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious frameworks for going through life. “The ethical cannot regard the esthetic in any other way than to regard a direct union with it as a misalliance…. The ethical only asks about guilt or not guilty, is itself man enough to be a match for men, has no need for anything external and visible, to say nothing of something as ambiguously dialectical as fate and chance or the tangibility of some verdict document. The ethical is proud and declares: When I have judged then nothing more is needed…. The religious then plays the same role as the esthetic, but as the superior; it spaces out the limitless speed of the ethical, and development takes place. But the scene is the internal…. The principle of the spirit is that the external and the visible (the world’s gloriousness or its miserableness for the existing person, a result in the external or the lack of it for the one acting) exist to try faith, consequently not to deceive but in order that the spirit can be tested by placing it in the realm of the indifferent and taking itself back again…. Indifferent towards the externals, which the esthetic needs in the result, the religious disdains anything like that and proclaims, jointly and individually, that the person who believes he has finished (that is, fancies that he has, for such things cannot be believed because faith is expressly the infinite)—has lost…. What is expressed here about the lack of a result in the religious, I can also say in this way: the negative is higher than the positive…. For the finite being, and that, after all, is what human beings are as long as they live temporally, the negative infinity is the higher, and the positive is a dubious reassurance. Spiritual existence, especially the religious, is not easy; the believer continually lies out on the deep, has 70,000 fathoms of water beneath him. However long he lies out there, this still does not mean that he will gradually end up lying and relaxing onshore. He can become more calm, more experienced, find confidence that loves jest and a cheerful temperament—but until the very last he lies out on 70,000 fathoms of water.”
Taciturnus concludes the exposition of his thoughts on his fictional gentleman by dealing with the act of repentance. “A person’s highest inward action is to repent. But to repent is not a positive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself…. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations, so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed…. The infinite annihilating power of this repentance is best seen in the sympathetically dialectical character that it also has.”
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