“The Sickness Unto Death” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

In this book, an accompaniment to “The Concept of Anxiety”, Kierkegaard is trying to define despair and sin Christianly, against psychological, ethical, pagan, Socratic, and speculative-philosophical accounts. The book is by Kierkegaard, but published under the pseudonym, Anti-Climacus. The book’s central claim is that despair is not merely unhappiness or psychological distress, but a sickness in the self’s relation to itself and to the power that established it. “The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness…. Consequently, to be able to despair is an infinite advantage, and yet to be in despair is not only the worst misfortune and misery—no, it is ruination…. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always the present tense…. In every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. The reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man…. Every moment he is in despair he is bringing his despair upon himself. For despair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself…. This concept, the sickness unto death, must, however, be understood in a particular way. Literally it means a sickness of which the end and the result are death…. In that sense, despair cannot be called the sickness unto death. Christianly understood, death itself is a passing into life. Thus, from a Christian point of view, no earthly, physical sickness is the sickness unto death…. If there is to be any question of a sickness unto death in the strictest sense, it must be a sickness of which the end is death and death is the end. This is precisely what despair is…. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.”

Kierkegaard then radicalizes despair: it is not limited to the miserable or obviously broken person, but includes every form of life that avoids becoming conscious of itself as spirit before God. Even aesthetic brilliance, ethical achievement, or absorption into state, nation, or universality can still be despair if the self does not transparently rest in God. “Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, whatever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless despair. That is what the ancient Church Fathers meant when they said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: they meant that the heart of paganism was despair, that paganism was not conscious before God as spirit.”

One lower form of despair is immediacy, where the person has not yet become inward enough to possess a self in any serious sense. Such a person identifies the self with external conditions and imagines salvation as becoming someone else, as if changing the self were like changing clothes. “Immediacy actually has no self, it does not know itself; thus it cannot recognize itself and therefore generally ends in fantasy. When immediacy despairs, it does not even have enough self to wish or dream that it had become that which it has not become. The man of immediacy helps himself in another way: he wishes to be someone else…. Imagine a self (and next to God there is nothing as eternal as a self), and then imagine that it suddenly occurs to a self that it might become someone other—than itself. And yet one in despair this way, whose sole desire is this most lunatic of lunatic metamorphoses, is infatuated with the illusion that this change can be accomplished as easily as one changes clothes. The man of immediacy does not know himself, he quite literally identifies himself only by the clothes he wears, he identifies having a self by externalities.”

Kierkegaard’s more intense form of despair is defiance: not despairingly wanting to get rid of oneself, but despairingly willing to be oneself apart from God. This is more spiritually developed and therefore more dangerous; it is close to faith because it uses the eternal, but it misuses the eternal by refusing surrender, consolation, and the possibility that “for God everything is possible.” He continues, “First comes despair over the earthly or over something earthly, then despair of the eternal, over oneself. Then comes defiance, which is really despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself…. In order in despair to will to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self. This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self…. The form of despair that despairs over the earthly or something earthly was understood basically to be—and it also manifests itself as being—despair of the eternal, that is, an unwillingness to be comforted by and healed by the eternal, an overestimation of the things of this world to the extent that the eternal can be no consolation. But this is also a form of the despair, to be unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end. The despairing person who in despair wills to be himself is unwilling to do that. He has convinced himself that this thorn in the flesh* gnaws so deeply that he cannot abstract himself from it (whether this is actually the case or his passion makes it so to him*), and therefore he might as well accept it forever, so to speak. He is offended by it, or, more correctly, he takes it as an occasion to be offended at all existence…. Hope in the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible.”

Kierkegaard’s account of sin turns on the difference between ignorance and will. Socrates can explain wrongdoing as a failure of understanding, but Christianity goes further: sin is not merely failing to know the good, but willing against the good, even when one understands it. “Socrates would say: If this happens, it just shows that a person such as this still has not understood what is right. This means that the Greek mind does not have the courage to declare that a person knowingly does wrong, knows what is right and does the wrong; so it manages by saying: If a person does what is wrong, he has not understood what is right…. Absolutely right. And no human being can come further than that; no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin…. That is why Christianity begins in another way: man has to learn what sin is by a revelation from God; sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right…. Socrates actually gives no explanation at all of the distinction: not being able to understand and not willing to understand…. Socrates explains that he who does not do what is right has not understood it, either; but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right. And in the next place it teaches that a person does what is wrong (essentially defiance) even though he understands what is right, or he refrains from doing what is right even though he understands it; in short, the Christian teaching about sin is nothing but offensiveness toward man, charge upon charge, it is the suit that the divine as the prosecutor ventures to bring against man…. To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine…. Therefore, interpreted Christianly, sin has its roots in willing, not in knowing, and this corruption of willing affects the individual’s consciousness…. Sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”

Because sin concerns the self before God, Kierkegaard denies that it can be mastered by speculative comprehension. Christianity requires faith, not because it is intellectually lazy, but because faith preserves the qualitative gulf between God and man that speculative thought is always tempted to smooth over. “I steadfastly hold to the Christian teaching that sin is a position—yet not as if it could be comprehended, but as a paradox that must be believed…. Whether one will believe or not must be left to faith…. So let others admire and praise him who pretends to be able to comprehend Christianity. I consider it an outright ethical task, perhaps requiring not a little self-denial in these very speculative times, when all “the others” are busy comprehending, to admit that one is neither able nor obliged to comprehend it…. Let us never forget that Socrates’ ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…. Christianity teaches that everything essentially Christian depends solely upon faith; therefore it wants to be precisely a Socratic, God-fearing ignorance, which by means of ignorance guards faith against speculation, keeping watch so that the gulf of qualitative difference between God and man may be maintained as it is in the paradox and faith.”

Furthermore, Kierkegaard describes an even deeper intensification: despairing over one’s sin. Here the sinner does not merely sin, but encloses himself within sin, treating repentance and grace as impossible, meaningless, or even hostile. "Sin is despair; the intensification is the new sin of despairing over one’s sin…. We are not talking about particular sins here; the state of sin is the sin, and this is intensified in a new consciousness…. To despair over one’s sin indicates that sin has become or wants to be internally consistent. It wants nothing to do with the good…. It insists on listening only to itself, on having dealings only with itself; it closes itself up within itself, indeed, locks itself inside one more inclosure, and protects itself against every attack or pursuit by the good by despairing over sin. It is aware of having burned the bridge behind it and of thereby being inaccessible to the good and of the good being inaccessible to it, so that if in a weak moment it should itself will the good, that would still be impossible. Sin itself is severance from the good, but despair over sin is the second severance. This, of course, squeezes the uttermost demonic powers out of sin, gives it the profane toughness or perverseness that must consistently regard everything called repentance and grace not only as empty and meaningless but also as its enemy.”

Finally, Kierkegaard opposes the ethical and Christian category of the single individual to speculative abstraction. Sin may be universal, but it is never merely a universal idea; it becomes actual only in the individual sinner, standing before God. “The ethical does not abstract from actuality but immerses itself in actuality and operates mainly with the help of that speculatively disregarded and scorned category: individuality. Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner…. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I…. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation. Christianity begins here—with the teaching about sin, and thereby with the single individual…. Sin, however common it is to all, does not gather men together in a common idea, into an association, into a partnership (“no more than the multitude of the dead out in the cemetery form some kind of society”); instead, it splits men up into single individuals and holds each individual fast as a sinner…. If “the single individual” is to feel in kinship with God (and this is what Christianity teaches), then he also senses the full weight of it in fear and trembling, and he must discover—as if it were not an ancient discovery—the possibility of offense…. Being a human being is not like being an animal, for which the specimen is always less than the species. Man is distinguished from other animal species not only by the superiorities that are generally mentioned but is also qualitatively distinguished by the fact that the individual, the single individual, is more than the species. This qualification is in turn dialectical and signifies that the single individual is a sinner, but then again that it is a perfection to be the single individual.”

“The Moment and Late Writings” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong)

This is basically Kierkegaard just bashing the established Lutheran state church of Denmark for a few hundred pages. The impetus for this harangue is a eulogy for Bishop Mynster by his successor, Bishop Martensen. Specifically, at issue is the classifying Mynster as a Christian truth-witness. Kierkegaard begins, “In the New Testament, Christ calls the apostles and followers witnesses, requires of them that they shall witness for him. Let us now see what is to be understood by that. They are men who in renunciation of everything, in poverty, in lowliness, then, ready for any suffering, are to go out into a world that with all its might and main expresses the contrast to what it is to be a Christian. This is what Christ calls witnessing, being a witness…. Now I ask, is there the slightest similarity between these pastors, deans, and bishops and what Christ calls witnesses?… They may be called teachers, public officials, professors, councilors—in short, anything one wishes, but not truth-witnesses…. If the clergy understand their interests, they will not hesitate to ask the bishop to discontinue this language usage, which, to put it mildly, makes the whole profession ludicrous.”

Kierkegaard is offended that, in Christendom, there reside so many people that are Christians in name only, rather than in true belief. He strictly blames the pastors, as a profession, for this state of affairs. “Nothing is more dangerous for true Christianity, nothing is more against its nature, than getting people light-mindedly to assume the name “Christians,” to teach them to have a low opinion of being a Christian, as if it were something that is so very easy. And “the pastor” has a pecuniary interest in having it rest there, so that by assuming the name “Christians” people do not come to know what Christianity in truth is…. Christ and the New Testament understand something very specific by having faith; to have faith is to venture out as decisively as possible for a human being, breaking with everything, with what a human being naturally loves, breaking, in order to save his life, with that in which he naturally has his life. But to those who have faith, to them is also promised assistance against all dangers…. But in “Christendom” we play at having faith, play at being Christians. As far removed as possible from any break with what the natural human being loves, we remain at home in the living room, in the routines of finiteness—and then we go and blather to each other.”

Kierkegaard earnestly wants to convert Christendom to the true Christianity of the New Testament. To the citizen of Denmark who is struggling to balance the demands of this world and the next, he urges, “Eternally he will not regret heeding my words, but it is quite possible that he could regret it temporally. He himself is then to consider whether it is the eternal he wants or the temporal. I, who am called Either/Or, cannot serve anyone with: both-and.” Kierkegaard concludes, “All religion in which there is any truth, certainly Christianity, aims at a person’s total transformation and wants, through renunciation and self-denial, to wrest away from him all that, precisely that, to which he immediately clings, in which he immediately has his life…. To become a Christian in the New Testament sense is designed to work the individual loose (as the dentist speaks of working the gum loose) from the context to which he clings in immediate passion, and which clings in immediate passion to him…. This kind of Christianity was never to the human being’s liking.”

“Works of Love” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

Kierkegaard, from the very start, sets out what this book will be all about, “They are Christian deliberations, therefore not about love but about works of love.” He begins by explaining why the love of God is different from worldly love, “But you shall love God in unconditional obedience, even if what he requires of you might seem to you to be to your own harm, indeed, harmful to his cause; for God’s wisdom is beyond all comparison to yours, and God’s governance has no obligation of responsibility in relation to your sagacity. All you have to do is obey in love.”

Kierkegaard relates how being bound by love eternally is actually the truest form of freedom that a human has, “But the love that has undergone the change of eternity by becoming duty and loves because it shall love—that love is independent and has the law for its existence in the relation of love itself to the eternal…. Alas, we often think that freedom exists and it is law that binds freedom. Yet it is just the opposite; without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom…. If when another person says, “I cannot love you any longer,” one proudly answers, “Then I can also stop loving you”—is this independence? Alas, it is dependence, because whether he will continue to love or not depends upon whether the other will love. But the person who answers, “In that case I shall still continue to love you”—that person’s love is made eternally free in blessed independence. He does not say it proudly—dependent upon his pride—no, he says it humbly, humbling himself under eternity’s shall, and for that very reason he is independent.”

In fact, love only becomes true love when it becomes an eternal duty. “The love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair, in fortune and misfortune equally saved from despair…. See, passion inflames, worldly sagacity cools, but neither this heat nor this cold nor the combination of this heat and this cold is the pure air of the eternal…. But this “You shall love” removes all the unhealthiness and preserves the healthiness for eternity. So it is everywhere, this shall of eternity is the saving, the purifying, the ennobling element.” True love always requires an element of self-denial. “Wherever the essentially Christian is, there is also self-denial, which is Christianity’s essential form…. Self-denial is the very transformation by which a person becomes sober in the sense of eternity.” Universal love is also in constant danger of being replaced by particular loves, “But erotic love and friendship are the very peak of self-esteem, the I intoxicated in the other I. The more securely one I and another I join to become one I, the more this united I selfishly cuts itself from everyone else. At the peak of erotic love and friendship, the two actually do become one self, one I.”

True Christian love can only be recognized in the form of the love of one’s neighbor. One must love all of humanity equally and only in this way love God. But that also means loving your enemy just as you would love yourself, “The neighbor is the utterly unrecognizable dissimilarity between persons or is the eternal equality before God—the enemy, too, has this equality…. Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy. In other words, when you shut your eyes, you do not see dissimilarities of earthly life…. The kinship is secured by each individual’s equal kinship with and relationship to God in Christ; because the Christian doctrine addresses itself equally to each individual…. Just as little as the Christian lives or can live without his body, so little can he live without the dissimilarity of earthly life that belongs to every human being in particular by birth, by position, by circumstances, by education etc.—none of us is pure humanity…. This must continue as long as temporality continues and must continue to tempt every human being who comes into the world, inasmuch as by being Christian he does not become exempt from dissimilarity, but by overcoming the temptation of dissimilarity he becomes a Christian. In so-called Christendom, therefore, the difference of earthly life still continually tempts—alas, perhaps it even more than tempts, so that one person is haughty and another defiantly envies. Both ways are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian…. Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”

Care for one’s station in the world is the enemy of Christian ethics. The temporal and eternity can never be reconciled. “Christianly the world’s opposition stands in an essential relationship to the inwardness of Christianity…. Christianity cannot keep anything other than what it has promised from the beginning: the world’s ingratitude, opposition, and derision, and continually to a higher degree the more earnest a Christian one becomes…. Therefore if anyone can demonstrate that the world or Christendom has now become essentially good, as if it were eternity, then I will also demonstrate that Christian self-denial has been made impossible and Christianity abolished, just as it will be abolished in eternity, where it will cease to be militant.”

Love is the only act that fulfills Christian law, “The relation of love to the Law is here like the relation of faith to understanding. The understanding counts and counts, calculates and calculates, but it never arrives at the certainty that faith possesses.” Love of your neighbor is the only debt in the temporal world worth owing,  “If possible, owe no one anything, no courtesy, no service, no sympathy in joy or in sorrow, no leniency in judging, no help in life, no advice in danger, no sacrifice, not even the hardest—no, in all this owe no one anything. But along with all this still remain in the debt that you certainly have not wished and before God have certainly not been able to pay off, the debt to love one another!”

The nature of true love is its immeasurability. It is immeasurable both for the lover and for the one loved. “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is always love along with it; and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable…. The object of love confesses in love that with the least little thing the lover does infinitely more than all the others do with the greatest sacrifices; and the lover confesses to himself that in making every possible sacrifice he is doing infinitely less than he perceives the debt to be.”

In order to love one’s neighbor properly, there is the necessity of granting belief freely and giving to all the benefit of the doubt. “The person who loves believes all things. With the blessed joy of amazement, he will someday see that he was right; and if he made a mistake by believing too much of the good—to believe the good is in itself a blessing.” It is similar with hope. “That is why the person who hopes can never be deceived, because to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal…. The loving one hopes all things. No indolence of habit, no pettiness of mind, no hairsplitting of sagacity, no quantities of experience, no slackness of years, no bitterness of evil passions corrupt for him his hope or counterfeit the possibility for him; every morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it…. Love hopes to the limit, yes, to the “last day,” for not until then is hope over.”

Kierkegaard circles back to the temptations of the worldly, “Acting sagaciously is, actually, a halfway approach, whereby one undeniably gets further ahead in the world, wins the world’s goods and advantages and the world’s honor, because, in the eternal sense, the world and world’s advantages are half-measures. But neither the eternal nor Holy Scripture has taught anyone to aspire to get ahead or furthest ahead in the world; on the contrary, it warns against getting too far ahead in the world in order, if possible, to keep oneself unstained by the defilement of the world…. If the hope is not fulfilled it perhaps will become apparent in one’s bitterness and despair how firmly one was attached to that for which it was a shame to hope.” The lust for money holds particular scorn for Kierkegaard, “From the eternal point of view money is less than nothing…. Think of eternity in whatever way you want to; only admit that many of the temporal things you have seen in temporality you wished to find again in eternity, that you wished to see trees and the flowers and the stars again, to hear the singing of birds and the murmuring of the brook again—but could it ever occur to you that there would be money in eternity? No, then the kingdom of heaven itself would again become a land of misery…. Of all the things you have seen, there is nothing of which you can be so sure that it will never enter heaven as—money.”

In fact, the rich and the poor can practice mercy alike. “Eternity understands only mercifulness; therefore if you want to learn to understand mercifulness, you must learn it from eternity. But if you are to have an understanding of the eternal, there must be stillness around you while you concentrate your attention completely on inwardness…. Mercifulness does not arouse amazement. What indeed is there to be amazed at if even the poorest wretch, and he best of all, can practice mercifulness? Mercifulness, if you in truth perceive it, does not arouse amazement; it stirs you, just because it is inwardness, it makes the deepest inward impression upon you.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “In the Christian sense, a person ultimately and essentially has only God to deal with in everything, although he still must remain in the world and in the earthly circumstances assigned to him…. The adult also readily imagines that his dealings with the world are actuality, but God brings him to understand that all this is only being used for his upbringing…. Thus God is the educator; his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness…. But everything in you that is of flesh and blood and is timorousness and attachment to things of this earth must despair, so that you cannot acquire external certainty, a certainty once and for all, and in the easiest manner. See, this is the struggle of faith in which you can have occasion to be tried and tested every day.”

In the end, what happens on earth is irrelevant compared to eternity and God’s eternal love. Forgiveness of others is the necessary path to the forgiveness of yourself. “Christianity’s view is: forgiveness is forgiveness; your forgiveness is your forgiveness; your forgiveness of another is your own forgiveness; the forgiveness you give is the forgiveness you receive, not the reverse…. God forgives you neither more nor less nor otherwise than as you forgive those who have sinned against you.” Kierkegaard returns once again to the unknowability of God’s love, “How rigorous this Christian like for like is! The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: as others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do unto you exactly as you do unto others. In the Christian sense, you have nothing at all to do with what others do unto you—it does not concern you; it is a curiosity, an impertinence, a lack of good sense on your part to meddle in things that are absolutely no more your concern than if you were not present. You have to do only with what you do onto others, or how you take what others do unto you. The direction is inward; essentially you have to do only with yourself before God…. The Christian like for like belongs to this world of inwardness…. In the Christian sense, to love people is to love God, and to love God is to love people.”

“Johannes Climacus” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

This is basically an attack against Hegel and his foundations of modern philosophy by Kierkegaard, again writing as Johannes Climacus in this eponymous work. Kierkegaard’s theme is doubt, “De omnibus dubitandum est [Everything must be doubted]…. This thesis became for [Climacus’] life what in other respects a name frequently is in a person’s history—everything can be said in all brevity by mentioning this name…. This thesis became a task for his thinking.” Kierkegaard appears to be wrestling with philosophy itself. “Just as one could have an intimation of a necessity in the past, was it not conceivable that one could have an intimation of a necessity in the future. Philosophy, however, wanted to do something even more difficult: it wanted to permeate everything with the thought of eternity and necessity, wanted to do this in the present moment, which would mean slaying the present with the thought of eternity and yet preserving its fresh life…. Perhaps a particular philosopher had doubted for all just as Christ suffered for all, and is one now only supposed to believe it and not doubt for oneself?” Surely not. Kierkegaard continues with his tale of Climacus’ intellectual journeying. “In an old saga, he had read a story about a knight who received from a troll a rare sword that, in addition to its other qualities, also craved blood the instant it was drawn…. It seemed to Johannes that he must have the same experience with that thesis: when one person said it to another, it became in the latter’s hand a sword that was obliged to slay the former, however painful it was for the latter to reward his benefactor in that way…. The very first person who had primitively discovered that one must begin with doubt had not been in that predicament…. But the single individual who is to learn this from another would fall into the predicament, and if his teacher is not quick enough, he is obliged to become a sacrifice to his teaching.”

“Philosophical Fragments” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Edna Hong and Howard Hong)

In this essay, Kierkegaard writes under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, comparing Socratic and Christian notions of truth, faith, the historical, and the eternal. He asks, “Can the truth be learned? With this question we shall begin. It was a Socratic question or became that by way of the Socratic question whether virtue can be taught—for virtue in turn was defined as insight.” Kierkegaard continues by stating Socrates’ notion of the individual and how its subjectivity relates to the objective world. “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self-knowledge is God-knowledge. Moreover, this is how Socrates understood himself, and in his view this is how every human being must understand himself, and by virtue of that understanding he must understand his relation to the single individual, always with equal humility and with equal pride.” Socrates was opposed to notions of individuality espoused by the Skeptics and by arch-subjectivists, “If the Socratic theory of recollection and of every human being as universal man is not maintained, then Sextus Empiricus stands there ready to make the transition implied in “to learn” not merely difficult but impossible, and Protagoras begins where he left off, with everything as the measure of man, in the sense that he is the measure for others, but by no means in the Socratic sense that the single individual is for himself the measure, no more and no less.”

Kierkegaard next compares the Socratic method to the teachings of Christ. “Between one human being and another the Socratic relationship is indeed the highest, the truest…. The presence of the god in human form—indeed, in the lowly form of a servant—is precisely the teaching.” Where Christianity steps beyond the Socratic is in the leap of faith. “Faith is not a knowledge, for all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and the historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical…. The follower, however, is in faith related to that teacher in such a way that he is eternally occupied with his historical existence…. Then the object of faith becomes not the teaching but the teacher, for the essence of the Socratic is that the learner, because he himself is the truth and has the condition, can thrust the teacher away…. Faith, then, must cling firmly to the teacher. But in order for the teacher to be able to give the condition, he must be the god, and in order to put the learner in possession of it, he must be man. This contradiction is in turn the object of faith and is the paradox, the moment…. The contradiction is that he receives the condition in the moment, and, since it is a condition for the understanding of eternal truth, it is eo ipso the eternal condition…. Faith is not an act of will…. But then is faith just as paradoxical as the paradox? Quite so…. Faith itself is a wonder, and everything that is true of the paradox is also true of faith…. The wonder that the eternal condition is given in time.”

Kierkegaard concludes, “Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical—indeed, precisely by means of the historical—has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical. No philosophy (for it is only for thought), no mythology (for it is only for the imagination), no historical knowledge (for it is for memory) has ever had this idea—of which in this connection one can say with multiple meanings that it did not arise from any human heart…. If in discussing the relation between Christianity and philosophy we begin by narrating what was said earlier, how shall we ever, not finish, but ever manage to begin, for history just keeps on growing.”

“The Concept of Irony” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This 1841 work by Kierkegaard was the dissertation for his college degree. It deals with the irony espoused by Socrates, as he was portrayed by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes. Kierkegaard begins by defining the ironic questioning style ubiquitous with Socrates. “One can ask with the intention of receiving an answer containing the desired fullness, and hence the more one asks, the deeper and more significant becomes the answer; or one can ask without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent content by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind. The first method presupposes, of course, that there is a plenitude; the second that there is an emptiness. The first is the speculative method; the second the ironic. Socrates in particular practiced the latter method…. Socrates’ questioning was essentially aimed at the knowing subject for the purpose of showing that when all was said and done they knew nothing whatever.” Kierkegaard is careful to separate, as best he can, the views of Socrates from those of the author who puts words into his mouth. “Just as Socrates’ philosophy began with the presupposition that he knew nothing, so it ended with the presupposition that human beings know nothing at all; Platonic philosophy began in the immediate unity of thought and being and stayed there. The direction that manifested itself in idealism as reflection upon reflection manifested itself in Socrates’ questioning. To ask questions—that is, the abstract relation between the subjective and the objective—ultimately became the primary issue for him.”

Kierkegaard furthers dissects Plato’s dialogues involving Socrates by analyzing the interplay of irony and the dialectic. “That irony and dialectic are the two great forces in Plato everyone will surely admit, but that there is a double kind of irony and a double kind of dialectic cannot be denied, either. There is an irony that is only a stimulus for thought, that quickens it when it becomes drowsy, disciplines it when it becomes dissolute. There is an irony that is itself the activator and in turn is itself the terminus striven for. There is a dialectic that in perpetual movement continually sees to it that the question does not become entrapped in an incidental understanding, that is never weary and is always prepared to set the issue afloat if it runs aground—in short, that always knows how to keep the issue in suspension and precisely therein and thereby wants to resolve it. There is a dialectic that, in proceeding from the most abstract ideas, wants to let these display themselves in more concrete qualifications, a dialectic that wants to construct actuality with the idea.” Kierkegaard continues on with the purpose of irony. “Because irony cuts the bonds that restrain speculation, helps to shove off from the purely empirical sandbanks and to venture out upon the ocean, this is a negatively liberating activity. Irony is in no sense a partner in the expedition. But insofar as the speculating individual feels liberated and an abundance spreads out before his observing eyes, he may readily believe that he also owes all this to irony and his gratitude may wish to owe it everything…. Thus a personality is a necessary point of departure in the positions of both irony and subjective thinking; the activity of this personality becomes liberating in both of these positions, but the position of irony is negative, whereas that of reasoning is positive.” 

Kierkegaard returns to the role of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. “If Plato’s view of Socrates were to be expressed in a few words, it could be said that he provides him with the idea. Where the empirical ends, Socrates begins; his function is to lead speculation out of finite qualifications, to lose sight of finitude and steer out upon Oceanus where ideal striving and ideal infinity recognize no alien considerations but are themselves their infinite goal. Thus, just as lower sense perception turns pale before this higher knowledge—indeed, becomes a delusion, a deception by comparison—just so every consideration of a finite goal becomes a disparagement, a profanation of the holy. In short, Socrates has gained ideality, has conquered those vast regions that hitherto were a terra incognita [unknown land]. For this reason, he disdains the useful, is indifferent to the established [Bestaaaende], is an out-and-out enemy of the mediocrity that in empiricism is the highest, an object of pious worship, but for speculation a troll changeling.” 

Kierkegaard makes the convincing case that Socrates’ views were indeed antithetical to the polis. “The negative relation of the daimonian to Socrates… had the express effect of making him relate negatively to actuality or, in the Greek sense, to the state…. It was a polemical relation to the state religion to substitute a silence in which a warning voice was audible only on occasion, a voice that (and this is about the most fundamental polemic) never had a thing to do with the substantial interests of political life, never said a word about them, but only dealt with Socrates’ and at most his friends’ completely private and particular affairs—to substitute this for the Greek life permeated, even in the most insignificant manifestations, by a god-consciousness, to substitute a silence for this divine eloquence echoed in everything.” Hegel comments on this birth of human agency, “In the ‘divine sign’ of Socrates we see the will which formerly had simply transferred itself beyond itself now beginning to apply itself to itself and so to recognize its own inward nature. This is the beginning of a self-knowing and so of a genuine freedom.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates’ position, then, is that of subjectivity, of inwardness, which reflects upon itself and in its relation to itself detaches and volatilizes the established [Bestaaaende] in the flood of thought that surges over it and carries it away while it itself recedes again into thought. Replacing the grace to be ashamed, which powerfully but mysteriously kept the individual tied to the lead string of the state, there now came the decisiveness and self-assurance of subjectivity.”

Another aspect of Socrates’ philosophy that Kierkegaard focusses on is the supremacy of ignorance. Socrates “gave up the study of nature for the study of man. To say, therefore, that Socrates did not accept the gods accepted by the state does not mean that he was an atheist. On the contrary, Socrates’ nonacceptance of the national gods was essential to his whole position, which he himself theoretically characterized as ignorance…. His accusers really ought to have charged him precisely with this ignorance, since particularly in the Greek state and to a certain extent in every state there is indeed an ignorance that must be regarded as a crime…. In the philosophic sense… he was ignorant. He was ignorant of the ground of all being, the eternal, the divine—that is, he knew that it was, but he did not know what it was.” Here Kierkegaard turns back to the newly emerging concepts of subjectivity and individuality. “When subjectivity by means of its negative power has broken the spell in which human life lay in the form of substantiality, when it has emancipated man from his relation to God just as it freed him from his relation to the state, then the first form in which this manifests itself is ignorance…. This ignorance is in turn quite consistently called human wisdom, because here man has come into his own right.”

Socrates freed himself from the bounds of Greek society through irony. “The ironic freedom he enjoyed because no relationship was strong enough to bind him and he continually felt himself free above it, the enjoyment of being sufficient unto himself, to which he abandoned himself—all this suggests something aristocratic…. True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed.” The preeminent form of freedom was moral freedom. “Here the moral individual is the negatively free individual. He is free because he is not bound by another, but he is negatively free precisely because he is not limited in another. When the individual by being in his other is in his own, then for the first time he is in truth (i.e., positively) free, affirmatively free. Therefore, moral freedom is arbitrariness; it is possibility of good and evil.” Hegel comments, “The conscience as formal subjectivity is simply to be on the verge of slipping into evil.” Kierkegaard continues, “Socrates brought this about, but not in the sense of the Sophists, who taught the individual to constrict himself in his own particular interests; he brought the individual to this by universalizing subjectivity, and to that extent he is the founder of morality…. The individual should no longer act out of fear of the law but with a conscious knowledge of why he acted.”

Going back to Socrates’ trial, Kierkegaard repeats why Socrates was anathema to the Athenian polis. “The whole substantial life of Greek culture had lost its validity for him, which means that to him the established actuality was unactual, not in this or that particular aspect but in its totality as such; that with regard to this invalid actuality he let the established order of things appear to remain established and thereby brought about its downfall; that in the process Socrates became lighter and lighter, more and more negatively free.” Kierkegaard concludes by bringing it back to irony. “It cannot really be said that the ironist places himself outside and above morality and ethics, but he lives far too abstractly, far too metaphysically and esthetically to reach the concretion of the moral and the ethical. For him, life is drama, and what absorbs him is the ingenious complication of this drama. He himself is a spectator, even when he is the one acting.”

“Practice in Christianity” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

In the invocation with which Kierkegaard begins this book, he starts by defining his conception of faith, “But as long as there is a believer, this person, in order to have become that, must have been and as a believer must be just as contemporary with Christ’s presence as his contemporaries were. This contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and, more sharply defined, it is faith.” He continues, ““History,” says faith, “has nothing at all to do with Jesus Christ; with regard to him we have only sacred history…. He is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism. He is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness—but the eighteen hundred years, or if it came to be eighteen thousand years, has nothing at all to do with it…. That in his abasement he was God, that he will come again in glory—this goes not a little beyond the understanding of history…. But that God has lived here on earth as an individual human being is infinitely extraordinary. Even if it had no results whatever, it makes no difference; it remains just as extraordinary, infinitely extraordinary, infinitely more extraordinary than all the results…. Only God can attach that much importance to himself, so that the fact that he has lived is infinitely more important than all the results that are registered in history.” Kierkegaard opposes faith and knowledge, “Jesus Christ is the object of faith; one must either believe in him or be offended; for to “know” simply means that it is not about him. Thus history can indeed richly communicate knowledge, but knowledge annihilates Jesus Christ.”

Kierkegaard describes the difference between Christianity and Christendom. He begins with compassion as a daily practice, “To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, this alone is divine compassion) this is “too much” for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour and involuntarily burst out laughing over when they see it in actuality. The point is that it is too lofty for them to bear seeing in its daily use; it must be at a distance for them to be able to bear it. People are not so familiar with loftiness that they really dare to believe in it.” By Kierkegaard’s time, Christendom is ubiquitous, but being an actual Christian is still a rarity, “To be a Christian has become a nothing, a silly game, something that everyone is as a matter of course, something one slips into more easily than one slips into the most trifling accomplishment. Truly it is high time for the requirements of ideality to be heard…. Only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare to put it that way (from the other side grace is the force), into this horror. And at the very same moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness or the greatest horror. Admittance is only through the consciousness of sin; to want to enter by any other road is high treason against Christianity…. It is brazen to want to fraternize with God and Christ. Only the consciousness of sin is absolute respect.”

The proper Christian reveals himself inwardly. This is contrasted in Christendom, in which religion has become a part of the established order and religion is not content with personal belief. “By making devoutness and piety inwardness, Christ prodded this whole structure of qualifications and relativities, this direct recognizability of piety by honor and esteem, power and influence, this objectivity…. It is always that way when the established order has gone so far as to deify itself…. The relationship with God is abolished; custom, ordinances, and the like are deified.” Christ is not his teachings, for then he would just be a dead wise man. Christ is about his being as a God-man, which makes him one of a kind. As a God-man, he could not communicate directly with humanity. He is paradox. It is not his teachings, but his being that is all of Christianity, “Direct communication is an impossibility for the God-man, for inasmuch as he is the sign of contradiction he cannot communicate himself directly; to be a sign is already a term based on reflection, to say nothing of being the sign of contradiction…. It is eighteen hundred years since Christ lived; then he is forgotten—only his teaching lasts—yes, that is, Christianity has been abolished.”

Kierkegaard next writes about the higher life of the individual Christian, “If a human life is not to be lived altogether unworthily like that of the animal, which never lifts up its head; if it is not to be trifled away, emptily occupied with what, as long as it lasts, is vanity and when it is over is nothing, or busily occupied with what does indeed make a noise at the moment but has no echo in eternity; if a human life is not to be loafed away in inactivity or wasted away in busy activity—then there must be something higher that draws it.” Kierkegaard makes the case that contemporary Christendom has become soft in its power. The original Christian faith was militant and that is how it must remain. “What Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world,” was not said in a special sense about the connection with that age; it is eternally valid…. As soon as Christ’s kingdom makes a compromise with this world and becomes a kingdom of this world, Christianity is abolished. But if Christianity is in the truth, it is certainly a kingdom in this world, but not of this world, that is, it is militant.”

Finally, Kierkegaard turns back to inwardness and his personal choices for living as a Christian in this world, “I chose the only escape that was left in Christendom: to seem to be the most frivolous person of all, to “become a fool in the world,” in order if it all possible in this earnest world to protect what I concealed in my innermost being, a little bit of earnestness, and in order that this inwardness could acquire the peace of inclosing reserve in which to grow in stillness…. I was concealing something else in my innermost being, but it was the best that I was hiding; I have never, never deceived by way of making myself out to be better than I was—through this life in the human throng, I learned with frightful veracity to understand that rigorousness is the only thing that can help.”

“Stages of Life” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

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.”

“Either/Or (Part II)” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

The “Or” section of Kierkegaard’s commentary on the values of aesthetics versus ethics is written by the fictional B, a married judge counseling his friend A on the errors of his licentious ways. B begins, “Just consider, your life is passing; for you, too, the time will eventually come even to you when your life is at an end, when you are no longer shown any further possibilities in life, when recollection alone is left, recollection, but not in the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth, but the earnest and faithful recollection of conscience.” B is trying to convince his friend that a faithful marriage is, in fact, aesthetically valid. He continues, “Romantic love manifests itself as immediate by exclusively resting in natural necessity…. Although this love is based essentially on the sensuous, it nevertheless is noble by virtue of the consciousness of the eternal that it assimilates, for it is this that distinguishes all love [Kjaerlighed] from lust [Vellyst]: that it bears a stamp of eternity. The lovers are deeply convinced that in itself their relationship is a complete whole that will never be changed.” But to B marriage brings about a kind of love even more profound than this type of love as well. “The defect in earthly love [Kjaerlighed] is the same as its merit—that it is preference [Forkjaerlighed]. Spiritual love has no preference and moves in the opposite direction, continually sheds all relativities. Earthly love, when it is true, goes the opposite way and at its highest is love only for a single human being in the whole world. This is the truth of loving only one and only once…. Thus marriage is sensuous but also spiritual, free and also necessary, absolute in itself and also within itself points beyond itself…. What I want to stress, however, is the beauty in the marriages that have as little “why” as possible. The less “why,” the more love…. A person who marries for this and that etc. is taking a step that is just as unesthetic as it is irreligious. The goodness of his objective is of no use, for the mistake is precisely that he has an objective.” 

B then compares the love within a faithful marriage to that of first love. “Thus it is not true that marriage is an exceedingly respectable but tiresomely moral role and that erotic love [Elskov] is poetry; no, marriage is really the poetic. And if the world has often witnessed with pain that a first love cannot be sustained, I shall grieve along with the world but shall also bring to mind that the defect was not so much in what happened later as in its not beginning rightly. What the first love lacks, then, is the second esthetic ideal, the historical. It does not have the law of motion in itself.” B then recites a litany of his ideals for marriage. “Honesty, frankness, openness, understanding—this is the life principle in marriage. Without this understanding, marriage is unbeautiful and actually immoral, for then the sensuous and the spiritual, which love unites, are separated. Only when the being with whom I live in the most tender union in earthly life is just as close to me in the spiritual sense, only then is my marriage moral and therefore also esthetically beautiful…. It takes courage to appear as one really is.”

B continues by relating his conception of the true nature of the aesthetic. “Most people seek esthetic satisfaction, which the soul needs, in reading, in viewing works of art, etc.; whereas there are relatively few who themselves see the esthetic as it is in existence, who themselves see existence in an esthetic light and do not enjoy only the poetic reproduction…. An esthetic representation always requires a concentration in the moment [Moment], and the richer this concentration is, the greater the esthetic effect…. Either this is a predestined moment, as it were, that sends a shudder through the consciousness by awakening the idea of the divineness of existence, or the moment presupposes a history…. How, then, can the esthetic, which is incommensurable even for portrayal in poetry be represented? Answer: by being lived…. He who in the most profound sense feels himself creating and created, who in the moment he feels himself creating has the original pathos of the lines, and in the moment he feels himself created has the erotic ear that picks up every sound—he and he alone has brought into actual existence the highest in esthetics…. We are not to read about or listen to or look at what is the highest and the most beautiful in life, but are, if you please, to live it.”

B’s second essay, in the form of a long letter to A, is on “The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality.” He begins, “Wherever in the stricter sense there is a question of an Either/Or, one can always be sure that the ethical has something to do with it. The only absolute Either/Or is the choice between good and evil, but this is also absolutely ethical…. The person who wants to decide his life task ethically does not ordinarily have such a wide range; the act of choosing, however, is much more meaningful to him…. The is an Either/Or that makes a human being greater than the angels…. What takes precedence in my Either/Or is, then, the ethical. Therefore, the point is still not that of choosing something; the point is not the reality of that which is chosen but the reality of choosing…. The esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes.”

B now and then specifically addresses A and tries to rebut his particular aesthetic stance of resigned despair to exterior worldly life. “It is manifest that every esthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives esthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not. But when one knows this, and you certainly know it, then a higher form of existence is an imperative requirement…. It is not despair involving something actual but despair in thought. Your thought has rushed ahead; you have seen through the vanity of everything, but you have not gone further. Occasionally you dive into it, and when for a single moment you abandon yourself to enjoyment, you are also aware that it is vanity. Thus you are continually beyond yourself—that is, in despair. Therefore, your life lies between two enormous contradictions: at times you have colossal energy, at times an equally great indolence.” B continues lecturing A on his particular aesthetic personality, which finds contentment in despair. “As far as enjoyment goes, you have an absolutely aristocratic pride. This is entirely appropriate, for, after all, you are finished with the finite altogether. And yet you cannot give it up. Compared with those who are chasing after satisfaction, you are satisfied, but that in which you find your satisfaction is absolute dissatisfaction…. In a certain sense you are right, for nothing that is finite, not even the whole world, can satisfy the soul of a person who feels the need for the eternal.”

B goes on by describing ethics as intwined with the universal. “The person who views life ethically sees the universal, and the person who lives ethically expresses the universal in his life. He makes himself the universal human being, not by taking off [affore] his concretion, for then he becomes a complete non-entity, but by putting it on [ifore] and interpenetrating it with the universal. The universal human being is not a phantom, but every human being is the universal human being…. The person who lives esthetically is an accidental human being; he believes he is the perfect human being by being the one and only human being. The person who lives ethically works toward becoming the universal human being.” The ethical also has a unique way of viewing the nature of the Self. “The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself…. That is why the ethical life has this duplexity, in which the individual has himself outside himself within himself…. If he does not hold firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.”

B concludes by again confronting the rare aesthetic life-view held by A, directly. He explains to A what happens to the person who cannot accept the universal, but must stand apart, as the exception. “If it so happens that the universal he is unable to actualize is the very thing he desired, then in one sense he will, if he is high-minded, rejoice in this circumstance…. He will then be convinced that there is something of the universal that he cannot actualize. But he is not finished with this conviction, for it will generate a profound sorrow in his soul…. He himself will grieve, not cravenly and dejectedly, but deeply and openly, for he will say: Nevertheless, I do love the universal. If it is the happy fate of others to testify to the universally human by actualizing it, well, then I testify to it by my grief…. I have placed myself outside the universal; I have deprived myself of all the guidance, the security, and the reassurance that the universal gives; I stand alone, without fellow-feeling, for I am an exception. But he will not become craven and disconsolate; he will confidently go his solitary way; indeed, he has demonstrated the correctness of what he did—he has his pain.”

“Either/Or (Part I)” by Soren Kierkegaard (translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong)

This is a collection of essays and miscellanea devoted to the aesthetic values of life. Kierkegaard wraps the work in multiple layers of obfuscation. He assumes the persona of Victor Eremita, the editor of a correspondence of papers between two individuals, A and B. The papers have been supposedly found in a secret drawer of a wooden desk bought in secondhand shop. These layers of remove give Kierkegaard the comfort of deniability for his more outrageous assertions. Part 1 of “Either/Or” contains the supposed papers of the person dubbed A, a pure aesthete.

The first section is a collection of aphorisms in which A writes lines such as, “desire in our age is simultaneously sinful and boring, because it desires what belongs to the neighbor.” Much of A’s writing revolves around the mimetic impulses of human nature. Another central theme of of his writings is a brutal self-examination of his own inner life. “One ought to a be a riddle not only to others but also to oneself. I examine myself; when I am tired of that, I smoke a cigar for diversion and think: God knows what our Lord actually intended with me or what he wants to make of me.” The subject matter never deviates far from the pure aesthetic, but also contains the portrayal of the power dynamic in all human relationships. “Real enjoyment consists not in what one enjoys but in the idea…. Enjoyment consists not in what I enjoy but in getting my own way.”

The second section of A’s papers is an essay devoted to the supreme beauty of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” A exclaims, “Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everything—to whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, that I was terrified at the core of my being—you to whom I owe that I did not go through life without encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die without having loved, even though my love was unhappy.” He reflects on the difference in the enjoyment of music and language. “Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate…. Sensuous immediacy has its absolute medium in music.” A goes on to relate the process of desire in detail. “As soon as desire awakens or, more correctly, in and with its awakening, desire and the object of desire are separated; now desire breathes freely and soundly, whereas before it could not draw its breath because of that which was desired. When desire has not awakened, that which is desired fascinates and captivates—indeed, almost causes anxiety. The desire must have air, must find escape; this occurs through their being separated.”

The third essay is a reflection on tragedy in ancient Greek and modern dramas. A reflects, “In ancient tragedy, the action itself has an epic element; it is just as much an event as action. This, of course, is because the ancient world did not have subjectivity reflected in itself. Even if the individual moved freely, he nevertheless rested in substantial determinants, in the state, the family, in fate…. The hero’s downfall, therefore, is not a result solely of his action but is also a suffering, whereas in modern tragedy the hero’s downfall is not really suffering but is a deed…. The hero stands and falls entirely on his own deeds…. But just as the action in Greek tragedy is something intermediate between action and the suffering, so also is guilt, and therein lies the tragic collision…. The Greek hero rests in his fate; his fate is unalterable; of that there can be no further discussion.”

The fourth essay is titled “Silhouettes Psychological Diversion.” A contrasts the forms of visual art with language. “Art is in the category of space, poetry in the category of time…. art depicts repose, poetry motion.” He goes on to contemplate inner sorrow and the possibility of its depiction in art. “Unhappy love is in itself the deepest sorrow for a woman, but it does not follow from this that even unhappy love engenders reflective sorrow…. Reflective sorrow, then, cannot become a subject for artistic portrayal. For one thing, it is never really present but is continually in the process of becoming; for another, the exterior, the visible, is a matter of unimportance and indifference.” It is buried so deep within the soul that reflective sorrow can never actually be seen and, therefore, portrayed in art. “The point in reflective sorrow is that the sorrow is continually seeking its object; this seeking is the sorrow’s restlessness and its life.” A concludes with the supposition, “for only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.”

The fifth essay is a short piece titled “The Unhappiest One,” addressed to a fake secret society, “The Fellowship of the Dead” or “The Society of Buried Lives.” A states, “we, like the Roman soldiers, do not fear death, we know a worse calamity, and first and last, above all—it is to live…. Happy is the one who died in old age; happier is the one who died in youth; happiest is the one who died at birth; happiest of all the one who was never born.” A reoccurring theme in many of Kierkegaard’s works is the concept of recollection. “Recollection is above all the distinctive element of the unhappy ones, which is natural, because past time has the notable characteristic that it is past.” A ends in paradox, “See, language breaks down, and thought is confused, for who indeed is the happiest but the unhappiest and who the unhappiest but the happiest, and what is life but madness, and faith but foolishness, and hope but staving off of the evil day, and love but vinegar in the wound.”

In his sixth essay, A says of poets, “The reason poets are called priests is that they interpret life, but they do not want to be understood by the masses but only by those natures with sensitive hearts.” Poetry is esoteric writing. He continues, “So it is in life, where one always needs explanatory notes, but it ought not to be so in poetry. Then the spectator, free from care, can enjoy, can absorb undisturbed, the dramatic life.”

The penultimate piece returns to the theme of recollection. A writes, “every particular change still falls under the universal rule of the relation between recollecting and forgetting. It is in these two currents that all life moves, and therefore it is a matter of having them properly under one’s control. Not until hope has been thrown overboard does one begin to live artistically; as long as a person hopes, he cannot limit himself…. To be able to forget always depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends on how one experiences reality…. Thus nil admirari [marvel at nothing] is the proper wisdom of life. No part of life ought to have so much meaning for a person that he cannot forget it any moment he wants to…. The more poetically one remembers, the more easily one forgets, for to remember poetically is actually only an expression of forgetting. When I remember poetically, my experience has already undergone the change of having lost everything painful. In order to be able to recollect in this way, one must be very much aware of how one lives, especially of how one enjoys.” A concludes with a plea for the arbitrary. “Arbitrariness is the whole secret. It is popularly believed that there is no art to being arbitrary, and yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not himself run wild in it but himself has pleasure from it. One does not enjoy the immediate object but something else that one arbitrarily introduces. One sees the middle of a play; one reads the third section of a book. One thereby has enjoyment quite different from what the author so kindly intended. One enjoys something totally accidental; one considers the whole of existence [Tilvaerelse] from this standpoint…. It is very advantageous to let the realities of life be undifferentiated in an arbitrary interest like that…. The eye with which one sees actuality must be changed continually…. The accidental outside a person corresponds to the arbitrariness within him…. The most insignificant thing can accidentally become a rich material for amusement.”

The final section takes the form of “The Seducer’s Diary,” which is a selection of letters and notes that A has supposedly written to and about his latest conquest, Cordelia. Kierkegaard, as Victor Eremita, editor of A’s works, begins forebodingly, “a bad conscience can indeed make life interesting.” The editor continues, “For him [A], individuals were merely for stimulation; he discarded them as trees shake off their leaves—he was rejuvenated, the foliage withered.” A, then, writes, “It is not a particular beauty who captivates me, but a totality; a visionary picture floats past me in which all these feminine beings blend with one another and all these movements are seeking something, seeking repose in a picture that is not seen.” He continues on with his conception of love and of Platonic forms. “The image I have of her [Cordelia] hovers indefinitely somewhere between her actual and her ideal form…. It is not art to seduce a girl but it is a stroke of good fortune to find one who is worth seducing. —Love is full of mysteries…. If at first sight a girl does not make such a deep impression on a person that she awakens the ideal, then ordinarily the actuality is not especially desirable; but if she does, then no matter how experienced a person is he usually is rather overwhelmed.” For a woman the Platonic form excites slightly differently. “I do believe a young girl would prefer to be all alone with her ideal, that is, at certain moments, and precisely at those moments when it has the strongest effect on her mind. Even if her ideal has found an ever so perfect expression in a particular beloved object, there nevertheless are moments when she feels that in the ideal there is a vastness that the actuality does not have.”

A contrasts, explicitly, for the first time, the aesthetic from the ethical. “Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient; when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular, infinitely langweiligt [boring].” Quickly, he returns to the aesthetic. “If a person does not know how to make erotic love the absolute, in comparison with which all other events vanish, then he should never let himself become involved in loving.” He also explicitly spells out his ideas on the proper course of love and its natural poetry. “I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and the point of love, who believes in love and knows it from the ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. All this I know; I also know that the highest enjoyment imaginable is to be loved, loved more than anything else in the world. To poetize oneself into a girl is an art; to poetize oneself out of her is a masterstroke. But the latter depends essentially on the former.” Finally, A concludes by summarizing his general opinion on aesthetics. “Woman still is and will continue to be an inexhaustible subject for contemplation for me, an everlasting overabundance for observations. The person who feels no need for this study can be whatever he wants to be in the world as far as I am concerned, but one thing he is not, he is no esthetician. What is glorious and divine about esthetics is that it is associated only with the beautiful; essentially it deals only with belles lettres and the fair sex.”