Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

It is usually thought to be very clever to say that Faust finally becomes a Don Juan, but this means very little, since the real question is in what sense he becomes one. Faust is a daemonic figure like a Don Juan, but higher. The sensuous first becomes significant in him only after he has lost the entire preceding world, but the consciousness of this loss is not erased, it is constantly present, and he seeks therefore in the sensuous not so much enjoyment as a diversion of mind. His doubting soul finds nothing in which it can rest, and now he reaches after love, not because he believes in it, but because it has a present element in which there is rest for a moment, and a striving which distracts and diverts his attention from the nothingness of doubt. Hence his enjoyment does not have the cheerful serenity which distinguishes a Don Juan. His countenance is not wreathed in smiles, his brow is not unclouded, and happiness is not his companion; the young women do not dance into his embrace, but he frightens them to him. What he seeks is not merely the pleasure of the sensuous, but what he desires is the immediacy of the spirit. As the shades of the underworld, when they got hold of a living being, sucked his blood, and lived as long as this blood warmed and nourished them, so Faust seeks an immediate life by which he can be renewed and strengthened. And where can this be found better than in a young woman, and how can he absorb it more perfectly than in the embrace of love? As the Middle Ages tell of sorcerers who understood how to prepare an elixir for the renewal of youth, and used the heart of an innocent child for that purpose, so is this the strengthening potion his starved soul needs, the only thing which is able to satisfy him for a moment. His sick soul needs what I might call a young heart’s first green shoots; and with what else shall I compare an innocent feminine soul’s first youth? If I were to call it a blossom, I should say too little, for it is more, it is a flowering: the soundness of hope and faith and trust shoots forth and blossoms in rich variety, and soft impulses move the delicate shoots, and dreams shade their fruitfulness. Thus it affects a Faust, it beckons to his restless soul like a peaceful isle in the quiet sea. That it is transient no one knows better than Faust; he does not believe in it any more than he believes in anything else; but that it exists, of that he convinces himself in the embrace of love. Only the fullness of innocence and childlikeness can for a moment refresh him. 204-205

A man enters upon his life, hoping that all will go well for him and with good wishes for others. He steps out into the world’s multiplicity, like one that comes from the country into the great noisy city, into the multiplicity where men engrossed in affairs hurry past one another, where each looks out for what belongs to him in the vast "back and forth," where everything is in passing, where it is as though at each instant one saw what he had learned borne out in practice, and in the same instant saw it refuted, without any cessation in the unrest of work, in multiplicity -- that all too vast a school of experience. For here one can experience everything possible, or that everything is possible, even what the inexperienced man would least believe, that the Good sits highest at the dinner table and crime next highest, or crime highest and the Good next highest -- in good company with each other. So this man stands there. He has in himself a susceptibility for the disease of double-mindedness. His feeling is purely immediate, his knowledge only strengthened through contemplation, his will not mature. Swiftly, alas, swiftly he is infected -- one more victim. This is nothing new, but an old story. As it has happened to him, so it has happened with the double-minded ones who have gone before him -- this in passing he now gives as his own excuse, for he has received the consecration of excuses.

Lord Jesus Christ, there is so much that will keep us back and draw us to itself. Everyone has something, and all of us much. But thou art eternally the most strong. Draw us then the more strongly to thee. We call thee our Deliverer, because thou didst come to the world to deliver us from all the bonds, the unworthy worries, which we put upon ourselves, and to break the heavy chains of our sins. We call thee Savior, that so thou mayest save us, and deliver us from all these things. For this was God’s will, which thou didst fulfill and make possible, even our sanctification. To this end thou didst descent to earth’s lowly meadows; and for this didst thou ascent up on high, in order to draw us unto thee.

We are not saying that knowing God or almost sinking into a dreaming admiration and a visionary contemplation of God is the only glorious thing to do; God does not let himself be taken in vain in this way. Just as knowing oneself in one’s own nothingness is the condition for knowing God, so knowing God is the condition for sanctification of a human being by God’s assistance and according to his intention. Wherever God is in truth, there he is always creating. He does not want a person to be spiritually soft and to bathe in the contemplation of his glory, but in becoming known by a person he wants to create in him a new human being.

Knowledge of the truth I may perhaps have attained to; happiness certainly not. What shall I do? Accomplish something in the world, men tell me. Shall I then publish my grief to the world, contribute one more proof for the wretchedness and misery of existence, perhaps discover a new flaw in human life, hitherto unnoticed? I might then reap the rare reward of becoming famous, like the man who discovered the spots on Jupiter. I prefer, however, to keep silent.

To be a teacher does not mean simply to affirm that such a thing is so, or to deliver a lecture, etc. No, to be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner, put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and the way he understands it.

I vow: as soon as possible to realize a plan envisaged for thirty years, to publish a logical system, as soon as possible to fulfill my promise, made ten years ago, of an esthetic system; furthermore, I promise an ethical and dogmatic system, and finally the system. As soon as this has appeared, generations to come will not even need to learn to write, because there will be nothing more to write; but only to read-the system.

A line by Thomas ? Kempis which perhaps could be used as a motto sometime. He says of Paul: Therefore he turned everything over to God, who knows all, and defended himself solely by means of patience and humility . . . . He did defend himself now and then so that the weak would not be offended by his silence. Book III, chapter 36, para. 2, or in my little edition, p. 131.

The apostle turns to the single individual in order to explain the condition that makes it possible for him to receive the good and perfect gift. This condition God himself has given, since otherwise the good would not be a gift. This condition is in turn itself a perfection, since otherwise the good would not be a perfect gift. Earthly need is no perfection but an imperfection. … but to need the good and perfect gift from God is a perfection; therefore the gift, which is intrinsically perfect, is also a perfect gift because the need is perfect. Before this need awakens in a person, there must be a great upheaval. All of doubt’s busy deliberation was mankind’s first attempt to find it. However long this continues, it is never finished, and yet it must be finished, ended, that is, broken off, before the single individual can be what the apostle calls the first fruit of creation. p. 136

Since reflection does not dare to set foot in the holy place of love and on the consecrated ground of immediacy, what direction shall it then take until it arrives at the resolution? Reflection turns toward the relation between falling in love and actuality. For the lover, the most certain of all things is that he is in love, and no meddlesome thoughts, no stockbrokers run back and forth between falling in love and a so-called ideal-that is a forbidden road. Nor does reflection inquire whether he should marry; he does not forget Socrates. But to marry is to enter an actuality in relation to a given actuality; to marry involves an extraordinary concretion. This concretion is the task of reflection. But is it perhaps so concrete (defined in terms of time, place, surroundings, the stroke of the clock, seventeen relationships, etc.) that no reflection can penetrate it? If this is assumed, one has thereby also assumed that, on the whole, no resolution is possible. A resolution is still always an ideality; I have the resolution before I begin to act in virtue of this resolution. But how, then, have I come to the resolution? A resolution is always reflective; if this is disregarded, then language is confused and resolution is identified with an immediate impulse, and any statement about resolution is no more an advancement than a journey in which one drives all night but takes the wrong road and in the morning arrives at the same place from which he departed. In a perfectly ideal reflection the resolution has ideally emptied actuality, and the conclusion of this ideal reflection, which is something more than the summa summarum [sum total] and enfin [finally], is precisely the resolution: the resolution is the ideality brought about through a perfectly ideal reflection, which is the action’s required working capital.

And how does the God’s existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity? Or have we not here an analogy to the behavior of the little Cartesian dolls? As soon as I let go of the doll it stands on its head. As soon as I let it go -- I must therefore let it go. So also with the proof. As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there. But this act of letting go is surely also something; it is indeed a contribution of mine. Must not this also be taken into the account, this little moment, brief as it may be -- it need not be long, for it is a leap. However brief this moment, if only an instantaneous now, this "now" must be included in the reckoning. Philosophical Fragments, Swenson, p. 32

In the life of the individual when love awakens it is older than everything else, because when it exists it seems as if it has existed for a long time; it presupposes itself back into the distant past until all searching ends in the inexplicable origin. Whereas all beginnings are ordinarily said to be difficult, this does not hold true of love’s beginning. Its happy awakening is unacquainted with work, and there is no advance preparation. Even if love can give birth to pain, it is not brought forth in pain; lightly, jubilantly, it bursts forth in its enigmatic coming into existence. What a wonderful beginning. But the life of freedom requires a beginning, and here a beginning is a resolution, and the resolution has its work and its pain-thus the beginning has its difficulty. The one making the resolution has, of course, not finished, because in that case he would have experienced that of which the resolution is the beginning. But if no resolution is made, the same thing can happen to such a person as sometimes happens to a speaker who only when he has finished speaking knows how he should have spoken: only when he has lived, only then does he know how he should have lived (what a sorry yield from life!) and how he should have made the beginning with the good resolution-what a bitter wisdom now that a whole life lies between the beginning and the one who is dying.

To God, world history is the royal stage where he, not accidentally but essentially, is the only spectator, because he is the only one who can be that. Admission to this theater is not open to any existing spirit. If he fancies himself a spectator there, he has simply forgetting that he himself is supposed to be the actor in that little theater and is to leave it to that royal spectator and poet how he wants to use him in that royal drama, The Drama of Dramas. This applies to the living, and only they can be told how they ought to live; and only by understanding this for oneself can one be lead to reconstruct a dead person’s life, if it must be done at all and if there is time for it. But it is indeed upsidedown, instead of learning by living one’s own life, to have the dead live again, then to go on wanting to learn from the dead, whom one regards as never having lived, how one ought-indeed, it is unbelievable how upside-down it is-to live-if one is already dead. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong p. 158

A random word collects a crowd; the easily bought victory makes them enthusiastic, but the more profound explanation puts them off, and if the price is what it must be in relation to the highest, then mockery gives the signal for retreat and gives the retreat the appearance of a glorious victory. Does not mockery always gain the highest at a bargain price! And yet how despicable to want to think that the price of the highest and most sacred, just like the price of temporal things, should be determined by an accident, by the scarcity or the abundance of the commodity in the country. On the other hand, how upbuilding it is to consider that this is not the case and that someone who fancies that he has bought the highest at a low price is simply mistaken, since the price is always the same. How sure and cheerful and resolute the soul becomes in the thought that no price is too high when that which one is buying is the highest.

The more one suffers, the more sense, I believe, one gains for the comic. Only by the most profound suffering does one gain real competence in the comic, which with a word magically transforms the rational creature called man into a Fratze [caricature]. This competence is like a policeman’s self-assurance when he abruptly grips his club and does not tolerate any talk or blocking of traffic. The victim protests, he objects, he insists on being respected as a citizen, he demands a hearing-immediately there is a second rap from the club, and that means: Please move on! Don’t stand there! In other words, to want to stand there to protest, to demand a hearing, is just a poor pathetic wretch’s attempt to really amount to something, but the comic turns the fellow around, just as the policeman who gets him turned around in a hurry and, by seeing him from behind, with the help of his club makes him comic. Yet this sense of the comic has to be acquired so painfully that one cannot quite wish to have it. But the sense of the comic presses in on me particularly every time my suffering brings me in contact with other people.

It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt a position: backwards.

Aristotle’s view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.

It also occurs again later in the life of Christ, that he was tempted in loneliness-while the apostles sleep. The same thing happens to us at those times when it seems as if all to whom we might have turned are sleeping too soundly and immovably to be roused by our cares. Then it is necessary to find a higher comfort.

What our age needs is an honest earnestness which affectionately preserves the tasks, which does not alarm people into wanting to rush pellmell into the highest but keeps the tasks young and beautiful and lovely to look at and beckoning to all and yet for all that difficult and inspiring to the noble, for the noble nature is inspired only by what is difficult. My listener, how did I dare to be so impolite as to doubt that I shall succeed in inspiring you — for I have the difficulties all ready.

It would be interesting to speculate upon the reputation that Kierkegaard might have attained, and the extent of the influence he might have exerted, if he had written in one of the major European languages, instead of in the tongue of one of the smallest countries in the world. An idealism more powerful and more consistent than that of either Emerson or Carlyle, a democratic individualism as thorough-going as the aristocratic individualism of Nietszche, and presented with an equally passionate intensity, an ethical voluntarism clothed in a literary form as persuasive as that of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and a species of pragmatism more carefully and thoroughly worked out than that of either James or Bergson these qualities must have attracted world-wide attention.