Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become one’s debtor.

Then the Comforter comes with the explanation; then he makes everything new, strips the sufferer of his mourning apparel and gives him a new heart and an assured spirit. It may, however, take time.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it. The Concept of Anxiety p. 44-45

**Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. I, Hong p. 353

Pride and cowardliness are one and the same because what is spoken under the name pride is ordinarily cowardliness. False pride conjures a high conception of one’s own worth. The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing, and he is actually struggling not with people but with God, because he wants to do it with his own power; he does not want to sneak out of something, what he wants is to set the task as high as possible and then to finish it by himself, satisfied with his own consciousness and his own approval. The proud person must concentrate all his thought in order to see the right; he must will it, because he is too proud to admit that people could be in the right in opposition to him, even if no one could convince him of that.

Every human being is only an instrument and does not know when the moment will come when he will be put aside. If he himself does not at times evoke this thought, he is a hireling, an unfaithful servant, who is trying to free himself and to cheat the Lord of the uncertainty in which he comprehends his own nothingness. That much in life is empty and worthless, people certainly do know, but how frequently the single individual makes an exception, and even the highest mission in the spiritual world is only an errand, and one who is equipped for it with all spiritual-intellectual gifts is only on an errand-but why is the sending out of angels so beautiful, inasmuch as they return again to God’s throne so speedily that they have no time to be tempted by the thought that they are taking care of their own affairs!

You have surely noticed among schoolboys, that the one that is regarded by all as the boldest is the one who has no fear of his father, who dares to say to the others, "Do you think I am afraid of him?" On the other hand, if they sense that one of their number is actually and literally afraid of his father, they will readily ridicule him a little. Alas, in men’s fear-ridden rushing together into a crowd (for why indeed does a man rush into a crowd except because he is afraid!) there, too, it is a mark of boldness not to be afraid, not even of God. And if someone notes that there is an individual outside the crowd who is really and truly afraid -- not of the crowd, but of God, he is sure to be the target of some ridicule. The ridicule is usually glossed over somewhat and it is said: a man should love God.Yes, to be sure, God knows that man’s highest consolation is that God is love and that man is permitted to love Him. But let us not become too forward, and foolishly, yes, blasphemously, dismiss the tradition of our fathers, established by God Himself: that really and truly a man should fear God. This fear is known to the man who is himself conscious of being an individual, and thereby is conscious of his eternal responsibility before God.

The actuality of action is so often confused with all sorts of ideas, intentions, preliminaries to resolutions, preludes of mood, etc. that there is very seldom any action at all.

If one person makes comprehensible to another something that is to his advantage in the temporal sense and the latter acts accordingly, then the former may be said to have brought it about. If, however, a person tries to make comprehensible to another his eternal well-being, this does not help straightaway in the same manner, inasmuch as the second still has not grasped the eternal on the basis of what the first said. If, however, he makes the eternal resolution and in it grasps the eternal, then he owes no one anything, not the speaker either.

Is it not a good deed to restrain the arm of someone who wants to commit a misdeed, and is it not also a good deed to restrain the judgment of someone who wants to misjudge and cannot judge otherwise if acknowledgment of the good does not prevent it? Much wrong can be done to a person, but perhaps the worst is to come with belated repentance over a rash, unjust judgment that one nevertheless has oneself helped to occasion. As you can see, if this happens, if a person goes astray in this way by doing the good, he can thank himself and cowardliness, because God gives a spirit of power of love, and of self-control. […] Do not do the good ashamedly and with downcast eyes, as if you were walking a forbidden road, acknowledge it even though you are ashamed because you always feel your own imperfection and lower your eyes before God. Venture it in trust in God. Let each one acknowledge the good, renewed in his resolution, never led astray by any jugglery that it is more difficult to serve the good when one is misjudged. How would it help for it to be more difficult if it was also less true or for it to be more difficult for many if it was easier for him?

I approach the presentation of Kierkegaard with some trepidation. Next to Nietzsche, or rather, prior to Nietzsche, I consider him to be the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age.

Abstraction does not care about whether a particular existing human being is immortal, and just that is the difficulty. It is disinterested, but the difficulty of existence is the existing person’s interest, and the existing person is infinitely interested in existing. Thus abstract thinking helps me with my immortality by killing me as a particular existing individual and then making me immortal and therefore helps somewhat as in Holberg the doctor took the patient’s life with his medicine, but drove out the fever. Therefore, when one considers an abstract thinker who is unwilling to make clear to himself and to admit the relation his abstract thinking has to his being an existing person, he makes a comic impression, even if he is ever so distinguished, because he is about to cease to be a human being. Whereas an actual human being, composed of the infinite and the finite and infinitely interested in existing, has his actuality precisely in holding these together, such an abstract thinker is a double creature, a fantastic creature who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and an at times pitiful professorial figure which that abstract creature sets down just as one sets down a cane.

Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person. At the point where the road swings off (and where that is cannot be stated objectively, since it is precisely subjectivity), objective knowledge is suspended. Objectively he then has only uncertainty, but this is precisely what intensifies the infinite passion of inwardness, and truth is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite. I observe nature in order to find God, and I do indeed see omnipotence and wisdom, but I also see much that troubles and disturbs. The sum total of this is an objective uncertainty, but the inwardness is so very great, precisely because it grasps this objective uncertainty with all the passion of the infinite. In a mathematical proposition, for example, the objectivity is given, but therefore its truth is also an indifferent truth.

What is the issue of the struggle? That God is goodness? Not at all. That God is love? Not at all. No, it is a matter of making oneself clear to God, of truly explaining to him what is beneficial for the one who is praying, of truly impressing it upon his mind, of truly gaining his consent to the wish. And the struggle is well intentioned toward God, because it is about truly being able to be happy in God, truly being able to give him thanks, truly being able to witness to his honor, truly being able to be assured that all fatherliness lives in heaven, about being truly being able to love him-as people do indeed say when they designate the ultimate, to love as much as one loves God. And the struggler is open toward God, because he dares to testify to himself that he is not a child, does not fragment his soul so that he wishes for one thing this minute and something else the next, so that when the fulfillment arrives he has thoughtlessly forgotten the wish-no, there is only the one. He dares to testify to himself that he is straining all his understanding to become sufficiently foresighted to spy the remotest hint of the fulfillment, that he is straining every thought to conjure forth from the most insignificant event anything it could be hiding, that he welcomes with thanksgiving any hint and invites it to stay. If he catches himself becoming lukewarm and falling away from God, he is not slow to repent and is quick to struggle again in prayer.

Blessed is the person who could truthfully say: God in heaven was my first love; blessed is the person whose life was a beneficent strengthening of his love; blessed is the person who, even though in his life he made the mistake of taking the outer instead of the inner, even though his soul in many ways was ensnared by the world, yet was again renewed in the inner being by turning back to his God. p. 101

One person talks day in and day out in general assemblies and always about what the times demand, yet not repetitiously in a Cato-like, tedious way, but always interestingly and intriguingly he follows the moment and never says the same thing; at parties, too, he imposes himself and doles out his fund of eloquence, at times with full even measure, at times heaped up, and always to applause; at least once a week there is something about him in the newspaper; also at night he bestows his favors, on his wife, that is, by talking even in his sleep about the demands of the times as if he were at the general assembly. Another person is silent before he speaks and goes so far that he does not speak at all; they live the same length of time-and here the question of the result is raised: Who has more to recollect?

Since Christ is the absolute it is easy to see that in relation to him there is only one situation-the situation of contemporaneity. Christ is revealed only to faith. … The qualification that is lacking-which is the qualification of truth (as inwardness) and of all religiousness is-for you. The past is not actuality-for me. Only the contemporary is actuality for me. That with which you are living simultaneously is actuality-for you. Thus, every human being is able to become contemporary only with the time in which he is living-and then with one more, with Christ’s life upon earth, for Christ’s life upon earth, the sacred history, stands alone by itself, outside history. History you can read and hear about as about the past; here you can if it so pleases you, judge by the outcome. But Christ’s life on earth is not a past; it did not wait at the time, eighteen hundred years ago, and does not wait now for the assistance of the outcome. A historical Christianity is nonsense and un-Christian muddled thinking, because whatever true Christians there are in any generation are contemporary with Christ, have nothing to do with Christians in past generations but everything to do with the contemporary Christ. Christ’s life on earth has an eternal contemporaneity. … If you cannot prevail upon yourself to become a Christian in the situation of contemporaneity with him, or if he cannot move you to draw you to himself in the situation of contemporaneity, then you will never become a Christian.

"Is changingness indeed a stronger power than changelessness, and who is the stronger, the one who says, “If you will not love me, then I will hate you,” or the one who says, “If you hate me, I will still continue to love you”?" "The one who loves presupposes that love is in the other person’s heart and by this very presupposition builds up love in him – from the ground up, provided, of course, that in love he presupposes its presence in the ground." "There is nothing, no ‘thus and so,’ that can unconditionally be said to demonstrate unconditionally the presence of love or to demonstrate unconditionally its absence..." "Thus even giving to charity, visiting the widow, and clothing the naked do not truly demonstrate or make known a person’s love, inasmuch as one can do works of love in an unloving way, yes, even in a self-loving way." "The self-deceived person may even think he is able to console others who became victims of perfidious deception, but what insanity when someone who himself has lost the eternal wants to heal the person who is extremely sick unto death!" "Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love." ... So a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love." Every human being by his life, by his conduct, by his behavior in everyday affairs, by his association with his peers, by his words, his remarks, should and could build up and would do it if love were really present in him." "Only the unloving person fancies that he should build up by controlling the other; the one who loves presupposes continually that love is present and in just that way he builds up." "The one who loves builds up by controlling himself." "It is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, he who himself is Love. Thus it is specifically unloving and not at all upbuilding if someone arrogantly deludes himself into believing that he wants and is able to create love in another person." "Truly, love is to be known by its fruit, but still it does not follow from this that you are to take it upon yourself to be the expert knower. " "If it is usually difficult to begin without presuppositions, it is truly most difficult of all to begin to build up with the presupposition that love is present and to end with the same presupposition." Works of Love Hong 1995 Princeton University Press p. 34, 216-217, 13-14, 7-10, 213-217, 15, 218

In the external world, he is capable of nothing; but in the internal world, is he not capable of anything there, either? If a capability is actually to be a capability, it must have opposition, because if it has no opposition, then it is either all-powerful or something imaginary. But if he is supposed to have opposition, from whence is it supposed to come? In the internal world the opposition can only come from himself. Then he struggles with himself in the internal world, not as previously, where the deeper self struggled with the first self to prevent it from being occupied with the external. If a person does not discover this conflict, his understanding is faulty and consequently his life is imperfect; but if he does discover it, then he will once again understand that he himself is capable of nothing at all. Every time a person properly comprehends this brief and pithy truth, that he himself is capable of nothing at all, then he knows himself.