Soren Aabye Kierkegaard

Only the person himself understands that he is guilty. The person who does not understand it this way still misunderstands; and the person who does understand it will find the harsh or gentle or quickly sympathizing explanation, according to what he has deserved. … And you, my listener, you of course know that earnestness is to be alone before the Holy One, whether it is the world’s applause that is shut out or whether it is the world’s accusation that withdraws. Did the woman who was a sinner feel her guilt more deeply when the scribes were accusing her than when there was no accuser anymore and she stood alone before the Lord! But you also realize that the most dangerously deceived person is the one who is self-deceived, that the most dangerous condition is that of the one who is deceived by much knowledge, and, furthermore, that it is a lamentable weakness to have one’s consolation in another’s light-mindedness, but it is also a lamentable weakness to have one’s terror from another’s heavy-mindedness. Leave it solely to God-after all, he knows best how to take care of everything for one who becomes alone by seeking him.

If the speculative thinker explains the paradox in such a way that he cancels it and now consciously knows that it is canceled, that consequently the paradox is not the essential relation of eternal essential truth to an existing person in the extremities of existence, but only an accidental relative relation to limited minds-then there is an essential difference between the speculative thinker and the simple person, whereby all existence is fundamentally confused. God is insulted by obtaining a group of hangers-on, a support staff of good minds, and humankind is vexed because there is not an equal relationship with God for all human beings. The religious formula set forth above for the difference between the simple person’s knowledge and the simple wise person’s knowledge of the simple, that the difference is a meaningless trifle, that the wise person knows that he knows or knows that he does not know what the simple person knows-speculation does not respect the formula at all. Nor does it respect the equality implicit in the difference between the wise person and the simple person-that they know the same thing.

The result of an education by novels and romances can be two-fold. Either the individual sinks deeper and deeper into illusion, or he emerges from it and loses faith in the illusion, but gains a belief in mystification. In the illusion the individual is hidden from himself; in mystification, he is hidden from others, but both cases are results of a romantic training.

imagine a child sitting and drawing with a pencil, drawing whatever occurs to a child, whatever a child recklessly and disconnectedly dashes off; but behind the child stands an invisible artist who guides his hand so that the drawing that is about to become disordered submits to the law of beauty, so that the line that is about to go astray is called back within the boundary of beauty-imagine the child’s amazement! Or imagine that child puts his drawing aside in the evening, but while he sleeps a friendly hand finishes the jumbled and poorly begun sketch-imagine a child’s wonder when he sees his drawing again in the morning! So also with a person; let us never forget that even the more mature person always retains some of the child’s lack of judgment, especially if the prayer is to assist the explanation, not as the essential but as the means.

The same thing that happened to the greatest among those born of women also happens to lesser ones; what happens in the unique decision also happens in the lesser ones, and the words are not profanely used by learning from them to compose oneself in the lesser situation of one’s own life.

The only person I actually manage to learn anything from is a long way from being in my service. Yet we have a secret understanding. He knows everything; he is perhaps the most dependable of all. Fortunately he hates me. If possible, he will torture me-indeed, that I understand. He never says anything directly, never mentions any names, but he tells me such strange stories. At first, I did not understand him at all, but now I know that he is talking about her but using fictitious names. He believes I have sufficient imagination to understand every illusion, and this I do, but I also have enough sense to pass it off as nothing. Yet I must count on his being malevolent.

As do all who suffer from fixed ideas, it has a strong tendency to see espionage and persecution everywhere, and just as rheumatic people feel drafts everywhere, so does it sense pressure everywhere, the misuse of power, and knows how to explain in a satisfying way the feeble signs of life in the public spirit not on the basis that its strength is merely symptomatic and imaginary but on the basis that it is cowed by governments, somewhat as the Busybody explains that he accomplishes nothing during the day, not on the basis that he is fussy and fidgety but on the basis of the many affairs that burst in on him. ** Stages on Life's Way, Hong p. 466 (1845)

all who are expecting do have one thing in common, that they are expecting something in the future, because expectancy and the future are inseparable ideas. The person who is expecting something is occupied with the future. p. 16

Of all ridiculous things, it seems to me the most ridiculous is to be a busy man of affairs, prompt to meals, and prompt to work. Hence when I see a fly settle down in a crucial moment on the nose of a business man, or see him bespattered by a carriage which passes by him in even greater haste, or a drawbridge opens before him, or a tile from the roof falls down and strikes him dead, then I laugh heartily. And who could help laughing? What do they accomplish, these hustlers? Are they not like the housewife, when her house was on fire, who in her excitement saved the fire-tongs? What more do they save from the great fire of life?

Some years ago at a specific hour of the day, a tall, slender man could be seen walking with measured steps back and forth on the flagstones in the southern section of Overgaden over Vandet. Hardly anyone failed to notice the peculiarity in his walks, for the distance he covered was so short that even the uninitiated were bound to become aware of him, that he did not enter shops and that he was not, like others, out for a stroll either. Anyone who observed him frequently could see in his gait an image of the force of habit. … He was, of course, well known in the whole neighborhood, but even though he was mentally disordered, he was never exposed to any insult; on the contrary, the neighbors treated him with a certain respect. Conducive to this were his wealth and also his charitableness and his attractive appearance. It is true that his countenance had the impassive expression characteristic of a certain kind of mental disorder, but his features were handsome, his figure erect and well formed, his attire very meticulous, even elegant. Moreover, his mental disorder manifested itself most clearly only in the forenoon between eleven and twelve o’clock, when he paced the flagstones between Bornehaus [Orphanage] Bridge and the south end of the street. The rest of the day he presumably spent trailing after his unhappy concern, but it did not express itself in this way. he spoke with people, went on longer strolls, involved himself in many things, but between eleven and twelve o’clock no one for all the world could stop him from walking, make him walk farther, answer any questions, or even respond to a greeting-he who otherwise was courtesy itself. … The conduct of the nearby residents toward him was almost reminiscent of the conduct of the Indians toward a mentally disordered person, whom they venerated as a wise man, in private they possibly had many conjectures as to the cause of his misfortune. It happens not infrequently that by this kind of conjecturing the so-called sagacious people betray just as much disposition to lunacy or perhaps more foolishness than anyone mentally disordered. The so-called sagacious people are often so stupid as to believe everything a lunatic says, and not infrequently stupid enough to believe that everything he says is lunacy, although many a time no one is more cunning at hiding what he wants to hide than a mentally disordered person, and although many a word from him contains a wisdom of which the wisest need not be ashamed. This no doubt explains how the same view that thinks that in the governance of existence a grain of sand or an accident determines the outcome can hold also in psychology, for it is the same view if one sees no deeper cause for insanity but regards insanity as easily explained by nothing, just as mediocre actors believe that acting the role of an intoxicated person is the easiest of tasks, which is true only if one is sure of having a mediocre audience to see the acting.

The self that is the objective is not only a personal self but a social, a civic self. He then possesses himself as a task in an activity whereby he engages in the affairs of life as this specific personality. Here his task is not to form himself but to act, and yet he forms himself at the same time, because, as I noted above, the ethical individual lives in such a way that he is continually transferring himself from one stage to another.

For whoever has what he has from the God himself clearly has it at first hand; and he who does not have it from the God himself is not a disciple. Let us assume that it is otherwise, that the contemporary generation of disciples had received the condition from the God, and that the subsequent generations were to receive it from these contemporaries -- what would follow?

The art in all communication is to come as close as possible to actuality, to contemporaries in the role of readers, and yet at the same time to have the distance of a point of view, the reassuring, infinite distance of ideality from them. Papers VII B 325

"Christianity cannot be poured into a child. No one begins with being Christian; each one becomes that in the fullness of time-if one becomes that. A strict Christian upbringing in Christianity’s decisive categories is a very venturesome undertaking, because Christianity makes men whose strength is in their weakness: but if a child is cowed into Christianity in its totally earnest form, it ordinarily makes a very unhappy youth. The rare exception is a sort of luck."

That which is true in this whole development, the genuinely esthetic, is that love is situated in striving, that this feeling is seen to be battling its way through an opposition. The defect is that this battle, this dialectic, is completely external and that love emerges from this battle just as abstract as when it entered into it. As soon as the idea of love’s proper dialectic awakens, the idea of its passionate struggle, of its relation to the ethical, the religious, then in truth there will be no need for hardhearted fathers or maiden bowers or enchanted princesses or trolls and monsters in order to give love an opportunity to show how much it can do. In our day, we seldom encounter such cruel fathers or such horrible monsters, and therefore insofar as modern literature has patterned itself on past literature, it actually is money that has become the medium of opposition through which love moves, and so we again drudge through four acts if there are sound prospects that a rich uncle may die in the fifth. Either/Or Part 2 p.18

In vain do individual great men seek to mint new concepts and to set them in circulation — it is pointless. They are used for only a moment, and not by many, either, and they merely contribute to making the confusion even worse, for one idea seems to have become the fixed idea of the age: to get the better of one's superior. If the past may be charged with a certain indolent self-satisfaction in rejoicing over what it had, it would indeed be a shame to make the same charge against the present age (the minuet of the past and the gallop of the present). Under a curious delusion, the one cries out incessantly that he has surpassed the other, just as the Copenhageners, with philosophic visage, go out to Dyrehausen "in order to see and observe," without remembering that they themselves become objects for the others, who have also gone out simply to see and observe. Thus there is the continuous leap-frogging of one over the other — "on the basis of the immanent negativity of the concept", as I heard a Hegelian say recently, when he pressed my hand and made a run preliminary to jumping. — When I see someone energetically walking along the street, I am certain that his joyous shout, "I am coming over," is to me — but unfortunately I did not hear who was called (this actually happened); I will leave a blank for the name, so everyone can fill in an appropriate name.

But more positively in the service of the truth has Soren Kierkegaard worked. I feel my inability to give a correct idea of the rich authorship of this champion of Christianity, who has found a better conductor to the truth than the philosophers of our time. Having long lost sight of his writings, it is with distrust I attempt to give a sketch of them. The intelligent classes in Denmark and Norway having long and painfully felt the deficiency of the established religion to satisfy their spiritual wants, they were looking in vain for a word that would solve the problems of life. Then sounded a voice through Europe-“The spirit of the times rules the world,” and “To think is to be.” “Yes, this must be the truth,” was echoed from thousands of hearts; “the great Hegel has said it.” All rejoiced: “Broken for ever is the chain of the church-the schools of science are the right churches, the thought is the true Messias. That man who dares to contradict this, has no right to be called a man, he is only a brute.” Even from the pulpits these new dogmas were taught and explained, and the Word interpreted according to them. But they were not long to remain in the uninterrupted enjoyment of this. While all appeared glad and happy, at once a flood of writings fell on the public-“Either, or,”-”Fear and Tremor,”-“The Reiteration,”-“The Idea of Dread,”-“The Proviso,”-“Philosophic Crumbs,”-“States of Life,”:-“Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs,” and some others. With great erudition, psychological acuteness, remarkable dialectical and logical power,-with almost unequalled command of language, together with a great amount of Christian experience,-they uncover the dark recesses of the human heart, and throw light therein from the Holy Word. Following the philosophers of our time, step by step, they show the psychological consequences of the new doctrines; and after having, in this way, shown what Christianity is not, in his book entitled “Works of Love,” he explains what it really is.

There was a thinker who became a hero by his death; he said that he could demonstrate the existence of God with a single straw.

When whatever causes person to despair occurs, it is immediately evident that he has been in despair his whole life.

But on the other hand, the understanding, reflection, is also a gift of God. What shall one do with it, how dispose of it if one is not to use it? And if one then uses it in fear and trembling not for one’s own advantage but to serve the truth, if one uses it that way in fear and trembling and furthermore believing that it still is God who determines the issue in its eternal significance, venturing to trust in him, and with unconditional obedience yielding to what he makes use of it: is this not fear of God and serving God the way a person of reflection can, in the somewhat different way than the spontaneously immediate person, but perhaps more ardently. But if this is the case, does not a maieutic element enter into the relation to other man or to various other men. The maieutic is really only the expression for a superiority between man and man. That is exists cannot be denied-but existence presses far more powerfully upon the superior one precisely because he is a maieutic (because he has the responsibility) than upon the other. As far as I am concerned, there has been no lack of witnesses. All my upbuilding discourses are in fact in the form of direct communication. Consequently there can be a question only about this, something that has occupied me for a long time (already back in earlier journals): should I for one definitely explain myself as author, what I declare myself to be, how I from the beginning understood myself to be a religious author. But now is not the time to do it; I am also somewhat strained at the moment, I need more physical recreation.