Kierkegaard's Concept of Existence

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

Marquette Studies in Philosophy Andrew Tallon, editor Harry Klocker, S.J. William of Ockham and the Divine Freedom Margaret Monahan Hogan. Finality and Marriage Gerald A. McCool, S.J. The Neo-Thomists Max Scheler. Ressentiment Knud Løgstrup. Metaphysics Howard P. Kainz. Democracy and the Kingdom of God Manfred Frings. Max Scheler: A Concise Introduction into the World of a Great Thinker G. Heath King. Existence Thought Style: Perspectives of a Primary Relation, portrayed through the work of Søren Kierkegaard Augustine Shutte. Philosophy for Africa Paul Ricoeur. Key to Husserl’s Ideas I Karl Jaspers. Reason and Existenz Gregory R. Beabout. Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair Manfred S. Frings. The Mind of Max Scheler. The First Comprehensive Guide Based on the Complete Works Claude Pavur. Nietzsche Humanist Pierre Rousselot. Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on The Broken World Karl-Otto Apel. Towards a Transformation of Philosophy Michael Gelven. This Side of Evil William Sweet, editor. The Bases of Ethics Gene Fendt. Is Hamlet a Religious Drama? An Essay on a Question in Kierkegaard Pierre Rousselot. The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages. A Historical Contribution Jan Herman Brinks. Paradigms of Political Change: Luther, Frederick II, and Bismarck. The GDR on Its Way to German Unity Margaret Monahan Hogan. Marriage As a Relationship Gabriel Marcel. Awakenings Roger Burggraeve. The Wisdom of Love in the Service of Love Jules Toner. Love and Friendship Anton Pannekoek. Lenin As Philosopher. A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism Gregor Malantschuk. Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence Gregor Malantschuk

Edited and Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong

Marquette Studies in Philosophy No. 35 Series Editor, Andrew Tallon Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Malantschuk, Gregor. [Fra Individ til den Enkelte. English] Kierkegaard’s concept of existence / by Gregor Malantschuk ; edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. p. cm. — (Marquette studies in philosophy ; no. 35) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87462-658-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855—Ethics. 2. Liberty. 3. Self (Philosophy) I. Hong, Howard Vincent, 1912– II. Hong, Edna Hatlestad, 1913– III. Title. IV. Marquette studies in philosophy ; #35. B4378.E8M3413 2003 198'.9—dc21 2002155431 English translation © 2003 by Postscript, Inc. [Translation of: Fra Individ til den Enkelte]

All rights reserved. Marquette University Press 2003

Table of Contents Preface

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The Way from an Individual to a Self

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The Rejection of Predestination and Determinism 11 The Concrete Actuality of the Human Person 16 The Movement of Irony 23 The Central Issues of Philosophy 27 The Three Aspects of Ethics 30 Judge William’s Accounting with the Esthetic 39 The Rationale of Pseudonymity 43 The Relation of Freedom to Repetition 53 The Conflict between the Individual and the Universal 57 Two Foundations: The Immanent and the Transcendent 67 The Psychological Presuppositions for Freedom 73 Freedom and Guilt 81 Subjective Actuality, Freedom and the Ethical 86 Becoming Christian 94 The Ethical and Religious Aspects in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 106 The Threat of Leveling 119 “That Single Individual”

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The Personal Ethical and Religious Aspects 123 The Social Aspect of Ethics: The Relation to the Neighbor Christian Love in Action 146 The Christian’s Struggle and the Voluntary 154 The Increased Claims of Martyrdom 160

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Gregor Malantschuk Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

The Self ’s Revolt against Faith: the Forms of Despair and Offense 164 The Accounting with the Christianity of Christendom The “Most Difficult Issues”

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Freedom and Necessity 188 The Race and the Single Individual 190 Time and Eternity 197 God’s Omnipotence and Human Freedom 203 Christ as the Paradox and the Highest Ethical Ideal

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Philosophy and Theology in the Light of Kierkegaard’s Existential Thinking 226 The Relation between Faith and Knowledge 226 Kant and Idealistic Systems 232 The Limitations of the Natural Sciences 250 Kierkegaard’s Perspectives on the Future 255 Notes

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Index Bibliography

297 311

Abbreviations Used KW refers to Kierkegaard’s Writings, I-XXVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978-2000. SV refers to Søren Kierkegaards samlede Værker, I-XIV. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901-1906. JP refers to Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, I-VII. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978. Pap. refers to Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, I-XI3 and supplemental volumes XII-XVI. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909-1948 and 1968-1978.

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Preface

T

he objective of this book is to review the complex of issues in Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of existence. It is evident that for Kierkegaard existence is always composed of three elements: namely, the subject, freedom, and the ethical. In the process of clarifying the relation between these three elements in the different stages of existence, the course of the development the individual must go through in order to become the single individual is described. The study falls into four parts. The first section describes the levels in existence on which a person attempts by his own powers to actualize the ethical ideals; in this stage the center of gravity for a person’s effort still lies within the bounds of immanence. The second section describes a person’s ethical and religious growth as it develops in relation to a transcendent power, whose highest expression is Christ as the revelation of God. The third section discusses the issues in existence that Kierkegaard himself designated as the most difficult of all for human thought. The last section points to the highest existential position to which philosophy in the broader sense and Christianity respectively can take a person. Kierkegaard utilizes these positions as a standard for evaluating existence within immanence and for Christian existence. This study is supplemented by an examination of the psychological and anthropological presuppositions of freedom and ethics. It gives me pleasure to be able to express here my gratitude to the Danish Humanities Research Council for supporting the preparation of this study and for encouraging the English edition. My thanks also to Grethe Kjær for her help in transcribing the manuscript and in reading the proofs. The English title has been formulated by me and the translators. Gregor Malantschuk

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

The Way from an Individual to a Self

The Rejection of Predestination and Determinism

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n Søren Kierkegaard’s whole authorship the center of his interest is the question of concrete human existence with its possibilities and tasks. Thus in one way or another all his writings involve the issues of existence. He tried to look at existence not only from every possible point of view but also took into consideration the many different forms it assumes in the different stages of spiritual development. In so doing he worked out the connecting lines of development that eventually formed the thoroughgoing basis for the structure of his writing. What is distinctive, however, about Kierkegaard is that he did not arrive at his penetrating understanding of existence solely through consistent dialectical reflection, but in his attempt to describe the complex of issues related to existence he drew upon sad and difficult personal experiences, plus the experiences he could borrow from his insight into other people’s psychical and spiritual situations and conflicts. Kierkegaard very early realized that human existence consists essentially of three elements: the subject (the self ), freedom, and the ethical—constituted in such a way that in his freedom the subject must continually make ethical choices. But this also means that existence always involves movement. Therefore, from the beginning Kierkegaard was interested in “motion,”1 and it is significant that of the four motions mentioned by Aristotle2 Kierkegaard focused on the movement that expresses the transition from possibility to actuality. In this movement there is for Kierkegaard the question of free-

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dom, which initiates the movement, and also of the ethical as the goal that is to be actualized. This is very clearly confirmed by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in his attempt3 to solve the issue of existence. His apparently merely dialectical exercises, which with the help of consistent thinking aim to erect a “scala paradisi [ladder of paradise],”4 are in fact also prototypes for existential movements. The best indication for this is that Kierkegaard uses, as the prototype for the step-by-step movement, the monk Johannes Climacus’s Scala Paradisi,5which is primarily an instructive guide to how a person, through freedom’s decisions, may move step by step toward the ethical and religious. The clearest evidence that for Kierkegaard movement and freedom are closely linked is found in some of his early journal entries. By means of them we are able to see how the issue of existence and the issues related to human freedom and the ethical continually intertwine. But at the same time these entries show that from his earliest youth a solution to these questions was personally important to Kierkegaard. The issue that in this connection occupied Kierkegaard most in the beginning was a “strict doctrine of predestination.”6 The external occasion for this was Kierkegaard’s reading of Schleiermacher’s Der Christliche Glaube.7 His very first entries, dating from the spring of 1834, clearly indicate his intense interest in this issue.8 Kierkegaard quickly perceived that the doctrine of predestination in its strictest form does justice neither to man nor to Christianity’s conception of God. Since God, according to the doctrine of predestination, determines everything, “the origin of evil”9 must also be traced back to God, and as for human beings, by denying the possibility of “human freedom”10 this doctrine renders it impossible for a person to be responsible before God. According to Kierkegaard, “the concept: predestination” “must be regarded as a thoroughgoing abortion.”11 On the basis of the doctrine of predestination, God cannot be regarded as a concrete, living, and active reality who can again and again intervene in the course of the world and in the activities of the individual human being, but can be regarded only as a power totally bound to his own fixed plan. Then everything occurs according to an inexorable necessity, and ethical responsibility in human existence is thereby

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nullified. Kierkegaard could not come to terms with this abstract view of the relationship between God and man, and he tried to find a solution in which the idea of God’s omniscience and omnipotence is maintained and at the same time room is left for the possibility of choice by human beings. In several journal entries Kierkegaard points out that “God’s foreknowledge” can very well be joined with human freedom.12 Subsequently Kierkegaard levels his criticism at the interpretation of a particular expression (in Paul’s Letter to the Romans) from which he thought far-reaching conclusions were erroneously drawn. “The error in the doctrine of predestination, which one will finally find in the N. T. if one is misled by a single word such as provqesi~ [purpose, design] (for example, Romans 8:28), consists in this: provqesi~ means a preconceived plan, to be sure, but this is to be interpreted to mean the whole of Christianity; its manifestation in its wholeness was decided from eternity; the individual, on the other hand, is called according to a doctrine whose whole relation to time is defined from eternity, but in such a way that his call is not enunciated from eternity.”13 Consequently Kierkegaard distinguishes between a “preconceived plan” for the salvation of human beings and the individual’s particular call from Christ in temporality, a call that by a person’s choice becomes either his salvation or his damnation. In this way Kierkegaard hopes to unite the idea of a preconceived plan by God with the possibility of human freedom. Also in another journal entry, where Kierkegaard speaks of “the real solution of the problem of predestination,” he stresses the call in temporality. Here Kierkegaard fastens particularly on the phrase “quos vocavit [those called]” (Romans 8:30). Whether people are “chosen to salvation or are damned” is not determined until they have entered into relationship with Christianity. In so saying, Kierkegaard points out that the possibility of choice lies in the person. To be called applies, then, only to the person “in whose consciousness Christianity has come into relation to the rest of his life-view.” In these reflections Kierkegaard shows that this conception can be united with Schleiermacher’s idea of “relative predestination.”14 In his otherwise strict adherence to Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, Schleiermacher maintains that the damnation or salvation of individuals occurs for

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Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

each one at a predetermined point of time in the world-historical development. But Schleiermacher goes so far that he first regards the historical development in the category of necessity and, second, believes that every individual is first of all judged but subsequently is also saved.15 Thus even if Kierkegaard’s conclusion of predestination approximates Schleiermacher’s idea of relative predestination, that the judgment and regeneration of the individual are not from eternity but occur only in the historical process, consequently in temporality, Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher go separate ways. For Kierkegaard it is important at all times to stress the human being’s freedom and the possibility of choice, whereas for Schleiermacher the idea of predestination ends in a necessary development. Thus it is understandable that on this basis Kierkegaard can compare Schleiermacher to Hegel.16 In other words, Kierkegaard believes that Schleiermacher’s idea of “infinite sin and infinite satisfaction” means that the individual must go through a necessary development in time, which is exactly what “the system” maintains.17 Kierkegaard also speaks of “Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as remaining in pantheism”18—which again is analogous to Hegel. The doctrine of predestination locks [lukke] a person in an inexorable, necessary context and thereby excludes [udelukke] freedom’s possibility in humankind. As we have seen, Kierkegaard tried to show that the attempt to base this doctrine on Scripture depended upon a misinterpretation. In so doing, he believed he had eliminated the first obstacle to a true conception of a person’s relationship to God. But in addition to the strict doctrine of predestination, which arose out of the premises of Christianity and therefore primarily involved a person’s salvation, Kierkegaard also encountered the consistent determinism that in Kierkegaard’s day was elaborated in Hegel’s system and that we have seen Kierkegaard compared to Schleiermacher’s doctrine of predestination. As early as 1836 Kierkegaard attacked this form of predestination also, even though in this case it does not involve a person’s salvation or damnation, which cannot have a place in a philosophical system, but involves the development of the idea in the historical process. On the basis of an ethical and religious view, Kierkegaard also had to reject Hegel’s concept of everything’s occur-

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ring in the category of necessity. In a substantiation of this rejection, Kierkegaard says: What about the theory that the course of world events is an inevitable development, and how does this theory work in life? Must it not paralyze all activity, inasmuch as it abolishes not only the obviously egotistical but also the natural and enthusiastic assurance, at least in the moment of battle, that what one is working for is the one right thing? Or is this philosophy practicable only for the past, so that it teaches me to solve its riddle and then lets present life stand again as a riddle that the following generation has to solve. But of what use is this philosophy to me? And are those who like this philosophy in a position to resign and let the world go its crooked way, and what is one to think about them? Is it their fault or the system’s?19

Kierkegaard also perceived that because of this necessary development the “system” must be “Calvinistic.”20 The difference, however, between the doctrine of predestination and Hegel’s system is that while predestination concerns a person’s eternal salvation or damnation, Hegel’s system is determinative for a person only in the temporal, in the course of world events, because Hegel’s philosophy remains exclusively within immanence.21 But both the doctrine of predestination and Hegel’s system take ethical responsibility away from human beings, because existence is determined, and by pointing out the weaknesses in these two prominent and consistently thought-out conceptions of human existence, which thereby do not provide space for the possibility of human freedom, Kierkegaard tried to clear the way for an unprejudiced and comprehensive study of all the issues related to the relation between existence and freedom.

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The Concrete Actuality of the Human Person Kierkegaard’s further consideration of the issue of freedom comes in connection with his exploration into and explanation of the existential levels in a person’s spiritual development. He joins the question of freedom and existence with the question of human nature, the definition and spiritual potentialities of being human. Kierkegaard’s point of departure for an understanding of humankind is the concept that the human person is a composite (synthesis) of two opposite qualities, a conception he could have arrived at in reading the New Testament (for example, Romans 8:5, I Corinthians 2:14 and 15:44), but in all probability also through Professor H. N. Clausen’s lectures on dogmatics in 1834-35, in the section on “Christian Anthropology,” in which with the support of many passages from the Bible Clausen spoke of the contrast between the soul as the “higher, inalienable nobility” and “the soul’s capacities for thinking and selfdetermination” on the one hand and “the corruptible body” on the other hand.22 Furthermore, Martensen’s lectures on “Speculative Dogmatics” in 1838-39 no doubt gave impetus to Kierkegaard for a closer study of the human person as a synthesis of two opposites, also from the point of view of freedom/necessity. In his discussion of Augustine’s system, Martensen stressed that, “according to Augustine’s view, the determination of a human being’s action in particular instances depends upon the person’s total state: if it is good, one cannot do otherwise than to will the good. Thus freedom and necessity are a unity; there is a beata necessitas boni [happy necessity of good] or a misera nec. mali [miserable necessity of evil].23 But the most perfect expression of this unity of freedom and necessity is the practice of love; therefore love can be defined precisely as “the unity of freedom and necessity.”24 In Martensen’s lectures, Kierkegaard was simultaneously confronted with the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius on “libertas indifferentiae [freedom of the indifferent]”25 and its wider ramifications. Of primary importance to Kierkegaard, however, was the fact that he now had the formula “the unity of freedom and necessity,” which thereafter was decisively important to him in defining human existence on its various levels of development.

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Because of his studies from the autumn of 1839 to the summer of 1840 in preparation for university examinations, Kierkegaard had no time to explore these questions more deeply. Nor do we have any journal entries from this period. But the fact is that the first journal entries Kierkegaard wrote after completing his theological examinations on July 3, 1840, take up for methodical and basic treatment the question of freedom and the formula of a human being as a synthesis of freedom and necessity. We shall now sketch the course of Kierkegaard’s attempt to find a solution to the question of freedom and existence such that his own experiences and the testimony of others in regard to free will, human responsibility, and the manifold manifestations of freedom and existence could be placed altogether in a larger context. Precisely this, that in solving this question Kierkegaard uses his own personal experiences and those of others, has the result that all his investigations tend toward concrete actuality and away from abstract speculations. At the same time Kierkegaard deals more freely with the concept of the human synthesis, because he discovers that other parallel (collateral) pairs of opposites correspond to the freedom/necessity pair of opposites, such as, for example, “the metaphysical and the accidental” or the infinite and the finite. But the contrast between freedom and necessity continues to be one of the most central points. The use of parallel pairs of opposites as well as the transition from the abstract to the concrete is already evident in the first of the journal entries written the day after Kierkegaard finished his examination.26 In this entry he turns to the concept of actuality that A. P. Adler, influenced by Hegel, employs in his doctoral dissertation. Here Kierkegaard criticizes the characteristic Hegelian view that a person arrives at historical actuality through an ever-greater abstraction from concrete actuality. He believes this to be incorrect. Even if Kierkegaard is sympathetic to the view that abstraction helps one to find “the eternal bond of existence,” he is severely critical of the view that confuses this “metaphysical actuality” with the “historical actuality.” Concealed in this criticism is a point of view frequently encountered later in Kierkegaard in his criticism of Hegel—namely, that the Hegelian system “has no ethics,”27 because it does not concern itself with concrete existence. In other words, for Kierkegaard the most

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important task now is to bring the eternal—that is, “the eternal bond of existence,” which the metaphysical represents—into relation with a person’s individual history. To stop at abstraction as the highest would for him mean to end up in the empty space of speculation, to become “volatilized and diffused in its heavenward emigration.” In Kierkegaard’s view the historical does not come into existence until the “unity of the metaphysical and the accidental” is formed— that is, the unity of the eternal and the temporal. Kierkegaard also gives us a definition of his understanding of the concept of “the accidental,” a definition to which he steadfastly adheres in his subsequent employment of this concept. To him “the accidental” means the temporal; he also calls it “the phenomenological”—that is, the world of phenomena that still lack the binding principle of the eternal.28 Consequently the historical does not come into existence until the phenomenal with its many possibilities is permeated by the higher reality. Thus the world of phenomena is not to be volatilized or annulled, as is done by Hegel, but “the individual is to be free within it”; freedom as the higher is to permeate the concrete actuality—that is, it pertains to a person’s concrete existence. Since Kierkegaard considers here only one phase in the movement toward freedom—the one that constitutes the first step toward constituting the personality—he expresses this as follows: “I become conscious simultaneously in my eternal validity, in, so to speak, my divine necessity, and in my accidental finitude (that I am this particular being, born in this country at this time, throughout all the various influences of changing conditions).” In other words, if a person does not relate his consciousness of the eternal to his concrete actuality, freedom has only an abstract meaning. Thus in this first journal entry Kierkegaard has already dissociated himself from the abstract concept of freedom and existence and accentuated the significance of the historical, which consists in the application of thought about the eternal to life’s concrete situations. In a journal entry29 the next day he maintains even more clearly that one now faces the task of concentrating thought on one’s concrete and personal actuality. After pointing out that “in modern philosophy” the attempt was made to surmount Kant’s scepticism with regard to the extent to which thought can grasp reality,30 and that

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Hegelian philosophy “arrived at the conclusion that earlier philosophy unreflectively assumed as a beginning—that on the whole there is reality in thought,” Kierkegaard then announces the task for the “whole line of thought,” that it would enter into “genuine anthropological contemplation.”31 From the journal entries 32 Kierkegaard himself refers to after this entry, it is clear that he was thinking of a deepening concentration in the human person, in which not only the human but also the Christian existence-relations emerge in their “concretions.”33 It may be stated explicitly that here Kierkegaard, in contrast to abstract thinking of the philosophers, especially Hegel, was on the way to making thought concrete and existential. The wider perspective that opens with “anthropological contemplation” was articulated in another entry made on the same day.34 After referring to the unity that philosophy attempts to create between “the divine and the human,” Kierkegaard again takes up the line of thought in the beginning of Pap. III A 1 (JP II 1587), the gist of which is that Hegel and thinking influenced by him, by a continual abstraction from concrete actuality and by doubt, seek to achieve “metaphysical reality,” which corresponds to the unity of the divine and the human. This is the form of reconciliation that philosophy tries to bring about. In contrast to this, Kierkegaard points in Pap. III A 4 (JP I 773) to the possibility of a religious reconciliation, which likewise, but on a higher plane, signifies the reconciliation of “the divine and the human.” The path to this reconciliation also goes through doubt, but this doubt has an existential character, which is why Kierkegaard also designates it with the more “concrete expression, a concern.”35 This latter doubt, which in Kierkegaard’s later terminology is called “despair,” comes when a person loses his original state of innocence, comes under sin, and doubts whether “sinful humanity” is able to return to unity with God.” Kierkegaard points out in this entry also that the unity (reconciliation) that philosophy is able to create lies on an abstract plane and does not touch a person in his concrete situation. This entry serves as a kind of farewell to Hegel and all philosophical attempts to solve existential issues. It must be added here that Kierkegaard’s reference to “sinful humanity” and not the single individual as the object of reconciliation

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clearly indicates that he was primarily thinking of the fall of humankind, of hereditary sin. But the words “everything Christian is a concretion” clearly point to the single individual’s relation to reconciliation. It seems that Kierkegaard meant this note as a protest to J. L. Heiberg’s confusing of human and Christian reconciliation.36 The next journal entry, Pap. III A 5 (JP II 2274), is closely related to Kierkegaard’s work on his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony. In this entry he establishes the boundaries of the sphere within which he will examine concretely the issue of human freedom. He cites first of all the Platonic doctrine of recollection, the gist of which is that every human being possesses the truth within and cannot obtain it from the outside. He compares this doctrine of recollection with similar views in Hegelian and Hegelian-influenced philosophy, which maintains that “all philosophizing is a self-reflection of what already is given in consciousness.”37 In this comparison Platonic recollection comes off the victor because it is more devout and not as speculative as Hegel’s. Kierkegaard compares the difference between recollection and speculation with the difference between stillness, which corresponds to recollection, and “infinite silence,” which characterizes the abstract. In contrast to abstraction, stillness has a personal element; in other words, stillness signifies listening to the recollection. This indicates also the difference between the abstract character of the system and the more concrete aspect of Socratic-Platonic recollection, which makes possible an existential relation on the person’s side. Here we see again Kierkegaard’s dissociation from abstract thinking. In the attitude for which the “recollection” is the expression, Kierkegaard finds also “a polemic against the world”—that is, a person undertakes a movement not only in his thinking, but also in existence. This shows that Kierkegaard’s point of departure is the thought that presupposes that the human being is a synthesis, which produces a contradiction in existence and not a balance of opposites in a summarizing abstraction. This journal entry is almost programatic, inasmuch as Kierkegaard, already engaged in “anthropological contemplation,” takes a critical and unsympathetic stance toward Hegel and turns back to Greek philosophy. This is also why Kierkegaard could not use Hegel’s abstract idea but instead used “recollection” as the

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point of departure for his deliberations on human freedom and existence such as are found in The Concept of Irony. In this particular journal entry, he even goes a step beyond recollection, inasmuch as he is of the opinion that it is not enough to let “these recollections” become audible, but that the task to use this eternal in existence is also implied. In this way recollection,38 which in itself is only a kind of knowledge, comes to form the basis for action, consequently for the ethical. Now the task is to actualize the ethical in one’s life. The ethical discussed here, which is derived from recollection, does not come as a demand from outside but is the spiritual possession of the individual person. In the following words Kierkegaard describes the process that begins with recollection’s making its demand on a person by way of its ethical aspect: “. . . we can therefore say that the finite spirit is as it is, the unity of necessity and freedom (it is not to determine through an infinite development what it is to become, but it is to become through development that which it is), and thus it is also the unity of consequence [Resultat] and striving (that is, it is not to produce through development something new, but it is to acquire through development what it has).”39 This form of the ethical, which is derived from recollection, lies entirely within the domain of the human. This is the ethical that Kierkegaard has Socrates represent in his later writings. Yet in The Concept of Irony, on which Kierkegaard was working at the time he wrote the above entry, he has Socrates exclusively represent irony and recollection in its abstract form, thus a recollection that still had not expanded to the ethical, and that here is used by Kierkegaard primarily under the designation “infinity.”40 It is noteworthy that Kierkegaard, while working on his doctoral dissertation and trying to define carefully the boundaries of the human, tries in his journal entries also to shed light on the ethical that lies within the domain of Christianity. He also seeks to relate ethical freedom and existence to the most central issues of Christianity— namely, sin, faith, and atonement. Kierkegaard discusses the question of freedom in journal entries III A 23, 48 (JP I 880; II 1240) and tries to draw the boundary between philosophy and faith in III A 25 (JP I 38). He tries to do the same in more detail in III A 211, 216 (JP III 2277, II 1101). But he

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gives the most profound perspectives in entries III A 39, 215 (JP II 1100, 1201), where he discusses sin and the forgiveness of sin within Christian existence. The perspective in all these journal entries is maintained in relation to the ethical, but the ethical element is especially adhered to in III A 216 (JP II 1101). Although the statement might seem to revolve around the ethical within the Socratic view, it nevertheless bears upon Christian existence. Kierkegaard points out, among other things, how the individual, who stands higher than the concept Church, works within the same Church and “through the power of the invisible (which is in the individual not merely as an element in the whole but continues in the individual) penetrates the visible and consummates itself in the visible.” It is also significant that Kierkegaard’s probational sermon 184141 (January 1841) on Paul’s Letter to the Philippians 1:19-25 contains reflections on freedom (choice), on Christian existence, and thereby also on ethical existence. The sermon is characteristic in that it is interspersed with several of Kierkegaard’s own ethical and religious experiences. In a sermon sketch from the same period the ethical element receives special emphasis in his stress upon the importance of “inward appropriation”42 in everything one experiences in life. Thus after he in entry III A 5 (JP II 2274) relates the ethical more closely to freedom and existence, Kierkegaard continues more and more to try to deepen the relation among these three categories, particularly from the perspectives of Christianity, and integrates them in his later reflections. These three categories are always adhered to. They come to presuppose and supplement one another in such a way that the different stages of existence are defined entirely by the levels of freedom and the ethical. It is apparent that Kierkegaard achieved thorough clarity on the question of the relation between the ethical and freedom and existence prior to publishing Either/Or. Before going further into Kierkegaard’s treatment of the issue of the relation between the ethical, freedom, and human existence in The Concept of Irony, we will examine his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, which also touches upon this question. Here we already find an appeal to the single individual for “a deep and earnest embracing of a given actuality.” This appeal, addressed particularly to H. C. Andersen, focuses on the transition “from the lyric to the

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epic.”43 which is in line with Kierkegaard’s later accentuation of the choice of a view of life that brings the person concerned beyond the esthetic person’s nebulous groping in life. Two possible views of life are mentioned: the human and the Christian. They have in common the representation of “an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience”—that is, they presuppose the break with a person’s immediate dependence on the external. The difference between the two is that within “a purely human standpoint” a person does not come “in contact with a deeper experience”—that is, the inner experience by which a person discovers his own limitation and imperfection. The Christian view of life has this “deeper experience” as its basis, and a person finds in Christianity “the center as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence.”44 As the third element mention must be made of Kierkegaard’s attempt to depict a view of life altogether concretely by tracing it to a paarticular individual existence. Thus in his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, he already uses the procedure that is later recommended by Climacus and that is practiced by most of the pseudonyms—namely, to have the relationships of existence come into being “in an existing individuality.”45 Therefore, in From the Papers of One Still Living he centers the question of a life-view around the person of H. C. Andersen.

The Movement of Irony In Kierkegaard’s doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, it is, as is apparent in the title, also an individual person who is the point of departure and the basis for a concrete exposition of a specific existential position, in this case the standpoint of irony. This procedure enables Kierkegaard to avoid a purely abstract treatment of the problems of existence and is also the condition for accentuating clearly the significance of the ethical and freedom in concrete life. It must first be noted that in his dissertation Kierkegaard exclusively assigns Socrates the role as ironist and goes to great lengths to

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substantiate this, whereas in his later books he strongly stresses that Socrates went beyond the position of irony. 46 According to Kierkegaard’s view, Socrates is led to this position, where the given actuality is always negated, because this actuality has lost its validity for him. It is an actuality that is disintegrating, and a new and eventually higher understanding of existence must be sought. But the negation of the previous state of things is itself precisely irony. Thus in The Concept of Irony Socrates abided by this negation, even if he, as was pointed out, came to the border of the new as possibility. Kierkegaard expressed this as follows: “But since the ironist does not have the new in his power, we might ask how, then, does he destroy the old, and the answer to that must be: he destroys the given actuality by the given actuality itself; But it should be remembered nevertheless that the new principle is present within him kata; duvnamin [potentially] as possibility.”47 Irony thereby becomes an “intermediate stage”48 between the old and the new. Briefly stated, the old was the individual’s attachment to finitude in all its forms; the new is the infinite, which presupposes that the individual can become the single individual and arrive at the stage where one can speak of a personal conscience. This abstract exposition of the meaning of irony for the particular individual cannot be given concrete attire until it is looked at from the angles of the ethical and of freedom. With regard to the ethical, in The Concept of Irony it is stated: “In early Greek culture, the laws had for the individual the venerableness of tradition, as the laws sanctioned by the gods. Corresponding to this tradition were time-honored customs.”49 The individual acquired the norms for his action from outside himself and did not act out of his own inner conviction. Thus the universal was higher than the particular individual. On this level the sense of respect and shame replaced the conscience; it was the sense of respect and shame that “powerfully but mysteriously kept the individual tied to the lead string of the state.”50 In Socrates’ day, the individual’s attachment to the social order was disintegrating. This disintegration was hastened particularly by the Sophists, who through their reflection and the knowledge that they wished to impart to the man in the street did their part to dissolve the old time-honored values. As a result, all moral laws were relativized; it was now the individual who arbitrarily de-

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cided what was right. Socrates then consistently completed the relativizing of the given actuality, simultaneously with his own self-deepening, by encountering not only the deeper self hitherto undiscovered but also the infinite as the higher ethical. Thus it can be said that Socrates as ironist vanquished the Hellenistic attitude that limited the ethical to finite goals. But he did not arrive at the positive point of departure for the ethical that the thought of infinity provides. In Kierkegaard’s view in The Concept of Irony, Socrates stopped at this border and as a “divine missionary”51 did not lead others any further than to it. The moral and the ethical set the goal for the individual’s actions. With regard to freedom, the question becomes to what extent the individual is personally responsible for these actions, or whether they occur by necessity. As mentioned earlier, prior to writing The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard had already expressed himself clearly on the reality of freedom for human existence,52 and he maintains this point of view in his doctoral dissertation. He distinguishes, however, between a relative and an absolute freedom. In the stage preceding irony, there can be no question of absolute freedom. Through his immediacy and his relative reflection, the individual on this level is attached to the visible world, and its goal also lies within the relativities of finitude. Under these conditions, neither freedom nor the ethical can be present in any real sense. Through irony, Socrates prepared the transition to a higher level for both these components in the individual life—ethics and freedom. But, as stated, as ironist he did not attain to the new positive expression for it.53 His “ironic freedom” liberated him from finitude’s snares, inasmuch as “no relationship was strong enough to bind him,”54 and thus he did indeed arrive at the absolute freedom, but only negatively, because, according to the dissertation, he did not come to the point of practicing the demands of the infinite in his life. Only through an existential point of view such as this would he have been able to unite the ethical and freedom on a higher level after having been obliged to abandon the first immediate synthesis of the two.55 It is significant that Kierkegaard later has his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis use the Socratic movement toward infinity as the definition of freedom when he has him declare: “Freedom is infinite and arises out of nothing.”56 The phrase

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“arises out of nothing” designates the movement of irony toward freedom, inasmuch as irony signifies the negation of finitude, which is the prerequisite for arriving at infinity as the expression of freedom.57 In Kierkegaard’s view, Socrates’ irony was a legitimate irony for the following reasons: through this irony there was created for the first time in world-history the foundation for what Kierkegaard understood as subjectivity—that is, the individual person’s sovereignty with regard to all external powers. Irony, however, was only the first step in this direction. This is why it is defined as “the first and most abstract qualification of subjectivity.”58 By leading the subject to the border of the infinite, irony opened the way to a higher level, where a new view of the ethical and freedom could affirm itself. The same cannot be said of romantic irony, especially as represented by Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, and Solger. According to Kierkegaard, this irony, which takes its point of departure in the “Fichtean principle that subjectivity, the I, has constitutive validity, is the sole omnipotence,”59 is unjustified because it disregards the higher ethic, which Christianity has already brought to light. Romantic irony could have a point in its shaking up the idolatry of finitude in which “people seemed to be totally fossilized in finite social forms.”60 But romanticism’s ironic poetic freedom degenerates into arbitrariness when it attempts “to suspend what is constitutive in actuality, that which orders and supports it: that is, morality and ethics.”61 This is precisely what happens in Schlegel’s Lucinde, where all moral categories are suspended. For this reason Kierkegaard directs his sharpest attack against Schlegel, while he treats Tieck and Solger more gently. This is also attributable to the fact that Tieck’s works represent a poet’s exaggerated reaction to the bourgeois mentality and Solger is most interested in the speculative side of romanticism. The two do not endorse, as does Schlegel in Lucinde, an outright suspension of the moral laws. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard makes it abundantly clear that he considers the spiritual development of the individuality to be intimately bound to the question of the ethical and freedom. After defending his doctoral dissertation, Kierkegaard journeys to Berlin with the special purpose of hearing Schelling’s lectures,62 which were, however, a great disappointment to him.63

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The Central Issues of Philosophy Before commencing his prodigious authorship, Kierkegaard seeks to reach a final clarity with regard to the issues that have his interest. He turns to the great masters of philosophy, especially Aristotle and Descartes. In a large collection of entries titled “Philosophica” he notes the solutions that other thinkers had expounded to the issues on which he has sought enlightenment and confronts them with the solutions he himself has achieved.64 It is very significant that it is the three following complexes of issues that have his special interest: 1. He seeks the basis for the form of being that goes beyond the being that comes within the domain of philosophy and that manifests itself first in the existing individuality. He states that this being “lies outside immanental thought, consequently outside logic.”65 Therefore it is here the question of being that comes into existence through the relation to the eternal, which is particularly characteristic of the Christian being that culminates in the absolute paradox.66 It is within this being that all the issues of Christian ontology lie, and thus it is here that Kierkegaard’s concept “redoubling” has its place. 2. The next group of issues involves the ethical. On these questions Kierkegaard consults particularly Aristotle and attempts to establish the border between Aristotelian ethics and moral philosophy, which have their goal within the finite, and the ethics that has the infinite or the eternal as its point of departure, whether or not it originates in the Socratic or Christian points of view. It is of great interest to Kierkegaard to discover that Aristotle operates with three forms of the ethical, namely, the three kinds of virtues: “moral virtues,” “intellectual virtues,”67 and “political virtues.”68 This division with its three aspects of the ethical Kierkegaard found within Christianity as well, although on a qualitatively higher level, and later this division was of decisive importance for his entire view of the ethical. 3. In “Philosophica” Kierkegaard concentrates also on the issue of freedom, particularly on the Aristotelian concept of kivnhsi~ [motion, change]. Tennemann renders this concept as “the transition from possibility to actuality,”69 a definition that is completely congruous with Kierkegaard’s other reflections on freedom and one that subse-

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quently comes to play an important role in his authorship. Through his reading of Leibniz’s Theodicy, Kierkegaard receives a detailed orientation in all the issues related to freedom and in all the conflicts waged in this area over the centuries. Kierkegaard agrees with Leibniz on many points, for example, also Leibniz’s repudiation of a liberum arbitrium, which Kierkegaard as well as Leibniz regards as “a nothing, a chimera.”70 But according to Leibniz’s as well as Kierkegaard’s view, the rejection of a liberum arbitrium does not at all exclude the possibility of human freedom. Furthermore, Kierkegaard substantiates, in his reading of Descartes, that he is uncertain whether he should regard thought or freedom as primary. In Kierkegaard’s day, Hegel wholly advocated the former alternative. For Kierkegaard, who concentrated his thinking on existence, it must be that freedom is “superior to thought.”71 Kierkegaard’s reflections on the issues of existence as embodied in “Philosophica” are finalized and summarized in his journal entry IV C 100 (JP I 197). Kierkegaard had earlier attempted to produce such schematic summaries;72 of these the most abstract but in return also the most capacious is IV C 100 (JP I 197). In its entirety it reads as follows:

Concerning the Concepts esse and inter-esse A methodological attempt The different sciences ought to be ordered according to the different ways in which they accent being [Væren] and how the relationship to being provides reciprocal advantage.

Ontology Mathematics Existential science

The certainty of these is absolute— here thought and being are one, but by the same token these sciences are hypothetical. [Existentiel-Videnskab].

This apparently simple formula73 contains vast perspectives, several of which are related to the theme of this book. In this formula Kierkegaard derives a classifying principle for all the disciplines, be-

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ginning with the most abstract, such as ontology and mathematics, and ending with the disciplines that have human existence as their subject. The sciences should be ordered “according to the different ways in which they accent being”; the more that being is accented, the higher the rank that is assigned to the sciences in question. As early as Either/Or [II, pp. 174-75, 224-26, 252-54, KW IV (SV II 158-59, 201-02, 227-28)] there is a classification, closely connected with the classification in entry IV C 100, of the sciences into two large groups. In the first division philosophy is the highest and most synoptic discipline. The second group begins with the ethics that places a person in relation to the eternal and is represented by Judge William. Of the first group, over which philosophy seeks to form a total view, it is said that it is placed under necessity, while the group with ethics in the lead belongs under freedom. With this, in continuation of entry Pap.IV C 100, there is introduced into Kierkegaard’s authorship the consistently maintained methodical point of view that within the world of nature and finitude necessity is dominant, whereas freedom comes to the fore to the very same degree that the subjective element affirms itself—and this is possible only in human existence. For a closer understanding of the relation between necessity and freedom, it must be added that, according to Kierkegaard’s conception, one must see everything in existence under two points of view: essence [Væsen] and being [Væren]. Essence corresponds to necessity, whereas the category of being is related to freedom. The more being is accentuated, the more freedom will affirm itself; but both components are present at all times. Essence expresses what the thing is, being expresses that it is, or how it is. The former expresses the concept of things, the latter the relation of things to actuality.74 Thus it is totally consistent that such abstract disciplines as mathematics and logic also have an element of being; it is said also of these sciences that in them “thought and being are one.”75 When discussing change within actuality, Kierkegaard or his pseudonyms use the expressions “possibility-necessity” instead of “being-essence.” Only in this form can the definition that actuality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity be applied to individual existence at the same time that the progressing line for a person’s spiritual development, in which freedom and the ethical are the dominating factors, can be drawn.

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The Three Aspects of Ethics With the work Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard commences his great authorship. Well prepared through his deep insight into the issues of existence, he was in a position to maintain a “balanced overview despite a productivity that advanced by leaps and bounds.”76 Everything was to be carefully deliberated, set in its right place, and adapted to the pseudonyms as representatives of the various life attitudes. With regard to this Kierkegaard himself declares that he used an “exceedingly rigorous ordering”77 in the organizing of his production. This is also true of the structuring of his first big work, Either/Or, which the editor in his preface likened to “boxes in a Chinese puzzle.”78 Before looking more closely at this work, we must take a look at the sequence in which the two separate volumes were written.79 It turns out that Kierkegaard first worked out volume II, which contains the positive existential points of view. The explanation of this is that he wished to draft a positive ethical point of departure before becoming involved in presenting deviations. In some respects the ethical position described here is a repetition of Socrates’ position, only on a qualitatively higher plane. This appears particularly when one looks at Judge William as an existing individuality. Socrates, as the first person in Greece on the way to becoming a self,80 was consequently a sovereign personality, which can be achieved only by a relation to the eternal. This goal is also the most important to Judge William and is closely connected with his views on freedom and the ethical. Like Socrates, Judge William achieves becoming a self by the movement of infinity, but in his case this is a movement of repentance, whereas with Socrates it was one of irony. Thus Judge William, through his knowledge of Christianity and a certain degree of acceptance of it, stands in a qualitatively higher stage than Socrates, and despite certain similarities between the two individualities this difference must be continually affirmed. On the basis of his own experiences, Judge William describes the connection between individuality, freedom, and the ethical. As far as the individuality is concerned, the primary task is to become a self, and this coming into existence of the self is carefully described. This

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coming into existence can never take place as long as one remains within the esthetic stage. Here one can achieve neither self-identity nor a firm continuity in one’s life, because one’s instincts, inclinations, and special talents, as well as different external circumstances, exercise essential influence. Therefore one is only “this specific product of a specific environment.”81 But even as this product of finitude one possesses in one’s innermost being the possibility of the eternal, of an absolute self that stands above all finite qualifications. The meaning of this self is qualitatively heightened by a person’s entering into relationship to God as “the eternal power.”82 One does not, however, become such a self without a choice, whereby that which faced one only as possibility now becomes actuality. Judge William describes the actualization of what was only possibility, consequently did not exist in a real sense, as follows: “The choice here makes two dialectical movements simultaneously—that which is chosen does not exist and comes into existence through the choice—and that which is chosen exists; otherwise it was not a choice.”83 Since the choice occurs through the relationship to God, a prior condition is that the movement of repentance be made, and what comes into existence by the choice is the person’s self “in his eternal validity.”84 By this movement of repentance a person repents himself out of all existence, or, to say it in Judge William’s own words: “He repents himself back into himself, back into the family, back into the race, until he finds himself in God.85 The words “he finds himself in God” sum up the movement toward God as well as the movement toward the deeper self. If one does not choose oneself and God in this absolute way, then one is not choosing in the right way. This is what Judge William means when he says: “the absolute as absolute can only be for the absolute.”86 One can choose absolutely only in relation to the eternal in one’s innermost being or to God, for there is no other absolute in all existence.87 Of the change that occurs in a person through the choice it is said: “He remains himself, exactly the same that he was before, down to the most insignificant feature, and yet he becomes another, for the choice penetrates everything and changes it. Thus his finite personality is now made infinite in the choice, in which he infinitely chooses himself.”88

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Judge William carefully describes the coming into existence of the self and at the same time declares: “It is for freedom, therefore, that I am fighting (partly in this letter, partly and chiefly in myself ), for the time to come, for Either-Or.”89 This is entirely consistent, inasmuch as the coming into existence of the self is bound up with freedom, since one cannot become a self except in freedom. In answer to the question: What is a self? Judge William says as a first expression for it: “It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is the most concrete of all—it is freedom.”90 Here there is reference to the movement of repentance, which frees a person from earthly bondage and guilt and through this liberation leads him to become a self. Freedom thereby remains the first condition for arriving at the existential position where there can be any question of a person as a self. In this quotation about the self that has freedom as its presupposition, it is mentioned that the self has two sides, an abstract and a concrete. Both of these elements combine in the self as a synthesis— as the “most abstract of all” it is the self ’s necessity, while as the “most concrete of all” it is the self according to its possibility, its freedom. Therefore if a person chooses himself only abstractly, that is, “according to his necessity” and excludes the other factor, freedom, this can prove to be a “terrible wrong path,” 91 because temporality loses all its meaning for him, together with all the consequences that this entails. Anti-Climacus, another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, later points out very clearly in The Sickness unto Death that the self has two sides. “The self,” he writes, “is kata; duvnamin [potentially] just as possible as it is necessary, for it is indeed itself, but it has the task of becoming itself. Insofar as it is itself, it is the necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility.”92 It is, however, not the self ’s necessity but the self ’s coming into existence, consequently the self’s possibility, that concerns Kierkegaard and all his pseudonyms, Judge William included. Both elements must always be present, since without necessity the self ’s identity and continuity could not be maintained; but at the same time freedom’s movement toward a new level must be accentuated, since without this coming into existence, which is the task of freedom, there is only deterioration in human existence.

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Particularly in his first letter, Judge William deals with the form of freedom that exists prior to the becoming of the self. This freedom he calls “psychical freedom.” It is present when “the individuality as yet has not purified itself of physical necessity.”93 In other words, as a child of nature the human being is primarily determined by natural necessity. But at the same time with the help of the element of freedom, one can continually free oneself from this tie. In contrast to the freedom of the spirit, which the self can attain by choice and which is absolute in character, psychical freedom is called a relative freedom.94 When a person, through repentance, has chosen himself absolutely and thereby attained the absolute freedom, the ethical promptly asserts its claim to the self. In other words, freedom means the self ’s possibility to be able to act, because freedom always means movement. But the self, in order to act, must have norms for its action. Without clear norms, there is always the danger of individual arbitrariness or of deviation from the task the self is to fulfill through freedom. Judge William names examples of the wrong ways to which the choice of the self without a concurrent ethical obligation can lead. One of the examples he dwells upon most is the mystic. The mystic, too, chooses himself and “chooses according to his freedom,” but the “mystic’s error”95 is that he does not choose himself ethically, because his repentance, according to Judge William, is abstract.96 Concrete repentance, on the other hand, signifies that a person is already looking at his former life from an ethical point of view, which also, after the choice, confronts him with concrete tasks and shows how they are to be accomplished. In the relation between freedom and the ethical, it therefore must always be maintained that freedom signifies only the self ’s possibility of being able to act, but in order to act freedom must have ethical norms. Later on, Kierkegaard says of the freedom a person attains by becoming a self: “. . . by becoming a ‘self,’ he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self. Duty, however, makes a person dependent and at the same moment eternally independent.” Here we see the close correspondence between freedom and the ethical. For Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms this connection is so essential that freedom cannot be called freedom until it lets itself be guided by the ethical. Kierkegaard voices this relation in the following quo-

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tation from Goethe: “Only law can give freedom,” or in Kierkegaard’s own words: “without law, freedom does not exist at all, and it is law that gives freedom.”97 In order to prevent eventual misunderstanding of the function of the ethical in the individual, it is necessary to make two comments before looking more closely at Judge William’s concept of the ethical. (1) The ethical always presupposes reflection, that is, conscious deliberation upon the action and its motives. A spontaneous reaction understood as an action has essentially nothing to do with the ethical. In other words, spontaneity resides within the domain of the immediate and, strictly speaking, cannot be viewed ethically.98 (2) The distinction between good and evil can never be derived from external conditions. This distinction is an inner determination. As long as one has not arrived at becoming “a self according to its absolute validity,”99 one has no ethical standard to distinguish truly between good and evil. One then lives within relative determinants, which of course can arbitrarily be made absolute. But, in the proper sense, the distinction does not come until a person as a self has himself become the absolute through his relation to the absolute power. With regard to the transition to this position, where for the first time it is possible to be able to choose between good and evil, Judge William says: “Rather than designating the choice between good and evil, my Either/Or designates the choice by which one chooses good and evil or rules them out. Here the question is under what qualifications will one will view all existence and personally live.”100 Thus the distinction between good and evil is initially established in a person’s position as a self who has earnestly chosen himself and who accentuates the meaning of his existence. On the basis of his conviction of the self ’s eternal validity, a person lives, viewed ethically, what Judge William calls a “double existence.” He fulfills his concrete and external tasks in the world but at the same time has an inner life that belongs to him alone. Of this interior deed, Judge William declares that “history or world history cannot take it from him; it follows him, either to his joy or to his despair.”101 With the expression “double-existence” Judge William gives the first definition of the two concepts “hidden inwardness” and “redoubling,” later so important in Kierkegaard’s authorship.

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The ethics with which Judge William works in Either/Or, II, is in accord with Balle’s Laerebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion,102 which was used in Danish schools in Kierkegaard’s day. It is also very significant that Judge William calls his two letters “notes to Balle’s Catechism.”103 This, however, does not mean that Judge William has summarily taken over the many detailed descriptions of the duties to God, oneself, and one’s neighbor that Balle’s Catechism contains. Life on the ethical level, according to Judge William, does not depend on “the multiplicity of duty but on its intensity.”104 He sees it as his task “to throw some light on the absolute significance of duty, the eternal validity of duty-relationship for the personality.”105 Thereby the ethical is raised above petty finite considerations and calculations to “an eternal responsibility” through its relationship to the eternal power. Judge William does, however, take over the main classification of duties in Balle’s Catechism—namely, the duties to God, oneself, and one’s neighbor. According to Balle, the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself ” contains not only a command about love to the neighbor, but also a command about love to oneself. In addition to the many annotated paragraphs instructing how one is to love God and one’s neighbor, Balle also describes in detail how one is to love oneself “in the right way.”106 It is very important to note the adoption of this tripartition of duties, because, as will be seen later, it not only forms the foundation for Judge William’s ethical points of view but runs through Kierkegaard’s entire authorship and decisively influences its composition. Of these three aspects, the religious is the most important, because it always presupposes the movement of infinity that is the movement toward the absolute. Of the three forms of the movement of infinity—irony, resignation, and repentance— Judge William has made the last one, which is the deepest of them and presupposes knowledge of God’s commandment. In other words, Judge William has been brought up in the Christian tradition. Through repentance, a person turns back to God, because in repentance a person has “ransomed himself in order to remain in his freedom.” But, as already stated, the ethical that led to the repentance simultaneously makes its claim for action. Judge William expresses

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this as follows: “He who has chosen himself on this basis is eo ipso one who acts.107 On the second aspect pertaining to a person’s relation to himself, Judge William says: “Here he then possesses himself as task in such a way that it is chiefly to order, shape, temper, inflame, control—in short, to produce an evenness in the soul, a harmony, which is the fruit of the personal virtues.”108 This personal ethics is the condition for the next ethics: a person’s relation to his fellow-being, his neighbor. As Kierkegaard himself and the other pseudonyms do, Judge William places the relation to oneself before the relation to the neighbor, because one cannot have the proper relation to one’s fellow-being without relating oneself to oneself in the right way. In the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” the words “as yourself ” thereby acquire a positive meaning.109 The third aspect pertains to one’s fellow beings and, according to Judge William, has to do with the civic and social side of existence. Inasmuch as Judge William as yet has not arrived at a more strictly Christian view of ethics, he does not use the designation “neighbor” about fellow beings. This tripartition also influences the structure of the self. The self that chose itself through the relationship to God represents the religious side of the self. This side is the essence of and the presupposition for all ethical action. Through a person’s relation to himself “a personal self ” is created. The relation to one’s fellow beings results in “a social, a civic self.” On the interplay between these three aspects Judge William writes to his friend, Esthete A, as follows: By now you have easily seen that in his life the ethical individual goes through the stages we previously set forth as separate stages. He is going to develop in his life the personal, the civic, the religious virtues, and his life advances through his continually translating himself from one stage to another. As soon as a person thinks that one of these stages is adequate and that he dares to concentrate on it one-sidedly, he has not chosen himself ethically but has failed to see the significance of either isolation or continuity and above all has not grasped that the truth lies in the identity of these two.110

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In the three key terms of this statement, we see that, instead of the diffused instructions in Balle’s Catechism regarding the three duties, Judge William speaks of three separate stages. The three duties are thereby considered as organic lines of development. In this way the individual develops the personal, the civic, and the religious virtues, which means a movement in existence. Moreover, attention must be given to the correlation among the three aspects, inasmuch as the task consists in the individual’s “continually translating himself from one stage to another.” It is also interesting that Judge William warns against disregarding “the significance of either isolation or continuity.” By isolation is meant, first and foremost, the religious relationship and thereafter a person’s relationship to himself—consequently, the personal aspect; continuity pertains to the individual’s life in society. But all three aspects must always be present if the choice is not to end up in onesidedness; they all have their point of departure in and are an expression of a person’s relationship to the absolute, which is also why they are also said to be identical. As example of the lack of continuity, Judge William cites the mystic, who by choice has, in his “love for God,”111 concentrated on the religious. In this category Judge William includes the case of “young Ludwig Blackfeldt,” who could not find his way to a positive philosophy of life after having experienced infinity intellectually.112 Another example of a onesidedness that eventually lacks continuity is Socrates, who after reaching infinity by way of the movement of irony remained in the domain of a personal ethics by developing “the personal virtues.”113 Judge William’s ethical norms come to stand on a higher level than the mores and conventions that are common and current in society. Mores and customs are always susceptible to “fluctuations,”114 and therefore there are the incessant changes throughout human history, because the goal or objective lies within the finite world and is determined by “the empirical,”115 which is dependent on the shifting conditions in time and society. As has already been pointed out, it is not until a person makes the absolute choice that he gets the criterion for his action that is given by responsibility before an absolute power. One has thereby also become a self, who through freedom and the higher ethical view tries to accomplish life’s concrete tasks. It is this

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ethics, built around the central points in Christian ethics, that Judge William uses as his criterion in evaluating the many different forms for conducting one’s life. To this criterion Spinoza’s familiar saying could be applied: Veritas norma sui est et falsi. The criterion indicates not only what is true or right, but it also discloses what is wrong. We have already mentioned specific examples of how Judge William exposes one-sided attitudes with regard to the ethical, but he points out primarily the inadequacy of the esthetic, even of its positive forms when they are not taken further to the ethical. Here he is thinking especially of a person’s use of his native capacities and talents without a higher ethical responsibility. He then examines various esthetic philosophies of life and step by step approaches his friend A’s position, which lies on the border between the esthetic and the ethical—namely, the standpoint of irony. Remaining in this position means despair, and Judge William ardently pleads with his friend to make the leap into the ethical. Already in his very first letter, the judge as an ethicist attempts to convince his friend that only the ethical, understood as duty, is able to create the foundation for marriage as it ought to be. He makes a great effort to show that all the finest esthetic elements in the relation between man and woman do not vanish but, on the contrary, are heightened by being raised to the ethical plane. Through Judge William, Kierkegaard has given a most profound and detailed description of marriage according to its idea.116 On the whole, Judge William attempts to apply ethics to all of the concrete and practical sides of life; he emphasizes not only the meaning of work in the formation of personality but also shows how individual capacities and talents can be ordered under the idea of vocation. In all these deliberations strong emphasis is placed on showing how the personality is developed by subordinating freedom to the ethical. Thus by means of the judge’s criterion his friend A’s chimerical life of despair (as already seen in volume I of Either/Or) is disclosed. With regard to the relation of the two volumes, what Johannes Climacus says in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is pertinent: “Part II is an ethical individuality existing on the basis of the ethical. Part II is also that which brings out Part I . . ..”117 Therefore volume II is the pre-

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requisite to understanding and evaluating volume I. As mentioned earlier, Kierkegaard did in fact work out volume II before volume I.

Judge William’s Accounting with the Esthetic Judge William believes that his ethical viewpoints will be able to form a positive foundation for human existence, but, as mentioned, there are also esthetic “views of life”118 that he does not wish to reject summarily. He does, however, directly denounce the existential examples of the esthetic sphere of life as portrayed in volume I of Either/Or. All of them represent a negative stance to existence and involve borderline life cases, in which misfortune or guilt or both have placed the individual in conflict with the ethical. Because of his own existential position, the ironist A, who is responsible for these poetical works, is beyond the positive aspects of the esthetic. For him the esthetic has collapsed, and he selects for his sketches the most pronounced cases of this collapse. Therefore, while Judge William wants to pilot the esthetic into a “higher concentricity,”119 A’s fantasy is preoccupied in his despair with extreme cases of misfortune and guilt within the esthetic and moral order of life.120 The ethicist is familiar with his friend’s ironic comments on existence121 and from his own standpoint has to denounce them and advise his friend to cross over to the ethical stage. With regard to method, ironist A works according to the same schema that Judge William uses and that is characteristic of all Kierkegaard’s works—namely, the ascending scale. But since all these descriptions of life attitudes are examined from an ethical or religious viewpoint, this scale goes in either a positive or a negative direction. Judge William’s line of development goes in the positive direction; the ironist’s is in the negative. Their common interest is life’s most concrete forms—namely, the erotic and the relation between man and woman in a wider sense. A begins by describing the as yet “innocent” forms of the erotic as found in oriental and Greek culture, where the ethical in the proper sense is not found. In the Page and Papageno (in Mozart’s Don

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Giovanni), who are representatives of this world, the erotic still develops altogether unhindered. Don Juan, however, is the protest of the sensual and the erotic against Christianity’s requirement that these spheres be subordinated to spirit. The erotic manifests itself in the three different characters, ascending from the most innocent form, dreaming, to seeking and to desiring. The individuality in the proper sense is still not awakened in Don Juan, and even less so in the two others. Don Juan’s position is described as a “hovering between being an individual and a force of nature.”122 Thus one actually cannot speak of guilt in Don Juan, because he is still not a responsible person who can come under guilt. In the next section, titled “The Tragic in Ancient Drama Reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama,” A first points out that in ancient Greece the tragic depended upon the presence of both innocence and guilt in the hero. Moreover, he shows that in modern tragedy guilt is more and more predominant, because here the individuality is increasingly stressed, whereas the classical tragic hero was still firmly bound by the race. Since, however, tragic guilt still lies within esthetic categories, it can never become absolute guilt, and since it also is closely related to heredity and environment it contains the same self-contradiction as hereditary guilt: “being guilt and yet not being guilt.”123 Not before the relation to the ethical, which requires an ethical individual, does guilt become an absolute guilt, and only then can there be any mention of repentance. This entire movement toward guilt also requires that the individual become conscious of his own situation, consequently that he secretly reflect on his own condition. A discusses this reflection, which can be discovered only by someone able to identify with another’s psychical life, in his “Extempore Apostrophe.”124 With this, the way is prepared for the description of the tragic women characters whose lives were destroyed by their being deceived in their love and who thereafter were confined to endless reflections over it. As examples, the unhappy loves of Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira, and Margrethe are described. A does not, however, mention the one single way out of their ceaseless reflection—an acknowledgment of guilt, after which through repentance they would

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have been able to be liberated from their former lives. The whole design, however, does suggest this possibility. With the next essay, titled “The Unhappiest Man,” we have gone a step beyond the movement between guilt and innocence. From the human point of view, the many characters125 described here are unjustly struck by a misfortune and suffer innocently. The best known example of such a human fate is Job, from whom everything was taken and who engaged in an argument with God because he believed that he had been wronged. Highest on the scale stands “the unhappiest man,” who can find no solace in thinking about either the past or the future. Each of these characters has his special dialectic, but they share in common their being exposed to the temptation to revolt against what is supposed to be a just world order; consequently, they are tempted to rebellion against God. It is this charge in particular that Judge William aims at A, whose “favorite expression” is that “the unhappiest person is the happiest,” a position that actually places all of life’s values in doubt. Of this provocative statement, Judge William says: “But this is a falsification, more terrible than any other; it is a falsification that is directed against the eternal power who rules the world. It is a mutiny against God, like laughing when one ought to cry, and yet there is a despair capable of this, there is a defiance that stands up to God himself.”126 In his review of Scribe’s “The First Love,” A speaks very appreciatively of Scribe’s parody on romantic love. This despairing enthusiasm for Scribe is characteristic of A’s critical attitude to everything that is sacred in existence. In “Rotation of Crops, an Attempt at a Doctrine of Social Prudence,” A also makes ironic remarks about society. He shows what happens when reflection and sagacity become the dominant factors in society. People try to adapt themselves in a kind of welfare society, which nevertheless comes to bear the stamp of petty self-seeking; thereby ideal striving is lost, and everything ends in boredom—whereupon people seek by various means to dispel the universal boredom. “The Seducer’s Diary” reaches the extremity of the negative scale. All moral laws are suspended in the seducer’s conduct. Morality is annihilated by a deliberate, consistent, systematic, methodical procedure. It is precisely this deliberate and clear method that leads to

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the triumph of nihilism in the erotic domain and to the individual’s total lack of character. As mentioned earlier, the ethicist is obliged to denounce all the negative attitudes depicted in volume I of Either/Or. These attitudes specifically lack what a true individuality should have—a self that in freedom has chosen itself through repentance and that subordinates its freedom under the ethical. A has the cast of characters he depicts remain within the esthetic without arriving at the choice; neither do they attain absolute freedom but move more or less in the direction of the demonic, which signifies that the individual has not come into communication with the good and thereby is avoiding the relation to the ethical and is forfeiting his freedom. Thus the individual is not living by ethical standards but is trying to base his life on personal and arbitrary caprice and ends up being self-willed and self-assertive. The question may be raised whether Judge William with his very abstract and optimistic exposition of his ethical viewpoints can actually be a guide and mentor for the ironist with all his difficulties or for anyone in a similar situation; the answer must be “no.” In other words, Judge William, unlike the others, proceeds to take a positive attitude to temporal existence, an attitude he then by means of choice tries to carry over to the ethical plane. He is personally unacquainted with the existential conflicts that so engross his friend. If he is to be able to help A move ahead, the religious factor in addition to the ethical must be emphasized even more strongly. It is this lack that Kierkegaard terms “an irregularity in the book.”127 Later he has Climacus comment as follows: If it were pointed out clearly in Either/Or where the discrepancy lies, the book would have needed to have a religious instead of an ethical orientation and would already have said all at once what in my opinion should be said only successively. The discrepancy was not touched upon at all, and that was quite in accord with my design. Of course, whether this point has been clear to the author, I do not know. The discrepancy is that the ethical self is supposed to be found immanently in despair, that by enduring the despair the individual would win himself. Admittedly, he has used a qualification of freedom to choose himself, which seems to remove

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the difficulty that probably has not been particularly conspicuous to many, since philosophice [philosophically] it goes one, two, three with doubting everything and then finding the true beginning.128

In Either/Or the ethicist has, as Kierkegaard declares some time later, “rounded off life with marriage,” consequently has worked out a limited existential task. Therefore Kierkegaard also adds with regard to Either/Or “but the whole work is also only an element in the endeavor.”129

The Rationale of Pseudonymity Originally it was Kierkegaard’s intention to become a pastor after publishing Either/Or. If he had done so, his literary endeavors would have come to an end, although as a pastor he perhaps would have written some devotional works. But when he had finished Either/Or, there awoke within him, as he himself declares, “such a powerful creativity” that he “could not resist it.”130 Yet it was not only the urge to write that was asserting itself. The “discrepancy” also had to be rectified, and even if this could be done in upbuilding discourses, there was still the discrepancy in volume II of Either/Or, so that the judge was unable to help his friend A because the latter had “swallowed a secret.”131 This was also why Judge William had to dissuade him from marrying—that is, from actualizing the universal. Thus A represents a series of issues that Kierkegaard had to work through before he could clarify his own existential position, the possibilities for his life. Kierkegaard’s existential position at this time can very briefly be described as follows. He was firmly convinced that he would not live beyond the age of thirty-four,132 and once this idea had gained a foothold he resolved to put everything into creating an extensive production that would serve the cause of Christianity. This authorship would be developed under the guidance of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who was to represent particularly Kierkegaard’s dialectical side. As a matter of fact, Johannes Climacus had left De

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omnibus dubitandum est unfinished precisely at the exciting point where the issue of “repetition” is introduced. Presumably the reason was that Kierkegaard gradually became aware that his personal difficulties had provided him material for several books that other pseudonyms should take on. After the publication of Either/Or, which Climacus maintains had also been included in his plans,133 it is Climacus who comes to stand as the leading dialectician behind Kierkegaard’s writing up to and including Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Climacus himself declares that the pseudonyms only carry out what he himself would have done. On this he says: “. . . because step by step, just as I wanted to begin the task of carrying out my resolution by working, there appeared a pseudonymous book that did what I wanted to do.”134 Thus the year 1846 was for Kierkegaard a final deadline for finishing the pseudonymous series as well as the series of discourses, both of which stand under Climacus’s dialectical supervision. It may now be asked why Kierkegaard selected Climacus as the pseudonym for a large part of his authorship. No doubt it was because Kierkegaard was attracted by the guidance of the sixth-century monk Johannes Climacus in Christian ethics. His book, Scala paradisi, which has been used through the centuries, gives instruction on how the person who wants to be obedient to God’s command must step by step practice the Christian-religious virtues in his striving toward perfection. As a matter of fact, Climacus’s experiences were actually the experiences of a monk, but after the publication of Either/Or Kierkegaard himself also became a Victor Eremita.135 He became the single individual who had to understand his inner condition and wanted to find out for himself how far a person can proceed along the religious path by his own efforts. In contrast to Judge William, who concentrated especially on civic ethics, one of the three aspects of the ethical, Kierkegaard through the pseudonym Climacus turned his whole interest toward religious and personal ethics, as was the case with the author of Scala paradisi. Therefore Climacus and his subordinate pseudonyms concentrate primarily on mapping out an individual’s inner existential development, his ethical and religious struggle. This was also the prerequisite for a clear and decisive way of drawing the boundary line between human perception and human

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capacity or incapacity on one side and the totally new encountered in Christianity on the other. The danger of obliterating this boundary is always present; it was also a current issue in Kierkegaard’s day, when Hegel’s philosophy blended and confused the spheres of knowledge and faith. In a discussion of the principal pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, a brief explanation of pseudonymity in Kierkegaard’s authorship is in order. This subject is much discussed but there are still some unsolved questions.136 The primary issue here is why Kierkegaard used pseudonyms and what their relation is to his own existence, to freedom, and to the ethical. It must first be pointed out, however, that the pseudonyms are not to be confused with the many characters Kierkegaard drew from history and world literature and whom he discusses in his works. What they have in common with the pseudonyms is that they are used to shed light on existential positions and that they manifest Kierkegaard’s tendency to move away from the abstract in order to portray existential situations through concrete individualities. In contrast to these characters, the pseudonyms are always fictitious persons who are named as authors of parts of the collected authorship. Of their significance, Kierkegaard himself says: “A pseudonym is excellent for accentuating a point, a stance, a position. He is a poetical person.”137 It is interesting that most of the pseudonyms are used to depict his own existential development. Then again, these pseudonyms often use in their exposition the literary and historical characters as concrete examples of the philosophies of life they are describing. When, for example, pseudonym A wishes to describe his own situation as utterly unhappy, he describes analogous instances such as, for example, Antigone, Niobe, Job, and “the Prodigal Son’s father.”138 But even if we assume that the most important pseudonyms represent the positions Kierkegaard himself had to go through, there still remains the difficulty of finding the way back to the origin of pseudonymity and the connection between the individual pseudonyms. The following brief explanation may be of help in coming to an answer to these questions. As a child Kierkegaard was powerfully influenced by his father in the direction of a Christianity in which suffering and collision with

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the world were decisive elements. In other words, the father sacrificed his son (how conscious his father was of doing this is hard to determine), inasmuch as by bringing him up in this way, by confronting him too early with the earnestness of Christianity, he destroyed his spontaneous, childlike relation to life and gave him the powerful impression that he was destined in advance for special service in the cause of Christianity. Kierkegaard himself says of this: “. . . religiously understood, I was pre-pledged [for-lovet] already early in childhood. Ah, I have paid dearly for at one time misinterpreting my life and forgetting—that I was pledged!”139 This entire influence not only provides the key to Kierkegaard’s life but also to the emergence of pseudonymity. In other words, for Kierkegaard the tie to Christianity in all its truth and with its rigorous requirement upon the human being became the hidden axis around which everything came to revolve. With a certain justification one may say that already as a child Kierkegaard experienced contemporaneity with Christ in a very intense and harrowing way. Only gradually did Kierkegaard become conscious and fully aware of this. The final expression of this experience is found in Practice in Christianity, where we also are told of the impact upon a child when shown a picture of the crucified Christ.140 But before reaching that point he had to struggle and suffer through the stages that lie between a person’s first immediacy and Christianity’s high ideal. It is these stages that the pseudonymous authors represent, and when Kierkegaard uses pseudonyms it is because of the positions he himself has traversed141 but which have their independent significance in a person’s spiritual development. The principal stages in this existential movement toward becoming a Christian may be sketched in the following way. Although Kierkegaard had very early lost a positive relationship to immediacy, he nevertheless attempts in his student days to “enjoy life” as other young people do and to flee from the heavy pressure of the influence he received during adolescence. These youthful years are his romantic period, later poetically reproduced through pseudonym A in volume I of Either/Or.142 After his father’s death Kierkegaard tries to come into a positive ethical relationship to life’s concrete tasks. This struggle he describes through Judge William in vol-

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ume II of Either/Or. At this point it is primarily his original tie to the ideal of Christianity that prevents him from actualizing the universal.143 When he perceives that he is barred from accomplishing this task, he straightforwardly asks the question whether this suspension can be canceled by faith in the absurd. This question is treated by the pseudonym Constantin Constantius in Repetition ; “the young man” compares his unhappy fate to Job’s and considers the possibility that he, like Job, can get everything back. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio, alias Kierkegaard himself at a specific stage, sets his position alongside Abraham’s but is unable to believe in the absurd as did Abraham. Because of Kierkegaard’s feelings of guilt because of his youthful excesses and his broken engagement, his situation may be considered analogous to that of the merman, who is also touched on in this book. The principal pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, who is Kierkegaard as dialectician and philosopher, points out in Philosophical Fragments that there are two firm foundations for a person to choose between— namely, the Socratic and the Christian. “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.”144 As the absolute opposite to this, the view is presented that, contrary to the Socratic view, humankind is in untruth and that the god himself as a historical person must enlighten humankind about this untruth and provide the condition for a new life. The pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, who is assigned as the author of The Concept of Anxiety, represents Kierkegaard as the experimenting psychologist who thoroughly examines the state in which Kierkegaard himself suffered greatly—namely, anxiety. By this means he gains a radical insight into the human presuppositions that enable one to come under guilt and hereditary guilt by way of freedom. Seen from the angle of pseudonymity, Stages on Life’s Way, which was published after The Concept of Anxiety, is singular in that Kierkegaard has several of the earlier pseudonyms appear again. This takes place according to the law of repetition, which plays an important role for him. The main idea of this law is that all previous lifeviews are re-evaluated from a new and higher existential point of view. In Stages on Life’s Way it is Quidam who as author of Part III of

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the book takes this higher position. Through the pseudonym Quidam, Kierkegaard provides the most concrete and detailed sketch of a person’s religious and ethical conflicts on the road to a new immediacy through repentance. Kierkegaard writes of this pseudonym: “In the imaginary psychological construction “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” (in Stages on Life’s Way) there is depicted a distressed character in the most extreme mortal danger of the spirit to the point of despair, and the whole thing is kept as if it could have happened yesterday. To such a degree the reproduction is placed as close as possible to actuality that the person struggling religiously in despair hovers, so to speak, right over the head of the contemporary age.”145 Seen from Quidam’s point of view, even the stages that depict positive life-attitudes must now be considered incomplete and defective, and the previously designated negative attitudes are raised to a higher negativity. Victor Eremita from Either/Or is an example of this; his position of resignation has a positive element because it can form a transition to something higher; but by remaining on this level without a continual struggle the positive is changed to the negative, so that in Stages on Life’s Way he is enrolled under the demonic. Here the old saying used by Goethe in Hermann and Dorothea holds true: “Wer nichts vorwärts geht, der kommt zurücke [Whoever does not go forward goes backward].”146 Similarly, the ironist’s position can be the introduction to a positivity on a higher level, as with Socrates, but remaining within the standpoint of irony makes it into something negative. For this reason, in Stages on Life’s Way Constantin Constantius is also reckoned among the negative characters. “The Young Man,” who in Repetition is very sympathetically and positively described, is also included in “In Vino Veritas” as a negative character, even though he is now placed no. 1 on a scale that shows progressively negative life-attitudes. A previously negative figure such as Johannes the Seducer becomes still more negative inasmuch as his imaginary construction has now become a life-view.147 Judge William, too, as representative of the positive and concrete attitude to life, does not appear in the same ideal light in Stages on Life’s Way as in Either/Or. His enthusiasm for the married life sounds quite superficial in, for example, the following quotation:

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If he comes home with a feather in his hat Hip, hip, hurrah! We’ll dance and drink to that!148

At the same time it must, however, be noted that here Judge William has to defend himself on two fronts, both against the esthetes in Part I and against Quidam as the religious exception in Part III. For Quidam, the esthetic remains only as “A Recollection.”149 As an exception he also struggles his way out of the position in which Judge William finds himself. Frater Taciturnus, who cites Quidam as an example, is himself a humorist, but he has not come as far existentially as Quidam. In other words, through the movement of repentance the latter is on the way beyond the stage of humor. Stages on Life’s Way is edited by Hilarius Bookbinder, who cannot properly be called a pseudonym. As editor he stands in a totally external relation to the work; this signifies that its three parts do not represent a continuous development but three distinct stages separated from each other by a qualitative leap. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the principal pseudonym Climacus gives a coherent presentation of the steps leading to Christianity. The contributions and positions of the previously mentioned pseudonyms are made the subjects of discussion and incorporated as illuminating examples in his sketch of the way to the genuinely Christian. With acute dialectical arguments the misinterpretations and variations to which Christianity has been exposed, especially through Hegel’s mediation between truth and knowledge, are repudiated. With the pseudonym Climacus, the use of the many pseudonyms in the authorship is ended, and there are only very few that come later. From now on the center of Kierkegaard’s interest is upbuilding literature, which began three months after the publication of Either/ Or. For the most part this literature comes out under Kierkegaard’s own name. The main distinction between the literature with the pseudonyms in charge and the upbuilding, religious literature that goes under Kierkegaard’s own name can be defined this way: the lifeattitudes that the pseudonyms represent are carried to their extreme logical conclusion. Kierkegaard declares that he “uses poetical writers (pseudonyms), ‘poetized thinkers,’ who consistently pursue a line of thought onesidedly to its uttermost.”150 This they do in the negative

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as well as the positive direction, as Johannes the Seducer in Either/Or and Victor Eremita and many others illustrate so well. Kierkegaard uses the pseudonyms in this consistent form because only in this way can he with full clarity portray an existential position and show where it leads. In life, writes Frater Taciturnus, the passions that constitute such life-attitudes are found only “to a certain degree,” but it is precisely a dialectician’s and psychologist’s task to see passion “carried to its extreme limit.”151 The positive pseudonyms may be said to represent the intensification of the claim that is made on human beings. Therefore Kierkegaard can also say: “But on the other hand I have created fictive personalities—something I as poet have the right to do—an ideality that is more than human.”152 As for the upbuilding literature, the person Søren Kierkegaard stands as its actual existential exponent. As is known, Kierkegaard was very scrupulous about indicating how far he had come religiously. At the same time it was this religious line of development that he primarily wished to communicate to his reader, and while he handed him the pseudonymous writings with the “left hand,” he handed him the upbuilding writings with the “right hand.”153 This is also the reason we find more clemency than rigorousness in the upbuilding literature. On occasion Kierkegaard expresses himself this way: “In my representation, rigorousness is a dialectical factor in Christianity, but clemency is just as strongly represented; the former is represented poetically by pseudonyms, the other personally by myself.”154 As an example, one can compare the representation of Job in the pseudonymous literature and in the upbuilding.155 The difference is conspicuous, as Kierkegaard himself later points out in the draft of a note in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.156 “In the book Repetition, the use of Job was so caught up in passion that it could easily have a disturbing effect on one or another reader accustomed to something more quietly upbuilding in a consideration of the devout man. [In margin: , even though the psychological and poetical use of Job in that work must be upheld.] Therefore he immediately decided to do his best to keep Job as a religious prototype also for one who is not tried in the extremities of the passions or who would not want this presented as imaginary construction. Therefore the upbuilding discourse also appeared a few weeks after Repetition.”157 In this way Eigh-

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teen Upbuilding Discourses forms a parallel to the pseudonymous authorship since they have the same dialectical line of development. This is also why in his discussion of the pseudonymous literature the dialectician Climacus could place these discourses into the existential line of development that he describes.158 The upbuilding literature is also subject to the law of repetition, according to which the earlier experience is repeated existentially on a higher level.159 In contrast to the pseudonymous literature, what is most important here is that the single individual is represented as standing in a personal inner relationship to God. Kierkegaard could put his name to this religious line as long as there was existential backing for it in himself. But for him there came a time when he once again had to use pseudonyms, because he was aware that his own life was far from matching the ideal of a Christian that must be regarded as Christianity’s true ideal. To represent this, a new pseudonym had to be used, and it became Anti-Climacus.160 By using this pseudonym, Kierkegaard wanted to indicate his own distance from the ideal. Hereafter Kierkegaard distinguishes between the earlier pseudonyms, which he calls the lower pseudonymity, and “the higher pseudonymity”161 as represented by Anti-Climacus. Between them lies the upbuilding part of his production, the part of the authorship closest to his own personal religious development. But as previously shown, Kierkegaard also included in the lower pseudonymity elements of his own spiritual development, which, however, were carried by the pseudonyms to their logical conclusion. But it is true of the upbuilding as well as of the pseudonymous authorship that Kierkegaard wanted thereby to delineate the movement away from the scholarly-scientific, the objective, and the abstract and back to the concretely personal, whereby the personality and the development of the self were placed in the center. Of this he says, for example: “The significance of my whole authorship, indeed, I dare say of my whole life, is precisely an effort whose aim is to secure, if possible, personality, to contribute to putting an end, if possible, to the objective, which has abolished conscience, demoralized society, and confused the point of view of Christianity.”162 By describing the self ’s spiritual possibilities and the different negative as well as positive steps the self can pass through in relation to the

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highest ideal, which Christianity sets forth, and by having either by real or fictive individualities represent these steps, Kierkegaard has made graphic a great multiplicity of existential positions. The decisive differences between these can be accurately indicated when they are placed in relation to freedom and the three aspects of the ethical. We now return to the main objective of this investigation, namely, to show that there is a very close relation between the existential positions of the various individualities and their relation to freedom and the ethical level. This relation has already been discussed in connection with Either/Or, and we continue with the works that appeared later. Generally speaking, it can be said of these later works up to and including Concluding Unscientific Postscript that they omit the civic and the social aspects of the ethical. Quite simply the explanation is that Kierkegaard was first and foremost interested in portraying through his pseudonyms a person’s inner struggle, and therefore the religious and personal aspects of the ethical came to the foreground. In other words, it was Kierkegaard’s sustained conviction that only by knowing oneself and by relating oneself to oneself in the right way will one be able to have the right relation to one’s fellowbeings. To begin with the latter before knowing oneself and one’s motives is, according to Kierkegaard, a great misunderstanding and testifies to a lack of familiarity with the way the ethical issues that arise in relation to one’s fellow-beings are to be solved. These questions are later dealt with very thoroughly in Works of Love; but, as already pointed out as early as Either/Or, the duty to oneself is discussed as well as the duty to God and to one’s neighbor. With these preliminary remarks, we proceed to a reading of the individual books.

The Relation of Freedom to Repetition In Repetition we meet three characters, the first of whom is Constantin Constantius, whose existential position is entirely clear. He is an ironist who plays the “stoic”163 and as an experimental observer wants to help the main character in the work, “the Young Man,” in his difficulties. In addition to these two Job appears as an example of how

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the loss of earthly happiness is rectified by God’s intervention. Job as well as Constantin Constantius has a firm position, and there is no further change in them. The Young Man, however, is in motion; he has lost the immediate relation to life and finds that he must leave the girl he loves. It becomes evident, however, that in these difficulries he cannot be helped by Constantin Constantius, because the latter keeps himself within immanence, which signifies that he keeps within the sphere that is the domain of philosophy.164 And philosophy cannot help the young man. His difficulties are of such a nature that only faith that the higher power for whom all things are possible can intervene (that is, faith in the absurd) and come to his rescue. Therefore he resorts to the story of Job, whose situation he believes resembles his own, and who has experienced a repetition of his human happiness. The Young Man does not come to experience such a repetition, first, because his girl becomes engaged to someone else and, second, because between him and Job there is the great difference that Job was a righteous man. Job did not know guilt, whereas the Young Man had also to struggle with the question whether he was guilty or not guilty165 in his unhappiness. This question requires clarification. He does not achieve a repetition as Job did—namely, a return to the normal life of the universal, but “by the help of Governance” he “is freed from the entanglement of his unhappy love.”166 Through this liberation the Young Man also receives a repetition by having won himself again and can make a new beginning. This form of repetition becomes for him “the raising of his consciousness to the second power,” declares Constantin Constantius.167 This means that the Young Man still has not attained a religious clarification of his difficulties. But he has nevertheless found relief in being released from the commitment he was prevented from fulfilling. He thereby becomes an exception in relation to the universal, and it is among such exceptions that poets usually appear. According to Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, a poet is ideally a person who has to step out of the universal, takes a polemical stance to it, but yet in the last resort serves it. The poet’s task, then, becomes the task of portraying the ideality as it is found within the esthetic sphere. According to this conception, the poet is usually an unhappy

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person, because he, as an exception, cannot directly embrace the universal, but neither does he attain to a religious clarification. This difficult and ambiguous position of the poet has already been described by Judge William as follows: “So when the spirit is not allowed to rise into the eternal world of spirit, it remains in transit and delights in the pictures reflected in the clouds and weeps over their transitoriness. Therefore a poet-existence as such is an unhappy existence; it is higher than the finite and yet is not infinite.”168 This definition of a poet is closely connected to Kierkegaard’s definition of poetry in The Concept of Irony: . . . poetry is victory . . . over the world; it is through a negation of the imperfect actuality that poetry opens up a higher actuality, expands and transfigures the imperfect into the perfect and thereby assuages the deep pain that wants to make everything dark. To this extent, poetry is a kind of reconciliation, but it is not the true reconciliation, for it does not reconcile me with the actuality in which I am living: no transubstantiation of the given actuality takes place by virtue of this reconciliation, but it reconciles me with the given actuality by giving me another actuality, a higher and more perfect actuality.”169

According to this definition, poetry, that is, the poet, is on the way to “the true reconciliation,” which according to Kierkegaard can be found only within the religious. That the Young Man in Repetition ends as a poet signifies that he has not carried through the religious movement. He has attempted repetition with Job as his model, but since he did not achieve repetition in this form the repetition he did achieve became a heightening of his consciousness, which confirms him as an exception and makes him a poet. But this poet is not therefore through with his inner difficulties. It is said of him: “While this productivity becomes his external aspect, he is sustained by something inexpressibly religious.”170 Constantin Constantius indeed thinks that there had been the possibility of a deeper religious development. Whether the Young Man achieves this religious repetition remains uncertain in Repetition. Thus Constantin Constantius does not exclude the possibility of a repetition on a level higher than the two forms of repetition

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mentioned—namely, Job’s and the poet’s. Indeed, like all concepts of existence in Kierkegaard, repetition has many forms from the lower to the higher and therefore must never be regarded as static; concepts of existence always register a movement from lower to higher stages. Moreover, it holds true particularly of the concept of repetition that it stands in a very close relation to freedom, because repetition always indicates a new beginning, which can be brought about only in freedom, by resolution. Kierkegaard, also under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius, has very clearly set forth this relation of repetition to freedom in the schema that is found recorded in his many outlines171 of a criticism of J. L. Heiberg’s discussion of the book Repetition in his yearbook Urania.172 First of all, the close relation of repetition to freedom is stated in the following sentences: “When applied in the sphere of individual freedom, the concept of repetition has a history, inasmuch as freedom passes through several stages in order to attain itself.” True repetition is really possible only when freedom has reached the level in a person where one can speak of freedom in the proper sense. Thus the schema describes not only the way to true repetition but also to true freedom. On the basis of this schema Constantin Constantius can place the characters in Repetition in relation to each other. The schema reads as follows: “(a) Freedom is first qualified as desire or as being in desire. What it now fears is repetition, for it seems as if repetition has a magic power to keep freedom captive once it has tricked it into its power. But despite all of desire’s ingenuity, repetition appears. Freedom in desire despairs. Simultaneously freedom appears in a higher form. (b) Freedom qualified as sagacity. As yet, freedom has only a finite relation to its object and is qualified only esthetically ambiguously. Repetition is assumed to exist, but freedom’s task in sagacity is continually to gain a new aspect of repetition. This stage has been given expression in—to mention a recent work—“Rotation of Crops” (in Either/Or). “Rotation of Crops” is a part of Either/Or, and therefore this view also appears in its unwarrantability. People who in freedom do not stand in any higher relation to the idea usually embellish this standpoint as the highest wisdom. But since freedom qualified as sagacity is only finitely qualified, repetition must appear again, namely, repetition of the trickery by which sagacity wants to fool

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repetition and make it into something else. Sagacity despairs. (c) Now freedom breaks forth in its highest form, in which it is qualified in relation to itself. Here everything is reversed and the very opposite of the first standpoint appears. Now freedom’s supreme interest is precisely to bring about repetition, and its only fear is that variation would have the power to disturb its eternal nature. Here emerges the issue: Is repetition possible? Freedom itself is now the repetition. If it were the case that freedom in the individuality related to the surrounding world could become so immersed, so to speak, in the result that it cannot take itself back again (repeat itself ), then everything is lost. Consequently, what freedom fears here is not repetition but variation; what it wants is not variation but repetition. If this will to repetition is stoicism, then it contradicts itself and thereby ends in destroying itself in order to affirm repetition in that way, which is the same as throwing a thing away in order to hide it most securely. When stoicism has stepped aside, only the religious movement remains as the true expression for repetition and with the passionate eloquence of concerned freedom proclaims its presence in the conflict.173 As indicated, (a) and (b) lie within the esthetic stage with its striving for happiness. Here desire and aversion are the sympathetic and antipathetic motive powers in human life. People seek fixed points in the transient and avoid contact with the steadfast and the eternal, which alone gives the true repetition. In (c) we have the standpoint in which a person discovers the eternal in his inner being, and this creates the possibility for true freedom and real repetition. Because of his unhappiness, Job in Repetition has had to abandon stage (a), the stage of happy immediacy, and seek help in the religious, whereby he goes beyond all three stages, (a), (b), and (c); but by repetition he returns to (a) with its human happiness and moral laws. Constantin Constantius positions himself as follows in the schema: “I actually am a Stoic; it is the highest form of (b) adjacent to (c).”174 Like Job, the Young Man has lost the immediate relation to life and like him tries by way of faith in the absurd to return to immediacy. But he does not return to (a), nor in the book Repetition does he achieve the religious clarification that lies beyond (c). He finally stands, then, on a level analogous to Constantin Constantius’s—that is, a level that is higher than (a) and (b) but does not carry through

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the freedom and repetition that lead out of and beyond (c) and into the religious. According to Kierkegaard, both Constantin Constantius and the Young Man must be classified with the people who constitute “a difference” in relation to ordinary people, as, for example, a philosopher or a poet.175

The Conflict between the Individual and the Universal In Repetition the possibility of a new beginning looms large. As well as pointing to the repetition that God in his freedom can give a person, Constantin Constantius points to the movement of freedom in the individual life whereby a person attains the eternal and thereby also the possibility of repetition. It is otherwise in the book Fear and Trembling, which was published on the same day as Repetition. Here the question of the relation of freedom to the ethical is central; therefore the book deals with the conflicts one gets into when one’s wishes that can be fulfilled through freedom’s possibility clash with one’s duties. In none of his other books does Kierkegaard come to grips with so many and such profound ethical conflicts as in Fear and Trembling. Indeed, in one of his later journal entries, Kierkegaard declares: “Oh, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book.” It is this pathos that, comparable to that of Kierkegaard’s own situation, lets us sense the weight and “the horror” in the book,176 just as its complex of issues places it on a higher plane than Repetition. An analysis of its dialectical structure will clearly indicate this. Because he is approaching the stage of humor, the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio is existentially already on a higher level than Constantin Constantius. His own position is one of resignation, which is higher than Constantin Constantius’s position of irony. The two also differ in their form of communication. Constantin Constantius takes the young man only to the position of a poet in the ordinary sense and does not become personally involved in the deeper con-

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flicts. Johannes de Silentio, on the other hand, is personally engaged in existence and often emphasizes his own position in relation to the numerous inner conflicts of the others in the book. At the same time there is in Fear and Trembling a new development in the conception of the new potential tasks of the poet. Johannes de Silentio does not remain in the position of the ordinary poet, who according to his categorical definition cannot involve himself in describing the conflicts that arise when a person is confronted with the requirement of the eternal. In other words, Johannes de Silentio is aware of Lessing’s observation that when the poet encounters the religious sphere he is confronted by something entirely new that contains a complex of issues with which he can only dubiously become involved. Johannes de Silentio answers the question by thinking that it is possible to use the poetic in relation to the religious if the application of the description is limited to the “Theologia viatorum [theology of wayfarers],”177 in which one sticks just to the human side and describes the individual’s movement toward the ethical and the religious. This is precisely the same line of thought Climacus later represents when he wants to depict the progress of a person’s development in the direction of the ethical and the religious. This requires a special insight and sympathetic entering into one’s own and others’ psychological condition and conflicts. As a dialectician and sympathetic humorist, Johannes de Silentio has the qualifications for this. To use an expression often used of Climacus, he is “the subjective thinker” who himself is an “existing person,”178 and who by concentrating on existence can clarify “the relation of the existence-categories to each other.”179 As the subjective thinker, Johannes de Silentio is more of a dialectician than a poet. Therefore his literary form is designated “dialectical lyric,”180 which means that the lyrical is dominated by the existential dialectic. Johannes de Silentio has this dialectic run up against conflicts that ordinary logical thinking cannot cope with, because it stands face to face with the absurd. Therefore thought must give way to faith. Using Abraham as example of a human being’s encounter with the absurd, the book describes a conflict that qualitatively surpasses the many other conflicts cited in the book. Kierkegaard says of the exceptional difficulty of this conflict: “The terrifying thing in the colli-

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sion is this—that it is not a collision between God’s command and man’s command, but between God’s command and God’s command.”181 In other words, it is God’s command that Abraham shall love his son, but at the same time God requires the sacrifice of this son. Johannes de Silentio himself answers the question of why Abraham sacrifices Isaac: “For God’s sake and—the two are wholly identical—for his own sake. He does it for God’s sake because God demands this proof of his faith; he does it for his own sake so that he can prove it.” From this observation it appears that here there are only two aspects of the ethical—namely, the religious and the personal. The significance of the religious is placed foremost, but Johannes de Silentio does also stress the personal aspect when he declares that Abraham was “great because of a purely personal virtue.”182 In this connection, however, the civic aspect of ethics plays no role whatever. Abraham’s greatness consists not only in his obeying God’s command to sacrifice Isaac but in his simultaneously believing the absurd (the impossible)—namely, that God will give Isaac back to him. By believing the latter he becomes the prototype for a believer; he becomes the “father of faith,”183 or, as he is also called, the “knight of faith.”184 Through obedience and his faith, he stands higher than Job, who is still fighting for his rights before God. Abraham ranks still higher than all the examples of greatness that paganism can show. Johannes de Silentio discusses the difference between them and Abraham in great detail. He illuminates this difference by using the levels of freedom and of the ethical as the criteria. We will first consider the forms of the ethical that in Fear and Trembling are most often designated as “the universal.” In paganism the universal is synonymous with the laws in force in society, which have their sanction by being traced to a divine origin. In Johannes de Silentio’s words: “The ethical is the universal, and as such it is also the divine.”185 Here the individual does not yet stand in a personal relationship to God; the civic aspects of ethics are identical with the religious.186 The authority of the state or of the people sets the boundary for the single individual and embraces all the areas of life with its laws. There is no higher authority for the single individual than this universal, which is traced to the divine powers. As Johannes

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de Silentio says: “The whole existence of the human race rounds itself off as a perfect, self-contained sphere, and then the ethical is that which limits and fills at one and the same time.”187 Thus the individual is here inclosed in a system of moral and political laws; the purely personal and the religious aspects are still not present.188 It is otherwise within Judaism. Even if Abraham’s ethics is said to have had “no higher expression than family life,”189 yet the door stood open for him to a personal relationship to God, a relationship not found in paganism. Therefore in Judaism, through “family life” and the nation, the ethical could acquire a personal and a religious aspect in addition to the existing social aspect. Within Christianity, whose complex of issues Johannes de Silentio just touches on at the end, all three aspects are represented. Fear and Trembling, however, deals only with the religious and the personal aspects. Consequently, if one wishes to understand the ethical conflicts discussed in Fear and Trembling, one must pay careful attention to the level on which they occur. Johannes de Silentio uses the ethical and freedom to show the difference between Abraham and the highest examples of human greatness in history or literature. Abraham as the knight of faith is compared with tragic heroes such as Agamemnon, Brutus, etc. The possibility of freedom first manifests itself in the individual as wish. But the wish must be subordinated to the universal, that is, in paganism to the laws of society, in the wider sense to duty.190 In the relation between an individual’s wish and duty there are two possibilities. The individual either comes in conflict with duty or submits to it. Both Abraham and the tragic hero are prepared to submit to duty, but for Abraham a new difficulty arises when duty conflicts with duty. The distinction between the tragic hero’s situation and Abraham’s can be stated quite concretely as follows: It is a father’s duty to love his child; but this is also his wish. Here wish and duty coincide. This is just as true for Agamemnon and Brutus as for Abraham. But when Agamemnon and Brutus have to sacrifice their child, it is duty that demands it, but “a higher expression”191 of the duty to the universal that they already are obeying; hence this is the same duty, only expanded, for “within its own confines the ethical has various gradations.”192 The claim and expansion of this duty are un-

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derstandable to all; it is based upon the welfare of the nation or of society. Therefore the tragic hero can be said to “give up his wish in order to fulfill his duty.” Not so for the knight of faith. For him “wish and duty are also identical, but he is required to give up both.”193 Kierkegaard, while working on Fear and Trembling, tells how dreadful the collision is when “it is not a collision between God’s command and man’s command but between God’s command and God’s command.”194 To say it concretely, the collision is between “God’s promise about Isaac and God’s demand that he sacrifice Isaac.”195 In the case of the tragic hero, the collision was between the universal, understood as the divine, and the human wish. The tragic hero’s deed is clearly understandable to all. With regard to the difference between him and Abraham, it is said: “The authentic tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything that is his for the universal; his act and every emotion in him belong to the universal; he is open, and in this disclosure he is the beloved son of ethics. This does not fit Abraham; he does nothing for the universal and is hidden.” Through “an absolute relationship to the absolute”196 Abraham has ventured beyond the borders of the understandable. His inner struggles and victory are hidden and cannot be directly communicated to anyone. This hiddenness, which comes into being in and with the single individual’s relationship to God and which is here introduced into Kierkegaard’s authorship through the example of Abraham, is the beginning of the inwardness197 that hereafter becomes the central specification in Kierkegaard for a person’s ethical and religious existence. Therefore it is noteworthy that in discussing Abraham as a knight of faith Johannes de Silentio also describes how he imagines a contemporary knight of faith must look.198 With hiddenness as a specification of inwardness, Abraham stands higher than the tragic hero, whose task lies open to the universal and who is “great because of a purely personal virtue.”199 Abraham, on the other hand, is great because of his inwardness, whose essential characteristic is hiddenness because his task involves only the relationship between him and God. Lest this hidden life of inwardness be confused with other possible forms of inwardness and in order to show that Abraham’s hiddenness is the highest, Johannes de

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Silentio elaborates on the concept of hiddenness by pointing out its location within the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. Here, too, the procedure is to use the levels of freedom and of the ethical in locating the different examples of hiddenness that he cites. In the esthetic stage, we find a primordial form of hiddenness in the individual. Here one possesses freedom’s individual possibilities and has one’s own private wishes that one would just as soon keep without any outside interference. But then the ethical in the form of the universal comes forward and demands that these wishes be revealed and that the individual’s life be subordinated to the universal. This situation is described as follows: “The ethical as such is the universal; as the universal it is in turn the disclosed. The single individual, qualified as immediate, sensate, and psychical, is the hidden. Then his ethical task is to work himself out of his hiddenness and to become disclosed in the universal. Every time he wants to remain in the hidden, he trespasses and undergoes spiritual trial [Anfægtelse], from which he can emerge only by disclosing himself.”200 This means that the universal has an unqualified claim on the individual because it is higher than the individual, and therefore it demands the end of the esthetic hiddenness. It is easy to see that Abraham’s hiddenness was not esthetic in nature, inasmuch as he obeyed the laws of the ethical until he was forced to break them in order to obey the power that is higher than these laws. This he cannot make understandable to the universal; therefore his hiddenness is a hiddenness that lies outside the universal. Johannes de Silentio still raises the question whether there is not in paganism an analogy to Abraham’s hiddenness. He searches for enlightenment in Aristotle, who has pointed out that hiddenness is an essential element in the tragic drama, but that it nevertheless is dissolved in “recognition.”201 Since this esthetic hiddenness can be dissolved, it is relative. Seen from the point of view of freedom, the individual in tragic drama is under the power of fate, and seen from the point of view of the ethical, this hiddenness can be regarded neither as guilt nor guiltlessness. Consequently, there is here no possibility of an analogy to Abraham’s hiddenness. Johannes de Silentio nevertheless seeks to find a possible analogy in paganism in a story Aristotle tells in his Politics.202 It involves an

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incident in which a bridegroom learns from the augurs that his marriage will bring him unhappiness. But now the augurs’ announcement constitutes a connecting link between the universal and “heaven’s decision,”203 but within the boundaries of the universal. Although the deeper meaning of the pronouncement is hidden, the pronouncement itself is clear to the universal, even though it can become an issue for the bridegroom and the hiddenness thereby becomes only relative. Johannes de Silentio then tries out another possibility with regard to the bridegroom and says: But if the will of heaven had not been declared to him by an augur, if it had come to his knowledge quite privately, if it had entered into a purely private relation to him, then we are in the presence of the paradox, if there is any at all (for my deliberation is dilemmatic)— then he could not speak, however willing he might be to do so. Then he would not enjoy his silence but would suffer the agony, but this indeed would be the assurance that he was justified. Then his silence would not be due to his wanting to place himself as the single individual in an absolute relation to the universal but to his having been placed as the single individual in an absolute relation to the absolute.204

The emphasis here is on the words “having been placed,” which signifies that in this case it would not be something the bridegroom had heard from the augurs or had found out on his own, but, as with Abraham, would be a case of having received a “private” communication from a higher power. Here, as with Abraham, it would be a matter of a religious exception,205 that is, that in this case there possibly had been an overstepping of the boundary of the universal within the esthetic. But this is not the situation in the narrative under discussion.206 When all is said and done, there can be no question of an analogy to Abraham unless a person receives a personal “hint” from the transcendent.207 This can happen later within Christianity, which in a personal way addresses the single individual and recommends the suspension of the ethical when it applies to the relationship to God. According to Johannes de Silentio, it derives from Luke 14:26, which offers “a remarkable teaching on the absolute duty to God: ‘If anyone

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comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.’”208 In this way Christianity deepens the inwardness that already began with Abraham. It is particularly in his upbuilding literature that Kierkegaard describes the movement of this inwardness. On the other hand, as a counterpart to this hidden inwardness, Johannes de Silentio propounds the demonic, which for Kierkegaard always means either the absence or the exclusion of inwardness. The examples of the demonic cited in Fear and Trembling are taken from the sphere of Christian culture, since only in it is there for human beings the possibility of an absolute relationship to the absolute, whereby the universal ethical relation is relativized. It is characteristic of Christianity that it attempts to create a synthesis between the absolute claim and the relative, although the absolute must always be the primary element. But when a person resists entering into a positive relation to the absolute in the way that Christianity requires, a person comes under the demonic. What is common to inwardness and the demonic is that they contain a paradox, because they both lie outside the sphere of the universal. The deepest in both of them is the hiddenness. Johannes de Silentio describes as follows the transition from the position of the tragic hero to the hiddenness that characterizes the divine as well as the demonic paradox: “The tragic hero, who is the favorite of ethics, is the purely human; him I can understand, and all his undertakings are out in the open. If I go further, I always run up against the paradox, the divine and the demonic, for silence is both. Silence is the demon’s trap, and the more that is silenced, the more terrible the demon, but silence is also divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual.”209 In this way the divine and the demonic are two oppsite spheres to which the single individual can relate himself. “The demonic has the same quality as the divine, namely, that the single individual is able to enter into an absolute relation to it.”210 The first demonic figure mentioned is the merman. His hiddenness and exclusion from the universal, which here must be interpreted as the civic aspect of the ethical, is assumed to be the result of a prior

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guilt. Using the language of Christian dogmatics, one would say that he suffers under concrete consequences of hereditary sin. Johannes de Silentio calls this entire hiddenness-complex in the merman “a human pre-existence, because of which his life was entrapped.”211 Johannes de Silentio mentions various possibilities of deliverance from the demonic, which the merman longs for because of his love for Agnes. The first and most important step on the way to deliverance is the movement of repentance, which is a movement back to the absolute. Immediately thereafter there is also the possibility of a reconciliation with the universal. Johannes de Silentio expresses this as follows: “In other words, when the single individual by his guilt has come outside the universal, he can return only by virtue of having come as the single individual into an absolute relation to the absolute.”212 In specifying this movement, Johannes de Silentio touches on something that goes deeper than anything hitherto said in Fear and Trembling—namely, the issue of sin in the single individual’s life.213 This issue could not come up with regard to Abraham, because he was “a righteous man”; his life still moved “in immediate categories.”214 Properly speaking, sin can first be spoken of in Christianity, after humankind has been informed about the absolute truth. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio first gives the greatest examples of virtue within Judaism and paganism, but within the sphere of Christianity he concentrates on the negative counterpart, the demonic. By describing in detail the difficulties in the merman’s attempt to achieve liberation from the demonic, Johannes de Silentio gives us a penetrating glimpse into the sphere of the demonic. In this way he holds to the line that existential issues are to be presented as concretely as possible. As other examples of the demonic, he mentions Sarah,215 Richard III from Shakespeare’s tragedy, and Faust. As far as Sarah is concerned, the discussion is only about the temptation to the demonic, inasmuch as she is prevented from realizing the universal. The situation is different with regard to Richard III, who is born deformed and thereby is placed outside the universal. He must either seek salvation in the divine paradox or be lost in the demonic, which is finally the case with him. Faust, who in Johannes de Silentio’s account is “the doubter” kat j ejxochvn [par excellence],” but “a sympathetic nature,”216 sees through

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the superficiality in people’s lives and their views on existence. As a doubter he then faces three possibilities. He can terrify and disturb other people with his doubt—this he avoids out of sympathy for them. He can remain silent, but that raises the question whether ethically he has the the right to do this in relation to his fellow-beings, to whom he owes it to speak the truth. Finally, as the single individual he can enter into an absolute relation to the absolute and “get authorization for his silence.”217 Like so many of the ethicalreligious issues that Johannes de Silentio illustrates with concrete characters, the issues surrounding the Faust figure are also Kierkegaard’s own personal questions. He was seeking authorization to be silent about his doubts whether all was right with the state of Christianity218 until he understood that it was demanded that he should speak about it. Fear and Trembling treats of the difficulties and conflicts a person faces if he is to subordinate his individual freedom totally to the higher ethical requirements whereby true freedom is first attained. The subordination signifies that a person is making a movement toward a continually greater inwardness. Failing that, the negative relation of individual freedom to the ethical signifies that a person loses this freedom. The individual remains inclosed in his egotistic preoccupations. This is the beginning of the demonic, which can be steadily intensified. Later on, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms discuss the demonic at length in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death. In the latter book the demonic is carried to its ultimate intensification.

Two Foundations: The Immanent and The Transcendent After Johannes de Silentio, with the aid of many examples, has in Fear and Trembling given an account of the most difficult human ethical-religious conflicts, the principal pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, in Philosophical Fragments compares the two views of life that he believes constitute the two essential foundations a person can build on—namely, the Socratic assumption that there is something eternal in a person, and the Christian faith in “the god,” who is God’s

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revelation in time. There are, however, other foundations than these two at which a person can stop when he seeks an explanation of existence—for example, the assumption that matter constitutes the ultimate and basic element of existence, or the mythological view, which stands somewhat higher because it allows for living powers that, with fate as the supreme law, rule the world, or, finally, the view of existence that assumes, as do Plato and Hegel, ideas or principles as the primary source. These points of view are discussed and evaluated elsewhere in Kierkegaard’s authorship. But for Climacus Christianity is a person’s true foundation or “place of rest,”219 which quite simply means that here a person finds his final and decisive stronghold. Climacus now contrasts Christianity and the Socratic as the highest life-view within the human sphere. By means of irony, Socrates had seen through the insecurity of existence and by introspection had found the firm foundation within his own inner self. Every human being has the possibility of finding this religious position. As Climacus says: “In the Socratic view, every human being is himself the midpoint, and the whole world focuses only on him because his self- knowledge is a God-knowledge.”220 As long as a person remains within the immanent, he will always be able to come back to this foundation. In Philosophical Fragments, which must be considered an attempt to write dogmatics in a new and different way, Socrates represents humankind within the order of creation with its possibilities and limitations. The main emphasis in Climacus’ dogmatics, however, is on the order of salvation, which Climacus explains in the following manner: First of all a sharp dialectically deliberated distinction is drawn between the truth that Socrates and every human being possess and the truth that the god, who is also designated as “a savior” and “a redeemer,” offers humankind. Since the god brings the truth, the Socratic view must necessarily prove to be untruth. But even if human beings, seen from Christianity’s point of view, do not possess the truth, they do, however, have a desire to seek beyond themselves; and their minds come up against the paradox— that is, the contradiction that thought is unable to master. Climacus finds the extreme position of this, which actually goes beyond Socrates’

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position centered on “the knowledge of God,” in Socrates’ comment that he does not know for sure whether he might be “a more curiously complex animal than Typhon, or whether he has in his being a gentler and diviner part.” Therefore it was this “intimated paradox of the understanding”221 that made Socrates “bewildered about himself.” Climacus then asks what Socrates lacked in order to advance further and answers: “The consciousness of sin, which he could no more teach to any other person than any other person could teach it to him. Only the god could teach it—if he wanted to be teacher.”222 It is the consciousness of sin, which a person acquires in meeting the god, that distinguishes a person within the human sphere from the Christian. So far Climacus agrees with the common Christian dogmatic conception. But by confronting humankind with the god in time, Climacus, using his hypothetical and imaginatively constructing method, also step by step brings out new and crucial Christian qualifications. In this book the procedure223 is not merely to set forth some abstract deliberations on Christianity but also to draw the issues together around a concrete personality, in this case the god in time, whereby the single individual is prompted to make up his mind. By means of the concept of contemporaneity, Climacus attempts to substantiate that it is possible for the single individual to meet Christ concretely. By mustering arguments clearly, Climacus shows that in regard to Christ one must distinguish between two kinds of contemporaneity—first the ordinary immediate contemporaneity and second the essential contemporaneity that can be attained only by faith in Christ. The first contemporaneity is far from adequate for coming to the faith that this specific person is the god; its only significance is that it can testify that there has lived a man whom some believed to be the god. The crucial and essential contemporaneity becomes the contemporaneity of faith, and it does not depend on a person’s having personally experienced the god’s earthly presence in time. Seen from this point of view, with regard to essential contemporaneity there is no difference between the generation that was contemporary with Christ in the ordinary sense and later generations. Climacus nevertheless thinks that it is important for the single individual to try to imagine how it would be to be contemporary with

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Christ in the ordinary sense, because everyone has to repeat the difficult process of meeting Christ in his debased form and believing in him under those conditions, therefore of relating oneself to what Climacus calls “that historical fact.” Of this he says: “Every time the believer makes this fact the object of faith, makes it historical for himself, he repeats the dialectical qualifications of coming into existence.”224 At a distance, after it is dogmatically confirmed that Jesus was God’s Son, it seems easy to become a believer, whereas in the situation of contemporaneity, of actuality, one will always run up against difficulties. In the first place, the god in time will become a stumbling-block for human thought. Climacus makes it manifestly clear that here a person runs up against the paradox in the eminent sense. Johannes de Silentio, too, uses the expression “paradox” in Fear and Trembling, but about a person’s relation to God in the sense that the single individual came to believe that for God all things are possible and that he can make the impossible possible, which is indeed a paradox and something that occurs by virtue of the absurd. In Philosophical Fragments it is God’s coming in human form that is the paradox and the absurd. Whereas Fear and Trembling centers on obtaining the repetition of things of this world by way of the paradox, by faith in God, in Philosophical Fragments faith in the paradox means that God will create a person anew after he has fallen short of his eternal destiny. The paradox is first of all a thought-category, a logical and ontological self-contradiction, in that it contains the idea of incarnation, which joins two opposite realities—namely, temporality and eternity—in a unity. As used by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, “the absurd” does not express merely a thought-category but also a person’s relation to God or the god in time.225 But according to Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms both the absurd and the paradox express life’s true reality.226 The second essentially Christian category that emerges especially in connection with contemporaneity is the concept of offense. While paradox and the absurd, but especially the paradox, are mainly thought-categories pertaining to the god’s temporal presence, offense on the other hand is a person’s existential stance in relation to the god. As Climacus says, “offense is always an act, not an event.”227

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The fact that offense later comes to play such a tremendously large role in Kierkegaard’s authorship is closely linked to its being the true expression of the first reaction of the people to the god as a living reality. A dogma would be unable to offend a person in this manner. Therefore in the meeting with Christ a person cannot avoid running up against the paradox or the possibility of offense. Through the concept of contemporaneity, these Christian categories become more pronounced in the single individual’s life in another and more concrete and profound way. Christ’s earthly existence is brought in close contact to a person’s deep existential situation. By this means a person is always confronted with a very difficult choice. Thus all deliberations about contemporaneity can be said to revolve also around the question of freedom. Therefore the most important issue in Philosophical Fragments is also precisely the loss or the restoration of freedom in a person through the relationship to the revealed God. Commenting on what the idea of contemporaneity actually means, Kierkegaard once said during the Church struggle: “This thought is for me my life’s thought. I also dare truthfully say that I have had the honor to suffer in order to advance this thought. Therefore I die joyful, infinitely grateful to Governance that it was granted me to become aware of this thought and to draw attention to it in this way, not that I have invented it, God forbid that I become guilty of such presumption—no, it is an old invention, is the New Testament’s. However, it was granted to me, in suffering, to bring this thought once again into recollection . . ..”228 Contemporaneity is closely related to the historical; to be contemporary with someone or something means expressly to be along where something happens or comes into existence—consequently, to be there at a present actuality at a specific time. But when the existing actuality becomes past, it becomes the historical. Contemporaneity, referring here to “immediate contemporaneity,”229 supplies the material for the historical. In order to illuminate the question of contemporaneity in all its aspects, Climacus in a section titled “Interlude”230 has subjected also the historical to thorough analysis. He shows that the question of freedom is central to contemporaneity as well as to the historical. This is clearly voiced in the following statement: “All coming into existence occurs in freedom, not by way of

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necessity. Nothing coming into existence comes into existence by way of a ground, but everything by way of a cause. Every cause ends in a freely acting cause. The intervening causes are misleading in that the coming into existence appears to be necessary; the truth about them is that they, as having themselves come into existence, definitely point back to a freely acting cause.”231 The relation between coming into existence, contemporaneity, and the historical can be stated as follows: Coming into existence signifies that something that did not exist comes into existence through freedom. Contemporaneity denotes being present at the coming into existence, whereas the historical has to do with the perception of that which has come into existence. In all these concepts freedom is the crucial presupposition. As the basis for his deliberations on freedom, Climacus uses the schema in journal entry Pap. IV C 100 (JP I 197), which speaks of accentuating being within “the different sciences.” The method aims to show how the actual, which is a synthesis of essence and being, of necessity and possibility, achieves a continuously higher quality. This occurs when being, and thereby possibility and freedom, comes to play a continually more dominant role. In nature the dominant element in the synthesis is necessity, but the element of freedom is also present because nature also is something that has come into existence. Nor in nature is it nature as such that determines the course of events, but God, who as a freely effecting cause conditions everything.232 Not until freedom begins to manifest itself in humankind in relation to necessity, not until then can one properly speak of the historical. It is freedom’s possibility within this historical that Climacus attempts to point out with his clear arguments. If this freedom were not present, the principal Christian concepts would also lose their meaning. It is noteworthy that Climacus also keeps a watchful eye on the point of view that claims that freedom is changed through the “apprehension” of the historical; for example, if reflection supposes it understands how a specific event has to happen under specific conditions, it might seem as if the event would take place by necessity and not by freedom, or in any case that it would become necessary by having happened. Climacus sums up his arguments against this view in the following sentence: “If what is apprehended is changed in the

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apprehension, then the apprehension is changed into a misunderstanding.”233 Climacus gives the same defense for the significance of freedom in relation to the historical in his extremely painstaking analyses of the process that takes place in a person’s appropriation of the historical knowledge.234 In his discussion of the historical, Climacus sees an essential task in distinguishing sharply between “the directly historical” and “that historical fact”235 that tells about the god in time. The most important thing here is this fact itself and not the historical details, “for faith cannot be distilled from even the finest detail.”236 On the basis of this observation, it is understandable that Climacus in the “worldhistorical nota bene” could be satisfied with describing this fact by means of the following brief formula: “‘We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died.’”237 This worldhistorical nota bene contains, in the first place, the direct historical, but then it also contains “the believer’s report” about the hidden, which could be grasped only by the eyes of faith. Just as freedom as a freely effecting cause is the moving power that starts all coming into existence, it is love, which also is an expression of freedom,238 that through the god in time brings a new and higher coming-into-existence into the world. The deliberations in Philosophical Fragments center primarily on the deepest issues of freedom; the ethical, however, does not come up for discussion at all. The simple explanation is that in his thoughtexperiment Climacus wished to point to the two places of rest that remain as humankind’s last possibilities when everything else, the ethical as well, vanishes. But in Concluding Unscientific Postscript the same Climacus no less conclusively accentuates precisely the ethical and its relation to freedom.

The Psychological Presuppositions for Freedom In Philosophical Fragments the center of gravity for the deliberations is not in the human being himself as an individual existence but in

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the two foundations on which a person can build—namely, the human and the Christian. Within the human, as mentioned earlier, “every human being is himself the midpoint” because through selfknowledge he can come to “God-knowledge.”239 This is also an expression of human freedom in relation to all external powers; but this freedom still lies on an abstract plane. The next and qualitatively new foundation comes into existence through a person’s relationship to the god in time; through this relationship freedom is concretely offered to a person as a beginning of a new life. But in The Concept of Anxiety, which was published a few days after Fragments, it is the psychological presuppositions of freedom’s possibility in the human being that are discussed. This is done profoundly and in great detail, inasmuch as the work concentrates on the possible presuppositions of the individual’s freedom and its wider consequences. Since most of these aspects are treated in an earlier book,240 only two will be considered here: first, the fundamental presuppositions of human freedom, and, second, the relation of freedom to the ethical and the religious. As for the first point, it is important at the outset to call attention to a concept not directly mentioned by the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, but which quite clearly is the basis for his deliberations on the origin and function of freedom—namely, the concept of imagination.241 As early as in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard advanced important points of view on the function of the imagination in a person. A more fundamental psychological view is found later in The Sickness unto Death, which continues the psychological deliberations in The Concept of Anxiety. It may, however, be taken for granted that this fundamental view is also the basis for the composition of The Concept of Anxiety.242 In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus says of the imagination: “As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing; it is not a capacity, as are the others—if one wishes to speak in those terms, it is the capacity instar omnium [for all capacities].” He goes on to say: “Imagination is infinitizing reflection . . .” and “The imagination is the possibility of any and all reflection.”243 These specifications embrace the following consequences, upon which Vigilius Haufniensis also builds his exposition in The

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Concept of Anxiety. By way of the imagination as “the medium of infinitizing,” the infinite (the eternal), the second element in the synthesis of time and eternity that the human being represents, manifests itself. Imagination thereby becomes the creative capacity and at the same time the capacity that distinguishes man from the animal. As the “possibility of any and all reflection,” imagination creates the basis for thinking and thereby supplies the presupposition of the higher psychical and spiritual life that is the mark of being human. Since imagination creates the elements that reflection thereafter appropriates, a person can by way of reflection rise above the momentary in which the immediate person lives. Now the individual is not bound solely to immediate reactions to inner or outer impulses but can rise above the present and look back upon the past or entertain ideas about the future. With this a new dimension, prepared by imagination and produced by reflection, comes into the individual’s life. This new dimension is possibility. Possibility is the very beginning of freedom; by means of it a person rises above his immediate confinement and on his own tries to stake out the directions of his life. But in the first long period in the development of humanity, later repeated abridged in the single individual, these possibilities must, according to Vigilius Haufniensis, be described as a dream, because as yet they do not correspond at all to the realities of life. It is only step by step that the individual learns to look honestly at existence—namely, by applying critical thinking in an ever greater extent to the creations of the imagination. The imagination per se is indeed indifferent to the question whether something “is true or not true.”244 The same is true of the question of good and evil. It requires dialectical thinking and ethical reflection to observe critically, to temper, and to direct the possibilities created by the imagination,245 which thereby becomes “an interlude in the task of life.”246 Possibility, which is created by the elements of the imagination and which through individual spiritual development is steadily and increasingly governed by critical thinking and the ethical, becomes thereby a central qualification in human life. Thus it can be said without exaggeration that it is the category of possibility, which is also an expression of freedom’s possibility, that governs all the delib-

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erations in The Concept of Anxiety. Here Vigilius Haufniensis delineates steadily heightened forms of possibility and freedom. As already mentioned, it is through the possibility created by the imagination that a person is torn out of his or her security within immediate life. With regard to this original condition, Vigilius Haufniensis declares that the individual is “psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition.”247 Severance from this “naturalness” is the infant beginning of a person’s individual life. But the loss of immediate security and life through possibility creates anxiety. Anxiety, then, means that the individual is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by possibility, inasmuch as one is tempted by it but not by the consequences it may carry with it. What the anxiety is about can differ greatly, which explains why anxiety can vary from its mildest to its most severe forms; the individual’s stage of development also influences how earnestly possibility is taken. Therefore the intensity of anxiety cannot be conquered before a person realizes that there is a possibility of the eternal. For this reason all the possibilities accompanied by anxiety and preceding this realization are called the “possibility of possibility” by Vigilius Haufniensis. Thus the whole sphere of anxiety is encompassed by this definition. But this anxiety about possibility, which is also an expression of freedom, is the driving force toward the freedom that a person attains by encountering the possibility of the eternal. Commenting briefly on these connections, Vigilius Haufniensis says: “Anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”248 On the psychological presupposition that it is possibility that creates anxiety and forms the point of departure for human freedom, Vigilius Haufniensis seeks to throw light on the Christian doctrine of hereditary sin. Precisely because he has a solid knowledge of the human psychological presuppositions and from the ethical point of view cannot exempt later generations from responsibility with regard to hereditary sin, he has to reject all the dogmatic theories that try to make Adam, as the first human being, solely responsible for the consequences of hereditary sin. Adam was only the one who first incurred hereditary guilt, but all subsequent individuals incur hereditary guilt in essentially the same way as Adam did. The difference

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between the first and the later individual is only quantitative. The later individual suffers the consequences of hereditary sin only to the extent heredity and environment predispose him more or less (thus quantitatively) to the Fall. Even though bearing the consequences of hereditary sin, every individual is born innocent. By making this claim, Vigilius Haufniensis champions individual freedom and individual responsibility. His method is to consider first of all the human psychological presuppositions before coming with his explanation, which, to be sure, he later subjects to the judgment of the Bible—instead of, as usually happens, beginning with basing an explanation on certain classical passages in the Bible, whereby the whole thing becomes alien to and detached from human existence. Vigilius Haufniensis goes so far as to assert that “in this respect the Bible has often had a harmful effect.”249 The procedure of Vigilius Haufniensis is very simple. On the basis of psychological experience, he knows that a person, like Adam, in his childhood does not have knowledge of good and evil as it is in Scripture. But he also knows that the process through which a person acquires insight into good and evil is prolonged and stretches through generations. Most important, however, is the fact that through possibility, anxiety, and freedom a person continually faces new decisions. These presuppose in the first place freedom’s possibility and then the ethical. Freedom manifests itself in the human being on the first level as “the anxious possibility of being able.”250 This occurs when the individual is confronted for the first time by a prohibition; this is the very first confrontation by a kind of ethical claim upon him. But this is far from being identical with the individual’s thereby acquiring knowledge of good and evil; it only sets a boundary for the individual, who is warned against stepping over it. This is the way all morality and ethics begin for the individual. He gets latitude for his development but at the same time gets the specific prohibition. The whole question will then revolve around obedience to the prohibition. It is noteworthy that Vigilius Haufniensis passes lightly over the difficulty that could be implicit in the Biblical narrative of “the prohibition and the voice of punishment as coming from without.”

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According to Vigilius Haufniensis, a person, on the basis of the presuppositions given to him, will himself be able to lay down the prohibition against the temptation of possibility. This he expresses as follows: Here, in the conclusion, I have adhered to the Biblical narrative. I have assumed the prohibition and the voice of punishment as coming from without. Of course, this is something that has troubled many thinkers. But the difficulty is merely one to smile at. Innocence can indeed speak, inasmuch as in language it possesses the expression for everything spiritual. Therefore, one needs only to assume that Adam talked to himself. The imperfection in the story, namely, that another spoke to Adam about what he did not understand, is thus eliminated. From the fact that Adam was able to talk, it does not follow in a deeper sense that he was able to understand what was said. This applies above all to the difference between good and evil, which indeed can be expressed in language but nevertheless is only for freedom. Innocence can indeed express this difference, but the difference is not for innocence, and for innocence it can only have the meaning that was indicated in the preceding account.251

Aready in this delineation of the Fall, one can discern two of the aspects of the ethical—namely, the relationship to God and to oneself and one’s fellow-beings. In the passage just quoted, Vigilius Haufniensis does not exclude the possibility that the process by which a person moves toward knowledge of the difference between good and evil begins with the person himself or, as he says, with Adam’s having “talked to himself.” This is the personal aspect of ethics. But then it must not be forgotten that this personal aspect can only be thought, because, as Vigilius Haufniensis points out, in language the human being possesses “the expression for everything spiritual,”252 which presupposes that the human being possesses within himself the possibility of the eternal, which refers to God. The ethical aspect with regard to one’s fellow beings does not as yet stand out; Vigilius Haufniensis wishes here only to give the grounds for the religious and the personal aspects.

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The relation to one’s fellow-beings comes more and more into the picture as the individual’s insight and experience of the race with regard to the moral and the ethical are increased; the responsibility of freedom is therefore also increased and anxiety is intensified. In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio shows what forms the ethical as the universal, which he always traces to its divine origin, has within paganism. This can also be supplemented with Judge William’s comments on the “fluctuations”253 to which the ethical is exposed in paganism because knowledge of the eternal in human beings has not yet been attained, which is why duty’s demand confronts the person as something external. In line with Judge William’s deliberations, Vigilius Haufniensis points to fate as the highest power for paganism. Fate, which is defined as “the unity of necessity and the accidental,”254 here expresses the human being’s uncertain groping when it comes to the moral laws. As Vigilius Haufniensis also emphasized, one cannot in the proper sense speak of sin within original paganism—that is, the paganism that as yet has not been informed of the truth. Vigilius Haufniensis then discusses Judaism, which did have knowledge of the true God and therefore, in contrast to paganism, knew guilt; according to Vigilius Haufniensis one can in the proper sense speak of guilt only in relation to a personal God.255 Therefore anxiety does not apply here to fate but to guilt. He emphasizes, however, the lack in Judaism that had already been mentioned by Judge William: “Even the Jew who chose God did not choose absolutely, for he did indeed choose the absolute, but he did not choose it absolutely, and thereby it ceased to be the absolute and became something finite.”256 The Jew remained ensconced in his relation to the temporal; he did not carry through the movement of repentance absolutely, and therefore his guilt acquired an ambiguity reminiscent of the ambiguity of anxiety within paganism. This is why Vigilius Haufniensis speaks of there being also in Judaism an “anxiety defined dialectically as guilt.”257 Vigilius Haufniensis leads the line of thought further to Christianity, in which the individual gains knowledge of the absolute good and thereby also of its opposite. The qualitatively new that comes through a person’s encounter with Christianity is also manifest in a

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person’s no longer facing the possibility of the eternal but the reality of the eternal. The meeting with Christianity also discloses the inadequacy of one’s own attempt to attain freedom at the same time that he is characterized as a sinner. Yet a person’s previous efforts have not been in vain, because through them he has had to learn to know himself in terms of his immanentally given qualifications and is thus matured to bow to the conditions Christianity places before him. This is also why Vigilius Haufniensis first confronts human existence with the two world-historical formations, paganism and Judaism, before describing the encounter with Christianity. In other words, a person does not come to Christianity in the proper way without having repeated in foreshortened perspective the previous steps in the individual’s and humanity’s spiritual development.258 A leap without the intermediate stages from the lowest to the highest is always a mistake. Some of the most important elucidations Vigilius Haufniensis makes in his investigation of the human encounter with the truth of Christianity are his showing how difficult it is for a person finally to perceive the impossibility of controlling, by one’s own freedom, one’s existence and to acknowledge one’s incapability and guilt. The beginning of this acknowledgment is “the true repentance,”259 whereby a person surrenders himself to the truth that will save him. But as a being with freedom’s possibility, a person can also resist the true acknowledgment of his condition, with the result that the anxiety that previously was ambiguous now unambiguously turns against the new as “anxiety about the good.”260 With the expression “anxiety about the good” Vigilius Haufniensis characterizes in great detail the whole vast sphere of the demonic. His profound analysis of the various forms of the demonic penetrates the most hidden recesses of the human soul. Because the demonic is in flight from the freedom that Christianity offers, it always signifies unfreedom. But at the same time the demonic mentality is a strong indicator of the presence of individual freedom, since without it one would not be able to resist Christianity’s offer. Thus, by means of consistent thinking about human existence in the three world-historical formations— paganism, Judaism, and Christianity—Vigilius Haufniensis has irre-

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futably demonstrated the presence of individual freedom and the function of this freedom in human life. While the question of freedom receives detailed treatment in The Concept of Anxiety, the ethical is touched upon only at central points in relation to the three principal forms of religion. This is connected with the aim of The Concept of Anxiety not to deal with existing individualities, which always presupposes the relationship of freedom and the ethical, but to provide a more theoretical and abstract consideration of freedom’s possibility within the different spheres of existence. Thus the book became “somewhat didactic” and, compared with Kierkegaard’s books depicting individualities, could more easily be accepted as scientific-scholarly literature.261 The book must first and foremost be classified under psychology. According to Vigilius Haufniensis, psychology always has to do with a “state,”262 and never with movement, which falls under the discipline of ethics. A “state” is correctly described by the category of possibility, which then also governs the interpretation in The Concept of Anxiety. The transition from possibility to actuality and thereby also to the ethical and religious occurs by a leap. This is also why the leap is frequently called a border category in The Concept of Anxiety. Freedom can likewise be dealt with in a psychology only as freedom’s possibility, even though freedom per se always expresses a movement. Although Vigilius Haufniensis therefore deals with freedom in the form of possibility and in its approximation to the leap, by which freedom becomes actuality, he clearly points out: “. . . freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual”;263 or “ . . . freedom is never in abstracto.”264 From this it is evident how important it is to be alert to whether freedom is being discussed in the medium of thought or in existence. In comparing Philosophical Fragments with The Concept of Anxiety, which appeared at the same time, one has to agree with Torsten Bohlin that the two books “go back to two different points of departure,”265 but this was expressly intentional on Kierkegaard’s part and not an inconsistency, as Bohlin thinks. Philosophical Fragments centers on a person’s becoming aware of a higher truth, becoming aware, through Socrates, of the eternal in the human being and becoming aware, through Christianity, of the god in time. In both cases the truth is

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something given to a person from above. The Concept of Anxiety, on the other hand, describes the psychological steps in a person’s movement toward truth. As far as Socrates is concerned, Vigilius Haufniensis takes him no further than to the surmounting of paganism’s supreme power, namely, fate.266 With regard to Christianity, the focus here is only on an initial confrontation, inasmuch as humankind is seen primarily in the light of the Christian dogma of hereditary sin, whereas human existence is not as yet placed in relation to the central Christian concepts of offense, salvation, and atonement.

Freedom and Guilt Whereas The Concept of Anxiety discusses in detail the concept of the demonic and the demonic as a cultural phenomenon,267 there are individual examples of this in Stages on Life’s Way in the section entitled “In Vino Veritas.” There we have a portrayal of self-confident individualities “who obviously know how to give an account of their existence.”268 In these characters the demonic reaches its culmination in a concrete way. We have already met other examples of the demonic in Kierkegaard’s writings: in The Concept of Irony in his discussion of German romantic poets; in Either/Or, A represents the demonic; similarly, the merman, King Henry IV, and others in Fear and Trembling are demonic figures. The demonic manifests itself in the five characters in “In Vino Veritas” in their attitudes to woman and the erotic, consequently to the most concrete situations in life. It is clear that it is the relation to freedom, or more correctly, the relation between freedom and the ethical, that constitutes these characters. Because they deny the moral and ethical authorities, they end up in unfreedom. The demonic is, however, first and foremost opposed to the religious—understood as Christianity’s challenge to humankind. This also explains why, according to Kierkegaard, it is only when a person has met Christianity and has rejected it that the demonic, strictly speaking, can manifest itself. But through this rejection the moral

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and ethical duties are also denied. Then a person regards his freedom purely arbitrarily, which means precisely a suspension of the ethical. This is the same point Nietzsche makes later when speaking of obliterating “Du sollst [you shall]” in order to go “Jenseits von Gut und Böse [beyond good and evil]” and to attain “Unschuld des Daseins [the innocence of existence].”269 The question is whether a person can in this way return at all to the state of innocence in the first immediacy. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms deny all possibility of it. For just as a person in his state of innocence would be unable to avoid anxiety, neither will he, after having rejected the eternal and Christianity, be able to avoid despair or offense.270 In other words, a person can remain guiltless only until confronted with the higher claims, which he can either attempt to fulfill or reject—whereby he in either case still incurs guilt. Therefore when the characters in “In Vino Veritas” (who live within the Christian culture) are judged from the point of view of Christianity, their demonic character, even though the five vary in degree, is indubitable. Thus there is a big leap between the two extreme points represented by the Young Man, for whom “there is still hope,” and Johannes the Seducer, whom Climacus calls “a ‘marked’ and extinct individuality.”271 Just as inwardness, which is the opposite of the demonic, has various gradations, so has also the demonic. Some of the figures in the preceding books—for example, the Young Man, Constantin Constantius, and Victor Eremita—are regarded as positive in their attitude. But when Quidam, who is the one who must be considered to have existentially gone the furthest, from his higher position in his “Recollection” looks at these more positive characters, who also must be understood as his own possibilities, they must from this standpoint be regarded as demonic. An important and characteristic feature of the demonic person is that he is unwilling to sever his unconditional attachment to the temporal and the things of this earth since he is unwilling to acknowledge anything higher. All his aspirations are confined to the esthetic sphere. But by means of his rejection of and opposition to this higher something he nevertheless, although in a negative way, goes beyond the esthetic. This negative spiritual attitude is later discussed by Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death.272

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Judge William, too, occupies a lower position in Stages on Life’s Way than in Either/Or—not only because he is seen from Quidam’s point of view, but also because he himself has perceived that the profound earnestness lies in the ethical-religious domain in which he is unwilling to become personally involved; on the contrary, he warns against the great struggles and spiritual trials of this stage. His ethical outlook continues for eight years,273 mainly in the direction of civic ethics. When, for example, he says: “The resolving is the ethical, is freedom,”274 this synthesis of the ethical and freedom is primarily concerned with life’s extroverted side and not with the individual’s inner struggle. The same is true of Judge William’s excellent account of the meaning of resolution for marriage, where resolution is called “the true beginning of freedom.”275 The freedom that is created by resolution is totally oriented to earthly tasks. Even though “brought up in the Christian religion,”276 he does not know from personal experience the conflicts into which the single individual is cast when the personal and religious aspects of ethics intervene in one’s life. Although Judge William emphasizes the meaning of time for the single individual’s existence in a way different from the Esthete’s, he has not personally arrived at the upheaval in which the meaning of time and the choice is accentuated absolutely, which will always be the case when a person encounters Christianity concretely. Thus from the most profound point of view Judge William stops on the Socratic level—that is, the purely human level, where the single individual always can find his foundation in recollection as the possibility of the eternal in a person. Therefore Climacus says of his position: “Here time is accentuated ethically, but still not in such a way that precludes the possibility of recollection’s withdrawal out of existence into the eternal.”277 The point of view with all its modifications that is represented by Judge William in Stages on Life’s Way as well as in Either/Or is briefly defined by Climacus in these words: “If the individual is dialectically turned inward in self-assertion in such a way that the ultimate foundation does not in itself become dialectical, since the underlying self is used to surmount and assert itself, then we have the ethical interpretation.” For this reason Judge William does not even reach “Religiousness A,”278 in which repentance becomes concrete in a

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person’s realization that despite great struggle and effort he is totally incapable, and in which a person’s only gain becomes “the eternal recalling of guilt.”279 The next step, then, would be to “break in this way with the understanding and thinking and immanence, in order then to lose the last foothold of immanence, the eternity behind, and to exist, situated at the edge of existence, by virtue of the absurd.”280 It is toward this climax that Quidam, the principal character in Stages on Life’s Way, is moving; it is not, however, a voluntary resolution that moves him in that direction, but the numerous existential complications into which his life has led him, particularly guilt in relation to another person. Through Quidam’s account of his life history and the inner conflict he has to fight through, we get the most concrete glimpse into someone who became demonically bound by life’s various situations but who fights through to the religious. Only the religious will be able to solve the complications of his life and his relation to guilt. Frater Taciturnus, who takes the role of observer with regard to Quidam, also calls him a demonic character “in the direction of the religious.”281 Quidam himself gives in diary form a detailed account of his journey toward the religious. The demonic in him consists in his having difficulty repenting himself out of his bondage to temporality, even though his relation to the first immediacy, which represents finitude, has been lost to him. The first and foremost hindrance to his repenting is that by breaking an engagement he has become guilty in relation to the girl, and that in his thoughts he must first of all suffer through the frightful consequences that the broken engagement could eventually have for her. He is unwilling to slip lightly around his ethical commitment, and of this he writes: “What is my guilt? To have ventured into something I could not carry out. What is my offense? To have made a person unhappy. Unhappy in what way ? In possibility in such a way that according to what she said and by virtue of possibility I have a murder on my conscience. What is my punishment? To endure this consciousness. What is my hope? That a compassionate Governance will in actuality reduce the sentence by helping her. What does my understanding say about her? That there is no real probability of the worst. What consequence does this have for me? None at all. An ethical commitment cannot be discharged by

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any calculation of probability but only by assuming the ultimate possibility of responsibility.”282 In addition, there were specific incidents in Quidam’s life that shaped the background for his inclosing reserve and depression. What great significance he attributes to these incidents283 is seen in the dating of his comments about them “on the fifth day of each month”284 of the half year covered in his diary. In order to free himself from their dark and secret stress he had to bring them to the light of day through reflection and heart-searching. But although Quidam himself has arrived at an understanding of their connection to his inner life, he speaks of them indirectly and symbolically. Thus Quidam is seeking here to expose the hidden regions of the human psyche, something that has also preoccupied later depth psychology. Before he could come to the religious stage by way of repentance, Quidam first had to clarify for himself the issues mentioned. Of his qualifications for solving these questions, Frater Taciturnus says: “. . . he must be esthetically developed in his imagination, must be able to grasp the ethical with primitive passion in order to take offense properly so that the original possibility of the religious can break through at this turning point.”285 Because of the many secret notes in Quidam’s life, repentance was “dialectically prevented from constituting itself.”286 Quidam must first “dialectically”—that is, reflectively— honestly face, under the perspectives of freedom and the ethical, all the difficulties in which he was involved. In the process of doing so he describes his difficult way to inward deepening, where the temptation to the demonic has continually been present. Quidam is a clear example of a person in whom the personal aspect of ethics and the religious is dominant. Concentration on these aspects, with the omission of the universally moral and civic aspects, is clearly evident in this comment by Frater Taciturnus, who first and foremost is aiming at the religious: “The religious healing, conversely, consists in transforming the world and centuries and generations and millions of contemporaries into something vanishing, transforming jubilation and acclamation and esthetic hero worship into a disturbing diversion, the idea of being finished into a phantasmagoric hallucination—so that all that remains is only the individual himself—this particular individual placed in his relationship with God

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under the qualification: guilty/not guilty.”287 The repentance to which Quidam comes presupposes ethics;288 repentance is the way to a higher freedom, even if in itself it is “a negative action.”289 At the same time repentance is the prerequisite for forgiveness of sin as the boundary, since “the idea of forgiveness of sin is extraneous to the task”290 that Frater Taciturnus has assigned himself in his imaginary construction. Only with the forgiveness of sin would the higher form of freedom and the higher ethical appear positive. But even if the ethical sphere consequently can be described only as a “passageway,” this does not mean that it is something one can “pass through once and for all,”291 because after a person has received the forgiveness of sin the ethical will once again come forward with its requirement.

Subjective Actuality, Freedom and the Ethical Of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus says that he will here attire in “historical costume”292 the issue he introduced in Philosophical Fragments. The central issue in Philosophical Fragments is a person’s encounter with the god in time. For methodological reasons the complex of issues in this book is extremely simplified.293 Socrates is made the representative of the human, and it is solely the point of departure, which he finds in his inner being, that provides the center of the presentation. With regard to Christianity, the book points out the obstacles a person always meets on the way to faith, namely, the paradox and the offense. Yet in Philosophical Fragments Climacus works out thoroughly and in detail the concept that is the condition for a true encounter between a person and “the god in time”: namely, contemporaneity. Especially through this concept, Climacus has in Philosophical Fragments already attired Christianity in “historical costume.” Therefore it is entirely consistent that in Concluding Unscientific Postscript he actually does not give even Christianity a historical costume but, on the contrary, totally concentrates on what is set aside in Philosophical Fragments—namely, how a person becomes a Christian. For this reason his primary effort is to describe a person’s difficulties in the movement toward Christianity. For the same reason

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Climacus divides the task of attiring Christianity in historical costume into the three following points: “the apologetical presuppositions of faith, approximational transitions and overtures to faith, the quantifying introduction to the decision of faith.”294 This division, which maps the course of the book, thereby states the issues people will encounter on their way to faith. Furthermore, Concluding Unscientific Postscript shows that the presupposition for this movement toward Christianity is freedom and the ethical. Here it is about freedom on a higher level, just as the ethical aspect is wholly personal and religious. Therefore we are dealing here with what Climacus believes should be the primary concern of time—“the essential, the innermost, freedom, the ethical.” Instead of stressing the importance of external events, “the world-historical,”295 as time is in the habit of doing, Concluding Unscientific Postscript deals with the deeper, hidden sides of existence—namely inwardness. Following the points set down by Climacus, the presentation proceeds as follows: the absolute difference between the human and Christianity is emphasized, likewise the impossibility of “wanting to quantify oneself into faith.”296 Likewise all the apologetical attempts to make Christianity acceptable by adducing certain objective claims about it are rejected. Climacus does not believe, for example, that one can become a Christian merely by increasing one’s objective knowledge about Christianity through a historical-critical study of Scripture or because the authority of the Church guarantees the interpretation. In this connection Grundtvig’s theories of the Church are also repudiated. Neither is the existence of Christianity for centuries a demontration of its truth. But the greatest confusion comes when someone like Hegel tries to help Christianity by way of speculative thought. After this rejection of attempts to render the truth of Christianity probable by means of objective criteria, Climacus prepares the subjective line and calls attention to all aspects of a person’s subjective relation to Christianity. First of all, however, he makes it abundantly clear that the eternal can never be communicated directly, consequently neither a person’s inner life nor the fact of the Godman. Climacus also draws the boundary of human knowledge and in contrast to Hegel asserts that “a system of existence cannot be given”297

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as long as existence is not ended and there are existing individualities. Furthermore, Concluding Unscientific Postscript makes a clear distinction between the world-historical and a person’s inner life. The objectives of the world-historical lie within finitude; these objectives and their fulfillment are something external and can be judged from outside, whereas this can never be done with the subjective movements in a person. Within the domain of the world-historical both freedom and the ethical are relative magnitudes. Not until a person has made the movement of infinity do freedom and the ethical become something absolute. Both the world-historical and the life of the race as such are on a plane lower than the individual subjective life that is lived by a person who has carried through the movement of infinity. In this there is a strong criticism of Hegel, for whom the highest was the state and the life of the race. On this Climacus says: “The desperate attempt of the miscarried Hegelian ethics to make the state into the court of last resort of ethics is a highly unethical attempt to finitize individuals, an unethical flight from the category of individuality to the category of the race.”298 Climacus points out that the most important questions in human existence can be solved only on the subjective path. Involved are such questions as death,299 immortality,300 the relationship to God,301 and marriage.302 In the process of answering these questions, one will discover a form of being different from the one that philosophy knows. Philosophy’s being becomes an abstraction, inasmuch as it turns out that truth and being in philosophy coincide, become identical; consequently the redoubling one gets becomes an abstract “redoubling.”303 Along this abstract way the existing subject can advance no further. Not until the individual through his freedom involves himself with the ethical can his form of life become concrete and the movement toward a new form of being have its beginning. Consequently the prerequisite for this beginning is that the individual turn his gaze toward the ethical—the personal ethical, please note, which, because it is the expression of the eternal, stands higher than all moral and political norms, which are designed solely for living together here on earth.

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As a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, a person can find this higher ethics in himself, and it is precisely this eternal in a person that points to a higher power as the basis on which a person can begin. Thus a person’s knowledge must primarily aim at becoming clear about this ethical and its connection with the religious. Only such knowing, in contrast to objective, philosophical knowledge, can be called an essential knowing, because it stands in relation to existence. As Climacus says, “Therefore, only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing. But all ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essentially a relating to the existing of the knower.”304 Face-to-face with his ethical-religious knowing, a person exists in his concretion. In the attempt to join these two qualitatively different elements, a redoubling takes place; it is not, however, philosophy’s abstract redoubling, but a concrete redoubling that steadily contains these two elements, which even when they form a synthesis can never become identical. It is the real ontological issue within Christianity that Climacus attempts to solve in this way. Here we see once again that it is the personal and religious aspects of ethics that are of decisive importance. In this way there emerges a special ethical and Christian definition of being to which the expression “redoubling” can also be applied. Climacus does not use the word “redoubling” in this qualitatively higher sense in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, possibly in order to avoid confusion with Hegel’s abstract redoubling. But thereafter the term in its higher meaning is used very frequently in the upbuilding writings. Climacus, in Socrates, finds a lower analogy to this higher form of redoubling and then expands and deepens his position in relation to the position in which he is placed in Philosophical Fragments. Socrates is now called “an existing thinker,”305 who as an ethicist with “the passion of inwardness” attempts to actualize the ethical in his life after having made the movement of infinity. “Socrates is thereby beyond all speculation,” says Climacus. The main emphasis for Socrates is now on personal ethics, which has the eternal as its foundation. Thus Socrates is the first to accomplish a concrete redoubling within the sphere of the human. In this connection Climacus points out that Socrates’ faith in the eternal is a lower analogy to faith in the god in time, but he promptly emphasizes that “the difference, never-

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theless, is infinite.”306 This difference can be defined more explicitly as follows: for Socrates as an ethicist, truth is “an objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.”307 Socrates’ faith in the ethical as something eternal cannot be justified objectively at all. The faith with which Christianity confronts a person is infinitely more uncertain—it is absurd. In other words, the Christian believes in the absurd, believes “that the eternal truth has come into existence in time, that God has come into existence.”308 A further distinction is that in the Socratic point of view a person believes that he can fulfill the eternal’s demand and thus the thesis “Subjectivity is truth”309 applies here in the sense that the subject himself can find and actualize truth in existence. Face to face with the revealed truth, however, a person finds out about his sin, whereupon the thesis about human subjectivity becomes: “Subjectivity is untruth.”310 It is easy enough on paper or in a sermon to make the leap from the acknowledgement expressed in the first thesis to the opposite acknowledgement expressed in the second thesis, but it does not help a person in his existence. Therefore Climacus, who tries to make things difficult, but no more difficult than they are in actuality, points out all the many concrete obstacles and difficulties people will encounter when they want to move from the sphere of the human to the Christian sphere. The way must first be cleared of many misunderstandings with regard to how easy it is to become a believer, and people must be made aware of the many false approaches that can be made before they truly stand before the decisive leap of faith. Therefore Climacus’s portrayal of the way that leads to Christianity is so detailed. As mentioned previously, in describing the way to Christianity, Climacus utilizes the many pseudonyms who appeared to have carried out the work he specifically aimed to do himself.311 Stated briefly, this work can be said to have as its aim to show how “an existing individuality”312 must struggle forward through the difficulties on the different levels of existence before being matured by repentance for the encounter with Christianity. The difficulties of repentance, which consequently becomes the high point in human existence, are very concretely illustrated through Quidam in Stages on Life’s Way.

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After explaining the pseudonymous authorship, Climacus contrasts the personal aspect of the ethical particularly with Hegel’s abstract thought. He points out that “the language of abstraction really does not allow the difficulty of existence and of the existing person to come up,”313 because abstract thought does not take into consideration individual existence, which is constituted of freedom and the ethical. As Climacus so often reaffirms, freedom manifests itself in decisions of passion. With regard to the passion that is in the service of freedom, he says: “Existing, if this is not to be understood as just any sort of existing, cannot be done without passion.”314 In its positive form, passion as a manifestation of freedom actualizes the ethical. But the ethical must always first confront the single individual as pure possibility before this possibility can, by way of movement, by way of freedom, become actuality. Since for Climacus it is a matter of actualizing the personal aspect of the ethical, the actualization thereby created pertains to all of the individual’s own existence. This means an identification of this ethical with the individual himself, as Climacus declares in the statement: “The individual’s own ethical actuality is the only actuality.”315 One must not, however, be led astray by “the only actuality” and regard it as the highest actuality. Behind all the individual’s deliberations the relationship to the eternal power stands supreme and is the true guarantee of a person’s own ethical actuality. From this and similar statments by Climacus, one sees that Climacus concentrates entirely on the single existing individual as he continually and decisively stresses the personal aspect of the ethical as essential in a person’s spiritual development. Climacus also points out that this “ethical actuality” is the only one to which the individual has a direct access; it is his own actuality. One can never arrive directly at the actuality of other people; when one thinks about it, one changes it into possibility. In thinking, a person can simultaneously transform his own actuality into a possibility in his thought and be in direct connection to it. As Climacus says, “All knowledge about actuality is possibility. The only actuality concerning which an existing person has more than knowledge about is his own actuality, that he exists; and this actuality is his absolute interest.”316 He declares further: “. . . the ethical as the internal cannot be observed by anyone standing outside. The ethical can be car-

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ried out only by the individual subject, who then is able to know what lives within him—the only actuality that does not become a possibility by being known and cannot be known only by being thought, since it is his own actuality, which he knew as thoughtactuality, that is, as possibility, before it became actuality, whereas with regard to another’s actuality, he knew nothing about it before he, by coming to know it, thought it, that is, changed it into possibility.”317 However, as Climacus points out in Philosophical Fragments,318 someone else’s actuality, which one in thought transforms into possibility, can be transformed into actuality again by faith. But faith is neither thought nor knowledge and always runs a risk with regard to what it accepts as actuality. Using many examples, Climacus maintains in Concluding Unscientific Postscript that his interest lies in the personal ethics’ possibility, because by making this possibility actuality the single individual transforms his existence. But since the realm of possibility is enormous, inasmuch as possibility is found within all the spheres of existence, Climacus tries to demarcate the ethical possibility, which ranks higher than the possibilities within the esthetic and intellectual domains. Within the esthetic domain, for example, are, among others, all the possibilities of the moral, the ideal works of poetry, etc. “Intellectual ideality” is occupied with existence from the viewpoints of philosophy. In the proper sense, one cannot speak of freedom and the ethical in these domains, since only relative goals are involved here. Only the “ethical ideality,”319 that is, the possibility of the personal ethical, centers on the individual’s existence in the deeper sense. It is this ethical that Climacus so clearly and fully analyzes by demarcating it from the esthetic and intellectual possibilities. Climacus is fully aware, however, that his categorical emphasis on the personal aspect of the ethical can be accused of making the “subjective individual’s ethical actuality the only actuality,” which “could seem to be acosmism.” In answer to any such imagined charge, Climacus states: “But to the individual his own ethical actuality ought to mean, ethically, even more than heaven and earth and everything found therein, more than world-history’s six thousand years, and more than astrology, veterinary science, together with everything the times demand, which esthetically and intellectually is a prodigious narrow-mindededness. If

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that is not so, it is worst for the individual himself, beause then he has nothing at all, no actuality at all, because to everything else he has at the very most only a relation of possibility.” Generally speaking, in his deliberations Climacus cautions strongly against overvaluing abstract thinking and against giving “thinking supremacy over everything else.”320 What he upholds is the importance of movement and freedom as the presuppositions for concrete existence. This, however, is not tantamount to saying that he undervalues the role of thinking in human existence in comparison with other primary elements in the human psyche, such as, for example, “imagination and feeling.” To be sure, because of their interest in existence, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms have attached great importance to freedom, to the will to actualize the ethical tasks of existence; but imagination, feeling, and cognition are simultaneously indispensible factors during the proper existential movement. Even imagination, which some have thought we gradually grow out of, ought to be along as “an interlude in the task of life.”321 Speaking of the simultaneous presence of these elements during the individual’s development, also with regard to thinking, Climacus declares: “In existence, the important thing is that all elements are present simultaneously. With respect to existence, thinking is not at all superior to imagination and feeling but is co-ordinate. In existence the supremacy of thinking plays havoc.”322 In the present investigation the elements that especially pertain to the existential movement are treated separately; a description of Kierkegaard’s anthropology and psychology would show how all essential elements in the human individuality are placed in relation to each other. Under the title “The Subjective Thinker, His Task, His Form, That Is, His Style,”323 Climacus indeed discusses certain fundamental points of view with regard to the simultaneity of the elements in an existing individuality. On the subjective thinker’s point of departure and task in relation to existence, he says: “Every human being must be assumed to possess essentially what belongs essentially to being a human being. The subjective thinker’s task is to transform himself into an instrument that clearly and definitely expresses in existence the essentially human.”324

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Becoming a Christian Not until Part Two, Section II, Chapter IV of Concluding Unscientific Postscript does Climacus clearly explain how a person becomes a Christian. All the previous deliberations must be regarded as preparation for this; their most important aim was to draw attention to the importance of concentrating on the subject’s actuality as the prerequisite for a person’s movement toward Christianity. It is expressly emphasized that this movement can occur only when the individual by his free choice attempts to translate into action the ethical requirement that the eternal places on him. Therefore Climacus has to begin at the beginning and not pass over a single one of the intermediate stages in the individual’s movement toward Christianity. If this procedure is not used, the distinction between the different spheres of existence is obliterated. The first level in all human existence is the level of paganism, because every human being begins with immediacy and in the esthetic stage, to which, according to Kierkegaard, paganism belongs. In so-called Christian countries, however, it is commonly thought that a person can be summarily transformed from a pagan into a Christian by baptism and instruction. Before proceeding to describe the preparatory existential movement that will rightly lead a person to the encounter with Christianity, Climacus takes issue with this misinterpretation of the meaning of baptism. For Climacus baptism holds only a possibility for becoming a Christian; not until it is appropriated in existence does this possibility become actuality. As he says: “That we become Christians as children has promptly given rise to the assumption that one is what has been anticipated kata; duvnamin [potentially]. Infant baptism can very well be defensible and commendable both as the Church’s well-intentioned interest, a safeguard against fanatics, and as the beautiful providential care of pious parents—the responsibility lies on the individual himself at a later stage. But it is and continues to be ludicrous to see people behave à la Christians on solemn occasions but who are Christians solely and simply by virtue of a baptismal certificate, because the most ludicrous thing Christianity can ever become is to become what is called custom and habit in the

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broad sense.”325 Further: “What is baptism without appropriation? It is the possibility that the baptized child can become a Christian, neither more nor less.”326 Thus baptism per se is no guarantee whatever that a person also becomes a Christian in his existence. Even if he is baptized and calls himself a Christian, a person who has not gone through the painful process of giving up the paganism in his existence is and remains a pagan. Since the essential factor for Climacus is one’s existence and not the more or less empty customs one follows, he is obliged to begin his description with the position in which the person in very fact finds himself. In order to go beyond paganism’s sphere of existence, a person must first try to repeat paganism’s highest ethical and religious ideals, designated by Climacus as “Religiousness A.” The highest goal for human existence in Religiousness A is “an eternal happiness.” Climacus goes so far here that he seems to be forming an analogy to Christianity’s offer of salvation and an eternal life. Nevertheless, there is a qualitative difference, because Christianity offers a concrete salvation, while Religiousness A speaks of the highest ideals a human being himself can seek to reach within immanence.327 Speaking of the presence of this goal (an eternal happiness) not only in paganism but also in Christianity, Climacus says, “Religiousness A can be present in paganism, and in Christianity it can be the religiousness of everyone who is not decisively Christian, whether baptized or not.328 Comparing this ideal with Christianity, which among other things is called “Religiousness with the dialectical in second place” or briefly, “Religiousness B,” Climacus declares: “A person existing religiously can express his relation to an eternal happiness (immortality, eternal life) outside Christianity, and it certainly has also been done, since it must be said of Religiousness A that even if it had not been present in paganism it could have been, because it has only universal human nature as its presupposition, whereas the religiousness with the dialectical in second place cannot have been prior to itself, and after having come it cannot be said to be able to have been where it had not been.329 In his existence, then, a person must first of all relate to the highest goal in Religiousness A. Adhering to this goal has a radical and transforming influence on existence. In other words, in his immediacy a

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person is “actually in the relative ends absolutely,”330 while the attaining of an eternal happiness, on the other hand, demands an absolute attachment to the eternal, the absolute. Thus a person’s goal must become to break, with the help of resignation, his absolute attachment to transient things and ends. Resignation thereby becomes the first condition not only for relating relatively to the relative but for coming into an absolute relation to the absolute. Climacus says: “In order to relate himself absolutely to the absolute tevlo~ [goal], the individual must have practiced renunciation of the relative ends, and only then can there be any question of the ideal task: simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute, and relatively to the relative. Not prior to this, because before this has been done the individual is continually more or less immediate and to that extent relates himself absolutely to relative ends. And even when he has surmounted immediacy, with his victory he is nevertheless again in existence and thereby again hindered from absolutely expressing the absolute relation to the absolute tevlo~.”331 At the end of this quotation Climacus warns that the battle of resignation is never finished in existence. It is resignation that frees a person from an absolute attachment to finite objectives and opens the possibility to relate to an eternal happiness. Climacus stresses this function of resignation often and strongly. He declares, for example: “The individual himself can then easily examine how he relates himself to an eternal happiness or whether he relates himself to it. He needs only to allow resignation to inspect his entire immediacy with all its desires etc. If he finds a single fixed point, an obduracy, he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.”332 Or “In immediacy, the individual is firmly rooted in the finite; when resignation is convinced that the individual has the absolute orientation toward the absolute tevlo~, everything is changed, the roots are cut. He lives in the finite, but he does not have his life in it.”333 We will now examine more closely why Climacus selects, out of the three forms of the movement of infinity: irony, resignation, and repentance, resignation as central, and what role resignation plays in a wider sense in a person’s movement toward Christianity. All three forms of the movement of infinity manifest a religious movement, for through them a person attempts to make room for

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the eternal in his life and in a wider sense make room for a relationship to God. But this can be done in various areas and with more or less depth. Irony, for example, is first and foremost an intellectual movement. Through his thinking the ironist discovers the uncertainty in everything that is external and finite—just as did Socrates, who used irony in his attempt to neutralize334 the significance of finitude. This movement helped him to discover infinity in his inner being, a discovery that became the point of departure for his “Godknowledge”335 and led him to assume the immortality of the soul and also prompted him as an ethicist to actualize the eternal in time. In this way irony became the initial prerequisite for enabling Socrates to move toward “a position bordering on the religious.”336 For the same reason Climacus concedes to him “an analogy to faith” and “an analogy to hidden inwardness.”337 Despite these concessions to irony, this nevertheless cannot be regarded as the basis for Climacus’s description of how paganism can be vanquished, since the ironist still has not discovered that there is also within himself a hindrance to fulfilling the eternal’s requirement. Even if he can concentrate on the personal aspect of ethics,338 he is too intellectually minded and too naive with regard to his own capability to discover its limitation. The movement of resignation goes deeper and aims precisely at the individual’s inner release from an absolute attachment to finitude. Therefore it involves a different and a deeper earnestness with regard to existence than irony can ever have. This is also the reason that Climacus chooses resignation as the movement of infinity by which a person can vanquish the paganism within himself. Of the three movements, the movement of repentance is deepest. One could ask why Climacus does not point to the movement of repentance as the one that leads beyond the sphere of paganism. In volume II of Either/Or, Judge William did indeed think that with the aid of repentance he could choose himself in his eternal validity. But as mentioned earlier, Climacus specifically criticizes the Judge’s repentance as inadequate because it was too abstract and was not grounded on existential experience in the religious sphere.339 And since Climacus regards it as his overall task to combat empty, abstract solutions in order to make room for an understanding of the concrete difficulties in existence, he could not begin with the ab-

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stract form of repentance that Judge William speaks about. In other words, true repentance presupposes that a person has previously tested his powers in existence and has realized his limitations and his guilt. A human being does not come to this insight until, by way of resignation, he has tried to reach the eternal goal that has been set for him. Just as Socrates’ irony prepared the way for the personal ethics, the attempt at resignation introduces the stage of humor. It may therefore justifiably be said that the previously mentioned very long chapter IV in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is mainly about humor, which is meant to make room for the religious. Therefore Climacus calls humor a confinium [border territory] of the religious, but at the same time he points out that “the humorous, precisely as the confinium of the religious, is very comprehensive.”340 This is connected with the fact that it is very difficult for a person totally to accept his powerlessness and guilt. With regard to the function of resignation in the individual’s attempt to relate himself relatively to the relative and absolutely to the absolute, it must first be observed that this process entails suffering. This suffering is not of an accidental kind, as is suffering in the esthetic stage, where happiness is the highest goal, and when it arises through the relationship to the eternal it must continue as long as a person in this temporal life relates himself to this eternal. Of this Climacus says, “ Just as resignation saw to it that the individual had the absolute orientation toward the absolute tevlo~, the continuance of suffering is the guarantee that the individual is in position and keeps himself in position.”341 Climacus calls the suffering that comes through the relationship to an eternal happiness a religious suffering. This suffering expresses the contradiction and inner struggle that a person experiences when he brings his craving for earthly things and his attachment to them into relation to the eternal happiness. The person who has most deeply perceived something of this happiness suffers the most. Therefore Climacus cites Paul as the supreme example of this suffering. Comparing the sufferings of others with Paul’s sufferings, Climacus says, “The rest of us human beings are satisfied with less, but the situation remains exactly the same. The religious person is not transported into the third heaven, but neither does he comprehend the suffering that

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is the thorn in the flesh. The religious person relates himself to an eternal happiness, and the relationship is distinguishable by suffering, and suffering is the essential expression of the relationship—for an existing person.”342 The movement of resignation, like the other movements of infinity, is a movement from relative freedom to the absolute. Within temporality the human being has in possibility a relative freedom, whereby he attempts to actualize the relative goals in finiteness. Through the movement of infinity he approaches absolute freedom. Thus Socrates, by way of irony, approached the infinite as the possibility of absolute freedom. His ethical position thereafter was aimed at using this freedom to develop “the personal virtues.”343 Since Socrates, according to Climacus, practiced his ethical ideals under the cover of irony, Climacus calls Socrates an ethicist who “uses irony as his incognito.”344 The inadequacy of Socrates’ position is that he does not discover the limits of his capability but thinks that he can use the infinite freedom to transform his existence ethically all by himself. That this kind of a naïve belief in one’s own capability is a mistake gradually dawns on the individual when his break with temporality occurs through resignation. Resignation immediately intervenes in a person’s existence more profoundly than irony does. Through resignation a person quickly discovers how attached he is to temporality; but not until by way of resignation one has practiced renunciation of the temporal can one begin to attempt to actualize the good. Consequently the carrying through of resignation and the possibility of actualizing the absolute demands are intimately connected. Through resignation the human being can make his way from the relative freedom he has in finitude to the absolute freedom. This absolute freedom, however, is of a negative kind, because the highest a human being can attain through an infinite resignation is release from the bond of finitude. This freedom certainly does stand on a higher plane than the relative freedom in finitude,345 but one is not capable of using this new freedom in a positive way. Climacus substantiates this with the logically viewed obvious statement that if a person uses all his power to resign, which is the case if it is a matter of infinite resignation, then there is no power left. He expresses the same thought in another way when he says, “Psychologically, the law

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very simply holds true that a power capable of doing this and that when directed externally needs an even greater power to keep that power from reaching out externally. Power directed externally and opposition from the outside—then the opposition is to be estimated as only half opposition; half as support.”346 This law, with due consideration of the different spheres, applies to all forms of the movement of infinity, even to the form of the movement of infinity that tries to abstract from everything. Climacus says of this: “If it is possible for a human being, thinking, to abstract from everything, it is impossible for him to do more, since this act, provided that it does not surpass human strength altogether, in any case completely exhausts it.”347 In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus goes thoroughly into the meaning of resignation for existence, and shows that through resignation one discovers one’s total incapability. This movement is a prerequisite for coming to the religious, which Climacus phrases in the following way: “Religiously, the task is to comprehend that a person is nothing at all before God, or to be nothing at all and thereby to be before God, and he continually insists upon having this incapability before him, and its disappearance is the disappearance of religiousness.”348 It is very difficult for a person to perceive and to practice his total incapability in existence, and for this reason Climacus elaborates on this point. To accept this truth and use it in one’s daily life costs difficult inner struggles. The difficulties of the humorist lie in this area. Face to face with the possibility of carrying out the ethical, the humorist certainly does gain insight into how little he can do, and he also understands “that suffering is related to existing,”349 but he does not comprehend the “essential meaning of suffering for the existing person,”350 just as in his attempting to carry out the ethical he does not want to give up the last bit of his confidence in his own capability. Thus in his powerlessness the humorist does not dare to surrender totally to the religious. On the humorist’s refusal to draw the final conclusions from his ethical and religious struggles, Climacus declares: “he does not relate himself to God in religious passion (stricte sic dictus [in the strict sense of the word]). He changes himself into a jesting and yet profound transition area for all these transactions, but he does not relate himself to God.” 351

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The person, however, whom Climacus calls the religious does do this. Speaking of the process that leads to the religious person’s engaging in the difficult task of relating himself totally to God, Climacus says: “The effect that a person’s conception of God or of his eternal happiness should have is that it transforms his entire existence in relation to it, a transformation that is a dying to immediacy. This takes place slowly, but then finally he will feel absolutely captive in the absolute conception of God, because the absolute conception of God is not to have the absolute conception en passant but is to have the absolute conception at every moment. This is the cessation of immediacy and the death warrant of annihilation.”352 Here Climacus provides us with a description of Religiousness A, in which the individual is “dialectically turned inward in selfannihilation before God.”353 This self-annihilation, the result of the absolute resignation, gives the negative freedom that consists in a person’s giving up his own cravings and his own desires in order to make room for God. This negative freedom is the prerequisite for the positive freedom “to be able to do all things through God.” Climacus knows very well how difficult it is to arrive at this point and says: “To be capable of doing everything through God is easy enough—if the greatest difficulty were not that one is capable of doing nothing oneself, so difficult that probably there are few in any generation who can truthfully say that day in and day out they are even moderately aware that a human being is capable of doing nothing at all.”354 Even if Climacus as humorist here lets himself say that it is easy enough to be able to do everything through God, he amply corrects this statement in many places by pointing out that it is not only difficult for a human being to keep himself continually in the position of self-denial, but also to submit in faith to the truth that he is able to do all things through God.355 To face that truth is an expression of the positive freedom that one cannot give to oneself but can only receive. Since one has to live in the world, one cannot stop with resignation’s self-annihilation before God356 but must act. From the absolute God-relationship that led to the annihilation, “the religious” returns to daily actuality by way of the ethical. The ethical “(which nevertheless is always somewhat dis-

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tanced from the absolute God-relationship) must intervene regulatively and take command.”357 One now reflects on all one’s actions, even so insignificant an act as “going to Deer Park,” in relation to God and ventures them in confidence in him—and thereby comes under the positive freedom. The relation to the eternal happiness always becomes one of suffering, and this lasts as long as the relation continues. But the task of relating oneself absolutely to the absolute goal and relatively to the relative is so difficult that no one can avoid becoming guilty in an act of negligence. Thus the individual has the additional suffering of guilt. Even the slightest guilt is sufficient to qualify a person as a debtor. As Climacus says: “The totality of guilt comes into existence for the individual by joining his guilt, be it just one, be it utterly trivial, together with the relation to an eternal happiness.”358 Consequently, through guilt a person enters into a new sphere of existence, a higher one than the one in which suffering alone was the conclusive indication of the relation to “eternity,” because “guilt-consciousness is a higher expression than suffering.”359 Since guilt belongs more profoundly to human existence than suffering, Climacus calls it “the most concrete expression of existence.”360 As the decisive indication that a person is conscious of such guilt, Climacus adduces “the eternal recollecting.361 He is thereby saying that this guilt has nothing to do with the world’s conception of guilt, since through its relation to the absolute it is infinite, and that this guilt exists only “in the hidden inwardness” where a person can recollect it. In other words, recollection, which signifies thinking about existence from the viewpoint of eternity, is so closely linked to inwardness that Climacus can also answer the question “What is inwardness?” with the words, “It is recollection.”362 “Guilt-consciousness,” which a person comes to in this way, must not be confused with “consciousness of sin,”363 which becomes a reality through a person’s encounter with Christianity. Climacus, who frequently warns against the self-deception of believing that one can come to a higher sphere of existence without living through the previous one, also calls attention to the fact that “the eternal recollecting of guilt as the highest expression”364 in immanence has to precede the encounter with Christianity with its offer of the

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forgiveness of sin. But before placing guilt-consciousness in relation to sin-consciousness, Climacus also demarcates the guilt that comes through the relation to the eternal from all lower forms of guilt, which one feels able to make amends for in various ways by oneself. Just as with regard to suffering, so also with regard to guilt the humorist does not draw the final conclusions. Climacus describes as follows the difference between the humorist and the religious person who draws these conclusions: “Humor joins the eternal recollecting of guilt together with everything but in this recollecting does not relate itself to an eternal happiness. Now we have come to hidden inwardness.” 365 Here the hidden inwardness means precisely the last position within immanence. It is the position at which humor stops without reaching it. Thus “the religious,” who lives in hidden inwardness, can use humor to conceal his inwardness from the surrounding world. In his detailed schema of the existential spheres, Climacus calls this position “Religiousness with humor as incognito.” Immediately thereafter comes “Christian religiousness.”366 Hidden inwardness as well as other concepts of existence undergoes an intensification. Here we pass over the forms of inwardness in the domain of the esthetic, none of which can properly be called hidden inwardness, because an adequate expression for all of them can be found in the external. In his description of the human being’s existential development, Climacus altogether consistently uses Socrates as the first example of hidden inwardness, because Socrates was the first one in the sphere of the human to try to translate the eternal ethical demand into action in his existence. Hidden inwardness is hidden precisely because the eternal can never be given finite and external expression. But as early as in Fear and Trembling we met another example of hidden inwardness; a “knight of faith” lives in temporality without anyone’s being able to detect that he lives at every moment on the basis of infinite resignation. This knight of faith is an ideal who Climacus thinks will scarcely ever appear, just as it will not be possible to observe him in existence either.367 Moreover, the hidden inwardness in Fear and Trembling differs from the hidden inwardness in Concluding Unscientific Postscript in that after resignation through faith the knight of faith attains a complete repetition within temporality,368 whereas the religious person in Concluding

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Unscientific Postscript is continually striving toward the eternal goal as he simultaneously attends to his daily duties. He “avoids attention by being like the others,”369 but the very relationship to the eternal as the goal gives existence a new dimension. The movement of inwardness is always a double movement. A person must first of all make room for the eternal and thereafter must let his action be determined by the eternal. In Socrates’ case we saw that in this regard he still had confidence in his own capability. In the stage of humor, a person would become sceptical of this capability. In the extreme intensification of hidden inwardness a person seeks to place his faith in God in his striving to fulfill his demands, but this also exposes his absolute powerlessness and his guilt in relation to God. For this reason Climacus also says that his delineation of the way to Christianity is “repelling,”370 because it shows how difficult it is to become Christian and does not extol the results of a person’s efforts but shows that precisely the greatest efforts expose his guilt. Therefore in the inward deepening the personal and the religious aspect stand at midpoint. That is, inwardness means the single individual’s concentration on the isisues pertaining to the deepest level of existence. The line of development here goes from overemphasis on the personal ethical aspect to the absolute priority of the religious. According to Climacus the steps are represented in the process of inward deepening of “the ethical and the ethical-religious individual”371 and finally of “the religious individual.” In this strong emphasis on individual inner growth, the ethical and moral issues related to communal life and society must recede into the background for the time being. For Climacus it was most important to show the coming into existence of the self and the individuality through an ever closer relationship to God. In addition to the ethical-religious, the other constituting element in this coming into existence is freedom. Climacus, however, only rarely mentions the word “freedom” itself in his presentation; he instead uses more intensified terms for freedom, such as decision, pathos, or, not least, passion. This last word appears in various gradations, either to convey the intensifying of freedom or the synthesis of freedom with the ethical or the religious. Of the many examples, mention may be made of “absolute passion,” “ethical

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passion,” “absolute religious passion.”372 And the important concept “leap” is conceivable only in relation to freedom. The most important qualitative leap is the leap from immanence to transcendence.373 With regard to freedom, it must also be noted that it is the efforts of freedom that ultimately result in a person’s acknowledgment of his powerlessness and guilt. Therefore Climacus can say also of the result of the efforts of freedom in the ethical-religious sphere that freedom is distinguishable by guilt,374 which means that if there is guilt there also must be freedom. Through guilt-consciousness as “a repelling reaction of a repelling relation,”375 freedom and the ethical as the essential components in inward deepening prepare the individual for the encounter with Christianity. Compared with the human sphere, in which the highest level is an “eternal recollecting of guilt,” the Christian sphere is “distinguished by the paradoxical accentuation of existence, by the paradox, by the break with immanence, and by the absurd.”376 In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus barely touches on this distinctive mark of Christianity. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he goes very thoroughly into these concepts, all of which pertain to Christianity as the absolute paradox. But these deliberations do not fall within the province of this study. It will only be stated that in relation to the god in time the importance of freedom as well as of the ethical is suspended; but it must nevertheless not be forgotten that freedom and the ethical do have their significance, even if it is in a negative way, because all of a person’s own efforts to actualize through freedom the absolute good would expose his total inability in this regard. Furthermore, this negative existential result is the prerequisite for a person’s being able, earnestly and in the consciousness of his own powerlessness, to submit to Christianity’s classification of him as a sinner. When a person has received “the condition”377 for a new life, freedom and the ethical once again gain their meaning—the new life will express itself in “a striving born of gratitude.”378

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The Ethical and Religious Aspects in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses is a collection of a series of signed works published alongside the pseudonymous works in the first period of the authorship, which ends with Concluding Unscientific Postscript. They begin to come out a few months after the publication of Either/Or and end a year and a half before the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Therefore they are included in Climacus’s discussion of the works published up to that time. There is an essential difference between the two parallel lines in Kierkegaard’s authorship: the pseudonymous authors sketch every possible positive as well as negative life attitude, from the esthetic to the ethical to the religious stage. Kierkegaard’s entering into the spirit of these numerous life-positions goes even so far that he uses various literary styles to make the subject and communication correspond.379 For example, there is a vast difference between the styles of volumes I and II of Either/Or, just as each of all the other books has its own distinctive style. In taking issue with Hegel’s abstract philosophy, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms use, for example, Hegel’s philosophical terminology. The task of the pseudonyms was to describe step by step the crises and collisions to which a person can be exposed in moving from the esthetic to the ethical and to the religious stage. For Kierkegaard the essential purpose of the pseudonymous authorship was to draw the line to the form of the ethical, which is higher than the moral and social laws of the esthetic. From the ethical the path continues on to the ethical-religious, whereby a person is prepared for the encounter with Christianity. Climacus summarizes this entire movement at the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. This pseudonymous line, which exhausts the domain of immanence and culminates in Religiousness A, lacks a description of the personal relationship to God that finds expression during one’s attempt to approach Christianity through ethical and religious experiences. Such a description could be given only in an upbuilding [opbyggelig] literature, in which the relationship to God as a tran-

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scendent power must be included, and in which the single individual can be addressed directly in a personal and intimate way. Kierkegaard says that the first two upbuilding discourses, published in 1843, were directed primarily to Regine.380 They were intended to help her in the ethical and religious conflicts caused for her by the broken engagement and to lead her from the esthetic stage in which she found herself into touch with the religious stage. But inasmuch as most people, according to Kierkegaard, even if they call themselves Christian, live in esthetic categories, these discourses should also be able to help every person. Therefore also in his upbuilding discourses Kierkegaard begins at the beginning. We will now see more closely how the religious points of view and the various aspects of the ethical are mirrored in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. In the preface to the first two upbuilding discourses there appears the later frequently repeated designation “the single individual [den Enkelte].” Therefore it is appropriate at this time to describe briefly what Kierkegaard implies with this word in comparison with the other often strictly defined designations he and his pseudonyms use about human beings. These designations specifically express a kind of order of precedence, inasmuch as they give a person’s existential position as defined, for example, by one’s relation to freedom, the ethical, and the religious. Lowest in rank is the term “specimen,” which actually should be used only when speaking of an animal species, since a specimen signifies only an unaltered repetition of a species without the possibility of further development to something higher. Therefore when Kierkegaard uses this term for human beings it is always in a pejorative sense.381 Particularly in his later authorship he uses the word “specimen” to signify the decadence that takes place when one does not rise above the animalistic and the life devoid of spirit.382 The most commonly used term for a human being is the word “individual.” The individual as such has the spiritual possibilities for further development and always stands in relation to the race, which is superior. When the individual has still not come to the point of becoming himself, he is in complete dependence on the life and history of the race, which always has its life within the temporal and the transient. In other words, the individual has an unfree relation to the

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race and must subordinate himself to its moral and ethical norms. The close connection between the individual and the race and the crucial significance of heredity and environment receive special emphasis in The Concept of Anxiety. In other words, the individual takes over his heredity from the race and makes his own contribution to the life and history of the race. At the same time the book shows how the individual can become himself by identifying with the suffering and the guilt of the race. Higher than the individual stands the individuality, who is raised above the individual by his special attributes or merits. In Kierkegaard’s authorship, the concept of individuality is very comprehensive and stretches through all three stages, whereas the individual actually belongs only to the esthetic stage. Since the essential in the individuality in comparison with the individual is the presence of various very definite differences, the position of the individuality in the existential order of precedence can be clearly stated with adjectives. The “beautiful individuality,”383 for example, is confined wholly to the esthetic stage; but one also encounters such terms as the “ethical individuality”384 or the “religious individuality”385 and also the “recollecting individuality” 386 and the “repenting individuality.”387 The terms “person” and “personality” are close to “individual” and “individuality” but do not signify the same dependent relation to the race. Thus the word “personality”—but not the word “individuality”—can be used about God. In contrast to an individuality, a personality has the special quality of having the courage to act in public without hiding behind the impersonal, the official, or the anonymous. The term “self ” is used about a person especially when the emphasis is upon the eternal nature of human beings. Judge William describes how a person becomes a self by choosing himself “in his eternal validity.”388 The term “self ” expresses particularly a person’s freedom and independence from the temporal. But since independence and freedom can properly be ascribed only to God, only God is a self in the eminent sense. 389 A human being will always be only “a derived self,” 390 that is, a self that owes its being to God. It must be added that apart from this eternal self Kierkegaard speaks also of a temporal, a lower self, which becomes the rallying point of an

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individual’s earthly cravings and efforts. This self, “that first self,” is in opposition to “the deeper self,”391 the eternal self. The most important and decisive designation for a person’s existential position is the category “the single individual,” which Kierkegaard has worked out in the most precise manner in his authorship and of which he says, among other things: “My possible historical significance is linked to this category.” 392 One must distinguish, however, between the esthetic and the religious meaning of this concept. Kierkegaard’s real interest is in its religious meaning, but in order to proceed properly he first had to delineate its esthetic meaning. Speaking of his method of procedure and the difference between the two meanings, he says: “In every one of the pseudonymous books the subject of the single individual appears in some way, but there the single individual is predominantly the single individual esthetically, defined in the eminent sense, the outstanding individual, etc. In every one of my upbuilding books, the subject of the single individual appears, and as officially as possible, but there the single individual is someone every human being is or can be. In other words, the point of departure of the pseudonymous writers is in the difference between person and person with regard to intelligence, culture, etc.; the point of departure of the upbuilding discourse is in the upbuilding, that is, in the universally human. But this doubleness is precisely “the dialectic of the single individual. The single individual can mean the most unique of all, and the single individual can mean everyone.”393 The primary attribute of the designation the single individual is that it isolates; this is partly true for the single individual within the sphere of the esthetic, who is isolated from the ordinary people by his outstanding talents, but it is entirely true for the single individual in the ethical-religious sense. In other words, a person comes to be fully isolated as the single individual only by the relationship to God. Therefore the various designations mentioned are terms for the person seen in different existential perspectives and therefore can partially coincide—as, for example, the ethical-religious individuality and the single individual in the religious sense. “The category of the single individual always relates to inward deepening;” 394 therefore it, too, has its lower and higher levels, as will be

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pointed out in the discussion of the upbuilding literature. There is no doubt that Kierkegaard’s interest in Socrates, his own difficult personal experiences, and his broken engagement were responsible for making the category of the single individual become his main existential category. 395 But although the pseudonymous authorship attempted to exhaust the scope of this category within the esthetic sphere, with continual reference to its meaning in a higher sphere— that is, on the ethical-religious plane—it is exclusively this latter meaning on which the upbuilding literature concentrates. Kierkegaard begins to turn his attention to this concern in the first of the two upbuilding discourses of 1843 by pointing to a personal relationship to God as the firm foundation that every person should seek in this uncertain existence. Later in many of the upbuilding discourses he stresses the changelessness of God in the midst of the changes and vicissitudes of life. Kierkegaard often uses the expressions “faith” and the “expectancy of faith,” but as yet there is no mention of the Christian faith. Christianity’s most important concern is to bring the offer of salvation, but for Kierkegaard it is still a long way before a person is ready to accept this offer. It is on this long way that he wishes to lead the individual person step by step—the way he himself tried to walk. It may seem surprising that the Kierkegaard who began as early as 1843 to depict the way to Christianity still did not regard himself as a Christian in 1845 when working on Concluding Unscientific Postscript. He says of this: “‘Johannes Climacus’ was actually a deliberative piece, for when I wrote it I was contemplating the possibility of not letting myself be taken over by Christianity, even if it was my honest intention to devote my whole life and daily diligence to the cause of Christianity, to do everything, to do nothing else but to expound and interpret it, even though I would then turn out to be like the legendary Wandering Jew—myself not a Christian in the final and most decisive sense of the word and yet leading others to Christianity.”396 This statement shows how scrupulously Kierkegaard tried to define his own position with regard to Christianity. It holds for all of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses that they deal with the relationship to God and not the relationship to Christ as Savior, even though they are designed to prepare the way to

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Christianity through the relationship to God. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Climacus says of the first upbuilding discourses (and this, incidentally, applies also to most of the later ones) that “they use only ethical categories of immanence, not the doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox.”397 This means that within immanence a person relates himself to God chiefly through the ethical; the encounter with the paradox, however, occurs through a double-reflection in such a way that one first of all reflects upon one’s own impotence face to face with the ethical and thereafter upon the offer of salvation contained in the paradox. According to Kierkegaard, the relationship to God always places the single individual face to face with ethical tasks. In Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses it is the personal aspect of the ethical that dominates, since the focus here is on the single individual’s inward deepening and not yet on the moral and social aspects. The task is the single individual’s inner growth and self-determination; not until later is the task widened to include the moral and social. Here Kierkegaard applies the earlier discussed viewpoint of the ethical— that a person first has to learn through God to relate himself in the right way to himself before he can fulfill his obligations to his neighbor in the right way. Inward deepening—that is, the transformation of the single individual—occurs through freedom’s possibility, which must at all times be presupposed. The single individual subordinates his desires to the higher requirement that the religious presents to him. By this progressive liberation from all external powers and his own attachment to the things of this earth, a person will find himself and at the same time bind himself more and more to God. The first steps and the first difficulties in this process are described in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. During this movement—in which, as always when it is a matter of the single individual’s growth, freedom and the ethical play a decisive role—the center is the religious aspect, to which freedom’s possibility and the ethical must ultimately be traced. Several of these discourses penetratingly study the verse from the Epistle of James: “Every good and every perfect gift is from above.”398

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After establishing the religious basis, which must at all times be presupposed, Kierkegaard concentrates on the single individual and points out how the law of love must guide him with regard to all the wrong and the sin that are found in the world. As the single individual attempts to fulfill this requirement, he achieves “strengthening in the inner being,” which signifies that he is not to concern himself about the whole world “but only about God and about himself.”399 In another discourse Job is cited as an example of how we are to bear the hard vicissitudes of life. Furthermore, it is urgently pressed home that the only way to conquer doubt is by freedom—that is, by resolving to break with doubt by making the leap into faith.400 Kierkegaard occasionally warns against the fruitless attempt to produce an external equality among people, since this can never be accomplished. On the other hand, he recommends that proper attention be paid to the divine equality “that opens the soul to the perfect and blinds the sensate eye to difference, the divine equality that like a fire burns even more intensely in the difference without, however, humanly speaking, consuming it.” Since Kierkegaard is fully convinced that external equality is a phantom, he can even speak humorously of implementing this equality at the same time as he stresses the divine equality and the importance of the single individual’s working with himself: Only in this way is equality the divine law, only in this way is the struggle the truth, only in this way does the victory have validity— only when the single individual fights for himself with himself within himself and does not unseasonably presume to help the whole world to obtain external equality, which is of very little benefit, all the less so because it never existed, if for no other reason than that everyone would come to thank him and become unequal before him.401

Kierkegaard gives much space to showing the meaning of patience for the single individual who wants to learn to bear all of life’s sorrows and burdens with bold confidence and wishes to free himself of his attachment to the temporal. The single individual thereby gains “his soul from God, away from the world, through himself.” 402 The fruit of all these inner battles and struggles is the religious virtues, which are

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later emphasized by Kierkegaard as specifically Christian virtues— namely, “patience, faith, humility, etc.”403 Kierkegaard further tightens the ethical requirement by setting ever higher goals for the single individual’s ethical and religious striving. He uses, for example, the prophetess Anna as an example of “the expectancy of the fullness of time;”404 but even greater is “the expectancy of an eternal salvation.”405 This expectancy corresponds to the step in a person’s religious development that Climacus describes as relating oneself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. The goal for human life is thereby moved to a qualitatively higher plane—eternity. Just as in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the last four of Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses show that the high goal for ethical and religious striving discloses a person’s total powerlessness to fulfill the requirements that this goal presents to human beings. Particularly in the first of these discourses, Kierkegaard elaborates and illuminates in a very concrete and convincing manner the experience Climacus arrived at in Concluding Unscientific Postscript—that a human being is “capable of doing nothing at all,”406 and so cannot do the good at all; only with God is a person capable of doing this. In other words, Kierkegaard demonstrates that if a person by his own power is able to practice the good, he would first have to be able to conquer his own desires and the temptations that beset him. But this is impossible; the most he can do is to restrain his desires and temptations. This, however, is not the same as conquering them, which would only create the possibility of acting according to the eternal’s demand. Kierkegaard therefore says of the person who wants to conquer himself: “. . . he is able to do only so much, and this only by his most extreme effort in resisting himself, but this, of course, is not overcoming himself.”407 With this and other similar statements Kierkegaard says that by the greatest effort a person certainly can attain a negative freedom but does not by himself attain the positive freedom that means that he would be able to act solely in consideration of the eternal. The latter is impossible, because a person exhausts all his powers in the attempt to arrive at negative freedom.408 Only with the help of God can a person conquer himself and use his freedom in a positive way. This happens when “he continually keeps his eyes on God” and “he, although he himself is capable of nothing at all, with God is capable

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of ever more and more—” and “he . . . is capable of overcoming himself, since with the help of God he is indeed capable of this.”409 More concretely and in more detail than in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the discourse on “The Thorn in the Flesh” emphasizes that the relation to eternal blessedness always brings suffering. Here it holds true that “if one does not know the inexpressible beatitude, neither will one know the thorn in the flesh in the future.”410 He who has most deeply experienced something of blessedness comes to suffer most. This is illustrated by the apostle Paul, of whom it is said: “He himself was the most severely tried, inasmuch as he experienced sufferings that until then no man had experienced—as surely, that is, as there was a higher life in an apostle than in any previous human being, which of course signifies that the sufferings are also more agonizing. He experienced them in such a way that he could not seek anyone else’s guidance or be strengthened by anyone else’s experience.”411 The discourse on “The Thorn in the Flesh” deals with the most personal issues related to freedom and the ethical-religious. In the third of the discourses, titled “Against Cowardliness,” human freedom is central, for it points to the significance of resolution in beginning and continuing a life with the eternal as the goal. Pride and cowardice are named as hindrances on the way to coming to a decision and are declared to be basically “one and the same,”412 even though they manifest themselves differently. Kierkegaard very well expresses the equality of all people in the realm of existence and of action when he says: “The good resolution, which corresponds to the acknowledgment of the good, is indeed to will to do everything in one’s power to serve it to the utmost of one’s capability. To do everything one is capable of doing—what blessed equality, since every human being is indeed capable of that.”413 But the boundary between what a person himself can do and the positive freedom that only God can give are clearly defined in the following statement: “Do what you can for God, and God will do for you what you cannot do. But is this doing what you can an unwillingness to be humbly aware of the weakness in which he perhaps will become understandable to you?”414 The last discourse, “One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious—in that God is Victorious,” aims to teach a person

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humility, so that he subordinates all his desires and his whole life to God’s will, and thereby helps him to practice one of the most important of the religious virtues. Since the last four discourses demonstrate primarily that one can do nothing at all by one’s own power, Climacus says of them that they “have a carefully shaded touch of the humorous,” and he continues: “What is arrived at in immanence presumably ends in this way. Although the requirement of the ethical is affirmed, although life and existence are accentuated as a difficult course, the decision is nevertheless not placed in a paradox, and the metaphysical withdrawal [Tilbagetagen] through recollection into the eternal is continually possible and gives immanence a touch of humor as the infinite’s revocation [Tilbagekaldelse] of the whole in the decisiveness of the eternity behind.”415 This means that these discourses do not lead to the decision with which Christianity confronts a person and that he therefore continually has the expedient of seeking his foundation within himself and in God and not in Christ as Savior. The movement described in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses parallels the one designated in Concluding Unscientific Postscript as Religiousness A, in which humor also forms the last position. But as already mentioned, there is an essential difference between these two parallel lines. In the first place, the upbuilding discourses are characterized by strong elements of personal inwardness; but in addition, the human being here relates himself to the transcendent God, to whom the Old and the New Testament testify, which provides the essential condition for an intimate and personal relationship between God and human beings. Climacus, however, declares of Religiousness A “that even if it had not been present in paganism it could have been, because it has only universal human nature as its presupposition.”416 Thus within Religiousness A it is the human being himself who forms an idea of God on the basis of his given presuppositions. And even if the human being may be able to conceptualize God as a transcendent power, this God nevertheless is and remains a product within immanence417 in contradistinction to the God who has revealed himself to humankind.

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After the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses , Kierkegaard published Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. In contrast to the former discourses, which accentuate inward deepening, these three discourses deal with the central events in human life. The first one describes the stages in a person’s seeking for God. It is actually a superbly developed religious-philosophical sketch. The second discourse is devoted to the earnestness involved in the resolution taken upon entering marriage. It points out that all the difficulties that may arise in marriage can be overcome by freedom’s and love’s resolution. The last discourse deals with death as life’s conclusion. “Death itself explains nothing,” says Kierkegaard. But a person can himself seek to find a meaning in it. Through the explanation a person chooses, he discloses “his innermost being”418 —that is, he indicates how far he has come in his spiritual development. Kierkegaard works out a whole scale of explanations from the more superficial to the serious, in which death is called “a transition, a transformation, a suffering, a struggle, the last struggle, a punishment, the wages of sin.” Of these explanations he says that every one of them “contains a whole life-view.” Moreover, entirely in accord with his emphasis on translating what one understands into action, Kierkegaard stresses that the explanation should have “retroactive power in life.”419 With the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard has portrayed the first coherent stage in the single individual’s spiritual development, in which the concrete individual aspects of human life as well as the anthropological aspects are taken into consideration. Kierkegaard’s presentation in the upbuilding literature of the existential steps builds first and foremost upon the Bible. Therefore it is appropriate at this point to say a little about Kierkegaard’s use of the Bible and in what way it could be a guide for his view of freedom as well as of the ethical and the religious. For Kierkegaard the center of the Bible was God’s Incarnation for humankind’s salvation. How great a significance he attributed to this event above everything else found in the Bible and especially in the New Testament is shown by his having Climacus say that it would have been sufficient if the generation contemporary with Christ had left just the following testimony, which Climacus calls the “world-historical nota bene”:

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“We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died.”420 But this certainly does not mean that Kierkegaard thought that the Bible’s enormous wealth of ethical and religious content is without essential meaning—quite the contrary. For Kierkegaard as a religious thinker who continually stresses that spiritual growth in the relationship to God proceeds by stages, the Bible, with its message and many ethical admonitions, metaphors, and calls to imitation, contains an inexhaustible source for guidance and motivation for action. Kierkegaard, however, chose with great care the Bible texts he used in his upbuilding literature; he endeavored to fit them into the stages a human being has to go through during his spiritual development. This means that his theory of the stages determined the context in which the words of Holy Scripture should be used. But when this is said, it must not be forgotten that his whole theory of the stages builds upon the New Testament’s view of the human being as a synthesis of body, soul, and spirit.421 Kierkegaard also attempted to co-ordinate all the voluminous material in the Bible relatiive to the human condition, along with human experiences in world literature and his own experiences, under Christianity’s point of view of salvation as the final goal. Kierkegaard’s classifying of a human being’s spiritual development in stages must accordingly be understood as a kind of “ordo salutis,” an order of salvation, in which the highest step comes to be the person’s encounter with Christ. Therefore when Kierkegaard is going to describe these stages and give a more explicit account, he chooses the passages in the Bible that especially illuminate them. It is not enough simply “to attach oneself to the Bible,” as Vigilius Haufniensis says. In this connection “the Bible has often had a harmful effect,” because people have been satisfied with “an arrangement” of “certain classical passages” without understanding how these should be placed in relation to existence.422 In Kierkegaard’s view, knowledge of human nature is a condition for communicating Christianity to people in the right way, and he says among other things: “Psychology is what we need, and above all, thorough knowledge of human life as well as sympathy for its interests. Herein lies the task, and until this is resolved there can be no question of completing a Christian view

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of life.”423 Kierkegaard was therefore very scrupulous about using Biblical quotations and examples in the right place. In his pseudonymous literature, for example, he carefully states the positions that his two great prototypes from the Old Testament, Job and Abraham, take in the context of the stages.424 But it is, of course, mainly in the upbuilding literature that Kierkegaard uses the Bible, and he himself lays down the following rules for the proper use of the words of the Bible: “Only when the words are said by the right person in the right situation in the right way, only then has the saying done everything it can to guide the single individual to do honestly what one otherwise is quick enough to do—to refer everything to oneself.”425 In this way Holy Scripture can become “an interpreter of the divine.” Therefore, Biblical expressions should not be misused in secular language but must find their “earnest place in the sacred context.”426 Accordingly, Kierkegaard makes a special point of uniting the Bible texts, especially the ones from the New Testament, organically with the subject he is discussing. As far as Kierkegaard was concerned, he felt that, in the task he had set for himself, he primarily had to single out the many texts that appeal to a person’s freedom and that speak of carrying out life’s ethical tasks as well as of God’s love for humankind. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses and Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions were published prior to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with which Kierkegaard rounded off his pseudonymous and upbuilding authorship. As stated earlier,427 Kierkegaard lived in the conviction that he would not live past his thirty-fourth year. But if he should, contrary to expectation, live longer, he nevertheless intended to terminate his authorship with Concluding Unscientific Postscript and possibly seek a pastoral appointment.428 As it so happened, Kierkegaard lived longer but still did not become a pastor. On the contrary, he prepared and initiated a new period in his authorship. Up until then he had been creating, especially in his upbuilding literature, the initial foundation for the category of the single individual preparatory to the encounter with Christianity. But until that time he had not delineated Christianity in upbuilding form. In Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript , Climacus

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had given only the decisive conceptual categories of Christianity. Perhaps Kierkegaard did not do it because his own existential attempt to reach Christianity had not yet had not brought him beyond the stage of humor.429 He now had the right to make up for this in the period that followed, a period that he used to continue work with himself and with his authorship.

The Threat of Leveling Before returning to the upbuilding literature, Kierkegaard wrote an appreciative analysis of Fru Gyllembourg’s novel Two Ages430 under the title Two Ages: A Literary Review. In discussing this book, he elaborates the theme he had already introduced in From the Papers of One Still Living—namely, the progressively intruding leveling tendencies of the age. He shows how uncommitted knowledge and the predominant reflection undermined faith in firm ethical and religious values, and he points to the many ensuing negative consequences not only for individuals but also for moral and social relations. This widespread and undermining reflection, which places a question mark after everything, nourishes doubt and, when it is a matter of existential questions, develops into despair. Reflection, however, is not able to level everything; it can disintegrate “every possible outlook on life” but not “the eternal life-view of the essentially religious.”431 Consequently all the pagan religions and life-views that people with their creative imagination have constructed can be leveled by reflection, but a life-view built upon the eternal as a reality is beyond its powers, as Christianity certainly is, since as a paradox and absurd truth it lies completely outside the domain of reflection. Speaking of the limitation to the leveling produced by reflection, Kierkegaard says: “For leveling is just as powerful with respect to the temporary as it is impotent with respect to the eternal.”432 Leveling can be rooted out only by determined resolution on the part of the single individual to turn away from the bleak hopelessness of leveling and make the leap into the religious. Of “the individuals who are saved” on this road, Kierkegaard says that they “gain

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the specific gravity of the religious life, gain its essentiality at first hand from God.” Therefore reflection can be halted only through freedom, and Kierkegaard goes on to describe movingly how this leap of decision occcurs: “Then it will be said: ‘Look, everything is ready; look, the cruelty of abstraction exposes the vanity of the finite in itself; look, the abyss of the infinite is opening up; look, the sharp scythe of leveling permits all, every single one, to leap over the blade— look, God is waiting! Leap, then, into the embrace of God.’“433 When one reads what Kierkegaard says about how the single individual who has made the leap must relate himself to his age under leveling, one cannot avoid thinking about Kierkegaard’s own situation. Among other things, he says of this single individual: “He does not dare to defeat leveling outright—he would be dismissed for that, since it would be acting with authority—but in suffering he will defeat it and thereby experience in turn the law of his existence, which is not to rule, to guide, to lead, but in suffering to serve, to help indirectly.”434 At the very time Kierkegaard was still working on Two Ages: A Literary Review, he challenged The Corsair, which he believed to be promoting the moral demoralization in Denmark. The external occasion for the challenge was P. L. Møller’s discussion of Stages on Life’s Way, especially “‘Guilty?’/Not Guilty?’” in Gæa, an esthetic yearbook for 1846. But Kierkegaard’s “suffering” battle against demoralization was already indirectly heralded in Two Ages: A Literary Review, which Kierkegaard expressly claims was begun before P. L. Møller’s article in Gæa appeared.435 It may be very difficult to get to the bottom of this affair between Kierkegaard and P. L. Møller; but the most important factor in this connection is that Kierkegaard, no matter what the external challenge, had never imagined that personal ethics—that is, an ethical and religious inwardness—should remain exclusively a hidden inwardness that should not have consequences in external action. When demoralization is very obviously widespread, then the single individual must rise up against it, not as an authority, but with an outspoken protest, by which the single individual would risk coming to suffer. In his exposition on hidden inwardness, Climacus had certainly postulated that it could be practiced where the universally human laws were respected. Under these conditions the single indi-

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vidual could have his private religious life in peace and also fulfill his civic duties. But if these conditions took a negative turn, then the presupposition that inwardness can continue concealed is revoked. In that case it would be important to make it clear that ethical norms not only had meaning for the single individual but also must necessarily have consequences for the moral norms in society. Climacus, however, thought that these norms had not yet deteriorated to the point where the life in hidden inwardness could not hide under them. On this he says, “Incidentally, it hardly needs to be recalled that when I say the religious person’s incognito is to look exactly like all the others, this does not mean that his incognito is the actuality of a robber, a thief, a murderer, because the world certainly has not sunk so deep that an open breach of legality can be regarded as the universally human. No, the expression ‘to look exactly like all other human beings’ naturally makes sure of legality, but this may very well also be without there being any religiousness in a person.”436 Here one sees that Climacus, who as a rule places most emphasis on the meaning of the ethical and religious aspects, also gives his full recognition to a social order with a certain moral standard.

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fter broaching in Two Ages the subject of society and social conditions, Kierkegaard does not abandon this aspect in his subsequent upbuilding literature but coordinates it with two other aspects of ethics—the personal and the religious. Kierkegaard’s next book, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, stands on a higher level than Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, as can be shown by the positions freedom and the ethical take here. This book also exemplifies how Kierkegaard repeats the previous steps whenever a new and higher level is introduced. We will examine this further in discussing the three sections into which the discourses are divided. The first section, entitled “An Occasional Discourse,” is written “on the occasion of a confession” and (in addition to being addressed in the preface, as is the case in the other discourses, to the single individual) on the reverse of the title page is dedicated to “That Single Individual.” This specific form of dedication emphasizes that an even greater stress is being laid on the category of the single individual. This is because now, for the first time, the individual, isolated as the single individual by confession, is confronted with God. If we look back to Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, we see clearly that they portray only the preparatory stage on a person’s way to becoming the single individual. The aim is solely to show how a person must try to free himself from finitude; this has to occur through faith in the eternal, by practicing patience, and by doing battle with oneself. This whole process can be described in Climacus’s words about relating relatively to relative ends. Climacus believes this to be the first condi-

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tion for being able to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute tevlo~ [end]. As he says: “In order to relate himself absolutely to the absolute tevlo~, the individual must have practiced renununciation of relative ends, and only then can there be any question of the ideal task: simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative.”437 As mentioned earlier, in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses Kierkegaard has very concretely and personally—thus in a way quite different from that of Climacus—shown how the individual step by step practices “renunciation” of relative relations and things. In the first section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, there is a description of what it means altogether concretely to relate absolutely to the absolute tevlo~. Here the philosophical expression “the absolute” gives way to the synonyms “the good” and “God,” which correspond to the ethical and religious aspects. At the same time the abstract verb “to relate oneself to” is no longer operative, but the verb “to will,”438 which indicates that the factors of freedom and resolution are more strongly emphasized here. This change from the terms “to relate oneself to” and “the absolute” to terms designating an existentially higher level is signaled, for example, by the following key heading: “If it is to be possible for a person to be able to will one thing, he must will the good.”439 Here the ethical is placed only in relation to “one thing”—that is, to God. Kierkegaard expresses this relation as follows: “O you unfathomable trustworthiness of the good; wherever a person is in the world, on whatever road he is traveling, if he wills only one thing, there is a road that leads him to you!”440 Kierkegaard’s main concern now is to call attention to the significance of freedom’s resolution to order one’s life solely according to the good as God’s will. This decision will help one to avoid ordering one’s life according to relative criteria and yielding to the doublemindedness that manifests itself in a person’s wanting to do the good “for the sake of reward,”441 “for fear of punishment,”442 “self-willfully,”443 or only “to a certain degree.”444 Consequently it is only by unconditional obedience to the good without regard to other motives for action that one can avoid the double-mindedness that makes one irresolute in choosing between the lower norms of action and the highest.

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Kierkegaard points also to the role sagacity, negative as well as positive, can play. In other words, by resorting to equivocations, sagacity can prevent one from coming to a decision for the good; but on the other hand it can also help one to see through all the excuses one thinks up when reaching and holding onto a decision for the good. According to Kierkegaard, there are two ways in which the good can be practiced. He declares: “If a person is to will the good in truth, he must will to do everything for the good or will to suffer everything for the good.”445 Of course the one who acts also runs the risk of suffering, but he still is essentially acting. On the other hand, the one who learns to will to suffer everything for the good is one “who suffers essentially,”446 that is, one so stricken by misfortune that his whole life is bound to an unavoidable suffering. Kierkegaard exhibits much understanding of and sympathy for people so unfortunate. But just as freedom’s resolution helps the one who acts to stick to the decision for the good, so it helps the person who suffers essentially in his hard task of freely resolving to accept his severe suffering. Of the person who freely chooses to endure his suffering in the right way, Kierkegaard says: “Unquestionably he is making a virtue of necessity; that is the secret, that is the most descriptive expression for what he is doing— he is making a virtue of necessity, he is deriving a category of freedom (virtue) from what is defined as necessity. Precisely in this lies the healing through the decision of the eternal, that the sufferer freely takes upon himself the enforced suffering. Just as it is a relief for the sufferer to open himself in confidence to a friend, so also it is his salvation through the decision of the eternal that he opens himself to the eternal while the constraint of necessity compresses his heart, so to speak, and he complies eternally by willing to suffer everything.”447 It is in relation to the requirement truly to will the good that the single individual must scrutinize his life. This self-examination must take three directions, corresponding to the three aspects of the ethical, but where the religious and the personal aspect nevertheless is placed the highest. This is evident, for example, in the following statement: “Are you now living in such a way that you are aware as a single individual, that in every relationship in which you relate yourself outwardly you are aware that you are also relating yourself to yourself as a single individual, that even in the relationships we hu-

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man beings so beautifully call the most intimate you recollect that you have an even more intimate relationship, the relationship in which you as a single individual relate yourself to yourself before God?”448 Faced with the many concrete ethical demands, the single individual must now make a confession before God. The result can be only the realization of his concrete guilt. Along this way the repentance the single individual comes to is not repentance in general449 but a very concrete and personal repentance. Repentance is a negative movement, but it creates the condition for a new and positive relation to life’s tasks. The single individual can once again begin from the beginning. Kierkegaard voices this in the second section of the work, “What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air.” That the three discourses correspond to each of the three stages indicates that Kierkegaard here again wants to start from the very beginning. In a journal entry he says of this: “The structure of the three discourses about the lilies and the birds is as follows: The first is esthetic, the second ethical, the third religious.”450 The first discourse has a social aspect, inasmuch as it deals with the most primary and common human necessities, such as food and clothing. Cares about these increase only if one compares one’s material situation with that of others who are better off and wishes to make oneself secure in relation to others or to the future. Such “worry about making a living” means that one is dissatisfied with the condition that everyone is in—namely, never having complete security in this world. What a person is really saying is that he is “not contented with being a human being but wants to compare himself to God, wants to have security by himself, which no human dares to have, and therefore this security is in fact—worry about making a living.”451 The next discourse contains a personal ethical aspect in that it calls to mind that “God created the human being in his image.”452 As a conscious spirit a person becomes the place “where the eternal and the temporal continually touch each other, where the eternal is refracted in the temporal.”453 Kierkegaard thereby declares that the eternal assigns a person an ethical task that also includes earning a living. As he says: “When a human being works for his food, we will not foolishly say that he is supporting himself; expressly to call to mind how

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glorious it is to be a human being, we prefer to say: he is working together with God for his food.”454 The religious aspect of the third discourse appears in the affirmation “that the human being is granted a choice.”455 The choice is “between God and mammon,” just as a person’s inner struggle is “between God and the world.”456 The discourse culminates in Kierkegaard’s underlining the New Testament’s injunction: “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness; then all these things will be added to you.”457 The way in which Kierkegaard uses the text about the lily and the bird, a text to which he later returns twice in his authorship, is very characteristic of his use of Holy Scripture. For example, he chooses the beginning words and the words toward the end from the passages selected for use in the last of the three discourses, because they explicitly provide the religious aspect. The words he chooses to elucidate the previous stages refer respectively to the purely material cares and to the thought of humankind’s elevation above nature. Finally, it should be noted that these three discourses are tinged with humor, since Kierkegaard believes that it should be observed with an element of humor that the lilies and the birds, who are lower than man, function as the teachers of humanity. In the third section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, “The Gospel of Sufferings,” subtitled “Christian Discourses,” Kierkegaard introduces the thought of imitation as a new intensified expression of the ethical.458 The progressively personal side of inward deepening is thereby further deepened; the single individual is now confronted with the personified truth as a prototype for his life. The transcendent God in human form manifests in concrete, personal ways the sufferings and conflicts that arise in temporal life when it is shaped very concretely in accord with eternity’s demand.459 The difference between the earlier upbuilding series and “The Gospel of Sufferings” is also marked by the fact that in this collection of seven deliberations on imitation Kierkegaard for the first time uses the designation “Christian Discourses.” In using this designation he does not intend that these discourses will depict Christianity’s most central theme, the Atonement, but that they will focus on Christ’s life as a man and on the call to imitation with which Christ confronts the single indi-

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vidual. In these discourses the thought of the prototype and imitation is taken as an essential side of Christianity, a thought that thereafter is related in various ways to Christianity’s proclamation of sin and grace. The New Testament call to imitation on which Kierkegaard lays main emphasis in these discourses shows the single individual very concretely how the ethical should mark his existence. But at the same time that he receives a concrete assurance of an eternal salvation through Christ he is also instructed that this goal cannot be reached without suffering. Earlier Climacus in particular stressed suffering as unavoidable in regard to an eternal salvation.460 Now comfort and encouragement are set alongside suffering in these discourses, which point to “the joy” in following Christ. The joy must belong to the imitation; this provides a paradoxical tension,461 inasmuch as the two opposite qualities thereby stand face to face with each other. Climacus had already pointed out that a higher spiritual life presupposes this holding firmly to two opposite elements or states. He says, for example: “But to understand extreme opposites together and existing, to understand oneself in them is very difficult.” And a bit later: “To be brokenhearted over one’s sin, and then in turn to be a jaunty fellow, is not difficult, but simultaneously to be brokenhearted and nonchalant is difficult.” 462 This paradoxical double state in imitation, with suffering and joy as opposites that must be present simultaneously, must be seen as a first step toward the doubleness that will not manifest itself in any essential way until the individual relates himself to Christ as Savior. As Climacus says, here it is a matter of “the doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox.”463 That it is important for Kierkegaard to emphasize this doubleness in imitation is seen in his giving, in all seven discourses, a detailed account of why the single individual must continually seek to find and hold on to joy in the midst of suffering. The suffering comes through having to learn self-denial as the individual renounces “the world and himself.”464 Self-denial serves inward deepening, and it is mainly the hidden inward deepening that is discussed here. Therefore it is justifiable to say that it is the personal ethical element that is dominant in the discourses. We are to learn to bear in patience and meekness the burdens, the cross, laid upon us.

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The significance of choice is stressed as being of primary importance. Clear emphasis is thereby given to the role of freedom and resolution in relation to the task with which the single individual is faced. That it is a choice means that there actually are only two possibilities to choose between, but for the person who chooses with “the earnestness of eternity,”465 there is only one choice—namely Christ as the highest prototype. Kierkegaard emphasizes that everyone is free to choose this highest: “Indeed, there can be no higher joy than this: to be able to become the highest; and this supreme joy cannot be made more confident, more blessed, more secure than it is by means of the joyful thought, heaven’s merciful thought: that this every human being can do.”466 In discussing the burden a person must bear, Kierkegaard points out that “In the main there is still only one thought, one single thought, that can determine the issue, one thought that contains faith’s transformation of the heavy burden into the light burden— this thought is that it is beneficial, that the heavy suffering is beneficial.”467 Kierkegaard also mentions here the heaviest burden a person must bear—namely, “the consciousness of sin”;468 he thereby prepares his reader for Christianity’s most important offer—forgiveness and reconciliation. Through Christ’s example, the single individual is to learn “obedience in the school of sufferings,” since only through obedience can freedom’s resolution be actualized. Kierkegaard defines this obedience quite simply: “. . . and what is obedience except this: to let God rule!”469 In the fourth discourse Kierkegaard defends, against all the attacks of doubt, the thought that God is love. If a person