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 were to have a shred of right in relinquishing his faith that God is love, he must first be totally without guilt before God, and “second, something must happen that is incompatible with the idea that God is love.”470 But this cannot happen to any human being; therefore no doubt can displace the faith in God’s love. Kierkegaard summarizes his argument as follows: “The joy is this: that now and at every moment and at every future moment it is eternally true that nothing has happened or ever can happen, even if it were the most sorrowfully contrived horror of the sickest imagination that became a reality, there is

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nothing that can rock the faith that God is love; and the joy is that if a person refused to understand this by means of the good then the guilt will help him to understand it.”471 With regard to the ethical, it is important to note here that on the basis of the position that “in relation to God a person always suffers as guilty” Kierkegaard draws the conclusion that for a person there must “always be something to do, there must be tasks, moreover human tasks, and along with the tasks a hope that everything can and will improve if he improves, becomes more diligent, more prayerful, more obedient, more humble, more devoted to God, more heartfelt in love, more fervent in his spirit.”472 These tasks are to be performed daily and throughout all one’s life. There is therefore mention of a road that must be followed, a “road of perfection” that Kierkegaard emphasizes is, according to many Scripture passages “that all say the same thing,” a road “of hardships.”473 Suffering thereby becomes a continually and inescapable consequence for the person who will walk this road; but at the same time one can derive comfort and encouragement in the thought that eternal salvation always outweighs all the hardships in time. As Kierkegaard puts it: “Consequently eternal happiness has the overweight, and the only requirement for comprehending that it has the overweight, for speaking unchangingly at every time and in every suffering about the eternally unchanged, is fidelity to this conception of the happiness of eternity.”474 The discourses in the third section deal, as mentioned, with the single individual’s personal ethical development, consequently with hidden inwardness. The last discourse shows how under certain conditions this hidden inwardness must break through and manifest itself outwardly. In other words, in true inwardness there is also an urge to confession when it is required. Of these two aspects of inwardness Kierkegaard says: “. . . but this same true inwardness surely cannot be silent—when confession is required.”475 Therefore the single individual must always be willing to stand by his conviction and suffer the consequences. The supreme example of this is the apostles, who did not let themselves be deterred by advice “but feared God more than people.”476 This can also happen on a minor scale and in other situations. Kierkegaard repeats often and urgently that confession is a suffering act and reminds us that the apostles did not wish to

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force anyone “but, themselves subjugated, they were victorious by letting themselves be subjugated.”477 Even if in this last discourse Kierkegaard suggests that, given the opportunity, the inwardness of imitation should express itself outwardly, there is still a long way to go before he voices the thought that imitation can also demand renunciation outwardly (for example, by poverty and celibacy). Kierkegaard had originally intended to publish Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits in three separate parts. In this connection he points out in a journal entry that the person who wishes to make comparisons and to seek a connection between the three sections will not “look in vain even if what is done in the discourses to illuminate this is also hidden, because something like that lends itself only to the person or persons who themselves in emulating self-activity produce it.”478 This hidden connection will primarily be experienced in full by the person who tests the content of these discourses in his existence. In this present condensed account, the specific task has been to show that these discourses describe a development in the single individual that takes place through freedom’s resolution and the ethical requirement of imitation.

The Social Aspect of Ethics: the Relation to the Neighbor In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits Kierkegaard took the category of the single individual to a crucial yet not its highest position. In the working out of this category it was the religious and the personal aspects that were stressed in particular; the civic and social aspect was touched on only occasionally. But for Kierkegaard the appropriation of the two first aspects was precisely the condition for being able to practice the third aspect in the right way. Therefore it was Kierkegaard’s objective, after working out the category of the single individual, to proceed with deliberations on the civic and social side of life. Kierkegaard also knew that he would be reproached if

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he left out the third aspect. On this subject he says: “Despite everything people ought to have learned about my maieutic carefulness, proceeding slowly and continually letting it seem as if I knew nothing more, not the next thing—now on the occasion of my new upbuilding discourses they will probably bawl out that I do not know what comes next, that I know nothing about sociality. Fools! Yet on the other hand I owe it to myself to confess before God that in a certain sense there is some truth in it, only not as people understand it—namely, that continually when I have first presented one aspect sharply, then the other manifests itself even more strongly. Now I have my theme of the next book. It will be called: Works of Love [Kjærlighed.]”479

In his deliberations in Works of Love Kierkegaard includes the social factor in full measure as it now appears from his Christian point of view. The religious and the personal aspects now form the firm basis for the civic and the social aspect. From now on the central focus in the religious aspect is on taking God as the middle term in everything a person undertakes; this is expressed in the following statement: “. . . but he belongs to God in every thought, the most hidden, in every feeling, the most secret, in every movement, the most inward.”480 This subordination of all the manifestations of life to God entails self-denial, which is the most characteristic trait of the personal ethics in Works of Love. Kierkegaard now faced the task of showing how the third aspect— that is, the relation to one’s fellow human beings—should be practiced. The solution of this task was of special immediate interest precisely at the time when Kierkegaard was working on Works of Love, because the trend was to promote political and social ideas that were diametrically opposite to Kierkegaard’s whole view of the role and significance of the ethical and the religious. Whereas he stressed the ethical and religious responsibility of the single individual according to the motto “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” as primary for human existence, the new currents of thought were chiefly interested in organizing people as a crowd, a mass, in order

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thereby to win economic and social equality, which was regarded as the most important goal for human life. Accordingly, the clash of interests between the single individual and the crowd becomes, especially in Kierkegaard’s journal entries, a continually recurring theme. In one of the first of these entries, from May 1847, he maintains that in the future the battle in the political and social sphere will be waged between the single individual and the crowd. He regards the so-called “bread-riots” in several large European cities as the first symptom that controversies of this kind were developing. He sees them as a confirmation of his analyses of the political and social situation in Europe. On this he says: “It all fits my theory perfectly, and I dare say it will come to be seen how exactly I have understood the age.”481 In his journal entries Kierkegaard steadily deepens the antithesis—the single individual and the crowd—by pointing on the one hand to the value-leveling power of the crowd, the mass man, and the public, and on the other hand to the task of the single individual under these conditions. He devotes himself to this question with special thoroughness in his journals after the 1848 revolution in France, which he felt had convincingly confirmed his theories.482 In order to understand this clash of interests between the single individual and the crowd, which Kierkegaard already touches on in Two Ages and which is the basis of his reflections in Works of Love, we must briefly clarify how he defines the difference between these two disparate entities. With the category the single individual, Kierkegaard seeks primarily to express a person’s absolute dependence on the power that was revealed in Christ. Through the relation to this power the single individual will in the ethical and religious sense stand higher than all merely moral and political laws that regulate human relations. If in his conscience the single individual discovers he is in opposition to these laws, he must refuse to obey them and suffer the consequences that this resistance involves. Kierkegaard, however, issues a strong warning against confusing conscience with individual arbitrariness. Socrates may be named as an example of a person who obeyed his conscience above all; yet he must be considered a lower analogy to the adherence to God and conscience that the Christian, for example the apostles, can demonstrate later. Socrates follows his

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convictions, which are in opposition to the laws of the state, but refuses to run away from the punishment he incurs. Therefore in Kierkegaard’s interpretation the single individual always relates himself, in addition to the human orders of control, to a still higher authority. At the pole opposite to the single individuals responsible to their consciences stands the crowd, where it is quantity instead of individual qualitative characteristics that plays a role. The crowd is recruited by those who have lost the relation to something higher and is measured by number.483 The rule here is: the greater the crowd, the greater the truth, the greater the craving for power. In Kierkegaard’s opinion, the crowd, from the spiritual point of view, is a nothing that can be manipulated because the individuals inside the crowd have lost the relation to the idea and thereby have lost their individual independence and freedom. On the subject of how dangerous this can be for the future political situation, Kierkegaard says: “With the cessation of the rational state, statecraft becomes a game. Everything revolves around getting shoes on the crowd, and then getting it on one’s side, voting, making noise, carrying torches, and armed, regardless, altogether regardless of whether it understands anything or not.”484 Therefore it is meaningless to want the ethical and religious relations between people to be decided by means of the crowd, by numbers. But Kierkegaard explicitly admits that under ordered conditions the crowd, that is, the majority, can have justification when it is a matter of decision on relative things and affairs, but not when it concerns human relationships. On this he writes: “Yet it is perhaps most appropriate to mention once and for all something that is selfevident and something I certainly have never denied—namely, that with regard to all temporal, earthly, worldly goals, the crowd can have its validity as the decisive factor, that is, as the authority. But I am not speaking of such matters, no more than I occupy myself with such things. I am speaking about the ethical, the ethical-religious, about the truth, and I say that from the ethical-religious point of view the crowd is untruth if it is supposed to be valid as the authority for what truth is.485 To specify carefully what he means by the crowd, Kierkegaard writes: “Therefore the reader will recall that here by ‘crowd,’ ‘the crowd,’ is understood a purely formal conceptual quali-

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fication and not what is usually understood by ‘the crowd’ when it presumably is also a qualification, inasmuch as human egotism irreligiously divides humankind into ‘the crowd’ and the elite, etc. Good Lord, how would the religious mentality ever dream up such an inhuman equality! No, ‘crowd’ is number, the numerical; a number of aristocrats, millionaires, important dignitaries, etc.—as soon as the numerical is operative, it is ‘crowd,’ ‘the crowd.’”486 For Kierkegaard it was evident that the question of the truth can never be decided by majority vote, since that would relativize and actually abolish the truth. He also quickly discovered that the movements that relied on the crowd, the mass, and that went under the names of “socialism” and “communism” were anti-religious, or more correctly, represented a demonic form of religiousness.487 For this reason he thought that only the single individuals raised to the highest power, that is, martyrs, would be able to take up the battle against the crowd in order to split it up into single individuals.488 In Works of Love these conclusions are not yet drawn, but in addition to encompassing many important ethical and religious perspectives, the book must also be regarded as a positive alternative to the emerging communistic movements.489 The Bible text “You shall love your neighbor as yourself ” forms the basis for Christian ethics in Works of Love. Kierkegaard immediately and very emphatically stresses the personal ethical side of the commandment—consequently that the commandment names not only love’s duty to others but also to oneself. The personal ethics thereby becomes the condition for the ethical relation to our fellowbeings, for social life. This is clearly expressed in these words: “The commandment said, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but if the commandment is properly understood it also says the opposite: You shall love yourself in the right way. Therefore, if anyone is unwilling to learn from Christianity to love himself in the right way, he cannot love the neighbor either. He can perhaps stick together with another or a few other persons ‘through thick and thin,’ as it is called, but this is by no means loving the neighbor. To love yourself in the right way and to love the neighbor correspond perfectly to one another; fundamentally they are one and the same thing.” This in turn declares that in order to love one’s fellow being, one’s neighbor, in

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the right way one must first of all try to become a “neighbor”—that is, qualify as one. Kierkegaard illustrates this relation with the story of the good Samaritan and says that “Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbor but about becoming a neighbor oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbor just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy. By this he did not show that the assaulted man was his neighbor but that he was a neighbor of the one assaulted.”490 What it actually means to become another person’s neighbor was a major concern for Kierkegaard, and his portrayal of inward deepening is also an answer to this, because in inward deepening one learns to submit one’s will to God’s will. This is indeed the presupposition for becoming another person’s neighbor. In other words, in one’s relation to others one must learn to surrender the impulses and motivations that are rooted only in the original human nature and thus lie on the level of the universally human. Otherwise one’s relation to others becomes primarily “a matter of drives and inclination, or a matter of feeling, or a matter of intellectual calculation.”491 These inclinations characterize an individual on a lower level and do indeed have their significance, just as one can speak here also of loving one’s fellowbeings; but this love has the same egocentric motives that are at the root of the egotistical love one has for oneself. Kierkegaard discusses in detail this primary and very broad level in the individual’s development, but he also shows the way these partly innate and partly acquired or conditioned reactions—all of which lie within the domain of finite goals—can be brought under the higher law, which ultimately means that the single individual in self-denial subordinates all his striving to the will of God. Thus, as Kierkegaard calls it, God becomes the “middle term” in everything a person undertakes. Therefore it is a matter of becoming a neighbor to another person and loving him regardless of his possible qualifications or whether he practices neighbor-love to you. In other words, one cannot convert another person to becoming one’s neighbor, but the command commits the single individual to becoming a neighbor to the other. Inasmuch, then, as the relation to others, thereby the social aspect, is dominant, Works of Love includes all three aspects of the ethical. At the same time the ethical in its entirety has its authority directly from the eternal, from God, which until now has not been the case in

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Kierkegaard’s upbuilding writings. In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, which represents the highest ethical position prior to Works of Love, we are still following only two ethical viewpoints: in the first part of these discourses Kierkegaard takes the ethics of immanence to its culmination (to what could also be called ethical idealism). By willing the good the single individual seeks to relate to God in such a way that everything depends on the single individual’s will in relation to the good, to which the single individual can have his eyes opened on the basis of his own immanental qualifications. Whereas the second part of the discourses is a repetition of this, in the third part we have a new ethical point of view: here, with Christ as his example, the single individual tries to learn to bear his temporal troubles, his cross. In this heightened form of the ethical the center is voluntariness but only in a suffering form, not, as later, a voluntary renunciation in the external or a voluntary exposing of oneself to suffering. Works of Love, on the other hand, points to the authority in the form of “you shall,” which proceeds from the transcendent power, therefore a command from God to obedience, which we find first in Judaism and which later gains its full content in Christianity. This authority was totally unknown in paganism and became an offense to the natural man. On this Kierkegaard declares: “What courage it takes to say for the first time, ‘You shall love,’ or, more correctly, what divine authority it takes to turn the natural man’s conceptions and ideas upsidedown with this phrase! There at the boundary where human language halts and courage fails, there revelation breaks forth with divine origination and proclaims what is not difficult to understand in the sense of profundity or human parallels but which did not arise in any human being’s heart.”492 Precisely because Kierkegaard drew this sharp distinction between the ethics of immanence and that which comes as a command from transcendence, he could clearly distinguish in Works of Love the purely secular and humanistic forms of human relations from Christian love with its authoritative “you shall.” It is important to note here that when Kierkegaard speaks of love for the neighbor he designates this love as “the moral task.” For Kierkegaard “moral” means expressly the extrinsic action that is the

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opposite of the inwardness that has a hidden center of gravity. From this it is clear that Works of Love deals primarily with the social aspect. Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that “the moral task” is “the origin of all tasks” and that “Christianity is the true morality.”493 It is on the basis of this view that Kierkegaard judges all the attempts beginning in his day to introduce an external equality among persons. Kierkegaard shows clearly that never in this world, the nature of which is dissimilarity, can perfect equality be effected. Christianity, however, teaches us the true equality—namely, that before God all persons have equal worth, because every human being has the possibility of the eternal. Christianity, says Kierkegaard, “allows all the dissimilarities to stand but teaches the equality of eternity. It teaches that everyone is to lift himself up above earthly dissimilarity.”494 This must not be misunderstood to mean that the Christian is not to do everything also in the temporal sense to help his neighbor and to work to improve his external situation. Kierkegaard only wants to point out the impossibility of carrying out attempts to establish a kingdom of perfect justice in this world. This is also why he turns against the arrogance (“superiority”) that rules those who have power and the defiant envy by which the less well off (“lowliness”) are actuated. “Both ways,” he says, “are in fact rebellion, are rebellion against the essentially Christian.”495 Christianity wants to do its part to mitigate external distinctions, but at the same time it points, as most important, to the requirement of love for the neighbor, which must at all times be the presupposition and which applies to all people. Kierkegaard realizes that attempts to produce perfect human equality will divide people into friends and enemies, which is totally contradictory to the ideal of Christian love.496 Kierkegaard stresses as something essential in Christian love that it is able to fulfill all the commandments of the Law, inasmuch as it contains more than the sum of all the separate commandments.497 In other words, the person who in continual self-denial is willing to submit to God’s will fulfills God’s commands in a more perfect way than the person who tries only to keep the Law according to the letter. In self-denial the single individual has found freedom in relation to the Law, but this freedom means precisely the greatest adherence to God.

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After having called attention to the essential qualities of Christian love and contrasted them to the purely human norms for love, Kierkegaard shows how only the single individual who submits to this love can assist in halting the leveling of the ethical and religious values that he thought was taking place in the society of his day and that he had already warned against in his review of Two Ages. In Works of Love Kierkegaard points out that the reason for the modern age’s confusion in the domain of the ethical and the religious is that people will not tolerate being bound to God and therefore want to set God aside and place themselves “in the rights of God.” He calls this presumption and says: “As a reward for such presumption all existence will in that way probably come closer and closer to being transformed into doubt or into a vortex.” “What, after all,” he continues, “is the Law, what is the Law’s requirement of a person? Well, that is for people to decide. Which people? Here the doubt begins.”498 Thus in their attempt to do away with God, people throw the whole ethical and moral order into doubt,499 an order they will be unable to re-establish by their own efforts. Kierkegaard sees only one possibility of halting this “mutiny against God”500 —namely, with the help of individuals, of whom he says: “Is not each individual under an obligation to God to stop the mutiny, not, of course, by loud noise or fancied importance, not by domineeringly wanting to compel others to obey God, but by being unconditionally obedient oneself, by unconditionally holding to the God-relationship and to God’s requirement, and thereby expressing that as far as he is concerned God exists and is the only sovereign, whereas he is an unconditionally obedient subject?” 501 Here again we see the overwhelming significance Kierkegaard gives to the category of the single individual, not merely with regard to a person’s own inner development but also to the restitution of ethical and social norms that are to hold in human relationships. Only through a relationship to the eternal, to God, can one become the single individual; consequently, it is this relationship that helps one to find clear and firm norms for one’s personal life and makes others aware that such higher ethical norms exist. Kierkegaard accordingly refers the single individual to his conscience [Samvittighed], consequently to “his co-knowledge [Samviden] with

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God”502 when he seeks clarity on how he should act in particular concrete situations. Through his conscience the single individual can take counsel with God with regard to his actions and thereby avoid making decisions on the basis of the spontaneous impulses and inclinations by which one is always governed on the lower existential levels. Kierkegaard plainly cites a whole scale of such impulses and motivations in a person’s conduct in life—namely, drives, inclination, feeling, or intellectual calculation.503 In conscience a person is freed from “a lower conceptual sphere”504 by binding himself to God, and for Kierkegaard this adherence signifies true freedom or, as he says: “Therefore, first the infinite boundedness, and then the talk about freedom can begin.”505 Prior to finding real freedom by becoming bound in this way, one can speak at most of a relative freedom. Absolute freedom can be attained only by continually seeking the contact with God that Christian love requires and that finds its adequate expression in self-denial. This also says that without God there is no freedom in the proper sense.506 The relative forms of freedom, on the other hand, lie on a lower plane—that is, before one has made the movement toward infinity—consequently there where one’s conduct and actions are exclusively determined by natural impulses and desires and there are only earthly and limited goals before one’s eyes. Kierkegaard’s conception of the conscience also provides a good example of the close connection between freedom and the ethical. By acting according to one’s conscience, one goes beyond the forms of the ethical that have their goals within the world of relativities, where accordingly the moral and ethical norms have only one dimension. On the other hand, the ethical, which has its source in the conscience, always has two dimensions—external and internal. Anyone who does his work not only for wages but also for the sake of conscience gives this work a new and higher meaning. Kierkegaard expresses this superbly in the following lines: “Take the most lowly, the most disregarded servant, take what we call a rather simple, indigent, poor charwoman, who earns her living by the most menial work—from the Christian point of view, she has the right, indeed, we most urgently beseech her in the name of Christianity to do it— she has the right to say, as she is doing her work and talking to herself and to God, something that in no way slows up the work, ‘I am

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doing this work for wages, but that I do it as carefully as I am doing it, I do—for the sake of conscience.’”507 Through the conscience, work acquires a higher quality, and because this work has two different dimensions Kierkegaard speaks of redoubling [Fordoblelse]. A work that has its goal within finitude and that also is not placed under the eternal’s requirement can never have this redoubling. Redoubling thereby also represents a higher actuality than the one created by setting only relative goals for oneself. Kierkegaard describes how the temporal actuality relates to the higher actuality that is created by the eternal and that manifests itself in redoubling: “But a temporal object never has redoubling in itself; just as the temporal vanishes in time, so also it is only in its characteristics. When, however, the eternal is in a human being, this eternal redoubles in him in such a way that every moment it is in him it is in him in a double mode: in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that this is one and the same, since otherwise it is not redoubling.”508 In the action that proceeds from deliberation in one’s conscience, it is love that should reign supreme; but here one must be careful not to confuse this love with the lower view of love, of which Kierkegaard says: “There is a lower view of love, therefore a lower love that has no view of love in itself.”509 A person comes to the love that is the starting point for conscience only as it is discovered through a process of inward deepening and finally through self-denial. Therefore, even if Kierkegaard often stresses that love is the deepest presupposition in humankind, because the human person as a synthesis has an eternal element, and that love ultimately “originates mysteriously in God’s love,”510 it is not thereby spontaneously present and as such is not active in people. In order to come to the true love that is “love in itself,” a person must first go through the stage of inward deepening. As was just stated, this love does not lie on the surface of a person’s actions and manifestations of life but is the deepest thing within him and can be reached only through renunciation and self-denial. Even if a person by his relationship to God through the conscience is now freed to act according to the love commandment and not according to his immediate drives or his intellectual calculations, he still faces the danger of interpreting the love commandment abstractly

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and of developing a fanatic enthusiasm for the higher “unseen,”511 with the result that the command does not get a steady application in practical life. After presenting all the aspects of the love commandment and showing that love of neighbor applies to all people without exception, Kierkegaard points out, especially in the chapter entitled “Our Duty to Love the People We See,” the danger of fanaticism. At the same time this chapter introduces the description of how the love commandment is to be translated continually into action in the concrete and current situation. Kierkegaard clearly states that there is a decisive transition from talking about love for the neighbor in general and its application in “the world of actuality.”512 In other words, this transition marks a leap from a description of love as possibility to love as actuality—that is, to the attempt to actualize it in daily life. In order better to understand the issues related to the transition from the theoretical to the concrete treatment of the commandment of love for the neighbor, the following three points of view must be pointed out. In the first place, it is always this specific particular person who is addressed with the commandment’s “you.” When a person obeys the commandment, he himself becomes the neighbor to the other person, as we see in the story of the good Samaritan. In his upbuilding literature prior to Works of Love, Kierkegaard pointed out that in order for one to practice works of love for one’s fellowbeings there has to be preparation and the practicing of obedience to God’s commandment. Without this practicing it is not the love commandment but the primal, spontaneous reactions that direct a person’s conduct. Even if these reactions in certain cases may be commendable, they cannot be called works of love in the Christian sense, since the latter presupposes the consciousness of acting according to God’s command.513 Consequently the center of gravity in the application of the commandment is always in the one addressed, who himself must first of all become the neighbor in order to be able to practice love for the neighbor to others; in other words, love for the neighbor always presupposes a personal accounting vis à vis God’s requirement. Therefore Kierkegaard can say of the extreme consequence of this way of thinking: “If someone living on a desert island mentally conformed to this commandment, by renouncing self-love he could be said to love the neighbor. To be sure, ‘the neighbor’ in itself is a mul-

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tiplicity, since ‘the neighbor’ means ‘all people,’ and yet in another sense one person is enough in order for you to be able to practice the Law.”514 Here it is clearly evident that it is the personal and religious aspects of ethics that are at the center of Kierkegaard’s treatment of the love commandment, and from these alone is derived the relation to the other person—consequently the social and civic aspect, but only in the Christian sense. In the second place, the commandment about love for the neighbor, which at first makes the one addressed into the neighbor, also bids him to regard every human being as his neighbor, consequently as a person toward whom he has the same ethical commitment as to himself. From Kierkegaard’s deliberations on this side of the question it appears that the deepest justification for the love commandment must be that God has set the eternal into every human heart.515 Through the commandment every person finds his meaning as an eternal being confirmed by God and thereby also has his spiritual destiny specifically emphasized. Kierkegaard expresses himself on this in many places in different ways. It is expressed most clearly when in his discourse on love for the neighbor he stresses “the equality of the eternal,”516 which means precisely that all people have equal access to the eternal. In Kierkegaard’s view, this is the only true equality to be found among human beings. On the same basis Kierkegaard can say: “It is only in love for the neighbor that the self who loves is defined as spirit purely spiritually and the neighbor is a purely spiritual specification.”517 Here it is clearly stated that not only the self who loves becomes spiritually qualified but also the object of love for the neighbor. This statement also clearly declares that here it is a matter of a deeper spiritual relation between people. Therefore, what is most profoundly expressed in love for the neighbor is that an eternal equality holds true for all—that is, all human beings have equal value before God; therefore the commandment obligates to the same love for all. Consequently Kierkegaard considered that the most important task for the person who wants to practice love for the neighbor is to help his fellow-being become a spiritual self by helping him to love God, whereby he will also become a neighbor to others. This occurs as a consequence of God’s becoming the middle term in everything a person undertakes in relation to his fellow-beings. Kierkegaard de-

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scribes the growth toward this goal in the following very brief formulation: “To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved.”518 Integrated into this statement are all three aspects of the ethical. The religious aspect is represented by God as the middle term and the presupposition of all love. The personal aspect appears when the single human being in loving God comes to love himself and relate himself to himself in the right way. The third aspect, which presupposes the first two, is expressed in the words: “To help another person to love God is to love another person.” With this elevated talk about love for the neighbor as a spiritual process, Kierkegaard seems to be moving away from the concrete and daily difficulties involved in the relation to the other person. But this is only one side of his exposition of the love commandment.519 As the third aspect—after his detailed and fundamental explanation of what love for the neighbor is—Kierkegaard shows in the chapter “Our Duty to Love the People We See” that this exalted form of love that Christianity proclaims is always to be translated into practical life and into the relation to the specific people with whom one comes in contact or with whom one lives in daily life. In this way love is brought down out of the world of ideals into actuality, where it must stand the test and be preserved. This chapter and the remainder of the book can really be said to deal with the many concrete questions and difficulties that face the single individual when he is to practice love for the neighbor. In actual life my task is to love the other person as he is and not summarily expect that the other person also loves me as his neighbor. The one who loves is to bring love “along” and must try to find the other lovable “despite his weaknesses and defects and imperfections.”520 In this way the single individual comes to love the other person not only with regard to the spiritual and eternal element in that person but also with regard to that person’s temporal concretion. The person who loves then tries to relate himself to the other person seen as a synthesis of these two qualities in the human essence. As a concrete expression for the doubleness in the synthesis, Kierkegaard, when enjoining the duty to actualize love in practical life, uses the verb “ love” twice in sequence, as, for example, when he speaks of “the love that can fulfill the duty—in

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loving to love the people we see,” or when he says: “When it is a duty in loving to love the people we see, then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be.”521 Kierkegaard also knew that this love will continually be made concrete in “the world of actuality” in such a way that “the task is not to find the lovable object, but the task is to find the once given or chosen object—lovable, and to be able to find him lovable no matter how he is changed.” 522 To this last category belongs the beloved or the friend;523 but in all these relationships love for the neighbor must be like a constant undercurrent—that is, “what is the eternal foundation must also be the foundation of every expression of the particular.”524 That love for the neighbor must be the foundation of special human relationships is enunciated very clearly in the following sentences: “The Christian may very well marry, may very well love his wife, especially in the way he ought to love her, may very well have a friend and love his native land; but yet in all this there must be a basic understanding between himself and God in the essentially Christian, and this is Christianity.”525 The depth and intensity of love for the other fellow human being depends entirely on one’s love of God. Of this connection Kierkegaard says: “A person should begin with loving the unseen, God, because then he himself will learn what it is to love. But that he actually loves the unseen will be known precisely by his loving the brother he sees; the more he loves the unseen the more he will love the people he sees.”526 That a person has a “duty to remain in love’s debt”527 to his fellow beings gives this love a constantly present and sustained character. At the same time the love must never begin “to dwell on itself, or to compare itself with love in other people or to compare itself with the deeds that it has accomplished,”528 because comparing relativizes love and drags it down. In discussing the danger of this kind of comparing, Kierkegaard gives a superb and enlightening description of how the temporal and the eternal in love’s work can form a combination whereby this work gains infinite meaning. Of the difference between work that is permeated by the eternal and work that is only dutiful work, he says: “In everything done for you by the one who loves, in the least little triviality as well as in the greatest sacrifice, there is

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always love along with it, and thereby the smallest service, which in the case of the hired servant you would scarcely find worth taking into account, becomes immeasurable.”529 It is noteworthy that in a depiction of this kind Kierkegaard actually gives us a representation of the eternal, the absolute, in a concrete form within existence. In his attempt to actualize a work of love, a person also makes himself free and independent of the judgment of others, since in his love he relates himself first and foremost to God. As Kierkegaard says: “Although love in all its expressions turns outward toward people, where indeed it has its object and its tasks, it still knows that here is not the place where it is to be judged, but that deep within, where love relates itself to God, there is the judgment.”530 This absolute dependence on God is also a person’s highest freedom, and Kierkegaard does not believe that human life becomes earnest without this dependence, commitment, and pressure. It is a reminder to all who think that the human being as sovereign lord can set tasks for himself and fulfill them. On this Kierkegaard says: “The deficiency in even the most noble human enthusiasm is that, as merely human, in the ultimate sense it is not powerful itself, because it has no higher power over itself.531 Kierkegaard realized clearly that attempting to practice Christian love as he presented it in Works of Love would always encounter opposition in the world, because the world understands only halfmeasures. Consequently this love must eventually struggle in two places: “first in the person’s inner being, where he must struggle with himself, and then, when he makes progress in this struggle, outside the person with the world.”532 Just as everything essentially Christian does, Christian love also will provoke offense in the world.

Christian Love in Action In the opening part of Works of Love, Kierkegaard first undertakes to make a clear distinction between the Christian view of love and the forms of love found within paganism, that is, in every human being prior to meeting Christianity. In this contrasting of paganism and

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Christianity, he also very clearly and consistently works out the principal categories pertaining to love for the neighbor, which is the Christian form of love. After having shown that this love is “the fulfilling of the Law”533 and “a matter of conscience,”534 he stresses that it is to be put into action in daily, concrete life. The emphasis in all of this presentation is on the single individual, who is to practice works of love toward his fellow-beings. The emphasis in Part II is also on the single individual, who is to practice love, consequently on the personal aspect of ethics. In this section this is evident in Kierkegaard’s frequent use of the uncommon expressions “the loving one,” “the truly loving one,” “the true love,” or similar terms to designate the person who continually and unceasingly practices self-denial, which is indeed the enabling condition for any practice of love for the neighbor. Therefore he seeks to present the ideal of Christian love in action and takes as his source Paul’s eulogy on love in I Corinthians 13. Kierkegaard expands and deepens Paul’s brief statements and describes in detail the numerous concrete situations that may be encountered by the one who wants to practice Christian love. Kierkegaard uses Paul’s words “Love builds up”535 to remind the reader that it is a presupposition that love as something eternal is given equally to all. To proceed from this presupposition is a condition for being able to practice love for the other person. As Kierkegaard says: “Love is to presuppose love; to have love is to presuppose love in others; to be loving is to presuppose that others are loving,” and further: “If, however, someone were to think that he was loving, but also that all others were not loving, we would say: No, stop; here is a contradiction in the thought itself, because to be loving is to assume, to presuppose, that other people are loving.”536 Just as Paul does in the Epistle to the Corinthians, Kierkegaard places love higher than faith and hope. This is connected with their speaking of love in a specific context, namely, as an ethical-religious relation to fellow-beings. Ethically, love must be considered greater than faith and hope, because love always expresses a movement, “an active work,”537 whereas faith and hope pertain to adherence to an object. In other words, love is concerned with existing actuality, while faith and hope are related to possibility that can become actuality.

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But if faith is taken in its eminent sense, that is, as faith in Christ or in the forgiveness of sins, then faith becomes the supreme Christian qualification. Paul has emphasized this faith in many passages, and Kierkegaard also names this faith as the highest. Through faith in the eminent sense, this fact finds expression: that the ethical in a person, that is, all human efforts to accomplish the good, suffers shipwreck, that ultimately a human being’s life can be restored only by faith. But this in no way diminishes the significance of the ethical, which plays its decisive role not only before one comes to faith but at least just as much afterward. When, however, it is a matter of works of love, love is the leading force before faith and hope, which Kierkegaard expresses in this way: “Love is therefore the ‘greatest’ among ‘these,’ but the one that in the sense of perfection (and what greater perfection is there for comparison than faith and hope!) is the greatest must also be able to take upon itself the function of the subordinates, if I may put it this way, and make it even more perfect.”538 Love, then—or, to put it more concretely, the loving one—also uses faith and hope to manifest in every life situation that from the profoundest point of view every human being, whatever the evidence to the contrary, is equally qualified to come to the true love. Thus the loving one must never give up his faith or hope when another person is involved. Love when it is practiced does indeed have its sights on everything temporal and concrete in human life, but above all it tries never to lose sight of a human being’s eternal worth. When “love believes all things,” it has a double meaning—that in faith love tries to believe the best about another person’s concrete life but at the same time steadfastly presupposes the possibility of true love in the other person. Here faith must battle with doubt, but love helps faith and hope to conquer doubt.539 As a synthesis of time and eternity, a person must not be abandoned, neither because of his temporal weakness and difficulties nor of the loving one’s disbelief in his eternal salvation. On this connection between the temporal and the eternal components, Kierkegaard expresses himself very clearly, especially when speaking of hope: “To hope all things or, what is the same thing, to hope always. At first glance it certainly seems as if to hope all things is something that

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could be done once and for all, since ‘all things’ indeed collects the multiplicity into one, and to that extent into what could be called an eternal moment, as if hope were at rest, in repose. Yet this is not so. In other words, to hope is composed of the eternal and the temporal, and this is why the expression for hope’s task in the form of eternity is to hope all things, and in the form of temporality to hope always. The one expression is not more true than the other; on the contrary, each of the expressions becomes untrue if it is set against the other instead of being united to express the same thing: at every moment always to hope all things.”540 Thus the one who loves hopes at the same time for a person’s temporal and eternal welfare. Kierkegaard uses Paul’s words “Love does not seek its own”541 particularly to enjoin that the one who loves is to love the other person’s singularity and encourage him to “that God-pleasing venture of humility and pride: before God to be oneself.”542 Kierkegaard says it in this way: “Insofar as the loving one is able, he seeks to encourage a person to become himself, to become his own master.”543 Love as a sustained and very present work achieves its culmination when it “hides a multitude of sins”544 in the neighbor. Here the situation is that the one who loves “cannot avoid seeing or hearing”545 how another person is ruled by the power of sin. The three following procedural methods are recommended as proper: silence, a mitigating explanation, and forgiveness. Here, too, love uses faith and hope as means. On this Kierkegaard says: “But believing all things in love and hoping all things in love are the two chief means that love, this lenient interpreter, uses for the mitigating explanation that hides a multiude of sins.”546 The work of love to forgive, to wipe out the neighbor’s sin, is indeed the greatest work love can achieve. Kierkegaard gives this work special emphasis by calling forgiveness “the most unusual way” in which one can hide the other person’s sin. He thereby wants to say that this work is a faint analogy to the work God alone can fully complete— namely, the forgiveness of sin. He explains more explicitly how love uses the help of faith in forgiveness and summarizes his thoughts on this in the sentence: “The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away.”547

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After describing love’s most important work, forgiving one’s neighbor, Kierkegaard points out in the chapter “Love Abides” that the true love is constant and unchanging, because it has its source in the eternal in the human being, who receives his affirmation through the love commandment from God. Therefore love is able to withstand all the changes and vicissitudes of time, which Kierkegaard expresses in Paul’s words: “Love never falls away.”548 Of the next chapter, titled “Mercifulness, a Work of Love Even If It Can Give Nothing and Is Able to Do Nothing,” Kierkegaard writes in a journal entry: “Deliberation No. VII in the Second Series about mercifulness is also rightly turned against communism. It is no art to speak of such things in ordinary expressions that mean nothing, but here the matter is given a completely different turn that is certainly Christian.”549 In his deliberation on mercifulness Kierkegaard is sharply critical of devaluating the poor man in comparison with the rich man, who can make an impression on others by his charitableness with money or other external means. Since Kierkegaard champions essential equality between people and does not regard external situations and benefits as something essential, he defends the worth of the poor man and emphatically declares that precisely the person who possesses nothing can be merciful. Furthermore, he shows that “mercifulness is how it is given,”550 not how much is given. Kierkegaard also turns against the “worship of money”551 in our society. Insofar as the aim is to limit the power of money—or, to use a later expression, of capitalism—he could agree with the communistic leanings. However, when he declares that his deliberations on mercifulness are “critical of communism,” his criticism is no doubt aimed at anyone who believes that what is supremely important occurs through external changes and institutions—in other words, precisely that to which every form of communism gives first consideration. From Kierkegaard’s point of view all external societal changes that do not have their deepest anchor in love and mercifulness are Christianly inadequate. Thus for Kierkegaard the way in which one wants to prevent temporal need is of primary importance. The contrast between the Christian way and the world’s way and, for that matter, also communism’s way of solving social problems is drawn sharply in the following sentences: “‘But the main thing is still this, that need be

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remedied in every way, and that everything possible be done to remedy all need.’ This is the way temporality, well-intentioned, talks, and it cannot even talk in any other way. Eternity, on the other hand, says: There is only one danger, that mercifulness is not practiced; even if all need were remedied, it still is not settled that it was done through mercifulness, and if this was not the case, this wretchedness, that mercifulness was not practiced at all, would be greater than all temporal need.”552 In rendering the Christian point of view in extreme form here, Kierkegaard in fact turns against all the political orientations that believe they can improve conditions in the world and thereby also a person’s situation without regard for a person’s deepest need and his eternal destiny. Whereas Kierkegaard in discussing mercifulness touches on the civic and social sides of ethics, in the next chapter “The Victory of the Conciliatory Spirit in Love, Which Wins the One Overcome,” there is significant insight into the human being’s freedom and capability in regard to the good. This is an aspect of freedom that Kierkegaard touched on earlier in his writing553 and that will be discussed in more detail later in connection with other aspects of freedom. Here he goes into the subject by showing how the one who loves wins the one overcome who fought “in league with evil.”554 With regard to a person’s freedom and capability, Kierkegaard believes that even if a person managed by extreme effort to conquer himself, he still could never by himself and his own powers practice the good. He expresses this by saying that there are “two victories, a first victory and then the second one in which the first victory is preserved.”555 In defining the relation between the two victories more specifically, he says: “In the first conflict the battle is against the world for the victory that is won; in the second conflict, the battle is with God about that victory. Only when a person in the very moment of victory relinquishes [afstaa] the victory to God, only then does a person continue to stand [bestaa] after having overcome everything.”556 In the moment when a person relinquishes the victory to God in order that it be preserved by God, he discovers that it also was God who helped him in the first victory. In his explanation of how the one who loves is reconciled with the one who is vanquished, Kierkegaard shows that the second victory, which consists of winning the vanquished one, is finished only by

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God’s help, because both the one who loves and the vanquished one bow before God as the third and highest power. Kierkegaard describes this as follows: “With the aid of the third that the loving one has introduced between them, they are both humbled. The one who loves humbles himself before the good, whose lowly servant he is, and, as he himself admits, in frailty; and the one overcome one does not humble himself before the loving one but before the good.”557 As previously mentioned, love in action is to take aim at both the temporal and the eternal in the human being; yet the eternal must always come first, because it is this that distinguishes human beings from other creatures at the same time that it forms the basis for the essential equality between persons. That the main emphasis is on a human being’s eternal destiny has the consequence that Christian love does not relinquish, even after their departure, those to whom it was linked in life. Love will remember them, which means that love on its part maintains a spiritual connection with them. Kierkegaard eulogizes in particular “the work of love in recollecting one who is dead,” because this love is not subject to the danger of being practiced for the sake of reward. He calls this love “the most unselfish,”558 “the freest,”559 and “the most faithful”560 love. In the last chapter of Works of Love Kierkegaard discusses the difficult ethical issue of how the nature of Christian love can be delineated in a true way. This means that the chapter actually centers on the complex of questions involved in communication, a theme to which Kierkegaard paid considerable attention during his authorship.561 When the discourse is about love, attention should be directed to two points: “The speaker must make himself into the selflover, and the content of the discourse must be about loving the unlovable object.”562 The first point means that by identifying oneself as a selfloving person the speaker avoids directing attention to himself and becoming an authority to the listeners, and thereby hindering them from independent decision making and a direct, personal God-relationship. As for the second point, it must be understood that loving one’s neighbor is a most difficult task; given the presupposition of self-denial in Christian love, the neighbor never becomes a lovable object in the usual sense.

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In his “Conclusion” Kierkegaard reaches the culmination of the exposition of the meaning of inwardness and of the ethical commitment in practicing the works of love. He points out that there is a Christian like for like that is the opposite of the Jewish and the worldly like for like. “The Jewish, the worldly, the bustling like for like is: As others do unto you, by all means take care that you also do likewise unto them. But the Christian like for like is: God will do exactly unto you as you do unto others.”563 How important it is for Kierkegaard to stress this Christian like for like is evident in the following statment: “This Christian like for like is such an important and decisive Christian specification that I could wish to end, if not every book in which I develop essentially the Christian, then at least one book, with this thought.”564 The main point in the Christian like for like is that the single individual in his relation to the neighbor has to do first and foremost with God, who judges and repays his actions. In this way “God’s rigorousness is leniency in the loving and the humble, but in the hard-hearted his leniency is rigorousness.” There is therefore great earnestness and rigorousness in this like for like, but this is precisely the side that Kierkegaard wishes to emphasize and that permeates the entire Works of Love. He wants to counteract the false conceptions and the misuse of God’s love and leniency. In other words, leniency and rigorousness are both expressions of God’s love, or as Kierkegaard puts it: “his love is the greatest leniency and the greatest rigorousness.”565 Kierkegaard knew, however, on the basis of his discourse on the Christian like for like, emphasizing the significance of a person’s works, that he could be accused of preaching works righteousness. For this reason he concludes his many deliberations on works of love by clearly pointing to grace as conclusive and decisive. Since Works of Love is the central volume in Kierkegaard’s ethical writings, it has been deemed important to dwell somewhat longer on its content and structure. In none of his writings on an ethical theme do the connection and interplay between the three duties—duty toward God, toward oneself, toward one’s neighbor—stand out so clearly as in Works of Love. Moreover, the major aspect of freedom—to become free by being bound to the highest Law—is illuminated here from many angles.

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This fine balancing of the three ethical aspects is not repeated again in Kierkegaard’s subsequent upbuilding literature. New notes are sounded in Christian Discourses; just as inWorks of Love, the center of gravity is in the single individual, but now no longer as a hidden inwardness, since the single individual comes into an increasingly polemical attitude to official Christianity because the requirements upon him are continually being made ever more rigorous. Therefore the essentially new note in Christian Discourses is the beginning of a criticism of hidden inwardness and an emphajsis on the voluntary as the characteristic of the Christian’s life.

The Christian’s Struggle and the Voluntary In Part One of Christian Discourses Kierkegaard again takes up the earlier theme of the lily and the bird as our school teachers, but this time he elaborates upon the subject by sharpening up the contrast between pagans and Christians made particularly in Works of Love. Throughout this whole section he attempts to show how a person can be freed, only by his obedience to God, from all the life-produced or self-induced worries. Therefore Part One of Christian Discourses can be said to center on the freedom that Christianity can give a person over against all possible worries. The example of the lily and the bird is used to elucidate more explicitly this release from worry. Both are without worries, because they always obey their creator; but they do not arrive at this obedience by choosing—they can do nothing but obey. The situation is different with human beings, who have received freedom’s possibility and thereby the possibility of choosing. A human being, then, can either attempt to manage his freedom himself or subordinate it entirely to God. So the Christian, who does the latter, can through this obedience continually free himself from all possible worries that the thought of the future, of “the next day,”566 can bring. He thereby comes to resemble the lily and the bird, who are not harassed by worries about the future either; but the Christian’s obedience is superior to the bird’s, since, in contrast to the bird, he has a will that is to be subordinated.

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Kierkegaard says of this difference: “The bird has no other will than God’s will, but the Christian has another will, which in obedience he always sacrifices to God—so much more obedient is he.”567 The liberation itself consists in the Christian’s “casting all his cares upon God.”568 This casting away of the worries is a kind of ethical action, completely dominated, however, by the religious aspect, because in this action the individual continually takes refuge in God. Paradoxically, for the pagan, who does not subordinate himself to God’s will, freedom’s possibility leads him to unfreedom. He arbitrarily wants to order his own life and do without God. Indeed, he can even go so far in his wanting to do without God that he tries to kill “the thought of God.” On the result of this attempt Kierkegaard says: “Then in his spiritless ignorance of God and in his vain knowledge about the world, the pagan sinks below the beast. To slay God is the most dreadful suicide; utterly to forget God is a human being’s deepest fall—a beast cannot fall that deep.”569 As a matter of fact, Kierkegaard had already contemplated expressing in this first section his doubts about the presence of hidden inwardness in Christendom’s Christians. In several drafts of the text570 he voices his mistrust of the worth of assurances that deep down within oneself one has renounced the things of this earth and that one is therefore able to renounce them in actual life if it is required. Kierkegaard, however, omitted these critical comments in this section, but in recompense this polemical note emerges in sharpened form in Part Three. In Part One Kierkegaard concentrates on showing how the many possible worries that people can have because they have freedom’s possibility can be conquered only by obedience to God. Here it is the category of possibility that is central and that should be brought into relation with the religious, a task that Vigilius Haufniensis had already undertaken when he pointed out that possibility, which is “the weightiest of all categories” because “in possibility all things are equally possible,” can be conquered in “faith’s anticipation.”571 Part Two goes more deeply into human existence by dealing with the Christian’s situation in actual life—namely, with suffering, which according to Kierkegaard is an essential part of Christian existence. Kierkegaard calls the suffering discussed here “innocent suffering,”572

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meaning the suffering that accompanies a person’s attempt to actualize the good. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms delineated this form of suffering earlier; the new element here is that even if, or perhaps precisely because, there is a worsening of the existential situation in which the suffering steadily increases, there is a spiritual growth if a person persists in his striving to actualize the good. This is clearly seen in just the chapter headings, as for example: “The Joy of It: That the Poorer You Become, the Richer You Are Able to Make Others” or “The Joy of It: That the Weaker You Become the Stronger God Becomes in You,” or “The Joy of It: That Adversity is Prosperity.” It is noteworthy here that simultaneously with the suffering a person experiences a spirit of joy. Here Kierkegaard lays the greatest stress on the fact that the ethical and the ethical-religious existence can be formed and developed only during a struggle filled with contradictions—that is, this development will always have a paradoxical character. This is also why the inner struggle can never be communicated directly but only in the form of opposites, which always face the reader with a choice.573 It is also important to note that only now, after pointing out the concrete consequences of trying to practice the Christian requirement, does Kierkegaard express his critique of people’s assurances about being ready to suffer for the truth if it is needed. Among other things, he says: “People would rather have the direct communication as assurance upon assurance; this is so comfortable, and most comfortable when nothing comes of it. Hardship, however, does not jest.”574 The groundwork is thereby also laid for the transition from the suffering of hidden inwardness to the suffering brought about by the visible, concrete clash with the external world. In this way suffering becomes a an actuality totally different from hidden inwardness, to say nothing of the mere assurance of this inwardness. Part Two of Christian Discourses is like an apotheosis of the suffering in the Christian’s life. Suffering as something positive is contrasted to sin as “a human being’s corruption.”575 Kierkegaard also points out that there is “a chasmic difference between suffering and sin.”576 In this part freedom is seen in the staying power within the actuality of the suffering itself, while the ethical here is the adhering to the good in a suffering way. As Kierkegaard has already pointed out earlier,

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every suffering such as this also involves an action, just as every action involves a suffering.577 In Part Three Kierkegaard introduces totally new points of view that deal particularly with freedom and ethical questions. It was in fact not his original plan to publish Part Three along with the others, since it was much too polemical, and he was apprehensive about bringing in the polemical too early. On the other hand, without this part, Christian Discourses would become “too repetitious,” as we have seen in the first two parts. Only after much vacillation did Kierkegaard decide to incorporate this part in the book, even though he thought that doing so would expose him to a certain danger because of the polemical tone in the “Christian Discourses,” as he called them with the collective title “Thoughts That Wound From Behind—For Upbuilding.”578 All seven chapters in this part contain a resolute attack on the religiosity of hidden inwardness, in which the collisions related to freedom and the ethical are a private internal affair and have no need at all to be demonstrated outwardly in any way. The first discourse already calls for self-examination, a theme that Kierkegaard later expands and deepens in such books as For SelfExamination and Judge for Yourself!. It is the self-assurance of the socalled Christians that must be shaken up. In the second discourse, “‘See, We Have Left Everything and Followed You, What Shall We Have?’ (Matthew 19:27)—and What Shall We Have?” emerge the totally new points of view with regard to the ethical and freedom, because the emphasis now is upon imitation, discipleship. Kierkegaard now construes this as “the Law raised to a higher level.”579 But the presupposition for this intensified law is an intensified form of freedom—namely “the voluntary.” The requirement for the single individual is now that he is to forsake everything—voluntarily and literally. This intensification places an ever greater responsibility and even greater expectations upon the single individual. Speaking of the voluntary as the mark of genuine Christianity, Kierkegaard says: “But Christianity is indeed the religion of freedom, and precisely the voluntary is essentially Christian. Voluntarily to give up everything to follow Christ means to be convinced of the gloriousness of the good that Christianity promises.”580 With the voluntary as his point of departure, Kierkegaard goes on to denounce

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Christendom’s perversion of this relation, saying, for example: “Voluntarily to leave everything in order to follow Christ, which the world neither wants nor is able to hear without being offended, is also that which so-called Christendom prefers to have suppressed or, if it is said, would very much like to ignore, or in any case hears in such a way that something different comes out of it.”581 Voluntarily forsaking everything is, according to Kierkegaard, a requirement to all, yet it is not the first. The first and absolute requirement is the love commandment, which forms the basis of Christian ethics and the contents of which he very fully delineated in Works of Love. The voluntary, which is also called “the specifically Christian,”582 must also be understood as a work of freedom that goes beyond the commandment’s universal demand for love to oneself, to God, and to one’s neighbor. The voluntary lays more emphasis on the single individual than on the universal. On the place of voluntariness within freedom and the ethical, Kierkegaard expresses himself very clearly at the time around the publication of Christian Discourses: “The pastors preach indulgence and teach that renouncing everything is required only of some individuals. No, it is required of all, but it is particularly required only of some individuals. But the one of whom it is not particularly required learns humility all the more. “The renouncing of all things has the spaciousness of freedom. God speaks something like this: It would give me great pleasure if you were to renounce everything for Christ’s sake, but it is not absolutely demanded of you.”583 Thus the voluntary coincides with “the evangelical counsel” (consilia evangelica), as it is known from the Catholic Church. But even if the voluntary is not at first absolutely required of all, Kierkegaard in his judgment of Christendom nevertheless uses it as a criterion for being Christian. Later this criterion is expanded to embrace the highest example of a Christian—namely, the martyr, who voluntarily exposes himself to suffering for Christ’s sake. After this emphasis on freedom and the ethical, Kierkegaard strongly stresses in two chapters the importance of carrying these concepts into effect in one’s personal life. It is the implementing of freedom and the ethical in particular that makes a person a conscious and

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responsible personality. As such, a person must also be accountable to God, and Kierkegaard, in accord with Paul, discusses the theme: “There will be the resurrection of the dead, of the righteous—and of the unrighteous; or about the demonstration of the immorality of the soul formulated in this way: it is only all too certain, fear it!”584 But however much Kierkegaard emphasizes the single individual’s commitment to freedom and the ethical requirements, he does not forget to issue a strong warning against being confident of one’s own salvation on the basis of one’s own achievements. He says: “No, away pernicious sureness. Save me, O God, from ever becoming completely sure; keep me unsure until the end so that then, if I receive eternal blessedness, I might be completely sure that I have it by grace! It is empty shadowboxing to give assurances that one believes that it is by grace—and then to be completely sure. The true, the essential expression of its being all by grace is the very fear and trembling of unsureness. There lies faith—as far, just as far, from despair and from sureness.”585 After issuing such a warning to the single individual against “pernicious sureness,” Kierkegaard once again directs his attention to the situation in Christendom and raises the question whether or not the legions of Christians might be a delusion. In his discourse on “But It Is Blessed—To Suffer Mockery for a Good Cause,”586 he is already here in Christian Discourses preparing for the Christianity of martyrdom that he applies as a criterion during his battle with the Church.587 This, in the proper sense, polemical section ends with “a confession of faith,”588 in which the single individual poetically—yet as the single individual—testifies to his undivided will, despite every possible “if,”589 to belong to Christ. Kierkegaard considered Part Three of Christian Discourses to be a powerful appeal to the single individual to re-examine his own Christian faith. Speaking of the transition to the “fourth part,” he says: “The contrast between the third and fourth parts of Christian Discourses is as sharp as possible and very intense: first there is something like a temple-cleansing—and then the quiet and most intimate of all worship services—the Communion service on Fridays.”590 In the seven “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,” two of which

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were delivered in Vor Frue Kirke ,591 the single individual’s encounter with Christ as Savior is described. In this encounter the single individual’s relation to freedom and the ethical is completely reversed. The ethical efforts and exertions now manifest their total inadequacy, and through the forgiveness of sins592 freedom is now bestowed in a totally new way. It is also stressed that a human being can never be a co-worker with Christ in the work of Atonement: “You cannot be Christ’s co-worker in connection with the reconciliation, not in the remotest way. You are totally in debt; he is totally the satisfaction.” But at the same time Kierkegaard points out that a human being can be God’s co-worker. The distinction made here is very important. In regard to Christ’s Atonement a person can do nothing, like an “infant”;593 but at the same time a person can be an instrument or coworker in God’s plan. In the first instance the role of freedom and the ethical is suspended; in the second, a person faces the constant requirement to choose and to act.

The Increased Claims of Martyrdom Kierkegaard was very scrupulous about whether the requirements he advanced in the upbuilding literature were honored also by himself. With the publication of Part Three of Christian Discourses, in which he emphasizes the voluntary as the essentially Christian, he was close to venturing beyond the boundary within which there was still a backing in his own existence. It must be added, however, that with his attack on The Corsair in 1846 he had already become involved with the voluntary by deliberately exposing himself to insult. Furthermore, by using his inheritance in the service of his authorship without really making any serious attempt to get financial security for himself in another way, he demonstrated that he was ultimately taking the risk of living the rest of his life in poverty. For Kierkegaard, however, the voluntary embraced a larger sphere than that; furthermore, it was his aim to draw the requirements of the essentially Christian tighter in order thereby to take them to their ultimate consequence—namely, the Christianity of martyrdom. These

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extreme requirements, which for him personally were also an unattainable ideal, had to be presented under a pseudonym—AntiClimacus, an idea he had thought of only recently.594 Kierkegaard published his next two major works, The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity under this pseudonym. But before examining more closely the role of freedom and the ethical in these two books, mention must be made of two minor works published between Christian Discourses and The Sickness unto Death. In the first of these works, The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, which appeared in serial form in the newspaper Fædrelandet under the pseudonym Inter et Inter, Kierkegaard returned for the last time to the enchanting country of the esthetic, through which he had wandered in the beginning of his authorship. Neither freedom nor the ethical belong in the proper sense in this territory. In these serialized instalments Kierkegaard pays tribute to Johanne Luise Heiberg’s acting, while at the same time he sensitively analyzes the art of acting. He emphasizes that even if the dramatic arts do not need to come in contact with the deeper spheres of existence, where freedom and the esthetic set a new existential movement in motion, there nevertheless is a development, a repetition on a higher level, also within the dramatic art. Inter et Inter calls this a metamorphosis and on the basis of Johanne Luise Heiberg’s two performances in Romeo and Juliet, spaced nineteen years apart, gives an extensive and detailed account of this metamorphorsis. Kierkegaard takes a final farewell to the domain of the esthetic in the “Three Devotional Discourses” about The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, published in May of 1849. Now it is poetry, the poetical, and the poet himself that are repudiated. Here a clear distinction is made between the ambiguous and imaginary actuality of the poetical and Christianity’s earnest view of life. Poetry, which despite everything belongs on a lower level, is placed face to face with Christianity’s prose, which is “the very poetry of the eternal.”595 To the poet, however, the concession is made that he does try to rise above transitoriness by immortalizing it in his works. Therefore he, too, is called a “child of eternity,” but he “lacks the earnestness of eternity,”596 because he lacks silence—that is, he does not carry through the movement of infinity, which places him in contact with the actu-

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ality that demands decision and action from him. Thus it is silence that leads to the next, the ethical level, in the three discourses where one is faced with an “either/or . . . either be devoted to him or despise him.”597 Here Kierkegaard takes up again the complex of issues we encountered in Judge William, but in sharpened form. The ethical here is characterized by obedience, and freedom means expressly to obey God. In the third discourse we enter into the religious stage, and here Kierkegaard discusses the joy that accompanies being free to cast all one’s cares upon God. In all these reflections, just as in the other discourses on the same theme, Kierkegaard uses the lily and the bird as teachers. In addition to the two works mentioned, Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym H. H., published Two Ethical-Religious Essays before The Sickness unto Death appeared. In the first of the two essays, “Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put To Death for the Truth?” Kierkegaard brings together all his deliberations on the question of becoming sacrificed for the truth, a question that had already preoccupied him earlier because he felt that it had a relation to his own existence.598 After the idea of the essentially Christian as the voluntary became clearer to him, the question of a greater sacrifice of himself became more acute for him. The issue here is not whether one has the courage to let oneself be put to death for the truth—this is assumed—but whether a human being has the right to take upon himself the great responsibility of allowing his fellow beings—that is, note, in Christendom—to become guilty of the murder of someone who is willing to witness to the truth of Christianity. By way of a very subtle argument, H. H. attempts to point out how laden with responsibility and how demanding the considerations are that confront the single individual when he is prepared to sacrifice himself for the truth. According to H. H., the circumstances are not the controlling factors, but the one who exposes himself to martyrdom is himself the one who creates the conflict and situation and thereby demonstrates his superiority. H. H. says of these connections: “This is the relation, and it is also the superiority without which no one, viewed in the idea, actually was a martyr, even if he sacrificed his life or, more correctly, lost it, was put to death. True superiority always

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works in two places: it produces itself the manifestation of power that puts it to death.”599 It is noteworthy here that H. H.-Kierkegaard assigns crucial importance to the human side of freedom also in the most extreme situation of Christian existence. H. H. declares that “the real self-sacrifice for truth” presupposes “voluntary collaboration in one’s own death,” and he speaks of the voluntary sufferer’s “freedom of self-determination which he collaborates in his death and lets the others get on their consciences the guilt of putting him to death.”600 By pointing out the importance of the continually renewed decision on the road to martyrdom and by emphasizing that one must continually maintain a loving and responsible relation to one’s neighbor, H. H. has decisively tightened the concept of the martyr. Yet at the same time his exposition seems to have made it impossible to go through with martyrdom, inasmuch as he insists that love will prevent the single individual from making others guilty of the murder of an innocent person. The only solution to this difficult dilemma is for the single individual not to expose himself to martyrdom on his own initiative but wait until he has received a hint from God about it, whereby the responsibility does not become his own. This was also why the apostles could with bold confidence expose themselves to the danger, because they received direct orders to proclaim the Gospel regardless of the consequences this would entail for them. In H. H.’s case, it is a matter of elucidating the responsibility and difficulties facing the person who has not received authorization but who step by step personally tries to translate into action what he regards as true Christianity, whereby he collides with the prevailing concept of Christianity. The second essay, “On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle,” is closely connected to Kierkegaard’s deliberations on Pastor Adler’s claim to have received a revelation. In his The Book on Adler,601 Kierkegaard had previously and very thoroughly discussed the whole question of the possibility of such a revelation. One of the central points in that book became this essay, which was published separately. Here the issue is to make as sharp a distinction as possible between the knowledge to which a person, but especially the genius, can arrive on the basis of his innate qualifications and the paradoxi-

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cal knowledge that the apostle receives from God and that he is to proclaim. The issue here is to draw the boundary between immanence and transcendence, which H. H. does so very compactly that he does not discuss the issues related to freedom or the ethical.

The Self ’s Revolt against Faith:the Forms of Despair and Offense The Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus has as its subtitle “A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening.” Thus its orientation is primarily psychological, and according to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the task of psychology602 it is to be concerned with the human psychical and spiritual condition. In the same way The Concept of Anxiety, which is also predominantly a psychological work, deals with the various forms and conditions of anxiety. Despair and offense correspond on a deeper level to anxiety, and it is precisely the source of these conditions and their continual intensification in the particular individual that provide the subject matter for The Sickness unto Death. Anxiety, despair, and offense manifest a lack of faith and therefore come within the category of sin. Therefore it can be said that when Anti-Climacus describes in The Sickness unto Death the steadily intensified forms of despair and offense, it actually is “the dialectic of sin”603 that is being discussed. At first glance one may not think that The Sickness unto Death as a psychological work describing certain states can contain important insights relevant to this book, which seeks to point out the tight relation between Kierkegaard’s three central concepts of existence— namely freedom, the ethical, and the self, all of which are chiefly concerned with movement and not states. But on closer inspection it is manifest that not one of the previously discussed books has as clear and irrefutable evidence of the close connection between these three concepts and of their crucial role in Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence as this book has. Therefore it is important to look at it more closely.

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It is apparent that The Sickness unto Death builds upon the same presuppositions that Johannes Climacus had already sketched in De omnibus dubitandum est in the discussion of his attempt to solve the question of doubt by using his own method.604 This attempt proceeds along the following lines: Climacus shows how reflection splits immediacy into ideality and reality, and how in this splitting consciousness (spirit) emerges as a third factor. From the historical point of view, what he describes here corresponds to the breakthrough that occurred in Greek philosophy with Socrates and Plato. In other words, critical reflection reached the point where the unity that characterizes immediacy was divided into three factors: ideality, reality, and, as the superior factor, consciousness (spirit). Thereafter philosophy understood that its constant task was to discover objectively, that is, “disinterestedly,” the relation between reality and ideality or between empirical, sensate actuality and the conceptual world.605 According to Climacus’s conception, however, thought or philosophy can never reach a new positivity, which would signify a new immediacy or what Climacus also calls “the highest form of existence.” The only possibility of reaching this is with the help of consciousness or spirit as the third factor. It is spirit that is interested in establishing the higher form of existence after the first immediacy has been lost. Philosophy, as already mentioned, remains within the objective sphere without any interest in a new reality and will always have doubts about “a form higher than any objective thinking.” Therefore Climacus can also say: “Even if the system were absolutely perfect, even if the actuality exceeded the advance reports, doubt would still not be overcome—it only begins—for doubt is based on interest, and all systematic knowledge is disinterested.”606 It must be noted here that this statement about the system does not apply only to idealism’s attempt to systematize knowledge but also to the efforts on the part of the empirical sciences. The domain of knowledge is always within immanence, while the actuality of spirit refers to a transcendence. When consciousness, or more correctly, spirit,607 is faced with the task of forming a synthesis or producing a repetition on a higher level, there are two possible attitudes—either that of doubt or of faith. Since both these attitudes presuppose a decision and conse-

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quently belong within freedom, they must, according to Climacus, stand higher than objective, disinterested thought. Therefore it can be said, not only of faith but also of doubt, which precedes faith, that it is “the beginning of the highest form of existence.” Faith is the positive overcoming of doubt, but one can also attempt to overcome doubt in a negative way, as did the Greek sceptics who made a practice of “transforming interest into apathy.”608 In his authorship Kierkegaard enlisted the help of Socrates to illustrate this movement from the domain of philosophy to the higher reality. For example, in The Concept of Irony Kierkegaard has Socrates look at the contrast between the real and the ideal from an existential point of view, not, as Plato did later, from a purely ontological point of view. In The Concept of Irony reality as an expression of the finite world is neutralized by irony, whereas ideality opens the perspectives of freedom and the ethical—without, however, being used in that book in the sense of actuality, inasmuch as in that book the third and most important factor, spirit, plays only a negative role with Socrates. But already in Either/Or the pseudonym has Socrates appear as an ethicist, thereby introducing the subjective or spirit.609 In this way the position discussed in De omnibus dubitandum est is reached, a position that pertains to doubt in the stricter sense. Here the personal interest that places the individual face to face with freedom finds expression. Climacus says: “In a stricter sense, doubt is the beginning of the ethical, for as soon as I am to act, the interest lies with me inasmuch as I assume the responsibility and thereby acquire significance.”610 As Climacus says earlier, doubt arises by one’s bringing “ideality into relation to reality,” and goes on to say “this is the ethical,” and further, “that in which I am interested is myself.” The passage from reality and ideality to the ethical, freedom, and the self ’s interest is very exactly indicated. It can also be said that here Socrates’ transition from ironist to ethicist is also depicted, since in becoming an ethicist it is his existential interest that is accentuated. It is also important to note that doubt, or more correctly despair—when it is a matter of the ethical or the ethical-religious—always precedes faith. Consequently doubt is first overcome by faith, which here means the resolution to will to actualize the ethical in the concrete and faith in being able to do it.

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In this description of the transition from reality and ideality to the ethical and freedom and to the self as the midpoint for the first two, it is stated that “it is really Christianity that has brought this doubt into the world,” for it is Christianity in particular that has accentuated the meaning of the self. Also when a person is confronted with Christianity’s high ethical demand and religious offer, doubt comes first. But Christianity, which has brought doubt into the world, also helps a person to overcome it by faith. At the same time as he is aiming his polemic against Hegel, Climacus says of doubt: “Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world.”611 With these deliberations on philosophic doubt, Climacus opens the great perspectives in the issues of despair and faith within the sphere of Christianity. The three existence-concepts—freedom, the ethical, and the self—which he has worked out in this way, play a decisive role from this time on and come to form the foundation for the structuring of his dialectic of existence. But the close connection between these concepts that Kierkegaard tried to show in De omnibus dubitandum est is not enunciated in any of Kierkegaard’s other books as precisely and specifically as in The Sickness unto Death. Just as Climacus does in De omnibus dubitandum est, Anti-Climacus begins his book with the presupposition that immediacy is split into ideality and reality. Thereafter, and again as with Climacus, AntiClimacus’s interest is not in a closer examination of the relation of the two concepts to each other but in a transfer of them to the aspects of freedom and the ethical in order thereby to reach a repetition of immediacy, which can be reached only by the faith that Christianity offers. When reality and ideality are transferred to the ethical, their philosophical aspect is then changed to the existential, with the resulting contrast of “Finitude/Infinitude.”612 Furthermore, under the point of view of freedom, ideality and reality become “Possibility/ Necessity,”613 because reality provides the finite and concrete relations of existence, which, since they can be surveyed and assessed, must, according to Kierkegaard, fall under necessity, while ideality points to the possibility of action by a person as a spiritual being. This must not be misconstrued to mean that already within the first immediacy there are not analogies to freedom and the ethical. In the Concept of

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Anxiety Vigilius Haufniensis extensively and thoroughly discusses these analogies that lie on a lower plane. But since The Sickness unto Death begins with the human position subsequent to the collapse of immediacy, freedom and the ethical acquire an absolute character in contrast to their finite and relative meaning within the first immediacy. Before Climacus introduces into his deliberations (on the relation between finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility) the third and decisive factor, namely, consciousness (spirit), he points out the existential consequences that follow when instead of a synthesis of the two elements there arises a misrelation due to the overemphasis on one of the elements and a consequent disregard of the other. This enables him to describe several existential positions that emerge in life when the synthesis is not achieved. At this point it must be noted in particular that Anti-Climacus, in explaining the misrelation in the synthesis between finitude and infinitude, emphasizes the enormous significance of imagination and also its eventual misuse with regard to the three transactional elements that play the lead in a person’s existential development—namely feeling, knowing, and willing. Imagination as a human being’s creative capacity opens ever new perspectives and thereby clears the way to the infinite. But when imagination is not kept close to concrete tasks by the ethical, it transforms all three—feeling, knowing, and willing—into something fantastic and remote from actuality. Anti-Climacus points out how the misrelation between the existence-concepts finitude/infinitude and necessity/possibility results in despair, and it is the concept of despair that becomes central in The Sickness unto Death inasmuch as this concept indicates the state of sin in humankind. The aim of the book is to give an account of “the dialectic of sin.” As mentioned, Anti-Climacus therefore substitutes for the concept of doubt in De omnibus dubitandum est the concept of despair, which is entirely consistent, since that book has as its point of departure a philosophic issue, and doubt is an expression of philosophy’s attempt to bring ideality and reality into relation to each other, whereas despair indicates the misrelation between them, seen from an existential point of view. As the positive opposite to doubt, Climacus stipulates the faith that seeks to form a synthesis between reality and ideality. But faith in the proper sense has to do

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with the ethical and religious relations. We have also noted that Climacus had already pointed out that it was Christianity that in the most profound sense brought doubt—that is, despair—but also faith into the world. Thus it is very significant that in The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus also gives as the opposite to despair a definition of the faith that alone is able to be victorious over despair. This definition, which appears repeatedly in the book, reads as follows: “. . . in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” Since “the definition of faith”614 here is very abstractly formulated, Anti-Climacus can use it throughout the whole book, even though the first part deals only with the Socratic-human existence-relations, while the second part comes all the way to the central Christian categories. It must be noted that this definition of faith has only two of the ethical aspects—namely a human being’s relation to himself (the personal aspect) and his relation to God (the religious aspect), whereas it lacks the social aspect (the relation to the neighbor). It is not until the introduction of the self, which is the central element in a human being considered as a synthesis of two opposite qualities, that Anti-Climacus begins his actual description of the forms of despair. Prior to this comes an exposition of the presuppositions of despair in general, and thereafter he prepares the way for the introduction of the self by showing how crucial freedom and the ethical are to the synthesis that is the task of the self to form. In other words, by means of this synthesis both of the two qualities—finitude and infinitude, which represent two opposite ethical movements, and necessity and possibility, which come within the problematics of freedom—are brought into right relation to each other. When this occurs in the proper way, it means that the self is moving along the road of faith. On the other hand, a misrelation in the structuring of the synthesis signifies a failure of the task assigned to the person by God, and as a result he enters into a state of despair. The self may be defined as the transitional point for everything that occurs in a person. Without the self as the juncture, there would be neither feeling, nor knowing, nor acting, which embrace both the ethical and freedom. Anti-Climacus-Kierkegaard distinguishes precisely between the self that appears after the collapse of immediacy

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and the self that exists prior to this. The self discussed in The Sickness unto Death is designated as “an eternal self ”615 in contrast to “the first self,”616 which is characterized as finite and perishable, and therefore Anti-Climacus can also go so far as to declare that “Immediacy actually has no self.”617 Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms have no less carefully described the first immediacy with its illusory self (the I) and have shown the development that leads from the first self to the eternal self. Thus Anti-Climacus himself refers to The Concept of Anxiety and its delineation of the continual approximations “in the direction of spirit”618 that occur throughout the levels of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. In The Sickness unto Death, however, Anti-Climacus starts with the assumption of an eternal self in the human being, because the entire structure begins with the presupposition that a common awareness of immediacy’s split has already entered the common cultural consciousness, and it is precisely after this split that the eternal self can appear. But it now appears that Anti-Climacus, after introducing the eternal self into his deliberations, for methodological and existential reasons nevertheless repeats the lower positions of the first immediacy before proceeding to the higher levels in the development. of the self. This is consistent with the fact that every individual begins his life with immediacy. And even if a person is born in a milieu in which knowledge of the eternal is a given, every individual person must for himself answer the question of how he will respond to the eternal’s demand and offer. Therefore both the point of departure and the direction of the movement are entirely different here than in The Concept of Anxiety, where the individual moves from ignorance of the eternal in the direction of knowledge of the eternal. Historically this knowledge is first encountered in the last stage of paganism, in Socrates; thereafter it is given in a more intensified form in Judaism, and finally in Christianity. In The Sickness unto Death this knowledge is presupposed as given, and the particular individual must decide whether he will in faith appropriate this knowledge or will flee from it. Anti-Climacus’s explicit aim is to portray how a person can consciously try to avoid confrontation with the demand of the good and thereby enter into ever more intense forms of despair. He carefully and in great detail

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depicts all the steps that lead from the lower forms of despair to its extreme form, which is active offense at Christianity. It is in going through these negative forms of human existence that the importance of and the coherence between the three central elements in Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence—namely, freedom, the ethical, and the self—appear more clearly than in any other book. At the same time as we look more closely at this, we will also point out that the often very brief but precisely formulated intensifications of the levels of despair in this book correspond to the presentation in the preceding authorship of very definite positive developmental steps in the inward deepening of the self. Examples will also be given of how the various concrete demonic figures in the authorship can be placed in a specific graduated series corresponding to the ever more intensified forms of despair in The Sickness unto Death. Thus it is presupposed in The Sickness unto Death that a person can receive knowledge about the eternal from outside, from his surroundings, but not until he reaches a certain stage in his development can he appropriate it. Anti-Climacus describes a consistently sustained resistance on his part to enter into an existential relation to this knowledge. The levels of this resistance are delineated as follows: it begins with a reluctance to know that one can find the eternal by self-deepening; next is a desire not to enter into relationship to the God one learns about; and finally comes the unwillingness to acknowledge Christ as the revelation of God and Savior. The presupposition for a person’s being able to receive knowledge of the eternal through self-deepening is the possibility of the eternal innate in every human being, but as long as a person is not conscious of this himself he is only potentially in despair. Anti-Climacus calls this state “The Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self.”619 This condition is characteristic of the immediacy with which every human being begins life. Here there can be no question either of the self as something eternal or of the ethical or of freedom; an individual relates himself spontaneously and reactively to his surroundings.620 He finds himself in a state of illusory happiness that can, however, be interrupted, not only by something that happens to him but also by his own beginning to reflect on the conditions of life. Now he attempts by way of reflection to clarify the difficulties of

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life. Immediacy with a greater or lesser admixture of reflection comprises the stages beyond which most people never reach.621 It is in this sphere that the civic, social, and other similar arrangements belong, inasmuch as their objectives always lie within the world of finitude and have nothing to do with the development that is of greatest importance to Anti-Climacus—namely, that a person be led in the direction of spirit. All this means that people live more or less in unconscious despair, or as Anti-Climacus puts it: “Despair over the earthly or over something earthly is the most common form of despair, and especially in the second form, that is, immediacy with a quantitative reflection.”622 Yet a person can later run up against a greater difficulty, which he again attempts to clarify by his relative reflection; but without self-reflection or ethical reflection623 he does not enter into relation to the infinite or to the eternal but on the contrary begins to become conscious of his despair. He can then attempt to clarify his situation by means of “the worldly wisdom that is so celebrated in the world.”624 Until this time despair has consisted mainly in a person’s having ascribed such enormous worth to the earthly that he has sought to avoid a relation to the eternal, which expressly wants to set the earthly in its proper place. The next level of despair is that he despairs over his weakness vis à vis the worldly, despairs over his clinging to it so hard. Instead of humbling himself before God in this weakness, he despairs over it. By his despair over his taking earthly loss so hard, he shows that he is reaching a greater consciousness of himself, which is why his despair also is more spiritual in character. Anti-Climacus thinks that inclosing reserve can have its beginning here, when the self cringes under its loss and hides it from the surrounding world. A major misrelation develops between whatever he undertakes in his external life and his inner struggles. Anti-Climacus also mentions the danger of suicide for the one shut in total inclosing reserve. Yet if someone shut in inclosing reserve does open up, he can later despair over having betrayed himself and may wish to destroy the one in whom he confided. The example is given of a demonic tyrant who cannot keep from confiding in others, which means certain death for those who thus have become a party to his secret.

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All the forms of despair mentioned above are united under the formula: “In Despair Not to Will to Be Oneself: Despair in Weakness.”625 They are all due to one’s attachment to the earthly and are analogous to the despair that Anti-Climacus defines as “Finitude’s Despair Is to Lack Infinitude.”626 Here the self reaches neither the ethical nor freedom in the right way and therefore sinks into ever deeper despair. An additional level on the way of despair involves misusing one’s knowledge of the eternal in order to become one’s “own master”627 after having arrived at a consciousness of “an infinite self.” AntiClimacus describes very precisely how a person with a consciousness of his infinite self wants to shape his existence without relation to the power that created him. “With the help of this infinite form, the self in despair wants to be master of itself or to create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be, to determine what he will have or not have in his concrete self.” In this form of despair the self can relate itself in two ways—namely as “an acting self and a self acted upon.”628 In its self-willfulness the acting self wants to control itself absolutely, wants to be its own lawgiver and dependent only on itself. Humanly speaking, this self is relatively easy to see through, because its experiments generally take place in the external actuality. Not so with the self acted upon, which has a deeper dialectic. This must be considered an intensification of the self that shut itself in inclosing reserve because it could not overcome its dependence on specific earthly circumstances. Now these circumstances are intensified until they seem to be “a cross, a basic defect,”629 which the self unjustly thinks it must suffer under. The self now uses its unhappiness as an argument, an accusation against the God who created the world; this becomes a defiance that becomes more subtle than anything the acting self could come up with. “Rebelling against all existence,” the acted-upon self “feels that it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness.”630 This mentality resembles that of Ivan in Brothers Karamazov, who wants to set himself up as judge over God because he allows the possibility of a child’s being abused and suffering innocently. Anti-Climacus refers to this kind of despair, which can drive a person into rebellion against God, as an extreme instance within the domain of the human, and with this he ends Part One of The Sickness unto Death, which comprises the domain of immanence,

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that is, the domain in which the human being makes either positive or negative movements of freedom solely on the basis of the presence of the eternal in himself. The negative end-result in The Sickness unto Death has its positive counterpart especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript in Climacus’s depiction of the break with immanence accomplished by the person who attempts to master immediacy and finitude by relating himself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to relative things. A person comes to the extreme negative position by continually fleeing from a deeper contact with the eternal; on the other hand, he comes to the positive experience of his own destitution through freedom’s continually attempting to actualize the ethical. The two opposite positions share in common the fact that they lead a person into isolation—the negative into demonic inclosing reserve, the positive into hidden inwardness. As examples of the forms of despair discussed so far, mention can be made of concrete figures such as Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira, and Margrete in Either/Or.631 Their trusting immediate relation to the world and their happiness have been lost, and they have not found an ethical-religious anchorage that could save them from despair. Insofar as they cannot establish a positive relation to the eternal, the characters depicted in “The Unhappiest One”632 also fall within this form of despair. The complex of issues related to unhappiness and despair comes out most clearly in the sketch of “The Unhappiest One.” But the forms of despair are most clearly delineated in “In Vino Veritas.” As Climacus says in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the characters here are “by no means ignorant of the ethical,”633 but they do not act according to it, and for this reason their condition is one of despair. The sequence in which they appear provides a rising scale of despair. Therefore in Climacus’s opinion the “Young Man” has the mildest form of despair; there “is still hope for him.” A more intense despair is found in Constantin Constantius, who represents “the callousness of the understanding” and by his irony obliterates the moral norms without succeeding in finding anything higher. Victor Eremita, who “is sympathetic irony,” suffers from “infinitude’s despair,” the symptom of which is “to lack finitude.”634 Therefore he is ironic about

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marriage as an institution. The Fashion Designer’s despair is even more intense, since it is “demonic despair in a state of passion.” The extreme position in despair is reached by Johannes the Seducer, of whom it is said that he is “perdition in a state of frigidity, a ‘marked’ and extinct individuality.” Still more examples could be drawn from Kierkegaard’s authorship as illustratations of the forms of despair described in the first part of The Sickness unto Death, but here only two historical figures will be used as illustratations of the two extreme forms of despair—namely, the acting self and the acted-upon self. In depicting the acting self who sets itself up as the “absolute ruler,” Anti-Climacus has anticipated Nietzsche’s doctrine of the superman. For the self acted upon, one may think of Kierkegard’s own desperate battle against the suffering he so often discusses in his journals under various names—for example, “my life’s deep-rooted hurt and torment,”635 and which at a certain stage in his life tempted him to rebel against God.636 Immanence culminates in the two forms of despair referred to here, and as before they point to their counterpart in the standpoint of humor, which forms the extreme positive position within immanence.637 While Part One of The Sickness unto Death deals with the forms of despair arising through the innate relation to the eternal, understood as the demand of freedom and the ethical, Part Two deals with the intensified forms of despair and offense due to a person’s flight from God as a transcendent power—that is, first of all from “the conception of God,”638 then from “a revelation” of God’s will through Christ,639 and finally from Christ himself as Savior.640 The transition from immanence to transcendence can occur only through a qualitative leap, whereby “the human self ” gets “a new quality and qualification.”641 The new qualification results from a person’s no longer feeling bound only to some abstract external laws, a kind of “categorical imperative,” but stands responsible before a personal power. This also sharpens in a qualitatively new way the demand of freedom and the ethical upon him. Consequently there is also a transition from “human guilt into sin”; accordingly the statement applies that “no one can become aware of God without becoming a sinner.”642 On this point Anti-Climacus agrees completely with Climacus, who holds that a person does not come any further in immanence than to “the

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eternal recollection of guilt” and insists upon sin as a qualification that applies to a human being only in relation to a transcendence. Consequently Anti-Climacus censures those who say: “Sin is sin; sin is no greater because it is against God or before God.”643 This view originated with Kant and subsequently was adopted by numerous philosophers and theologians, whom Anti-Climacus here criticizes. As early as 1834-35 Kierkegaard became aware of this bias in Kant. When reading Fr. Baader’s Vorlesungen über speculative Dogmatik, he wrote the following critical note in his journal: “(A third error is the Kantian that assumes evil as primitively arisen in man and concluded in him.)”644 This means that Kierkegaard realized quite early that sin according to Kant is situated only within immanence and has no relation to a transcendence. This is apparent in another journal entry in which Kierkegaard in criticizing H. N. Clausen’s doctrine of Atonement mentions the Kantian view that “we ought to improve ourselves because our reason tells us to,” and then adds: “Thus God comes to play a very subordinate role.”645 In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus sharply denounces this Kantian view of the ethical and of sin, a view that as a final consequence leaves not only philosophy but also theology within the sphere of immanence in the same way as Hegel does, but this actually means that one does away with Christianity as it defines itself. As a countermove against this position, Anti-Climacus affirms a very sharp distinction between immanence and transcendence. He clearly points out the difference between these two totalities. Socrates is used as an example of the positive side of immanence, but thereby it is also explained how different his point of view is from that of Christianity, which presupposes faith in a transcendent God. Anti-Climacus makes many a sortie against the “speculation” that attempts to obliterate this difference. In being “conscious of existing before God,”646 a person’s self gains its infinite reality; thereby freedom and the ethical also are accentuated in a new and decisive way. In other words, through the ever clearer consciousness of transcendence not only does the self become intensified but the ethical also appears with more rigorous requirements and freedom comes under greater responsibility. But if this knowledge is used only for an ever more deliberate flight from God

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as the transcendent power, the intensification of the self means an “intensification of despair,” which is precisely sin.647 All these relations are summed up by Anti-Climacus in the following lines: “Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, infinitely when God is the criterion. In fact, the greater the conception of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God. Not until a self as this specific single individual is conscious of existing before God, not until then is it the infinite self, and this self sins before God.”648 The sin is further intensified when one learns “through a revelation from God” what sin is. Here, too, the intensification occurs in two principal forms: “before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”649 This intensification reaches its culmination in the encounter with Christ, of whom Anti-Climacus says: “As stated previously: the greater the conception of God, the more self, so it holds true here: the greater the conception of Christ, the more self.”650 Through the intensification of the ethical, now understood as the imitation of Christ, the self is led to the central offer of Christianity—the forgiveness of sin. At this point offense appears as the highest intensification of despair. To be sure, Anti-Climacus does indeed point out that offense must be present with “every determination of what is Christian,”651 but it is only in relation to Christ as Savior and his offer of the forgiveness of sin that offense reaches its highest intensification. It must not be forgotten, however, that both despair and offense also have a positive function on the way to faith. In other words, a person cannot arrive at faith, which is the opposite of despair and offense, without coming up against the possibility of despair and offense respectively. Only a continuance in these negative states is sin. Therefore offense and despair must always be regarded as the negative possibility of choice.652 That is why Anti-Climacus can also declare that in such a case despair is “dialectically understood as pointing toward faith” and that in this way it is “the first element in faith.” He also calls the annulled possibility of offense “an element in faith.”653 But in The Sickness unto Death despair and offense become fixed states in a person expressly by the self ’s continual refusal to form the proper synthesis in relation to the power that established it and wants to

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save it. Thereafter offense as a manifestation of sin reaches its highest point in the rejection of the offer of the forgiveness of sins. In The Sickness unto Death offense is discussed from an anthropological point of view—that is, it is grounded in human nature itself, inasmuch as an individual sets his will against forming a synthesis to become a self and against humbling himself under the forgiveness of sin. Here offense is not due to “the composite of God and man”654 that we meet in Christ—as is the case in Practice in Christianity (of which more later). Thus in The Sickness unto Death despair and offense are dealt with from the point of view of the human being as a synthesis of two opposite elements—time and eternity. If this synthesis is not properly formed with the aid of faith, the individual lapses onesidedly either into choosing the temporal, which results in the despair of weakness (not to will to be oneself ) or into the despair of defiance (in despair to will to be oneself ), in which he uses his knowledge of the eternal to assert himself. The increase of despair also has the characteristic that one’s opposition on the first levels comes “indirectlydirectly from the self,” whereas the opposition in defiance “comes directly from the self.”655 When despair becomes intensified into offense, the will and thereby the self become more deeply engaged.656 As mentioned earlier, in The Sickness unto Death the two basic forms of despair are present on every level of development, even in the relation to Christianity, in which despair is intensified to offense at Christianity’s ethical requirement when Christ stands as “the criterion” for human life. Only in the self ’s relation to Christ as Savior, in which all the self ’s notions of the possibility of being saved on the basis of its own performance must be surrendered, may the sequence of the two forms of despair be altered. Anti-Climacus substantiates this change more precisely as follows: “Now a self comes directly before Christ, a self that in despair still does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself. Despair of the forgiveness of sins must be traceable to the one or to the other formula for despair, despair in weakness or the despair of defiance: despair in weakness, which is offended and does not dare to believe; the despair of defiance, which is offended and will not believe. But here weakness and defiance are the opposite of what they usually are (since here the point is not just

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about being oneself but about being oneself in the category of being a sinner, thus in the category of one’s imperfection). Ordinarily weakness is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Here this is defiance, for here it is indeed the defiance of not willing to be oneself, what one is—a sinner—and for that reason wanting to dispense with the forgiveness of sins. Ordinarily defiance is: in despair to will to be oneself. Here this is weakness, in despair to will to be oneself—a sinner—in such a way that there is no forgiveness.”657 In taking offense at Christ (which also manifests an ascending intensification), a person reaches the culmination of his flight from the good and then moves from a merely passive resistance to Christianity to a conscious and active attack upon it. Anti-Climacus calls this final form of offense the “sin against the Holy Spirit.”658 Even if the possibility must not be excluded, it is difficult to imagine that anyone with a clear conviction of the truth of Christianity would deliberately try to attack it in order to eradicate it. Indeed, prior to his discussion of offense at Christ, Anti-Climacus says that “seldom is there a person who is so mature, so transparent to himself ”659 that he willfully and deliberately continues on the way of perdition after having been informed by God what sin is. But in any case Anti-Climacus has, from an anthropological point of view, carried “the dialectic of sin” way through to its culmination. In this connection he mentions only a single example (who, however, is far from the culmination of despair)—namely, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who despairs over his crime.660 Another example of intensified despair is found in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de Silentio calls Richard III “the most demonic figure Shakespeare has depicted.”661 The positive line, which corresponds to the intensified forms of despair in Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, is found in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and religious literature. Inasmuch as this has been fully discussed earlier, only the main points will be mentioned here.662 The entire upbuilding literature up to Works of Love characterizes God as a transcendent reality to whom the individual stands in relationship—the opposite of his situation in The Sickness unto Death, where he distances himself from God. In other words, the upbuilding writings describe how a person as a transgressor before God tries to practice the religious and personal ethics and by continual effort in

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freedom tries to move ahead on the way of inward deepening. The most important experience he has during this movement is to perceive that he is incapable of anything good on his own and that by his own power can only work himself more deeply into despair. Just as Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death gradually tightens the requirements of freedom and the ethical, even though done here only schematically, so also Kierkegaard step by step tightens the same requirements in his upbuilding writings. With Works of Love there enters a qualitatively new element: through “the revelation” that comes with Christ the love commandment is proclaimed with new authority and in a manner that “did not arise in any human being’s heart.”663 The negative attitude to this requirement is formulated in The Sickness unto Death as follows: “sin is— after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in despair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself.”664 Here the qualification of sin involves one’s having received from God enlightenment about the good but then in the despair of weakness or of defiance, setting oneself against it. As the positive counterpart corresponding to these subsequently ever more intensified forms of despair are the single individual’s struggles and efforts that Kierkegaard describes more fully in Works of Love and in Christian Discourses. In all this he does not forget to accentuate the meaning of grace as the principal element in Christianity. The climax in the single individual’s inward deepening is reached in his surrender to Christ. Later in Part Four of Christian Discourses, in the seven “Christian Discourses,” the single individual’s preparation to receive the forgiveness of sins is described. The single individual now becomes a witness to Christ, and Kierkegaard later carries this line of thought into his explanation of the concept of the martyr. Looking now at the two culmination points as presented in the upbuilding literature and in The Sickness unto Death, we see on the one side the witness, the martyr, who also is saved by grace, and on the other side the demonic figure who wants to know nothing about Christ’s requirement and offer but deliberately turns actively against them. With these two polar positions Kierkegaard concludes his portrayal of the positive and negative levels possible in a person’s existential

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development. According to this, anyone will be able to find and to recognize his own position. He has thereby also created the directives for a renewal of Christianity, which must occur through the individual person’s act of taking a position. Throughout the present work the three categories, the single individual, freedom, and the ethical have played the decisive role. Kierkegaard, as has been shown, has most accurately worked out the existential interplay between them in the description of the movement that he believed is faced by every human being as a task—namely to become a self—a task to which a person can in freedom say yes or no.

The Accounting with the Christianity of Christendom Having given what he believed to be a clear and trustworthy exposition of the relation of the human to Christianity and since, according to his conception, this relation had been perverted in Christendom, Kierkegaard understood it as his urgent task “again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”665 These new thoughts appear in the next book by Anti-Climacus—Practice in Christianity. This book does not deal directly with the questions related to freedom, the ethical, and the self but advances the fundamental Christian views that were the driving force behind Kierkegaard’s authorship with regard to both content and structure. Anti-Climacus begins his book by confronting Christ, as he appeared in his earthly existence, with various representatives of the present age, whereby he wants to show that the situation in Christendom in his day is a parody of Christianity. Anti-Climacus emphasizes in this way the meaning of the situation of contemporaneity so that the single individual can verify whether he actually relates himself in the right way to the Jesus who claimed to be God. Indeed, Kierkegaard expressly declares in a journal entry that his entire “productivity has tended” toward providing “the situation of contemporaneity.”666 After having, in the course of his authorship, tightened more and more the requirements for being a Christian and Anti-Climacus had also confronted his generation with Christ as a contemporary, con-

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crete actuality, Kierkegaard thought that he had clearly and fully explained “what it means in the strictest sense to be a Christian.” But even though he had presented the ideal in this way, he nevertheless has Anti-Climacus say that for the time being it must be everyone’s task to do “his work and rejoice in it, love his wife and rejoice in her, joyfully bring up his children, love his fellow beings, rejoice in life. If anything more is required of him, God will surely let him understand and in that case will also help him further”; only he must not forget “that he before God shall honestly humble himself under the requirements of ideality.” Thus Anti-Climacus is prodding his contemporary generation to admit its distance from the ideal; “this is required of everyone,” but the single individual must also be sensitive and alert to whether “anything more is required of him,” about which God will certainly let him know.667 To demonstrate further Christendom’s distance from Christianity in the strictest sense, Anti-Climacus uses many Scripture passages to show in some detail that no one can become a Christian, rightly understood, without passing through the possibility of offense, or as Anti-Climacus puts it: “Just as the concept ‘faith’ is an altogether distinctively Christian term, so in turn is ‘offense’ an altogether distinctively Christian term relating to faith. The possibility of offense is the crossroad, or it is like standing at the crossroad. From the possibility of offense, one turns either to offense or to faith, but one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense.”668 Christendom, which has arranged itself so well in this world, readily avoids becoming aware that the way to Christ always goes through the possibility of offense. In contrast to the offense described in The Sickness unto Death, in which one wants to have nothing at all to do with Christ and takes a hostile attitude to him, the offense in Practice in Christianity is the offense that the believer cannot avoid in the meeting with Christ. Essentially viewed, this offense has two forms: (1) offense at a particular human being’s claiming to be God and (2) offense because this human being (if he is God) proves, in the most crucial situations, to be powerless and at the mercy of wickedness. It is in this latter form that offense reaches its culmination. This happened even with the disciples the night before Christ’s crucifixion. Anti-Climacus

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says of it: “He wanted to save all, quite literally all—and all were offended at him, quite literally all!” And further: “Ah, abysmal suffering, unfathomable to human understanding—to have to be the sign of offense in order to be the object of faith!”669 By pointing in this way to Christ’s impenetrable incognito, Anti-Climacus shows that one cannot arrive at faith along the path of thought or speculation but can come to it only by a leap. Not until the third section of Practice in Christianity does AntiClimacus-Kierkegaard disclose the deepest driving force in his life and authorship—namely, the childhood impression he received when he stood before the picture of the Crucified One and learned who he was. With a child’s imagination he so identified with the situation that he forgot that it happened “eighteen hundred years ago.” This childhood impression influenced him the rest of his life, and even if as a youth and adult he inevitably understood it differently than he did as a child, he nevertheless was continually determined to contend “with the world in which people would spit upon the Holy One, the world in which people crucify love and plead for the robber.”670 This experience of contemporaneity with the Crucified One has its final amplification in Practice in Christianity, and in discussing this book later Kierkegaard says of the idea “to become involved with Christ in contemporaneity”: “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 set forth this thought.”671 In order to reach the situation of contemporaneity in the right sense, Kierkegaard himself had to struggle through several developmental stages, which then became incorporated in the authorship in his view of the stages, in which the movement advances to the situation of contemporaneity through a steady intensification of the meaning of the self, of the ethical requirements, and of freedom’s responsibility. The requirement of imitation became the high point in this intensification, as is evident, for example, in the following statement: “Christ as the prototype is still a form of the Law, yes, the Law raised to a higher level,” and further: “To be contemporary with Christ is the most rigorous examination ever possible.”672 This rigorous conception of Christianity undoubtedly has its origin in the fact that

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Kierkegaard’s first experience of contemporaneity involved the most difficult situation in Christ’s life. By placing the imitation of Christ as the highest ideal, AntiClimacus went beyond the form of Christianity designated as “hidden inwardness,” which is characteristic of Protestant piety. In Kierkegaard’s preliminary sketches for one of the Christian discourses, it already appears, as previously mentioned, that he realized that hidden inwardness contains a temptation to live solely on the assurance that in the literal sense one could, if need be, easily fulfill Christianity’s requirement of imitation. Kierkegaard did not, however, thereby repudiate the legitimacy of this level under certain conditions; it is just not the highest form of Christianity. Even during the Church battle he maintained the legitimacy of the lower levels.673 Yet renunciation in the literal and external sense ranks highest, because it has Christ himself as the prototype, But the importance of hidden inwardness is not thereby disparaged, inasmuch as the eternal can never be exhausted in temporal and external relations. Since, however, hidden inwardness has been misused, Kierkegaard had to advance the highest and most challenging form of self-denial—namely, the self-denial that in addition to the inner, secret struggles bears visible signs of its presence. Yet it is and remains a self-contradiction that the eternal should be able to be expressed in finite categories. Therefore Kierkegaard, comparing this highest form of self-denial with hidden inwardness, declares that it has “paradoxical recognizability.” “For all this about hidden inwardness as the true existence-form of true Christianity, all this that has even been proclaimed as superior and truer than early Christianity, is purely and simply an inferior form. Christianity, as it is in the New Testament, no doubt has in Protestantism as much hidden inwardness as ever, but it will not be satisfied with that; it wants to have the paradoxical recognizability, and it is only through this that all the Christian collisions are produced.”674 Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity confronts the single individual with Christ through the situation of contemporaneity, and thereby, as Kierkegaard says in the “Editor’s Preface,” “the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to the highest peak of ideality.” This requirement became not only the criterion of the single individual’s distance from Christianity but

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also the final and decisive basis for all of freedom’s and the ethical’s demands upon the single individual. With this Kierkegaard has reached the final phase of his authorship that “advanced step by step” and could now stop at the “its decisive place of rest, at the foot of the altar.”675 With this he declares that taking refuge in grace is the final and the decisive step in the life of the single individual. The books that were published after Practice in Christianity do not belong to the step-by-step advancing authorship. Both For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself ! only explore particular aspects of imitation and call attention to the issues Kierkegaard raised concerning a Christian’s circumstances in the world. As for the Church battle, Kierkegaard understood this to be his most difficult task, one that was assigned him by Governance.676 It was only of a destructive nature and was supposed to emphasize that room should now be made for a new beginning in the history of Christendom.

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ierkegaard or the pseudonymous authors describe some of the issues they encounter and find especially difficult. Kierkegaard declares, for example, in a journal entry in 1843, that (1) in connection with Christ’s polemical relationship to “the concrete-ethical elements of actuality” “the most difficult issues come together”677 because Christ in his existence as true man did not enter fully into the universally human. (2) Then, too, Kierkegaard names “motion (kivnhsi~)” and thereby the issues of freedom, as perhaps “one of the most difficult issues in all philosophy.”678 (3) Furthermore, Vigilius Haufniensis and Johannes Climacus call the issues involving “individuality, race, and immortality . . . very difficult.”679 (4) Kierkegaard also included among the difficult issues the relation between time and eternity—namely, how an eternal decision such as the one Christ sets before us can be made in time, which consists only of a succession of moments.680 (5) Finally, Kierkegaard considered the issue of the origin of evil and God’s omnipotence as a central and extremely difficult issue. Therefore when he makes the following note while reading Leibniz’s Theodicy: “The whole conflict between Leibniz and Bayle is very much to the point, and one is astonished if one compares it with controversy in our time, for we have actually gone backward, and I believe that Hegel has not really understood what it was all about,”681 this affirms how important to him was the question of God’s omnipotence and the issues related to it. In the controversey between Leibniz and Bayle these very questions came up for discussion.682 It is quite obvious that all the difficult isues that Kierkegaard mentions here decidedly involve what to him were the three most impor-

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tant questions concerning human beings—namely, freedom, the ethical, and the self and the relationship of these to God. We will now examine more closely how and from what presuppositions he encounters the issues mentioned and along what path he succeeds in finding his solutions.

Freedom and Necessity Inasmuch as the first issue stated above is resolved in the closing period of Kierkegaard’s authorship, it will be dealt with at the end of this study, and we will begin with the issue of freedom. Kierkegaard gave the difficult issue of freedom and its relation to necessity the following solution, one which thereafter was used both by him and his pseudonyms in the authorship. Kierkegaard’s perception was that the final cause of the universe and of everything created was an “absolutely freely acting cause.”683 Therefore everything that occurs occurs in freedom. But every object that is created comes under necessity as well as freedom, because necessity expresses an object’s essence, while the object’s coming into existence falls under being. Thus the object’s coming into existence comes under freedom, whereas what the object is expresses its necessity—that is, everything created contains both these qualifications simultaneously. But since what is created has various levels of development from the lowest to the highest, it will function in such a way that necessity dominates on the lowest levels, whereas freedom becomes increasingly dominant on the highest levels. Thus it can be said that as long as the created object cannot affirm itself in its conscious individual expressions, it is ruled by necessity. This is principally true for all nature and on the lowest levels for human beings. But the human being alone of all creatures comes under freedom, since through the possibilities created by the imagination he can rise above his constraints to the present, in both time and space. Perspectives such as past and future are thereby opened. Every time the imagination opens the sphere of possibilities for a person, he is lifted out of his connection with concrete life, which is ruled by cause and

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effect. Other principles rule in the world of possibilities, and a person can imagine constellations totally different from those the realities provide. He can then choose between certain possibilities and freely intervene in the natural state of things and in his own life. We shall not take up here the subtle questions about the degree to which heredity and environment are concurrent causes, but that freedom is present to a certain degree (that is, in principle) is seen in the fact that the play of possibilities is accompanied by anxiety, which, according to Kierkegaard, means that the outcome is not determined.684 Freedom’s possibility “passes through several stages in order to attain itself,”685 says Kierkegaard. As long as an individual is on the level of the physical-psychical synthesis and knows no other goals than those that the life in finitude offers, freedom remains only relative. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms have carefully described all the levels that relative freedom must traverse before a person reaches the stage where he can be said to have anything to do with absolute freedom. In other words, he has to make “the movement of infinity” before there can be any mention of freedom in the proper sense. Vigilius Haufniensis clearly depicts the transition from relative to absolute freedom that takes place with the aid of irony as a movement of infinity. “Freedom is infinite and arises out of nothing.”686 The sentence expresses that by means of irony a person neutralizes the finite world, which proves to be a “nothing.” After this, as Kierkegaard shows in The Concept of Irony, one encounters infinity. It is primarily freedom as infinity that holds Kierkegaard’s interest. This is expressed in the following journal entry: “Like freedom, truth is the eternal. If the eternal is not, there is neither truth nor freedom.”687 When the eternal or infinity comes within a person’s horizon, this eternal comes to stand as a contrast to the person as a finite being. Anti-Climacus points out in The Sickness unto Death that a person is then seen under the qualifications finitude/infinity or necessity/possibility. It is now freedom’s task to rule necessity or, as AntiClimacus puts it, to form a synthesis of the two opposite elements, of which infinity or possibility becomes the dominant element. Freedom is then used within finitude to try to actualize the eternal’s requirements, but in so doing a person discovers his bondage to finitude and that he really does not wish or will to free himself from

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complete dependence on it. This means that one becomes guilty through freedom. Now the opposite of freedom is no longer necessity but guilt.688 Moreover, before God and Christ as the revealed truth, this guilt becomes qualified as sin. But sin also means that a human being is a free entity and therefore can be held responsible. Then one can regain freedom only through Christ’s act of reconciliation. Kierkegaard’s resolution of the issue of freedom/necessity is characterized by his insistence that these two elements are simultaneously present, yet in such a way that necessity is dominant on the lower levels. In a person’s spiritual development freedom increasingly affirms itself in relation to necessity. As is evident from what has been said, it makes no sense to ask about the relation between necessity and freedom in general but only within specifically limited spheres. As suggested, this relation changes from one sphere to the other, just as the terms Kierkegaard and his pseudonymns use for freedom and necessity can also undergo certain modifications from sphere to sphere.

The Race and the Single Individual Freedom’s movements through these spheres or levels simultaneously mark a person’s development from an individual to a spiritual being (a self ) who is conscious of standing responsible before a higher power. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms also discuss the difficulties that arise when a person, who as an individual is totally dependent on the race and the development of the race, is to become a spiritual being, a self, who stands higher than the race and who is immortal. The race as such is a perishable quantity, and the individual seems to be even more so when he in his existence is dependent on the race. But in Kierkegaard’s view every individual as a synthesis of time and eternity has something eternal within him, whereby he has the possibility of coming to stand higher than the race. Then the task here is to show whether and how the eternal element can affirm itself in a person’s life, and whether and when one can truthfully say that the

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single individual will come to stand higher than the race and the universal and will be able to come under rigorous ethical judgment and guilt. It is precisely these issues that Vigilius Haufniensis is thinking about when he says: “Every human life is religiously designed. To want to deny this confuses everything and cancels the concepts of individuality, race, and immortality. Herein lie very difficult problems, for which reason one could wish that more people would exercise discernment at this point.”689 On this same theme Climacus declares in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “. . . if the world-historical is to amount to something, it must be the history of the human race. Here is an issue that, in my opinion, is one of the most difficult: how and to what extent does the human race result from individuals, and what is the relation of the individuals to the human race?” Climacus continues, ironizing over Hegel’s attempt to give a solution to the world-historical: “I shall not attempt to answer that question, and the attempt might fail anyway; but I shall instead entertain myself by bearing in mind that the survey of world history has for the most part been completed, or is at least in full swing, without having removed this difficulty.”690 It may be said that precisely in his structuring of the stages Kierkegaard has also given a clear answer to these questions, but, as we see, in his journal entries he was occupied until the very end with the issue of immortality and eternal life if the individual does not succeed in becoming the single individual, a self.691 According to Kierkegaard, on the lower levels the individual, precisely with the help of the eternal element, creates everything that constitutes the special human qualifications, that which forms the basis of culture, above all the moral norms and belief in divine powers, without his needing to have a clear awareness of having the eternal within himself. Not until Socrates does a person within paganism reach recognition of “infinity” or of the eternal in his innermost being. This means that a conscious awareness of the eternal element and the idea of the possibility of immortality come only through “the movement of infinity.”692 The movement of infinity, whether it involves irony or one of the higher forms such as resignation, gives a person the assurance of being more than an earthly and merely ephemeral individual. This is what

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Johannes de Silentio means when, ironizing over his contemporary age, he says: “Then it is amusing to think how odd it is that doubt about the immortality of the soul can be so prevalent in the very age when everyone can achieve the highest, for the person who has actually made just the movement of infinity scarcely doubts.”693 The same Johannes de Silentio also points out that when a person, after having made the movement of infinity, comes into a personal relationship to God, he will stand higher than the race and the universal. On the whole, this pseudonym, one of the first, has described the transition from the particular individual, who is subordinate to the universal, to the single individual, who stands above the universal. It is he, too, who introduces the paradox and the category of the absurd in order to explain most clearly this transition. When it has occurred, it means that the possibility of the eternal in a person and a personal relationship to a higher power become the actuality that raises the individual as the single individual over the transitory being of the race. Consequently the paradoxical lies also in the fact that the individual, who lived only in the categories of temporality, gains the quality of the eternal. How the single individual becomes the single individual in the religious sense through the movement of infinity, which is the presupposition for faith, is very clearly delineated: “Faith is precisely the paradox that the single individual as the single individual is higher than the universal, is justified before it, not as inferior to it but as superior—yet in such a way, please note, that it is the single individual who, after being subordinate as the single individual to the universal, now by means of the universal becomes the single individual who as the single individual is superior, that the single individual as the single individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediated, for all mediation takes place only by virtue of the universal; it is and remains for all eternity a paradox, impervious to thought.”694 Consequently the contradiction discussed here, which is a paradox, always appears when the individual person through a personal relationship to God is to express the eternal within the temporal. This is eminently true of him who was the revelation of God and who therefore, as the “ultimate paradox,”695 is the source and foundation for all Kierkegaard’s thought on paradox. In other words, here

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the eternal is truly incorporated in the temporal, whereas in all other human beings the eternal can manifest itself only imperfectly in their existence. That through the movement of infinity a person raises himself above the race and enters into a personal relationship to God also signifies an individual immortality. But a demand is thereby also placed upon him, and he is responsible and falls under judgment. So it is entirely consistent that Kierkegaard in Christian Discourses subsumes the idea of immortality under the resurrection. In other words, a person faces judgment and the resurrection, because by giving him the gift of immortality God has brought him under the responsibility of eternity. On this Kierkegaard says: “. . . you are immortal, and you are to make an accounting to God of how you have lived, you immortal one! Precisely because you are immortal you will not be able to escape God, will not be able to mislay yourself in a grave and behave as if nothing had happened; and the criterion by which you will be judged by God is that you are immortal.”696 That faith in the resurrection presupposes, according to Kierkegaard, that man is immortal comes to light in the following underscored heading: “there will be resurrection of the dead, of the righteous—and of the unrighteous,—or about the demonstration of the immortality of the soul formulated in this way: it is only all too certain, fear it.”697 Here Kierkegaard brings immortality into close proximity with resurrection,698 and as far as I understand it, to him the two concepts are related as follows: immortality at first means the possibility of the eternal that all human beings have in common. Through the relationship to God this possibility becomes a genuine actuality—so one can legitmately speak of a person’s individual immortality even in this life. Resurrection, however, is on another level and involves the future, in which all things will be restored. Thus immortality is grounded in God’s work of creation, through which every human being as a synthesis of time and eternity has received the possibility of the eternal, whereas resurrection is linked wholly to Christ’s work of redemption and his promises of an eternal life. For Kierkegaard, therefore, immortality and resurrection can never come in conflict with each other.

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The eternal element in a person, which he has received through creation and which is the presupposition for immortality, can never perish, whether a person lives or dies and whether or not he is conscious of that element. But not until “the movement of infinity” does a person discover the reality of the eternal and its presence in his inner being. At this point the very difficult question arises about the nature of this immortality as long as it is present only as the possibility of the eternal and as long as a person is not consciously aware of its presence or does not draw conclusions for his life from it.699 Because his attention was always turned to the various stages in a person’s existential development, Kierkegaard was continually preoccupied with this question. But it was especially during the last period of his life, when he tightened all the Christian concepts, that in his absorption in the thought of immortality he carried it to its ultimate consequences. By that time Kierkegaard had reached the conclusion that a person could come to immortality as the full reality only by “dying to the world,” which is the most radical of the movements of infinity. In the beginning of the authorship, for example, in Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio presented the milder forms of the movement of infinity as the condition for coming to the conviction of individual immortality; but in his last years Kierkegaard maintained that the person who does not, by dying to the world, manage to outgrow the transitory nature of the race must be satisfied with what he calls “the substitute for immortality ,” namely, “propagation of the species.”700 Ordinarily a person is more interested in finite affairs than in spiritual development and, despite being created for eternity, does not aspire to an eternal life. One of Kierkegaard’s statements on this subject reads: “Surely the way in which immortality is shoved upon people in Christendom is very confusing, making them think that they feel a deep need for immortality.”701 Athough human beings have been given the possibility of the eternal, and although the thought of immortality is found both within paganism and Judaism, interest in immortality can fade away. When a person has turned entirely to the earthly as the sole and supreme reality, as a substitute for individual immortality he finds comfort in marriage, understood as “the moral expression for the propagation of the species.” With regard to this, Kierkegaard declares

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that “to leave posterity is a consolation for not being immortal, that propagation of the race is a substitute for the immortality of the individual, and therefore the person who clings to life, if he does not assume his immortality, still tries to extend his life by leaving a family.” Kierkegaard believes that this tendency to substitute the propagation of the race for immortality comes out very strongly in Judaism, whereas Christianity places the emphasis on the single individual. He says: “This has never been expressed as strongly as in Judaism, where everything revolves around: Propagate and be fruitful—everything revolves around the line of descent and genealogy—and this is divinely sanctioned. Therefore, according to Judaism, there is no immortality either. “Then along comes Christianity and introduces virginity—that is, religion of the spirit.” Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that “The identifying differences among all religions” is seen in whether the greatest emphasis is laid to the continuation of the race or on individual immortality.702 In Kierkegaard’s last journal entry, dated September 5, 1855, in which he carries to its ultimate consequences the idea of renouncing the world and dying to the world to be saved by grace, he attempts to summarize this whole difficult question of immortality and human salvation in these three aspects: “Most people these days are so devoid of spirit and bereft of grace that the punishment [to be deprived of all zest for life] cannot be used for them at all. Completely wrapped up in this life, they clutch at this life of nothingness and become nothing, their lives a waste. “The persons in whom there still is some spirit and whom grace still does not disregard are led on to that point where life reaches the extremity of life-weariness. But they cannot reconcile themselves to it; they rebel against God, and so on. “Only those persons who, brought to this point of life-weariness, are able by the help of grace to maintain that God does it out of love and do not conceal in their souls, in the remotest corner, any doubt that God is love—only those persons are matured for eternity.”703 Apparently the first view seems to conflict with Kierkegaard’s earlier insistence that not a single human being will come to nothing, because everyone possesses an eternal element.704 In all probability

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Kierkegaard is thinking of those who have failed to enter into a personal relationship to the eternal and therefore their lives here on earth are to be regarded as wasted because they had failed to become “matured for eternity.” The second view concerns those people who come in contact with the eternal but rebel against it. The third category involves those who are led by grace to renunciation and the faith that it is out of love that God requires a person to die to the world so as to attain eternal life.705 In the last journal entry, which so strongly emphasizes how a person can be led by God’s grace to renunciation and “life-weariness,” Kierkegaard in conclusion emphasizes the importance of freedom in saying that God “was present with the person and helped him insofar as God can give help for what only freedom can do.”706 The consequences of the relation of human beings to the eternal and their possibility of salvation are also dealt with in gentler tones in the last period of Kierkegaard’s life. He writes: “Yet it seems to me that, despite the abyss of nonsense into which we are thrust, we all will still be just as fully saved.”707 It must also be noted that Kierkegaard includes himself when he is thinking of the severe consequences that he, as time goes on, draws with regard to immortality and a person’s salvation. At the beginning of the Church battle, when he ponders his attitude to the late Bishop Mynster, he writes: “But I do not pretend to be better than others. Therefore what the old Bishop once said to me is not true—namely, that I spoke as if the others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell, then I say something like this: If the others are going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I, too, and this awakens my deepest wonder.”708 All the above quotations demonstrate that to the very end Kierkegaard was struggling to clarify the enormous difficulties raised by the question of individual immortality and salvation.

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Time and Eternity Kierkegaard also attempted to resolve in an original way the issues implicit in the relation between time and eternity. The difficulties manifest themselves particularly within Christianity, which, in maintaining that a person’s salvation is decided in time, makes the transitory moment in time commensurable with an eternal decision. Involved here is the issue that Climacus formulated in Philosophical Fragments as follows: “Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?”709 Time and the historical consist of successive moments in continual transit, and the issue here is how an eternal decision can get a footing in that which is continually vanishing. The easiest thing to do would be to accept the solution that predestination provides, whereby the single individual’s salvation was decided from eternity. 710 But Kierkegaard was never willing to accept this solution, because it eliminates God as a living reality who continually intervenes in existence. Existence would then be defined by necessity and not by freedom. Indeed, human freedom would also lose its meaning if the question of the individual’s salvation had been decided from eternity without the single individual’s having had the opportunity and possibility to struggle through the battle of faith and doubt in his life in a real way. Even though Kierkegaard, especially through the pseudonyms Vigilius Haufniensis and Climacus, made a supreme effort to stress the significance of the moment for decision, he nevertheless simultaneously points to the continual possibility of a person’s relapse and to the need for renewed decisions that go along with spiritual growth. Nevertheless, his strong emphasis on the occurrence of decision in the moment could be misunderstood if it is taken out of the context of a person’s religious and Christian development. One of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries was already guilty of such a misunderstanding of his view—namely, A. P. Adler, Doctor of Theology and pastor on the island of Bornholm. Adler, who obviously had realized the significance of the moment through a reading of

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Kierkegaard’s writings, understood the moment as a demarcated atomistic decision without any connection to the individual person’s past and future. In such a moment a person’s salvation would be decided. In his polemic against Adler’s misuse of the idea of the moment, Kierkegaard includes a very subtle and penetrating explanation of the intellectual difficulties in understanding the dialectic of the moment and also points out that a solely intellectual and abstract understanding of the moment must result in an acceptance of predestination. He writes: “The moment,” regarded as an issue, is undeniably a very difficult task, since it has to deal with the dialectical relation between the temporal and the eternal. The eternal is the infinite value, and yet this is to be made commensurable with temporality, and the contact is—in the moment. Yet the moment is nothing. Thinking halts here at the most terrible contradiction, at the most exhausting of all thoughts, which, if it is to be held fast for long at the most extreme peak of exhaustion, must lead the thinker to madness. To erect a house of cards on a table is not difficult, but to have to erect an enormous building (and the eternal is indeed the infinite value) or in so doing to have to understand that an enormous building can be erected upon what is smaller than the sharp corner of a card, upon a foundation that is nothing (because the moment as such does not exist, is merely the boundary between the past and the future, is when it has been)—is certainly a terrible contradiction. If the imagination is permitted to run wild, then paganism’s teaching about luck and fate emerges, or the unchristian doctrine of election by grace in the desperate sense. To be saved by the desperate election by grace, which dialectically is just like fate, is the most unblessed of all felicities. In a certain sense, the desperate election by grace posits the most dreadful split in humanity, and in another sense it makes the whole human race unblessed, because it is unblessed to be excluded and cast out, unblessed to be saved in this manner.

Kierkegaard maintains further that if just one single moment is to be decisive for salvation, then the question about it will be like an illfated lottery game, in which chance decides all. He concludes by saying: “Even to the most desperate person, even to the one who

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forfeited the most, the ethical and the ethical-religious dare to shout: The moment is still there. The ethical cannot be fooled any more than God can be mocked; it knows very well how, with qualitative dialectic, to make the moment valid as decision. But it will not worry a person to madness, nor madly make him happy with a game.”711 It is clear that Kierkegaard is here attacking the fantastic and frivolous use of the moment. The significance of the moment is always to be seen in connection with a person’s existential development.712 At the beginning of his polemic against Adler, Kierkegaard points out that his pseudonyms had explained the issues involving the moment but that Adler had not read any of them. He refers here to the previously mentioned treatment of this issue by Climacus and Vigilius Haufniensis in Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety respectively. Climacus shows how “the fullness of time”713 comes with God’s incarnation within temporality. This occurrence, which is a paradox, Climacus terms “the moment,” whereby in “the most abbreviated form” he characterizes God, who as Redeemer and Savior meets humankind. In Philosophical Fragments the emphasis is also on Christ’s Incarnation, and it is shown how a person through his relation to “the moment” gains a new beginning for his life. In The Concept of Anxiety the task is different. Here Vigilius Haufniensis is particularly interested in depicting how the human race in general and the individual in particular are matured through a historical development to reach the level where it is a matter of meeting Christianity’s offer in the right way. For this reason Vigilius Haufniensis goes through the dialectic of the moment as seen from the human side, the levels of paganism and Judaism, before going more explicitly into the Christian understanding of the moment. He points out, for example, how paganism’s struggle with the issue of the moment is reflected in Plato’s philosophy. Plato, however, comes no further than to understand the moment as “a silent atomistic abstraction.”714 Judaism went further with regard to attaching importance to time, because the Jew stood in a relation to an eternity that was not an abstraction but a personal power before whom he stood responsible. But only in Christianity does the moment have decisive meaning for a human being—namely, when he is to take a position to the God who entered time and gave the moment the fullness of

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eternity.715 Vigilius Haufniensis strongly emphasizes that when one stresses the importance of the moment in Christianity one must take great care that such terms as “conversion, atonement, redemption,” and “resurrection, judgment” do not lose their meaning. It is these categories that first provide coherence in the Christian’s life, whereas the moment points to the decision itself that is to be reached in time and that gives the moment content, provided the decision is made at some point in time. Adler obviously concentrated primarily on the dialectic in Philosophical Fragments; but it is easy to misunderstand Kierkegaard’s theory of the moment if one considers only one of the two books cited here, since the point is that they supplement each other. At the same time it must not be forgotten that Kierkegaard, especially in the upbuildingreligious part of his authorship, has carefully described the existential levels through which a person is matured to come in a true way to the eternal decision with which Christianity confronts a person. Kierkegaard found a mistaken view of the relation between time and eternity also in the theologian Julius Müller’s theory of a “timeless fall,” which was to explain original sin. He summarizes his objections to Müller’s views in the following statements: “Julius Müller has invented the theory that original sin (peccatum originale) is traceable to a timeless fall before the lives of all human beings in time. “This is a basic dislocation of Christianity. Johannes Climacus comes immediately with his problem: that an eternal blessedness or unblessedness is decided in time by a relation to something historical. “J. Müller believes that he has extricated himself from the first difficulty of getting sin and guilt into the world and in every person. “But now the next: the decision of salvation, since it is an eternal decision, becomes just as incommensurable for a decision in a moment of time as the former one. So it presumably became necessary for J. M. to place this decision outside of time also, in a timeless decision in every individual before the lives of all human beings in time. “The consequence comes to be that a person has timelessly lived through his whole life in a kind of ideality before he lives it in time.” Kierkegaard then comes with his solution: “The whole thing is sim-

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ply an indirect proof of the rightness of my view: posit the paradox. The dubiousness of speculation is revealed by Müller’s theory. The paradox is that an eternal decision is decided in time. I say: It cannot be comprehended; it must be believed—that is, it is a paradox. Now comes speculation, saying: Of course I can comprehend it. I do it like this—I imagine a timeless decision prior to time—understand? Yes, my dear friend, but the problem was an eternal decision—in time, not an eternal decision in a timeless manner outside of all time.”716 Therefore Kierkegaard’s main objection is that if all the contradictions in the relation between time and eternity could be explained by speculative thinking as Julius Müller adduces in his very copious treatment of the problem with regard to a timeless fall, this would signify an attack upon Christianity as belonging to the sphere of faith, which has the paradox precisely as safeguard against all the encroachments of philosophical speculation. Kierkegaard has nothing against the pointing out of contradictions within the domain of the Christian, because human thought can never actually cope with the paradoxes of Christianity. Kierkegaard, however, has attempted to clarify the distinction between time and eternity by carefully and consistently reflecting on the implications of each of these concepts. Time, then, is defined as the infinite succession of separate moments. The nature of time is that “it passes by.”717 It has no consistency; as long as time lasts, it remains—seen from the perspective of eternity—only a transition, a moment. Kierkegaard also expresses it another way, that “temporality, no matter how long it lasts” never becomes anything more than a moment.718 Nevertheless time and temporality have a decisive meaning for resolution and action and thereby for freedom and the ethical. Of eternity, on the other hand, it can be said: “The eternal is.”719 Here a distinction must be made between an abstract eternity and a concrete and personal eternity. The abstract eternity is characterized by being changeless, thus “outside of motion.” Subsumed under it are the mathematical, logical, and ontological truths, “poetry and art” as an “anticipation of the eternal,” together with the idea of the absolute good as an abstract qualification.720

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In the eminent sense, only God is the personal eternal. Therefore if someone wishes to define eternity as an “eternal now”721 and does not differentiate between the abstract and the personal eternity, then eternity’s relation to time cannot be clearly defined either. The abstract eternity as such has no relation to time; its nature consists only in its having eternal validity. The personal eternity in the eminent sense (God), on the other hand, has a twofold relation to time, first by having created it and next by containing within itself an infinite time. The difference between created time and eternity’s time can be stated as follows: Time in the ordinary sense has no eternity, whereas time in the concrete personal sense has infinite time. With regard to time within finitude, Kierkegaard declares that it, like finite objects, is limited and transient; neither of them is eternal. “For every finite object there must be a moment when in circumnavigating it one has circumnavigated it, and from then on it appears smaller.”722 Only the eternal as personal reality—that is, God—has time, which, however, must not be understood as the succession of time but as a fullness of time that is always available. God’s reality also signifies a fullness of content, which constitutes God’s inner life. The person who has attained to eternal life has a lower analogy to God’s eternity. Of the single individual’s life in eternity, Kierkegaard says briefly: “But in eternity a person is not in the succession of time, and being eterno modo [in the mode of eternity] is the most intensive punctuality.”723 There are two things to notice in this statement. One is that , according to Kierkegaard, a person possesses a body of content as the yield of his life that in other passages he calls recollection.724 The other is that a person is not under the succession of time, because he no longer is to reach any decision, which must always occur in time. But this does not mean that in eternity there is no time for a person. Kierkegaard speaks also of eternal life as “recollection’s vast future,” in which it then also holds that there is something to recollect. Thus enjoyment as “pleasant,” the “momentary in its emptiness,” does not “exist at all for an eternal recollecting. On the other hand, there is no recollecting more blessed, and nothing more blessed to recollect, than sufferings over and done with in company with God; this is the secret of sufferings.”725 Therefore these sufferings are also to be considered as something “saved up for eternity.”726 In a journal entry Kierke-

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gaard says: “Viewed from eternity, to enjoy is the same as to squander, to dissipate; to suffer is like accumulating savings—high-rate savings, although here in time one does not usually recognize this kind of currency or define its value.”727 Therefore a person will have time and opportunity to broaden and deepen the recollection he has brought along into eternity. Kierkegaard hoped also on his own behalf to have time in eternity. “God be praised, there will be time in eternity to think every thought through to the smallest particular. There, thinking will not mean anything but to think; it will not mean earning a living, acquiring honors and status—and being understood by others—by means of a few half-digested thoughts.”728 It is important to add one more thing. Even though Kierkegaard believed that a person can attain eternal life and thereby become an eternal being, he insisted that also in eternity there will be an absolute distinction between God and man. God is still the absolute self and a human being is still only a “derived self,”729 and therefore there will continue to be a qualitative difference between them. With regard to this, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym H. H. declares: “But between God and a human being there is an eternal essential qualitative difference, which only presumptuous thinking can make disappear in the blasphemy that in the transitory moment of finitude God and a human being are certainly differentiated, so that here in this life a human being ought to obey and worship God, but in eternity the difference will vanish in the essential likeness, so that God and human beings become peers in eternity, just as the king and the valet.”730

God’s Omnipotence and Human Freedom Kierkegaard tried also to answer the difficult and earnest question all believers at some time or other ask themselves—namely, how can the presence of evil in the world be explained if God is both omnipotent and loving. Kierkegaard deals with this issue specifically in one of his journal entries,731 in which he is not content with the distinction that “God accomplishes the good and merely permits the evil,” and

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he tries, as he says, to solve the question in an altogether simple manner. Before an analysis of this solution, it must first be interpolated that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms expressly sought to show that the origin of evil can never be explained scientifically or through argumentation. Vigilius Haufniensis, for example, strongly maintains that this question can be answered only by each individual for himself, since it involves the individual’s most personal and profound relationships and decisions. He declares: “How sin came into the world, each man understands solely by himself. If he would learn it from another, he would eo ipso misunderstand it. The only science that can help a little is psychology, yet it admits that it explains nothing, and also that it cannot and will not explain more. If any science could explain it, everything would be confused. That the man of science ought to forget himself is entirely true; nevertheless, it is therefore also very fortunate that sin is no scientific problem, and thus no man of science has an obligation (and the project maker just as little) to forget how sin came into the world.”732 Therefore sin and along with it evil is not a subject for scientific knowledge, since it, like faith, is a paradox and therefore lies beyond the boundaries of science. In both faith and sin the single individual goes beyond the qualifications of finitude and thereby comes to stand higher than the race and the universal laws. From the standpoint of the universal, this will always be regarded as a paradox.733 Consequently the question of the actuality of sin cannot be answered within the sphere of knowledge, but an accounting of the presuppositions that are present in the human individual and that make sin possible can be given. Vigilius Haufniensis shows this by pointing out in detail that every human being has freedom’s possibility to choose, but this possibility nevertheless does not entail being predestined to sin, since the movement from the possibility of sin to its actuality occurs in freedom. Vigilius Haufniensis declares: “That human nature is so constituted that it makes sin possible is, psychologically speaking, quite correct, but wanting to make the possibility of sin its actuality is revolting to ethics, and to dogmatics it sounds like blasphemy . . ..”734 Here the distinction between being able to sin and sinning itself is explicit. Psychology can explore “the real possibility of sin,” but it cannot do more than that; thereafter it must, as

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Vigilius Haufniensis puts it, enlist “in the service of another science,”735 —that is, dogmatics, which is not science in the current use of the word but has its aim to give an account of the Christian concept of faith. The furthest point that psychology can reach, which is the line of demarcation between innocence and guilt, is “the anxious possibility of being able.”736 When a person stands before the prohibition, it is disclosed whether he will be conform to it or will break it. Here is a parting of the ways. Vigilius Haufniensis brings his deliberations to bear primarily on the possibility of sin and the actuality of hereditary sin; but in principle they apply to all sin, because all sin is rooted in disobedience.737 Kierkegaard tried not only to show the possibility of evil on the basis of psychological considerations but also tried consistently to trace this possibility, which presupposes freedom’s possibility in human beings, from specific dogmatic doctrines about the attributes of God. Here we come back again to that extremely significant entry Pap. VII1 A 181 (JP II 1251), in which Kierkegaard goes beyond the psychological grounds of human freedom and the possibility of evil and seeks for a more profound theological explanation in the omnipotence and goodness of God.738 Kierkegaard now finds these attributes of God to be the proper presupposition for the freedom that is implicit in “human nature” and of which psychology can give an account. It is remarkable that, in the very attributes of God that seem to be most incompatible with the presence of evil in this world, Kierkegaard seeks the basis of freedom and the possibility of evil, a possibility, however, that first becomes actuality through human beings’ own guilt. With this the complex of issues related to this question take a completely new turn. According to Kierkegaard, God’s omnipotence is the presupposition for the ability to create the human person as a free being. His point of departure is the Christian view that God in his omnipotence has created the world and humankind. But he goes further and maintains that God in his omnipotence can make room for the human person as a free being. Therefore omnipotence does not signify only the act of creation and dominion over all creation but also God’s power to hold back, as it were, in order to give latitude for a human being’s free decisions and actions. On the subject of these two aspects

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of omnipotence, Kierkegaard writes: “But if one will reflect on omnipotence, one will see that it also must contain the unique qualification of being able to withdraw itself again in a manifestation of omnipotence in such a way that precisely for this reason that which has been originated through omnipotence can be independent.” Kierkegaard says that an imperfect analogy to this can be found in the relationships of people to one another. But a human being cannot make another human being free, because he can never surmount himself absolutely, since he is bound to himself by self-love. “Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver.” Climacus advances the same thought when he declares that no one is “as resigned as God, because he communicates creatively in such a way that in creating he gives independence vis-à-vis himself.”739 But this also means that by his absolute resignation God retains his freedom in relation to his creation. Kierkegaard goes on to say in this significant journal entry that God is able to give human beings freedom because his omnipotence is combined with love. “God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent.” For Kierkegaard it is rock firm that God has brought forth all creation and humankind from nothing and that everything, with the exception of humankind, will revert to nothingness. Only humankind “has its continuity in itself through the continuous withdrawing of omnipotence.” In reality God’s power to withdraw himself signifies that God always stands free before his creation and also before humankind as well, but at the same time it signifies that “a being independent of that very omnipotence” has the right to choose through the freedom bestowed upon him. At the end of the journal entry Kierkegaard makes some very perceptive observations on two conditions that must be assumed to be present so that God could give human beings freedom. The first is that from the morning of creation there must not have been the slightest presence of anything that had independent continuity and upon which God was dependent. God must be the one who alone created everything. This is the meaning of the sentence: “Therefore if a hu-

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man being had the slightest independent existence over against God (with regard to materia [substance]), then God could not make him free. Creation out of nothing is once again the Omnipotent One’s expression for being able to make [a being] independent.” 740 The other observation is that it is unimaginable that God had to surrender some of his power in order to create humankind, or that he had to be swallowed up in the creation as pantheism, for example, assumes, since in that case God would not be omnipotent as a sovereign self. Kierkegaard mentions these possibilities merely in order to rule them out completely. Especially in his latest journal entries, Kierkegaard attempted to go more thoroughly into the thought of God’s sovereign majesty, his independence of the creation, and the role of omnipotence with regard to humankind. For example, he says of God: “God is pure subjectivity, sheer unmitigated subjectivity, and intrinsically has no trace at all of the objective, since everything with such objectivity still comes thereby within the realm of relativities.” And of God’s relation to the operation of the world Kierkegaard says that he is “infinite majesty in such a way that nothing in and for itself can concern him but only insofar as it pleases his majesty. Consequently the smallest trifle can concern him just as much as what we humans call the most significant of all, because it is his pleasure and not the object that determines his concern—he is infinite subjectivity.” And as a drastic example that God is not interested in what we humans consider to be great epoch-making events but in what is taking place within the individual’s inner being, Kierkegaard surmises that “If not only a European war broke out but a war with Asia, and then Africa, America, and Australia were forced to take part—in and for itself, this would not concern God at all—but that a poor human being sighs to him, this would concern him, for his majesty is so disposed and this would move him subjectively.”741 That Kierkegaard believes that it is a person’s inwardness and his interior battles that God finds pleasing also emerges in the following statement: “Humanly speaking, God has no cause at all. Eternal, unchanged, he sits and surveys all existence and looks to see if there is anyone who wants to worship him. To worship him means to relate oneself unconditionally to him. But all who want to relate themselves unconditionally must eo ipso collide with this world,

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collide, for this world is precisely the world of the conditioned. Thus worship becomes eo ipso suffering—and to find it blessed is to serve God.”742 Therefore God’s punishment of those who refuse to be known by him is to ignore them; so they “go on living drugged in diversions and busyness—forgotten by God.”743 Kierkegaard expresses this same thought in many other places, as, for example, in the following journal entry: “We always forget that we human beings are the ones who need God, not God who needs us; we forget that God in his majesty does not care at all for our earthly and temporal busyness. This accounts for the universality in Christendom of the false—yes, almost brutish and irrational—consolation that if God does not intervene with punishment, then one is in excellent standing with him. We forget that the divine Majesty has a punishment that he himself, of course, regards as the most dreadful: to ignore, majestically to ignore, to hand people over to themselves.”744 Kierkegaard tries to summarize and illustrate God’s omnipotence and the relationship of majesty to the created world and to the freedom he has given human beings in the analogy of a poet and a poet’s relation to his productions. “My thought is that God is like a poet. This is why he puts up with evil and all the nonsense and wretchedness and mediocrity of triviality, etc. The poet is related in the same way to the poetic productions (also called his creations) he permits to come forth. But just as it is a mistake to think that what a particular character in a poem says or does represents the poet’s personal opinion, so it is a mistake to assume that God consents to all that happens and how. Oh, no. He has his own view of things. But poetically he permits everything possible to come forth; he himself is present everywhere, observing, still a poet, in a sense poetically impersonal, equally attentive to everything, and in another sense personal, establishing the most terrible distinctions—such as between good and evil, between willing according to his will and not willing according to his will, and so on.”745 Kierkegaard gives a similar example when he compares God to a natural scientist who lets his experiment unfold itself. At the same time that God “omnipotently constrains himself ” he also relates with “infinite interest” to his experiment. Kierkegaard concludes this en-

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try by saying: “In a certain sense it can be said that there is no providence at all, just as if there were no experimenter or the experimenter were no one, since, after all, he does not intervene but merely lets the concatenated forces develop. And yet the experimenter is sheer awareness and attention and is constantly present—all of which is but a poor picture of God’s being present, although in yet another sense he refrains completely from intervening. “Only once has providence omnipotently intervened—in Christ.”746 As is evident in the last sentence of this journal entry, Kierkegaard regarded Christ’s incarnation as a manifestation of God’s omnipotence and love’s intervention in the course of the world. This makes three decisive manifestations of God’s omnipotence and love—namely, the creation of the world, the creation of a being with freedom’s possibility, and the Incarnation, which had as its objective humankind’s salvation. Kierkegaard’s view of God’s omnipotence and governance as providing a certain latitude for human freedom implies that his conception of God’s foreknowledge does not necessarily lead to the assumption of predestination. A predetermination of that kind he was never able to accept, inasmuch as he always emphasized the significance of freedom in existence. As early as in Philosophical Fragments, Climacus stated a philosophical basis for maintaining that foreknowledge as cognition does not give the historical process a necessary sequence, since it is contingent on freedom or, as Climacus very concisely says: “Knowledge of the present does not confer necessity upon it; foreknowledge of the future does not confer necessity upon it . . . ; knowledge of the past does not confer necessity upon it—for all apprehension, like all knowing; has nothing from which to give.”747 As mentioned previously, Kierkegaard later bases his position that foreknowledge does not lead to predestination on the thought of God’s omnipotence and love, which leaves room for a human being’s free decisions. An example of this is found in Practice in Christianity. Here Anti-Climacus, pointing out that not everyone will accept Christianity, says that God is not responsible, as a consequence of his foreknowledge, for what happens in the world, since “in foreknowledge Governance certainly can know that it is going to happen, although human beings still are responsible for its happening.”748 This view is

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fully supported in many journal entries on the theme that God will not, with his omnipotence and love, force a person to accept salvation but waits for a free decision, and that a person bears the guilt himself if he turns away from God.749 On the other hand, Kierkegaard believes that in the relationship to God there is always the possibility of a new beginning: “It is indeed most strenuous and exhausting for a poor human being to begin unconditionally, which is the case with everything related to the unconditional; but then again there is the consolation that only the unconditional beginning has—namely, that one can begin at any and every moment.”750 We will now take a closer look at Kierkegaard’s understanding of the relation between the freedom a human being has received as a gift and God’s omnipotence and absolute freedom. Kierkegaard addresses this question particularly in his upbuilding writings, the first time more theoretically in Christian Discourses, which was published a few years after the journal entry (Pap. VII1 A 181) about God’s omnipotence. In one of the discourses he directly repeats the line of thought in this entry but defines specific factors more exactly in order ultimately to point to the proper relation between human freedom and the requirement to humankind by God’s omnipotence and love. In the first place, Kierkegaard calls attention to the fact that it is more inconceivable that God in his omnipotent love has given humankind freedom than that God in his omnipotence has created everything from nothing. “The omnipotence that creates out of nothing is not as inconceivable as the omnipotent love that can make this wretched nothing for omnipotence into something for love.” Here Kierkegaard makes a sharp distinction between the omnipotence that creates and the omnipotent love that “makes the created being something” in relation to himself by giving him freedom. Kierkegaard deepens this thought in maintaining that it is not omnipotence that places requirements upon humankind, because, as he says: “If the Omnipotent One required something of you, then at that very moment you are nothing.” He goes on to say: “But the loving God, who in incomprehensible love made you something for him, lovingly requires something of you.” This is even more strongly expressed in the following sentence: “It is said that God’s omnipo-

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tence crushes a human being. But this is not so; no human being is so much that God needs omnipotence to crush him, because for omnipotence he is nothing. It is God’s love that even in the last moment manifests his love by making him something for it.” Only by a person’s becoming something through God’s omnipotent love is a “reciprocal relationship” possible. In other words, God lovingly requires of a human being that he not misuse his independence and freedom by using it in a selfish way, but lovingly requires that he perceive his weakness and nothingness so that he subordinates his freedom under God. Thereby comes the proper “reciprocal relationship,” the gist of which is that “the stronger a human being is, the weaker God is in him; the weaker he is, the stronger God is in him.” Thus if a human being wants to elevate himself, confirm the impression that he is strong, God becomes weak in him. “If, however,” declares Kierkegaard, “a person himself gives up this something, the independence, the freedom to go his own way that love gave him, if he does not misuse this, his perfection, to exist for God, by taking it in vain, if God perhaps helps him in this regard by hard sufferings, by taking away his dearest possession, by wounding him in the tenderest spot, by denying him his one and only wish, by taking his final hope away from him—then he is weak.”751 What a person on his part can do in the reciprocal relationship between God and man has been touched on earlier in the discussion of human freedom and the limit of human capability, but in order for the two sides of the reciprocal relationship to emerge clearly we must briefly sketch here the human side of the relationship. It is Kierkegaard’s constant presupposition that as a synthesis of time and eternity the human being has freedom’s possibility to seek to actualize in his life the requirements of the eternal. Humankind’s striving for the eternal is a long process—hence the emergence of various religions. This striving of freedom reaches its climax in the movement of infinity, which is the human being’s most consistent attempt to free himself from his attachment to finitude in order to reach the eternal. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms have discussed in detail the ever more penetrating forms of this movement as they manifest themselves in irony, resignation, and repentance. In liberating himself from his boundedness to finitude, it is necessary for a

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person to use all his powers in the movement of infinity, and therefore he cannot do more.752 He can arrive at a negative freedom in this way, that is, by supreme effort can liberate himself from his boundedness to finitude, but he cannot arrive at a positive freedom— namely, to actualize the good, because he does not have more power in reserve. From an ethical point of view, the tasks a person can accomplish before making the movement of infinity never come within the category of the good, since he as yet has only a relative criterion, and therefore all his activities fall into the relative sphere. Nor can his attempt to relate himself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative lead to a positive result. On the contrary, he will experience in an existentially convincing way his own incapability and guilt in relation to the eternal. In other words, a person can never all by himself actualize the good by tearing himself free from his boundedness to immanence. But even if the results of all his efforts are totally negative, they nevertheless are of the greatest significance, since without these experiences he cannot learn to know himself. Since, then, a person can never practice the good on his own, he must, if he is to go further, be helped by the transcendent power. This brings us to the divine side of the “reciprocal relationship” that Kierkegaard has thoroughly substantiated in Christian Discourses. But even if this is the first book in which, in continuation of journal entry Pap. VII1 A 181, he gives an account of the reciprocal relationship between man and God, his previous writings show that he was aware of these connections very early and that he and his pseudonyms were trying to come to grips with them. There is an example of this in Fear and Trembling where it is described how Abraham receives the command to sacrifice his son. Because Abraham in his absolute resignation, which completely exhausts his powers, is obedient to God, he receives Isaac again through faith “by virtue of the absurd.”753 In this case God as a transcendent power intervenes in a human being’s life. There is another example of this in volume II of Either/Or where Judge William describes the transition from the ethical stage to a new foundation for life, which presupposes God’s assistance. Judge William, however, does not mention this. Later in Concluding Unsci-

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entific Postscript, Climacus calls this a “discrepancy”754 in the Judge’s exposition, even though Climacus of course knows that this was done for methodological reasons. From his side, Climacus stresses the reciprocal relationship in pointing out that when a person has exhausted his possibilities within the esthetic sphere he can proceed no further on his own power. Therefore the discrepancy consists in Judge William’s attempt to construct the ethical stage without stressing that the religious is the prerequisite for this. Climacus writes: “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 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. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself, but if I do this I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, although it is quite correct that one must first have understood the existence-relationship between the esthetic and the ethical in order to be at this point—that is, by being there in passion and inwardness, one indeed becomes aware of the religious—and of the leap.”755 It is in the upbuilding literature, however, that Kierkegaard first goes more deeply into the difficult complex of issues in the relationship between man and God. Here Kierkegaard develops the view that a human being is capable of nothing by himself, that he can never by himself go beyond his boundedness to the temporal and consequently cannot by his own power overcome himself. But at the same time the other side of the reciprocal relationship is increasingly accentuated— namely, that with God a person “is capable of ever more and more— that he is capable of overcoming himself, since with God’s help he is indeed capable of this!”756 The more strictly the requirement to deny oneself is presented, the more Kierkegaard emphasizes the divine side of the relationship. In Works of Love the movement of infinity is expressed by the Christian concept of self-denial, and God’s acting in a person and God’s support are also emphasized more strongly. For example, it is stated

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that if a person has won his battle with the world he still has to fight yet another battle, in which he experiences that he cannot preserve the victory without God’s help: “In the first conflict the battle is against the world for the victory that is won; in the second conflict the battle is with God about that victory. Only when a person in the very moment of victory relinquishes [afstaa] the victory to God, only then does a person continue to stand [bestaa] after having overcome everything. As long as he was fighting, the opposition in a certain sense helped him to stand [staa]; but when he has given God the honor of the victory, God is the support with whose help he continues to stand.” In this connection Kierkegaard leaves it an open question whether a person, purely externally, can be victorious without God’s help. “It is certainly possible that it was also through God’s support that he was victorious (although in the external sense the victory can also be won without God’s support), but God’s support first becomes really clear when the person has conquered. Oh, what foolishness in the eyes of the world—to need God’s support most when one has won the victory!”757 The thought of God’s support comes out most strongly, however, in the discussion about a person’s placing himself at God’s disposal through a self-renunciation that has required and continues to require all his powers. “In a spiritual sense,” says Kierkegaard, “it holds true that just when a person strains his spiritual powers as such he then, and only then, becomes an instrument. From that moment on, if he honestly and faithfully perseveres, he will gain the best powers, but they are not his own; he has them in self-denial.”758 The examples cited, which can be supplemented with many more, show that Kierkegaard often used the idea of the reciprocal relationship between man and God in his authorship prior to his coherent account of it in Christian Discourses. In that book he also makes preparations for showing how a person may enter into the relationship to the God who has revealed himself in temporality. In Part Three he points out the misinterpretations of Christianity that stand in the way of the encounter with Christ. The encounter itself can occur in the most fulfilling way only by a person’s breaking with everything to which he has been bound in order then to surrender oneself uncondition-

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ally to Christ. Only then can he truthfully say: “I have believed in and do believe in him.”759 In this relationship to Christ as Savior there can no longer be mention of a reciprocal relationship but only of a person’s acceptance of grace, with which Part Four of Christian Discourses deals. In the last of these discourses a sharp distinction is drawn between the reciprocal relationship between man and God, in which the human being can be God’s co-worker, and the encounter with Christ as Savior, in which it is Christ alone who gives a person a new life, a new beginning. “You cannot meet him before the Communion table as a coworker as you indeed can meet God in your work as co-worker. You cannot be Christ’s co-worker in connection with the reconciliation, not in the remotest way. You are totally in debt; he is totally the satisfaction.” The distinction also shows itself in the way in which the blessing works. In the reciprocal relationship the blessing pertains to a person as co-worker, whereas in the Atonement there can be no question of any work from the person’s side. “What is the blessing? The blessing is what God does; everything that God does is the blessing; the part of the work in which you call yourself God’s coworker, the part God does, is the blessing. But at the Communion table Christ is the blessing. The divine work of reconciliation is Christ’s work, and in it a human being can do only less than nothing—therefore the blessing is everything, but if the work is Christ’s, then Christ is indeed the blessing.”760 Kierkegaard has always insisted that when it comes to salvation collaboration from the person’s side is out of the question. But just as in the relationship to God as father a person can become God’s coworker, in the relationship to Christ as the prototype a person can acquire the task of being a witness—indeed, perhaps a martyr. A person’s course from God the Father to Christ the Redeemer and prototype actually signifies an existential tightening. Here it can be pointed out that on closer inspection it is apparent that Kierkegaard also brings the Christian Trinity to a specific level in a person’s spiritual development. In his book Samtidighedens Situation, Per Lønning is the first one to point out that in a specific journal entry (Pap. X5 A 23 [JP II 1432]) Kierkegaard speaks of the Trinity in relation to religious existence. Per Lønning writes: “It is significant when for once,

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in a discussion of the inter-trinitarian relation, it is not defined in itself but in connection with a person’s way into Christianity.”761 In the journal entry cited, Kierkegaard’s line of thought, which he bases on the New Testament, ends in the following conclusion: “Thus it is not the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father; no, it is the Father who directs to the Son, the Son who directs to the Spirit, and not until then is it the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father.” Kierkegaard’s view of this correlation essentially forms the basis for his interpretation, especially in his upbuilding literature, of the positive use of the gift of freedom that God in his omnipotence has bestowed on man. Thus in Pap. X5 A 23 we have another example of how Kierkegaard summarizes in a brief formula a relationship that he has already used extensively in his authorship. In concluding these deliberations on the possibilities in a person for the good and for evil and their relationship to God’s omnipotence, which has created beings who can freely choose, the mistaken view that equates the evil in the world with suffering must also be mentioned. Kierkegaard attempts to clarify this point also and makes a sharp distinction between the forms of suffering that are a result of the evil and the suffering that accompanies translating the good into action. The suffering that comes on account of the good is connected with a person’s being bound to the relative things of this world, and if he is to enter the service of the good, he must continually renounce this attachment—that is, he must accomplish the movement of infinity. This process means suffering in a wider sense, and Kierkegaard speaks of it as follows: “Christianity helps absolutely, but in its initial form the absolute means suffering for the relative man.” He continues: “Absolute help (it is found in the category-relationships themselves, since the actual relationship is lacking) is first of all suffering for one whose life is in the relative. But man as man lives in the relative.”762 In these sentences Kierkegaard defines the source of the religious suffering he describes in detail many places in his authorship. Therefore he considers it very misleading when “an older piety (Luther, for example)”763 attributed all suffering to the devil. The religious suffering and the specifically Christian suffering that is a prerequisite

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for a person’s relationship to God “is related to the qualitative difference between man and God and to the collision of the temporal and the eternal in time, which must involve suffering.”764 Or it can be explained by “the discrepancy between God’s infinite majesty and man.” Kierkegaard amplifies this idea: “If a human being is really going to have anything to do with God, it must become suffering— the discrepancy between these two qualities in the relationship must needs bring suffering; but despite all this, the relationship is still blessedness.”765 On the basis of these presuppositions, Kierkegaard obviously has to reject the idea that suffering is from the devil. This does not preclude, however, that there are sufferings that result from the power of evil, which he by no means attempted to explain away.766 Kierkegaard also points out that a person can proceed so far along the road of evil that in “a demonic possession” he can go to the extreme of maintaining that “God is the evil in the sense that he is guilty of all man’s unhappiness; if we could only eliminate the unconditional, knock all ideals out of your heads, everything would go well.”767 In conclusion it must be noted that Kierkegaard respects his own presuppositions that in the last resort both the divine and the demonic paradoxes elude intellectual, abstract investigation, but at the same time he tries—as far as it is possible for human thought—to illuminate the boundary territory, in both the positive and negative directions, between this thought and the paradoxical actuality. It must also be noted that the person who has made the leap of faith and is acquainted with the struggle of faith and thereby is also intimate with demonic temptations and power can very well give an account of them. But this takes “a deeper experience”768 than that which ordinary knowledge and experience can provide. Such a deeper experience, hard-won through the years, Kierkegaard himself possessed, and therefore he could depict both the believer’s struggles and the ever increasing power of the demonic over a human being—the former in the upbuilding literature and the latter in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death.

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Christ as the Paradox and the Highest Ethical Ideal The final difficult issue we shall discuss is the one Kierkegaard confronted in his deliberations on Christ’s relation to the basic universally human order. In a journal entry in 1843 he describes this issue as follows: “That the Son of God became man is certainly the highest metaphysical and religious paradox, but it is nevertheless not the deepest ethical paradox. Christ’s appearance contains a polemic against existence. He became a human being like all others, but he stood in a polemical relationship to the concrete-ethical elements of actuality. He went about and taught the people; he owned nothing; he did not even have a place to lay his head. Truly it is uplifting to see the faith and trust in providence that makes a person carefree as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, but to what extent is this an ethical expression for human life? Shall a person not work in order to live; is it not superior; do I dare ignore providing for tomorrow in this way? Here the most difficult issues come together. Christ’s life had a negative-polemical relation to Church and state. It would be the highest ethical paradox if God’s Son entered into the world of actuality, became part of it, submitted to all its triviality, because even if I have the courage and trust and faith to die of starvation, so it is worthy of admiration, and in each generation there probably are not ten who have it, we nevertheless teach and proclaim that it would be even greater to submit to the actualities of life.”769 As it appears in this journal entry, the difficulty arose for Kierkegaard because in the ecclesiastical tradition in which he grew up a life in harmony with the basic order of creation was held up as the highest human ideal, the ideal that Luther described with the words “ehelich leben und Acker bauen [live married and cultivate the soil].”770 But Christ did not fulfill this ideal in his life but seems to burst it at the seams with his polemical attitude to working for a living and to family life. Therefore Kierkegaard says that Christ did not represent the deepest ethical paradox. This would have required a wholly concrete relation to the basic order of human existence. In Kierkegaard’s view, it is not enough to regard Christ’s life as the highest metaphysical and the highest religious paradox. The first

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paradox expresses only that one mentally joins two qualitative opposites in a unity. This is the viewpoint that metaphysics (philosophy) as the culmination of the esthetic would establish. The second, the religious paradox, expresses faith’s claim that God became a particular historical human being. But neither of the two paradoxes speaks about Christ’s relation to the universal life-order in his own life. But if one proceeds from the premise that a person first fulfills the ideal of a concrete, actual human life when he undertakes wholeheartedly to realize the universal, then one must come to the conclusion that Christ did not fulfill this ideal. Here we see the decisive importance Kierkegaard attributes to the ethical view of human life in comparison with the other two views, the esthetic (represented by philosophy) and the religious. It is the ethical that first brings a person and therefore also the God-man into a concrete relation to the universal realities of life. It is this incongruency in Christ’s earthly life with regard to the universal that became an issue for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard explores deeply the issue of Christ as paradox in another journal entry 771 of the same period and adds two more viewpoints to the paradox with regard to Christ—namely, the absolute and the divine paradox. With regard to the former he says: “The absolute paradox would be that the Son of God became man, came into the world, went around in such a way that no one detected it, in the strictest sense became an individual human being who had a trade, got married, etc. (on this point the various observations would show how Christ’s life is patterned according to a higher criterion than the ethical). In that case God would have been the greatest ironist, not God and Father of humankind.” Consequently as the absolute paradox Christ would go unnoticed through the world. When Kierkegaard goes on to say that if this had been the case it would have to be noted that Christ’s life must have been patterned according to a higher criterion than the ethical, he means by “higher” the religious. In that case Christ would stand in an absolutely dependent relation to God. Christ’s life would markedly resemble the “taxcollector’s” as described in Fear and Trembling. Through the movement of infinity the tax-collector has continual contact with the eter-

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nal, but at the same time he lives his civic existence so exemplarily that no one can discover his absolute relation to the absolute. But Kierkegaard believes that if Christ as the Incarnation of God had led such an unnoticed existence God could not have been “God and Father of humankind.” The intent and purpose of Christ’s coming into the world would thereby have been lost; he would not have been able to enlighten people about the truth and neither would he have been able to become the Savior of humankind. As for the expression “the absolute paradox,” it must be noted that in a journal entry under “Philosophica”772 Kierkegaard still uses this expression about Christ as paradox. Here he is speaking abstractly about the complete congruity between Christ’s divinity and the esthetic and thereby the universally human circumstances of life. The second expression Kierkegaard uses in Pap. IV A 103 [JP III 3077] for Christ’s Incarnation is “the divine paradox,” which he explains more specifically as follows: “The divine paradox is that he became noticed, if in no other way then by being crucified, that he performed miracles and the like, which means that he still was recognizable by his divine authority, even though it demanded faith to solve its paradox.” Here Kierkegaard finally introduces the Christ that the New Testament has given to us. In the journal entries just cited Kierkegaard has assembled several forms of the paradox related to Christ in order probatively to discover why Christ did not live in accord with the circumstances and ideals for human life that during Kierkegaard’s upbringing in the Lutheran tradition were inculcated in him as the highest. Thereafter Climacus in Philosophical Fragments tries to resolve the difficult issues in these journal entries. In Chapter III, titled “An Absolute Paradox,” and with the suggestive subtitle “(A Metaphysical Caprice),” Climacus shows that human thought has an innate urge to go beyond its boundaries, to “want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.” Thought is thereby self-propelled toward a paradox, but all the stipulations thought arrives at on this side of its border appear in the last analysis to be its own invention. As a result, if thought alone is to decide, a qualitative difference between thought’s claim of a transcendent reality and this reality itself cannot be stated. Thus thought indeed leads astray when it pitches into the

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issue of the Incarnation and attempts to make the eternal being of the god [Guden] congruent with his earthly life. In so doing thought obliterates the qualitative difference between man and God [Gud] inasmuch as they are placed within the same sphere. As an illustration of the attempt of the understanding to grasp the paradox, Climacus in Philosophical Fragments uses the very train of thought we encountered in the first part of entry Pap. IV A 103 [JP III 3077], where mention is made of the absolute paradox, meaning that “God’s Son” has completely identified with human life as an ordinary human being who is in no way different from other human beings. The assumption of this complete merging of man and God must, however, be regarded as a “metaphysical caprice,” since the end of thought’s attempt to explain the paradox is that “The understanding has the god [Guden] as close as possible and yet just as far away.”773 It is probable that Climacus had Hegel’s philosophy in mind, since in his very attempt to clarify the issue of the Incarnation by speculation Hegel completely distanced himself from its reality. In the next section Climacus shows that if one wants to go beyond what thought can master, then one must be enlightened in another way about the difference between man and the god that separates them qualitatively and that thought on its own could never discover. If such a qualitative difference is not found, one would still remain within the human domain, of which Socrates is named as the highest representative. The difference between man and the god must then manifest itself in a sphere outside the domain of thought, since thought is always seeking to reconcile opposites and make them identical. The absolute opposite (as real), which thought is unable to mediate, must then lie in the existential sphere. Climacus thereby takes the whole complex of issues to a new and qualitatively higher level. Climacus points out that as far as a human being is concerned, he by his own guilt ends up in untruth, in sin, but that “it is too much to ask of him to find this out for himself.” Therefore a human being needs the god in order to be enlightened about this. So two qualitative opposites confront each other: the sinner face to face with the holy God.

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This absolute difference between man and the revealed God has the result that a person’s primary reaction is always offense. Without the possibility of offense he cannot arrive at faith in the god. Therefore, after his deliberations on the paradox, Climacus deals with “Offense at the Paradox” in an “Appendix.” The offense serves as a defense against the paradox’s ending up as a purely intellectual term, at the same time that it becomes “an indirect testing of the correctness of the paradox.” Thus offense is not “the origination of the understanding,” but a human being’s initial existential response when he stands face to face with the revealed God, who will always be a paradox to thought. It is this concrete, historical paradox and not the same paradox construed metaphysically that provides the occasion for offense, and it is with this historical paradox in mind that Climacus says: “No, the offense comes into existence with the paradox.”774 Thus offense becomes a confirmation of the truth of the paradox, and it is of great importance to Climacus to stress that the close connection between the paradox and offense must be maintained if Christianity as the paradoxical reality is not to be distorted. Only after emphasizing in this way the essential function of offense in relation to Christ’s earthly life and pointing out that the possibility of offense must always precede faith in Christ does Climacus continue in Chapter IV his poetical rendition of Christ’s life on the basis of the account in the gospels. This recounting was interrupted in Chapter III, in which by bringing in the concept of offense, the objective was to correct the misunderstandings related to Christ as the paradox. In accord with the new perspective in Chapter IV of Philosophical Fragments, the hypothesis in Pap. IV A 103 [JP III 3077] and in Chapter III—namely, that the god had lived his human life completely unnoticed—is rejected. What is new in Chapter IV is that the god appears in the form of a servant at the same time as he lives in obscurity. This possibility is also rejected and in the following way: “He humbled himself and took the form of a servant, but he certainly did not come to live as a servant in the service of some particular person, carrying out his tasks without letting his master or his co-workers realize who he was—wrath such as that we dare not ascribe to the god.”775

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Kierkegaard’s and Climacus’s repeated rejection of the possibility that the god could have lived unnoticed is consistent with Kierkegaard’s and his pseudonym’s maintaining in the most decisive way—despite their unconditional affirmation that Christ was a true man—the purpose of the Incarnation. It had the very specific objective of saving humankind. If the god had lived in obscurity in the world without having any decisive significance for humankind’s salvation, the meaning of the Incarnation would be entirely lost. Therefore the rejection of the idea of the god’s earthly life in obscurity is actually the result of a consistent consideration of both the human and the divine sides of the god’s appearance in history. Continuing his portrayal of Christ’s life according to the gospels, Climacus raises the same question found in Pap. IV A 62 [JP III 3076], whether it was “proper” for the god not to live as ordinary human beings do. This question is now answered: “We are unable to poetize the god otherwise, but what does a fiction prove?” Thus Climacus holds to tradition and will not change it, but his “fiction,” which corresponds to the tradition about “the god,” nevertheless gives occasion for the following theoretical question: “Is it permissible to wander around erratically like this, stopping wherever evening finds one?”776 Right after this comes the sentence that summarizes the whole complex of issues related to the god’s polemical relation to the universal, the question that so intensely engrossed Kierkegaard and in which the contemporary “theologians and philosophers” did not see anything at all problematic.777 This sentence, which not only raises the issue but also prepares the solution, reads: “The question is this: May a human being express the same thing?—for otherwise the god has not realized the essentially human.” We will look more closely at the presuppositions and consequences of this quotation. Climacus has come so far that he has rejected all speculations about whether the god’s earthly life should be totally congruent with a universally human life, with marriage, working for a living, the life that the Lutheran Church set as the ideal. Climacus now follows the presentation of the gospels, which unequivocally declare that Christ stood in a polemical relation to “the concreteethical elements of actuality.”778 But then the question arises whether Christ did indeed actualize what it is to be human in addition to

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being God. Here the answer from Climacus’s side is entirely clear. Contrary to all the arguments that aim to make Christ’s human life an absolute exception, Climacus insists that Christ was a true human being, even if his life most certainly did manifest the highest ideality. And yet, if this ideality cannot be set up as an ideal for all human beings, Christ would not have “realized the essentially human”779 taken in its broader sense and not only as the realization of the universal. But precisely in this higher ideal for human life the point is found where Christ’s earthly life and a human being’s life can touch each other. Therefore the question whether a human being dares to express the same as Christ did as a human being can be answered with a yes. But the presupposition of a human being’s daring to do this is that “he is capable of it,” that he, like Christ, “can become so absorbed in the service of the spirit.” With this, Kierkegaard-Climacus, after many probative thoughts pertaining to the extremely difficult issue inherent in Christ’s relation to the universally human order and a human being’s relation to it, has rejected the Jewish-Lutheran conception. The highest prototype for a human being then becomes the life of Christ himself. This point of view is maintained more and more in Kierkegaard’s authorship until it culminates in Practice in Christianity. At the same time it must not be forgotten that despite the presentation of Christ as the prototype in Philosophical Fragments, it is the idea of Christ as Savior that is central here. In Philosophical Fragments and thereafter, both aspects of Christ’s work have their place in the authorship. Finally, it must be added that throughout Concluding Unscientific Postscript Climacus uses the designation “the absolute paradox” for the historical Christ, consequently in a sense different from the one Kierkegaard uses, for example, in Pap. IV A 103 [JP III 3077] and IV C 84 [JP III 3074], or Climacus in Fragments, pp. 37-48 (SV IV 204-15). But this is bound up with the fact that when Climacus wrote Concluding Unscientific Postscript it was established that the possibility of offense always had to precede the appropriation of the paradox. Therefore he could use this expression without necessarily causing misunderstanding. Moreover, it is this expression that best characterizes the tension between aspects of the Incarnation.

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In conclusion it must be mentioned that simultaneously with his journal entries on the difficult issues concerning Christ’s relation to the universal, Kierkegaard also raised the question of contemporaneity with Christ.780 The solution to this issue is also given in Philosophical Fragments in connection with his penetrating analysis of the historical.

Philosophy and Theology in the Light of Kierkegaard’s Existential Thought

The Relation between Faith and Knowledge

T

he central points of view in Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence dealt with in this study will now be considered briefly together with the views of other thinkers on these questions, and thereby important and interesting perspectives will be opened up. But only the main lines of this vast subject will be pointed out here. The starting point is Leibniz, who in Kierkegaard’s opinion still probes deeply in his treatment of these issues, as is shown particularly in his controversy with Bayle, whereas thinkers after Leibniz solve them in a more one-sided and superficial way. Kierkegaard voices this in the statement quoted earlier: “The whole conflict between Leibniz and Bayle is very much to the point, and one is astonished if one compares it with controversy in our time, for we have actually gone backward, and I believe that Hegel has not really understood what it was all about.”781 According to Kierkegaard, the sphere of philosophy lies within immanence, and therefore its task becomes on the one hand to provide a comprehensive view of the totality of the visible world and on the other hand to attempt to realize an ethical aspect, whereby it will reach the boundary of immanence and encounter the possibility of a transcendent reality. With the coming of Christianity a new order of things commences, in which faith, not knowledge, plays the essential role inasmuch as a transcendent reality meets humankind, who would never be able to reach this point through its thought and its own

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efforts. Instead of knowledge it is now faith that has the decisive word. But ever since Christianity as a spiritual power came to dominate western culture there have been attempts to bring the two totalities, philosophy and dogmatics, into relation to each other. Yet despite all these attempts it has remained firmly fixed that faith lies on a higher plane than knowledge. Throughout the entire Middle Ages, philosophy, despite all recognition of its significance, had to be content with a servant role in relation to theology (philosophy as ancilla theologiae [handmaiden of theology]. It is, however, very significant that Kierkegaard never showed particular interest in these attempts to subordinate philosophy under theology.782 The reason for that is very likely that Kierkegaard himself was always of the opinion that faith stood higher than any and all philosophical thought and consequently agreed with the philosophy of the Middle Ages, even though he missed there the strict demarcation between knowledge and faith by means of the paradox. What interested Kierkegaard in the Middle Ages was its existential shaping of human life on the basis of Christianity. In regard to this, he considered (as is apparent in the pseudonymous literature) the high point to be “the monastic movement of the Middle Ages,”783 although he at the same time realized its inadequacy in certain respects as an expression of Christian existence. Despite its deficiencies, this movement, in the Middle Ages considered to be the highest form for Christian life, gave full expression to the viewpoints for human life that Kierkegaard regarded as central—namely, freedom, reached by way of the movement of infinity, in this case resignation, the ethical, for which resignation creates the possibility, and finally the assurance of an eternal self, which actually is attained only through the movement of infinity.784 Therefore it is quite understandable that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms are less interested in the Middle Age’s attempts to set philosophy and theology in relation to each other; on the other hand, they frequently use the monastic movement of the Middle Ages as a basis for comparing subsequent religious development.785 With the renaissance and reformation conceptions of the earthly existence as the central human task, the Middle Age’s view of resignation as the highest expression of Christian life fell into dis-

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credit. This also promoted a trend to a return to paganism. This had the result that philosophy moved toward the front and gradually took the lead in relation to faith. The various directions of Christianity thereby assumed a defensive position, since philosophy and the natural sciences to a great extent came to influence people’s life-view. It is customary to trace the breakthrough of modern philosophy back to Descartes, who in order to get a secure point of departure for philosophy put forward the method of first doubting everything (de omnibus dubitandum est). It must be noted, however, that Kierkegaard, who made this thesis the subject of his first “philosophical deliberations,”786 did not regard Descartes to be the one who broke away from the Middle Ages’ subordination of philosophy to faith. In his preface to Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio quotes from Descartes’ writings and shows that Descartes did not doubt what has been revealed by God.787 From Kierkegaard’s point of view there is no objection to philosophy’s trying to clarify its domain by means of doubt if only, as did Descartes, it respects the priority of faith in relation to thought. Kierkegaard was constrained to take another position, however, with regard to another great thinker—namely, Spinoza. Despite a certain appreciation of Spinoza’s attempt to form a strictly scientific view of existence, Kierkegaard nevertheless is definitely critical of his thought, precisely because Spinoza ceased completely to distinguish between faith and knowledge, because he thought that philosophy could cope with the totality of existence. In this way there was no room in Spinoza for freedom or for the ethical or for a self in Kierkegaard’s understanding of them. In Kierkegaard’s view, Spinoza’s major error was his rejection of a purposiveness in existence (teleology), which is the condition for the freedom of the single individual to make decisions.788 Spinoza looked at all existence from the viewpoint of necessity, sub specie aeterni [under the aspect of eternity].789 Before proceeding to Leibniz and the succeeding major representatives of philosophical thought, it is appropriate to ask why Kierkegaard really did not take any interest at all in British empirical philosophy. This question cannot be answered on the grounds that all the philosophical attention in Kierkegaard’s day was directed to Germany and that he was more or less unfamiliar with English phi-

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losophy. From lectures at the university he did know the names John Locke and David Hume, 790 and if he had had any interest in their philosophy he certainly would have found a way to occupy himself with them. Therefore the answer simply has to be that the two philosophers’ points of departure were totally unacceptable to Kierkegaard—so he did not think it worth his trouble to dig deeply into their thought only to have to reject them. The human being as a “tabula rasa” must have seemed to Kierkegaard a nonentity. To him a person’s inner being has not only the possibility of the eternal but also the qualifications for forming definite concepts and laws, which emerge in a person’s contact with the external world through experience. These qualifications, which are always present in a human being, are not created solely by the empirical. 791 According to Kierkegaard the inner being also contains a higher reality and worth than the external, empirical world. On the other hand, Kierkegaard could learn much from Shakespeare’s writings, in which existential conflicts are portrayed fully and profoundly. Shakespeare’s outlook on life was built precisely upon the view of the human being as a being composed of opposites, a view corresponding to Kierkegaard’s own. Therefore Kierkegaard had high regard for the experience in which Shakespeare in his works makes us participants. One of his pseudonyms rates Shakespeare side by side with the Old Testament,792 because both have passages describing people with intense passions and in tragic situations. Another psuedonym, commenting on one of Shakespeare’s portrayals of the demonic person, says that it “has more value than all the systems of morality, which have no intimation of the nightmares of existence or of their explanation.”793 On the whole, Kierkegaard thinks that the sphere of thought has “actually gone backward” since Leibniz. This he says with special reference to Leibniz’s battle with Bayle, which we touched on earlier and which concerned the most profound questions, questions that lie close also to theology—namely, the relation between reason and faith, God’s goodness, human freedom, the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul—and consequently, as is evident, how the questions about freedom, the ethical, and the self were dominant. As a defender of the Christian truths, Leibniz opposes Bayle, and with

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him philosophical thought still continues to have a servant role in relation to theology and therefore has a place analogous to that which it occupied with relation to theology in the Middle Ages.794 For Leibniz as a philosopher, the Christian truths always have a reality, and he tries to support them with the aid of philosophical arguments. Kierkegaard, however, is not entirely satisfied with the kind of defense Leibniz offers. Leibniz distinguishes between “what is above reason and what is against reason”795 and thinks that faith in the Christian truths is certainly above reason but not against reason, because even though they are higher than reason they are not in conflict with it. But this means that the continuity between reason and that which is higher than reason is not broken, which Kierkegaard thinks ought to be the case if there is to be any mention of faith. To Kierkegaard, the Christian truths are in conflict with reason, and that in turn means that faith must be of paradoxical character. It is interesting that in the above-mentioned argument Kierkegaard actually has to agree with Bayle, who defines the Christian truths as being against reason. That which an adversary of Christianity adduces as an argument against it Kierkegaard counts as evidence of its truth. Thus while Leibniz still persists in the Middle Ages’ attempt to bring harmony between philosophy and theology, Kierkegaard tries to make a sharp distinction between them. The chasm between knowledge and faith can be crossed only by a leap. In Leibniz’s Theodicy we have the last attempt to support the truth of Christianity by way of philosophical argument. After Leibniz, who has his best representatives in Germany, philosophy gradually emancipates itself from the guardianship of theology and thereby more and more from Christianity. This philosophy ends quite consistently as an exponent for a new paganism, because philosophy, as mentioned earlier, is always paganism’s chief instrument for knowing the truth. Very much to the point, Anti-Climacus says modern philosophy is “neither more nor less than paganism.”796

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Kant and the Idealistic Systems In Kant’s philosophy we have the most interesting and enlightening step on the way from the philosophy that still, as with Leibniz, is in the service of theology, to the philosophy that in every regard is selfsufficient and thereby reverts to the stage of paganism. In other words, Kant with his postulates of freedom, the ethical, and the immortality of the soul still goes back to the Christian ideals, but by his emphasis on the categorical significance of the understanding and the autonomy of reason he paves the way for their supremacy in all questions pertaining to knowledge of the truth in theory and in practice. We will look more closely at his philosophical position in order to trace the further consequences of its relation to the three main points in Kierkegaard: freedom, the ethical, and the self. The task that Kant sought to accomplish in his philosophy was to show, first, that all empirical experience is ruled within its borders by a necessary lawfulness, and second, that through practical reason postulates may be made that go beyond empirical experience and make possible the assumption of God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom (of the will), which always have a relation to the ethical. As he often emphasizes, Kant was spurred on to his task by Hume’s scepticism, which made all lawfulness in existence an illusion, since our claim to such lawfulness depends, according to Hume, solely upon custom. In his attempt to demonstrate the necessary lawful connections in nature, Kant’s point of departure was mathematical truths, which, although the presuppositions for them are present in the intellect and thereby are given àpriori, have proved to be applicable to external actuality. But in order to establish that there are objectively valid norms for all empirical experience, he also had to assume that neither time nor space has reality per se but both are only forms of intuition under which the human subject subsumes all experiential material. Kant’s next and decisive step was an attempt to show that, taken as a whole, all the concepts and categories that are used to order our experiences are given prior to these experiences and are present à priori. Kant thereby rejects Hume’s scepticism, because it is the human being himself as a rational being who, with the help

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of the above-mentioned forms of intuition and categories that are valid for all experience, brings order and lawfulness into the perception of the phenomenal world. Kant’s surmounting of scepticism had the result that he regarded the perceived actuality as the actuality of the phenomena, because the forms of intuition and the categories encompass only the stuff given through experience, inasmuch as they cannot reach the absolute reality, “das Ding an sich [the thing in itself ].” With the help of these epistemological principles, Kant thought he was able not only to define accurately the boundaries of phenomenal actuality but also to create room for the postulates of God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul, which together constitute the higher reality. Yet Kierkegaard, who regarded Kant as an honest thinker, was from the outset critical of some central points in his philosophy. He had nothing against Kant’s regarding external reality as only a world of phenomena, because Kierkegaard also held the view that this reality is a relative reality that stands in opposition to an absolute reality corresponding to Kant’s “das Ding an sich.” But he chides Kant for not defining more specifically what is meant by “das Ding an sich”; this he had already done in his doctoral dissertation, in which he goes so far as to say that Kant with his insistence upon “das Ding an sich” sometimes approaches “the mythical.”797 In this connection Kierkegaard also calls his theory of “radical evil” a myth.798 When Kierkegaard in a later journal entry says that Kant ought to have used “radical evil” in a category by itself, namely, the category of the paradox, the same applies to “das Ding an sich,” because both fall within the category of “the inexplicable.”799 As early as 1834 Kierkegaard criticizes Kant’s thinking on dogmatics, declaring that he did not attribute essential importance to the Christian doctrine of Atonement, because, according to Kant, a person can improve himself by his own unaided efforts, whereby God “comes to play a very subordinate role.”800 We will now consider the similarities and differences in Kant’s and Kierkegaard’s treatment of the three central issues: freedom, the ethical, and the self. They agree that these are the most significant issues in human existence and that they involve a supersensory reality that is higher than the empirical and the phenomenal. Kierkegaard would

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also agree with Kant that there cannot be any theoretical grounds for the concepts that express a supersensory reality, but only practical, that is, existential grounds. These concepts, in addition to the concept of God as the highest reality, pertain to existence. On the other hand, there is a difference in the way Kant and Kierkegaard define these concepts more closely and in how they use them in their thinking. With regard to freedom, Kant, in order to establish the unconditional validity of the principle of causality in the phenomenal world, had to assume necessity as a fundamental rule for all phenomenal actuality. Here Kant’s attempt to repudiate Hume’s attack on the principle of causality led him consistently to a onesidedness, since he thought he had to postulate that not only nature but also the human being’s empirical actuality is ruled by necessity. He could not come to terms with any discretionary, noncausal connection within the lawfulness of phenomena. For Kierkegaard, however, everything that comes into existence belongs in principle under freedom.801 But at the same time every coming into existence contains both a qualification of necessity and of freedom, yet in such a way that on the lower levels it is necessity that dominates, while on the higher levels it is freedom that continually has predominance over necessity. Kierkegaard has this schema of the relation between freedom and necessity ascend step by step from the areas ruled principally by necessity to those that increasingly come under the qualification of freedom. Thus, according to Kierkegaard, nature comes primarily under necessity, whereas freedom can assert itself more and more vis à vis necessity in a human being’s existential development. Kant, however, on the basis of his presuppositions, had to carry through a sharp division between the spheres of freedom and necessity. On the one side, he maintains, as previously mentioned, that not only nature but a human being’s entire phenomenal actuality is determined; but on the other side he thinks that a human being as a rational being has autonomy and freedom, whereby in the deeper sense he becomes free and responsible. Kant goes to great efforts to show how a human being as a free being must relate himself to his phenomenal actuality when freedom cannot intervene in the causal coherence of the phenomena. As a result, freedom and necessity must

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run parallel to each other. Kant illustrates this by saying: “It may be admitted that if it were possible for us to have so deep an insight into a man’s character as shown both in inner and outer actions, that every, even the least, incentive to these actions and all external occasions which affect them were so known to us that his future conduct could be predicted with as great a certainty as the occurrence of a solar or lunar eclipse, we could nevertheless still assert that the man is free.”802 This doctrine of “the existence of freedom together with necessity” Schopenhauer calls “the greatest of all accomplishments of human thoughtfulness,”803 and yet this solution must be said to be unsatisfactory, because it lets the two sides of human existence run parallel to each other without the possibility that freedom can intervene in existence. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, shows throughout his whole authorship how freedom and necessity, as expressions of an existential actuality, continually stand in a very definite relation to each other, depending on which level of existence a person finds himself. Contrary to Kant, Kierkegaard thinks that within the lower levels of existence (phenomenal actuality), therefore prior to a person’s attainment of essential freedom, he already has a relative freedom. This manifests itself in the human being’s ability to create possibilities through reflection, whereby he is able to rise above empirical actuality; through possibility he can intervene in the causality in this actuality. The two different views of freedom in Kant and Kierkegaard meet on one point. For Kierkegaard, too, freedom in the proper sense is first found within the spiritual sphere of existence, which corresponds to Kant’s view of freedom as belonging to the supersensory world. But the difference appears again in the way in which this freedom is attained. For Kant freedom is given in and with the human person as a rational and autonomous being. For Kierkegaard the way to true freedom is arduous and goes through the special existential effort that Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms call the movement of infinity; only after the individual has concentrated his entire will on making this movement is the possibility present that this freedom can be achieved. It is noteworthy that the meticulous and honest Kant suspected a weakness at this point in his deduction of the concept of freedom. In

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several places, for example in The Critique of Practical Reason, we find signs of defining the way to freedom as going through “pain” or “the sensation of displeasure.”804 Furthermore, it must be added that Kant also designates these states as the negative that precedes the positive qualification of freedom, which corresponds in Kierkegaard to the movement of infinity as a negative movement that is to make room for the positive. Kant, however, could not draw practical conclusions from this insight, because he established freedom and necessity as two categories that cannot enter into a relation to each other or form a synthesis, as in Kierkegaard. To Kierkegaard, a human being’s task is to bring these two opposites into a relation to each other. With regard to the ethical, Kant, like Kierkegaard, understands it as something absolute. This is articulated in his “categorical imperative,” which reads: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”805 This rule, according to Kant’s own statement, is formulated abstractly in order to be universally valid. Thus, just as with freedom, the difficulty with regard to the ethical is to bring it into a concrete relation to the multiplicity of the world, whereas Kierkegaard can describe in detail how the various forms of the ethical can be actualized on the different levels of existence. But the major deficiency in Kant is that he one-sidedly bases the ethical upon human autonomy. In other words, Kant in many places clearly rejects the basing of ethics upon the relation to God, even though he introduces the concept of God as a postulate from the side of practical reason. For Kant, God becomes pure possibility, an “as if,”806 that never gets any existential meaning for a person’s action. With Kant’s one-sided emphasis on the principle of autonomy, neither the personal nor the religious aspect of freedom comes into its own. Kierkegaard voices this in the following criticism of Kant’s ethics: Real self-redoubling (Selvfordoblelse) without a constraining third factor outside oneself is an impossibility and makes any such existing into illusion or imaginative constructing.

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Kant was of the opinion that a human being is his own law (autonomy)—that is, he binds himself under the law that he himself gave himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or imaginative constructing is posited. This is not being rigorously earnest any more than Sancho Panza’s self-administered blows to his own bottom were vigorous. It is impossible for me to be really any more rigorous in A than I am or wish to be in B. Constraint there must be if it is going to be in earnest. If I am bound by nothing higher than myself and I am to bind myself, where would I get the rigorousness as A, the binder, which I do not have as B, who is supposed to be bound, when A and B are the same self.807

Here Kierkegaard expresses quite clearly that Kant’s ethics lacks the religious aspect that always has its beginning in the relationship to God, and without which all ethical earnestness vanishes. Earnestness can be maintained only if ethics is traced back to God’s law as the criterion. Without this criterion the concept of sin also vanishes.808 By saying that “Real self-redoubling without a constraining third factor outside oneself is an impossibility,” Kierkegaard is pointing out that the personal aspect also is dropped when “a third”—that is, God—is not present. By using the expression “self-redoubling” instead of “redoubling” Kierkegaard suggests that in Kant it is the person himself who is to transform himself. He ordinarily uses the word redoubling809 when it is a question of the personal aspect of ethics, which finds its expression in the movement of inward deepening. Since it is freedom and the ethical that constitute the self, and since these two issues do not receive a satisfactory solution in Kant, the whole question of the self could not receive it either. Kant’s conclusion with regard to this was that he advanced the postulate of the immortality of the soul. But here, too, it is a purely abstract qualification, since he lacks the concrete, existential basis that was the presupposition for Kierkegaard’s solution of this issue. So even if Kant took the principle of personality as the point of departure for his philosophy, he did not succeed in solving the question of the self in an adequate way. Kant thought that he could establish the validity of freedom, the ethical, and the immortality of the soul through philosophy and criti-

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cal thinking. This was his tribute to theology, but the way he did it opened precisely the door to an acknowledgment of the complete dominance of critical, philosophical thought over theology. This, as previously mentioned, became the beginning of the modern, more conscious paganism that thereafter crystallizes in various aspects of German philosophy. With his critical and systematic thinking, Kant from his side attempted to combine the two world-historical formations, paganism and Christianity, into a coherent unity, in which, however, his re-interpreted weft of Christianity holds the priority.810 It is very significant that as early as in his doctoral dissertation Kierkegaard clearly sees the consequences that Kant’s philosophy, seen from the “world-historical” point of view, must have, that “modern speculative thought, feeling itself mature and come of age, became tired of the guardianship in which it had lived hitherto under dogmatism, and like the prodigal son went to its father and demanded that he divide and share the inheritance with him.” He goes on to say that “Kant lacks the negative infinity,”811 meaning that he has not consistently made the movement of infinity that would have given him a new point of departure. How this movement of infinity is effected, Kierkegaard illustrates fully in The Concept of Irony with the example of Socrates. In this regard Socrates is far ahead of Kant, and while Socrates through the movement of infinity makes room for personal ethics, to which Kant never arrived at all, and goes beyond paganism, Kant moves back to paganism. From Kierkegaard’s point of view it was therefore a deficiency in Kant’s philosophy that he did not lead it out of its anti-dogmatic and sceptical attitude to the borderline concept where he could set the paradox as the line of demarcation between knowledge and faith, and where freedom, the ethical, and the self could also get a new point of departure. Kierkegaard nevertheless emphasizes again and again that Kant is an honest thinker, because despite his critical idealism he continually holds fast to a distinction between what is thought and what is real.812 J. G. Fichte, on the other hand, in his first period of total concentration on the subject, on the I, carried through a movement of infinity. He thereby reached a new point of departure, but his mistake was that on the basis of this absolute position he himself would cre-

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ate the world and things. He did indeed come to the negative infinity but lacked the positive. On this Kierkegaard says more specifically in The Concept of Irony: “But since Fichte in his I-I insisted on abstract identity in this way and in his ideal kingdom would have nothing to do with actuality, he achieved the absolute beginning, and proceeding from that, as has so frequently been discussed, he wanted to construct the world. The I became the constituting entity. But since the I was merely formally understood and consequently negatively, Fichte actually went no further than the infinite, elastic molimina [efforts] toward a beginning.”813 This focus in “the earlier Fichte” provided the incentive for the romantic movement in Germany, which by appropriating Fichte’s concept of the subject as the infinite, constituting principle attempted to neutralize the given actuality. Therefore Fichte, even though in his later period he tried to repair his one-sidedness by drawing concrete ethical elements into his philosophy, was unable to solve the issue of giving philosophy a new beginning. The question now is: from what deeper deliberations and viewpoints does Kierkegaard criticize Kant’s and Fichte’s philosophical views? The answer to this question will not only retrospectively provide the basis for his rejection of Kant and Fichte, and the difference in this rejection, but in addition show why he also had to take a critical stance to Schelling and especially to Hegel. The answer is found in the copious comments Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms make about the inadequacy of idealistic systems. On the basis of these, the following reason for his criticism can be derived. Kierkegaard was convinced that philosophy, after having begun to emancipate itself from theology and having commenced with Kant to institute critical investigations on its own base and its own presuppositions, had to discover a new positive foundation. Philosophical thought now found itself in a situation comparable to that in Socrates’ time, when philosophy tried to free itself from the traditional religious conceptions. Socrates tried to find a new point of departure for thought and the human being’s relation to existence by reflecting on the principles he found in his own inner being. In order to achieve this he first had to neutralize the external actuality by means of irony.

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Through irony as an intellectual form of the movement of infinity, he arrived at the three ideas—the beautiful, the true, and the good— as something absolute in relation to the perishable world. After this he tries as an ethicist to actualize the idea of the good in his existence. In this way Socrates surmounts the mythological, religious ideas prevailing in his day and grounds his life-view on the truth a person finds in his inner being. Kierkegaard was now of the opinion that philosophy, also in the modern period, should attempt, but on a higher plane, to find the eternal point of departure in the person and thereby attain the ethical, especially in its personal aspect. This ethical would still lie entirely within immanence, and in the attempt to actualize it a person would discover whether he would by himself be able to actualize the absolute ethical requirement. The task would now consist in relating himself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to relative things, as Kierkegaard later had Climacus formulate it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Through his attempt to actualize this difficult requirement, a person would not merely discover the boundary of his capability but also arrive at the very boundary of immanence, where Christianity will come to stand before it as the absolute paradox. In this way with the aid of philosophy a person can be led to the ethical, and through the relation to the absolute this movement also gains a religious element; therefore Climacus can later designate it as “religiousness A.” Further than this a human being cannot go on the strength of his given qualifications, neither with regard to knowledge nor to existence. If he is to go any further, his only possibility is a transcendence that can intervene in a person’s existence. According to Kierkegaard, the movement sketched here would be the only dialectically as well as existentially defensible mode of procedure that modern philosophy could use if it would resolve in a positive way the scepticism and crisis that Kant’s philosophy in particular had made acute. Kant himself, as mentioned earlier, was not capable of making the movement of infinity in a consistent way and of arriving at the position that Kierkegaard believed it was philosophy’s task to reach in order to emerge from scepticism. Kant remained standing at the halfway point; he did not let go of theology completely, but neither did he by way of philosophy arrive at the

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personal ethics whereby he could have exhausted the domain of immanence and could have reached theology on a higher plane. Fichte, however, seems to have come closer to accomplishing the task that according to Kierkegaard was the task of philosophy. He arrived at the negative infinity, and in his later attempts to draw in the ethical he seems to have approached the positive that Kierkegaard sought. What Kierkegaard values in Fichte is his ethical pathos, but he nevertheless finds his conception of the ethical too abstract, and he criticizes in particular his comments on repentance, which Fichte believes can become an obstacle to ethical action. To Kierkegaard this was a sign that Fichte’s personal ethics had no relation whatever to the higher power that is the central condition for all forms of ethics. In the following quotation Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Frater Taciturnus emphasizes both the positive and the negative side in Fichte: “Thus it seems inexplicable how that powerful thinker Fichte could assume that there was no time for the man of action to repent, and all the more so because this energetic and, in the noble Greek sense, honest philosopher had a great conception of a person’s actions taking place only in the internal.”814 Consequently, for the reasons here stated, Fichte, too, could not find a solution satisfactory to Kierkegaard to the issues surrounding freedom, the ethical, and the self. Schelling, who was five years younger than Hegel, began to work as a philosophical author much earlier than Hegel and had been introduced into Denmark by Henrik Steffens in 1802. Hegel first began to exercise his influence about the time Kierkegaard became a university student (1830). Therefore it was especially Hegel’s philosophy that Kierkegaard encountered during his student days and to whom he tried to take a position as he became more and more clear about his own theological and philosophical position. His attitude grew more and more negative as he gradually discovered that Hegel, too, despite his claims, had not been able to lead philosophy to the new point of departure that could put an end to the scepticism in which philosophy found itself. Inasmuch as Schelling after Hegel’s death announced that he would come with a positive philosophy as the successor to what Kierkegaard considered to be Hegel’s negative philosophy, Kierkegaard did indeed expect something new from this

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side, while he himself still worked persistently to get to the depths of the crucial philosophical and theological questions. That Kierkegaard gave some credence to Schelling’s announcements is evident in the following note written in 1840: “The view that Hegel is a parenthesis in Schelling seems to be more and more manifest; we are only waiting for the parenthesis to be closed.”815 Yet it is not improbable that Kierkegaard had already at that time reached such wide-ranging conclusions from his specific philosophical and theological studies that he himself was eyeing the possibility of giving a solution to the challenge of scepticism from philosophy.816 Therefore it is possible that one of the reasons he went to Berlin in 1841 after completing his doctoral dissertation was that he wanted to find out for himself whether Schelling, who had just been appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, had now managed to close the “parenthesis” that Hegel’s philosophy was supposed to form within Schelling’s own philosophy. What Kierkegaard wanted to hear in particular was how Schelling would define the new positive actuality that would stand in contrast to Hegel’s negative concept of actuality. How great Kierkegaard’s curiosity and eagerness were comes out in the following journal entry: “I am so happy to have heard Schelling’s second lecture—indescribably. I have been pining and thinking mournful thoughts long enough. The embryonic child of thought leapt for joy within me, as in Elizabeth, when he mentioned the word ‘actuality’ in connection with the relation of philosophy to actuality. I remember almost every word he said after that. Here, perhaps, clarity can be achieved. This one word recalled all my philosophical pains and sufferings.”817 Kierkegaard’s enthusiastic anticipation was great; just as great was his subsequent disappointment over Schelling’s brilliant but often very unclear exposition of the positive philosophy. It utterly failed to reach the depths Kierkegaard presumably had expected. Thereafter his criticism of Schelling’s philosophy became severe, but according to the notes Kierkegaard took on these lectures818 the criticism seems justified. In a letter to his friend Emil Boesen he airs his disappointment: “Schelling talks endless nonsense both in an extensive and an intensive sense.”819

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After Kierkegaard realized that Schelling was completely incapable of giving a positive answer to the questions raised by Kant’s philosophy, he concentrated his criticism against Hegel, who in Kierkegaard’s view had left no stone unturned to conquer “Kant’s scepticism”820 but who nevertheless ended up banalizing the issues of philosophy and creating confusion in the relation between philosophy and Christianity. He directs his criticism of Hegel primarily on three points: (1) Hegel’s inadequate attempt to create a new point of departure for philosophy, (2) his situating of philosophy in relation to theology, (3) his misleading views on the boundary of immanence and its possible relation to transcendence. With regard to the first point, Kierkegaard fully acknowledges Hegel’s efforts to overcome the scepticism that Kant had put between thought and actuality, because Hegel really did try to find a new beginning for philosophical thought. But at the same time he points out that Hegel was not able to penetrate deeply enough into this whole complex of issues, with the result that he failed to bring his new point of departure into a concrete relation to individual existence. Kierkegaard voices this very clearly in a journal entry in 1840: “On the whole one has to say that modern philosophy, even in its most grandiose forms, nevertheless is really only an introduction to making it possible to philosophize. Hegel undeniably completes— but only the development that had its beginning with Kant and was directed toward knowledge. In Hegel one finds in a more profound form that which earlier philosophy unreflectively assumed as a beginning—that on the whole there is reality in thought. But the whole line of thought proceeding from this assumption (or now happy over this result) was entering into genuine anthropological contemplation, which has not yet been undertaken.”821 Here Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that one has arrived “in a more profound form” at the presupposition with which philosophy prior to Kant worked—namely, that there is reality in thought.822 Hegel thereby recreated on a higher level the relation between actuality and thought, but he did not arrive at what Kierkegaard considered to be the major issue—namely, the human being himself as a concrete, existential actuality. The result of this was that Hegel’s thinking became abstract. In this connection Vigilius Haufniensis says: “Hegel’s

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misfortune is exactly that he wants to maintain the new quality and yet does not want to do it, since he wants to do it in logic, which, as soon as this is recognized, must acquire a different consciousness of itself and of its significance.”823 It is precisely Hegel’s stopping at the logical as the central issue and his assumption “that the logical is the existential and that the principle of contradiction is abrogated”824 that Climacus in particular directs his sweeping attack in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Hegel’s inadequacy was primarily that he was unclear about “the dialectic of the beginning,” which demanded a real leap if a concrete reality was to be reached. This leap can be made only by a resolution and not at all by way of abstract thought. Climacus also points out that if Hegel had attempted in all earnestness to “abstract from everything” by thinking he would have discovered the limit of his capability and become aware of the leap not merely as a phenomenon within pure thought but as the leap that can constitute “the absolute beginning.” Without this leap the result will be that one still remains within the “spurious infinity.”825 If Hegel had accomplished a real leap, he would have become aware that “the individual’s own ethical actuality is the only actuality.” On the subject of Hegel’s failure to understand the individual’s ethical actuality and his remaining within “pure thought” Climacus says: “. . . instead of putting a stop to Kant’s deviation, which brought actuality into relation to thinking, instead of referring actuality to the ethical, Hegel certainly went further, inasmuch as he became fantastical and overcame the skepticism of idealism by means of pure thinking, which is a hypothesis and, although it does not proclaim itself as such, is fantastical.”826 Thus Hegel did not arrive at the new point of departure for philosophy, because he did not become deeply involved with the ethical or, to put it in Kierkegaard’s words: “In relation to the confusing of thinking by self-reflection, ethics is the only salvation and Hegel simply did not understand ethics.”827 The next point that occasioned Kierkegaard’s criticism was, as mentioned earlier, that Hegel’s philosophy had created confusion not merely by jumbling the issues of philosophy and theology together but especially by placing philosophy higher than theology. In his authorship Kierkegaard tries carefully to demarcate exactly these two

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totalities, at the same time that he clearly substantiated why faith and especially Christian faith will always stand higher than philosophical thought. This is demonstrated by means of existential examples. For example, it is shown that the reality of faith, with which Socrates came in contact after having made the movement of infinity, cannot be understood on the basis of Hegel’s speculative concept of faith. Johannes de Silentio says of this: “If faith is nothing more than philosophy makes it out to be, then even Socrates went further, much further, instead of the reverse—that he did not attain it. In an intellectual sense, he did make the movement of infinity. His ignorance is the infinite resignation. This task alone is a suitable one for human capabilities, even though it is disdained these days; but only when this has been done, only when the individual has emptied himself in the infinite, only then has the point been reached where faith can break through.”828 Since speculative thought does not know anything about the movement of infinity, which is a presupposition for proceeding any further in the existential sense, it stands, despite all its systematic knowledge, behind Socrates, who arrived at the ethical within immanence and actualized it in his existence. Moreover, from an existential point of view, Abraham stands higher than Socrates, because his action is stipulated by a personal, eternal power. Speculative thought has to explain Abraham’s conduct as paradoxical and absurd. If philosophical speculation would stoutly hold to a distinction between what it can understand and what is beyond the boundary of philosophical knowledge, it would discover the absurd as its boundary. By holding fast to this distinction, philosophy would discover, when it encounters Christianity, that here it stands face to face with an absolute paradox. If philosophy does not wish to become involved with the paradox, it should at least allow it to stand. It is reprehensible, however, to obliterate the boundary between the two qualitatively different spheres. Sometime later Kierkegaard says of this: “On the whole, the most profound Hegelian confusion with regard to Christianity is that it has no time or understanding for posing the Christian issue first of all before one comprehends.”829 Kierkegaard himself and his pseudonyms, having learned from Hegel’s attempt by way of speculation to have philosophy and dogmatics merge in a higher unity,

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showed convincingly that there is a qualitative difference between them. It is in the nature of the case that if “human knowledge” cannot cope with a specific form of reality, namely the reality that must seem absurd, then this reality must be judged by a higher authority than philosophy. Thereby the domain of philosophy is placed on a lower level than the reality that dogmatics informs us about. By means of his unique dialectic of communication, Kierkegaard explains in great detail in his authorship why faith’s reality lies within a higher sphere than philosophy’s. The highest philosophy can do is to point to the eternal ideas in humankind, especially to the idea of the good; this can provide a point of departure for the ethical within the sphere of the human. In his attempt to actualize this ethical, a person will be led to the border of immanence not only in theory but also in practice. Hegel completely failed to take such a factual result of philosophy into consideration in his systematic thinking. Therefore Kierkegaard had to criticize Hegel for the inadequacy of his view of immanence and its possible relation to transcendence—which brings us to the third point in Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel. In a journal entry in 1844 commenting on Hegel’s statement at the beginning of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy,830 Kierkegaard notes that Hegel “pursues studies toward unity,” meaning that he wants to look at all existence under the viewpoint of immanence. Parenthetically speaking, it might seem as if Hegel has been spurred on to this endeavor of his by Kant’s statements at the end of his Critique of Pure Reason. Here he says that there is so much material created by “the sheer self-development of reason” that is already joined “in a system of human knowledge” that it will not be difficult to work up this material together into a unity. Kant himself thought he would have to be satisfied with solving the issues pertaining to “the architectonic of all knowledge arising from pure reason.” But the next possible task would be to build up a coherent system of knowledge “from the ruins of ancient systems.”831 In any case, Hegel threw himself zealously and thoroughly into the study of the religious and philosophical thought of the human race in order to provide a systematic and coherent unity, for which, according to Kant’s view, there was

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already material enough in all that which human reason had developed through the ages. In this way everything in Hegel was brought under the supremacy of reason and no room was left for a transcendent reality that could maintain its independence over against a system that immanently embraced all forms of being. He thereby not only excluded the idea of a possible transcendence but also narrowed the concept of immanence itself by failing to come to the deeper ethics within it. His effort to bring actuality together into a systematic unity left him standing at an immanence that lay entirely on the intellectual plane and could be governed by “pure thought.”832 Hegel’s immanence thereby became a “logical immanence,”833 in which the ethical, the first step of which involves a person’s attempt to relate his life to the absolute good, is ruled out. It was precisely this ethical that Socrates tried to actualize in his life. Hegel failed to come that far, and that is why Kierkegaard so often accuses Hegel of lacking an ethics.834 According to Kierkegaard, immanence embraces two main levels. The first is that which can be mastered by thought and where the human being arrives at ideas of the absolute; the second level, which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym also calls “the subsequent immanence,”835 embraces also a person’s ethical efforts within immanence as he tries to relate himself existentially to the absolute. In his attempt to actualize the absolute ethical goals, he approaches the boundary of immanence, with the result that within the domain of Christianity he encounters the possibility of a transcendence. It is this last position of immanence that Climacus describes with the words: “. . . to break in this way with understanding and thinking and immanence, in order then to lose the last foothold of immanence, the eternity behind.”836 Consequently, in making this break a person surrenders not only the relation to the temporal but also to that which is the most firmly fixed point within immanence, namely, recollection, “the eternity behind,” which until now has in the existential sense provided the basis for the ethical. But when Christianity then offers the Atonement, it will also intensify the ethical requirements. Therefore the break that Climacus describes here presupposes a knowledge of the transcendent that can create a new positive point of departure.

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Hegel had this knowledge, but, judging from everything we know about his system and his existence, he never ventured as far as the last border of immanence. Since Hegel did not reach the absolute as an existential qualification, which would require both an absolute relation to the absolute and an absolute relation to oneself, this means that the ethical as well as freedom and the self lose their essential significance, which first appears in the single individual’s relation to the eternal. Therefore Hegel’s ethics remains within relativity and is worked out in moral philosophy and political science. Freedom, too, becomes relative in Hegel. According to Kierkegaard, there can be a question of freedom only in connection with a relation to the eternal. This is the meaning of, for example, the following sentence: “Like freedom, truth is the eternal. If the eternal is not, there is neither truth nor freedom.”837 Furthermore, if freedom is understood to be within finitude, it is always subordinate to necessity. Hegel, too, clearly voices this in his exposition on freedom in the course of world-historical development: “Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt im Bewusstseyn der Freiheit,—ein Fortschritt, den wir in seiner Notwendigkeit zu erkennen haben [The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom—a progress whose development, according to the necessity of its nature, it is our business to investigate].”838 Here Hegel unambiguously states that freedom is to be recognized in its necessity; therefore it ultimately is necessity that rules freedom, which is exactly the opposite of Kierkegaard’s view, according to which it is freedom that on the highest level ultimately dominates necessity. Hegel’s view of the self also had to bear the impress of the exclusion in his system of any existential meaning of the eternal in the human being. Then the self becomes only a vanishing element in the unfolding of the absolute idea. Poul M. Møller, in speaking of Hegel’s view of the individual existence, had stated earlier that individuals become merely “temporary forms of the process of spirit determinable with logical necessity. According to the basic hypothesis, every finite rational being becomes merely a vanishing ripple in the ocean of thought, the undulation of which is determined by undeviating necessity.”839 This devaluation of the human personality can be shown by several of Hegel’s statements; but the most important indicator of

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it is the fact that on the whole the personal ethical aspect and the religious-ethical aspect are lacking in Hegel. But it is precisely these aspects that create the possibility for the coming into existence of the self in individual existence. In summary, according to Kierkegaard, it can be said that Hegel, too, has not satisfactorily resolved the issue with regard to freedom, the ethical, and the self. If he had carried through the movement of infinity as an existential act, these qualifications would have acquired an absolute meaning, but without this movement they had to have only a relative character. Hegel’s philosophy, in relation to Kant’s, thereby signifies a retrogression. This retrogression manifests itself also in the fact that Hegel, who speaks so much of reason and its fundamental role in the system, actually narrows its meaning. For Kant it was reason that as a higher form of knowing framed the postulates of God, the ethical, freedom, and the self, understood as eternal qualifications that could never acquire the character of the finite inasmuch as they involved the supersensory.840 Hegel, on the other hand, draws reason all the way into the sphere of the finite. In his preface to The Philosophy of Right, where he first begins his attack on “the assertion of a beyond,” he maintains that the given actuality is indistinguishable from reason: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”841 Therefore Hegel’s ethics has, as stated, its highest expression in the relation to the state and in a glorification of the monarch as the sovereign authority, which in reality is indeed paganism.842 In this way Hegel established the foundation for the “systematiske Rutschen [systematic sliding]”843 away from Christianity. Subsequently, with Hegel as a point of departure, it was not difficult for the left-wing Hegelians, Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, to carry through a movement leading to an obvious pagan position. The next step was made by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who, by consistently carrying through their materialistic view of life, end as declared opponents of Christianity. It was not only Hegel’s dialectic in a modified form that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could borrow from Hegel and incorporate in their philosophy, but also his view of freedom,844 the ethical, and individuals as vanishing elements, that Marx and Engels could take over from Hegel and incorporate into their phi-

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losophy. Since these concepts in Hegel did not reach any further than finite, relative actuality, it was not at all difficult to adapt them to materialistic points of view. In this way Marx and Engels—aided by the central concepts in Hegel’s philosophy, for which they, despite its idealistic point of departure, had great respect, and also for Judaism’s very noble but utopian idea of a Messianism845 that was supposed to bring justice on earth and earthly happiness to all peoples—could create a system the implementation of which would ultimately mean the end of Christianity. Furthermore it must be noted that Friedrich Nietzsche’s atheistic and anti-Christian life-philosophy is also to be understood only against the background of the soil for paganism that Hegel’s philosophy had prepared.

The Limitations of the Natural Sciences But there was also another branch of knowledge, the natural sciences, that was beginning to press its claims and that in Kierkegaard’s opinion promoted the devaluation of all higher values. He was quite early aware that the one-sided infatuation with the findings of the natural sciences could be a threat to the acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the reality of spirit that is the distinctive mark of the human being above all other creatures. The advance of the natural sciences and the enthusiasm for them encourage people’s attachment solely to earthly goals and thereby diminish interest in the values lying beyond the narrow earthly horizon. This one-sided interest in the natural scientific disciplines supports the movement toward paganism, also in the polemical form it has taken in materialistic and atheistic trends. Therefore it is not by chance that all these movements view nature as the one and only fixed point of departure and that to them the spiritual becomes only secondary. Kierkegaard perceived a danger of degrading the human being as a spiritual entity, and he launched a sharp attack on the uncritical enthusiasm for the conquests of the natural sciences. He noted his comments in his journals, especially in connection with his reading

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of C. G. Carus’s book, Psyche, Zur Entwicklungsgeschicthe der Seele [On the Development of the Soul].846 In this book the author attempts to establish the evolutionary theory of humankind. According to Carus, the unconscious forms the basis for the conscious, or as Kierkegaard quotes from Carus: “The key to the knowledge of conscious mental life lies in the unconscious.” What Kierkegaard particularly criticizes in Carus is the inconsistency in the presentation of his theory. On the one hand, Carus claims that the conscious comes through “a miracle,” but at the same time he speaks of a development in which everything happens “little by little,” and where no reference is made to the decisive leap that the miracle must signify. Kierkegaard calls Carus’s procedure “sophistical” and his science “sophistical physiology,” since it does not clearly distinguish between the boundary of our knowledge and what science cannot explain. But Kierkegaard is even more severely critical of “materialistic physiology”—which he labels “comic” because it believes “that by putting to death one finds the spirit that gives life.”847 In other words, the materialist begins with a denial of life, since he begins with the lifeless (matter) as primary and on that basis tries to work out an explanation of life itself. Kierkegaard’s main view of the relation of the natural sciences to the sphere of the spiritual is that natural scientific research—in this case the biological sciences—can never have the competence to speak about spiritual matters. As he states it: “If there were anything by way of the natural sciences that would help define spirit, I should be the first to get hold of a microscope, and I think my perserverence would equal anyone’s. But when by qualitative dialectic I easily perceive that, qualitatively understood, in 100,000 years the world will not have advanced one single step, I shall do the very opposite, preserve my soul and not waste one single second of my life on curiosity.”848 Therefore he ironizes also over the sober busyness the natural science researcher exhibits, as if the most important matter of all could be reached along this road: It does no good to get involved with the natural sciences. We stand there defenseless and utterly without control. The researcher immediately begins to distract us with his particular projects—

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When Kierkegaard speaks in this way, it is consistent with his conviction of the supreme importance of the ethical and that the natural sciences can never provide humankind with knowledge of that. Care must rather be taken lest the natural sciences lead the development astray. It is this danger that Kierkegaard is thinking of when he says: “Ultimately all corruption will come from the natural sciences.”850 He does not allow himself to be impressed by the many “volumes” and by the “enormous apparatus”851 of the natural sciences, all of which cannot explain life’s central issues, inasmuch as the domain of the natural sciences lies within “the spurious infinity.”852 But most people will not be able to perceive these connections, and they will onesidedly let themselves be overawed and influenced by the discoveries of the natural sciences. Kierkegaard perceives that as a result of this development the natural sciences “will harness all humankind;”853 indeed, it can end up becoming a form of religion, and in any case it will promote the relapse into various forms of paganism.”854 We find here a similarity to the trends produced by Hegel’s system. Therefore Kierkegaard could also say: “The conflict with the objections of the natural sciences and the struggle related to this are generally analogous to the conflict with the system.” Therefore the method that is to be used to set the natural sciences in their proper place must resemble the one Climacus in particular employed against the system. One must point out the inconsistencies and weaknesses and repudiate groundless positions that build merely upon a multiplicity of facts without being able to place them in any deeper connection. Kierkegaard adds further that “A sense of humor and personal courage are what is needed—a sense of humor to show how ridiculous the objection is, since no matter

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how scientifically justified natural science is, it misses the point in ‘religion’ and lacks the personal courage to dare to fear God more than people.”855 What Kierkegaard feared in particular was that the natural sciences would be instrumental in giving people quantitative criteria in other spheres of existence also and in this way relativize the ethical until it would lose its unconditional and absolute character. Therefore he can express himself in the following dismissive way about the increasingly dominant role of the natural sciences: “O dreadful sophistry that expands microscopically and telescopically in volume after volume and yet, qualitatively understood, yields nothing but does deceive people out of the simple, profound, passionate wonder and admiration that gives impetus to the ethical.”856 Kierkegaard’s view of the natural sciences may seem negative and one-sided. Since he wrote down his reflections on scientific research, especially with regard to “physiology,” that is, the biological sciences, these have achieved noteworthy results. But if we take as an example some statements by one of the foremost researchers in this area— namely, the biologist and Nobel prizewinner Jacques Monod—we see clearly that the goal, to give an objective explanation of the origin and development of life, still lies far out in the future and can be supported only by faith that this will eventually happen. In his book Le hasard et la necessitè,857Jacques Monod mentions the new conquests in biology but at the same time points out that at the crucial point one comes up against “the actual ‘sound barrier’” and goes on to say: “The riddle remains—and it veils a question of supreme interest”858 —namely, how life could originate. The interesting thing in Monod is that “the postulate of objectivity”859 builds upon an “ethics of knowledge” that in turn has “the ethical choice” as a presupposition. Here Monod makes what AntiClimacus would call despair’s flight into the “lofty heroism”860 that consciously wants to relate to existence with objective indifference. The fact that this heroism is based on an ethical resolution clearly shows its subjective personal point of departure. Thus objectivity here presupposes in the highest degree the subjectivity that Monod wishes to avoid.

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Faced with philosophy’s and the natural sciences’ leveling of spiritual values and the degrading of the meaning of the single individual, not even the Christian Church was able to build up an adequate counterweight. Kierkegaard soon realized that Protestantism, especially in Denmark, was eager to accommodate theology to Hegel’s philosophy, which was considered to be the highest production of philosophical thought. Moreover, it gradually became more and more clear to him that in practice people lived by completely different norms than those of Christianity. Therefore he regarded his main task to be to state what Christianity is and what meaning it should have for the individual person. Through his profound and comprehensive studies and his existential experiences, he thought that he had found his way to the Christianity that once had overcome the world and that once again could take up the battle against all the leveling and disintegrating trends. Just as Kierkegaard had made the highest demands with regard to philosophy, he now, but even more fully and with a deeper basis, carried Christianity step by step to its highest ideality in a way that has already been shown in the present study. Both philosophy and Christianity were in this way existentially carried to their ultimate consequences. This was accomplished, as he himself says, by using “poetical writers (pseudonyms), ‘poetized thinkers,’ who persistently pursue a line of thought unilaterally to its uttermost.”861 Climacus, for example, took philosophy to its furthest border, while AntiClimacus did the same for Christianity. Therefore it must not be forgotten that these portrayals are ideals to which Kierkegaard himself as an existing person had to determine his personal relation. He would never, for instance, believe that his own existence could be identified with the “supreme ideality”862 as presented by Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity. As for his own personal position, he said, “I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower than AntiClimacus,”863 meaning that he went beyond what philosophy and paganism as forms of existence could give him but was far from Christianity’s highest ideal.

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Kierkegaard’s Perspectives on the Future With his consistent thinking through of the existential problems in both philosophy and theology, Kierkegaard develops clear criteria for the examining and demarcating of every possible existential level lying within the domains of philosophy and theology. Philosophy’s highest goal, as stated, is to carry human knowledge and existence to the uttermost boundary of immanence. The highest level to be reached within Christianity is the relationship to the transcendent reality (that is, to Christ as the revealed truth), which may be defined as martyrdom, and in which both the right use of grace and a person’s existential submission to the ideal reach their culmination. Precisely because the criteria for philosophy and theology are taken to their extreme in this way, they lend themselves to a clear examination of all the lower positions. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century, when philosophers and theologians began to realize the seriousness of the spiritual crisis, were enlightenment and assistance sought in Kierkegaard’s dialectics of existence, which became the beginning of both existential theology and existential philosophy. One would now think that thereby the first earnest steps to a new rebuilding of values would be made. But this was not the case, because as yet there was no penetrating understanding, either in philosophy or in theology, of the deepest intentions of Kierkegaard’s life and authorship. Much could be said on that subject, but here only a few central observations. As far as philosophy is concerned, the importance Kierkegaard attributes to the personal and religious aspects of ethics has not been perceived. This is why philosophical thought influenced by Kierkegaard has not attained a realization of either its possibilities or its limits. Therefore Kierkegaard’s judgment of existential philosophy would be essentially the same as his criticism of Hegel—that it lacks ethics. Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, for example, moved to the borders of immanence and tried to touch transcendence, but they lacked the personal aspect of ethics, by which they would have first been able to exhaust immanence completely. As for Martin Heidegger, both his earlier and later philosophical positions are completely out

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of contact with the ethical issues that were central for Kierkegaard. Jean Paul Sartre’s position can be said to be that of an esthete who operates merely with relative freedom’s possibility, which was Hegel’s stopping point also, and which Engels then took over. He does not know at all the freedom and ethics that Kierkegaard regarded as essential. With Kierkegaard’s intensification of Christianity as the criterion, all Christian religious communities throughout history from the time of early Christianity must be said to fall short, and this was especially true of the Danish Lutheran Church. True Christianity is on such a high existential plane that it presupposes a “giving up” of the esthetic and human forms of existence, ways of life that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms also discuss with great understanding. Climacus, for example, says: “. . . what an enormous existence-range is possible outside Christianity.” He also declares: “It is possible both to enjoy life and to give it meaning and substance outside Christianity, just as the most renowned famous poets and, artists, the most eminent thinkers, even pious men have lived outside Christianity.” But it is nevertheless a giving up of these stages that “is the condition for properly accepting Christianity.” “Upon its entrance into the world Christianity was not proclaimed to children but to an outworn Jewish religiosity, a world of effete science and art.”864 As already pointed out, the most philosophy can give to a person is the ethical, by means of which he can come to religiousness A. Further than that he cannot come by way of his immanently given qualifications. But in return Climacus is certain that human beings can go that far. He says: “. . . 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.”865 From the existential point of view, one cannot leap over Religiousness A and come summarily to Religiousness B, Climacus’s designation for Christianity.866 From these and similar statements it is clear that the way to Christianity is long and difficult if one is going to take it seriously and not be satisfied with being a Christian in name only. This is what many have still not understood, even the theologians one associates with existential theology—for example, Karl Barth and

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Rudolf Bultmann. Barth himself tells867 how he in the beginning of his theological work had been helped by Kierkegaard, who had had such a crucial showdown with speculative thought, which obliterated “den unendlichen qualitativen Unterschied von Gott und Mensch [the infinite qualitative difference between God and man].” But Barth quickly abandoned Kierkegaard when he discovered that he strongly emphasized the single individual’s inner conflicts and the resulting subjective and anthropocentric elements related to Christianity. Barth also objected to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the love commandment. According to Kierkegaard, it contains not only a command to love God and the neighbor but also a command to love oneself, a view that in Barth’s opinion corresponds to Augustine’s and the Scholastics’ but conflicts with Luther’s and Calvin’s! From Barth’s rejection we see how little zeal he displayed for understanding Kierkegaard.868 If Barth had thought more existentially about this issue, he would in the first place have discovered that for Kierkegaard to love oneself has nothing to do with self-love, that to love oneself in the right manner leads precisely to self-denial. In the second place, he would have perceived that only the one whose love is grounded upon self-denial can love his neighbor in conformity with the lovecommandment. Unfortunately, it must be said of Barth that on the whole he had no inkling whatever of the radical renewal that is to be found in Kierkegaard. For him Luther and Calvin remained the highest authorities, whereas for Kierkegaard the existential encounter with Christ in the situation of contemporaneity is decisive. He says, for example: “Luther’s mistake was that he did not go back far enough, did not make a person contemporary enough with Christ.”869 His returning to Christianity’s original source comes out still more clearly in the following statement: “It is neither more nor less than a matter of an auditing [Revision] of Christianity; it is a matter of getting rid of 1800 years as if they had never been.”870 It is somewhat amusing that even if Barth insists that every theologian should become acquainted with Kierkegaard, he at the same time advises everyone to do what he himself did—namely, back away in time and return to him no more. According to Barth’s own idea, the yield he had from Kierkegaard was comparable to only “a little

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dash of cinnamon,”871 an expression he borrowed from Kierkegaard himself; but he misunderstood what Kierkegaard’s means when he applies it to himself personally as a “corrective,” as one of the “sacrificed ones.” Cinnamon here must be compared to the little lump of leaven that can leaven the whole loaf.872 Thus Barth’s encounter with Kierkegaard did not open up great perspectives for him; his paramount interest was to present objectively God’s and Christ’s work in humankind’s salvation, but not to depict the path of personal inwardness that one must take prior to accepting the Gospel message in the right way. Rudolf Bultmann, who also was influenced by Kierkegaard, became known especially for his theory of the demythologizing of Christianity. This theory overstates the importance of the method of the natural sciences and tries by this method to rinse out of Christianity the so-called mythological elements. Bultmann goes so far as to say: “It is, of course, true that de-mythologizing takes the modern worldview as the criterion.”873 He goes on to say: “The contrast between the ancient world-view of the Bible and the modern world-view is the contrast between two ways of thinking, the mythological and the scientific.”874 Bultmann considers the natural laws to be absolutely unbreakable, and on the basis of this point of view miracles are excluded. God thereby is not the sovereign Lord of the natural laws. He cannot if it so pleases him break these natural laws in a miraculous way. Kierkegaard was very outspoken in a journal entry about people who adduce the unbreakability of the natural laws, saying that they either want “to make God completely superfluous and to substitute natural laws . . . or they force God, so painfully embarrassed, into his own laws, so that, if I dare say so, the devil himself must be God.”875 When Bultmann speaks of faith, he does, however, emphasize that it lies on another plane where freedom rules. This view comes very close to Kant’s, which altogether consistently divided nature and the phenomenal world, which is subject to necessity, and the realm of spirit and personality, where freedom prevails. But neither Kant nor Bultmann succeed in showing how a synthesis between these two qualitatively different spheres takes place. Bultmann fails to discover

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that Kierkegaard, in his concrete depictions of the existential steps, gives a satisfactory solution to the issue of freedom and necessity. Moreover, Bultmann draws the inference from demythologizing that God’s Word is directed to the single individual “here and now;”876 but at the same time this means that he rinses the eschatological elements out of Christianity so that it loses its perspectives for the future. Despite Kierkegaard’s concentration on the present in existence, he does not doubt the reality of a future judgment and resurrection. Even if Bultmann studied Kierkegaard’s thought quite extensively, he never became aware of the decisive significance that the personal aspect of ethics has in Kierkegaard. Despite Bultmann’s erudition and his thorough acquaintance with the New Testament,877 his delibrations on ethical issues are abstract; his discussion of “here and now” accommodates neither the past nor the future and therefore cannot give any coherence in the individual person’s life. In conclusion, it can be said that neither Barth nor Bultmann reached the core of Kierkegaard’s theological issues. The influence of these two theologians can have only local significance, since they move within the confines of Protestantism. Kierkegaard’s perspectives, on the other hand, are universal, because he goes past the historic ecclesiastical formations back to the source itself—namely, to the situation of contemporaneity in relation to Christ. After these critical comments on how Kierkegaard would have regarded the modern crises in philosophy and theology, it is appropriate to gather the points of view that Kierkegaard thought would become effective in the conflict of spirits that the future would bring. Kierkegaard was convinced very early of Christianity’s unique position in relation both to other religions and to philosophy. This is best expressed particularly in his discussion of the younger Fichte’s views on the relation between philosophy and Christianity. Despite a certain acknowledgment of Fichte’s earnest efforts to emphasize “the uniqueness in Christianity,” Kierkegaard disagrees with Fichte’s view that Christianity is “only a factor in the world.” On the contrary, he believes that “Christianity explains the world,” and, moreover, that it “contains not only something that human beings have not them-

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selves given but something that has never occurred to the mind of any human being even as a wish, an ideal, or anything else.” This must be insisted upon “in order that the concept of revelation shall not be volatized.”878 Anti-Climacus in particular develops this view more thoroughly in his polemic against Christendom’s “error” of regarding the truth of Christianity only as a completed result or as a doctrine; from the Christian point of view, the truth is always “the way.” After rejecting this error, Anti-Climacus says: “That this is a fallacy has already been pointed out; here it need only be added that this is why Christ’s teaching is infinitely superior to all the inventions of any and every age, an eternity older and an eternity higher than all systems, even the very newest, also even the one that in ten thousand years time is the very newest, for his teaching is the truth—but in the sense that the truth is the way, and as the God-man he is and remains the way, something that no human being, however zealously he professes that the truth is the way, would dare say of himself without blasphemy.”879 This quotation contains two important points. The gist of one is that “Christ’s teaching” surpasses anything that philosophy or, generally speaking, human knowledge can reach as a result of its efforts, since this teaching involves a transformation of existence, which means that here it is a matter of a way and not a result. Anti-Climacus even goes so far as to claim that never in all future time will any philosophical system be able to surpass Christ’s teaching. Climacus had already tried to demonstrate that it is impossible to produce “a system of existence,” since existence always means movement, whereas philosophy is interested in a result. Climacus does admit, however, that “a logical system”880 can be given that evades the concrete difficulties of existence. Neither will he deny that all existence can be a system, but not for an existing person: “Existence itself is a system—for God, but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit.”881 In other words, system signifies completion and a comprehensive view of one’s own life and all the factors of existence, but no human being can attain this. A person’s own existence with all its future possibilities prevents him from forming a system of existence. Any system he is able to form will always be abstract, a system sub specie aeternitatis [under the aspect of eternity],882 which can never cover concrete actuality.

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Therefore Christianity, which pertains to a person’s concrete and deepest actuality, and where truth is the way, is higher than all philosophical systems. The second point is Anti-Climacus’s further emphasis on the meaning of the truth as the way by pointing out that Christ is the only one who has actualized this truth in his earthly life. But at the same time he presents Christ as the prototype for human existence or as the criterion with which the single individual can compare his existence. Yet Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms have scrupulously pointed out that through this comparison a person discovers his infinite distance from the ideality that is required of him; but this is also the condition for Christ’s being able to come in the right way to a person as his Savior. As Savior, Christ affirms in a new and qualitatively higher way that his teaching and life are infinitely elevated above all philosophy and all human capability. As Savior he can recreate a person and give him new life, something that neither philosophy nor any religion will ever be able to do. After Kierkegaard has had Anti-Climacus draw the ultimate consequences from Christ’s being both prototype and Savior for humankind, has therefore presented Christianity in its highest ideality, he uses this depiction as a criterion for the judgment of Christendom. For example, he has Anti-Climacus say: “Nevertheless, it has to be said, and as frankly as possible, that so-called Christendom (in which all are Christians by the millions as a matter of course, and thus there are just as many—exactly just as many—Christians as there are people) is not merely a shabby edition of the essentially Christian, full of printer’s errors that distort the meaning and of thoughtless omissions and admixtures, but is also a misuse of it, a profanation and prostitution of Christianity.”883 The task now is to go behind traditions to Christianity’s beginning. Anti-Climacus gives the following reasons for this step: “Christendom has abolished Christianity without really knowing it itself. As a result, if something must be done, one must attempt again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”884 This was clear to Kierkegaard very early in his life—indeed, this was the real reason that he saw it as his task from the very beginning to point the way to a renewal.

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With this goal in mind, Kierkegaard worked out his own totally original dialectic of communication,885 which has two characteristics in particular. In the first place, it is exclusively designed for the single individual, because Kierkegaard was thoroughly convinced that all true progress occurs through the inner development of the single individual and not by means of external institutions. In the second place, he firmly believed—as he later formulated— “If One Is Truly to Succeed in Leading a Person to a Specific Place, One Must First and Foremost Take Care to Find Him Where He Is and Begin There.”886 Therefore even in Christendom one must begin by addressing the pagan, because in accord with his strict Christian categories people are pagans as long as they in their existence have not personally resolved to be Christians. As early as in his very first work, Kierkegaard makes full use of his dialectic of communication. For example, in 1848 he writes in his journal: “For Christendom is very far behind. One has to begin with paganism. So I begin with Either/Or.”887 Even if one makes the objection that this statement is Kierkegaard’s later interpretation of Either/Or’s place in the authorship, one does not get around the fact that the attitudes to life depicted in volume I of Either/Or are pagan and include original forms of paganism and not merely paganism in Christendom. In following works he presents Job and Abraham as the best representatives of Jewish piety, whereas later he concentrates on the portrayal of the steps of inward deepening within Christianity. Therefore Kierkegaard’s authorship has a universal character, inasmuch as it does not address only a group within a certain confession but pertains to people within paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. As early as The Concept of Anxiety, these three world-historical orders are placed in very clear relation to each other, and it is the role that the freedom’s possibility plays in each of them that becomes the criterion for making the essential distinction between them. In paganism freedom manifests itself in anxiety about fate, in Judaism in anxiety about guilt, and in Christianity “in anxiety of sin the object of anxiety is sin.”888 In this way Kierkegaard wanted to reach the single individual on whatever religious level he finds himself. This he could do, because

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his authorship did not become a system but with the aid of the pseudonyms became a description of the many existential levels, leading from the lowest positions to the one Kierkegaard considered to be the highest, namely, Christianity, within which martyrdom is the highest. A few comments must be made here in order to avoid misunderstandings. The fact that Kierkegaard did not create a system does not mean that there is no “comprehensive plan”889 in his authorship— quite the contrary. But this comprehensive plan is organic and is not according to the necessary, logical unfolding of the idea, as in Hegel, but to a “consistently developed basic view,”890 based on the idea that Christianity provides the goal for human life and that it “explains the world.”891 In the dialectic of existence that Kierkegaard constructed with Christianity as its point of departure, it is freedom, and not necessity, that is decisive; therefore the separate levels are independent positions, and the transition from the one to the other, or a remaining within a specific position, occurs by a decision in freedom. Therefore it is wrong to blend or confuse the stages or make them into a system. It is stressed in many places, especially in Climacus, that the reader is to respect “the qualitative dialectic of the spheres”892 lest he create confusion within the existential relations. This in turn says that one must not quote Kierkegaard without stating whether it is he himself or a pseudonym who is speaking, and from which position it is spoken. Moreover, anyone attempting to give a coherent explanation of Kierkegaard’s thought must be attentive to this and continually point out the significance of freedom and resolution in the transition from one level to another. By means of his dialectic of communication, Kierkegaard was able to speak to individuals on the different levels of spiritual development, and his authorship, although now and then only sketchily, depicts all the steps in this development. Since each transition occurs in freedom, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms, in their portrayal of the different positions, both the negative and the positive ones, can do nothing other than to place the single individual before a choice, an either/or. Precisely because of choice and freedom, there is both a positive and a negative line in Kierkegaard’s description of the levels. The positive signifies the way to inward deepening, while the nega-

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tive leads to the demonic and despair. Kierkegaard, however, clearly shows that only the movement within the positive line gives life meaning, which is to become the single individual, to become a self. This can occur only through the relationship to the eternal, to God and to Christ. Without the assumption that there is an eternal destiny for human existence, the individual human being is downgraded from a spiritual being to a vanishing speck of fluff 893 in the objective worldhistorical process, as indeed is taught in Hegel’s pantheistic philosophy and the materialist theories emerging in its wake. The materialistic theories in particular, however much they speak of a positive understanding of the human situation, end up in nihilism, because without a relation to the eternal the human being ultimately is always returned to nothingness.894 Kierkegaard’s writings contain the best dialectically thought out and existentially grounded alternative to all nihilistic and materialistic views of the human being, under whatever name they are cloaked. Therefore Kierkegaard addresses himself, perhaps especially, to those who have thoroughgoingly tried to live with the conviction that thoughts of eternity are fictive illusions. According to his dialectic of communication, Kierkegaard cannot point the single individual to a very specific step that he should choose, inasmuch as each individual must himself achieve clarity on his own spiritual status. Therefore he could not assume the role of the authority or the expert vis à vis the single individual. Kierkegaard’s tightening of the Christian ideals and his conviction that a special dialectic of communication with concrete examples of the consequences of the many different attitudes to life895 should be used caused him to search beyond the form of Christianity in which he had grown up—Danish Lutheranism.896 As do many other confessions, Lutheranism builds upon a very specific aspect of Christianity with the possibility of many interpretations. Kierkegaard portrays a multiplicity of points of view on the way to Christianity and also within it,897 all consistently ordered in accordance with “the qualitative dialectic of the spheres.” To this it may be objected that from the Christian point of view everyone is always a beginner; but this position ends in empty abstractions if one ignores that Christianity

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is the way, and that it faces a person with the requirement of inward deepening. It is the freedom, the ethical, and the self that constitute Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence, and this present study has often pointed out how the individual can become a self only through freedom and the ethical and a relationship to the transcendent. Therefore the renewal of the spiritual values for which his authorship calls must have as its first condition the single individual’s incorporation of the eternal elements in his life, consequently an ethical-religious upbringing with freedom as a presupposition. This was indeed what Kierkegaard considered to be the first requisite in an age of disintegration. “In regard to the ethical and the ethical-religious, the genuine communication and instruction is upbringing.”898 “Upbringing is the one thing needful: once again there must be upbringing in Christianity.”899 Kierkegaard himself was strictly brought up both by his father and by God, and therefore he knew well the significance of upbringing. Of the upbringing he received from God and its perspectives he writes: “The heart of the matter is this: what our age needs is upbringing. And to this end the following has happened: God picked out one who also needed upbringing and brought him up privatissime in order that he might be able in turn to teach others.”900

Notes 1

Johannes Climacus, De omnibus dubitandum est, pp. 123, 150, KW VII (Pap. IV B 1, pp. 110, 132). 2 See JP I 258 (Pap. IV C 47). See W. G. Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, IXII (Leipzig: 1798-1819), III, pp. 126-28. 3 Johannes Climacus’s De omnibus dubitandum est, pp. 113-72, KW VII (Pap. IV B 1) most likely is partly autobiographical. 4 Ibid., p. 118 (Pap. IV B 1, p. 105). 5 The first time Kierkegaard mentions Johannes Climacus in his journals is in 1839 (JP II 1575; Pap. II A 335). But he may have known the name prior to that, inasmuch as his brother mentions de Wette’s book Christliche Sittenlehre, I-III (Berlin: 1819-23), in which Climacus is discussed (P. Chr. Kierkegaard, De notione atque turpitudine mendacii [Göttingen: 1829], p. 46). In all probability Kierkegaard himself later owned de Wette’s book. 6 JP II 1302 (Pap. I A 2). 7 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube (Berlin: 1830). 8 H. Martensen, who later became Bishop but as a tutor took Kierkegaard through Schleiermacher’s dogmatics, Der Christliche Glaube, also tells of Kierkegaard’s great interest in the issue of predestination. Martensen relates that Kierkegaard could be very wearisome with his questions, and that his “penchant for sophistry” emerged particularly when we “were going through the doctrine of election” (H. Martensen, Af mit Levnet, I-II [Copenhagen: 1883]), I, p. 78). What Martensen calls “sophistry” no doubt was Kierkegaard’s tenacious attempt to get to the bottom of this issue. 9 JP II 1302 (Pap. I A 2). 10 JP II 1231 (Pap. I A 7). 11 JP II 1230 (Pap. I A 5). 12 JP III 3544. See also 3543, 3545 (Pap. I A 20, 19, 22). 13 JP I 227 (Pap. I C 40). 14 JP III 3547 (Pap. I A 295). 15 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, pp. 288-90. See also the essay “Über die Lehre von der Erwählung,” Theologischer Zeitschrift (Berlin: 1819), pp. 111-12. 16 See JP II 1563 (Pap. I A 170). 17 JP II 1190 (Pap. II A 31). 18 JP IV 3849 (Pap. II A 91). 19 JP II 1232 (Pap. I A 205). 20 JP II 1190 (Pap. II A 31). 21 Kierkegaard’s attack on this aberration in Hegel’s system was later expanded by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. For the

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Notes to pages 16-23

Hegel-Kierkegaard relationship, see Niels Thulstrup’s careful and detailed account in Kierkegaards Forhold til Hegel (Copenhagen: 1967), and Kierkgaards Verhältnis zu Hegel, Forschungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: 1969). 22 Pap. XII, I C 19:23. 23 Pap. XIII, II C 28:74. 24 Ibid. See also, for example, Luther: “Gute fromme Werke machen nimmer mehr einem guten frommen Mann; sondern ein guter frommer Mann machet fromme Werke [Good pious works never make a good pious man; but a good pious man does good pious works].” See also N. H. Søe, Kristelig Etik (Copenhagen: 1962), pp. 131-33. 25 Pap. XIII, II C 28:75. 26 JP II 1587 (Pap. III A 1). 27 See The Book on Adler, pp. 128, 288, KW XXIV (Pap. VII B 235, pp. 214, 162); Stages on Life’s Way, p. 231, KW XI (SV VI 218); Postscript, p. 119, KW XII.1 (SV VII 98). 28 See also The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 96-98, KW VIII (SV IV 366-67). 29 JP I 37 (Pap. III A 3). 30 See what Vigilius Haufniensis writes about Hegelian philosophy’s reflections on Kant’s scepticism. Anxiety, p. 11, KW VIII (SV IV 283). 31 See Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 11-15, 17. 32 JP III 3261, 3262, 3263 (Pap. II C 55, 56, 57). 33 JP III 3261 (Pap. II C 55). 34 JP I 773 (Pap. III A 4). 35 See also a journal entry in 1839: “The profoundly penetrating significance of hereditary sin is shown in the fact that all Christianity in the single individual begins with grief—godly grief” (JP I 443; Pap. II A 360). See also JP I 34 (Pap. II A 362) and Pap. II A 363. 36 See J. L. Heiberg, Om Philosophiens Betydning for den nuværende Tid (Copenhagen: 1833), pp. 8-10. 37 JP II 2274 (Pap. III A 5). It is safe to say that Kierkegaard was here rendering J. L. Heiberg’s interpretation of Hegel’s ideas. See Philosophiens Betydning, pp. 4952. 38 It must be noted that recollection, as both Socrates and Kierkegaard view it, embraces the knowledge of three ideas: the beautiful, the true, and the good. When recollection forms the basis for the ethical, it is the idea of the good that is taken as the point of departure. See Anxiety, pp. 11-12, KW VIII (SV IV 37981 fn.). 39 JP II 2274 (Pap. III A 5). 40 Kierkegaard’s aim in using the word “infinity” was to accentuate the element of freedom in recollection. 41 JP I 3915 (Pap. III C 1). 42 JP I 1069 (Pap. II C 13). 43 From the Papers of One Still Living, in Early Polemical Writings, pp. 70-71, KW I (SV XIII 61-63). 44 Ibid., p. 76 (68). In everything he wrote later, Kierkegaard maintained this careful distinction between the two forms of existence, the human and the Christian. 45 See, for example, Postscript, pp. 251-52, KW XII (SV VII 211-12).

Notes to pages 24-28 46

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As early as Either/Or, Socrates is mentioned as representative of the ethics that develops “the personal virtues” such as “courage, gallantry, abstinence, contentment, etc.” (II, p. 240, KW IV; SV II 216); in Philosophical Fragments, the highest humanistic knowledge, namely “self-knowledge, which is also a knowledge of God,” is attributed to Socrates (p. 11, KW VII; SV IV 181); in Postscript, Climacus develops the existential position to the point of calling Socrates “an existing thinker,” who as such becomes secondarily analogous to a Christian (pp. 205-06, KW XII.1; SV VII 172-73). See also Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, p. 284 fn.). 47 The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, p. 262, KW II (SV XIII 336). 48 Ibid., p. 211 ( 291). 49 Ibid., p. 163, ( 247). 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., p. 236 ( 312). 52 JP III 3281; II 2277, 1101 (Pap. III A 11, 211, 216). 53 Consequently Socrates did not arrive at “the concept of positive freedom.” JP II 1734 (Pap. III B 23). 54 Irony, p. 182, KW II; see also pp. 217-18 (SV XIII 264, 297). 55 On this point Kierkegaard says: “If one bears in mind that in happy Greece essence and phenomenon were united as an immediate natural qualification, then one also perceives that as this harmony is broken the separation must be cut deep so that a unity in a higher form is brought about.” Ibid., p. 212 fn. (291). 56 Anxiety, p. 112, KW VIII (SV IV 381). 57 Generally speaking, freedom, according to Kierkegaard, is attained only through the movement of infinity, of which irony is the first form. Resignation and repentance, which also are expressions for the movement of infinity, are more profound. 58 Irony, p. 264, KW II (SV XIII 337). 59 Ibid., p. 275 (347). 60 Ibid., p. 303 (371). 61 Ibid., p. 283 (354). 62 See Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, Letter 70, KW XXV. 63 Ibid., Letter 69. 64 For more on the content of “Philosophica,” see Malantschuk, Kierkegaards Thought, pp. 68-86. 65 JP I 196 (Pap. IV C 88). 66 JP III 3074 (Pap. IV C 84). 67 JP III 3292 (Pap. IV C 25). 68 JP I 114 (Pap. IV C 27). 69 See JP I 258 (Pap. IV C 47). 70 JP II 1241 (Pap. IV C 39). 71 JP III 2338 (Pap. IV C 11). 72 See Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought , pp. 115-20. 73 To a high degree the strength in Kierkegaard’s authorship is connected with his always having clear and well-defined formulas before he begins discussing a theme. His pseudonyms, for example, speak of having “his schema ready” (Anxiety, pp. 137, 141, KW VIII; SV IV 404, 407), or reference is made to a

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Notes to pages 28-34

schema for orientation within the sphere of existence (Postscript, p. 572 fn., KW XII.1; SV VII 499). In a journal entry Kierkegaard himself declares that “using my diagram, a young person should be able . . . very accurately beforehand to orient himself or herself to the conditions of existence” (JP 1046; Pap. VIII1 A 127). Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis warns against “fanatical superstitious belief in an empty schema” (Anxiety, p. 148 fn., KW VIII; SV IV 413). Kierkegaard avoids this danger by supporting his formulas with a scrupulous observation of concrete life situations. 74 The concept of the actual (thing) as containing two aspects, form and matter, is found as early as Aristotle. See, for example, Metaphysics 1029 a; see also Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, III, pp. 233-35. Consequently, form corresponds to essence, matter to being. 75 When dealing with something purely abstract as in Hegel’s ontology (logic), Kierkegaard uses the formula “thought and being” instead of “essence and being.” It is Climacus in particular who uses this terminology when criticizing Hegel’s abstract system; in Philosophical Fragments, however, where it is a matter of categories of actuality, he uses the terms essence and being. 76 JP V 5864 (Pap. VII B 75) 77 JP V 5891 (Pap. VII1 A 104). 78 Either/Or , I, Preface, p. 9, KW III. See JP V 5627, 5628 (Pap. IV A 214, 215). 79 See P. A. Heiberg, Nogle Bidrag til Enten-Eller’s Tilblivelse Historie (Copenhagen: 1910). 80 See, for example, Either/Or, II, p. 240, KW IV (SV II 215). 81 Ibid., p. 251 (225). 82 Ibid., p. 177 (160). The heightening of the self through the relationship to God is later described in great detail by Anti-Climacus in The Sickness unto Death in the transition from Part I to Part II, pp. 77-79, KW XIX (SV XI 189-91). 83 Either/Or, II, p. 215, KW IV (SV II 193). 84 Ibid., pp. 211, 214, 219 (189, 192, 196). 85 Ibid., p. 216 (194). 86 Ibid., p. 213 (191). 87 Ibid., p. 214 (192). 88 Ibid., p. 223 (200). 89 Ibid., p. 176 (159). 90 Ibid., p. 214 (192). 91 Ibid., p. 231 (207) 92 Sickness unto Death, p. 35, KW XIX (SV XI 148). 93 Either/Or, II, p. 61, KW IV (SV II 56). 94 The difference between relative and absolute freedom is comparable to the difference between “the actual self and the ideal self” (Either/Or, II, p. 259, KW IV [SV II 232]) and later the difference between “the first self” and “the deeper self.” Kierkegaard uses this last distinction several times in one of his upbuilding discourses, “To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection,” Eighteen Upbuildingj Discourses, pp. 314-18, KW V (SV V 95-99). 95 Either/Or, II, p. 247, KW IV (SV II 222). 96 Ibid., pp. 248-49 (223). 97 Works of Love, pp. 38-39, KW XVI (SV IX 41-42). The quotation is from Goethe’s prologue “Was wir bringen,” Goethe’s Werke , I-LX (Stuttgart, Tübingen: 1828),

Notes to pages 34-43

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XI, p. 316: “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben.” 98 See JP III 3793 (Pap. IV A 156): “When I am going to act, my action has existed in my consciousness in conception and thought—otherwise I act thoughtlessly— that is, I do not act.” 99 Either/Or, II, p. 219, KW IV (SV II 196). 100 Ibid., p. 169 (153). 101 Ibid., p. 175 (159). 102 Copenhagen: 1814. This is the edition to which reference is made here. 103 Either/Or, II, p. 323, KW IV (SV II 290). 104 Ibid., p. 266 (238). 105 Ibid., p. 270 (242). 106 See Balle, Lærebog, pp. 69-71. 107 Either/Or, II, p. 232 (208). 108 Ibid., p. 262 (235). 109 On the whole complex of issues regarding the third aspect of duty, from the systematic as well as the historical point off view, see N. H. Søe’s clear presentation in Kristelig Etik, especially pp. 174-77. 110 Either/Or, II, p. 262, KW IV (SV II 235). 111 Ibid., p. 248 (222). 112 Ibid., p. 245 (220). This sketch possibly reflects Kierkegaard’s own struggle with the thought of suicide. 113 Ibid., p. 240 (216). 114 Ibid., p. 263 ( 236). 115 Ibid., p. 265 (238). 116 Ibid., pp. 5-154 (140). See also Pap. X6 B 115; JP III 6882 (Pap. XI1 A 210). 117 Postscript, p. 253, KW XII.1 (SV VII 214). 118 Either/Or , II, pp. 79-82, KW IV (SV II 163-65). 119 Ibid., pp. 47, 55 (44, 51). 120 In Kierkegaard the moral and the ethical must always be distinguished; the moral still lies within the esthetic, and the individual has not as yet become a self by choosing absolute freedom and the ethical. 121 The exchange of ideas between the judge and his friend may well be conceived as taking place within the same person’s inner self, where the ethical and the esthetic are in conflict. See Either/Or, I, p. 13, KW III (SV I XV). 122 Ibid., p. 96 (77). On the relation between the three characters, see Kierkegaard’s first journal entry pertaining to this, JP IV 4397 (Pap. I C 125). 123 Either/Or, I, p. 150, KW III (SV I 127). On the subject of the tragic in Kierkegaard, see K. Friis Johansen, “Kierkegaard on ‘The Tragic,’” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, 13, 1976, pp. 105-46. 124 Either/Or, I, p. 167, KW III (SV I 145). 125 Ibid., pp. 227-30 (200-03.). 126 Either/Or, II, p. 236, KW IV (SV II 212). 127 Ibid., Supplement, p. 418 (Pap. IV B 59). 128 Postscript, pp. 257-58, KW XII.1 (SV VII 217-18). 129 JP VI 6410 (Pap. X1 A 377).

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Notes to pages 43-50

JP VI 6843 (Pap. X5 A 146). See also Gregor Malantschuk, “Poet or Pastor,” in Kierkegaard, Armed Neutrality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 3-24. 131 Either/Or, II, p. 117, KW IV (SV II 106). 132 In 1847 he writes: “Strange that I have lived out thirty-four years. I cannot fathom it; I was so sure of dying before that Geburtsdag or on it that I actually am tempted to assume that the date of my birth is a mistake and I will still die on my thirtyfourth.” JP V 5999 (Pap. VIII1 A 100). See also Pap. X3 A 177. 133 See Postscript, pp. 251-52, KW XII.1 (SV VII 211-12). 134 Ibid., p. 251 (212). See also Pap. X5 B 168, 211. 135 See JP V 5710 (Pap. IV B 59), also The Point of View for My Work as an Author, p. 35, KW XXII (SV XIII 526): “. . . I who religiously was already in the monastery—an idea concealed in the pseudonym: Victor-Eremita,” and further: “Strictly speaking, Either/Or was written in a monastery.” 136 That the subject is difficult is apparent in Kierkegaard’s own comment on the pseudonymity: “It is the fruit of long reflection, the why and how of my use of pseudonyms; I easily could write whole books about it.” JP VI 6567 (Pap. X6 B 245). See also John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 137 JP VI 6421 (Pap. X1 A 450). 138 Either/Or, I, pp. 153-64, 227-28, KW III (SV I 130-41, 200-01). 139 JP VI 6389 (Pap. X1 A 272). See also Pap. X5 B 153. 140 Practice in Christianity, pp. 174-79, KW XX (SV XII 162-67). 141 See Kierkegaard’s statement in Point of View, p. 86 fn. (SV XIII 570): “Here one will see the significance of the pseudonyms, why I had to be pseudonymous in connection with the esthetic production, because I had my own life in altogether different categories and from the very beginning understood this writing as something temporary, a deception, a necessary emptying out.” 142 Kierkegaard later says of this: “However much I have lived in another sense, I had really leaped over, humanly speaking, childhood and youth. This presumably had to be retrieved (this no doubt was the view of Governance)—instead of having been young, I became a poet, which is youth a second time. I became a poet, but with my religiously oriented background, indeed, with my definite religiousness, the same fact became for me a religious awakening also. So in the most decisive sense I came to understand myself in the religious, in the religiousness to which I had related myself only as to a possibility.” Ibid., p. 84 (568-59). 143 Either/Or, II, pp. 329, 332, KW IV (SV II 295, 298). 144 Fragments, p. 11, KW VII (SV IV 181). 145 Adler, p. 16, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235, p. 14). See also JP 5865 (Pap. VII1 B 83). 146 Goethe’s Werke, XL, p. 261. 147 See Postscript, pp. 295-99, KW XII.1 (SV VII 253-56). 148 Stages, p. 164, KW XI (SV VI 156). 149 Ibid., p. 7 (13). 150 JP VI 6566 (Pap. X6 B 127). 151 Stages, p. 191, KW XI (SV VI 181). 152 Pap. X6 B 151: 8. 153 Point of View, p. 36, KW XXII (SV XIII 527).

Notes to pages 50-60 154

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JP VI 6590 (Pap. X2 A 525). See Repetition, pp. 197-215, KW VI (SV III 231-47), and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, pp. 109-24, KW V (SV IV 9-23). 156 See Postscript, pp. 272-73, KW XII.1 (SV VII 231-32). 157 Ibid., Supplement, p. 64, KW XII.2 (Pap. VI B 98:52). 158 Postscript, pp. 256-58, KW XII.1 (SV VII 216-19). 159 There is a clear example of this in Christian Discourses, Part One and Part Two, KW XVII (SV X Forste Afdeling and Anden Afdeling). 160 The existential position of the pseudonym H. H., author of Two Ethical-Religious Essays, in Without Authority, KW XVIII, lies between the positions of Climacus and Anti-Climacus. 161 JP VI 6461 (Pap. X1 A 593). 162 Pap. X6 B 159, p. 240. 163 Repetition, Supplement, p. 303, KW VI (Pap. IV B 117). 164 We can also conceive of Constantin Constantius and the Young Man as one person, with the former representing common sense and irony and the other representing feeling. See JP V 5865 (Pap. VII1 B 83) and Postscript, pp. 290-91, KW XII.1 (SV VII 249). But this does not preclude seeing them as two independent persons. 165 See Repetition, Supplement, p. 304, KW VI (Pap. IV B 117): “Fate has played a trick on him and let him become guilty.” On the relation between fate and guilt, see, for example, Anxiety , p. 120, KW VIII (SV IV 388); JP IV 4586 (Pap. V A 49). This question appears in all its depth in part III of Stages, “‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’” 166 Repetition, Supplement, p. 295 (Pap. IV B 111). See also p. 304 ( Pap. IV B 117): “Now providence steps in to help, rescues him from his entanglement.” 167 Ibid., p. 229 (SV III 263). See also Supplement, pp. 295-96, 304 (Pap. IV B 111, 117). 168 Either/Or, II, p. 210, KW IV (SV II 189). 169 Irony, p. 297, KW II (SV XIII 367). 170 Repetition, p. 229, KW VI (SV III 263). 171 See ibid., Supplement, pp. 283-319 (Pap. IV B 110, 111, 116, 117). 172 Urania, Aarbog for 1844 (Copenhagen: 1843), pp. 97-102. 173 Repetition, Supplement, pp. 301-02, KW VI (Pap. IV B 117, pp. 281-82). 174 Ibid., p. 320 (IV B 118:3). 175 JP I 896 (Pap. IV C 96). 176 JP VI 6491 (Pap. X2 A 15). 177 Fear and Trembling, p. 88 fn., KW VI (SV III 136). 178 Postscript, pp. 350-51, KW XI.1 (SV VII 304). 179 Ibid., p. 358 (310). 180 Fear and Trembling, p. 1, KW VI (SV III 55). 181 JP I 908 (Pap. IV B 67). 182 Fear and Trembling, p. 59, KW VI (SV III 109). 183 Ibid., p. 55 (105). 184 Ibid., pp.74-80 (122-26). 185 Ibid., p. 68 (117). 155

274 186

Notes to pages 60-67

Judge William has already taught us this in saying that “the religious virtues in Christianity” correspond to the “civic virtues,” which “really were the true virtues in paganism.” Either/Or, II, p. 240, KW IV (SV II 216). 187 Fear and Trembling, p. 68, KW VI (SV III 117). 188 For the lower ranking analogies to this in paganism, see Kierkegaard’s Thought, pp. 77-78. 189 Fear and Trembling, p. 112, KW VI (SV III 158). 190 This whole area can be said to come under a relative freedom. 191 Fear and Trembling, p. 78 fn., KW VI (SV III 126). 192 Ibid., p. 57 (107). 193 Ibid., p. 78 fn. (126). 194 JP I 908 (Pap. IV B 67). 195 JP I 11 (Pap. X6 B 80). 196 Fear and Trembling, p. 113, KW VI (SV III 159). 197 The first mention of a life of inwardness is in Either/Or, where Judge William speaks of the “double existence” and the “interior deed” of the single individual (Either/Or, II, p. 175, KW IV [SV II 159]). 198 Fear and Trembling, pp. 38-41, KW VI (SV III 89-91.). In a footnote in Postscript, p. 500, KW XII.1 (SV VII 435), Climacus comments on this example of “hidden inwardness.” It is very enlightening to see how a pseudonym from a higher stage regards the productions of another pseudonym. 199 Fear and Trembling, p. 59, KW VI (SV III 109). 200 Ibid., p. 82 (130). 201 Ibid., 82-85 (131-33). 202 Aristotle, Politics, 1304 a. 203 Fear and Trembling, p. 92, KW VI (SV III 140). 204 Ibid., p. 93 (141). 205 See Søren Holm’s attempt to find a religious exception in ancient Greece. “Is ‘the Religious Exception’ To Be Found in Greece?” Kierkegaardiana, VIII, 1971, pp. 143-49. 206 It could be natural to ask whether Kierkegaard would speak in this mystifying manner of the hint he himself received with regard to Regine: “Let go of this object!” See For Self-Examination , p. 78, KW XXI (SV XII 362). 207 JP I 11 (Pap. X6 B 80). 208 See Fear and Trembling, 72-75, KW VI (SV III 120-23). 209 Ibid., p. 88 (135-366). 210 Ibid., p. 97 (144). 211 Ibid., p. 96 (143). 212 Ibid., p. 98 (145). 213 Ibid., 98-99 (145-46). 214 Ibid., pp. 98-99 (146). 215 Book of Tobit 6:9-17; Fear and Trembling, pp.102-07, KW VI (SV III 149-53). 216 Ibid., p. 109 (155). 217 Ibid., p. 111 (157). 218 See, for example, JP V 5181, pp. 81-82 (Pap. I A 328). 219 Kierkegaard himself sought such a “place of rest” for his life and authorship and found it in Christianity’s central point, namely the Atonement (Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, in Without Authority, p. 165, KW XVIII; SV XII

Notes to pages 67-74

275

267). On the whole complex of issues in Philosophical Fragments, see in particular Niels Thulstrup’s instructive introduction and commentary in the Princeton University Press edition of Fragments (1962). 220 Fragments, p. 11, KW VII (SV IV 181). 221 Ibid., p. 39 (206). 222 Ibid., p. 47 (214). 223 See Kierkegaard’s statement about “letting the concept come into existence in the individuality and situation.” Repetition, Supplement, p. 302, KW VI (Pap. IV B 117). 224 Fragments, p. 88, KW VII (SV IV 251). 225 See G. Malantschuk, “The Concepts Immanence and Transcendence in Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, IX, 1974, pp. 109-32. 226 See Postscript, pp. 567-68, KW XII.1 (SV VII 495); JP I 7, 10 (Pap. X2 A 354; X6 B 79): “The absurd is a category, the negative criterion, of the divine or of the relationship to the divine. When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it . . ..” 227 Fragments, p. 50, KW VII (SV IV 217). 228 The Moment, no. 8 (SV XIV 300). In his doctoral dissertation, Samtidighedens Situation (Oslo: 1954), Per Lønning has correctly, fully, and painstakingly explained the importance of the concept “the situation of contemporaneity” in Kierkegaard’s authorship. 229 Fragments, pp. 66-68, 83-85, KW VII (SV IV 231, 247-49). 230 Ibid., pp. 72-88 (235-88). 231 Ibid., p. 75 ( 239). 232 See The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, in Without Authority, pp. 25-26, KW XVIII (SV XI 28-29): In nature everything is obedience, unconditional obedience,” and further: “. . . there is nothing else than God’s unconditional will; the moment it is not unconditionally God’s will, it has ceased to exist.” 233 Fragments, pp. 79-80, KW VII (SV IV 243). 234 In his essay “The Forms of Doubt and Their Role in the Knowledge of the Historical” (Dansk Teol. Tidsskrift, XXXVII, pp. 177-216), Paul Müller treats this subject in detail. 235 Fragments, pp. 86-87, KW VII (SV IV 249-50). 236 Ibid., p. 103 (265). 237 Ibid., p. 104 (266). 238 “Out of love, therefore, the god must be eternally resolved in this way . . ..” Fragments, p. 25, KW VII (SV IV 194). 239 Ibid., p. 11 (SV IV 181). 240 Gregor Malantschuk, Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest (Copenhagen: 1971). 241 Many of Kierkegaard’s ideas on imagination are found in Rasmus Nielsen, Om Fantasiens Magt (Copenhagen: 1976). Nielsen’s ideas in all probability echo his conversations with Kierkegaard on this subject. 242 In Karl Rosenkranz, Psychologie oder die Wissenschaft vom subjectiven Geist (Königsberg: 1837), which Vigilius Haufniensis praises highly (Anxiety, pp. 14748, KW VIII; SV IV 413), there is a full treatment of imagination that Kierkegaard no doubt had read with interest. 243 Sickness unto Death, pp. 30-31, KW XIX (SV XI 144).

276 244

Notes to pages 74-82

Irony, p. 102 fn., KW II (SV XIII 190). It is important to note here that Anti-Climacus later carefully distinguishes between imagination [Fantasi] and imagination [Indbildningskraft] according to their respective relations to the ethical. Imagination [Indbildningskraft] is defined by Anti-Climacus as “the capacity for perfecting (idealizing).” Practice in Christianity, p. 192, KW XX (SV XII 178). 246 Irony, p. 292 fn., KW II (SV XIII 362). 247 Anxiety, p. 41, KW VIII (SV IV 313). 248 Ibid., p. 42 (313). 249 Ibid., p. 40 (312). 250 Ibid., p. 44 (315). 251 Ibid., pp. 45-46 (316). 252 The connection between language and spirit as the eternal is clearly articulated as early as Either/Or: “Not until spirit is posited is language installed in its rights.” Further: “Language, regarded as medium, is the medium absolutely qualified by spirit.” Either/Or, I, pp. 66-67, KW III (SV II 49). 253 Either/Or, II, p. 263, KW IV (SV II 236). 254 Anxiety, p. 97, KW VIII (SV IV 367). 255 Ibid., p. 161 (427). 256 Either/Or, II, p. 214, KW IV (SV II 192). 257 Anxiety, p. 103, KW VIII (SV IV 372). 258 See Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, p. 21, KW X (SV V 187): “What once was life’s substance comes again in the repetition of the race”; Postscript, 292, KW XII.1 (SV VII 259): “That faith and the Christian-religious have humor preceding them also shows what an enormous existence-range is possible outside Christianity, and on the other hand, what life-development is the condition for properly embracing Christianity.” In many other passages Kierkegaard speaks of the repetition of the previous stages in order to advance further. 259 Anxiety, p. 116, KW VIII (SV IV 384). 260 Ibid., p. 118 (386). 261 See Climacus’s statement in Postscript, p. 270, KW XII.1 (SV VII 229): “The somewhat didactic form of the book was undoubtedly the reason that, in the eyes of assistant professors, it found a little more favor than the other pseudonymous works.” 262 Anxiety, pp. 15, 113, KW VIII (SV IV 287, 381). 263 Ibid., p. 22 (294). 264 Ibid., p. 111(380). 265 See Torsten Bohlin, Kierkegaards dogmatiska åskådning (Stockholm: 1925), pp. 222-23 (ed. tr.). 266 Anxiety, p. 96, KW VIII (SV IV 125-26). 267 See Gregor Malantschuk, Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest, p. 110-13. 268 Postscript, p. 297, KW XII.1 (SV VII 255). 269 Friedrich Neitzsche, Werke, I-III (Munich: 1954-46), II, pp. 294, 565; III, pp. 541, 824. 270 That this in fact was the situation with Neitzsche is very clearly shown by Ludwig Klages in Die psychologischen Errungenschaften Neitzsches (2 ed., Leipzig: 1930), pp. 214-16. 245

Notes to pages 82-90 271

277

Postscript, p. 298, KW XII.1 (SV 255). See “In Despair to Will to Be Oneself: Defiance,” Sickness unto Death, pp. 67-74, KW XIX (SV XI 178-84). 273 Stages, p. 129, KW XI (SV VI 124). 274 Ibid., p. 11 (107). 275 Ibid., p. 161 (153). 276 Ibid., p. 124 (119). 277 Postscript, p. 299, KW XII.1 (SV VII 256). 278 Ibid., p. 572 (498). 279 Ibid., p. 554 (483). 280 Ibid., p. 569 (496). 281 Stages, p. 398, KW XI (SV VI 371). 282 Ibid., p. 394 (367). 283 Ibid., pp. 199-200, 232-234, 250-52. 276-88, 323-28, 360-63 (189-90, 219-21, 236-37, 259-70, 302-06, 336-39). 284 JP V 5723 (Pap. V 148:25). Kierkegaard’s birthday was May 5. 285 Stages, p. 430, KW XI(SV VI 401). 286 Ibid., p. 446 (SV VI 416). 287 Ibid., pp. 462-63 (430-31). 288 See Anxiety, p. 17, KW VIII (SV IV 289): “Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked with the aid repentance.” 289 Stages, p. 476, KW XI (SV VI 442). 290 Ibid., p. 484 (450). 291 Ibid., p. 477 (443). 292 Postscript, p. 10, KW XII.1 (SV VII 2). 293 See JP II 1606 (Pap. V B 41). 294 Postscript, p. 15, KW XII.1 (SV VII 6). See also Introduction and Commentary to Niels Thulstrup’s edition of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, I-II (Copenhagen: 1962). 295 Postscript, p. 135, KW XII.1 (SV VII 109). 296 Ibid., p. 11 (SV VII 3). 297 Ibid., p. 109 (88). In his book Die Erkenntnis der Subjectivität und die Objectivität des Erkennens bei Søren Kierkegaard (Zurich: 1973), Anton Hügli has searchingly pointed out how far one can penetrate into Kierkegaard’s thought along the objective scientific road. 298 Postscript, p. 503 fn., KW XII.1 (SV VII 438). 299 Ibid., pp. 165-70 (137-41). 300 Ibid., pp. 171-77 (141-47). 301 Ibid., pp. 177-79 (147-49). 302 Ibid., pp. 179-81 (149-50). 303 Ibid., p. 190 (158). See also Gregor Malantschuk, “Begrebet Fordoblelse hos Søren Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, II, 1957. 304 Postscript, p. 198, KW XII.1 (SV VII 165). 305 Ibid., p. 205 (172). 306 Ibid., p. 206 fn. (173). 307 Ibid., p. 203 (170) 308 Ibid., p. 210 (176). 309 Ibid., for example, p. 203 (170). 272

278 310

Notes to pages 90-100

Ibid., p. 207 (174). Ibid., pp. 251-52 (212-14). See also Supplement, p. 149 (Pap. X5 B 168, p. 362). 312 Postscript, p. 252, KW XII.1 (SV VII 212). 313 Ibid., p. 304 (261). For the relation between ethics and existence in Kierkegaard, see Helmut Fahrenbach’s penetrating treatment in Kierkegaards existenzdialektische Ethik (Frankfurt a. Main: 1968). 314 Postscript, p. 311 (SV VII 267). 315 Ibid., p. 327 (282). 316 Ibid., p. 316 (271). 317 Ibid., pp. 320-321 (275). 318 Fragments, pp. 83-85, KW VII (SV 247-49). 319 Postscript, p. 318, KW XII.1 (SV VII 273). 320 Ibid., p. 341 (296). In his book Hegels Philosophie (Copenhagen: 1838), pp. 9397, Sibbern had already strongly criticized the supremacy Hegel gave to thinking. 321 Irony, p. 292 fn., KW II (SV XIII 362). See also pp. 76-78. 322 Postscript, p. 346-47, KW XII.1 (SV VII 300). 323 Ibid., p. 349 (303). 324 Ibid., p. 356 (309). See also JP IV 4538 (Pap. VI A 63). 325 Ibid., pp. 363-64 (314-15). 326 Ibid., p. 366 (317). 327 See, for example, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, p. 19, KW X (SV V 186): “The content of paganism is experienced again in the repetition of each generation.” 328 Postscript, p. 557 (SV VII 486). 329 Ibid., p. 559 (488). 330 Ibid., p. 432 (374). 331 Ibid., pp. 432-32 (375). 332 Ibid., p. 394 (SV 342). 333 Ibid., p. 410 (356). 334 See Irony, p. 187, KW II (SV XIII 269). 335 Fragments, p. 11, KW VII (SV IV 181). 336 Postscript, p. 503, KW XII.1 (SV VII 437). 337 Ibid., p. 504 fn. (438 ). See also p. 206 fn. (173). 338 See Either/Or, II, p. 240, KW IV (SV II 216). 339 Postscript, pp. 257-58, KW XII.1 (SV VII 217-18). 340 Ibid., p. 451 (SV VII 392). 341 Ibid., p. 443 (385) 342 Ibid., pp. 454-55 (395). See also Gregor Malantschuk, “Pælen i Kjødet hos Søren Kierkegaard, “Dansk Teologisk Tiddskrift, III, 1940. 343 Either/Or, II, p. 241, KW IV (SV II 216). 344 Postscript, pp. 503, 531 fn., KW XII.1 (SV VII 437, 464). 345 Climacus classifies the finite relationships pertaining to freedom and the ethical in three forms: either “to exist purely immediately in the dialectic of the unpleasant” or “to exist in a finite ethic” or to let “the relationship with God exhaust itself in relative ends” (ibid., p. 474 (412). 346 Ibid., p. 507 (441). 347 Ibid., p. 114 (93) 348 Ibid., p. 461 (401). 311

Notes to pages 101-109 349

279

Ibid., p. 447 (389). Ibid., p. 451 (393). 351 Ibid., p. 505 (439) 352 Ibid., p. 483 (420). 353 Ibid., p. 572 (498). 354 Ibid., pp. 429-30 (373). 355 See, among others, ibid., pp. 486-87 (423). 356 This was done by “the monastic movement of the Middle Ages,” which Climacus nevertheless, even though perceiving its one-sidedness, places higher than the unspiritual accommodation to the world that was taking place in the Protestantism of his day. See ibid., pp. 401-02 (348). 357 Ibid., p. 488 (424). 358 Ibid., p. 529 (462). 359 Ibid., p. 534 (466). 360 Ibid., p. 528 (460). 361 Ibid., p. 534-35 (466). 362 Ibid., pp. 550 (479). 363 Ibid., pp. 532 (464). 364 Ibid., p. 538 fn. (470). 365 Ibid., p. 554 (483-84). 366 Ibid., p. 531 fn. (464). 367 Ibid., p. 500 fn. (435). 368 Fear and Trembling, pp. 38-41, KW VI (SV III 89-92). 369 Postscript, p. 504 fn., KW XII.1 (SV VII 438 ). 370 Ibid., pp. 383, 533, and especially 560 (331, 465, 488). 371 Ibid., p. 434 (377). See also pp. 467, 481, 542 (406, 418, 473). 372 Ibid., pp. 404, 503, 506 (SV VII 351, 437, 440). 373 For the other qualitative leaps, see Gregor Malantschuk, Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest, pp. 80-88. 374 Postscript, p. 534, KW XII.1 (SV VII 466). 375 Ibid., 533 (465, 560, 488). 376 Ibid., p. 531-32 fn. (464 ). 377 Fragments, p. 18, KW VII (SV IV 188). 378 JP I 993 (Pap. X3A 734). 379 For an exhaustive treatment of this subject, see F. J. Billeskov Jansen, Studier i Søren Kierkegaards litterære Kunst (Copenhagen: 1951). 380 See JP III 3750; VI 6800, 6472 (Pap. X3A 266; X4A 540; X5A 149:18). 381 Anxiety, p. 61, KW VIII (SV IV 331); Postscript, p. 345, KW XII.1 (SV VII 299). 382 See, for example, Point of View, pp. 106-07, KW XXII (SV XIII 593); JP II 2048, 2054 (Pap. XI1 A 42, 168): “The category of race has been applied so extensively that individuals have been debased to copies or specimens [Exemplarer].” 383 Irony, p. 213, KW II (SV XIII 292); Either/Or, I, pp. 62-64 (SV I 45-46.). 384 Anxiety, p. 12 fn., KW VIII (SV IV 389). 385 Postscript, pp. 388-89, KW XII.1 (SV VII 336-37). 386 Either/Or, I, pp. 224-25, KW III (SV I 198). 387 Stages, p. 317, KW XI (SV VI 296). 388 Either/Or, II, p. 211, KW IV (SV II 189). 389 The Moment, no. 4, p. 173, KW XXIII (SV XIV 186). 350

280 390

Notes to pages 109-119

Sickness unto Death, p. 69, KW XIX (SV XI 180). Eighteen Discourses, pp. 312-19, KW XV (SV V 94-99). 392 JP II 2004 (Pap. III A 482). 393 Point of View, p. 115, KW XXII (SV XIII 601), See also JP 6357 (Pap. X1 A 139). 394 JP II 2013 (Pap. IX B 63:8). 395 See, for example, Pap.X3 A 308. 396 JP VI 6523 (Pap. X2 A 163). See also JP I 353 (Pap. X3 A 257). 397 Postscript, p. 256, KW XII.1 (SV VII 216). 398 Eighteen Discourses, pp. 31-48, 125-39, 141-58, KW V (SV III 35-52, IV 24-37, 38-53). 399 Ibid., p. 87 (303). 400 See, for example, ibid., pp. 134-35 (SV IV 32-33; Postscript, p. 258, KW XII.1 (SV VII 218); Two Ages, pp. 71, 108, KW XIV (SV VIII 67, 101). 401 Eighteen Discourses, p. 143, KW V (SV IV 40). 402 Ibid., p. 167 (60). 403 JP I 941 (Pap. VIII1 A 144). 404 Eighteen Discourses, p. 219, KW V (SV IV 107); Luke 2:36-37. 405 Eighteen Discourses, p. 253, KW V (SV IV 139). 406 Postscript, p. 430, KW XII.1 (SV VII 373). 407 Eighteen Discourses, p. 320, KW V (SV V 100). 408 See pp. 000. 409 Eighteen Discourses, p. 325, KW V (SV V 104). 410 Pap. V B 214:3. 411 Eighteen Discourses, p. 331, KW V (SV V 109-10). 412 Ibid., p. 354 (130). 413 Ibid., p. 361 (136). 414 Ibid., pp. 368-69 (142). 415 Postscript, p. 270, KW XII.1 (SV VII 229). 416 Ibid., p. 559 (488). 417 See Fragments, pp. 12-13, KW KW VII (SV IV 182-83). 418 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, pp. 96-97, KW X (SV V 247-48). 419 Ibid., pp. 98-99 (249-50). 420 Fragments, p. 104, KW VII (SV IV 266). 421 This is very clearly stated by Paul. See, for example, I Thessalonians 5:23; I Corinthians 15:46. On Kierkegaard’s use of the Bible, see P. Guillamore Hansen: Søren Kierkegaard og Bibelen (Copenhagen: 1924). 422 Anxiety, p. 40 KW VIII (SV 312). On Kierkegaard’s use of a text, see also Eighteen Discourses, pp. 353-54, KW V (SV V 129-30). 423 See Anxiety, Supplement, p. 191, KW VIII (Pap. V B 53:29). Here “psychology” includes philosophical anthropology. See note 821; Sickness unto Death, pp. x-xi, KW XIX, and the key rubric “anthropological contemplation.” 424 For one example, see Repetition, p. 210, KW VI (SV III 243-44): “Job’s significance is that the disputes at the boundaries of faith are fought out in him, that the colossal revolt of the wild and aggressivre powers of passion is presented here.” 425 Eighteen Discourses, p. 276, KW V (SV IV 158). 426 Ibid., p. 327 (106). 427 See note 132. 391

Notes to pages 119-128 428

281

JP VI 6843, pp. 482-83 (Pap. X5 A 146). See JP VI 6523 (Pap. X2 A 163). 430 To Tidsaldre [Two Ages], a novel by the author of A Story of Everyday Life, published by Johan Ludvig Heiberg (Copenhagen: 1845). 431 Two Ages: The Age of Revoluation and the Present Age. A Literary Review, p. 89, KW XIV (SV VIII 84). 432 Ibid. (83). See also Sickness unto Death, p. 120, KW XIX (SV XI 229): “Here Christianity steps in, makes the sign of the cross before speculation; it is just as impossible for speculation to get around this issue as for a sailing vessel to sail directly against a contrary wind.” See also Adler, p. 119, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235, p. 207). 433 Two Ages, p. 108, KW XIV (SV VIII 101). 434 Ibid., p. 109 (101-02). 435 See The Corsair Affair, Supplement, pp. 203-04, KW XIII (Pap. VII1 B 71). See also pp. vii-xlv and Eduard Geismar: Søren Kierkegaard, I-VI (Copenhagen: 1927-28), IV, pp. 8-10. 436 Postscript, p. 500 fn., KW XII.1 (SV VII 434). 437 Ibid., pp. 431-32 (365). 438 Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 24, KW XV (SV VIII 133). 439 Ibid., p. 24 (134). 440 Ibid., p. 25 (134). 441 Ibid., pp. 37-43 (144-49). 442 Ibid., pp. 44-52 (151-57). 443 Ibid., pp. 60-64 (164-67). 444 Ibid., pp. 64-66 (167-168). 445 Ibid., p. 78 (178). 446 Ibid., p. 100 (198). 447 Ibid., pp. 119-20 (213-14). 448 Ibid., p. 129 (221). 449 On sin and repentance “in general,” see Discourses on Imagined Occasions, pp. 32, 34-35, KW X (SV V 196, 198). 450 JP V 5970 (Pap. VIII1 A 1). 451 Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 178, KW XV (SV VIII 266). 452 Ibid., p.192 (278). 453 Ibid., p. 195 (281). 454 Ibid., p. 199 (284). 455 Ibid., pp. 205-06 (290). 456 Ibid., pp. 206-07 (291-92). 457 Ibid., p. 208 (292). 458 Kierkegaard declares in several places that imitation and Christ as the prototype may be seen as intensified Law, for example, in JP II 1654 (Pap. X2 A 451): “Christ as the prototype is still a form of the Law, yes, the Law raised to a higher level.” See also JP II 1884 and 1905 (Pap. X3A 615, X4 A 366): “That there is a prototype who is the fulfillment of the Law and whom we should imitate—this is a thoroughly qualitative intensification.” 459 For Kierkegaard’s work on the issues surrounding Christ’s earthly existence and his relation to the ethical, see JP III 3076 (Pap. IV A 62). 460 Postscript, pp. 443-47, KW XII.1(SV VII 385-89). 429

282 461

Notes to pages 128-137

In his doctoral dissertation, Sören Kierkegaard, Die Paradoxe Dialektik des politischen Christen (Münich: 1974), Hermann Deuser points out very clearly the decisive role that the paradoxical context and the paradoxical dialectic play also in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and Christian literature. 462 Postscript, p. 354, KW XII.1 (SV VII 307). 463 Ibid., p. 256 (216). 464 Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 228, KW XV (SV VIII 315). 465 Ibid., p. 225 (312). 466 Ibid., p. 226 (313). 467 Ibid., p. 235 (321). 468 Ibid., p. 246 (331). 469 Ibid., p. 257 (342). 470 Ibid., p. 270 (353-54). 471 Ibid., pp. 268-69 (352). 472 Ibid., p. 275 (358). 473 Ibid., p. 292 (373). 474 Ibid., p. 317 (394). 475 Ibid., p. 322 (399). 476 Ibid., p. 327 (404). 477 Ibid., p. 334 (410). 478 Ibid., Supplement, p. 365 (Pap. VII1 B 219). 479 JP V 5972 (Pap. VIII1A 4). On the two Danish words for love, Kjærlighed and Elskov, see Works of Love, pp. xi, 424-25, KW XVI. 480 Ibid., p. 115 (SV IX 112). 481 JP IV 4116 (Pap. VIII1 A 108). For Kierkegaard it is very clear that the battle will now revolve around class differences or, as he says: “. . . the residents on the various floors begin to fight—not with the caretaker but among themselves. — Controversies on the various floors, from the basement all the way up to the attic, but among themselves.” JP IV 4117 (Pap. VIII1A 109). See also JP II 2004; IV 4119; V 5979, 6017 (Pap. VIII1A 482, 134, 23, 172). 482 See, for example, JP VI 6256 (Pap. X6 B 40); Point of View, Supplement, pp. 27683, KW XXII (Pap. IX 13 64, 65, 63:13). 483 Later on Kierkegaard frequently uses the expression “the numerical” to designate the crowd. 484 Without Authority, Supplement, p. 231, KW XVIII (Pap. IX B 24). 485 Point of View, p. 106 fn., KW XXII (SV XIII 592). 486 Ibid., p. 107 fn. (593). 487 See JP VI 6256-57 (Pap. X6 B 40-41). Kierkegaard was unfamiliar with the rebellion against God based on Nietzsche’s ideas. It is certain, however, that he would have opposed it as strongly as he opposed the communist movements. 488 Adler, Supplement, p. 234, KW XXIV (Pap. IX B 20). 489 In his book Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Stuttgart: 1964), pp. 130 and 138, Karl Löwith is entirely correct in saying that Kierkegaard has propounded an anticommunist manifesto—except that it was not done first, as Löwith believes, in The Present Age but inWorks of Love. 490 Works of Love, p. 22, KW XVI (SV IX 26). 491 Ibid., p. 143 (137). 492 Ibid., pp. 24-25 (28).

Notes to pages 138-145 493

283

Ibid., p. 51 (53). Ibid., p. 72 (73). 495 Ibid., p. 70 (72). 496 Ibid., p. 80 (80). 497 Ibid., p. 104 (102). 498 Ibid., p. 115 (112). 499 Here Kierkegaard is in agreement with Nietzsche’s comment in the aphorism “The Mad Man”. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, I-III (Münich: 1955), II, p. 126-27. 500 Works of Love, p. 117, KW XVI (SV IX 113). 501 Ibid., p. 117 (114). 502 Postscript, p. 155, KW XII.1 (SV VII 127). See also Emanuel Skjoldager: Søren Kierkegaards Syn på Samvittigheden (Copenhagen: 1967). 503 Works of Love, pp.143-44, KW XVI (SV IX 137-38). 504 Ibid., p. 236 (226). 505 Ibid., p. 149 (142). 506 See, for example, Pap. V B 60, p. 136: “Truth, like freedom, is the eternal; if the eternal does not exist, then there is neither truth nor freedom.” 507 Works of Love, p. 136, KW XVI (SV IX 131). 508 Ibid., p. 280 (267). 509 Ibid., p. 237 (227). 510 Ibid., p. 10 (13-14). See Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978, pp. 374-76, 380-86. See also Paul Müller, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: Christian Ethics and the Maieutic Ideal (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1993), pp. 13-16. 511 Works of Love, p. 161, KW XVI (SV IX 154). 512 Ibid., p. 159 (152). 513 This is why K. E. Løgstrup’s concept of “the sovereign manifestations of life” is in a pre-ethical stage. See, for example, K. E. Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: 1967), pp. 110-13, 115-18. 514 Works of Love, p. 21, KW XVI (SV IX 25). 515 Ecclesiastes 3:11. See Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 11, KW XV (SV VIII 122). 516 Works of Love, p. 44, KW XVI (SV IX 47). 517 Ibid., pp. 56-57 (59). See also “The neighbor is the pure category of the spirit” (ibid., p. 68 [69]). 518 Ibid., p. 107 (104-05). 519 In his discussion of Works of Love in his book Den etiske Fordring (Copenhagen: 1956), pp. 240-44, K. E. Løgstrup has fastened upon this one side, and therefore his polemic against Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the love commandment is onesided. 520 Works of Love, pp.157-58, KW XVI (SV IX 150). 521 Ibid., p. 164 (156). 522 Ibid., pp. 159 (152). 523 Ibid., pp. 165-66 (157-58). 524 Ibid., p. 141 (135). 525 Ibid., p. 145 (139). 526 Ibid., p, 160 (153). 494

284 527

Notes to pages 145-152

Ibid., p. 175 (167). Ibid., p. 179 (171). 529 Ibid., p. 181 (173). 530 Ibid., p. 189 (180). 531 Ibid., p. 190 (181). This statement, among others, certainly has reference to Kant’s view of ethical autonomy. See, for example, a later comment: “Kant was of the opinion that man is his own law (autonomy)—that is, he binds himself under the law that he himself gave himself. Actually, in a profounder sense, this is how lawlessness or imaginary constructing is posited.” JP I 188 (Pap. X2 A 396). 532 Works of Love, p. 192, KW XVI (SV IX 183). 533 Ibid., pp. 91-134 (90-129). 534 Ibid., pp. 135-53 (130-46). 535 Ibid., p. 209 (201); I Corinthians 8:1. This is the same word (opbygge, opbyggelig; build up, upbuilding) that Kierkegaard uses in the titles of the eighteen discourses of 1843-1844. See Eighteen Discourses, pp. 503-05, KW V. 536 Works of Love, p. 223 ( 214). 537 Ibid., p. 202 (288). 538 Ibid., p. 225 (216). 539 Ibid., pp. 225-45 (216-34). 540 Ibid., pp. 248-49 (237-38). 541 Ibid., p. 264 (252). 542 Ibid., p. 271 (259). 543 Ibid., p. 278 (265). 544 Ibid., p. 280 (267). Kierkegaard had already used this theme in two of his upbuilding discourses published in 1843. While the first two discourses were actually addressed to Regine, the first two of the next three discourses of that same year have reference to Kierkegaard’s relation to his father. Both are titled “Love Will Hide a Mulitude of Sins.” Note that the title of both these discourses uses the words “will hide,” because here it is an ethical task, while in Works of Love it reads “hides,” which expresses love in action. 545 Ibid., p. 288 (275). 546 Ibid., p. 294 (280). 547 Ibid., p. 295 (281). 548 Ibid., p. 302 (288). 549 JP II 4124 (Pap. VIII1A 299). 550 Works of Love, p. 327, KW XVI (SV IX 312). 551 Ibid., p. 320 (305). 552 Ibid., p. 326 (310-11). 553 See pp. 113-14. 554 Works of Love, p. 335, KW XVI (SV IX 318). 555 Ibid., p. 332 (316). 556 Ibid., p. 333 (317). 557 Ibid., pp. 339-40 (322). 558 Ibid., p. 349 (330). 559 Ibid., p. 351 (332). 560 Ibid., p. 355 (336). 561 On the principles of communication, see JP I 648-57 (Pap. VIII2 B 79-89). Herman Diem in a certain sense is correct in emphasizing the great importance 528

Notes to pages 152-160

285

of the method in Kierkegaard. See Hermann Diem, Philosophie und Christentum bei Sören Kierkegaard (Munich: 1929); Lars Bejerholm, Meddelelsens Dialektik (Copenhagen: 1962). 562 Works of Love, p. 371, KW XVI (SV IX 351). 563 Ibid., p. 383 (363). 564 Ibid., p. 376 (356). 565 Ibid., p. 377 (357). 566 Christian Discourses, p. 70, KW XVII (SV X 74). 567 Ibid., p. 84 (SV X 87). 568 Ibid., p. 77 (SV X 80). 569 Ibid., p. 66 (SV X 70). 570 See, for example, ibid., Supplement, pp. 362-64 (Pap.VIII2 B 123:10); JP II 2118 (Pap. VIII2 B 91:13). 571 Anxiety, pp. 156-57, KWVIII (SV VIII 422-23). 572 See JP V 6101 (Pap. VIII1A 504), where Kierkegaard clearly distinguishes between suffering in “The Gospel of Sufferings” in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits and suffering in “States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering” in Christian Discourses. The difference is that suffering in the former book was “indefinite,” while in the latter the discussion is about “innocent suffering.” By calling the suffering indefinite, Kierkegaard implies that the distinction between guilty and innocent suffering has not as yet been drawn. See Christian Discourses, p. 105, KW XXVII (SV X 110), where Kierkegaard says: “But this holds for every suffering endured in covenant with God; it is blessed to recollect it in eternity.” 573 See Hermann Deuser, Die Paradoxe Dialektik des politischen Christen, especially pp. 200-04. 574 Christian Discourses, pp. 110-11, KW XVII (SV X 115). See also note 570. 575 Ibid., for example, p. 123 (128). 576 Ibid., pp. 102-03 (108). 577 See, for example, Discourses in Various Spirits, pp. 116-17, KW XV (SV VIII 21112). 578 For Kierkegaard’s reflections, see JP V 6111-13 (Pap. VIII1A 559-61), especially 6112-13. 579 See JP II 1654 (Pap. X2 A 451). See also JP I 401 (Pap. X5A 42). 580 Christian Discourses, p. 179, KW XVII (SV X 181-82). 581 Ibid., p. 179 (182). 582 JP IV 4602 (Pap. VIII1A 259). 583 JP III 3744 (Pap. VIII1A 572). 584 Christian Discourses, p. 205, KW XVII (SV X 206). 585 Ibid., p. 211 (211). 586 Ibid., p. 223 (222). 587 See Gregor Malantschuk and N. H. Søe, Søren Kierkegaards Kamp mod Kirken (Copenhagen: 1956). 588 Christian Discourses, pp. 244-45, KW XVII (SV X 242-43). 589 Ibid., p. 240 (238-39). See also JP I 73; IV 4942 (Pap. X2 A 406; XI1 A 458). 590 JP V 6121 (Pap. VIII1 A 590). 591 Christian Discourses, p. 249, KW XVII (SV X 251). 592 Ibid., pp. 267, 270, 289 ( 271, 276-77, 303). 593 Ibid., p. 299 ( 316).

286 594

Notes to pages 161-173

On Anti-Climacus, see JP VI 6142, 6439 (Pap. IX A 9; X1 A 530). JP II 1942 (Pap. VIII1 A 643). 596 The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, in Without Authority, p. 8, KW XVIII (SV XI 12). 597 Ibid., p. 23 (25). 598 We find these deliberations in many places in his journal entries. For Kierkegaard’s first comment on this, see JP VI 6843 (Pap. X5 A 146). See also Point of View, p. 81 (SV XXII 566). 599 Two Ethical Religious Essays, by H.H., in Without Authority, p. 79, KW XVIII (SV XI 81). 600 Ibid., p. 70 (73). 601 Adler, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235-270). 602 See note 423. 603 Sickness unto Death, pp. 101, 120, KW XIX (SV XI 212, 229). 604 Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, pp. 166-72, KW VII (Pap. IV B 1, pp. 144-50). Note the use of “reality” for “actuality” in Climacus. 605 Climacus discusses this issue later in more detail in Postscript, pp. 189-93, KW XII (SV VII 157-61). 606 Johannes Climacus, p. 170, KW VII (Pap. IV B 1, p. 149). 607 The distinction between consciousness and spirit can be defined briefly as follows: consciousness as a comprehensive view of the three factors still belongs in the realm of knowledge and is a presupposition for spirit. Spirit, on the other hand, always expresses action and actuality. 608 See note 606. 609 See Either/Or, II, p. 240, KW IV (SV II 215). See also Postscript, pp. 205-08, KW XII.1 (SV VII 172-74). 610 Johannes Climacus, Supplement, p. 265, KW VII (Pap. IV B 13:19). 611 Ibid., p. 256, KW VII (Pap. IV B 13:18). 612 Sickness unto Death, pp. 29-35, KW XIX (SV XI 142-47). 613 Ibid., pp. 35-42 (148-53). 614 Ibid., for example, pp. 13-14, 131 (128, 241). 615 Ibid., p. 42 (155). 616 See Eighteen Discourses, pp. 314-17, KW V (SV V 95-98). 617 Sickness unto Death, p. 53, KW XIX (SV XI 165). 618 Ibid., p. 47 (159). 619 Ibid., p. 42 (155). 620 See ibid., p. 51 (163). 621 See Kierkegaard’s statement: most people “only live out the elements of the psychical-physical synthesis, never arrive at the qualification: spirit.” Point of View, p. 83 (SV XXII 567). 622 Sickness unto Death, pp. 56-57, KW XIX (SV XI 169). 623 See ibid., p. 55 (167). 624 Ibid., p. 56 (168). 625 Ibid., p. 49 (161). 626 Ibid., p. 33 (146). 627 Ibid., p. 69 (180). 628 Ibid., p. 68 (179). 629 Ibid., p. 70 (181). 595

Notes to pages 173-179 630

287

Ibid., p. 73 (184). Either/Or, I, pp. 176-214, KW III (SV I 154-88). 632 Ibid., pp. 217-30 (191-203). 633 For Climacus’s comments on the characters in “In Vino Veritas,” see Postscript, pp. 297-99, KW XII.1 (SV VII 255-56). 634 Sickness unto Death, p. 30, KW XIX (SV XI 143). 635 Either/Or, II, Supplement, p. 435, KW IV (Pap. VIII1A 422). 636 In this connection it must be noted that Anti-Climacus begins Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, where a transition from immanence to transcendence occurs, with exactly the same form of despair with which he concludes Part One. But now he looks at this despair from a religious point of view, and suffering is now regarded as “the thorn in the flesh.” Sickness unto Death, pp. 77-79, KW XIX (SV XI 189-91). 637 See Climacus’s remark: “. . . humor terminates immanence within immanence, still consists essentially in recollection’s withdrawal out of existence into the eternal, and only then do faith and the paradoxes begin.” Postscript, p. 291, KW XII.1 (SV VII 249). See also p. 553 (483). 638 Sickness unto Death, p. 77, KW XIX (SV XI 189). In his authorship Kierkegaard has carefully depicted how one’s idea of God goes through a developmental process from the lower to the higher levels. When Anti-Climacus uses the expression here, he is signifying an advanced conception of God, one in which a person will always come to be qualified as a sinner. 639 Ibid., p. 96 (207). 640 Ibid., p. 113 (223). 641 Ibid., p. 79 (191). 642 Discourses on Imagined Occasions, p. 28, KW X (SV V 193). See also Sickness Unto Death, pp. 80-81, KW XIX (SV XI 192-93). 643 Ibid., p. 80 (192). 644 Pap. I C 27, in Pap. XII, p. 133. 645 JP II 1305 (Pap. I A 30). 646 Sickness unto Death, p. 79, KW XIX (SV XI 191). 647 Ibid., p. 77 (189). 648 Ibid., p. 80 (192). 649 Ibid., p. 96 (207). 650 Ibid., pp. 113-14 (223). 651 Ibid., p. 83 (195). 652 In Either/Or, II, pp. 210-13, KW IV (SV II 189-91), Judge William elaborates on despair as an element of choice and its difference from doubt. 653 Sickness unto Death, p. 116 fn., KW XIX (SV XI 226). See also Practice in Christianity, p. 81, KW XX (SV XII 78): “From the possibility of offense one turns either to offense or to faith, but one never comes to faith except from the possibility of offense.” 654 Ibid., p. 81 (79). 655 Sickness unto Death, p. 62, KW XIX (SV XI 174). 656 See ibid., p. 29 (142): “The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self.” 657 Ibid., p. 113 (223). 658 Ibid., p. 131 ( 240). 631

288 659

Notes to pages 179-189

Ibid., p. 101 (211). Ibid., pp. 106, 110 ( 217, 220). See also Anxiety, p. 146, KW VIII (SV VIII 412). 661 Fear and Trembling, p. 105, KW VI (SV III 152). 662 See Gregor Malantschuk, “Begreberne Immanens og Transcendens hos Søren Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaardiana, IX, 1974, pp. 104-32. 663 Works of Love, p. 24, KW XVI (SV IX 28). 664 Sickness unto Death, p. 96, KW XIX (SV XI 207). 665 Practice in Christianity, p. 36, KW XX (SV XII 34). 666 JP I 691 (Pap. IX A 95). 667 Practice in Christianity, p. 67, KW XX (SV XII 64). 668 Ibid., p. 81 (78). On the subject of imitation, see also Bradley R. Dewey, The New Obedience, Kierkegaard on Imitating Christ (Washington D.C., Cleveland: 1968). 669 Practice in Christianity, p. 105, KW XX (SV XII 100). 670 Ibid., pp. 174-78 (162-66). Kierkegaard’s journals clearly confirm the truth of this. For example, he writes: “—if I forgot everything, I will never forget, just as I hitherto have not forgotten, that this was told to me as a child, and the impression it made on the child.” Therefore Kierkegaard could also say: “religiously understood, I was already in early childhood—pre-pledged.” Pap. X5 B 153, p. 354. See also JP VI 6389 (Pap. X1 A 272). 671 See The Moment, No. 8, pp. 288, 290, KW XXIII (SV XIV 198, 300). 672 JP II 1654 (Pap. X2 A 451). 673 See The Moment and Late Writings, p. 66, KW XXIII (SV XIV 76-77): “Thus one will find, especially in the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, what approximately may be said in defense of the kind of Christianity that is closest to that of the established order . . ..” And further: “Do not misunderstand me. I do not find it fatuous for someone to have the view of Christianity that I, after making it known, have put behind me . . ..” 674 JP I 614 (Pap. XI2 A 80). See also JP III 3217, 3099 (Pap. X1 A 628; XI2 A 51). 675 Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, in Without Authority, p. 165, KW XVIII (SV XII 267). See the important supplementary statements in Christian Discourses, Supplement, pp. 388-89, KW XVII (Pap. VIII2 B 119). 676 See, for example, JP VI 6842 (Pap. X6 B 232). 677 JP III 3076 (Pap. IV A 62). 678 JP V 5601 (Pap. IV C 97). 679 Anxiety, p. 105, KW VIII (SV IV 374). See also Postscript, p. 154, KW XII.1 (SV VII 127), where these issues are said to be among “the most difficult.” 680 See Adler, Supplement, p. 289, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235, p. 163). 681 JP II 3073 (Pap. IV C 29). 682 For more on this, see Leif Nedergaard-Hansen’s detailed and searching study, Bayle’s & Leibniz’s Drøftelse af Theodicé-Problemet, I-II (Copenhagen: 1965). 683 Fragments, p. 76, KW VII (SV IV 240). 684 See Gregor Malantschuk, Frihedens Problem i Kierkegaards Begrebet Angest (Copenhagen: 1971). 685 Repetition, Supplement, p. 301, KW VI (Pap. IV B 117, p. 281). 686 Anxiety, p. 112, KW VIII (SV IV 381). 687 Ibid., Supplement, p. 206 (Pap. V B 60, p. 136). 660

Notes to pages 190-199 688

289

See Anxiety, pp. 108-109, KW VIII (SV IV 377), where Vigilius Haufniensis points out how the antithesis necessity/freedom becomes the antithesis guilt/ freedom. 689 Ibid., p. 105 (374). 690 Postscript, p. 154, KW XII.1 (SV VII 127). 691 See also Gregor Malantschuk, “Problemer omkring Selvet og Udødeligheden i Søren Kierkegaards Forfatterskab,” Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift, XXIV, 1961, pp. 167-80. 692 Within Judaism, which stands on a higher level than paganism, the Preacher declares: “God has made everything beautiful in its time; he has also put eternity into the heart of human beings” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), which indicates that also in Judaism there was the sprout of the idea of immortality and an eternal life. See Discourses in Various Spirits, p. 11, KW XV (SV VIII 122). 693 Fear and Trembling, p. 100, KW VI (SV III 147). 694 Ibid., pp. 55-56 (106). 695 JP III 3074 (Pap. IV C 84). 696 Christian Discourses, pp. 206-07, KW XVII (SV X 207). 697 Ibid., p. 205 (206). 698 For more on the relation between immortality and the resurrection of the dead, see p. 175 in the article cited in note 691. 699 See Postscript, pp. 171-77, KW XII.1 (SV VII 141-47) for Climacus’s reflections on immortality. 700 JP III 2624 (Pap. XI2 A 154). 701 JP II 1952 (Pap. X4 A 440). 702 JP III 2617 (Pap. XI1 A 150). For more on these issues, see especially JP III 2624, 3043 (Pap. XI2 A 154; XI1 A 585). 703 JP VI 6969 (Pap. XI2 A 439). 704 See, for example, Sickness unto Death, p. 17, KW XIX (SV XI 131): “But he cannot rid himself of the eternal—no, never in all eternity. He cannot throw it away once and for all, nothing is more impossible . . ..” 705 The first view is already found described in Anxiety, in which Vigilius Haufniensis describes “the anxiety of spiritlessness” (pp. 93-96, KW VIII [SV IV 363-66]). The second view, according to which the person is already aware of the eternal but is in flight from it, is treated in The Sickness unto Death. The third view is the way of inward deepening carried to its extreme position. 706 JP VI 6969 (Pap. XI2 A 439). See also JP IV 4551 (Pap. X2 A 301), where Kierkegaard very convincingly maintains that one cannot exclude the significance of subjectivity—that is, of freedom—in the relationship to God. 707 JP VI 6934 (Pap. XI2 A 244). 708 JP VI 6947 (Pap. XI3 B 57). 709 Fragments, p. 1, KW VII (SV IV 173). On the dialectic of time in relation to the self, see Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship, A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 710 It is the solution Augustine had already reached in order to clear up this difficult question. With regard to this Kierkegaard says: “I now interpret Augustine as having hit upon election by grace simply in order to avoid this difficulty; for in this case eternal salvation is not decided in relation to a striving.” JP III 2551 (Pap. XI1 A 297). See also JP II 1251 (Pap.VII1 A 181). 711 See Adler, Supplement, pp. 289-91, KW XXIV (Pap. VII B 235, pp. 163-65).

290 712

Notes to pages 199-205

According to Kierkegaard, the less importance one attaches to the existential, the greater the inclination to zero in under a doctrine of predestination. He says, for example: “The emergence of the doctrine of predestination is also an unmistakable sign of how the existential momentum has been diminished.” JP III 3550 (Pap. X4 A 180). 713 Fragments, p. 18, KW VII (SV IV 188). 714 Anxiety, p. 84 fn., KW VIII (SV IV 353). 715 Vigilius Haufniensis says: “. . . but the fullness of time is the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past.” Anxiety, p. 90, KW VIII (SV IV 360). 716 JP III 3093 (Pap. X2 A 501). 717 Anxiety, p. 87, KW VIII (SV IV 357). 718 Christian Discourses, p. 98, KW XVII (SV X 104). 719 Works of Love, p. 249, KW XVI (SV IX 238). 720 See Postscript, pp. 312-13, KW XII.1 (SV VII 267-69). 721 On the complex of issues involving an “eternal now,” see the very instructive exposition in N. H. Søe, Religionsfilosofi (Copenhagen: 1955), pp. 253-57. 722 JP I 842 (Pap. X1 A 48). See Kierkegaard’s poetic observation in Christian Discourses , p. 255, KW XVIII (SV X 259): “Even though through thousands of years the stars remain so fixed and without changing their positions in the sky, I will still not allow myself to be deceived by this reliability; I will call to mind that they at some time will fall down.” 723 JP I 842 (Pap. X1 A 48). 724 See Gregor Malantschuk: “Begrebet Erindring og dets Aspekter i Søren Kierkegaards Forfatterskab,” Kierkegaard-Studiet, ed. Masaru Otani (Osaka, Japan), III, 1966. 725 Christian Discourses, p. 104, KW XVII (SV X 110). 726 Point of View, p. 97, KW XXII (SV XIII 581). 727 JP IV 4614 (Pap. VIII1 A 597). 728 JP VI 6152 (Pap. IX A 42). 729 Sickness unto Death, p. 69, KW XIX (SV XI 180). 730 Two Ethical-Religious Essays, by H. H., in Without Authority, p. 100, KW VIII (SV XI 102). 731 JP II 1251 (Pap. VII1 A 181). 732 Anxiety, p. 50, KW VIII (SV IV 321). 733 Johannes de Silentio discusses the paradox of faith and of sin at some length in Fear and Trembling. In a later journal entry in which he appreciatively discusses J. Müller’s conception of sin as “the incomprehensible,” Kierkegaard points out that his pseudonym Anti-Climacus also tried to demonstrate “the incomprehensibility of sin.” JP IV 4030 (Pap. X2 A 436). See also JP III 3093 (Pap. X2 A 501). 734 Anxiety, p. 22, KW VIII (SV IV 294). 735 Ibid., p. 23 (295). 736 Ibid., p. 44 (315). 737 Vigilius Haufniensis does not involve himself beyond this in answering the tempting question as to what would have happened if Adam had not sinned. See ibid., pp. 50, 79, especially 93 (320, 348, 363). 738 On this, see H. Roos’s claim that a similar point of view is found in Thomas Aquinas. Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1954), pp. 17-18.

Notes to pages 206-222 739

291

Postscript, p. 260, KW XII.1 (SV VII 220). JP II 1251 (Pap. VII1 A 181). 741 JP III 2570 (Pap. XI2 A 54). 742 JP III 2571 (Pap. XI2 A 55). See also JP II 1436 (Pap. XI1 A 5). 743 Pap. X5 A 6. See also JP III 2560 (Pap. X4 A 612). 744 JP III 2569 (Pap. XI2 A 43). 745 JP II 1445 (Pap. XI2 A 98). 746 JP II 1450 (Pap. XI2 A 170). See also JP II 1391 (Pap. X1 A 605). 747 Fragments, p. 80, KW VII (SV IV 243). 748 Practice in Christianity, p. 222, KW XX (SV XII 203). 749 See, for example, JP III 3769, 3770, 3774 (Pap. X5 A 25, 29, 79). 750 JP IV 4916 (Pap. XI2 A 60). See also JP VI 1136 (Pap. X2 A 371). 751 Christian Discourses, pp. 128-29, KW XVII (SV X 132-33). 752 There are many comments on this in the authorship. See, for example, Fear and Trembling, pp. 49-50, 99-100, KW VI (SV III 99, 147); Postscript, pp. 113-14, 507-08, KW XII.1 (SV VII 93, 441). 753 Fear and Trembling, pp. 49-50, KW XVII (SV III 99). See also JP I 11 (Pap. X6 B 80). 754 Postscript, p. 258, KW XII.1 (SV VII 218). 755 Ibid., pp. 257-58 (218). 756 Eighteen Discourses, p. 325, KW XVII (SV V 104). See also pp. 319-20 (100). That a person is able to do nothing by himself is also voiced by Climacus. See Postscript, pp. 467-73, KW XII.1 (SV VII 406-10). 757 Works of Love, p. 333, KW XVI (SV IX 317). 758 Ibid., p. 362 (343). This thought of self-denial, as a prerequisite for being able to become an instrument in God’s hands, is taken to its ultimate conclusion in Kierkegaard’s portrayal of an apostle’s life. It shows how God, in slaying all selfwillfullness in a person, as omnipotent “can give unconditionally new and full powers at any moment.” JP II 2098 (Pap. XI1 A 400). 759 Christian Discourses, p. 244, KW XVII (SV X 242). 760 Ibid., p. 299 (316). 761 Per Lønning, Samtidighedens Situation (Oslo: 1954), pp. 159-60. 762 JP I 486 (Pap. IX A 292). 763 JP II 1433 (Pap. X5 A 39). 764 JP II 1477 (Pap. XI2 A 130). See also JP IV 4384 (Pap. XI2 A 132). 765 JP IV 4949 (Pap. X4 A 487). 766 JP II 1449 (Pap. XI2 A 133). 767 JP IV (Pap. XI1 A 516). 768 Papers of One Still Living, p. 76, KW I (SV XIII 68). 769 JP III 3076 (Pap. IV A 62). 770 See, for example, Eduard Geismar, Luthersk Etik i Grundrids (Copenhagen: 1933), p. 97, also p. 214. 771 JP III 3077 (Pap. IV A 103). 772 JP III 3074 (Pap. IV C 84). 773 Fragments, p. 46, KW VII (SV IV 213). 774 The quotation is from the first edition (1844) of Fragments, p. 73. In SV (first collected edition) IV, pp. 217-18, it reads: “No, the paradox comes into existence with the offense,” which cannot harmonize with Climacus’s outlook, since he 740

292

Notes to pages 222-233

expressly wishes to emphasize that it is a matter of cognition, that it involves a paradox that causes the reaction of which the offense is the manifestation. Fragments, p. 51, KW VII, conforms to the first edition (1844). 775 Ibid., p. 56 (222). 776 Ibid., p. 57 (223). 777 JP III 3077 (Pap. IV A 103). 778 JP III 3076 (Pap. IV A 62). 779 Fragments, p. 57, KW VII (SV IV 223). 780 JP III 3075 (Pap. IV A 47). 781 JP III 3073 (Pap. IV C 29). 782 For example, Kierkegaard does not discuss in his works the Middle Age’s great thinker, Thomas Aquinas, and mentions him only once in his journal entries (JP II 1906, Pap. X4 A 369) and in a letter to Sibbern (Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents, Letter 55, p. 107). 783 See, for example, Fear and Trembling, pp. 100-01 (SV III 147-48; Postscript, pp. 401-02, 405-10, 413-19, KW XII.1 (SV VII 348-49, 351-55, 358-64). 784 See Fear and Trembling, p. 48, KW VI (SV III 98): “. . . what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness.” See also pp. 45-46, 99-100 (96, 147). ‘785 Postscript, pp. 413-19, KW XII.1 (SV VII 358-64). 786 JP V 5574 (Pap. IV A 2). See also Johannes Climacus, pp. 127-72, SV VII (Pap. IV B 1-17). 787 Fear and Trembling, pp. 5-6, KW VI (SV III 57-58). See JP I 736 (Pap. IV C 14), where Kierkegaard writes: “One gets a quite different impression of Descartes by reading him oneself. Descartes thinks a divine revelation should be believed even if it teaches quod naturali lumini contrarium [something contrary to natural light].” 788 See Kierkegaard’s notes with reference to Spinoza’s not having consistently followed through this view. JP I 734, 931; IV 4319, 4320 (Pap. IV B 2:16; VII1 A 35, C 1, 2). 789 It should be noted that Climacus in particular expressly uses the phrase sub specie aeterni in his critique of Hegel’s system. Postscript, pp. 81, 192, 305, etc., KW XII.1 (SV VII 63, 160, 262, etc.). 790 On Hume, see JP II 1540 (Pap. I A 237), where Kierkegaard is in accord with Hamann’s ironic comment about Hume’s saying (omitted in Kierkegaard’s quotation) that in order for one to be able to believe in Christianity there would have to be a ceaseless miracle. While studying Leibniz, Kierkegaard encountered the name Thomas Hobbes. JP I 894 (Pap. IV C 72). 791 See JP II 1240, 2274 (Pap. III A 48, 5). 792 Either/Or, I, pp. 27-28, KW III (SV I 12). See Johannes Sløk, Shakespeare og Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: 1972). 793 Fear and Trembling, p. 105, KW VI (SV III 152). 794 See Leif Nedergaard-Hansen, Bayle’s & Leibniz’ Drøftelse af Theodicé-Problemet, I-II (Copenhagen: 1965), II, p. 234, where it says that Leibniz’s “metaphysics is even more closely bound to scholasticism than Descartes’ and Spinoza’s. 795 JP III 3073 (Pap. IV C 29). For an interpretation of this entry, see NedergaardHansen (note 794), II, p. 115. 796 Sickness unto Death, p. 93, KW XIX (SV XI 204). 797 Irony, p. 107, KW II (SV XIII 195). See also pp. 272-73 (345).

Notes to pages 233-242 798

293

Ibid., pp. 107-08 (195). Yet many years later in a polemic against Julius Müller, who tried to explain the origin of evil by speculation, Kierkegaard concedes that “Kant with his radical evil was essentially more honest, for he never pretends that his theory is supposed to be a speculative comprehension of the Christian problem.” JP III 3093 (Pap. X2 A 501). 799 JP III 3089 (Pap. VIII1 A 11). 800 JP II 1305 (Pap. I A 30). 801 See Climacus’s statement: “All coming into existence occurs in freedom, not by way of necessity . . .. As soon as coming into existence is definitively reflected upon, even an inference from natural law is not evidence of the necessity of any coming into existence.” Fragments, p. 75, KW VII (SV IV 239). 802 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 102-03. 803 See Preisschrift über die Grundlage der Moral, Arthur Schopenhauer’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Grisebach, I-VI (Reclam, Leipzig), III, pp. 557-58 (ed. tr.). 804 See Kant (note 802), pp. 75-81. 805 Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, tr. Lewis White Beck (New York, London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 39. 806 Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: 1950), p. 517. 807 JP I 188 (Pap. X2 A 396). 808 This is underscored by Anti-Climacus in Sickness Unto Death (pp. 79-82, KW XIX [SV XI 191-94]), where he undoubtedly is thinking of Kant and the dogmaticians he influenced. 809 See particularly Works of Love, pp. 280-82, KW XVI (SV IX 267-69). 810 Thus in a way Schopenhauer was right in reproaching Kant for not being able to free himself from the influence of Christianity and for the end result of his thinking as exposing “die verlarvte theologische Moral, in der Lehre vom höchsten Gut, in den Postulaten der prakischen Vernuft und endlich in der Moraltheologie [the disguised theological morality in the doctrine of the highest good in the Postulates of Practical Reason and finally in the moral theology].” Preisschrift, Werke, III, p. 550. 811 Irony, pp. 272-73, KW II (SV XIII 344-45). 812 See JP I 1057 (Pap. X2 A 328), where Kierkegaard writes: “Obviously Kant honestly thinks of existence as not being absorbed into the concept, empirical existence.” 813 Irony, p. 273, KW II (SV XIII 346). As early as 1836 Kierkegaard takes telling aim at this very focus: “In despair Fichte threw the empirical ballast overboard and foundered.” JP II 1189 (Pap. I A 302). 814 Stages, p. 476, KW XI (SV VI 442). See also Anxiety, pp. 117-18, 138 (SV IV 38586, 405). See also Irony, pp. 273-74, KW II (SV XIII 345-46). 815 JP II 1589 (Pap. III A 34). 816 In this connection it is also significant that Kierkegaard’s first philosophical attempts in The Concept of Irony and De omnibus dubitandum est focus on Greek scepticism and doubt in modern philosophy. 817 JP V 5535 (Pap. III A 179). 818 Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures, with Irony, KW II (Pap. III C 27, in XIII). On the reasons for Kierkegaard’s disappointment over Schelling, see Niels Thulstrup’s

294

Notes to pages 242-251

illuminating account in Kierkegaards Relation to Hegel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 267-74. 819 Letters, Letter 69, p. 139, KW XXV. 820 Anxiety, p. 11, KW VIII (SV IV 283). 821 JP I 37 (Pap. III A 3). See note 423. 822 See Anxiety, p. 11, KW VIII (SV IV 283). 823 Ibid., p. 30 fn. (SV IV 303 ), 824 JP II 1610 (Pap. VI B 98:45). 825 Postscript, pp. 111-17, KW XII.1 (SV VII 90-96). 826 Ibid., pp. 327-33 (282-88). 827 JP I 654 (Pap. VIII2 B 86). With regard to the self-reflection that Kant’s philosophy initiated and how it could be stopped, see Postscript, pp. 334-42, KW XII (SV VII 289-96), but especially JP III 3702 (Pap. VI B 54:19). 828 Fear and Trembling, p. 69, KW VI (SV III 118). 829 JP II 1615 (Pap. X2 A 431). 830 See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke (Berlin: 183245), I, pp. 32, 37; Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, I-III, tr. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), I, pp. 1920, 24-25. See also JP I 704 (Pap. IV A 192). 831 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 655. 832 Postscript, pp. 305-06, 328-29, 331-32, KW XII.1 (SV VII 261-62, 283, 286). 833 Anxiety, p. 30, KW VIII (SV IV 302). 834 See, for example, Adler, p. 128, Supplement, p. 288, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235, pp. 214, 162); Stages, pp. 231, KW XI (SV VI 218); Postscript, p. 119, KW XII.1 (SV VII 98). 835 Anxiety, p. 32, KW VIII (SV IV 304). 836 Postscript, p. 569, KW XII.1 (SV VII 496). 837 Anxiety, Supplement, p. 206, KW VIII (Pap. V B 60). 838 Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 19. See Bernard Delfgaauw, Geschichte als Fortschritt , I-III, (Cologne: 1962-66), in which the author thoroughly demonstrates the inadequacy of Hegel’s concept of freedom. See especially II, pp. 198-204. 839 Efterladte Skrifter af Poul M. Møller, I-VI (3 ed., Copenhagen: 1855-56), V, p. 72. See Climacus’s comment, Postscript, p. 545, KW XII.1 (SV VII 475). 840 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 631-35. 841 Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: 1978), p. 10. 842 For a clear exposition of this, see Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Trakat (Berlin: 1970). The author shows how Hegel used Christological elements in erecting his system; at the same time he explains the way in which this Christian basis was abandoned, so that Hegel finally ends with a deification of the monarchy. See in particular the last chapter. 843 See Stages, pp. 292, 446, KW XI (SV VI 273, 416). 844 See Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Moscow: 1959), p. 157: “Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity.” 845 See Theunissen, pp. 355-56. 846 C. G. Carus, Psyche (Pforzheim: 1846). 847 JP III 2809 (Pap. VII1 A 186). 848 JP III 2813 (Pap. VII1 A 191).

Notes to pages 252-262 849

295

JP III 2820 (Pap. VII1 A 200). JP III 2809 (Pap. VII1 A 186). 851 JP III 2816 (Pap. VII1 A 196). 852 JP III 2810 (Pap. VII1 A 188). 853 JP III 2816 (Pap. VII1 A 196). 854 JP III 2822, 2823 (Pap. X4 A 232; X5 A 73). 855 JP III 2823 (Pap. X5 A 73). 856 JP III 2809 (Pap. VII1 A 186). See also JP 2807 (Pap. VII1 A 182). 857 Jacques Monod, Le hasard et la necessite (Paris: 1970); Tilfældigheden og Nødvendigheden (Copenhagen: 1971). 858 Ibid., pp. 130-34. 859 Ibid., p. 159. 860 Sickness unto Death, p. 5, KW XIX (SV XI 117). 861 JP VI 6566 (Pap. X6 B 127). 862 See “Editor’s Preface,” Practice, p. 7, KW XX (SV XII xv). See also JP VI 6431 (Pap. X1 A 510, p. 329): “a Christian on an extraordinary level.” 863 JP VI 6433 (Pap. X1 A 517). 864 Postscript, pp. 292-93, KW XII.1 (SV VII 250-51). 865 Ibid., p. 559 (488). 866 Ibid., p. 556 (486). 867 See Karl Barth, “Mein Verhältnis zu Søren Kierkegaard,” Orbis Litterarum, XVIII, 1963, pp. 97-100. 868 Not so with N. H. Søe, who concentrated more and more on Kierkegaard’s thoughts and clearly perceived that his statements about loving oneself is not self-love in the usual sense of the word. See N. H. Søe, Kristelig Etik (Copenhagen: 1962), pp. 178-79. 869 JP I 691 (Pap. IX A 95). 870 JP VI 6168 (Pap. IX A 72). 871 JP I 709 (Pap. X4 A 596). 872 See Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:21. 873 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner, 1958), p. 35. 874 Ibid., p. 38. 875 JP III 2823 (Pap. X5 A 73). See Postscript, pp. 156-57, KW XII.1 (SV VII 129). 876 Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, pp. 78-83. 877 See Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, I-II (New York: Scribner, 1955), II, pp. 237-51. 878 JP III 3276 (Pap. II A 517). 879 Practice, pp. 210-11, KW XX (SV XII 194). 880 Postscript, pp. 109-11, KW XII.1 (SV VII 88-90). For a clear understanding of these connections, read Poul M. Møller’s very instructive lecture “Ontologien eller Kategoriernes System,” in which he tries to make a clear distinction between a logical and concrete actuality. Efterladte Skrifter, III, pp. 189-. 881 Postscript, p. 118, KW XII.1 (SV VII 97). 882 Møller, III, pp. 200-04. 883 Sickness unto Death, p. 102, KW XIX (SV XI 212). 884 Practice, p. 36 (SV XII 34). 885 See JP I 648-53, 657 (Pap. VIII2 B 79-85, 89). See also Lars Bejerholm, Meddelelsens Dialektik (Copenhagen: 1962). 850

296 886

Notes to pages 262-265

Point of View, p. 45, KW XXII (SV XIII 533). JP V 6107 (Pap. VIII1 A 548). 888 Anxiety, Supplement, p. 201 (Pap. V 135b:4). 889 See JP VI 6346 (Pap. X1 A 116). 890 Sickness unto Death, p. 22, KW XIX (SV XI 136). 891 JP III 3276 (Pap. II A 517). 892 Postscript, p. 562, KW XII.1 (SV VII 490). See also pp. 388-89, 436 (337, 379). 893 Ibid., p. 545 (475). 894 It is significant that Marx and Nietzsche meet at this central point. 895 See JP I 1046 (Pap. VIII1 A 127): “Using my diagram, a young person should be able to see very accurately beforehand, just as on a price list: if you venture this far out, then the conditions are thus and so, this to win and this to lose; and if you venture out this far, these are the conditions, etc.” 896 Several scholars have pointed out the divergence between Kierkegaard and Luther. For example, Eduard Geismar: “Wie urteilte Kierkegaard über Luther,” Jahrbuch der Luthergesellschaft, 1928, pp. 1-27. Viggo Mortensen has gone furthest in this regard, as in the conclusion of his essay “Luther og Kierkegaard ” in Kierkegaardiana, IX, pp. 194-95. “Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity, at least as it comes out in his later stage, comes in conflict with Luther—a conflict that borders on incompatibility.” 897 His whole religious upbuilding literature is built upon an ascending scale; see his description of the various levels within Christianity. 898 JP I 650 (Pap. VIII2 B 82:12). 899 JP III 2647 (Pap. IX B 63:11). 900 JP II 2090 (Pap. VIII1 A 43). 887

Index A A (the Esthete), 36 à priori, 232 Abraham, 47, 58-65, 118, 212, 245, 262 absolute, 25, 27-28, 31, 33-35, 37, 40, 42, 47, 61, 63-66, 78, 87-88, 91, 9699, 101-102, 104-105, 113, 124, 133, 146, 158, 168, 174-175, 189, 192, 202-203, 206, 210, 212, 216, 219222, 224, 233, 236, 238-240, 244245, 247-249, 253, 270-271 abstract, 13, 17-21, 23-24, 28-29, 3233, 42, 45, 51, 68, 73, 80, 88-89, 91, 93, 97, 100, 106, 124, 175, 198, 201202, 217, 237, 239, 243-244, 259260, 270 abstraction, 17-20, 88, 91, 120, 199 absurd, 47, 53, 56, 58-59, 69, 84, 90, 105, 119, 192, 212, 245-246, 275 accidental, 18, 78, 98 acosmism, 92 action, 5, 16, 21, 24, 33-37, 86, 94, 103104, 114, 116-117, 120, 124, 137, 141-142, 146-147, 152, 155, 157, 162-163, 167, 201, 216, 236, 241, 245, 271, 284, 286 actuality, 5, 16-19, 22, 24-27, 29, 54, 69-70, 75, 80, 84, 86, 90-94, 101, 121, 141-142, 144-145, 147, 156, 161, 165-166, 168, 173, 182, 187, 192-193, 204-205, 217-218, 223, 232-235, 239, 242-244, 247, 249250, 260-261, 270, 286, 295 Adam, 75-77, 290 Adler, Alfred P., 17, 163, 197-200, 268, 272, 281-282, 286, 288-289, 294 Agamemnon, 60 ancilla theologiae, 228 Andersen, Hans Christian, 22-23 Anna, 113

anthropological contemplation, 19-20, 93, 243, 280 Christian anthropology, 7, 178, 190 philosophical anthropology, 280 Anti-Climacus, 32, 51, 73, 82, 161, 164, 167-173, 175-184, 189, 209, 231, 253-254, 260-261, 270, 273, 276, 286-287, 290, 293 anxiety, 2, 47, 66, 73-76, 78-82, 108, 164, 168, 170, 189, 199, 217, 262, 268-270, 273, 275-277, 279-280, 285, 288-290, 293-294, 296 apathy, 166 appropriation, 22, 72, 90, 95, 224 Aristotle, 11, 27, 62, 270 Atonement, 21, 127, 160, 176, 200, 215, 233, 274 auditing, 257 Augustine, 2, 16, 257, 289 autonomous, 235 autonomy, 232, 234, 236-237, 284 B Balle, Nicolai Edinger, 35, 37, 271 baptism, 94-95 Barth, Karl, 256-259, 295 battle, Church, 184-185, 196 Bayle, Pierre, 187, 227, 230-231, 288, 292 beata necessitas boni, 16 becoming, 5, 30, 32-34, 46, 80, 89, 94, 102, 107, 123, 136, 140, 143, 152, 159, 162, 166, 175, 182, 191, 211, 252 beginning, 11-12, 19, 43, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 73-76, 83, 88, 94, 107, 114, 126127, 138, 154, 161, 166, 171-172, 185, 194, 196, 199, 210, 213, 237239, 243-244, 246, 250, 255, 257, 261, 272

298 being, 2, 12, 14, 16-18, 20, 23, 27-29, 31, 33, 38, 40-42, 46-47, 53, 55-56, 58-59, 61, 67-68, 70-80, 85-86, 8890, 92-95, 97-101, 103-105, 107109, 112-117, 121, 123-124, 126-127, 129, 131, 135, 137-139, 141, 143156, 158-160, 162, 164, 166-171, 173-174, 176, 178-182, 184, 188195, 199, 201-207, 209-213, 215224, 230-232, 234-237, 239-240, 243, 247-248, 250, 252, 256, 260261, 264, 270, 272, 291, 293 being able, 33, 76, 103, 105, 124, 131, 147, 166, 171, 204-207, 252, 261, 291, 293 Bejerholm, Lars, 285, 295 Bible, 16, 76, 116-118, 135, 258, 280 biblical, 76-77, 118 bird, 127, 154-155, 161-162, 275, 286 blessedness, 114, 159, 200 Bohlin, Torsten, 80, 276 boundedness, 140, 212-213 break, 23, 62, 84-85, 96, 99, 105, 112, 130, 174, 205, 245, 247, 258 Bultmann, Rudolph, 257-259, 295 busyness, 208, 251 C call, calling, 13 Calvin, Jean, 13, 257 Calvinistic, 15 capable, 41, 99-101, 113-114, 213, 224, 240 capability, 97, 99-100, 104, 114, 151, 211, 261 Carus, Carl G., 251, 294 categorical imperative, 236 Catholic Church, 158 cause, 43, 46, 71-72, 110, 159, 188, 207 change, 2, 27, 29, 31, 53, 124, 178, 223 changelessness, 110 child, 33, 45-46, 60, 95, 161, 173, 183, 242, 288 Chinese puzzle, 30

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence choice, 13-14, 22-23, 31, 33-34, 37, 42, 70, 83, 94, 127, 129, 156, 177, 253, 263, 287 choose, 31, 33-34, 42, 47, 78, 97, 129, 160, 189, 204, 206, 213, 216, 264 Christ, 6-7, 13, 46, 68-70, 110, 115117, 127-129, 133, 136-137, 148, 157-160, 171, 175, 177-184, 187, 190, 193, 199, 209, 214-215, 218220, 222-225, 255, 257-261, 264, 281, 288, 295 Christendom, 6, 155, 158-159, 162, 181182, 185, 194, 208, 260-262 Christian, 5, 16, 19-20, 22-23, 27, 3536, 38, 44, 46-47, 51, 64-66, 68-71, 73, 75, 81-83, 87, 90, 94-95, 103105, 107, 110, 113, 117, 127, 132133, 135, 137-140, 142-143, 145-147, 150-160, 162-163, 169, 177, 180182, 184-185, 193-194, 197, 199201, 205, 210, 212, 214-215, 217, 228, 230-233, 245, 254, 256, 260262, 264, 268-269, 273, 282-283, 285, 288-291, 293-295 Christians, 94, 154-155, 157, 159, 261262 Christianity, 6-7, 12-14, 21-22, 26-27, 30, 40, 43, 45-47, 49-52, 60, 63-68, 78-83, 86-87, 89-90, 94-96, 102, 104106, 110-111, 115, 117-119, 127129, 135, 137-138, 140, 144-147, 154, 157, 159-163, 167, 169-171, 176-185, 195, 197, 199-201, 209, 214, 216, 222, 224, 227-229, 231, 238, 245, 247, 249-250, 254-264, 268, 272, 274, 276, 281, 287-288, 291-293, 296 Church, 22, 70, 87, 94, 158-159, 184185, 196, 218, 223, 254, 256 cinnamon, 258 civic virtue, 36-37, 44, 52, 59, 83, 131, 150-151 Clausen, Henrik N., 16, 176 cognition, 93, 209, 292 co-knowledge, 139 collision, 45, 59, 61, 217 coming into existence, 30-32, 70-72, 104, 188, 234, 249, 293

Index command, 35, 44, 59, 61, 102, 136137, 142, 212, 257 commitment, 53, 84, 143, 146, 153, 159 communication, 42, 57, 63, 106, 152, 156, 246, 262-265, 284 communism, 135, 150 comprehensive plan, 263 concentricity, 39 concrete existence, 17-18, 93 confinium, 98 conflict, 5, 39, 56-58, 60, 84, 151, 162, 187, 193, 195, 214, 227, 231, 252, 259, 271, 296 conscience, 24, 51, 84, 133, 139-141, 147 consciousness, 13, 18, 20, 53-54, 68, 84, 102, 105, 129, 142, 165, 168, 172173, 176-177, 197, 244, 248, 271, 286-287, 292 Constantin Constantius, 47-48, 52-57, 82, 174, 273 anthropological contemplation, 280 contemporaneity, 46, 68-71, 86, 181, 183-184, 225, 257, 259, 275 co-worker, 160, 215 create, 19, 38, 64, 113, 173, 205, 207, 233, 235, 243, 247, 249-250, 263 creation, 67, 193-194, 205-207, 209, 218 criterion, 37-38, 158-159, 177, 178, 184, 193, 212, 219, 237, 255, 256, 258, 261, 275 crowd, 132-135, 282 custom, 94, 232 D death, 32, 46, 66, 73, 82, 88, 101, 116, 161-165, 167-180, 182, 189, 217, 241, 251, 270, 275, 277, 280-281, 286-290, 292-293, 295-296 deepening, 85, 104-105, 111, 116, 127128, 136, 141, 171, 180, 237, 262264, 289 defiance, 41, 173, 178-180, 277 Delfgaauw, Bernard, 294

299 demonic, 42, 48, 64-66, 79, 81-82, 8485, 135, 171-172, 174-175, 179-180, 217, 230, 263 Danish, 7, 35, 256, 264, 271, 282 Denmark, 120, 241, 254 dependence, 23, 107, 133, 146, 173, 190 dependent, 33, 37, 108, 173, 190, 207 Descartes, 27-28, 229, 292 despair, 2, 6, 34, 38-39, 41-42, 48, 82, 119, 159, 164, 166-175, 177-180, 213, 253, 263, 277, 287, 293 destiny, 69, 143, 151-152, 264 determinism, 5, 11 Deuser, Hermann, 282, 285 devil, 217, 252, 258 dialectic, 58, 109, 164, 167-168, 171, 173, 179, 198-200, 227, 244, 246, 249, 251, 262-265, 278, 282, 289 dialectical, 11-12, 31, 43-44, 49-51, 5758, 69, 74, 83, 95, 198 Diem, Hermann, 284-285 difficulty, Climacus’s view of, 90 Ding an sich, 233 disclose, 183 disclosure, 61 disintegration, 24 dissertation, 17, 20-21, 23, 25-26, 233, 238, 242, 275, 282 dissimilarity, 138 divine, 2, 18-19, 25, 59, 64-65, 78, 112, 118, 137, 191, 208, 212-213, 215, 217, 219-220, 223, 275, 292 Don Juan, 40 Donna Elvira, 40, 174 double, 34, 104, 128, 141, 148, 274 double reflection, 111, 128 doubt, 16, 19, 41, 44, 66, 110, 112, 119, 129, 139, 148, 150, 165-169, 184, 192, 195, 197, 229, 259, 267, 272, 275, 287, 293 doubter, 65-66 duty, 33, 35, 38, 52, 60-61, 63, 78, 135, 142, 144-145, 153, 271

300 E earnestness, 46, 83, 97, 116, 129, 153, 161, 237, 244 egotism, 135 1848, 133, 262 Elrod, 272 Elskov, 282 empirical, 37, 165, 229-230, 232-235, 293 end, 18, 37, 43, 51, 60, 62, 81, 96, 106, 124, 127, 153, 159, 188, 191, 196, 206, 221, 241, 246, 249-250, 252, 264-265, 293 ends, 14, 41-42, 54, 56, 71, 96, 106, 115, 123-124, 159, 173, 216, 221, 231, 264, 278, 294 Engels, Friedrich, 249-250, 256, 294 English, 4, 7, 229 environment, 31, 40, 76, 108, 189 equality, 112, 114, 133, 135, 138, 143, 150, 152 erotic, 39-40, 42, 81 esse, 297 essential, 31, 61-62, 66, 68, 72, 87, 89, 91, 95, 99-100, 105-106, 108, 115, 117, 128, 138-139, 150, 152, 155, 159, 203, 222, 227, 233, 235, 248, 262 esthetic, 5, 23, 31, 38-39, 42, 49, 53, 56, 62-63, 82, 85, 92, 94, 103, 106-110, 120, 126, 161, 213, 219, 256, 271272 Esthete (A), 36 Esthete, 36, 83, 256 eternal, 15, 17-18, 21, 27, 29-31, 34-35, 41, 54, 56-58, 66, 69, 74-75, 77-80, 82-84, 87-91, 94-99, 101-105, 108109, 113-115, 119, 125-126, 128, 130, 136, 138-139, 141, 143-149, 151-152, 159, 161, 170-176, 178, 184, 187, 189-198, 200-203, 207, 211-212, 217, 221, 228, 230, 240, 245-246, 248-249, 264-265, 276, 283, 287, 289-290, 292 eternal life, 95, 191, 193-194, 196, 202203, 289

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence eternity, 6, 13, 74, 84, 102, 113, 115, 127, 129-130, 138, 148-149, 151, 161, 178, 187, 192-197, 199-203, 211, 229, 247, 260, 264, 285, 289 Ethics, 2, 5, 7, 17, 25-27, 29-30, 35-38, 44, 59-61, 64, 76-77, 80, 83, 85-86, 88-89, 92, 97-98, 120, 123, 131132, 135, 137, 143, 147, 151, 158, 179, 204, 236-238, 241, 244, 247249, 253, 255-256, 259, 269, 277278, 283 ethical, the, 5, 7, 11-12, 21-27, 29-30, 33-36, 38-40, 42, 44-45, 52, 57-60, 62-64, 66, 72-78, 80-83, 85-94, 101, 104-108, 111, 113, 115-116, 121, 123-124, 127-128, 130-137, 139140, 144, 148, 153, 156-162, 164, 166-169, 171, 173-177, 180-181, 183, 185, 199, 212-213, 219, 228230, 232, 236-238, 240-241, 244249, 252-253, 256, 265, 268, 271, 276, 278, 281 evil, 2, 12, 16, 34, 74, 76-77, 82, 151, 176, 187, 203-205, 208, 216-217, 230, 233, 293 evolution, 251 exception, 49, 53-54, 63, 142, 206, 224, 274 exist, 31, 34, 55, 71, 84, 139, 198, 202, 211, 275, 278, 283 existential, 6-7, 12, 19-20, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 39, 42-45, 47, 50-52, 58, 65, 69-70, 84, 93-94, 97, 103, 105, 107, 109-110, 116, 119, 140, 156, 161, 166-168, 170-171, 180-181, 194, 199-200, 215, 221-222, 227-228, 230, 234-237, 243-245, 247-249, 254-257, 259, 263, 269, 273, 290 existence, 1-3, 6-7, 9, 11-12, 14-18, 2032, 34, 36-42, 44-46, 48, 50, 52, 5456, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66-68, 70-74, 76, 78-84, 86-88, 90-106, 108, 110, 112, 114-118, 120, 124, 126, 128, 130132, 134, 136, 138-140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154-156, 158, 160-168, 170-174, 176, 178, 180182, 184, 187-188, 190, 192-194, 196-198, 200, 202, 204, 206-210,

Index 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 228-230, 232-236, 238-240, 242, 244-246, 248-250, 252-256, 258, 260-265, 268, 270, 272, 274-275, 278, 281, 287, 291, 293 existential, 6-7, 12, 19-20, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 39, 42-45, 47, 50-52, 58, 65, 69-70, 84, 93-94, 97, 103, 105, 107, 109-110, 116, 119, 140, 156, 161, 166-168, 170-171, 180-181, 194, 199-200, 215, 221-222, 227-228, 230, 234-237, 243-245, 247-249, 254-257, 259, 263, 269, 273, 290 expectancy, 110, 113 experience, 23, 46, 51, 53, 76, 78, 83, 97, 113, 120, 174, 180, 183-184, 217, 230, 232-233 external, 12, 26, 31, 34, 54, 73, 78, 8788, 97, 103, 111-112, 120, 137-138, 140, 150, 156, 172-173, 175, 184, 214, 230, 232-233, 235, 239, 262

301 finitude, 18, 24-26, 29, 31, 84, 88, 97, 99, 123, 141, 167-169, 173-174, 189, 202-204, 211-212, 248 foreknowledge, 13, 209 forgiveness, 22, 86, 103, 129, 148-149, 160, 177-179 Frater Taciturnus, 49-50, 84-86, 241 freedom, 2, 5-7, 11-18, 20-30, 32-34, 37-38, 42, 45, 47, 52, 55-57, 59-60, 62, 66, 70-83, 85-88, 91-93, 99, 101102, 104-105, 107-108, 111-114, 116, 118, 120, 123-125, 129, 131, 134, 138, 140, 146, 151, 153-164, 166-169, 171, 173-176, 180-181, 183, 185, 187-190, 196-197, 201, 203-206, 209-213, 216, 228-230, 232-238, 241, 248-249, 256, 258259, 262-263, 265, 268-271, 274, 278, 283, 289, 293-294 fullness of time, 113, 199, 202, 290 future, 6, 41, 74, 114, 126, 129, 133134, 154, 188, 193, 198, 202, 209, 235, 253, 255, 259-260, 290

F Fahrenbach, Helmut, 278 faith, 6, 21, 45, 47, 53, 56, 58-61, 66, 68-69, 72, 86-87, 89-90, 92, 97, 101, 103-104, 110, 112-113, 119, 123, 129-130, 147-149, 155, 159, 164170, 176-178, 182-183, 192-193, 196-197, 201, 204-205, 212, 217220, 222, 227-231, 238, 245-246, 253, 258, 275-276, 280, 287, 290 family, 31, 60 Fantasi, 276 Fashion Designer, 175 fate, 41, 47, 62, 67, 78, 81, 198, 262, 273 father, 45-46, 59-60, 64, 215-216, 219220, 238, 265, 284 Faust, 65-66 feeling, 93, 132, 136, 140, 168-169, 175, 238, 273 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 249 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 238-239, 241, 259, 293

G Geismar, Edward, 281, 291, 296 German, 2, 81, 238 Germany, 229, 231 goal, 12, 25, 27, 30, 37, 95-96, 98, 102, 104, 113-114, 117, 128, 133, 141, 144, 253, 255, 262-263 goals, 25, 92, 99, 113, 134, 136, 140141, 189, 247, 250 God, 2, 6-7, 12-14, 19, 31, 35-37, 41, 44, 47, 51-53, 57, 59-61, 63, 66-73, 77-78, 80, 85-86, 88-90, 97, 100102, 104-106, 108-118, 120, 123124, 126-127, 129-130, 132-133, 136-146, 149-156, 158-160, 162164, 169, 171-173, 175-182, 187188, 190, 192-193, 195-197, 199, 202-224, 229-230, 232-234, 236237, 249, 253, 257-260, 264-265, 269-270, 275, 278, 282, 285, 287, 289, 291

302 god, the, 47, 66-70, 72-73, 80, 86, 89, 105, 115, 117, 171, 173, 199, 214, 221-223, 275 God-knowledge, 47, 67, 73, 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 34, 48, 270, 272 good, the, 16, 42, 79, 99, 113-114, 124125, 130, 136-137, 142, 148, 151152, 156-157, 170, 179-180, 204, 212, 216, 240, 246, 268 Governance, 53, 70, 84, 185, 209-210, 272 grace, 128, 153, 159, 180, 185, 195196, 198, 215, 255, 289 gratitude, 7, 105 Greek Philosophy, 20, 165 Grundtvig, Nicolai Frederick Severin, 87 Guden, 221 guilt, 5, 32, 39-41, 47, 53, 62, 65, 75, 78-79, 81-82, 84, 98, 102-105, 108, 126, 129-130, 163, 175-176, 190191, 200, 205, 210, 212, 221, 262, 273, 289 Gyllembourg, Thomasine, 119

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence historical, 2, 14, 17-18, 45, 47, 69-72, 86-87, 109, 165, 175, 197, 199, 209, 219, 222, 224-225, 271, 275 history, 18, 34, 37, 55, 60, 84, 107-108, 185, 191, 223, 246, 248, 256, 294 Hobbes, Thomas, 292 Holm, Søren, 274 Holy Spirit, 179 hope, 82, 84, 130, 147-149, 174, 211 Hügli, Anton, 277 human, the, 5, 14, 16-17, 19-21, 23, 33, 41, 46-47, 58, 60-61, 67-68, 72-80, 85-87, 89-90, 93, 99, 103, 105, 115, 117, 126-127, 134, 141, 144, 146, 150-152, 163-164, 168, 170, 173175, 178, 181, 188, 191, 199, 204205, 211, 215, 221, 223, 230, 232, 234-235, 239, 243, 246-248, 250, 264, 268 Hume, David, 230, 232, 234, 292 humor, 49, 57, 98, 103-104, 115, 119, 127, 175, 252, 276, 287 humorous, 98, 115 I

H H.H., 162-164, 203, 273, 286, 290 happiness, 53, 56, 95-96, 98-99, 101103, 130, 171, 174, 197, 250 Hegel, 14-15, 17-20, 28, 45, 49, 67, 8789, 91, 106, 167, 176, 187, 191, 221, 227, 239, 241-250, 252, 254-256, 263-264, 267-268, 270, 278, 282, 292, 294 Heiberg, Johan L., 20, 55 Heiberg, Peter Andreas, 270 Heiberg, Johanne Luise, 161 Heidegger, Martin, 255 hereditary sin, 20, 65, 75-76, 81, 268 heredity, 40, 76, 108, 189 hero, 40, 60-61, 64, 85 the hidden, 46, 62, 72, 85, 103, 128 Hilarius Bookbinder, 49

I, 26, 238-239 ideal, 6, 41, 46-48, 51-52, 92, 95-96, 103, 124, 138, 147, 161, 166, 182, 184, 218-219, 223-224, 239, 254255, 260, 270, 283 ideals, 7, 95, 99, 144, 217, 220, 232, 254, 264 idealism, 137, 165, 244 ideality, 50, 53, 92, 165-168, 182, 184, 200, 224, 254, 261 ignorance, 155, 170-171 imagination, 73-75, 85, 93, 119, 129, 168, 183, 188, 198, 275-276 imaginative constructing, 236-237 imitation, 117, 127-128, 131, 157, 177, 183-185, 281, 288 immanence, 7, 15, 53, 84, 95, 102-103, 105, 111, 115, 137, 165, 173-176, 212, 227, 240, 243, 245-248, 255, 275, 287 immanent, 5, 66-67

Index immediate, 23, 25, 34, 53, 56, 62, 65, 68, 70, 74-75, 96, 132, 141, 174, 269 immediacy, 46, 56, 82, 84, 94-96, 101, 165, 167-172, 174 immortality, 88, 95, 97, 187, 191-196, 230, 232-233, 237, 289 Incarnation, 69, 116, 199, 209, 220221, 223-224 inclination, 136, 140, 290 inclinations, 136 inclosing reserve, 85, 172-174 incognito, 99, 103, 121, 183 Indbildningskraft, 276 independence, 108, 134, 206-207, 211, 247 independent, 33, 46, 146, 152, 206207, 273 individual, particular, 24, 85, 107-108, 164, 170, 192 individual, single, 5-7, 19-20, 22, 24, 44, 51, 59, 61-66, 68, 70, 83, 91-92, 104, 107, 109-113, 116, 119-121, 123, 125-141, 143-145, 147, 149, 151, 153-155, 157-163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179-185, 190-192, 195, 197, 202, 204, 229, 248, 254, 257, 259, 261-265, 268, 274 individuality, 23, 26-27, 30, 33, 38, 40, 42, 56, 82, 88, 90, 93, 104, 108-109, 175, 187, 275 infinitizing, 73-74 infinity, 21, 25-26, 30, 35, 37, 88-89, 96-97, 99-100, 140, 161, 189, 191194, 211-212, 214, 216, 219, 228, 235-236, 238, 240-241, 244-245, 249, 252, 268-269 inner, 23-24, 34, 44, 51-52, 54, 56, 58, 61, 67, 74, 83-88, 97-98, 100, 104, 111-112, 127, 139, 146, 156, 172, 184, 194, 202, 207, 230, 235, 239240, 257, 262, 271 innocence, 19, 40-41, 77, 82, 205 inter-esse, 28 Inter et Inter, 161 interest, 11-12, 27, 39, 44, 49, 56, 9194, 109-110, 132, 165-167, 189, 194,

303 197, 209, 228-230, 250, 253, 258, 267, 275 intervention, 53, 209 inwardness, 34, 61, 64, 66, 82, 89, 97, 102-104, 115, 120-121, 130-131, 138, 153-154, 156-157, 174, 184, 207, 258, 274 irony, 5, 20-26, 30, 35, 37-38, 48, 54, 57, 67, 73, 81, 96-99, 166, 174, 189, 191, 212, 238-240, 269, 273, 276, 278-279, 292-293 Isaac, 59, 61, 212 issues, difficult, 6, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215, 217-221, 223, 225 Ivan, 173 J Jaspers, Karl, 255 Jesus, 69, 181, 295 Job, 41, 45, 47, 50, 52-56, 59, 112, 118, 262, 280 Johannes Climacus, 12, 38, 43-45, 47, 66, 90, 110, 165, 187, 200, 254, 267, 286, 288, 292 Johannes de Silentio, 47, 57-66, 69, 78, 179, 192, 194, 229, 245, 290 Johannes the Seducer, 48, 50, 82, 175 Johansen, 271 joy, 34, 128-130, 156, 162, 242 Judaism, 60, 65, 78-79, 137, 170, 194195, 199, 250, 256, 262, 289 Judge William, 5, 29-39, 41-44, 46, 4849, 54, 78, 83, 97-98, 108, 162, 212213, 274, 287 K Kant, Immanuel, 2, 6, 18, 176, 232240, 243-244, 246, 249, 258, 268, 284, 293-294 kata; duvnanin, 24, 94 kat jexocnvn, 65

304 Kierkegaard, Søren, 1-3, 6-7, 9, 11-30, 32-36, 38-40, 42-58, 60-62, 64, 6670, 72-74, 76, 78, 80-82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 92-94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106-114, 116-120, 123-164, 166168, 170-172, 174-176, 178, 180185, 187-190, 192-220, 222-225, 227-265, 267-272, 274-278, 280293, 295-296 King Henry IV, 81 kivnhsi~, 27 Klages, Ludwig, 276 knight of faith, 59-61, 103 knowledge, 6, 21, 30, 35, 45, 49, 63, 68, 72, 75-78, 87, 89, 91-92, 117, 119, 163-165, 170-171, 173, 176, 178, 197, 204, 209, 217, 227-229, 232, 238, 240, 243, 245-248, 250-253, 255, 260, 268-269, 275, 286 L language, 65, 77, 91, 118, 137, 276 law, 34, 47, 51, 67, 99-100, 112, 120, 136, 138-139, 143, 147, 153, 157, 183, 236-237, 281, 284, 293 leap, 38, 79, 80, 82, 90, 105, 112, 11920, 142, 175, 183, 213, 217, 231, 244, 251 left hand, 50 Leibniz, Gottfried, 28, 187, 227, 229232, 288, 292 leniency, 153 Lessing, Gotthold, 58 leveling, 5, 119-120, 139, 254 libertas indifferentiae, 16 liberum arbitrium, 28 life-view, 13, 23, 48, 67, 116, 119, 229, 240 life-weariness, 195-196 lily, 127, 154, 161-162, 275, 286 Locke, John, 230 logic, 27, 29, 244, 270 Løgstrup, K.E., 2, 283 Lønning, Per, 215-216, 275, 291 lovable, 144-145, 152

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence love, 2, 5, 16, 35-37, 40-41, 52-53, 5960, 65, 72, 112, 116, 118, 129-130, 132-133, 135-154, 158, 163, 179180, 182-183, 195-196, 206, 209211, 214, 257, 270, 275, 282-285, 288, 290-291, 293 love, Christian, 5, 137-140, 146-147, 152 Löwith, Karl, 282 Luther, 2, 216, 218, 257, 268, 296 Lutheran, 220, 223, 256 M majesty, 207-208, 217 majority, 134-135 Malantschuk, Gregor, 268, 269, 272, 274, 275, 277, 278, 279, 285, 288, 289, 290 Marcel, Gabriel, 2, 255 Margrethe, 40 Marie Beaumarchais, 40, 174 marriage, 2, 38, 43, 83, 88, 116, 175, 194, 223 Martensen, Hans L., 16, 267 martyrdom, 6, 160, 162-163, 263 Marx, Karl, 249-250, 296 mass, 132-133, 135 materialism, 249-250, 264 mathematics, 28-29 mercifulness, 150-151 mercy, 136, 182 merman, 47, 64-65, 81 Messianism, 250 metaphysical, 17-19, 218, 220-221 metaphysics, 2, 219, 270, 292-293 Middle Ages, 2, 228-229, 231, 279 misera nec. mali, 16 misrelation, 168-169, 172 Møller, Peder Ludvig, 120 Møller, Poul Martin, 248, 261 moment, 15, 33, 101, 103, 129, 141, 149, 151, 197-203, 210, 213-214, 275, 279, 288, 290-291 money, 150 moral, 24-27, 39, 41, 56, 60, 78, 81, 85, 88, 92, 104, 106, 108, 111, 119-121,

Index 133, 137-140, 174, 191, 194, 248, 271, 293 morality, 26, 41, 76, 138, 230, 293 Monod, Jacques, 253 motion, 11, 53, 161, 187, 201 movement, 5, 11-12, 18, 20, 23, 26, 3032, 35, 37, 40-41, 46, 49, 51, 54-58, 64-66, 78, 80-81, 86-89, 91, 93-94, 96-97, 99-100, 104, 106, 111, 115, 126, 132, 140, 147, 161, 164, 166, 170, 180-181, 183, 189, 191-194, 204, 211-212, 214, 216, 228, 235240, 245, 249-250, 260, 264, 269, 279 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 39 Müller, Julius, 200-201, 275, 283, 290, 293 mutiny, 41, 139 mystic, 33 man, natural, 137

305 nothing, 25-26, 34, 71, 92-93, 100-102, 110, 113, 115-116, 129-130, 132, 134, 150, 154, 156, 160, 172, 180, 182, 189, 193, 195, 198, 201-202, 206-207, 209-211, 213, 215, 218, 233, 237, 239, 245, 253, 257, 263, 275, 289, 291 nothingness, 195, 206, 211, 264 number, 134-135 O

obedience, 59, 76, 124, 129, 137, 142, 154-155, 162, 275, 288 objectivity, 207, 253 offense, 6, 69-70, 81-82, 84, 86, 137, 146, 164, 171, 175, 177-179, 182183, 222, 224, 287, 291-292 Old Testament, 118, 230 Olsen, Regine, 107 omnipotence, 187, 203-217 omniscience, 13 N ontology, 27-29, 270 natural sciences, 6, 229, 250-254, 258 opposites, 16-17, 20, 128, 156, 221, 230, 236 nature, human, 16, 95, 115, 136, 178, 204-205, 256 necessity, 6, 12, 14-18, 21, 25, 29, 3233, 71, 78, 125, 167-169, 188-190, P 197, 209, 229, 234-236, 248, 258paganism, 59-60, 62, 65, 78-79, 81, 94259, 263, 289, 293-294 95, 97, 115, 137, 146, 170, 191, 194, Nedergaard-Hansen, Leif, 288, 292 198-199, 229, 231-232, 238, 249negation, 24, 26, 54 250, 252, 254, 256, 262, 274, 278, negative, 39, 41-42, 48-49, 51, 65-66, 289 82, 86, 99, 101, 105-106, 113, 119, 121, 125, 166, 171, 174, 177, 180, pantheism, 207 212, 217, 236, 238-239, 241-242, paradox, 6, 27, 63-65, 67-70, 86, 105, 111, 115, 119, 128, 192, 199, 201, 253, 263, 275 204, 218-222, 224, 228, 238, 240, neighbor, 5, 35-36, 52, 111, 131, 135245, 290-292 138, 142-145, 147, 149, 152-153, passion, 50, 85, 89, 91, 100, 104-105, 158, 163, 169, 257, 283 175, 213, 280 Neitzsche, Friedrich, 276 New Testament, 16, 70, 115-118, 127- past, 15, 41, 70, 74, 118, 188, 198, 209, 259, 290 128, 184, 216, 220, 259, 295 Paul, 2, 13, 22, 98, 114, 147-150, 159, nihilism, 42, 264 256, 275, 280, 283 norms, 24, 33-34, 37-38, 88, 108, 121, Pelagius, 16 124, 139-140, 174, 191, 232, 254

306 person, 5, 7, 12-21, 23, 26, 29-38, 4041, 44-48, 50, 52-58, 61, 63-64, 6670, 72-91, 94-111, 113-118, 121, 123-127, 129-133, 136, 138-154, 156, 158-160, 163, 167-177, 179181, 188-200, 202-203, 205, 207, 210-219, 222, 230, 235-237, 240241, 246-247, 254-257, 259-262, 264, 270-271, 273, 287, 289, 291, 296 personality, 30-31, 35, 38, 51, 68, 108, 159, 237, 248, 258 personal virtue, 59, 61 phenomena, 18, 233-234 phenomenal, 18, 233-235, 258 philosopher, 2, 47, 57, 231, 241 Philosophica, 27-28 philosophy, 2, 4-7, 15, 19-21, 27, 29, 45, 53, 88-89, 106, 165-166, 168, 176, 187, 199, 219, 221, 227-233, 235, 237-252, 254-257, 259-261, 263, 265, 268, 271, 293-294 psychical freedom, 33 physical necessity, 33 picture, 46, 78, 183, 209 Plato, 67, 165-166, 199 poet-existence, 54 poetical, 39, 45, 49-50, 161, 222, 254 poetry, 54, 92, 161, 201 possibility, 11-15, 19, 24, 27-29, 31-33, 41, 47, 54, 56-57, 60, 62-65, 67, 7071, 73-77, 79-80, 82-85, 91-96, 99100, 110-111, 113, 139, 142, 147-148, 154-155, 163, 165, 167169, 171, 173, 177-179, 182, 189, 191-194, 196-197, 204-205, 210211, 222-224, 227-228, 230, 235236, 240, 242, 247, 249, 256, 262, 264, 272, 287 posterity, 195 predestination, 5, 11-15, 197, 209, 267, 290 pre-pledged, 46, 288 present, 15, 24-25, 29, 32-33, 37, 45, 60, 70-71, 74, 85, 93, 95, 115, 128, 131, 141, 145, 147, 149, 177-178, 181, 188-190, 194, 196, 204, 206,

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence 208-209, 230, 232, 235, 237, 254, 256, 258-259, 265, 281-282 presupposition, 71, 74-75, 95, 121, 136, 138, 144, 147, 152, 157, 167, 170171, 192, 194, 205, 211, 224, 243, 245, 253, 256, 265, 286 principle of contradiction, 244 prose, 161 Protestant, 184 Protestantism, 184, 254, 259 Prototype, 12, 50, 59, 127-129, 183184, 215, 224, 261, 281 providence, 209, 218, 273 pseudonym, 12, 25, 43-45, 47-49, 51, 55, 57, 66, 73, 161-162, 166, 192, 203, 223, 241, 247, 263, 267, 270, 272-274, 290 pseudonymity, 5, 43, 45-47, 51, 272 psychology, 80, 85, 93, 117, 164, 204205, 280, 283 Q qualitative difference, 203, 220-221, 246, 257 quantity, 134-135, 253 Quidam, 47-49, 82-86, 90 R race, 190-196 reality, 12, 18-19, 25, 69-70, 79, 102, 119, 129, 165-168, 176, 179, 194, 197, 202, 206, 220-222, 227, 230234, 243-247, 249-250, 255, 259, 286 reason, 2, 26, 44, 48, 50, 75, 83, 86, 97, 100, 104, 112, 139, 153, 174, 176, 179, 191, 199, 206, 228, 230-232, 236, 239, 246-247, 249, 261, 276, 293-294 rebellion, 41, 138, 173, 282 reciprocal, 28, 211-215 recognizability, 184 recollection, 20-21, 49, 70, 82-83, 102, 115, 176, 202-203, 247, 268, 287

Index reconciliation, 19-20, 54, 129, 160, 215 redoubling, 27, 34, 88-89, 141, 237 reflection, 11, 24-25, 34, 40-41, 71, 7374, 85, 111, 119-120, 165, 171-172, 235, 272 relationship, 13-14, 25, 28, 31, 35-37, 46, 51, 59-61, 63-64, 70, 73, 77, 80, 85, 88, 91, 97-99, 101-104, 106, 109-11, 115, 117, 125-26, 139, 141, 152, 171, 179, 187-88, 192-93, 196, 206, 208, 210-18, 237, 255, 264-65, 268, 270, 275, 278, 289 relative, 13-14, 25, 33-34, 62-64, 88, 92, 96, 98-99, 102, 113, 123-124, 134, 140-141, 168, 172, 174, 189, 212, 216, 233, 235, 240, 248-250, 256, 270, 274, 278 religion, 14, 35, 80, 83, 157, 195, 252253, 261 religious, 2, 5, 7, 12, 14, 19, 22, 35-37, 39, 42, 44, 48-54, 56-63, 67, 73, 77, 80, 83-85, 87, 89, 95-101, 103-109, 111-113, 115-117, 119-121, 123128, 131-135, 139, 143-144, 155, 162, 167, 169, 179, 192, 197, 213, 216-219, 236-237, 240, 246, 255256, 262, 272, 274, 286-287, 296 Religiousness A, 83, 95, 101, 106, 115, 240, 256 Religiousness B, 256 renewal, 181, 257, 261, 265 renunciation, 96, 99, 124, 131, 137, 141, 184, 196 repentance, 31-33, 35, 40, 42, 48, 65, 78-79, 83, 85-86, 90, 96-98, 126, 212, 241, 269, 277, 281 repetition, 5, 30, 44, 47-48, 50-57, 103, 107, 137, 161, 165, 273, 275-276, 278, 280, 288 requirement, 40, 46, 58, 86, 97, 111113, 115, 125, 130-131, 138-139, 141-142, 156-158, 160, 178, 183184, 210, 213, 240, 248, 264 requirements, 66, 113, 154, 159-161, 180-183, 210-211, 247 resignation, 35, 48, 57, 96-101, 103, 191, 206, 212, 228, 245, 269, 292

307 resolution, 44, 55, 83, 114, 116, 119, 124-125, 129, 131, 166, 190, 201, 244, 253, 263 responsible, 25, 39-40, 75, 110, 134, 159, 163, 175, 190, 193, 199, 209210, 234 responsibility, 12, 17, 35, 37-38, 75-76, 78, 85, 94, 132, 157, 162-163, 166, 176, 193 resurrection, 159, 193, 200, 289 revelation, 7, 67, 137, 163, 171, 175, 177, 180, 192, 260, 292 Richard III, 65, 179 rigorousness, 50, 153, 237 romantic, 26, 41, 46, 81, 239 Roos, H., 290 Rosenkranz, Karl, 275 S sagacity, 41, 55-56, 125 salvation, 13-15, 65, 67, 81, 95, 110111, 113, 116-117, 125, 128, 130, 148, 159, 195-198, 200, 209, 215, 244, 258, 289 Samaritan, 136, 142 Sancho Panza, 237 Sarah, 65 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 256 Scala Paradisi, 12, 44 scepticism, 18, 232-233, 240-243, 268, 293 Schelling, Friedrich W.J., 26, 239, 241243, 293 Schlegel, John, Frederick, 26 Schleiermacher, Friedrich D., 12-14, 267 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 235, 293 Scribe, Augustin E., 41 self, the, 7, 30-38, 42, 51, 108-109, 164, 167, 169-71, 175-78, 183, 190-91, 228, 230, 237, 244, 248-49, 264-65 self-denial, 101, 128, 132, 136, 138, 140-141, 147, 152, 184, 214, 257, 291 self-knowledge, 47, 73, 269 self-redoubling, 236-237 self-reflection, 20, 172, 244, 294

308 servant, 117, 140, 146, 152, 222, 228, 231 Shakespeare, William, 65, 179, 230, 292 Sibbern, Frederik C., 278, 292 silence, 20, 63-64, 66, 149, 161-162 silent, 66, 130, 199 sin, 14, 19-22, 65, 68, 75-76, 78, 81, 86, 90, 102-103, 112, 116, 128-129, 149, 156, 164, 168, 175-180, 190, 200, 204-205, 221, 237, 262, 268, 277, 281, 290 sinner, 79, 105, 175, 179, 221, 287 Skjoldager, Emanuel, 283 Sløk, Johannes, 292 social ethics, 5, 24, 26, 36, 41, 52, 60, 106, 111, 119, 121, 123, 126, 131133, 135-136, 138-139, 143, 150151, 169, 172 society, 37, 41, 51, 59-61, 104, 121, 123, 139, 150 Socrates, 21, 23-26, 30, 37, 48, 67-68, 80-81, 86, 89-90, 97-99, 103-104, 110, 133, 165-166, 170, 176, 191, 221, 238-240, 245, 247, 268-269 Søe, Niels, 268, 271, 285, 290, 295 Solger, Karl W.F., 26 Son of God, 218-219 sophistry, 251, 253, 267 species, propagation of, 194-95 specimen, 107 speculation, 18, 20, 89, 176, 201, 221, 245, 281, 293 speculative, 16, 20, 26, 176, 201, 238, 245, 257, 293 spheres, 40, 45, 64, 80, 92, 94, 100, 103, 161, 190, 234, 245, 253, 258, 263264 Spinoza, Baruch, 38, 229, 292 spirit, 21, 33, 40, 48, 54, 106-107, 117, 126, 130, 143, 151, 156, 165-166, 168, 170, 172, 179, 195, 216, 224, 248, 250-251, 258, 260, 276, 283, 286 spiritlessness, 289 spiritual development, 16, 29, 46, 51, 74, 79, 91, 116-117, 178-81, 190, 194 spurious infinity, 244, 252

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence stages, 7, 11, 22, 36-37, 46-49, 55-56, 79, 81, 83-84, 90, 94, 108, 116-118, 120, 126-127, 172, 183, 189, 191, 194, 256, 263, 268, 272-273, 276277, 279, 293-294 Steffens, Henrik, 241 stillness, 20 Stoic Stoicism Strauss, Friedrich, 249 sub specie aeternitatis, 260 subjectivity, 26, 90, 207, 253, 289 suffering, 45, 70, 98-100, 102-103, 114, 116, 120, 125, 128-130, 137, 155158, 175, 208, 216-217, 285, 287 suspension of the ethical, 63, 82 synoptic, 29 synthesis, 16-17, 20, 25, 29, 32, 64, 71, 83, 89, 104, 117, 141, 144, 148, 165, 168-169, 177-178, 189-190, 193, 211, 236, 258, 286 system, 14-17, 20, 60, 87, 165, 167, 246-248, 250, 252, 260, 262-263, 267, 270, 292, 294-295 systematic, 41, 165, 238, 245-247, 249, 271 T tabula rasa, 230 Taylor, Mark C., 289 teacher, 68 tevlo~, 96, 98 temporal, 15, 18, 42, 69, 78, 82, 89, 9899, 107-108, 112, 126-127, 134, 137138, 141, 144-145, 148-150, 152, 178, 184, 192-193, 198, 208, 213, 217, 247 temporality, 13, 32, 69, 84, 99, 103, 149, 151, 192, 198-199, 201, 214 temptation, 41, 65, 77, 184 Tennemann, William G., 27, 267, 270 theology, 6, 58, 176, 227-233, 235, 237241, 243-245, 247, 249, 251, 254257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 293, 295 Theunissen, Michael, 294

Index third, 7, 23, 36, 98, 114, 126-127, 130132, 137, 144, 152, 159, 162, 165166, 168, 176, 183, 196, 236-237, 246, 271, 289 thought, 243 Thulstrup, Niels, 268, 275, 277, 293 Tieck, Ludwig, 26 time, 6, 12-14, 17-18, 21, 26, 29, 32-34, 37, 43, 46, 49-51, 58-60, 62, 67-70, 72-74, 76, 79-80, 83, 86-87, 89-90, 97-98, 104-108, 111-113, 118, 120, 123-124, 127-128, 130, 132, 136138, 141-142, 145, 148-150, 152, 154, 158, 160-161, 163, 167, 171172, 178, 182, 187-188, 190, 193194, 196-197, 199-203, 206, 209-211, 213, 217, 220, 222, 224, 227-228, 232, 234, 236, 239, 241-243, 245, 251, 253, 256-257, 259-261, 267, 272, 289-290, 294 tradition, 24, 35, 218, 220, 223 traditional, 239 tragedy, 40, 65 tragic, 40, 60-62, 64, 230, 271 transcendence, 105, 137, 164, 175-176, 240, 243, 246-247, 255, 275, 287 transcendent, 5, 7, 63, 66, 115, 137, 175-177, 179, 212, 220, 227, 247, 255, 265 the transient, 56, 107 transparency, 169 trifle, 207 triviality, 145, 208, 218 Trinity, 215-216 truth, 20, 36, 46, 49, 65-67, 71, 78-81, 87-88, 90, 100-101, 112, 119, 125, 127, 132, 134-135, 156, 162-163, 179, 189-190, 220, 222, 231-232, 240, 248, 255, 260-261, 283, 288 Typhon, 68

309 universal, 5, 24, 41, 43, 53-54, 57, 5965, 78, 95, 115, 158, 191-192, 204, 219, 223-225, 236, 256, 259, 262 untruth, 47, 67, 90, 134, 221 upbringing, 220, 265 upbuilding, 5, 43, 49-51, 64, 89, 106107, 109-111, 113, 115-119, 123124, 127, 131-132, 137, 142, 154, 157, 160, 164, 179-180, 210, 213, 216-217, 270, 273, 281-285, 296 V Væren, 28-29 Væsen, 29 validity, external, 34 value-leveling, 133 Victor Eremita, 44, 48, 50, 82, 174 victorious, 114, 131, 169, 214 victory, 54, 61, 96, 112, 151, 214 Vigilius Haufniensis, 25, 47, 73-81, 117, 155, 168, 187, 189, 191, 197, 199200, 204-205, 243, 268, 270, 275, 289-290 virtue, 54, 59, 61, 65, 69, 84, 94, 125, 192, 212 virtues, 27, 36-37, 44, 99, 112-113, 115, 269, 274 vocation, 38 voluntary, 5, 84, 137, 154, 157-158, 160, 162-163 W

weakness, 114, 172-173, 178-180, 211, 235 will, 13, 16-17, 20, 22, 29, 34-35, 39, 52, 56-57, 59, 63, 67, 69, 73, 76-77, 79, 82-84, 86-88, 90, 93-94, 96, 101, 103, 105, 107-109, 111, 114-115, 120, 123-128, 130-134, 136-139, U 143, 145-146, 151-156, 159, 163, 165-166, 170-171, 173, 175, 177unconditional, 82, 124, 210, 217, 223, 182, 184, 188-189, 191-193, 195234, 253, 275 196, 198-199, 203-206, 208-210, unconscious, 172, 251 212, 214, 222-223, 227, 232-233, unfreedom, 79, 81, 155

310

Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence

235-236, 239-240, 244-247, 251253, 260-261, 272, 275, 277, 282, 284, 287-288, 290 woman, 38-39, 81 work, 2, 15, 20, 30, 38-39, 43, 49-50, 52, 55, 62, 73, 90, 119, 126, 138, 140-141, 145-147, 149-150, 152, 158, 160, 164, 180-182, 193, 215, 218, 224, 241, 246, 251, 257-258, 262, 272, 281 world-historical orders, 262 worries, 154-155 worry, 126, 154, 199 worship, 85, 150, 159, 203, 207-208 Y Young Man, 47-48, 52-54, 56-57, 82, 174, 273 Bible 1 Corinthians 2:14, 16; 8:1, 147, 13, 111, 149, 15:44, 16 James 1:17 Luke 14:26, 63 Philippians 1:19-25, 22 Romans 8:5, 16; 8:28, 13; 6:30, 147, 8:30 Tobit 6:9-19, 65, 274 Søren Kierkegaard’s Works Book on Adler, The, 163, 268 Christian Discourses, 127, 154, 156-160, 180, 184, 193, 210, 212, 214-215, 273, 285, 288-291 Concept of Irony, The, 20-26, 54, 73, 81, 166, 189, 238-239, 269, 293 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 38, 44, 49-50, 52, 72, 86-89, 98, 100, 103, 105-106, 110, 113-115, 118, 174, 224, 244, 267, 277 Corsair, The, 120, 160, 281 Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, The, 161

De omnibus dubitandum est, 165-168, 229, 267, 286, 293 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 5, 106107, 110-111, 115-116, 118, 123124, 273 Either/Or, 22, 29-30, 34-35, 38-39, 4244, 46-50, 52, 55, 81, 83, 97, 106, 162, 166, 174, 212, 262-263, 269274, 276, 278-279, 286-287, 292 Fear and Trembling, 47, 57-61, 64-66, 69, 78, 81, 103, 159, 179, 212, 219, 229, 273-274, 279, 288-292, 294 For Self-Examination, 157, 274 Johannes Climacus, 12, 38, 43-45, 47, 66, 110, 165, 187, 200, 254, 267, 286, 288, 292 Judge for Yourself!, 157, 185 Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air, The, 161, 275, 286 Papers of One Still Living, The, 22-23, 119, 268 Philosophical Fragments, 47, 66-67, 6970, 72, 80, 86, 89, 105, 197, 199, 209, 220-222, 224-225, 269-270, 275 Practice in Christianity, 46, 161, 178, 181-185, 209, 224, 272, 287-288, 291 Repetition, 5, 30, 44, 47-48, 50-57, 103, 107, 137, 161, 165, 273, 275-276, 278, 280, 288 Sickness unto Death, The, 32, 66, 73, 82, 161-162, 164-165, 167-171, 173180, 182, 189, 217, 270, 287, 289 Stages on Life’s Way, 47-49, 81, 83-84, 90, 120, 268 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, 94, 116, 118, 276, 278, 280-281, 287 Two Ages, 119-120, 123, 133, 139, 280281 Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, 159, 274, 288 Two Ethical Religious Essays, 286 Works of Love, 52, 132, 135, 137-139, 142, 146-148, 153, 214, 270, 282285, 288, 290-291, 293

Index

311

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