TITLE PAGE. See Supplement, p. 177 (Pap. V B 39), for changes in the title page in draft and final copies; see Historical Introduction, pp. xvi-xvii.
EPIGRAPHS, happiness. The Danish Salighed has a richness of meaning (happiness, bliss, felicity, blessedness, salvation) such that some scholars prefer to keep the word as an especially significant term without translation. Here Salighed is translated as “happiness,” in keeping with Socratic-Platonic terminology in English. Εὐδαιμονία is usually rendered as “happiness” in the sense of complete well-being, the fulfillment of one’s essential human nature rather than pleasurable satisfaction or joyousness. See, for example, Plato, Phaedo, 81 a; Platonis quae exstant opera, I-XI, ed. Friedrich Ast (Leipzig: 1819-32; ASKB 1144-54), I, pp. 530-31; Udvalgte Dialoger af Platon, I-VIII, tr. Carl Johan Heise (Copenhagen: 1830-59; ASKB 1164-67, 1169 [I-VII]), I, p. 49; The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 64 (Socrates speaking): “Very well, if this is its condition, then it [the soul] departs to that place which is, like itself, invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, where, on its arrival, happiness awaits it, and release from uncertainty and folly, from fears and uncontrolled desires, and all other human evils, and where, as they say of the initiates in the Mysteries, it really spends the rest of time with God.”
Can . . . historical knowledge. See Supplement, pp. 182-83 (Pap. V B 1:12, 39), for changes in the epigraph on the title page; see also pp. 181-82 (Pap. V B 35). The central issue of the relation of historical knowledge and eternal truth is treated by Lessing in “Ueber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s sämmtliche Schriften, I-XXXII (Berlin, Stettin: 1825-28; ASKB 1747-62), V, pp. 80-83; Lessing’s Theological Writings, ed. and tr. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 53-55, a portion of which is cited in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, KW XII (SV VII 74). On this issue, Lessing follows Leibniz, although Lessing’s distinction pertains to philosophy of religion and Leibniz’s is epistemological and metaphysical. See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology, para. 33; God. Guil. Leibnitii opera philosophica . . ., I-II, ed. Johann Eduard Erdmann (Berlin: 1840; ASKB 620), II, p. 707; Leibniz: The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, tr. Robert Latta (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 235-36: “There are also two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible: Truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.”
Better well hanged than ill wed. Hellig Tre Kongers Aften, eller: Hvad man vil, tr. Adolphe Engelbert Boye (Copenhagen: 1829); Det Kongelige Theaters Repertoire, I-VI (Copenhagen: 1828-42), I, no. 22, p. 5: “At blive godt hængt, er mangen Gang bedre end at blive slet givt [To be well hanged is many times better than to be ill wed]”; Was ihr wollt, I, 5, Shakspeare’s dramatische Werke, I-XII, tr. August Wilhelm v. Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck (Berlin: 1839-41; ASKB 1883-88), V, p. 116: “Gut gehängt ist besser als schlecht verheirathet [Well hanged is better than ill wed]”; Twelfth Night, I, 5, 20-21, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, Ginn, 1936), p. 404 (Clown to Maria): “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.” In the Preface to Postscript, KW XII (SV VII, p. v), the line in Philosophical Fragments is interpreted: “Undisturbed and in accordance with the motto (‘Better well hanged than ill wed’), the hanged, indeed, the well-hanged, author has remained hanging. No one—not even in sport or jest—has asked him for whom he did hang. But that was as desired: better well hanged than by a hapless marriage to be brought into systematic in-law relationship with the whole world.”
1. See Supplement, pp. 183-85 (Pap. V B 24), for an earlier version of the Preface.
2. A similar kind of expression is found in Cicero, Philippics, II, 37; M. Tullii Ciceronis opera omnia, I-V, ed. Johann August Ernesti (Halle: 1756-57; ASKB 1224-29), II2, pp. 1376-77; Philippics, tr. Walter Kerr (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1926), p. 158.
3. In Ludvig Holberg, Jacob von Tyboe Eller Den stortalende Soldat, III, 4, Den Danske Skue-Plads, I-VII (Copenhagen: 1788; ASKB 1566-67), III, no pagination, Magister Stygotius boasts (ed. tr.): “I walk in the footsteps of the ancients, of which proof will be seen the day after tomorrow when I, volente Deo [God willing], will defend my thesis.”
4. In Jugurtha, IV, 4, Sallust writes that it was from justifiable motives rather than from indolence that he would record events instead of engaging in politics. C. Sallustii Crispi opera, I-II (Halle: 1828-34; ASKB 1269-70), II, p. 22; Sallust, tr. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1921), pp. 136-37.
5. Xenophon uses the term with reference to Socrates. See Memorabilia, III, 11, 16; Xenophontis memorabilia, ed. F. A. Bornemann (Leipzig: 1829; ASKB 1211), p. 236; Memorabilia, tr. E. C. Marchant (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1923), p. 248. According to Solon’s law, an Athenian who refused to participate in civil disputes should lose his rights as a citizen. See Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens, 8, 4-5; The Works of Aristotle, I-XII, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908-52), X; see also Karl Friedrich Becker, Verdenshistorie, I-XII, tr. Jacob Riise (Copenhagen: 1822-29; ASKB 1972-83), I, p. 427.
6. See Valerius Maximus, VIII, 7, 7; Valerius Maximus: Sammlung merkwürdiger Reden und Thaten, I-V, tr. Friedrich Hoffmann (Stuttgart: 1828-29; ASKB 1296), V, pp. 514-15. See The Concept of Anxiety, p. 23, KW VIII (SV IV 295); The Corsair Affair, p. 165, KW XIII (Pap. VII1 B 11).
7. Diogenes of Sinope (c. 413-323 B.C.), prototype of Greek Cynic philosophers. See Lucian, “How to Write History,” 3; Luciani opera, I-IV (Leipzig: 1829; ASKB 1131-34), II, p. 122; Lucian, I-VIII, tr. K. Kilburn (Loeb, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), VI, p. 5.
8. With a reference to Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, Geschichte der Philosophie, I-XI (Leipzig: 1798-1819; ASKB 815-26), I, p. 355, fn. 6 b, journal entry JP V 5618 (Pap. IV A 63, 1843) states: “If anyone wants to call my fragment of wisdom Sophistic, I must point out that it lacks at least one characteristic according to both Plato’s and Aristotle’s definitions: that one makes money by it.” See Plato, Greater Hippias, 283 b; Opera, IX, pp. 6-7; Collected Dialogues, p. 1535; Aristotle, On Sophistic Fallacies, 165 a, 171 b; Aristoteles graece, I-II, ed. Immanuel Bekker (Berlin: 1831; ASKB 1074-75), I, pp. 165, 171; Works, I.
9. In one of Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s plays, Baron Goldkalb of Frankfurt is expected to travel to Copenhagen via Korsør. When the poor Jewish merchant Salomon Goldkalb of Hamburg arrives in Korsør, he is ceremoniously welcomed. Kong-Salomon ogjörgen Hattemager (Copenhagen: 1825), 14-26, pp. 47-79.
10. See Supplement, pp. 226-27 (Pap. X2 A 155). In the preface to Hans Lassen Martensen’s dissertation, published in Danish translation by Lauritz Vilhelm Petersen, Den menneskelige Selvbevidstheds Autonomie i vor Tids dog-matiske Theologie (Copenhagen: 1841; ASKB 651), Petersen states (ed. tr.): “It was the first work to appear in this country in the new speculative trend and heralded the era in theology from which we have already begun to reckon.”
11. The Danish Dyrehavstid is literally “Deer Park time.” An area in Deer Park (near Copenhagen to the north), known as Dyrehavsbakken, was and still is the site of a carnival-type amusement park (perhaps the world’s oldest) that operates from springtime into autumn.
12. The flip-flopping of the concept refers to Hegel’s view, in his criticism of Kant’s antinomies, that thought is a unity of opposites and that events proceed through contradictions in a progressive unity of opposites. See, for example, G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe, I-XVIII, ed. Philipp Marheineke et al. (Berlin: 1832-45; ASKB 549-65), III, p. 217; Jubiläumsausgabe [J.A.], I-XXVI, ed. Hermann Glockner (Stuttgart: 1927-40), IV, p. 227; Hegel’s Science of Logic (tr. of W.L., Lasson ed., 1923; Kierkegaard had 2 ed., 1833-34), tr. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 191: “But profounder insight into the antinomial, or more truly into the dialectical nature of reason demonstrates any Notion whatever to be a unity of opposed moments to which, therefore, the form of antinomial assertions could be given.”
13. Presumably an allusion to David’s dancing before the Ark of the Covenant; see II Samuel 6:14-16.
14. With reference to the remainder of the sentence, see Supplement, p. 185 (Pap. V B 36:1).
15. An allusion to I Corinthians 9:13.
16. With reference to the following three sentences, see Supplement, p. 185 (Pap. V B 36:2).
17. Plato, Cratylus, 384 b; Opera, V, pp. 108-09; Collected Dialogues, p. 383 (Socrates speaking): “Son of Hipponicus, there is an ancient saying that ‘hard is the knowledge of the good.’ And the knowledge of names is a great part of knowledge. If I had not been poor, I might have heard the fifty-drachma course of the great Prodicus, which is a complete education in grammar and language—these are his own words—and then I should have been at once able to answer your question about the correctness of names. But, indeed, I have only heard the single-drachma course, and therefore I do not know the truth about such matters.”
1. See Supplement, pp. 185-86 (Pap. V B 1:12, 3:1, 40:6), for changes in draft and final copies. See Historical Introduction, p. xvii. The term “Propositio” means “proposal,” more specifically here “hypothesis,” with the “if/then” form that provides the structure of the entire work.
2. Originally termed “Position II.” See Historical Introduction, p. xvii.
3. See p. 91, where the form of Philosophical Fragments is called “algebraic,” in contrast, for example, to Either/Or, “A Fragment of Life,” and Fear and Trembling, “Dialectical Lyric.” The hypothetical (“if/then”) character of Fragments is signaled again by “Thought-Project” (see note 1 above), in contrast to Postscript, which is in “historical costume.”
4. See Supplement, pp. 186-87 (Pap. V B 3:2, 40:7). The original opening portion was shifted to the end in the final copy.
5. The Danish læres may be rendered as “be learned” or as “be taught.” See Plato, Protagoras, 320 b; Opera, I, pp. 28-29; Heise, II, p. 129; Collected Dialogues, p. 318 (Socrates speaking): “Protagoras, I do not believe that virtue can be taught.” Gorgias offers very little on this theme. See Meno, 70 a; Opera, IX, pp. 194-95; Collected Dialogues, p. 354 (Meno speaking): “Can you tell me, Socrates—is virtue something that can be taught?” Euthydemus, 276 d; Opera, IX, pp. 120-21; Collected Dialogues, p. 390 (Euthydemus speaking): “Do the learners learn what they know, or what they don’t know?”
6. Meno, 80 e; Opera, IX, pp. 222-23; Collected Dialogues, p. 363 (Socrates speaking): “Do you realize that what you are bringing up is the trick argument that a man cannot try to discover either what he knows or what he does not know? He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is no need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for.” W. K. Guthrie’s translation (“trick argument”) of ἐϱιστιϰòν λòγον gives a secondary and narrow meaning of the phrase. Climacus takes the primary meaning of “combative, pugnacious,” and in so doing is also close to Ast’s Latin litigiosam orationem. The position is pugnacious because it apparently ends in a dilemma. It is a trick argument, however, to one who has a third way, the way of recollection, whereby one learns what one once knew and has forgotten but nevertheless in a sense does know and in principle can recollect.
7. See Meno, 81 c-d; Opera, IX, pp. 224-25; Collected Dialogues, p. 364 (Socrates speaking):
Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed. All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single piece of knowledge—learned it, in ordinary language—there is no reason why he should not find out all the rest, if he keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of the search, for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.
We ought not then to be led astray by the contentious argument you quoted. It would make us lazy, and is music in the ears of weaklings. The other doctrine produces energetic seekers after knowledge, and being convinced of its truth, I am ready, with your help, to inquire into the nature of virtue.
8. See note 7 above. No distinction is made here between Socrates and Plato. Nor is a distinction made in Fragments between Socrates-Plato and philosophical idealism nor between them and naturalism and scientific humanism, inasmuch as all of them presuppose an immanental possession of genuine knowledge or of the condition for acquiring it. See Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 172-74); JP II 2274 (Pap. III A 5).
9. See Plato, Phaedo, 72 e-77 a; Opera, I, pp. 508-21: Heise, I, pp. 32-41; Collected Dialogues, pp. 55-60, for example, 75 e, p. 59 (Socrates speaking): “And if it is true that we acquired our knowledge before our birth, and lost it at the moment of birth, but afterward, by the exercise of our senses upon sensible objects, recover the knowledge which we had once before, I suppose that what we call learning will be the recovery of our own knowledge, and surely we should be right in calling this recollection.” See Supplement, p. 187 (Pap. V B 40:8).
10. By “ancient speculation,” Climacus may be pointing not only to Plato’s views but also to the metempsychosis of the Orphic mysteries and of the Pythagoreans, as well as to medieval thinkers like Origen and John Scotus Erigena. “Modern speculation” presumably points to Franz Baader, Schelling, and Hegel. See Supplement, p. 181 (Pap. II A 448).
11. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 187 (Pap. V B 40:8).
12. See The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, KW II (SV XIII 232-78), in which the treatment of Socrates by Hegel and certain contemporary Hegelians is discussed. The emphasis there is upon Socrates’ thought and actions as negative. See JP I 754 (Pap. III A 7). Cf. JP IV 4281 (Pap. X3 A 477).
13. The Danish text here and throughout Fragments (with few exceptions) has Guden, a noun with the definite article. This unusual form emphasizes the Socratic-Platonic context of the hypothesis and its development in the entire work. Although the English quotation in note 15 below uses no definite article in the translation of ὁ θεòζ, at the time Fragments was being written the current German translation employed the definite article. See Platons Werke, I-III, tr. Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (Berlin: 1817-28; ASKB 1158-63), II1, p. 202. There was no Danish translation of Theaetetus available to Kierkegaard. Guden is used in later Danish translations: Platons Theaitetos, tr. Bendt Treschow and Frederik Clemens Bendtsen Dahl (Copenhagen: 1869), pp. 22-23; Platons Skrifier, I-XI, tr. Carsten Høeg and Hans Ræder (Copenhagen: 1932-41), VII, pp. 108-09. The Jowett translation of the quotation from Theaetetus in note 15 below has “the god.” In the entire Kierkegaard authorship, Guden is very rarely found except in Fragments and Postscript.
14. Apology, 21-23 b, 28 e-30; Opera, VIII, pp. 106-13, 126-31; Collected Dialogues, pp. 7-9, 15-17, for example, 28 d-e, p. 15 (Socrates speaking): “This being so, it would be shocking inconsistency on my part, gentlemen, if, when the officers whom you chose to command me assigned me my position at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, I remained at my post like anyone else and faced death, and yet afterward, when [the] God appointed me, as I supposed and believed, to the duty of leading the philosophical life, examining myself and others, I were then through fear of death or of any other danger to desert my post. That would indeed be shocking, and then I might really with justice be summoned into court for not believing in the gods, and disobeying the oracle, and being afraid of death, and thinking that I am wise when I am not.”
15. Theaetetus, 150 b-d; Opera, II, pp. 26-29; Collected Dialogues, p. 855 (Socrates speaking): “My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth. And the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. I am so far like the midwife that I cannot myself give birth to wisdom, and the common reproach is true, that, though I question others, I can myself bring nothing to light because there is no wisdom in me. The reason is this. Heaven [ὁ θεός; Jowett translation: “the god”] constrains me to serve as a midwife, but has debarred me from giving birth. So of myself I have no sort of wisdom, nor has any discovery ever been born to me as the child of my soul. Those who frequent my company at first appear, some of them, quite unintelligent, but, as we go further with our discussions, all who are favored by heaven make progress at a rate that seems surprising to others as well as to themselves, although it is clear that they have never learned anything from me. The many admirable truths they bring to birth have been discovered by themselves from within. But the delivery is heaven’s work and mine.” See note 16 below.
16. Diogenes Laertius, II, 21. The text has a Danish translation from the Greek, Diogenis Laertii de vitis philosophorum, I-II (Leipzig: 1833; ASKB 1109), I, p. 70. See Diogen Laërtses filosofiske Historie, I-II, tr. Børge Riisbrigh (Copenhagen: 1812; ASKB 1110-11), I, p. 66; Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I-II, tr. R. D. Hicks (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1925), I, pp. 150-51: “he discussed moral questions in the workshops and the market-place, being convinced that the study of nature is no concern of ours; and . . . he claimed that his enquiries embraced
Whatso’er is good or evil in an house . . ..”
17. See p. 20 and note 43.
18. Mediering in its various forms is the Danish rendering of the Hegelian term Vermittelung: reconciliation of opposites in a higher unity. See, for example, Wissenschaft der Logik, I-III, Werke, III, pp. 92, 110, 159, 197, 456; IV, pp. 75-77, 90-91, 107, 117-18, 120-24, 127-29, 167-68; V, pp. 229-30, 233-35, 311-12, 353; J.A, IV, pp. 102, 120, 169, 207, 466, 553-55, 568-69, 585, 596, 599-603, 605-07, 645-46; V, pp. 229-30, 233-35, 311-12, 353; Science of Logic, pp. 93 (“For being which is the outcome of mediation we shall reserve the term: Existence”), 107, 146, 175, 375, 445-47, 456-57, 469, 478 (“This immediacy that is mediated by ground and condition and is self-identical through the sublating of mediation, is Existence”), 481-83, 486-87, 516-17 (“the truth of the relation consists therefore in the mediation; its essence is the negative unity in which both the reflected and simply affirmative [seiende] immediacy are sublated”), 749, 752-53, 811, 843-44 (“But in this next resolve of the pure Idea to determine itself as external Idea, it thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the Notion ascends as a free Existence that has withdrawn into itself from externality, that completes its self-liberation in the science of spirit, and that finds the supreme Notion of itself in the science of logic as the self-comprehending pure Notion”).
19. Prodicus of Ceoa was a distinguished Sophist contemporary with Socrates. Plato mentions him in Protagoras, 337 a-c, 340-42 a; Theaetetus, 151 b; Cratylus, 384 b; Charmides, 163 d; Greater Hippias, 282 c; Euthydemus, 305 c; Meno, 75 e, 96 d; Opera, I, pp. 64-67, 72-77; II, pp. 28-29; VIII, pp. 436-41; IX, pp. 4-5, 186-87, 208-09; Heise, II, pp. 165-66, 171-75; Collected Dialogues, pp. 331-32, 333-35, 856, 422, 109, 1535, 418-19, 358, 380. His famous “Choice of Heracles” is related in Xenophon, Memorabilia, II, 1, 21-34; Borneman, pp. 91-101; Loeb, pp. 95-103.
20. See Supplement, p. 187 (Pap. V B 3:4); JP IV 4512 (Pap. IV A 44).
21. Presumably πϱοτϱεπτƚϰὀς (encouraging) was intended here. Both forms are used in the dialogue. See Clitophon, 410 b-e; Opera, IX, pp 362-65.
22. See Supplement, pp. 231-32 (Pap. III A 7) and note 2.
23. In keeping with the context of the hypothesis in Fragments, this conception of the eternal echoes classical Greek philosophy, Augustine, and nineteenth-century speculative idealism. See, for example, Plato, Timaeus, 37-38; Opera, pp. 150-55; Collected Dialogues, pp. 466-68 (“the past and future are created species of time, which we unconsciously but wrongly transfer to eternal being”); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Vom ICH als Prinzip der Philosophie (Tübingen: 1795), p. 105 (“Ewigkeit . . . ist Seyn in keiner Zeit [eternity is being in no time]”); Hegel, Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems . . ., Werke, I, p. 225; J.A., I, p. 97 (“Das wahre Aufheben der Zeit ist zeitlose Gegenwart, d.i. Ewigkeit”); The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, tr. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 134: “The true suspension of time is a timeless present, i.e., eternity.”
24. For a discussion of the concept “the moment,” see a companion volume to Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety (published four days later, June 17, 1844), pp. 81-90, KW VIII (SV IV 351-60); JP III 2739-44 and pp. 821-22; VII, p. 62. See note 25 below.
25. The Danish blev til (as well as tilblive, Tilblivelse, være til, and Tilværelse) refers to temporal and spatial modes of becoming and being. The eternal as timeless being does not come into being but comes into time and space as a specific embodiment of the eternal. The moment, therefore, is an atom of eternity and has a significance qualitatively different from that of transient instants of time. Existence is a mode of being, but not all being is existence. Therefore, for example, in Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 287), Johannes Climacus states that “God does not think, he creates; God does not exist, he is eternal.”
26. See The Sickness unto Death, p. 95, KW XIX (SV XI 206); JP I 651 (Pap. VIII2 B 83).
27. On the concept of human freedom and responsibility in relation to divine omnipotence, see JP II 1251 (Pap. VII1 A 181).
28. With reference to the following three paragraphs and footnote, see Supplement, pp. 187-88 (Pap. V B 3:8).
29. On the origin and consequences of sin and responsibility for it, see Anxiety, passim, KW VIII JP IV 3989-4051 and pp. 657-58; VII, pp. 69, 87.
30. With reference to the following six sentences, see Supplement, p. 188 (Pap. V B 2).
31. On freedom and the eventuation of misused freedom in unfreedom, see, for example, Anxiety, pp. 107-12, KW VIII (SV IV 376-81); JP II 1230-78 and p. 561; VII, p. 39.
32. See, for example, Either/Or, I, KW III (SV I 13).
33. A free but substantially correct rendering of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 5, 1114 a; Bekker, II, p. 1114; Die Ethik des Aristoteles, I-II, tr. Christian Garve (Breslau: 1798-1801; ASKB 1082-83), II, p. 41; Works, IX.
34. A reading note (Pap. IV C 49) includes these lines: “Also the way in which the skeptics denied motion. See Diogenes Laertius, IX, 11, para. 99.” Vitis, II, p. 175; Riisbrigh, I, p. 445; Loeb, II, p. 511. Earlier in Diogenes Laertius (IX, 72; Vitis, II, pp. 164-65; Riisbrigh, I, p. 433; Loeb, II, p. 485), Zeno is specifically named as a skeptic: “Furthermore, they find Xenophanes, Zeno of Elea, and Democritus to be skeptics: Xenophanes because he says,
Clear truth hath no man seen nor e’er shall know;
and Zeno because he would destroy motion, saying, ‘A moving body moves neither where it is nor where it is not’ . . .” (see para. 99). Zeno’s paradoxes of motion were the flying arrow, Achilles and the tortoise, and the marching columns.
35. See John 8:34; Galatians 5:1.
36. For a reference to Socrates, see The Point of View for My Work as an Author, KW XXII (SV XIII 541-42).
37. See Galatians 4:4.
38. The Danish term Discipel means “pupil,” “learner,” “apprentice,” “follower,” and “disciple.” Here and elsewhere in Fragments (except for references to the relation of teacher and pupil or learner), “follower” is most appropriate.
39. On this theme, see JP III 3782-90 and pp. 918-19; VII, p. 81.
40. See Philippians 3:13-14; Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, KW XV (SV VIII 119-20).
41. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 188 (Pap. VB 3:11).
42. The judges of the underworld, named by Socrates in Apology, 41 a; Opera, VIII, pp. 154-55; Collected Dialogues, p. 25.
43. See p. 11. With reference to the following three sentences, see Supplement, p. 188 (Pap. V B 3:12). While writing the draft of Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est in 1842-43, Kierkegaard read Descartes’s works and Hegel on Descartes. The text may refer to Meditations on First Philosophy, III; Meditationes de prima philosophia, Renati Des-Cartes opera philosophica (Amsterdam: 1678; ASKB 473), pp. 19, 21; Descartes’ Philosophical Writings, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 222, 225: “Now among my ideas in addition to the idea which exhibits me to myself . . . there is another which represents God . . . my awareness of God must be prior to that of myself.” The same thought is found in Hegel’s treatment of Descartes in Vorlesungenüber die Geschichte der Philosophie, III, Werke, XV, p. 350; J. A., XIX, p. 350; Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (tr. of G.P., 2 ed., 1840-44; Kierkegaard had 1 ed., 1833-36), I-III, tr. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), III, p. 237: “In the form of God no other conception is thus here given than that contained in Cogito, ergo sum, wherein Being and thought are inseparably bound up . . ..”
44. Opera, II, pp. 50-51; Collected Dialogues, p. 856: “People have often . . . been positively ready to bite me for taking away some foolish notion they have conceived.”
45. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 188 (Pap. V B 3:13).
46. With reference to the remainder of the chapter, see Supplement, pp. 188-89 (Pap. V B 3:14).
47. In the Danish game Gnavspil, if the player who has the counter with the picture of a house does not want to make an exchange, he says, “Go to the next house.” See Fear and Trembling, p. 100, KW VI (SV III 147).
1. See p. 9 (“Propositio” and “Thought-Project”); Repetition, pp. 357-62, KW VI. All three terms point to the hypothetical character and form of the imaginary construction elaborating the implications of going beyond Socrates. On “poetical venture,” see Two Ethical-Religious Essays, KW XVIII (SV XI 55, 91).
2. In his dissertation (1841), The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, KW II (SV XIII 231-59), Kierkegaard concludes that Aristophanes’ presentation of Socrates is less a caricature than is generally supposed. In Chapter I of Fragments, Socrates is treated as symbolic of an epistemological position. In Chapter II, Socrates is depicted positively as a unique practicing pedagogue, a characterization at some variance with the interpretation in Irony.
3. Influenced as well as influencing: the teacher is also a learner and the learner is also a teacher.
4. Presumably a reference to Hegel and Hegelians, perhaps also to Schelling. See, for example, Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, II, Werke, XIV, pp. 71, 85; J.A., XIX, pp. 71, 85; History of Philosophy, II, pp. 407, 426: “It [the Good] is a principle, concrete within itself, which, however, is not yet manifested in its development, and in this abstract attitude we find what is wanting in the Socratic standpoint, of which nothing that is affirmative can, beyond this, be adduced. Aristophanes regarded the Socratic philosophy from the negative side, maintaining that through the cultivation of reflecting consciousness, the idea of law had been shaken [added in second German edition, 1840-44: and we cannot question the justice of this conception]. Aristophanes’ consciousness of the one-sidedness of Socrates may be regarded as a prelude to his death; the Athenian people likewise certainly recognized his negative methods in condemning him.” The title of Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus’s pirated pre-edition of Schelling’s Berlin lectures (1841-42; see Kierkegaard’s notes in KW II) was Die endlich offenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der Offenbarung (Darmstadt: 1843).
5. Jealous of their prerogatives, the gods disciplined, even destroyed, men who in pride (hybris) went beyond their proper bounds. This is the central theme of Greek tragedies. In the Symposium, 189 d-191 d, Plato has Aristophanes relate the consequences of the moon descendants’ encroachment on Mt. Olympus, the home of the gods. Opera, III, pp. 468-75; Heise, II, pp. 37-41; Collected Dialogues, pp. 542-44.
6. See Plato, Symposium, 215 d-e; Opera, III, pp. 528-31; Heise, II, pp. 88-89; Collected Dialogues, p. 567 (Alcibiades speaking): “And speaking for myself, gentlemen, if I wasn’t afraid you’d tell me I was completely bottled, I’d swear on oath what an extraordinary effect his words have had on me—and still do, if it comes to that. For the moment I hear him speak I am smitten with a kind of sacred rage, worse than any Corybant, and my heart jumps into my mouth and the tears start into my eyes—oh, and not only me, but lots of other men.”
7. The Corybantes were priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, whose rites were conducted with wild music and frenzied dancing.
8. This observation is a remnant of the earlier interpretation of Socrates in Irony. See p. 23 and note 2; Supplement, p. 189 (Pap. V B 4:3).
9. See Symposium, 216-18, where Alcibiades tells of his having tried to influence Socrates in this way. Opera, III, pp. 530-37; Heise, II, pp. 89-94; Collected Dialogues, pp. 567-69.
10. With reference to the next three sentences, see Supplement, p. 189 (Pap. V B 4:4).
11. Aristotle’s definition of God. See Metaphysics, 1072 b; Bekker, II, p. 1072; Aristoteles Metaphysik, I-II, tr. Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (Bonn: 1824; ASKB 1084), I, p. 243; Works, VIII: “The final cause, then, produces motion as being loved, but all other things move by being moved. Now if something is moved, it is capable of being otherwise than as it is. Therefore if its actuality is the primary form of spatial motion, then in so far as it is subject to change, in this respect it is capable of being otherwise,—in place, even if not in substance. But since there is something which moves while itself unmoved, existing actually, this can in no way be otherwise than as it is. For motion in space is the first of the kinds of change, and motion in a circle the first kind of spatial motion; and this the first mover produces. The first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle. For the necessary has all these senses—that which is necessary perforce because it is contrary to the natural impulse, that without which the good is impossible, and that which cannot be otherwise but can exist only in a single way. On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature.” JP II 1332 (Pap. IV A 157) mentions Schelling’s references to Aristotle’s discussion of the first and final cause. See also Kierkegaard’s account in Schelling Lecture Notes, KW II (Pap. III C 27, Suppl. XIII, pp. 271-78).
12. Plato, Gorgias, 490 c; Opera, I, pp. 570-71; Heise, III, p. 110; Collected Dialogues, p. 272 (Callicles speaking): “You keep talking about food and drink and doctors and nonsense. I am not speaking of these things.”
13. See Plutarch, “Themistocles,” XXIX, 3, Lives; Plutark’s Levnetsbeskrivelser, I-IV, tr. Stephan Tetens (Copenhagen: 1800-11; ASKB 1197-1200), II, pp. 59-60; Plutarchs Werke, I-VI, tr. J. G. Klaiber (Stuttgart: 1827-30; ASKB 1190-91), III, p. 352; Plutarch’s Lives, I-XI, tr. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb, New York: Macmillan, 1914-26), II, p. 79: “But Themistocles made answer [to King Xerxes] that the speech of man was like embroidered tapestries, since like them this too had to be extended in order to display its patterns, but when it was rolled up it concealed and distorted them. Wherefore he had need of time.”
14. The Danish hoverende (overende in Kierkegaard’s manuscript) is related to the Latin ovatio, a lesser celebration or ovation in which the victor entered the capital on foot or on horseback and offered only a sheep (ovis) in sacrifice; triumpherende is related to the Latin triumph, a more splendid celebration in which the victor entered in a chariot.
15. See Matthew 22:19-21.
16. See Matthew 9:23, the raising of Jairus’s daughter.
17. See Psalm 90:4; II Peter 3:8.
18. See Matthew 6:29.
19. A reference to Exodus 33:20: “‘But,’ he [the Lord] said, ‘you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.’ ” Although the Danish text has the Platonic “the god” (Guden), the Hebrew “the Lord” or “God” seems more appropriate here.
20. See Luke 15:7.
21. The dash signifies the recurrence of the basic conditional “if/then” formulation of the hypothesis (as on p. 28): “if the moment is to have decisive significance (and without this we return to the Socratic, even though we think we are going further), the learner . . . .”
22. With reference to this phrase and the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 189 (Pap. V B 4:6).
23. See John 8:32.
24. See Symposium, 209 e-211 b; Opera, III, pp. 514-19; Heise, II, pp. 77-80; Collected Dialogues, pp. 561-62. In his speech, Socrates recalls the Eros-inspired ascent as told to him by Diotima:
Well now, my dear Socrates, I have no doubt that even you might be initiated into these, the more elementary mysteries of Love. But I don’t know whether you could apprehend the final revelation, for so far, you know, we are only at the bottom of the true scale of perfection.
Never mind, she went on, I will do all I can to help you understand, and you must strain every nerve to follow what I’m saying.
Well then, she began, the candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all, if his preceptor instructs him as he should, he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body, so that his passion may give life to noble discourse. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, when he will see that if he is to devote himself to loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and every body is the same.
Having reached this point, he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body, and bring his passion for the one into due proportion by deeming it of little or of no importance.
Next he must grasp that the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul, so that wherever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and to cherish—and beautiful enough to quicken in his heart a longing for such discourse as tends toward the building of a noble nature. And from this he will be led to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions. And when he discovers how nearly every kind of beauty is akin to every other he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not, after all, of so great moment.
And next, his attention should be diverted from institutions to the sciences, so that he may know the beauty of every kind of knowledge. And thus, by scanning beauty’s wide horizon, he will be saved from a slavish and illiberal devotion to the individual loveliness of a single boy, a single man, or a single institution. And, turning his eyes toward the open sea of beauty, he will find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest thought, and reap a golden harvest of philosophy, until, confirmed and strengthened, he will come upon one single form of knowledge, the knowledge of the beauty I am about to speak of.
And here, she said, you must follow me as closely as you can.
Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries of Love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession, is at last drawing near the final revelation. And now, Socrates, there bursts upon him that wondrous vision which is the very soul of the beauty he has toiled so long for. It is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshiper as it is to every other.
Nor will his vision of the beautiful take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words, nor knowledge, nor a something that exists in something else, such as a living creature, or the earth, or the heavens, or anything that is—but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness, while every lovely thing partakes of it in such sort that, however much the parts may wax and wane, it will be neither more nor less, but still the same inviolable whole.
25. See Symposium, 220 a-b; Opera, III, pp. 538-41; Heise, II, p. 97; Collected Dialogues, p. 571. Alcibiades tells of the winter expedition to Potidaea: “Then again, the way he got through that winter was most impressive, and the winters over there are pretty shocking. There was one time when the frost was harder than ever, and all the rest of us stayed inside, or if we did go out we wrapped ourselves up to the eyes and tied bits of felt and sheepskins over our shoes, but Socrates went out in the same old coat he’d always worn, and made less fuss about walking on the ice in his bare feet than we did in our shoes. So much so, that the men began to look at him with some suspicion and actually took his toughness as a personal insult to themselves.”
26. See Luke 9:58.
27. See Matthew 4:6; Psalm 91:11-12.
28. See, for example, Matthew 4:24, 9:36.
29. See Philippians 2:8.
30. See Matthew 4:2.
31. See Matthew 27:46.
32. Ecce homo! See John 19:5.
33. See Luke 7:37-38.
34. See Luke 10:39-42.
35. See John 2:4.
36. See Matthew 4:10, 16:23.
37. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 189 (Pap. V B 4:7).
38. See Luke 2:35.
39. See Matthew 26:38.
40. See Matthew 26:39.
41. See Matthew 27:48.
42. Faith or offense.
43. The Danish digte (nouns: Digt, poem, and Digter, poet) means “to write a poem,” “to compose a literary work.” It also means “to fabricate” or “to fictionize.” In all cases, it signifies that the project is a making, as does the English “poem” (from the Greek poiema, derived from poiein: “to make,” “to compose,” “to write”). Here and elsewhere in Fragments, digte and Digt are rendered as the context requires. See note 1 above.
44. See Matthew 9:17.
45. See Exodus 19:16-19.
46. With reference to the remainder of the chapter, see Supplement, pp. 189-90 (Pap. V B 4:2).
47. See Plato, Apology 27 b-c; Opera, VIII, pp. 122-23; Collected Dialogues, p. 13 (Socrates speaking): “Is there anyone in the world, Meletus who believes in human activities, and not in human beings? Make him answer, gentlemen, and don’t let him keep on making these continual objections. Is there anyone who does not believe in horses, but believes in horses’ activities? Or who does not believe in musicians, but believes in musical activities? No, there is not, my worthy friend. If you do not want to answer, I will supply it for you and for these gentlemen too. But the next question you must answer. Is there anyone who believes in supernatural activities and not in supernatural beings?”
48. See JP V 5222 (Pap. II A 92).
49. See I Corinthians 2:9; Sickness unto Death, pp. 84, 118, KW XIX (SV XI 195, 228).
1. On the theme of “paradox,” see JP III 3070-3102 (especially 3073-74) and pp. 845-46; VII, p. 69.
2. See Plato, Phaedrus, 229 d-230 a; Opera, I, pp. 130-31; Collected Dialogues, p. 478 (Socrates speaking):
For my part, Phaedrus, I regard such theories [a scientific account of how Boreas seized Orythia from the river] as no doubt attractive, but as the invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied, for the simple reason that they must then go on and tell us the real truth about the appearance of centaurs and the Chimera, not to mention a whole host of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegasuses and countless other remarkable monsters of legend flocking in on them. If our skeptic, with his somewhat crude science, means to reduce every one of them to the standard of probability, he’ll need a deal of time for it. I myself have certainly no time for the business, and I’ll tell you why, my friend. I can’t as yet ‘know myself,’ as the inscription at Delphi enjoins, and so long as that ignorance remains it seems to me ridiculous to inquire into extraneous matters. Consequently I don’t bother about such things, but accept the current beliefs about them, and direct my inquiries, as I have just said, rather to myself, to discover whether I really am a more complex creature and more puffed up with pride than Typhon, or a simpler, gentler being whom heaven has blessed with a quiet, un-Typhonic nature.
3. See Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 84); JP III 3566 (Pap. X1 A 609): “Take the paradox away from a thinker—and you have a professor. A professor has at his disposal a whole line of thinkers from Greece to modern times; it appears as if the professor stood above all of them. Well, many thanks—he is, of course, the infinitely inferior.”
4. For the analogy of laughing and crying to walking and falling, see Either/Or, I, KW III (SV I 5).
5. See p. 12 and note 18.
6. See, for example, Stages on Life’s Way, KW XI (SV VI 161-62); Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 178).
7. One source of information about Democritus’s thought is the work of Sextus Empiricus (fl. A.D. 200), Greek skeptic and author of Pyrrhonenses hypotyposes, a summary history of Greek skepticism, and Adversus mathematicos, a skeptical critique of those who claim to know and to teach. See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, II, 22-24, 27; Sexti Empirici opera quae extant (Avreliana: 1621; ASKB 146), pp. 56, 58; Sextus Empiricus, I-IV, tr. R. G. Bury (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1933-49), I, pp. 165-67, 169.
8. See JP I 42 (Pap. IV C 50).
9. Besides denying universals and thereby the possibility of learning and teaching, Sextus Empiricus argues against that possibility in another way. See Outlines of Pyrrhonism, III, 253-54; Opera, pp. 162-63; Loeb, I, p. 495:
Thus, for instance, the matter of instruction is either true or false; if false it would not be taught; for they assert that falsehood is non-existent, and of non-existents there could be no teaching. Nor yet if it were said to be true; for we have shown in our chapter “On the Criterion” that truth is non-existent. If, then, neither the false nor the true is being taught, and besides these there is nothing capable of being taught (for no one, to be sure, will say that, though these are unteachable, he teaches only dubious lessons), then nothing is taught. And the matter taught is either apparent or non-evident. But if it is apparent, it will not require teaching; for things apparent appear to all alike. And if it is non-evident, then, since things non-evident are, as we have often shown, inapprehensible owing to the undecided controversy about them, it will be incapable of being taught; for how could anyone teach or learn what he does not apprehend? But if neither the apparent is taught nor the non-evident, nothing is taught.
10. Protagoras (481-411 B.C.) was the leading Greek Sophist. His famous formulation, based upon the privacy of experience, is given in Plato’s Theaetetus, 152 a (see also Cratylus, 385 e); Opera, II, pp. 50-51; Collected Dialogues, p. 856: “‘man is the measure of all things—alike of the being of things that are and of the not-being of things that are not.’”
The Danish editors take “with everything as the measure of man” as a careless rendition of the Protagorean motto. The unusual formulation may, however, be an echo of a version in Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, II, 5, 34-36; Opera, pp. 58-59; Loeb, I, pp. 173-75:
Since, then, we are unable to make an agreed statement as to the standard by which the proof itself can be tested (for we are still inquiring about the criterion “By whom”), we shall be unable to pronounce judgement on the proof, and therefore also to prove the criterion, which is the subject of discussion. And if it shall be asserted without proof that objects ought to be judged by Man, the assertion will be disbelieved, so that we shall be unable to affirm positively that the criterion “By whom” (or Agent) is Man. Moreover, who is to be the judge that the criterion of the Agent is Man? For if they assert this without a judgement (or criterion) they will surely not be believed. Yet if they say that a man is to be the judge, that will be assuming the point at issue; while if they make another animal the judge, in what way do they come to adopt that animal for the purpose of judging whether Man is the criterion? If they do so without a judgement, it will not be believed, and if with a judgement, it in turn needs to be judged by something. If, then, it is judged by itself, the same absurdity remains (for the object of inquiry will be judged by the object of inquiry); and if by Man, circular reasoning is introduced; and if by some judge other than these two, we shall once again in his case demand the criterion “By whom,” and so on ad infinitum. Consequently we shall not be in a position to declare that objects ought to be judged by Man.
The idea of measuring or judging and of being measured or judged is found also in an early note (Pap. II C 13) on Hans Lassen Martensen’s lectures (1837) on Greek philosophy. Following the heading “Protagoras ‘Everything is the measure of man’” is a line from Matthew 7:2 (King James tr.): “with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.”
11. See Plato, Symposium, 220 c-d; Opera, III, pp. 540-41; Heise, II, pp. 97-98; Collected Dialogues, p. 571 (Alcibiades speaking):
And now I must tell you about another thing “our valiant hero dared and did” in the course of the same campaign. He started wrestling with some problem or other about sunrise one morning, and stood there lost in thought, and when the answer wouldn’t come he still stood there thinking and refused to give it up. Time went on, and by about midday the troops noticed what was happening, and naturally they were rather surprised and began telling each other how Socrates had been standing there thinking ever since daybreak. And at last, toward nightfall, some of the Ionians brought out their bedding after supper—this was in the summer, of course—partly because it was cooler in the open air, and partly to see whether he was going to stay there all night. Well, there he stood till morning, and then at sunrise he said his prayers to the sun and went away.
12. Cf. a similar expression used by Hegel in connection with Aufhebung (contradiction, destruction, and preservation on a higher level) in the dialectic of contradictories in existence. See, for example, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, IV, pp. 117-18; J.A., IV, pp. 595-96; Science of Logic, pp. 477-78:
The fact emerges from the ground. It is not grounded or posited by it in such a manner that ground remains as a substrate; on the contrary, the positing is the movement of the ground outwards to itself and its simple vanishing. Through its union with the conditions, ground receives an external immediacy and the moment of being. But it receives this not as something external, nor through an external relation; on the contrary, as ground, it makes itself into a positedness, its simple essentiality unites with itself in the positedness and is, in this sublation of itself, the vanishing of its difference from its positedness, and is thus simple essential immediacy. Ground, therefore, does not remain behind as something distinct from the grounded, but the truth of grounding is that in it ground is united with itself, so that its reflection into another is its reflection into itself. Consequently, the fact is not only the unconditioned but also the groundless, and it emerges from ground only in so far as ground has “fallen to the ground [zu Grunde gegangen]” and ceased to be ground: it emerges from the groundless, that is, from its own essential negativity or pure form.
This immediacy that is mediated by ground and condition and is self-identical through the sublating [Aufheben] of mediation, is Existence.
13. See Mark 11:31; Works of Love, KW XVI (SV IX 34-40).
14. With reference to the parenthetical portion, see Supplement, p. 190 (Pap. V B 5:2).
15. See p. 23 and note 2. In the text, the Greek for “than Typhon” is omitted.
16. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 190 (Pap. V B 5:3).
17. See Supplement, p. 190 (Pap. V B 5:3) and notes.
18. With reference to the following two paragraphs, see Supplement, pp. 190-91 (Pap. V B 5:5). In these paragraphs and in the footnote, Kierkegaard uses Gud (God) rather than Guden (the god), inasmuch as the language of Spinoza and Leibniz is employed in the discussion of their thought.
19. Cf. Sickness unto Death, p. 121, KW XIX (SV XI 231).
20. See Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Def. 1, Prop. 7, 11; Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata, Opera philosophica omnia, ed. August Gfroerer (Stuttgart: 1830; ASKB 788), pp. 289, 291; The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, I-II, tr. R.H.M. Elwes (London: Bell, 1909-12), II, pp. 48, 51: “Existence belongs to the nature of substance”; “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists.”
21. Opera, p. 15; Baruch Spinoza, Principles of the Philosophy of René Descartes, Earlier Philosophical Writings, tr. Frank A. Hayes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 37.
22. Opera, p. 15, n. II; Earlier Philosophical Writings, p. 38. On the front flyleaf of his copy of the Gfroerer edition of Spinoza’s Opera (University of Copenhagen Library, Fil. 18782), Kierkegaard wrote:
re pg. 15. Lemma 1. Note II. This dissolves in a tautology, since he explains perfectio by realitas, esse. The more perfect a thing is, he says, the more it is; but in turn he explains the perfection of a thing by saying that it has in itself more esse, which therefore says that the more it is the more it is.
In a logical sense, this is correct—the more perfection, the more it is; but here being has an altogether different meaning than that it factually is.
Thus, with respect to God, this ends in the old thesis that if God is possible, he is eo ipso necessary (cf. Leibniz on this somewhere in the Theodicy).
See note 25 below.
23. See JP I 1057, 1059; IV 3852 (Pap. X2 A 328, 439, 416).
24. Hamlet, III, 1, 56; Kittredge, p. 1166.
25. See, for example, Monadology, para. 44-45; Opera, II, p. 708; Monadology, p. 242:
44. For if there is a reality in essences or possibilities, or rather in eternal truths, this reality must needs be founded in something existing and actual, and consequently in the existence of the necessary Being, in whom essence involves existence, or in whom to be possible is to be actual. (Theod. 184-189, 335.) 45. Thus God alone (or the necessary Being) has this prerogative that He must necessarily exist, if He is possible. And as nothing can interfere with the possibility of that which involves no limits, no negation and consequently no contradiction, this [His possibility] is sufficient of itself to make known the existence of God a priori. We have thus proved it, through the reality of eternal truths. But a little while ago we proved it also a posteriori, since there exist contingent beings, which can have their final or sufficient reason only in the necessary Being, which has the reason of its existence in itself.
26. With reference to the following two paragraphs, see Supplement, pp. 190-91 (Pap. V B 5:5).
27. See, for example, Anselm, Proslogium, II, where, trusting in the presupposed ideality, he proceeds to demonstrate its existence. St. Anselm, tr. Sidney N. Deane (Chicago: Open Court, 1930), p. 7:
Truly there is a God, although the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
And so, Lord, do thou, who dost give understanding to faith, give me, so far as thou knowest it to be profitable, to understand that thou art as we believe; and that thou art that which we believe. And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms xiv. I). But, at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak—a being than which nothing greater can be conceived—understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist.
28. An eccentrically weighted tumbler doll that rolls to its feet when released is misnamed for the so-called Cartesian devil (a hollow glass figure, weighted and open at the bottom and partially filled with air), which moves in a partially filled container of water when the pliable top of the container is pressed down.
29. With reference to the Stoic Chrysippus (282-209 B.C.) and Carneades (c. 215-125 B.C.), a skeptic, see Supplement, p. 191 (Pap. V B 5:5), and note 26. A sorites (from σωϱός, a heap, of grain, for example) is a compound or chain syllogism, reputedly invented by Chrysippus, whereby an opponent is brought by small degrees from the admission of a self-evident truth to the admission of what is not manifestly true. In the statement of a sorites, all conclusions except the last are suppressed, and the sorites may be thought of as a single valid inference independent of analysis into constituent syllogisms. According to the order in which the premises are arranged, the sorites is called progressive (if, in the analysis into syllogisms, each new premise after the first is a major premise and each intermediate conclusion serves as a minor premise for the next syllogism) or regressive (if each new premise after the first is a minor premise and each intermediate conclusion a major premise).
30. Psalms 14:1 and 53:2.
31. For a deletion from the final copy, see Supplement, pp. 191-92 (Pap. V B 40:11). See JP III 3195 (Pap. X1 A 401).
32. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 4, 2-7; Bornemann, pp. 53-56; Loeb, pp. 55-57 (Socrates speaking):
“Tell me, Aristodemus, do you admire any human beings for wisdom?”
“I do,” he answered.
“Tell us their names.”
“In epic poetry Homer comes first, in my opinion; in dithyramb, Melanippides; in tragedy, Sophocles; in sculpture, Polycleitus; in painting, Zeuxis.”
“Which, think you, deserve the greater admiration, the creators of phantoms without sense and motion, or the creators of living, intelligent, and active beings?”
“Oh, of living beings, by far, provided only they are created by design and not mere chance.”
“Suppose that it is impossible to guess the purpose of one creature’s existence, and obvious that another’s serves a useful end, which, in your judgment, is the work of chance, and which of design?”
“Presumably the creature that serves some useful end is the work of design.”
“Do you not think then that he who created man from the beginning had some useful end in view when he endowed him with his several senses, giving eyes to see visible objects, ears to hear sounds? . . . With such signs of forethought in these arrangements, can you doubt whether they are the works of chance or design?”
“No, of course not. When I regard them in this light they do look very like the handiwork of a wise and loving creator.”
See Hegel, Beweise fur das Daseyn Gottes, Werke, XII, p. 518; J.A., XVI, p. 518. The reference is to Socrates and the Xenophon passage quoted above. See Supplement, p. 192 (Pap. V B 5:6).
33. For continuation of the thought, see Supplement, p. 192 (Pap. V B 5:6). For deletion from the final copy, see Supplement, pp. 192-93 (Pap. V B 40:12).
34. A reference to the formulation by Gorgias, a Sophist. See Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, VII, 65; Opera, p. 149; Loeb, II, p. 35: “Gorgias of Leontini belonged to the same party as those who abolish the criterion, although he did not adopt the same line of attack as Protagoras. For in his book entitled Concerning the Non-existent or Concerning Nature he tries to establish successively three main points—firstly, that nothing exists; secondly, that even if anything exists it is inapprehensible by man; thirdly, that even if anything is apprehensible, yet of a surety it is inexpressible and incommunicable to one’s neighbour.”
35. See The Book on Adler, KW XXIV (Pap. VII2 B 235, p. 144); Sickness unto Death, pp. 99, 117, 126, 127, KW XIX (SV XI 209-10, 227, 235, 237).
36. See, for example, JP III 3074-77 (Pap. IV C 84, A 47, 62, 103).
37. See Matthew 6:26.
38. See Supplement, p. 193 (Pap. V B 1:11, 5:7).
39. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, pp. 193-94 (Pap. V B 5:8).
40. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 194 (Pap. V B 5:9).
41. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, pp. 194-95 (Pap. V B 5:10).
42. Socrates. See pp. 23, 39.
43. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 195 (Pap. V B 5:11).
1. See Supplement, pp. 195-96 (Pap. V B 6:1).
2. See Supplement, p. 196 (Pap. V B 11:2).
3. The Danish lidende literally means “suffering” or “undergoing,” therefore passivity and receptivity in contrast to activity and agency.
4. See, for example, Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Def. III; Opera, p. 340; Works, II, p. 130:
By emotion I mean the modifications of the body, whereby the active power of the said body is increased or diminished, aided or constrained, and also the ideas of such modifications.
N.B. If we can be the adequate cause of any of these modifications, I then call the emotion an activity, otherwise I call it a passion, or state wherein the mind is passive.
5. See Spinoza, Ethics, Part II, Prop. 43, Demonstration; Opera, p. 331; Works, II, p. 115: “Further, what can there be more clear, and more certain, than a true idea as a standard of truth? Even as light displays both itself and darkness, so is truth a standard both of itself and of falsity.”
6. See Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, 9, 5; Bornemann, pp. 216-17; Loeb, p. 225:
He said that Justice and every other form of Virtue is Wisdom. “For just actions and all forms of virtuous activity are beautiful and good. He who knows the beautiful and good will never choose anything else, he who is ignorant of them cannot do them, and even if he tries, will fail. Hence the wise do what is beautiful and good, the unwise cannot and fail if they try. Therefore since just actions and all other forms of beautiful and good activity are virtuous actions, it is clear that Justice and every other form of Virtue is Wisdom.”
See Irony, KW II (SV XIII 307-08).
7. The final clause has the same form as, for example, the proverb “Inteter saa galt at det jo er godt for noget [Nothing is so bad that it is not good for something].” For an explication of the idea, see JP IV 4297 (Pap. XI1 A 318).
8. See John 8:44.
9. With reference to the remainder of the sentence, see Supplement, p. 196 (Pap. V B 11:4).
10. See I Corinthians 1:23.
11. A common version of Tertullian, De carne Christi, 5: “Mortuus est dei filius; credibile est, quia ineptum est”; On the Flesh of Christ, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, I-IX, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885-97), III, p. 525: “And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd [ineptum].” In an entry from 1839 (JP IV 4095; Pap. II A 467), Kierkegaard uses the common version.
12. See Supplement, pp. 195-96 (Pap. V B 6:1).
13. A game (Forundringsstolen; also, but rarely, named Beundringsstolen) sometimes called the “wonder stool” or “wonder game,” in which one person sits blindfolded on a stool in the middle of a circle while another goes around quietly asking others what they wonder about the person who is “it.” Upon being told what others had wondered about him, he tries to guess the source in each instance. See Sickness unto Death, p. 5, KW XIX (SV XI 117); “To Mr. Orla Lehmann,” Early Polemical Writings, KW I (SV XIII 28).
14. See Supplement, pp. 195-96 (Pap. V B 6:1).
15. See Lactantius, Institutiones divinae, VI, 9; Firmiani Lactantii opera, III, ed. O. F. Fritzsche (Leipzig: 1842-44; ASKB 142-43), II, p. 19; The Divine Institutes, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, VII, pp. 171-72. The idea is usually attributed to Augustine, although the expression is not his. Cf. The City of God, XIX, 25; Aurelii Augustini . . . de civitate Dei, I-II (Leipzig: 1825), II, p. 267; The City of God, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, I-II, ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), II, p. 504:
For although some suppose that virtues which have a reference only to themselves, and are desired only on their own account, are yet true and genuine virtues, the fact is that even then they are inflated with pride, and are therefore to be reckoned vices rather than virtues. For as that which gives life to the flesh is not derived from flesh, but is above it, so that which gives blessed life to man is not derived from man, but is something above him; and what I say of man is true of every celestial power and virtue whatsoever.
16. See Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, II, 3, 1-3; Kittredge, p. 373 (Lafeu speaking): “They say, miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.” The Danish text is based on a German translation, Schlegel and Tieck, XI, p. 297.
17. See Shakespeare, King Lear, IV, 6, 97-101; Schlegel and Tieck, XI, pp. 100-01; Kittredge, p. 1230 (Lear speaking): “Ha! Goneril with a white beard? They flatter’d me like a dog, and told me I had white hairs in my beard ere the black ones were there. To say ‘ay’ and ‘no’ to everything I said! ‘Ay’ and ‘no’ too was no good divinity.”
18. For references to the various items, see notes 11, 14-17 above. The particular Luther reference has not been located.
19. Goethe, “Der Fischer,” 31, Goethe’s Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe letzter Hand, I-LX (Stuttgart, Tübingen: 1828-42; ASKB 1641-68 [I-LV]), I, p. 186 (ed. tr.). Cf. Goethe, ed. and tr. David Luke (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1964), p. 80.
1. With reference to the opening of the chapter, see Supplement, pp. 196-97 (Pap. V B 5:10, 6:3,6).
2. See Philippians 2:7-8.
3. See JP III 3077 (Pap. IV A 103).
4. See Luke 7:25.
5. See Matthew 26:53.
6. See Matthew 6:25-26.
7. See Matthew 8:20.
8. See Matthew 8:22.
9. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 197 (Pap. V B 12:1).
10. See Luke 24:29.
11. See Matthew 6:28.
12. See John 4:34.
13. See Matthew 12:49.
14. See, for example, Matthew 4:25.
15. See John 3:1-15.
16. See Luke 2:7.
17. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 197 (Pap. V B 1:4, 6:4).
18. See title page.
19. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 197 (Pap. V B 6:2).
20. See Matthew 27:24.
21. See Matthew 4:4; John 6:12.
22. Plato was a pupil of Socrates for a time, but Socrates’ view of knowledge and his method of teaching precluded followers both in principle and in practice. See Chapter 1.
23. See p. 24 on Alcibiades.
24. See pp. 10-11.
25. With reference to the following eight paragraphs, see Supplement, p. 197 (Pap. V B 6:7).
26. With reference to the remainder of the sentence, see Supplement, p. 197 (Pap. V B 12:4).
27. See JP I 203 (Pap. I A 55).
28. See I John 1:1.
29. See Supplement, p. 198 (Pap. V B 12:5); Luke 24:13-32.
30. See Luke 11:27-28.
31. See Luke 13:26.
32. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph and the first five sentences of the next, see Supplement, p. 198 (Pap. V B 12:7).
33. See Luke 13:27.
34. See I Corinthians 13:12.
35. Cf., for example, Pliny, Natural History, VII, 24, 88; Natural History, I-X, tr. H. Rackham (Loeb, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), II, pp. 563-65:
As to memory, the boon most necessary for life, it is not easy to say who most excelled in it, so many men having gained renown for it. King Cyrus could give their names to all the soldiers in his army, Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people, King Pyrrhus’s envoy Cineas knew those of the senate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival. Mithridates who was king of twenty-two races gave judgements in as many languages, in an assembly addressing each race in turn without an interpreter.
36. The first edition of Fragments has Guden here; the article ending is lacking in Samlede Værker, editions 1, 2, and 3.
37. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 198 (Pap. V B 6:8).
38. With reference to the remainder of the sentence, see Supplement, p. 199 (Pap. V B 12:8).
39. Literally, “the personal act of seeing” (Grk. autos, self+ optos, seen).
40. See Herodotos, History, III, 61-69; Die Geschichten des Herodotus, I-II, tr. Friedrich Lange (Berlin: 1811; ASKB 1117), I, pp. 255-62; Herodotus, I-IV, tr. A. D. Godley (Loeb, New York: Putnam, 1921-24), II, pp. 77-91:
Now after Cambyses son of Cyrus had lost his wits, while he still lingered in Egypt, two Magians, who were brothers, rebelled against him. One of them had been left by Cambyses to be steward of his house; this man now revolted from him, perceiving that the death of Smerdis was kept secret, and that few persons knew of it, most of them believing him to be still alive. Therefore he thus plotted to gain the royal power: he had a brother, his partner, as I said, in rebellion; this brother was very like in appearance to Cyrus’ son, Smerdis, brother of Cambyses and by him put to death; nor was he like him in appearance only, but he bore the same name also, Smerdis. . . .
Cambyses being dead, the Magian, pretending to be the Smerdis of like name, Cyrus’ son, reigned without fear for the seven months lacking to Cambyses’ full eight years of kingship. . . . but in the eighth month it was revealed who he was, and this is how it was done:—There was one Otanes, son of Pharnaspes, as well-born and rich a man as any Persian. This Otanes was the first to suspect that the Magian was not Cyrus’ son Smerdis but his true self; the reason was, that he never left the citadel nor summoned any notable Persian into his presence; and in his suspicion—Cambyses having married Otanes’ daughter Phaedyme, whom the Magian had now wedded, with all the rest of Cambyses’ wives—Otanes sent to this daughter, asking with whom she lay, Smerdis, Cyrus’ son, or another. . . . So Phaedyme, daughter of Otanes, performed her promise to her father. When it was her turn to visit the Magian (as a Persian’s wives come in regular order to their lord), she came to his bed, and uncovered the Magian’s ears while he slumbered deeply; and having with much ease assured herself that he had no ears, she sent and told this to her father as soon as it was morning.
41. With reference to the following three sentences, see Supplement, p. 199 (Pap. V B 12:9).
42. A children’s game, a version of blindman’s buff.
1. See Supplement, p. 199 (Pap. V B 6:9).
2. See Supplement, pp. 182, 199 (Pap. IV C 62; V B 6:9).
3. See Callicles’ complaint in Plato, Gorgias, 490 e-491 b; Opera, I, pp. 572-73; Heise, III, pp. 111-112; Collected Dialogues, p. 273:
CALLICLES: How you keep saying the same things, Socrates!
SOCRATES: Not only that, Callicles, but about the same matters. . . . You see, my good Callicles, that you do not find the same fault with me as I with you. For you claim that I keep saying the same things, and reproach me with it, but I make the opposite statement of you, that you never say the same things about the same subjects.
4. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, pp. 199-200 (Pap. V B 13).
5. For deletions here, see Supplement, pp. 200-09 (Pap. V B 14, 41).
6. “Existence,” “exist,” and “to exist” pertain to temporal and spatial being or actuality. All existence is being, but not all being is existence or actuality. Therefore, for example, in Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 287), Johannes Climacus states that “God does not think, he creates; God does not exist, he is eternal. A human being thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being, holds them apart from each other in succession.”
“To exist” and “exist” also have a special qualitative meaning in Postscript. Johannes Climacus (SV VII 508) touches on the ordinary meaning (temporal and spatial actuality) and the special meaning (qualitative becoming, in view of which ordinary existence could more accurately be termed “subsistence”): “Sin is the new existence-medium. ‘To exist [at existere]’ generally signifies only that by having come into existence the individual does exist and is becoming; now it signifies that by having come into existence he has become a sinner. ‘To exist’ generally is not a more sharply defining predicate but is the form of all more sharply defining predicates; one does not become something [qualitative] by coming into existence, but now to come into existence is to become a sinner.” In Fragments (p. 76), the special qualitative meaning of “to exist” is expressed as a “redoubling,” “a coming into existence within its own coming into existence.” In Either/Or, II, KW IV (SV II 125), Judge William, in writing about the qualitative possibility of the ethical, states, “Thus, when patience acquires itself in patience, it is inner history.” Johannes Climacus in Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 214), calls it “gaining a history.”
7. With reference to the following four paragraphs, see Supplement, pp. 209-10 (Pap. V B 15:1).
8. Motion, change of all kinds. See JP I 258 (Pap. IV C 47). The views of Aristotle and of Tennemann are in the background of the discussion of change. See Aristotle, Physics, 200 b; Bekker, I, p. 200; Works, II:
NATURE has been defined as a “principle of motion and change”, and it is the subject of our inquiry. We must therefore see that we understand the meaning of “motion” [ϰίνησις]; for if it were unknown, the meaning of “nature”, too, would be unknown. . . .
We may start by distinguishing (1) what exists in a state of fulfilment only, (2) what exists as potential, (3) what exists as potential and also in fulfilment—one being a “this,” another “so much,” a third “such,” and similarly in each of the other modes of the predication of being.
See Tennemann, III, pp. 125-27 (ed. tr.):
The word ϰίνησις had already been used by Plato in a broader and in a narrower sense, namely, for any change and for motion in space. Aristotle uses it in the broader sense. He, of course, could designate all changes with one word, motion, because he really treats the science of natural entities that exist in space and every change that happens to them in space. Therefore he declares that motion in space is the basis of every other motion. . . . It should not appear strange that he sometimes regards production and passing away (γένεσις, ϕθοϱά) as kinds of motion. . . . Change takes place only with actual objects. Everything that is, is either possible or actual, and the actual is conceived of as substance of a specific quantity and quality etc. in keeping with the remaining categories. Everything that changes changes with regard to the subject, with regard to its quantity and quality, or with regard to place. There are no other kinds of changes. Because in everything possibility and actuality are distinguishable, the change, then, really is the actualization of the possible.... The transition, then, from possibility to actuality is change, ϰίνησις. One could express this more accurately by saying: change, motion, is the actualization of the possible insofar as it is possible. Therefore Aristotle uses the expressions ἐνέϱγεια [energy] and ἐντελέχεια [entelechy], both of which mean actualization as action in which something becomes actual.
9. See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 75 a; Bekker, I, p. 75; Works, I: “It follows that we cannot in demonstrating pass from one genus to another. We cannot, for instance, prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.”
10. See pp. 41-42 fn.
11. The source has not been located. The quotation may refer to phrases already used in the paragraph.
12. See, for example, Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, Werke, IV, p. 211; J.A., IV, p. 68; Science of Logic, p. 549:
The negation of real possibility is thus its identity-with self; in that in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoil of this sublating, it is real necessity.
What is necessary cannot be otherwise; but what is simply possible can; for possibility is the in-itself that is only positedness and therefore essentially otherness. Formal possibility is this identity as transition into a sheer other; but real possibility, because it contains the other moment, actuality, is already itself necessity. Therefore what is really possible can no longer be otherwise; under the particular conditions and circumstances something else cannot follow. Real possibility and necessity are therefore only seemingly different; this is an identity which does not have to become but is already presupposed and lies at their base. Real necessity is therefore a relation pregnant with content; for the content is that implicit identity that is indifferent to the differences of form.
See also Hegel, Encyclopädia der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Erster Theil, Die Logik, para. 147, Werke, VI, p. 292; J.A. (System der Philosophie), VIII, p. 330; Hegel’s Logic (tr. of L., 3 ed., 1830; Kierkegaard’s ed., 1840, had the same text, plus Zusätze), tr. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 208: “Necessity has been defined, and rightly so, as the union of possibility and actuality.”
13. See Aristotle, On Interpretation, 21 b-23 a; Bekker, I, pp. 21-23; Works, I:
The contradictory, then, of ‘it may not be’ is not ‘it cannot be’, but ‘it cannot not be’, and the contradictory of ‘it may be’ is not ‘it may not be’, but ‘it cannot be’. Thus the propositions ‘it may be’ and ‘it may not be’ appear each to imply the other: for, since these two propositions are not contradictory, the same thing both may and may not be. But the propositions ‘it may be’ and ‘it cannot be’ can never be true of the same subject at the same time, for they are contradictory. Nor can the propositions ‘it may not be’ and ‘it cannot not be’ be at once true of the same subject.
The propositions which have to do with necessity are governed by the same principle. The contradictory of ‘it is necessary that it should be’ is not ‘it is necessary that it should not be’, but ‘it is not necessary that it should be’, and the contradictory of ‘it is necessary that it should not be’ is ‘it is not necessary that it should not be’.
Again, the contradictory of ‘it is impossible that it should be’ is not ‘it is impossible that it should not be’ but ‘it is not impossible that it should be’, and the contradictory of ‘it is impossible that it should not be’ is ‘it is not impossible that it should not be’. . . .
Yet perhaps it is impossible that the contradictory propositions predicating necessity should be thus arranged. For when it is necessary that a thing should be, it is possible that it should be. (For if not, the opposite follows, since one or the other must follow; so, if it is not possible, it is impossible, and it is thus impossible that a thing should be, which must necessarily be; which is absurd.)
Yet from the proposition ‘it may be’ it follows that it is not impossible, and from that it follows that it is not necessary; it comes about therefore that the thing which must necessarily be need not be; which is absurd. But again, the proposition ‘it is necessary that it should be’ does not follow from the proposition ‘it may be’, nor does the proposition ‘it is necessary that it should not be’. For the proposition ‘it may be’ implies a twofold possibility, while, if either of the two former propositions is true, the twofold possibility vanishes. . . . Those potentialities which involve a rational principle are potentialities of more than one result, that is, of contrary results; those that are irrational are not always thus constituted. As I have said, fire cannot both heat and not heat, neither has anything that is always actual any twofold potentiality. . . .
Our conclusion, then, is this: that since the universal is consequent upon the particular, that which is necessary is also possible, though not in every sense in which the word may be used.
We may perhaps state that necessity and its absence are the initial principles of existence and non-existence, and that all else must be regarded as posterior to these.
It is plain from what has been said that that which is of necessity is actual. Thus, if that which is eternal is prior, actuality also is prior to potentiality. Some things are actualities without potentiality, namely, the primary substances; a second class consists of those things which are actual but also potential, whose actuality is in nature prior to their potentiality, though posterior in time; a third class comprises those things which are never actualized, but are pure potentialities.
14. See Tennemann, III, p. 407 (ed. tr.): “Judgments (δόξαι) can be either true or false. The criterion of their truth is sensory perception: negative, if no sensory perceptions contradict the judgment; positive, if it is actually confirmed by experience. If experience is contrary, the judgment is false.” See also Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke, XIV, pp. 481-82; J.A., XVIII, pp. 481-82; History of Philosophy, II, p. 284:
In the last place, opinion is nothing but the reference of that general conception, which we have within us, to an object, a perception, or to the testimony of the senses; and that is the passing of a judgment. For in a conception we have anticipated that which comes directly before our eyes; and by this standard we pronounce whether something is a man, a tree, or not. ‘Opinion depends on something already evident to us, to which we refer when we ask how we know that this is a man or not. This opinion is also itself termed conception, and it may be either true or false:—true, when what we see before our eyes is corroborated or not contradicted by the testimony of the conception; false in the opposite case.’ That is to say, in opinion we apply a conception which we already possess, or the type, to an object which is before us, and which we then examine to see if it corresponds with our mental representation of it. Opinion is true if it corresponds with the type; and it has its criterion in perceiving whether it repeats itself as it was before or not. This is the whole of the ordinary process in consciousness, when it begins to reflect. When we have the conception, it requires the testimony that we have seen or still see the object in question.
15. See note 13 above.
16. See note 6 above.
17. A clue to the meaning of “by way of a ground” is suggested by a reading entry in German from the early stage of the writing of Fragments (JP V 5603; Pap. IV C 101, 1842-43):
A.
Essence as Ground of Existence
(a) The Primary Characteristics or
Categories of Existence
(a) Identity (β) Difference (γ) Ground
(b) Existence
(c) The Thing
B.
Appearance
(a) The World of Appearance or
Phenomenal World
(b) Content and Form
(c) Ratio (Relation)
C.
Actuality
See Hegel, Inhalts-Anzeige, Die Logik, Werke, VI, p. xlii; J.A., VIII, p. vi; Hegel’s Logic, p. xxix (an abbreviated table of contents). Hegel identifies thought and being, logic and metaphysics, the becoming of events and the necessity of logical thought. See Die Logik, para. 123 Zusatz, para. 147 Zusatz, Werke, VI, pp. 250-52, 294; J.A., VIII, pp. 288-89, 332; Hegel’s Logic, pp. 180, 209:
The phrase “Existence” (derived from existere) suggests the fact of having proceeded from something. Existence is Being which has proceeded from the ground, and has reinstated by annulling its intermediation. The Essence, as Being set aside and absorbed, originally came before us as shining or showing in self, and the categories of this reflection are identity, difference, and ground. The last is the unity of identity and difference; and because it unifies them it has at the same time to distinguish itself from itself. But that which is in this way distinguished from the ground is as little mere difference as the ground itself is abstract sameness. The ground works its own suspension: and when suspended, the result of its negation is existence. Having issued from the ground, existence contains the ground in it; the ground does not remain, as it were, behind existence, but by its very nature supersedes itself and translates itself into existence. This is exemplified even in our ordinary mode of thinking, when we look upon the ground of a thing, not as something abstractly inward, but as itself also an existent. For example, the lightning-flash which has set a house on fire would be considered the ground of the conflagration; or the manners of a nation and the condition of its life would be regarded as the ground of its constitution. Such indeed is the ordinary aspect in which the existent world originally appears to reflection—an indefinite crowd of things existent, which being simultaneously reflected on themselves and on one another are related reciprocally as ground and consequence. In this motley play of the world, if we may so call the sum of existents, there is nowhere a firm footing to be found: everything bears an aspect of relativity, conditioned by and conditioning something else. The reflective understanding makes it its business to elicit and trace these connections running out in every direction; but the question touching an ultimate design is so far left unanswered, and therefore the craving of the reason after knowledge passes with the further development of the logical Idea beyond this position of mere relativity.
The theory however which regards the world as determined through necessity and belief in a divine providence are by no means mutually excluding points of view. The intellectual principle underlying the idea of divine providence will hereafter be shown to be the notion. But the notion is the truth of necessity, which it contains in suspension in itself; just as, conversely, necessity is the notion implicit. Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood. There is nothing therefore more mistaken than the charge of blind fatalism made against the Philosophy of History, when it takes for its problem to understand the necessity of every event.
18. See Hegel, Encyclopädie, II, Zweiter Theil, Die Naturphilosophie, para. 254, Werke, VII, p. 45; J.A., IX, p. 71; Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (tr. of N., 2 ed., 1847; Kierkegaard had 1 ed., 1841), tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 28, where space is called “a wholly ideal side-by-sideness,” that is, the self-externality of the Idea. See Anxiety, p. 86 fn., KW VIII (SV IV 356).
19. Presumably a reference to German romantic philosophy of nature, for example, that of Henrich Steffens and of Schelling, both of whom regarded nature as a system of sequential levels.
20. See JP III 3660-64 and pp. 908-09; VII, p. 80.
21. See note 6 above.
22. See JP V 5593 (Pap. IV C 34); Tennemann, II, pp. 155-56; IV, 273 (ed. tr.):
He claimed that only that is possible which actually is or that actually will happen. Nothing happens that does not happen out of necessity, and whatever can possibly happen is either already actual or will become actual. Just as the truth about what has happened cannot become false, it is also impossible that the truth about the future becomes false. What has happened cannot be made to have not happened. Here the necessity and the unchangeability are so obvious that nobody can deny it.
Chrysippus had a dispute with the Megarian Diodorus and with his teacher Cleanthes about the possibility of the future and the necessity of the past. He asserted against the one that everything past, inasmuch as it cannot be changed, is necessary, and against the other that even that which will not happen is possible.
See also Leibniz, Theodicy, para. 169-70; Leibnitzs Theodicee, tr. Johann Christoph Gottscheden (Hanover, Leipzig: 1763; ASKB 619), pp. 333-39; Opera, II, pp. 554-55; Theodicy (tr. of T. In Philosophische Schriften, I-VII, 1875-90), ed. Austin Farrer, tr. E. M. Huggard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 229-33:
169. The question of the possibility of things that do not happen has already been examined by the ancients. It appears that Epicurus, to preserve freedom and to avoid an absolute necessity, maintained, after Aristotle, that contingent futurities were not susceptible of determinate truth. For if it was true yesterday that I should write to-day, it could therefore not fail to happen, it was already necessary; and, for the same reason, it was from all eternity. Thus all that which happens is necessary, and it is impossible for anything different to come to pass. But since that is not so it would follow, according to him, that contingent futurities have no determinate truth. To uphold this opinion, Epicurus went so far as to deny the first and the greatest principle of the truths of reason, he denied that every assertion was either true or false. Here is the way they confounded him: “You deny that it was true yesterday that I should write to-day; it was therefore false.” The good man, not being able to admit this conclusion, was obliged to say that it was neither true nor false. After that, he needs no refutation, and Chrysippus might have spared himself the trouble he took to prove the great principle of contradictories, following the account by Cicero in his book De Fato . ... M. Bayle observes (Dictionary, article ‘Epicurus’, let. T, p. 1141) ‘that neither of these two great philosophers [Epicurus and Chrysippus] understood that the truth of this maxim, every proposition is true or false, is independent of what is called fatum, it could not therefore serve as proof of the existence of the fatum, as Chrysippus maintained and as Epicurus feared. Chrysippus could not have conceded, without damaging his own position, that there are propositions which are neither true nor false. But he gained nothing by asserting the contrary: for, whether there be free cause or not, it is equally true that this proposition, The Grand Mogul will go hunting to-morrow, is true or false. Men rightly regarded as ridiculous this speech of Tiresias: All that I shall say will happen or not, for great Apollo confers on me the faculty of prophesying. If assuming the impossible, there were no God, it would yet be certain that everything the greatest fool in the world should predict would happen or would not happen. That is what neither Chrysippus nor Epicurus has taken into consideration.’ . . .
170. Let us come now to the possibility of things that do not happen, and I will give the very words of M. Bayle, albeit they are somewhat discursive. This is what he says on the matter in his Dictionary (article ‘Chrysippus’, let. S, p. 929): ‘The celebrated dispute on things possible and things impossible owed its origin to the doctrine of the Stoics concerning fate. The question was to know whether, among the things which have never been and never will be, there are some possible; or whether all that is not, all that has never been, all that will never be, was impossible. A famous dialectician of the Megaric Sect, named Diodorus, gave a negative answer to the first of these two questions and an affirmative to the second; but Chrysippus vehemently opposed him. . . . Cicero makes it clear enough that Chrysippus often found himself in difficulties in this dispute, and that is no matter for astonishment: for the course he had chosen was not bound up with his dogma of fate, and, if he had known how, or had dared, to reason consistently, he would readily have adopted the whole hypothesis of Diodorus. We have seen already that the freedom he assigned to the soul, and his comparison of the cylinder, did not preclude the possibility that in reality all the acts of the human will were unavoidable consequences of fate. Hence it follows that everything which does not happen is impossible, and that there is nothing possible but that which actually comes to pass. Plutarch (De Stoicor. Repugn., pp. 1053, 1054) discomfits him completely, on that point as well as on the dispute with Diodorus, and maintains that his opinion on possibility is altogether contrary to the doctrine of fatum. . .. Take note that Chrysippus recognized that past things were necessarily true, which Cleanthes had not been willing to admit.’ . . .
It is sufficiently evident that Cicero when writing to Varro the words that have just been quoted (lib. 9, Ep. 4, Ad Familiar.) had not enough comprehension of the effect of Diodorus’s opinion, since he found it preferable. He presents tolerably well in his book De Fato the opinions of those writers, but it is a pity that he has not always added the reasons which they employed. Plutarch in his treatise on the contradictions of the Stoics and M. Bayle are both surprised that Chrysippus was not of the same opinion as Diodorus, since he favours fatality. But Chrysippus and even his master Cleanthes were on that point more reasonable than is supposed. That will be seen as we proceed. It is open to question whether the past is more necessary than the future. Cleanthes held the opinion that it is. The objection is raised that it is necessary ex hypothesi for the future to happen, as it is necessary ex hypothesi for the past to have happened. But there is this difference, that it is not possible to act on the past state, that would be a contradiction; but it is possible to produce some effect on the future. Yet the hypothetical necessity of both is the same: the one cannot be changed, the other will not be; and once that is past, it will not be possible for it to be changed either.
23. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 211 (Pap. V B 15:6).
24. An allusion to the title of Ludvig Holberg’s comedy Hexerie Eeller blind Allarm, Danske Skue-Plads, IV, no pagination.
25. See Supplement, pp. 200-05 (Pap. V B 14); Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, V, pp. 329-34; J.A., V, pp. 329-34; Science of Logic, pp. 825-30, especially pp. 826-27:
From this course the method has emerged as the self-knowing Notion that has itself, as the absolute, both subjective and objective, for its subject matter, consequently as the pure correspondence of the Notion and its reality, as a concrete existence that is the Notion itself.
Accordingly, what is to be considered here as method is only the movement of the Notion itself, the nature of which movement has already been cognized; but first, there is now the added significance that the Notion is everything, and its movement is the universal absolute activity, the self-determining and self-realizing movement. The method is therefore to be recognized as the unrestrictedly universal, internal and external mode; and as the absolutely infinite force, to which no object, presenting itself as something external, remote from and independent of reason, could offer resistance or be of a particular nature in opposition to it, or could not be penetrated by it. It is therefore soul and substance, and anything whatever is comprehended and known in its truth only when it is completely subjugated to the method; it is the method proper to every subject matter because its activity is the Notion. This is also the truer meaning of its universality; according to the universality of reflection it is regarded merely as the method for everything; but according to the universality of the Idea, it is both the manner peculiar to cognition, to the subjectively self-knowing Notion, and also the objective manner, or rather the substantiality, of things—that is of Notions, in so far as they appear primarily to representation and reflection as others. It is therefore not only the highest force, or rather the sole and absolute force of reason, but also its supreme and sole urge to find and cognize itself by means of itself in everything.
26. See Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke, IX, pp. 129-35; J.A., XI, pp. 151-57; The Philosophy of History (tr. of P.G., 2 ed., 1840; Kierkegaard had 1 ed., 1837), tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 105-10, in which the phases of the expression of Absolute Mind in history are outlined: the Orient as unreflected consciousness; the Greek world, the period of adolescence; the Roman state, the manhood of history, the realm of abstract universality; and the fourth phase of world history, old age as perfect maturity and strength.
27. See Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, V, pp. 348-49; J.A., V, pp. 348-49; Science of Logic, p. 840: “We have shown that the determinateness which was a result is itself, by virtue of the form of simplicity into which it has withdrawn, a fresh beginning; as this beginning is distinguished from its predecessor precisely by that determinateness, cognition rolls onwards from content to content. First of all, this advance is determined as beginning from simple determinatenesses, the succeeding ones becoming ever richer and more concrete. For the result contains its beginning and its course has enriched it by a fresh determinateness. The universal constitutes the foundation; the advance is therefore not to be taken as a flowing from one other to the next other. In the absolute method the Notion maintains itself in its otherness, the universal in its particularization, in judgement and reality; at each stage of its further determination it raises the entire mass of its preceding content, and by its dialectical advance it not only does not lose anything or leave anything behind, but carries along with it all it has gained, and inwardly enriches and consolidates itself.”
28. The main character in Ludvig Holberg’s Mester Gert Westphaler Eller den meget talende Barbeer, Danske Skue-Plads, I no pagination. The reference to Hegelian Westphalers is presumably to Johan Ludvig Heiberg and to the Danish jurist Carl Mettus Weiss (1809-1872), who published in J. L. Heiberg’s Perseus (II, 1838, pp. 47-99) an article, “Om Statens historiske Udvikling,” based on Hegel’s idea of the four phases of world history (see notes 26, 27 above). In Pap. IV B 131, part of a draft of Prefaces, KW IX, Nicolaus Notabene writes that the idea of the four world-historical monarchies “has been taken up now in our time and one hears it everywhere, and at times it is spoken of in such a way that one would think Gert W. to be the source.”
29. See note to subtitle of Repetition, pp. 357-62, KW VI.
30. “To construct” (from Latin construere, to build) is imaginatively to devise a representation of an idea, a theory. In contrast to a hypothesis, which purports to represent actuality, a construction is fictional and may be quite arbitrary. See Anxiety, p. 11, KW VIII (SV IV 283); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Vorlesungenüber die Methode des academischen Studium (Stuttgart, Tübingen: 1830; ASKB 764), pp. 91-92; On University Studies, tr. E. S. Morgan (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), pp. 46-47:
Reality in general, and the reality of knowledge in particular, is not defined exclusively in terms of the universal, nor exclusively in terms of the particular. Mathematical knowledge is neither of mere abstractions nor of concrete things, but of the intuitively apprehended Idea. The representation of the universal and the particular in their unity is called construction, which does not differ from demonstration. The unity is expressed in two ways. First, underlying all geometrical constructions, such as the triangle, the square, the circle, etc., is the same absolute form, and to grasp them in their particularity nothing is required beyond the one universal and absolute unity. Second, in respect to every figure the universal is identical with the particular. For instance, what is true of the triangle in general is also true of any particular triangle, and conversely. The particular triangle stands for all triangles and is both unity and totality. The same unity is expressed as form and essence, since the construction, which—in the sense of a cognition—would seem to be mere form, is also the essence of the construct itself.
See also Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, II, Werke, V, pp. 311-12; J.A., V, pp. 311-12; Science of Logic, pp. 811-12:
Now the mediation, which we have next to consider in detail, may be simple or may pass through several mediations. The mediating members are connected with those to be mediated; but in this cognition, since mediation and theorem are not derived from the Notion, to which transition into an opposite is altogether alien, the mediating determinations, in the absence of any concept of connexion, must be imported from somewhere or other as a preliminary material for the framework of the proof. This preparatory procedure is the construction.
Among the relations of the content of the theorem, which relations may be very varied, only those now must be adduced and demonstrated which serve the proof. This provision of material only comes to have meaning in the proof; in itself it appears blind and unmeaning. Subsequently, we see of course that it served the purpose of the proof to draw, for example, such further lines in the geometrical figure as the construction specifies; but during the construction itself we must blindly obey; on its own account, therefore, this operation is unintelligent, since the end that directs it is not yet expressed. It is a matter of indifference whether the construction is carried out for the purpose of a theorem proper or a problem; such as it appears in the first instance before the proof, it is something not derived from the determination given in the theorem or problem, and is therefore a meaningless act for anyone who does not know the end it serves, and in any case an act directed by an external end.
This meaning of the construction which at first is still concealed, comes to light in the proof. As stated, the proof contains the mediation of what the theorem enunciates as connected; through this mediation this connexion first appears as necessary. Just as the construction by itself lacks the subjectivity of the Notion, so the proof is a subjective act lacking objectivity.
See also Frederik Christian Sibbern, Logik som Tænkelære (Copenhagen: 1835; ASKB 777), pp. 137-63, especially pp. 137-39 (ed. tr.):
The above-described analytical procedure presupposes given or existing objects from which the concepts are abstracted in that they are intellectually envisioned in these objects . . .. We have also seen (para. 20) that this analysis itself leads to a construction or a genetic representation, consequently to a synthetic procedure, which as yet has only appeared as an imitation. But in itself it is a free forging and could be constructed in other ways. . . . we have examples of the synthesis of actual intuitions for the formation of new intuitions in mathematics, in both arithmetic and geometry, in which the objects, whose nature, characteristics, and relations are to be investigated, must first be constructed by the science itself or be brought into existence, which takes place here independently of all experience.
30a. See Postscript, p. 118, KW XII. 1 (SV VII 97)
31. See Supplement, p. 211 (Pap. V B 15:7); Anxiety, p. 11, KW VIII (SV IV 283); Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung, ed. Paulus, p. 611, where “manifestation” refers to the created world as a divine manifestation. Hegel rarely uses the expression but does have a similar concept in his view of the expression and self-objectivization of mind. See also Encyclopädie, III, para. 380, 383, 384 Zusatz, 386, Werke, VII2, pp. 12-13, 27, 30-32, 35-36; J.A., X, pp. 18-19, 33, 36-38, 41-42; Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (tr. of E.W., III, 3 ed., 1830; Kierkegaard had the same text in Werke, 1 ed., 1840-45), tr. William Wallace, Zusätze (from Werke, 1 ed.), tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 7, 16, 18-19, 22:
380
The ‘concrete’ nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a manifestation all their own—it is the solar system; and similarly the differentiae of sense-perception have a sort of earlier existence in the properties of bodies, and still more independently in the four elements. The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their separate existence and become factors, states, and features in the higher grades of development. . . .
383
This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularizing, whilst it still remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is ‘manifestation’. . ..
Zusatz. Self-manifestation is a determination belonging to mind as such; but it has three distinct forms. The first mode in which mind, as [only] in itself or as the logical Idea, manifests itself, consists in the direct release [Umschlagen] of the Idea into the immediacy of external and particularized existence. This release is the coming-to-be of Nature. . . .
This gives the second form of mind’s manifestation. On this level, mind which is no longer poured out into the asunderness of Nature but exists for itself and is manifest to itself, opposes itself to unconscious Nature which just as much conceals mind as manifests it. . . .
Now this limitation is removed by absolute knowledge, which is the third and supreme manifestation of mind. On this level there vanishes, on the one hand, the dualism of a self-subsistent Nature or of mind poured out into asunderness, and, on the other hand, the merely incipient self-awareness of mind which, however, does not yet comprehend its unity with the former. Absolute mind knows that it posits being itself, that it is itself the creator of its Other, of Nature and finite mind, so that this Other loses all semblance of independence in face of mind, ceases altogether to be a limitation for mind and appears only as a means whereby mind attains to absolute being-for-self, to the absolute unity of what it is in itself and what it is for itself, of its Notion and its actuality.
The highest definition of the Absolute is that it is not merely mind in general but that it is mind which is absolutely manifest to itself, self-conscious, infinitely creative mind, which we have just characterized as the third form of its manifestation. . . .
386
The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea, and finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality—but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind’s own light—a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realize and become conscious of freedom as its very being, i.e. to be fully manifested. . . .
See also Benedict Franz Xaver v. Baader, Fermenta Cognitionis, I-V (Berlin: 1822-24; ASKB 394), I, pp. 20-24, 50, 54-55, 65, on manifestation theory, particularly in Jakob Böhme and Hegel.
32. See Supplement, pp. 182, 211 (Pap. IV C 62; V B 15:8).
33. Carl Daub, “Die Form der christlichen Dogmenund Kirchen-Historie,” Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie (ASKB 354-57), ed. Bruno Bauer, I, 1836, p. 1 (ed. tr.): “The act of looking backward is, just like that of looking into the future, an act of divination; and if the prophet is well called a historian of the future, the historian is just as well called, or even better, a prophet of the past, of the historical.”
34. See Supplement, p. 182 (Pap. IV C 62); JP III 2365, 3549 (Pap. IV C 31, 40); Leibniz, Theodicy, para. 406-16; Opera, II, pp. 620-23; Theodicy, pp. 366-73, especially p. 372: “The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which completed the pyramid, and which was the most beautiful of all: for the pyramid had a beginning, but one could not see its end; it had an apex, but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. That is (as the Goddess explained) because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else would God not have determined to create any; but there is not any one which has not also less perfect worlds below it: that is why the pyramid goes on descending to infinity.”
35. The Danish Beundring is literally translated as “admiration,” as in “admiration” for Mozart’s music (Either/Or, I, KW III; SV I 31). The context, however, and the association with Plato and Aristotle at the end of the next sentence require “wonder,” as in “Wonder is the starting point of knowledge” (Stages, KW XI; SV VI 325). See Plato, Theaetetus, 155 d, Opera, II, pp. 40-41; Collected Dialogues, p. 860: “This sense of wonder [admiratio in Opera] is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin . . .”; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982 b; Bekker, II, p. 982; Hengstenberg, I p. 5; Works, VIII: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize . . ..” In Anxiety, p. 146, KW VIII (SV IV 411), Beundring is used for “wonder” in connection with Descartes, De passionibus animae, II, LIII, Admiratio; Opera, p. 27; The Passions of the Soul, Writings, p. 306. On the other hand, a draft portion of Johannes Climacus (see Supplement, p. 266; Pap. IV B 13:23) on the same theme in Descartes has Forundring (wonder) as the Danish equivalent of admiratio. Benedict Franz Xaver v. Baader, who is mentioned in the sentence following references to Plato and Aristotle (see note 31 above), uses Bewunderung, the German cognate of Beundring, in his Fermenta Cognitionis, I, p. 39, where he discusses the object of admiration, adoration, and devotion. Therefore, Baader’s usage does not explain the use of Beundring for “wonder.” For a twentieth-century English translator of the Latin admiratio, the use of “admiration” would come too easily, but a now archaic meaning of “admiration” was “wonder,” a direct derivative from the Latin root. Kierkegaard knew very little, if any, English (see Letters, Letter 2, p. 40, KW XXV). He did, however, know Latin very well, and, under the influence of the double meaning of the Latin admiratio, he perhaps conflated the two Danish terms, Beundring and Forundring, as synonymous (see p. 52 and note 13) with the one Latin word. Whatever the explanation may be, the context and Pap. IV B 13:23 make it clear that here and in Anxiety the term Beundring means “wonder.” See JP II 2292; III 3284; V 5588 (Pap. VII1 A 34; III A 107; IV C 10).
36. Benedict Franz Xaver v. Baader (1765-1841). The line has not been located.
37. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p 211 (Pap. V B 15:9).
38. In Greek, μέθοδος (methodos) means “pursuit,” “following after.”
39. See Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 335-75).
40. See, for example, Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I Werke, III, pp. 64-65; J.A., IV, pp. 74-75; Science of Logic, p. 71:
The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first.
We see therefore that, on the other hand, it is equally necessary to consider as result that into which the movement returns as into its ground. In this respect the first is equally the ground, and the last a derivative; since the movement starts from the first and by correct inferences arrives at the last as the ground, this latter is a result. Further, the progress from that which forms the beginning is to be regarded as only a further determination of it, hence that which forms the starting point of the development remains at the base of all that follows and does not vanish from it. The progress does not consist merely in the derivation of an other, or in the effected transition into a genuine other; and in so far as this transition does occur it is equally sublated again. Thus the beginning of philosophy is the foundation which is present and preserved throughout the entire subsequent development, remaining completely immanent in its further determinations.
41. In its immediacy, experience prior to judgments is simply what it is. Truth/falsity pertains to judgments. See Supplement, p. 266 (Pap. IV B 13:22); JP II 1243 (Pap. IV C 56). Cf. Irony, KW II (SV VIII 285); Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 271).
42. Danish: Tro (belief, faith). Here, and in the following three pages, Tro is rendered as “belief,” that is, “faith ... in its direct and ordinary sense,” distinguished from faith “in an wholly eminent sense.” See p. 87.
43. Cf. Hebrews 11:1.
44. See pp. 17, 38 and notes 34, 9.
45. See, for example, Hegel, Geschichte der Philosophie, II, Werke, XIV, p. 69; J.A., XVIII, p. 69; History of Philosophy, I, p. 406: “Philosophy must, generally speaking, begin with a puzzle in order to bring about reflection; everything must be doubted, all presuppositions given up, to reach the truth as created through the Notion.” See Johannes Climacus, p. 132 and notes 14, 15.
46. See Supplement, p. 265 (Pap. IV B 13:21); Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 30; Opera, I, pp. 20-21: “Hence we say that, while in regard to matters of opinion the Sceptic’s End is quietude, in regard to things unavoidable it is ‘moderate affection [μετϱιοπάθεια].’ But some notable Sceptics have added the further definition ‘suspension of judgement [ἐποχή] in investigations.’ ” See also Supplement, p. 261 (Pap. IV B 10:17), and note 48.
47. See note 46 above. Here the Greek word is not the equivalent of the Danish nægte Bifald (deny assent) but designates the consequence of declined assent, that is, moderate feeling. See JP I 774, 776; II 1243, 1244 (Pap. IV A 72, B 5:13, C 56, 60).
48. See, for example, Diogenes Laertius, IX, 102-04; Vitis, II, pp. 176-77; Riisbrigh, I, pp. 446-47; Loeb, II, pp. 513-15:
The dogmatists answer them by declaring that the Sceptics themselves do apprehend and dogmatize; for when they are thought to be refuting their hardest they do apprehend, for at the very same time they are asseverating and dogmatizing. Thus even when they declare that they determine nothing, and that to every argument there is an opposite argument, they are actually determining these very points and dogmatizing. The others reply, “We confess to human weaknesses; for we recognize that it is day and that we are alive, and many other apparent facts in life; but with regard to the things about which our opponents argue so positively, claiming to have definitely apprehended them, we suspend our judgement because they are not certain, and confine knowledge to our impressions. For we admit that we see, and we recognize that we think this or that, but how we see or how we think we know not. And we say in conversation that a certain thing appears white, but we are not positive that it really is white. As to our ‘We determine nothing’ and the like, we use the expressions in an undogmatic sense, for they are not like the assertion that the world is spherical. Indeed the latter statement is not certain, but the others are mere admissions. Thus in saying ‘We determine nothing,’ we are not determining even that.”
49. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 119; Opera, p. 24; Loeb, I, p. 71: “These effects are due to distances; among effects due to locations are the following: the light of a lamp appears dim in the sun but bright in the dark; and the same oar bent when in the water but straight when out of the water . . ..”
50. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 7; Opera, p. 2; Loeb, I, pp. 5-7:
The Sceptic School, then, is also called “Zetetic” from its activity in investigation and inquiry, and “Ephectic” or Suspensive from the state of mind produced in the inquirer after his search, and “Aporetic” or Dubitative either from its habit of doubting and seeking, as some say, or from its indecision as regards assent and denial, and “Pyrrhonean” from the fact that Pyrrho appears to us to have applied himself to Scepticism more thoroughly and more conspicuously than his predecessors.
See also Diogenes Laertius, IX, 69-70; Vitis, II, pp. 163-64; Rusbrigh, I, p. 432; Loeb, II, pp. 482-83:
All these were called Pyrrhoneans after the name of their master, but Aporetics, Sceptics, Ephectics, and even Zetetics, from their principles, if we may call them such—Zetetics or seekers because they were ever seeking truth, Sceptics or inquirers because they were always looking for a solution and never finding one, Ephectics or doubters because of the state of mind which followed their inquiry, I mean, suspense of judgement, and finally Aporetics or those in perplexity, for not only they but even the dogmatic philosophers themselves in their turn were often perplexed. Pyrrhoneans, of course, they were called from Pyrrho.
51. See, for example, Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 14-15; Opera, p. 4; Loeb, I, p. 11:
Moreover, even in the act of enunciating the Sceptic formulae concerning things non-evident—such as the formula “No more (one thing than another),” or the formula “I determine nothing,” or any of the others which we shall presently mention,—he does not dogmatize. For whereas the dogmatizer posits the things about which he is said to be dogmatizing as really existent, the Sceptic does not posit these formulae in any absolute sense; for he conceives that, just as the formula “All things are false” asserts the falsity of itself as well as of everything else, as does the formula “Nothing is true,” so also the formula “No more” asserts that itself, like all the rest, is “No more (this than that),” and thus cancels itself along with the rest. And of the other formulae we say the same.
See also Diogenes Laertius, IX, 74-75; Vitis, II, p. 166; Riisbrigh, I, pp. 434-35; Loeb, II, pp. 488-89:
Thus by the expression “We determine nothing” is indicated their state of even balance; which is similarly indicated by the other expressions, “Not more (one thing than another),” and the like. But “Not more (one thing than another)” can also be taken positively [θετιϰω̃ς], indicating that two things are alike; for example, “The pirate is no more wicked than the liar.” But the Sceptics meant it not positively but negatively, as when, in refuting an argument, one says, “Neither had more existence, Scylla or the Chimera.”
52. Vitis, II, p. 178; Riisbrigh, I, p. 448; Loeb, II, pp. 517-19:
Against this criterion of appearances the dogmatic philosophers urge that, when the same appearances produce in us different impressions, e.g. a round or square tower, the Sceptic, unless he gives the preference to one or the other, will be unable to take any course; if on the other hand, say they, he follows either view, he is then no longer allowing equal value to all apparent facts. The Sceptics reply that, when different impressions are produced, they must both be said to appear; for things which are apparent are so called because they appear. The end to be realized they hold to be suspension of judgement [ἐποχή], which brings with it tranquillity [ἀταϱαξία] like its shadow: so Timon and Aenesidemus declare.
53. With reference to the following footnote, see Supplement, pp. 211-12 (Pap. V B 15:11).
54. See Supplement, p. 212 (Pap. V B 40:14).
55. With reference to the following six sentences, see Supplement, p. 212 (Pap. V B 15:12).
56. See JP III 3658 (Pap. IV C 89).
57. See, for example, Von den Göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, I-VI (Leipzig: 1812-25; ASKB 1722-28), III, pp. 367-68; Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herm Moses Mendelssohn, IV1, pp. 210-11 (ed. tr.):
Dear Mendelssohn, we all are born in faith and must remain in faith, just as we all are born in society and must remain in society. How can we strive for certainty if certainty is not known to us beforehand, and how can it be known to us except through something that we already know with certainty? This leads to the concept of an immediate certainty, which not only needs no proof but totally excludes all proofs and is purely and simply the representation itself in harmony with the presented things (accordingly, this certainly has its ground in itself). The persuasion through proofs is a certainty at second hand, rests on comparison, and can never be thoroughly certain and perfect. Now, if every truth determination that does not originate in rational argument is faith, then persuasion and rational argument themselves must come from faith, and their power must be received solely from it.
A reference to David Hume might have been made in the text of Fragments in connection with Jacobi. Martensen had lectured on Hume (Pap. II C 18-19); Hamann wrote on Hume; and Jacobi not only touches on Hume at times but has a long piece on Hume and faith: David Hume über den Glauben, Werke, II, pp. 3-310. See JP II 1539-40 (Pap. I A 100, 237); Pap. II C 18-19, pp. 329-30, 25 (vol. XII, pp. 283-84), 27 (vol. XIII, p. 279).
58. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 212 (Pap. V B 15:13).
59. See p. 83 and note 50.
60. See Either/Or, II, KW IV (SV II 158-59).
61. See, for example, Wissenschaft der Logik, Werke, IV, p. 69; J.A., IV, p. 547; Science of Logic, p. 440; Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke, IX, p. 70; J.A., XI, p. 92; Philosophy of History, pp. 56-57:
External, sensuous motion itself is contradiction’s immediate existence. Something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another there, but because in this ‘here’, it at once is and is not. The ancient dialecticians must be granted the contradictions that they pointed out in motion; but it does not follow that therefore there is no motion, but on the contrary, that motion is existent contradiction itself.
Similarly, internal self-movement proper, instinctive urge in general (the appetite or nisus of the monad, the entelechy of absolutely simple essence), is nothing else but the fact that something is, in one and the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the negative of itself. Abstract self-identity is not as yet a livingness, but the positive, being in its own self a negativity, goes outside itself and undergoes alteration. Something is therefore alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradiction within it.
Universal History exhibits the gradation in the development of that principle whose substantial purport is the consciousness of Freedom. The analysis of the successive grades, in their abstract form, belongs to Logic; in their concrete aspect to the Philosophy of Spirit. . . .
Here we have only to indicate that Spirit begins with a germ of infinite possibility, but only possibility—containing its substantial existence in an undeveloped form, as the object and goal which it reaches only in its resultant—full reality. In actual existence Progress appears as an advancing from the imperfect to the more perfect; but the former must not be understood abstractly as only the imperfect, but as something which involves the very opposite of itself—the so-called perfect—as a germ or impulse.
62. See p. 81 and note 42.
63. See JP III 3085 (Pap. VI B 45).
1. See Supplement, p. 213 (Pap. V B 6:18). Chapters IV and VI in the draft became Appendix (p. 49) and Interlude (p. 72) in the final copy, and Chapter VII became Chapter V.
2. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 213 (Pap. V B 18).
3. See p. 43 and note 29.
4. See Anxiety, p. 3, KW VIII (SV IV 276).
5. Systematically (in principle) and compactly. See Either/Or, II, KW IV (SV II 193); Anxiety, pp. 113, 128, 137, KW VIII (SV IV 382, 395, 403); JP V 6137 (Pap. VIII1 A 652).
6. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 213 (Pap. V B 6:19).
7. A reference to the legend of the seventy-two (rounded off to seventy) translators of the Septuagint (sometimes written LXX), a Greek version of the Old Testament made (c. 270 B.C.) for Ptolemy II by emissaries from Jerusalem.
8. In this case, however, it is the paradoxical historical fact of the eternal in time.
9. Danish: opdrage (to bring up, educate). Kierkegaard frequently uses verbs with the prefix op, for example, opelske (to love up, to love forth), opbygge (to build up). See Works of Love, KW XVI (SV IX 204-09).
10. With reference to the following two paragraphs and the footnote, see Supplement, p. 213 (Pap. V B 19).
11. See Diogenes Laertius, X, 124-26 (letter to Menoeccus); Vitis, II, pp. 235-36; Riisbrigh, I, pp. 501-02; Loeb, II, pp. 651-53:
Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an illimitable time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly apprehended that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatsoever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. But in the world, at one time men shun death as the greatest of all evils, and at another time choose it as a respite from the evils of life. The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life.
12. With reference to the following paragraph and the first two sentences of the next, see Supplement, p. 214 (Pap. V B 6:15, 17:2).
13. See JP I 452 (Pap. V A 10). Cf. Hans Lassen Martensen, Den christelige Daab (Copenhagen: 1843; ASKB 652), p. 23 (ed. tr.): “It is clear in and by itself that in the period when the essential task was to establish the Church in the world, much had to take forms different from those in later times, when the Church had put out its firm roots in the world, where God’s kingdom had become just like nature.”
14. See JP II 1335 (Pap. V A 8).
15. Ludvig Holberg, Den Stundesløse, I, 6, Danske Skue-Plads, V, no pagination (ed tr.): “A sailor’s wife in the Neuen Buden [Nyboder, since 1631 quarters for naval personnel] had at one time brought thirty-two children into the world and was nevertheless no stouter than an ordinary pregnant woman. How can your grace comprehend this? ... I can tell the story with details; the children were all baptized but straightway died.”
16. A Greek neo-Pythagorean (first century A.D.) who held the Pythagorean-Platonic view of pre-existence and claimed that in an earlier life he had been the captain of an Egyptian ship. See JP III 3289 (Pap. IV A 19); Flavius Philostratus, Apollonius of Tyana, VI, 21, Werke, I-V, tr. Friedrich Jacobs (Stuttgart: 1828; ASKB 1143), V, p. 537; Life of Apollonius of Tyana, I-II, tr. F. C. Conybeare (Loeb, New York: Macmillan, 1912), II, p. 91.
17. See, for example, Hegel, Philosophie der Geschichte, Werke, IX, pp. 393, 407-08, 547; J.A., XI, pp. 415, 429-30, 569; Philosophy of History, pp. 323-24, 335, 457:
The recognition of the identity of the Subject and God was introduced into the World when the fulness of Time was come: the consciousness of this identity is the recognition of God in his true essence. The material of Truth is Spirit itself—inherent vital movement. The nature of God as pure Spirit is manifested to man in the Christian Religion.
But what is Spirit? It is the one immutably homogeneous Infinite—pure Identity—which in its second phase separates itself from itself and makes this second aspect its own polar opposite, viz. as existence for and in self as contrasted with the Universal. But this separation is annulled by the fact that atomistic Subjectivity as simple relation to itself [as occupied with self alone] is itself the Universal, the Identical with self.
Reason in general is the Positive Existence [Wesen] of Spirit, divine as well as human. The distinction between Religion and the World is only this—that Religion as such, is Reason in the soul and heart—that it is a temple in which Truth and Freedom in God are presented to the conceptive faculty: the State, on the other hand, regulated by the selfsame Reason, is a temple of Human Freedom concerned with the perception and volition of a reality, whose purport may itself be called divine. Thus Freedom in the State is preserved and established by Religion, since moral rectitude in the State is only the carrying out of that which constitutes the fundamental principle of Religion. The process displayed in History is only the manifestation of Religion as Human Reason—the production of the religious principle which dwells in the heart of man, under the form of Secular Freedom. Thus the discord between the inner life of the heart and the actual world is removed.
That the History of the World, with all the changing scenes which its annals present, is this process of development and the realization of Spirit—this is the true Theodicæa, the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the History of the World—viz., that what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not “without God,” but is essentially His Work.
18. See p. 37 and note 1.
19. Danish: Afgrund (without + ground: bottomless pit, abyss).
20. In Greek-Roman mythology, Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures it out, and Atropos cuts it.
21. Danish: primitivt. In Kierkegaard’s writings, the term in its various forms does not mean “undeveloped” or “ancient” but pertains rather to an individual’s freshness and authenticity in thinking, feeling, acting, and responding. It designates the opposite of habit, external conformity, and aping. See JP III 3558-61 and pp. 887-88; VII, p. 76.
22. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 214 (Pap. V B 6:16).
23. See Supplement, p. 214 (Pap. V B 6:22). In grammar, casus (case) is the relation of a noun, pronoun, or, in inflected languages, an adjective to other words in the sentence or the form indicating the relation. In Hebrew grammar, the genitive or possessive case is indicated by placing the noun possessed directly before the noun that is the possessor, as in the English construction “the hand of the man.” The noun possessed is said to be in the status constructus. The second noun or possessor is in the status absolutus.
24. With reference to the following four paragraphs, see Supplement, pp. 214-215 (Pap. V B 6:10, 12).
25. See Supplement, p. 215 (Pap. V B 22).
26. With reference to the remainder of the sentence and the following two sentences, see Supplement, p. 215 (Pap. V B 23:1).
27. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 215 (Pap. V B 6:17).
28. See p. 70 and note 39; Supplement, p. 198 (Pap. V B 6:8).
29. See I Corinthians 1:23.
30. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 216 (Pap. V B 6:14).
31. See Ludvig Holberg, Erasmus Montanus Eller Rasmus Berg, IV, 2, Danske Skue-Plads, V, no pagination. Berg (hill) is the name of the main character and also the name of the place where the comedy is set. Per Degn, in a discussion of Erasmus’s view that the earth is round, argues that the good people of the town believe that the earth is flat and that “one must believe more in what so many say than in what one alone says. Ergo, you are wrong” (ed. tr.).
32. A legendary narrator of tall tales, which were based on the anecdotes of Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-1797) of Bodenwerder, Hanover, Germany.
33. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 216 (Pap. V B 6:13). See JP I 294, 343 (Pap II A 369; X1 A 624).
34. Surgeon Brause says of his assistant, Saft: “How like the devil he twists and turns so that he ends up either in the pantry or in the wine cellar.” Adam Oehlenschläger, Sovedrikken, I (Copenhagen: 1808), p. 27 (ed. tr.).
35. See John 16:7.
36. See JP I 1008-18; VII, p. 31.
37. A conflation of the account (Plutarch, “Nicias,” 30, Lives; Loeb, III, pp. 309-11) of the barber who spread word of the defeat in Sicily (413 B.C.) and the legend of the runner who fell dead after bringing news of the Marathon victory (490 B.C.) to Athens. See Prefaces, KW IX (SV V 18-19).
38. With reference to the following sentence, see Supplement, p. 216 (Pap. V B 6:21).
39. See John 21:25.
40. See John 19:30.
41. Danish: ølnordisk, literally “beer-Nordic,” a play on oldnordisk and presumably an allusion to Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig’s interest in Norse mythology. See JP V 5740, 5819, 5832 (Pap. V A 58; VI A 73, B 235).
42. An allusion to N.F.S. Grundtvig’s Christelige Prædikener eller Søndags-Bog, I-III (Copenhagen: 1827-30; ASKB 222-24), III, p. 614: “So there is singing and ringing among you” (a translation of Ephesians 5:19).
43. See Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Die Symbolik des Traumes (Bamberg: 1821; ASKB 776), p. 38 (ed. tr.): “. . . voice of nature, the air music on Ceylon, which sings a frightful, merry minuet in the tones of a profoundly plaintive, heartrending voice.” See Irony, KW II (SV XIII 329); Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 287).
44. With reference to the remainder of the paragraph, see Supplement, p. 216 (Pap. V B 6:20).
45. See Anxiety, p. 3, KW VIII (SV IV 276).
46. See, for example, Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, I, Werke, IV, pp. 57-73; J.A., IV, pp. 535-51; Science of Logic, pp. 431-43, especially p. 433:
Contradiction resolves itself. In the self-excluding reflection we have just considered, positive and negative, each in its self-subsistence, sublates itself; each is simply the transition or rather the self-transposition of itself into its opposite. This ceaseless vanishing of the opposites into themselves is the first unity resulting from contradiction; it is the null.
See also Hegel, Encyclopädie, I, Logik, Werke, VI, p. 242; J.A., VIII, p. 280; Hegel’s Logic, p. 174:
Contradiction is the very moving principle of the world: and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction is unthinkable. The only thing correct in that statement is that contradiction is not the end of the matter, but cancels itself. But contradiction, when cancelled, does not leave abstract identity; for that is itself only one side of the contrariety. The proximate result of opposition (when realized as contradiction) is the Ground, which contains identity as well as difference superseded and deposited to elements in the completer notion.
See also Either/Or, II, KW IV (SV II 154-55, 200); Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 261, 264, 271, 284, 301, 365-66, 497).
47. See Metaphysics, 1005 b-1006 a, 1007 b, 1008 a; Bekker, II, pp. 1005-06, 1007, 1008; Hengstenberg, I, pp. 60, 65, 67; Works, VIII:
For a principle which every one must have who understands anything that is, is not a hypothesis; and that which every one must know who knows anything, he must already have when he comes to a special study. Evidently then such a principle is the most certain of all; which principle this is, let us proceed to say. It is, that the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect; we must presuppose, to guard against dialectical objections, any further qualifications which might be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles, since it answers to the definition given above. . . . —Some indeed demand that even this shall be demonstrated, but this they do through want of education, for not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education. For it is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything (there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration); but if there are things of which one should not demand demonstration, these persons could not say what principle they maintain to be more self-evident than the present one.
Again, if all contradictory statements are true of the same subject at the same time, evidently all things will be one.
Also all things would on this view be one, as has been already said, and man and God and trireme and their contradictories will be the same. For if contradictories can be predicated alike of each subject, one thing will in no wise differ from another; for if it differ, this difference will be something true and peculiar to it. And . . . if one may with truth apply the predicates separately, the above-mentioned result follows none the less, and, further, it follows that all would then be right and all would be in error, and our opponent himself confesses himself to be in error.
48. A reference to a possible sequel, namely, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. See Supplement, pp. 185, 217-19 (Pap. V B 1:5-10, 12, 7-9, 20). In the Introduction to Postscript, KW XII (SV VII 18), Johannes Climacus discusses the relation of Fragments and Postscript.
49. See Irony, KW II (SV XIII 191).
50. See I Corinthians 2:7-9.
51. See Johann Georg Hamann’s letter to Lavater, Hamann’s Schriften, I-VIII, ed. Friedrich Roth (Berlin, Leipzig: 1821-43; ASKB 536-44), V, p. 274 (ed. tr.): “der weiseste Schriftsteller und dunkleste Prophet, der Executor des neuen Testaments, Pontius Pilatus [the wisest author and most obscure prophet, the executor of the New Testament, Pontius Pilate].”
52. With reference to the following paragraph, see Supplement, p. 219 (Pap. V B 23:6).