1834–1836

The First Journal Entries and their Background

In a famous entry from 1843 Kierkegaard wrote that after his death no one would find the slightest information in his papers about what had really filled his life.1 He called this a ‘consolation’. At the time of his death at the age of forty-two, his apartment was found to contain, among piles of other papers, more than seven and a half thousand pages of journal entries dating from three years later than that earlier prediction. Or was it a promise? If so, then the question is whether in the light of this huge Nachlass he managed, or by then even intended, to fulfil it.

To answer that we should know more about what Kierkegaard thinks is missing, and why. He calls it ‘information’. But what could such information be about? Some sickness perhaps? It has been suggested that there are indications that Kierkegaard was an epileptic.² Certainly that is something he does not mention; while the heavy overscoring we see on the sample manuscript page in the Translator’s Preface could well be an attempt to remove a reference to such a ‘disposition’ (see entry II A 68 below). Yet could such a thing, though it would certainly affect Kierkegaard’s life in many significant ways, really occupy it?

Maybe the use of the term ‘information’ here is ironical. In his pseudonymous works, one of Kierkegaard’s principal theses is that information is systematically incapable of conveying what interests you in the state of affairs about which you want to be informed. So if what remains hidden in the journals is some answer to the question of what interest it was that filled Kierkegaard’s life, according to that theory no amount or kind of information could ever convey what the reader fails to find in the journals.

But usually you would think that even if words cannot convey some deeper motive, at least there are words which we can use to say what kind of motive or interest it is. Perhaps, then, Kierkegaard is saying that we will not even find words in the journals which indicate – however much they may be unable to convey – the kind of thing that ‘filled’ his life. As one probes the journals themselves, one comes across remarks about subterfuge and, perhaps more to the point, a passion for disguise.3 Apart from merely indulging this passion, one may as a journal writer also have very good reasons for disguising motives: discretion towards some other person, a friend perhaps; not trusting posterity to put the appropriate construction on one’s words; not knowing quite how to express one’s motivation in the first place.

It seems at least to be something fairly crucial that Kierkegaard claims is missing, at least up until 1843. In the same 1843 entry he calls it an inscription in his innermost being which ‘explains everything’, and, ‘more often than not, makes what the world would call trifles into, for me, events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note which explains it’.

Kierkegaard often talks of a clue of this kind – some idea or principle which throws light on the whole, whether nature, a body of thought, or a person’s life. Sartre talks similarly of ‘basic projects’, but in Kierkegaard’s case it seems more like something in the past which stays with him and which he has to come to terms with. Perhaps one can consider the situation in the following way. Whatever Kierkegaard meant by indirect communication, there is one clear sense in which the communication provided by the journals is genuinely direct. They are records of Kierkegaard’s reactions to events in his own environment, to the thoughts of the many classical and contemporary authors he reads, to the words and the behaviour of people around him. There is no attempt here to conceal that these are indeed his own reactions, no attempt to fabricate them, or to attribute them to other, possibly fictitious, writers. So if you incline to the view that what makes communication indirect in the Kierkegaardian sense is pseudonymity, you could argue that the communication in the journals is certainly direct, at least in so far as large portions of them provide frank reports of their author’s own thoughts and reactions. What perhaps is missing is precisely any clue to the special nature of the thoughts and the degree of the reactions. I say any clue, but there are no doubt many readers today, far more than in Kierkegaard’s own time – and this is perhaps a measure both of his influence and his prescience – who are able to glimpse or detect the ‘secret note’ which makes this remarkable person respond and act in the ways he did. Perhaps they may also glimpse whatever reasons Kierkegaard may have had for wanting to leave behind him a record of the life whose inner side, due in large measure also to his own efforts at misdirection and subterfuge, escaped so many of his contemporaries.

The earliest papers are from 1831–2, Kierkegaard’s first years as a university student, and are mainly in the form of notes, transcriptions, and translations. The entries selected here begin in 1834, Kierkegaard’s fourth year of study. The first entries date from just before the death of his mother on 31 July. It will be useful to trace the background of that event and the context of Kierkegaard’s own life and that of his family.

Born on 5 May 1813 at the family home in Nytorv in the centre of Copenhagen, Søren Aabye was the youngest by four years of seven children born to their father’s second wife, Anne (or Ane) Sørensdatter Lund (18 June 1768–31 July 1834). The first marriage, to Kirstine Nielsdatter Røyen (c. 1758–96), had been childless and had ended with her death after only two years. Anne, the mother of all Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s children, had been the first wife’s maid and their first child4 was born just five months after the wedding. Michael himself came from a peasant family that had worked the land of their local priest in Jutland under a system that reduced them formally and politically to virtual vassalage. But Michael had been sent as a boy of twelve to Copenhagen to work in an uncle’s hosiery business. In 1777, at the age of twenty-one and with a career as errand boy and shop assistant already behind him, he was officially released from his bondage by the village priest. Michael prospered, first as a travelling clothier, then as a wholesale importer of cloth and textiles. Having amassed, by good luck as much as by good judgement, a considerable fortune, he retired at the early age of forty, shortly after marrying Anne. Since he was by far the stronger partner in the marriage, his continual presence at home meant that he exerted a considerable and direct influence on the minds of his children, something which had dire consequences for at least two of them, Søren’s brother Peter Christian, the eldest of the sons, and Søren himself.

Søren began his regular schooling in 1821 as a pupil at the School of Civic Virtue (Borgerdydskolen), and in due course received his school-leaving diploma, allowing him to matriculate as a student at the University. A testimonial provided by his headmaster, Michael Nielsen, presents a portrait of the pupil:

A good mind, receptive to everything that requires special application, though for a long time he was exceedingly childish and devoid of all seriousness; and a taste for freedom and independence, which also shows itself in his behaviour in the form of a good-natured, sometimes amusing lack of constraint, has stopped him entering more into anything or committing himself to it more than would allow him to draw back again. When in due course his frivolousness, which rarely allowed him to bring his good intentions to fruition or to pursue some definite goal consistently, subsides, and greater earnestness enters his character, in which respect there has been a notable progress especially in this last year, and once his good intellectual gifts are given the chance to develop more freely and unencumbered at the University, he will surely be counted among the able, and in many ways come to resemble his eldest brother. […] Among several brothers and sisters who have all enjoyed an excellent upbringing, he is the youngest; a few years before he came to the school he lost his next to eldest brother,5 whose illness may have been caused by a head injury when he and another boy collided when at play in the school-yard. This, together with his small stature, may well have had some influence on his development for several years afterwards …⁶

Søren was remembered by his contemporaries at the School of Civic Virtue not for any outstanding ability that might have presaged his future fame as writer, but for a certain oddity. He was ‘quaintly attired, slight, and small for his age at the time, a pale, freckled boy’, this combined with a ‘foul mouth that cost him many a bloody nose’,7 and a sovereign impertinence towards teachers Who failed to impress or cow him. To one fellow student, later Bishop of Aalborg, the later polemicist and social critic seemed ‘very conservative’, someone who liked to ‘honour the King, love the Church, and respect the police’.⁸ In October 1830 Søren entered the University of Copenhagen with the good grades in all his entry examinations expected of a pupil of Borgerdydskolen, but with distinction in Greek, History, French, and Danish essay-writing. Just a month after matriculation, Herr Student Søren Aabye Kierkegaard enlisted in the King’s Guard but, after only four days and without reporting for duty, was declared unfit for service and removed from the roll.

Although embarked on a theological career, Kierkegaard’s first university examinations (April and October 1831), which formed part of an obligatory propaedeutic study, embraced science as well as the liberal arts. Indeed mathematics and physics, along with theoretical and practical philosophy, proved to be Kierkegaard’s strongest subjects. His performance in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and History was merely creditable, though his command of Latin later earned from his former headmaster the highest praise after a period (in 1837–8) in which Kierkegaard was appointed to teach the subject at his former school.⁹ When he later defended his doctoral dissertation in July 1841, the disputation was conducted in Latin.

As noted, the journal entries selected here begin in 1834, in Kierkegaard’s fourth year of study, and immediately before the death of his mother at the end of July. The reader will find no record of that event, though when four years later Kierkegaard’s father died, that fact was not only recorded but its effect carefully noted and described. It is important to remember this when determining the function and nature of Kierkegaard’s journals. Of course, the absence of any loose-sheet entries or letters concerning Kierkegaard’s mother’s death does not mean that none were written, but the fact that none are preserved may indicate that both in consciously writing a journal and preserving his own loose notes Kierkegaard was deliberately focusing on events and relationships which gave his life the shape it acquired and that his mother’s death was not one of these. A routine search for the ‘secret note’ would nevertheless have to include the possibility that it concerned the death of Kierkegaard’s mother. According to Hans Lassen Martensen, Kierkegaard’s tutor (about whom more later), Søren was deeply affected by his mother’s death; indeed Martensen’s own mother remarked that she had never seen someone grieve so much over a death.10 But it is unlikely that this is the real explanation. The death of his mother was, for Kierkegaard, the last stage in a long process of attrition in which the life-support system provided by a family finally collapsed. This was the background of incontrovertible fact in which his life had to be lived, its ‘facticity’, to use a word employed by Kierkegaard himself in a more general connection. One brother and a sister had died before he was nine, and his two surviving sisters, a brother, and his mother all died before he was twenty-two. Søren himself became convinced that he would not live to be more than thirty-three (see I A 325, p. 65). Time was therefore short, and as the younger of the two surviving children of his parents, it became necessary for him not to lose the seconds, the moments, left to him, and to find his life’s positive form and record its content. Later, there are many personal references to his own states of mind, in connection with his father and then with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, as well as with others with whom his life became closely and polemically involved. In these respects, as the reader of this selection from the journals will discover, Kierkegaard’s father and Regine played a continuing role, while neither his mother nor any of the other departed members of his family played a formative part in Kierkegaard’s subsequent career as writer and polemicist.

The first regular journal kept by Kierkegaard records a summer vacation spent at his father’s suggestion, and expense, a year after Anne died. Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard may have detected his son’s growing despair; at any rate he recommended a spell in North Sjælland, which Søren used to advantage. The entries recording this vacation, a selection of which are printed here, indicate how distance from the coteries and involvements in Copenhagen allowed him to face and assess his own state of mind. There is a surviving letter from his father which indicates that during the vacation Søren had kept up a correspondence with his family:

My dear son,

To put your mind at rest regarding your concern at my letting Peter answer your letters rather than writing myself, I send you these few lines from my own hand. There is, thank God, no other reason, internal or external, than the one you know of and surmise: my ever-increasing difficulty in writing, which you are quite familiar with. The past few days I have also been plagued more than usually by my colic.

Since your letter says nothing about how you are I conclude that you are well, which makes me very happy. Your brother is also in his usual good health, as also your brothers-in-law and their children.

Please give affectionate and friendly greetings to Mr Mentz and his wife from us, and especially from me.

Your most loving and wholly devoted father,  

M. P. Kierkegaard

Copenhagen, 4 July 1835

To Student of Theology S. A. Kierkegaard at the Inn at Gilleleje11

The remaining entries for 1835 (whose order in relation to the journal recording the summer vacation must so far remain to a degree speculative) and for 1836 do not indicate that Kierkegaard’s despair diminished as a result of his self-confessions. But one good reason for that may be a conversation which he had with his father, whom Kierkegaard on his return from Gilleleje found also in an unusually confessional state of mind. What the actual confessions were remains secret, and perhaps they concern the elusive ‘inscription’, but something of their nature may be divined from Kierkegaard’s later mention of a relationship between a father and a son where the son finds out things he doesn’t want to know:

His father is a man of note, God-fearing and strict; only once, when drunk, did he drop a few words that made the son suspect the worst. The son has no other intimation of it, and never dares ask his father or anyone else.¹²

There is also the even later comment, from the last year of his own life, that it was through a ‘crime’ that he ‘came into the world’.¹³ This is usually thought to be a bitter reference to his father’s age, fifty-seven, at Søren’s birth, thus too old to bequeath his youngest son physical strength yet too weak to control the sexual urge that gave him birth. But then there was also the fact that Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard’s first-born was conceived out of wedlock, just a few months after the death of his first wife, and furthermore by the latter’s maidservant whom he married when it became clear that she was pregnant. To someone of Michael Pedersen’s cast of mind, that could mean that the whole family was conceived in sin, though perhaps a natural development for one who, as a child tending sheep on the Jutland heath, stood upon a hill and cursed God for making an innocent child suffer so.14 The outcome at any rate, whatever the causes, was a falling-out with the father and a deliberate attempt on Søren’s part to compensate for his ‘lost childhood’. He turned his attention more conscientiously to the amenities of student life and studies took second place. This, as certain entries clearly indicate, led Kierkegaard to the verge of mental breakdown. However, the Gilleleje experience seems to have stayed with him, since instead of using his new-found discovery of the debilitating effects of his father’s religion to reject Christianity altogether, Kierkegaard began to see in the prospect of restoring Christianity to its pristine vigour a goal worth devoting a life to. Indeed, we see already at this stage the fundamental alternatives which were to form the disjunctive framework for all of Kierkegaard’s thought: either a conscious retreat into the solace of pleasure and enjoyment, which whether you realize it or not is despair, or a genuine relationship to Christianity. In Kierkegaard’s authorship this was first to find expression in Either/Or in the choice, once the alternatives are offered, between ignoring the categories of good and evil or accepting them (thus the original choice is not between good and evil as such but between eschewing the hold of the distinction between good and evil or living in accordance with it). However, in that work, for reasons which become clear in the next section (1837–1839), the latter alternative came to be identified not so much with adopting a genuine relationship to Christianity in the abstract as with conforming to an ideal of socio-ethical responsibility and openness, what Kierkegaard calls ‘realizing the universal’.

You always need one more light positively to identify another. Imagine it quite dark and then one point of light appears; you would be quite unable to place it, since no spatial relation can be made out in the dark. Only when one more light appears can you fix the place of the first, in relation to it.

15 April 34 I A 1

A strict predestinarianism traces the origin of evil to God, which makes it less consistent even than that of the Manicheans, in that the latter system posits two beings. The former unites these two opposites in one being.

30 May 34 I A 2

Sin can’t come just from man, any more than the one sex by itself can produce a new individual, which is why the Christian doctrine of the devil’s temptation is right. It is the other factor, and also why man’s sin specifically differs from the devil’s (original sin – the possibility of conversion). The other principle would be disanalogical.

34 I A 3

Why I really cannot say I definitely enjoy nature is that I can’t get it into my mind what in nature I enjoy. On the other hand, I can grasp a work of art; there I can find – if I may so put it – that Archimedean point, and once I’ve found that, everything easily becomes clear to me. I can then follow this one big idea and see how all the details serve to throw light on it. I see the author’s whole individuality like the ocean in which every detail is reflected. He is a kindred mind, no doubt far superior yet with the same limitation. The works of the Deity are too large for me; I am obliged to lose myself in the details. That’s also why the expressions people use in their observation of nature are so vapid – ‘How glorious’, ‘grand’, and so on; being far too anthropomorphic, they stop at the outside, they are incapable of expressing the inside, the depth. What to me also seems most striking in this respect is how the great poet geniuses (an Ossian, a Homer) are presented as blind. Naturally it doesn’t matter to me whether they really were blind; the point is that people have imagined them so, as if to indicate that what they saw when they sang of the beauty of nature appeared not to the external eye but to an inner intuition. How remarkable that one of the best writers on bees – yes, the best of them – was blind from early youth;15 it’s as if to show that here, where you would have thought external observation so important, he had found that point and from it was then able by purely mental activity to infer back to all the particulars and reconstruct them in analogy with nature.

11 September 34 I A 8

[On the above] Or as it is expressed most profoundly in the story of Paul’s conversion (Acts 9:8): ‘and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man …’.

26 June 37 I A 9

Just like the ant-eater, the doctrine of predestination seems to draw me down a funnel: with a fearful consistency the first Fall stipulates all succeeding ones. Like the ant-eater, it places its funnel (surely an appropriate image for such a logical train of thought) in the loose sand (feelings of religious piety) and coils all its consistent conclusions like snakes around whoever has fallen, like Laocoön.¹⁶

11 September 34 I A 10

I’m surprised no one (to my knowledge) has ever used the ‘master thief’ theme, one that should lend itself remarkably well to dramatic treatment. It is impossible to ignore how practically all nations have had such concept, how they have all entertained an ideal of a thief, and will see that however much a Fra Diavolo differs from a Peer Mikkelsen or a Morten Frederiksen, they still have traits in common.17 Thus many stories circulating about thieves are attributed by some to Peer Mikkelsen, by others to Morten Frederiksen, by others to yet another, and so on, but without knowing definitely which of them they really refer to; which just shows that people have a certain ideal conception of a thief, embodying a number of main characteristics which are then ascribed to this or that actual thief. We should especially bear in mind that depravity and rapacity are by no means thought to be all that is behind it. On the contrary, the master thief has also been thought of as endowed with natural goodness, amiability, and charitableness, along with exceptional judgement, cunning, and ingenuity, and as someone who did not steal just to steal, that is, to appropriate someone else’s property, but for some other reason. We may think of him, often, as someone discontented with the established order and who expresses his dissatisfaction by violating the rights of others, seeing in this an opportunity to make fools of the authorities and come to grips with them. Here it is worth noting (as is told of Peer Mikkelsen) that one imagines him stealing from the rich to help the poor, which indeed shows magnanimity, and never stealing for his own gain. We might further imagine him having a warm affection for the opposite sex, for example Foster (Feuerbach, volume 2), ¹⁸ indicating on the one hand a redeeming feature in his character but also, on the other hand, giving him and his life just that element of romance needed to distinguish him from common thieves – whether the motivation for theft is to secure a better future in his loved one’s arms (like Foster) or he looks upon his activity as a thief in the light of an opponent of the establishment, or as avenging himself upon the authorities for an injustice done to him. His girl then takes on the role of guardian angel, at his side, providing comfort in his hardship as the authorities seek his arrest; for its part the populace looks upon him with suspicion as somebody who is still just a thief, despite some inner voice which may sometimes speak in his defence, and he finds no solace or encouragement among other thieves since they are much too far beneath him, and among them depravity indeed prevails. The only association he can have with these is to use them for his own ends; otherwise he can only despise them.

12 September 34 I A 11

Such a master thief (for example, Kagerup) will also confess his crime boldly and frankly, and accept the punishment as a man conscious of having lived for an idea; in so doing, he recognizes the reality of the state and – as one might say – does not disavow it in his life. It is only abuses that he opposes. True, we could also imagine him ridiculing a court of justice, but we would have to look at that as a kind of mockery of the whole business, a practical expression of a vainglory entirely consistent with his motivating idea. He will never forget to be frank, and once he has shown how he could hoodwink a court of justice, he will come with his own confession.

17 September 34 I A 12

It occurs to me that dogmatics made the same discovery that Copernicus did in astronomy when it was found that it was not God that changed (God could be neither lenient nor wrathful), but people who changed their attitude to him – in other words, the sun did not go around the earth but the earth around the sun.

29 September 34 I A 21

As a counterpart to predestinarianism as a doctrine the very upholding of which involves one in self-contradiction, one could adduce the following: if one were to imagine someone doing everything out of egoism, one would be constantly falling into contradiction; one would be aware that something was a case of noble sacrifice, but according to one’s theory one would have to say it was egoism. (Fichte’s doctrine of identity is also an example.19)

29 September 34 I A 22

Naturally he may also be thought of as equipped with a good measure of humour, which can easily combine with his discontent, just this being what makes him satirical, and – though he mustn’t be imagined as always discontented – can nevertheless easily be combined with his origins among the commoner class of people, in the nation’s roots. In some cases he will resemble an Eulenspiegel.²⁰

29 January 35 I A 13

He isn’t a man who tries to lead others astray; on the contrary he dissuades them from leading such a life. He has tasted its bitterness and puts up with it only because he lives for an idea. […] Rather I would think of such a master thief as someone who had lost his father early in life and now had only an old mother whom he dearly loves and she him, though she is horrified at her son’s errant ways, while his beloved quite overlooks his bad side […]

29 January 35 I A 15

I can imagine a scene which has him in a moonlit wood. He turns to the moon: ‘Thank you, moon, you silent witness to the lovers’ rendezvous, the bandit’s lair, the unquiet of the greedy, the torpor of the police – but especially are you fond of the thief, you who steal your light from the sun!’

[…] I could also imagine him in a tavern meeting a tramp (or a failed government clerk, or perhaps a titled secretary who also tries to impress with his title, education, etc. – a figure of low comedy besides) who then attempts to arouse the peasants by talking about the failings of the management, etc., thus in sharp contrast to the master thief’s serious dissatisfaction with much of the system.

9 February 35 I A 16

Comparing the master thief with the Italian brigand, we see an essential difference in the predominance of the social factor in the latter. You can practically only think of him as heading a robber-band in whose midst he joins in the revelling once the hazard and hardship are over. In the master thief there is some far deeper motivation, a certain melancholic trait, a keeping of himself to himself, a dark view of life, an inner discontent.

15 March 35 I A 18

It seems to me that Christian dogmatics must be an explication of Christ’s activity, the more so since Christ established no teaching but was active. He didn’t teach that there was a redemption for man, he redeemed men. A Muhammadan dogmatics (sit venia verbo)21 would be an explication of Muhammad’s teaching, but a Christian dogmatics is an explication of Christ’s activity. Christ’s nature was imparted through that activity, Christ’s relation to God, human nature, man’s situation conditioned by Christ’s activity (which was really the main thing). All the rest would then be regarded as mere introduction.

5 November 34 I A 27

Probably few fields of study bestow on man the serene and happy frame of mind that the natural sciences give him. Out into nature he goes, everything is familiar, it is as though he had talked with the plants and the animals beforehand. He sees not only the uses man can put them to (for that is quite secondary) but their significance in the whole universe. He stands like Adam of old – all the animals come to him and he gives them names.

22 November 34 I A 31

To me the difference between a writer who picks up his material from everywhere but doesn’t work it into an organic whole and a writer who does is like that between mock turtle and real turtle. The meat of the real turtle tastes in some places like veal, in others like chicken, but all of it has been combined in one organism. You find all these different kinds of meat in mock turtle but what binds the separate parts is a sauce, which even so is often more sustaining than the jabber which stands in for it in much writing.

22 November 34 I A 32

The most sublime tragedy consists without doubt in being misunderstood. That is why the life of Christ, misunderstood as he was by the people, Pharisees, disciples, in short by everyone despite the fact that the ideas he would convey to them were the most sublime, is the greatest tragedy. That is why Job’s life is tragic, he suffers surrounded by uncomprehending friends, a mocking wife. That is why the wife’s situation in the Riquebourg family is so affecting,22 precisely because her love for her husband’s nephew forces her into concealment and hence the apparent coolness. That is why the scene in Goethe’s Egmont (Act 5, scene i) is so genuinely tragic; Clara is altogether misunderstood by the burghers. That surely is also why certain of Holberg’s comic characters are tragic. Take for instance den Stundesløse²³ [The Busy Trifler]. He sees the huge pile of business accumulating while all the others smile at him and see nothing. Hence too the tragedy in the life of the hypochondriac, also that of the one who has been gripped by a longing for something higher and who then falls foul of people who misunderstand him.

22 November 34 I A 33

It seems to me that the stone laid before Christ’s grave might well be called the philosopher’s stone, in so far as its overturning has given not just the Pharisees but now for 1,800 years the philosophers, too, so much to busy themselves with.

24 November 34 I A 35

Certainly faith must involve an expression of will, yet in a sense other than that in which, for instance, all acts of cognition must be said to involve an expression of will; for how else can I explain that the New Testament has it that he who does not have faith shall be punished?

25 November 34 I A 36

Presumably the police use a coat of arms portraying a hand with an eye in the middle to show that it has an eye on each finger. But the fact that the eye doesn’t extend to the thumb also means that it has a finger free – when necessary – to cover the eye.

16 December 34 I A 17

Is a great man to be judged according to different principles from anyone else? This question has often been answered in the affirmative, but I think the right answer is ‘No’. A great man is great precisely because he is a chosen instrument in the hands of the Deity. The moment he fancies it is he himself who acts, that he can gaze out over the future and allow the end seen in that light to ennoble the means – then he is petty. Right and duty hold for everybody, and transgressing them is just as inexcusable in the great man as in states in which people fancy that politics is allowed to perpetrate injustice. True, such an injustice often has beneficial consequences; but it is not that man or the state that we are to thank for these, but providence.

23 December 34 I A 42

As a contribution to fixing the concept of faith, it may be remarked that we say of a sick person afraid of dying that he believed he was going to die, where the expression of will is precisely lacking; similarly of somebody afraid of ghosts; that we can say on the other hand: I would like to believe but I cannot, since here the expression of will seems precisely to be present.

31 December 34 I A 44

The concept of orthodoxy is like that of consistency. Many think the latter means always doing the same thing, and would presumably insist that because one takes an umbrella to walk in the rain one should do the same in sunshine.

28 January 35 I A 45

People resort to the concept of inspiration when they speak of the close relationship of the apostles to Christ as the reason for their supreme understanding; they forget, on the other hand, that those living after Christianity has lasted for 1,800 years have a great advantage now that Christianity has made itself felt in all aspects of life and has evolved; the apostles had to fight against various misuses, misunderstandings, etc. simply because Christianity was just beginning its development.

5 February 35 I A 50

Eulenspiegel seems to represent the satyric in the Northerner.

16 March 35 I A 51

Just as there are people who, like the French fashion boutiques, put on show everything they have, so there are people in whom one keeps on suspecting something deep but where it nevertheless all turns out to be just like a muddy pond or a mirror – everything reveals itself there.

3 April 35 I A 52

What the Jews and many later have demanded of Christ, that he prove his divinity, is an absurdity. For if he really were God’s son the proof would be ludicrous, just as ludicrous as a person wanting to prove his own existence, since in Christ’s case existence and divinity are the same – and if he were a deceiver, he must surely have entered well enough into the part to realize that the moment he tried to prove his divinity he would be refuting himself.

19 April 35 I A 53

The subjectivity which I myself think must first be born with regard to the Church – in that every new norm one wants to impose on the Church faces the same objection rightly raised against the Bible – is already prototypically there in the most objective thing of all; the confession begins: I believe.

35 I A 56

In a way, there is something right in what the orthodox say, that the Church must have an immediate awareness of its own existence; that is something I find just as true as that every human being is immediately aware of his own existence. But just as it would be preposterous for someone to say: ‘I am aware of myself, I exist, therefore I existed yesterday’ – for this latter is, after all, not something he is presently conscious of – so it is equally preposterous for the Church to say: ‘I am conscious of my own existence, therefore I am the original apostolic Church.’ Naturally, this latter definition is what it must undertake to prove, for it is an historical question.

35 I A 58

Just as the consistent unfolding of the Protestant view of the Bible as constituting the Church led to the establishment of a new branch of learning, namely the introductory science where people tried to prove that its origins in the apostles gave it the right to constitute the Church, so too must an introductory science follow from the theory of the Apostolic symbolum.24

35 I A 59

SOME COMMENTS ON GRUNDTVIG’S THEORY OF THE CHURCH

1. Grundtvig thinks the Church is based on the sacraments and that whoever changes these is trying to change the Church and has eo ipso left it. But in this connection I must remark: Why didn’t Grundtvig lay stress on the holy communion, which was already instituted, rather than baptism which […] after all hadn’t yet been introduced into the Church? […]

2. Still, there has always been a distinction between what is and what is less essentially Christian. The Bible has been held to contain the essentially Christian in this respect. How then does Grundtvig’s theory differ from the others? While they let it remain rather vague, Grundtvig thinks, on the contrary, that he has found a form of expression which decides once and for all what is and what is not Christian faith. He must now stand by this, and insist on it with the utmost rigour, as Lindberg has so consistently done.25 He must insist upon every letter, yes, every thousandth part of a jot. For otherwise the door is immediately open once more for human beings to decide what is and what isn’t Christian, and then he must in all fairness grant everyone else the same right, in which case his theory will be on the same footing as the others. But if we now look at the expression of Christian faith on which he thinks the Church is based, we have to admit that it is inherently impossible for an idea to find a completely adequate expression in words. Even if the Deity himself were to utter them, a snag would arise as soon as human beings tried to understand them. Here I have conceded what I am provisionally willing to allow, that the word was indeed given by inspired men. But if we insist on the concept of inspiration in this way, as we must on Lindberg’s theory, we must also confine its operation to the language in which it is originally given. Yet all the churches which now nave essentially the same creed have it in translation, and it is precisely the Greek Church which departs from the others in its creed (which is also why Grundtvig says somewhere in Theologisk Maanedsskrift that it is like a withered branch). Must we then concede a miracle with regard to the translation? No one grants us that entitlement […]. But, of course, with translation several more snags arise, etc. So the more consistently the theory is maintained the more it departs from the truth, but unless it is maintained consistently we have come no further and Grundtvig’s theory has no meaning at all. […]

Grundtvig has been asked to prove that the present Creed was the original, but on this point the Magister [Lindberg] held that it was up to the others to prove it was not the original. […]

Opponents have pointed out that the Creed does not occur in the New Testament (what right has one to attack him in that manner?). To this Lindberg and Grundtvig have replied: (1) Yes, that is natural, because it was to Christians that [Paul] wrote and they knew the Creed so well that he had no need to quote it. But that makes it a special case, for the Christians knew the holy communion too, yet Paul quotes the words of institution (I Corinthians II) […]. (2) As for its not being found in the oldest Church Fathers either, Magister Lindberg has suggested they kept it secret. But suppose that is true, it would still not be a reason for the apostles not to quote it, since there was far more reason to have considered the holy communion something of a mystery (as in fact they did), and this is discussed fully in I Corinthians II. Still, suppose it was the case, it is at least certain that we find it recorded from about the fourth century, though not quite in the same form as ours. Here we can indeed say (regarding Lindberg, who argues from the dead letter) that we have something which we know exists; how it was previously we do not know, but we assume it has been just like this and claim quite consistently that if you believe the opposite the burden of proof lies with you. But since the present Creed and that of the fourth century are not exactly the same, for the fourth-century one lacks certain articles – and yet if you wish to be consistent you will have to admit that on your account I can say the one is just as original as the other – then you must admit that we do not have the original. This conclusion is awkward only for you who think that if we don’t have it, then it’s all over with the Church, the covenant is broken, and happiness can come to no man; but not for us who believe that the Church essentially expresses itself at the concrete moment in its confessions of faith, and that these are to be regarded accordingly as milestones on the road of Christian development.

Grundtvig also thought this theory would help to determine what is and what is not Christian, theologically. He thought the Bible was deaf and dumb, that it could be interpreted in any way, but then he meant that just these words were so straightforward that no one could misconstrue them. However, in the first place it is inherently ridiculous to claim that an account of the kind one finds in the Bible, which is composed by the same apostles, should bring confusion to the ideas, as though throwing light on something from different directions diminished its clarity […]. And second, we should note that the Bible has been constantly under attack. But let us now suppose that this theory of the symbol became just as generally accepted as the one about the Bible. I would still like to know whether it would be harder for an opponent to attack the single phrase ‘the forgiveness of sins’ than the entire teaching in the Bible, as if the single phrase didn’t contain far greater possibilities of conceptualization than the entire exposition itself, where precisely the single phrase has found its illumination in the whole. […]

28 May 35 I A 60

It occurs to me that Grundtvig looks on the development of Christian understanding not as progress down a difficult road but like a steam engine going down a railway track with its head of steam fired up by the apostles, so that Christian understanding is concocted in enclosed machines.

1 June 35 I A 62

GILLELEJE

During my stay at Gilleleje I’ve visited Esrom, Fredensborg, Frederiksværk, Tidsvilde. The last village is best known for its St Helen’s Spring, to which the whole district goes on pilgrimage around Midsummer’s Eve. When you come just outside the village your attention is immediately drawn to a quite tall, three-sided column with an inscription to the effect that quicksands once caused great devastation, the subsidence burying in its waves a whole village, Tibirke, but also that it was checked by the tireless efforts of our excellent government. Looking down from this high point into the valley where the town of Tidsvilde lies, and informed of the nature of the terrain both by the inscription on the column and by the lush buckwheat growing on either side, a friendly, smiling nature meets one’s eyes. The small but very neat houses lie separately, surrounded by fresh verdure (unlike larger cities which, when we approach them, impress on us the clear contour of the whole mass of buildings, these are, if I may so put it, like individuals extending a friendly hand to one another in a smiling totality), for the whole expanse where the quicksand did its worst is now planted with pine trees – so one is almost tempted to believe the whole thing is a story, a strange fiction: that in this very region where health is sought so many have found their graves. At dusk the whole thing looks like a legend made plain to the eye, a kind of story of Job in which Tibirke church has the main part. Alone on a great sandhill, it stands like a gravestone over the luckless village, yet also as an example of a church built on a rock over which storm and sand cannot prevail. When the church held its own, a forest sprang up where there had been quicksand. – Now on entering the village one is most unpleasantly put off to find, instead of peaceful rural tranquillity mixed perhaps with a little melancholy in view of the circumstances, boisterous noise, tents, and tables where, curiously, almost all the vendors are Germans, as if to say that only foreigners could carry on like this here, that only a foreign tongue could profane the place in this way. One leaves the village and comes to the field where the grave of St Helen lies. There it stands, calm, plain, surrounded by a screen of granite boulders; the gate leading into the slightly elevated grave stands open. But here, too, to disturb every impression of solemnity, a tent has been pitched just opposite, where there is revelling and carousing and some people have picked their location with a view to mocking those who come to see it. A remarkable kind of discourse is being carried on here. Because these people are from the district, they have imbibed with their mothers’ milk a considerable awe for this grave and the cures to which it is supposed to have contributed. They can’t totally deny these, but they want to convince themselves and others that they are above such things and choose this way of making a mockery of it all. In curious contrast to all this are the comments and ways of a man who functions as a kind of inspector and has a key to the wooden shed which contains the springs (there are in fact three, which is why locally they talk of going to the springs and not the spring) from which he earns some money. He says that he has been there twenty years now and has seen many cured. One soon notices, however, that he too doesn’t put particular trust in it all but speaks well of the place for his own good. Just as I had no need on my arrival to fear becoming an object of their derision – they’d expect a man dressed in modern clothes, wearing spectacles, and smoking a cigar to have the same superior enlightenment on these matters as they themselves rather than to have come there with pious intentions – so too the keeper of the key just mentioned was disconcerted, fearing that his own interests might clash with the impression his remarks would make upon me. He therefore snatched at what I have noticed is a common expedient: those concerned had been healed in this way ‘by the help of God’. However, it is quite characteristic of people like that to come to this conclusion, for when they can’t explain the cure to themselves as being effected by these means, they push it over on to something more remote just to be rid of the whole thing, but precisely by so doing make the whole affair curious. For after all, it is indeed curious that God’s assistance should have fastened on this way. Consistency with their intellectual point of view would require them either to deny the whole thing and insist upon incontrovertibly factual evidence or, if they were very modest, postpone the explanation indefinitely.

On entering the burial mound the whole inspires a certain mood of melancholy evoked by the strange mystery of the place, by the dark side that superstition always brings with it, escaping the eye of the observer yet intimating a whole system or nexus. One sees oneself surrounded by locks of hair, rags, crutches. It is as though one hearkened to the cries of the suffering, their prayers to heaven; one hears someone’s despairing lament at being unable to fall asleep (there seems something altogether beautiful in its being made a condition that one sleep in this holy place, as though to mark the quiet, God-devoted calm), and all this at midnight on a burial mound where they are surrounded by nothing but small pieces of wood in the form of mementoes placed on the graves and bearing testimony to the happily overcome sufferings of the healed. And now day is breaking, the morning twilight with its strangely shifting life and clammy moistness fades; the sun in its majesty shines on the landscape and perhaps hears the hymns of joy of the healed. – Of the small boards mentioned, some give briefly and plainly the name and birthplace of the healed and their thanks to God – for example: ‘Johanne Anders’ daughter, 1834, suffered much from headaches, miracle 23 June 1834’; ‘Sidse Anders’ daughter, solo gloria’. – Some are much longer and more detailed; some haven’t written their names in full; some have written in the first person, others simply tell of the person concerned – for example, ‘Such-and-such a girl was cured here’, etc. Altogether, it is quite noticeable that most are women. In the middle of the site is the grave proper, and on top of it there lies a stone, or rather a piece of stone; the inscription wasn’t legible.

Just by the beach, a short distance away, are the springs, in a wooden shed. The land slopes down to this point quite steeply. Charles W. Schröder has composed a report in commemoration of Crown Prince Frederick’s visit here. – Down on the beach lies the rock on which the ship carrying Helen is supposed to have grounded; they say it becomes visible at low tide. The legend has it that when they were carrying her body to the graveyard they were unable to go further than this point where her burial mound is, and on that same occasion three springs gushed out from the earth.

35 I A 6326

On the fifth of July I visited Gurre Castle, where excavation of the ruins is now in progress. The castle itself […] was on a beautiful site, surrounded on all sides by forest. A very large stretch still exists, and the area gives some indication that at one time there was more. Then there’s Lake Gurre, fairly long and proportionally not all that wide, and with a well-grown beech forest on one side and on the other a forest of smaller, more stunted trees. The lake itself is in many places overgrown with rushes. When this landscape is viewed in the afternoon light and the sun is still high enough to give the necessary sharp contours to the friendly landscape, like a melodious voice that is accented sharply enough not to lisp, our entire surroundings seem to whisper to us, ‘This is a good place to be.’ It is the kind of familiar, intimate impression which a lake surrounded by forest (large enough to separate and unite at the same time) can produce, but the sea cannot. Also especially characteristic of this area are the rushes that billow along the shore. While the sough of the trees lets us hear King Valdemar’s hunt and the sound of the horns and baying of the hounds, the rushes seem to exhale applause – the blonde maidens admiring the knights’ swift riding and noble poise. How different in this respect the view at Lake Søborg! Here the mighty reeds bow before the wind too, but their rustling proclaims struggle and power. And then there’s the sea which like a mighty spirit is always in motion, and even in its calmest moments gives intimations of violent mental suffering. Over the region around Lake Gurre there dwells a calm sadness; it lives so to speak more in the past. That is the reason why it too is growing over, while the sea, for its part, wrests from the land – like two hostile powers they stand opposed to each other. The coastline is barren and sandy, the land rises up as if powerfully to resist. The sea is at its height when the storm chimes in with its bass, when its distinctive, deep roar vies with heaven’s thunder and everything is lit by lightning. Lake Gurre is at its most beautiful when a soft breeze ruffles its blue surface and birdsong accompanies the soughing of the reeds; the only accompaniment to the sea is the hoarse shriek of the solitary seagull. The former (the sea) is like a Mozart recitative, the latter like a Weberian melody. – From here the road went to Hellebæk. The last few miles go through the lovely forest which offers views of a special kind. The forest itself is fairly large and wild, and only the track (not a road) reminds us that we still have any connection with the human world. Here and there leaps up a deer that has been hiding in the bushes from the rays of the noonday sun. The birds rise up screeching into the sky. The rather hilly countryside now forms a multitude of little lakes in the forest. Not only because the land slopes down towards them, but also because of the shade of the leaves, the impression forced upon one is that they are very deep. In contrast to this dark mirror surface, a single flower now rises forth, growing on the surface, a nymphaea alba (white waterlily), swimming about with its big broad green leaf. It has bobbed up, white and pure, innocent, from the ocean depths. Not far from Hellebæk lies Odin’s Hill, where Schimmelmann27 lies buried. This view has been sufficiently praised and discussed, and much of its impact thus regrettably disappears. If only people would tire of running about so busily pointing out the romantic settings […]. From there the road went to Esrom and thence to Gilleleje.

35 I A 64

July the 29th. When walking from the inn over Sortebro [Black Bridge] (so called because at one time the bubonic plague was supposedly checked here) to the open ground along the beach, about a mile north one comes to the highest point around here – Gilbjerget. This has always been one of my favourite spots. Often, as I stood here of a quiet evening, the sea intoning its song with deep but calm solemnity, my eye catching not a single sail on the vast surface, and only the sea framed the sky and the sky the sea, and when, too, the busy hum of life grew silent and the birds sang their vespers, then the few dear departed ones rose from the grave before me, or rather it seemed as though they were not dead. I felt so much at ease in their midst, I rested in their embrace, and I felt as though I were outside my body and floated about with them in a higher ether – until the seagull’s harsh screech reminded me that I stood alone and it all vanished before my eyes, and with heavy heart I turned back to mingle with the world’s throng – yet without forgetting such blessed moments. – I have often stood there and pondered my past life and the different circles that have had their influence upon me. And before my contemplative gaze there vanished the pettiness that so often causes offence in life, the many misunderstandings that so often separate persons of different temperament, who, if they understood one another properly, would be tied with indissoluble bonds. When it all, seen thus in perspective, presented only the larger, bolder outlines and I didn’t lose myself in detail as one so often does, but saw the whole in its totality, I gained the strength to grasp things differently, to admit how often I myself had made mistakes, and to forgive the mistakes of others. – As I stood there, without depression and despondency making me see myself as an enclitic of those by whom I am usually surrounded, or without pride making me the formative principle in a small circle – as I stood there alone and forsaken and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, while the sure flight of the birds reminded me on the other hand of Christ’s words, ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will’, I felt at once how great and yet how insignificant I am. Those two great forces, pride and humility, amicably combined. Fortunate the man for whom this is possible every moment of his life, in whose breast these two factors have not merely settled out of court but have reached out their hands to each other and celebrated a wedding – a marriage neither of convenience nor of social unequals, but a truly quiet wedding performed in the innermost recesses of a person’s heart, in the holy of holies, where few witnesses are present but everything happens before the eyes solely of Him who alone attended that first wedding in the Garden of Eden and who blessed the pair – a marriage that will not be barren but will have blessed fruits visible in the world to the eye of the experienced observer. For these fruits are like cryptogamia28 in the plant world; they escape the attention of the masses and only a solitary researcher discovers them and rejoices in his find. His life will flow on calmly and quietly, and he will drain neither the intoxicating bowl of pride nor the bitter chalice of despair. He has found what that great philosopher – who by his calculations was able to destroy the enemy’s instruments of assault – desired but did not find: that Archimedean point from which he could lift the whole world, that point which precisely for that reason must lie outside the world, that point outside the confines of time and space.

From this spot I have seen the sea ruffled by a soft breeze, seen it play with the pebbles; from here I have seen its surface transformed into a massive snowstorm and heard the bass voice of the gale begin to sing falsetto; here it is as though I had seen the world’s emergence and destruction – a sight that truly enjoins silence. But to what purpose that word which is so often profaned? How often do we not encounter those sentimental blondes who, like nymphs in white gowns, watch such things with eyes prepared, in order then to blurt out in ‘silent admiration’? How different from the wholesome, exuberant, unaffected girl who watches such things with innocence in her eye and upon her brow. And she remains silent. But like the Virgin Mary of old, she hides it deep in her heart.

To learn true humility (I am using this expression to refer to the state of mind under discussion), it is well for a person to withdraw from the turmoil of the world (we see also that Christ withdraws when the people wanted to proclaim him king, as well as when he had to walk the thorny path), for in life either the depressing or the elevating impression is too dominant for the true equilibrium to come about. Here, of course, individuality is most decisive, for just as almost every philosopher believes he has found the truth and almost every poet believes he has reached Mount Parnassus, so we find on the other hand many people who link their existence entirely to another, as the parasite to a plant, live in him, die in him (for example the Frenchman in relation to Napoleon). But in the midst of nature where a person, free from life’s often suffocating air, breathes more freely, here the soul opens willingly to every noble impression. Here a human being steps forth as nature’s master, but he also feels that in nature something higher is manifested, something he must bow down before. He feels a need to surrender to this power that rules it all. (Naturally I will not speak of those who see nothing higher in nature than mass – people who really think of the sky as a cheese-cover and men as maggots living inside.) Here he feels himself at once great and small, and without going so far as the Fichtean remark (in his Die Bestimmung des Menschen) about a grain of sand constituting the world, a statement very close to madness.

35 I A 68

Copenhagen, 1 June 183529

You know with what great excitement I listened to you at the time, how enthusiastic I was about your description of your stay in Brazil, and again, not so much in the mass of detailed observations you made […] as in your first impressions of those natural wonders, your paradisaical happiness and joy. Such things must always appeal in that way to any man of warmth and feeling, even if he believes he finds his contentment, his influence, in an entirely different sphere, and be especially appealing to the young who as yet only dream of their destiny. […]

First of all […] a person must stand on the soil to which he really belongs, but that is not always so easy to find. There are, in this respect, fortunate temperaments so decisively inclined in a particular direction that they faithfully follow the path once assigned to them, without being deterred for a moment by the thought that perhaps they should really be taking another. There are others who let themselves be so completely directed by their surroundings that they never become clear about what they are really after. Just as the former has its internal, so has the latter its external categorical imperative. But how few there are in the former class, and to the latter I do not wish to belong. The number of those is greater who get to try out in life what this Hegelian dialectic really means. […] Especially important is it for the person who in this way becomes clear about his destiny, not only because of the peace of mind that follows upon the preceding storm, but also because one has life in an entirely different sense from before. It is this Faustian element, which to an extent asserts itself in any intellectual development, that has always made me think that the idea of Faust should be accorded world significance. Just as our forefathers had a goddess of longing, so, in my opinion, is Faust doubt personified. […]

Naturally every man wants to be active in the world according to his aptitudes, but that again means in a definite direction, namely that best suited to his individuality. But what direction is that? Here I stand before a big question mark. Here I stand like Hercules, but not at the dividing of the path – no, here there are far more roads to take and thus it is much more difficult to choose the right one. It is perhaps the misfortune of my life that I am interested in far too much and not decisively in any one thing; all my interests are not subordinated to one but stand on an equal footing.

I will try to state how matters look to me.

1. The natural sciences. If I look first at this whole direction […] along this road, as on any other (though mainly this one), I have of course seen examples of people who have made a name for themselves in the literature by their enormous industry in collecting. […] These men are then satisfied with their details. […] In so far as there is a kind of unconscious life in such a man’s knowledge, the sciences can be said to call for his life; in so far as that is not the case, his activity is like that of the man who contributes to the upkeep of the earth by the decomposition of his dead body. This is not, of course, true in other cases, with the kind of researchers who through their speculation have found, or tried to find, that Archimedean point which is nowhere in the world and from there have surveyed the whole and seen the details in their proper light. […] For me, it is the life by virtue of reason and freedom that has interested me most, and it has always been my desire to clarify and solve the riddle of life. The forty years in the wilderness before I reached the promised land of the sciences strike me as too costly, all the more since I believe that nature is also to be observed from a point of view that does not require insight into the secrets of science. […]

2. Theology. This seems what I have got a best hold on. But here too there are great difficulties. Here there are such great contradictions in Christianity itself that an open view is hindered, to say the least. As you know, I grew up so to speak in orthodoxy, but as soon as I began to think for myself the huge colossus gradually began to totter. I call it a huge colossus advisedly, for taken as a whole it actually possesses great consistency and through many centuries the separate parts have fused together so tightly that it is difficult to pick a quarrel with it. Now I could very well accept it on particular points, but then these would be like the seedlings often found in rock fissures. On the other hand, I could probably also see the unevennesses in many separate points, but the main foundation I was obliged to leave in dubio for a time. The moment that changed, the whole thing naturally looked different, and thus my attention was drawn to another phenomenon: rationalism, which on the whole makes a rather mediocre showing. As long as reason consistently keeps to itself and, by giving an account of the relation between God and the world, comes again to look at man in his deepest and most fervent relation to God and in this respect from its own viewpoint, too, considers Christianity to be what for many centuries has satisfied man’s deepest needs, there is nothing to object to in it; but then neither is it rationalism any more, for rationalism then gets its special colouring from Christianity and thus stands in a completely different sphere, and does not construct a system but a Noah’s Ark (to use an expression employed by Professor Heiberg on another occasion).30 […]

As far as small irritations are concerned, I will remark only that I am embarked on studies for the theological examination, a pursuit which does not interest me in the least and which therefore is not going specially well. I have always preferred free, perhaps therefore also rather indefinite, studies to the offerings at private dining clubs where one knows beforehand who the guests will be and what food will be served each day of the week. Since it is, however, a requirement, and one hardly has permission to enter into the scholarly pastures without being branded, and I consider it advantageous in view of my present state of mind, plus the fact that I know that by doing this I can make my father very happy (he thinks that the real land of Canaan lies on the other side of the theological diploma, but also, like Moses of old, ascends Mount Tabor and declares that I will never get in – yet I hope that this time the prediction will not be fulfilled), so I had better knuckle down. How lucky you are to have found in Brazil an enormous field for your investigation, where every step brings some new, remarkable phenomenon, where the screaming of the rest of the learned Republic does not disturb your peace. To me the scholarly world of theology is like Strandveien³¹ on Sunday afternoon in the Dyrehaug³² season – they rush past one another, yell and shout, laugh and make fools of one another, drive their horses to death, tip over and are run over, and when they finally reach Bakken, covered in dust and out of breath – yes, they look at one another – and go home.

As for your own return, it would be childish of me to hasten it, just as childish as Achilles’ mother trying to hide him in order to avoid the quick, honourable death – Best wishes!

1 June 1835 I A 72

Gilleleje, 1 August 1835

The way I have tried to show it in the preceding pages is how these matters actually appeared to me. But when I try now to come to an understanding with myself about my life, things look different. Just as a child takes time to learn to distinguish itself from objects and for quite a while so little distinguishes itself from its surroundings that, keeping the stress on the passive side, it says things like ‘me hit the horse’, so too the same phenomenon repeats itself in a higher spiritual sphere. Therefore I thought I might gain more peace of mind by taking up a new line of study, directing my energies towards some other goal. I might even have managed for a while in that way to banish a certain restlessness, though no doubt it would have returned with greater effect like a fever after the relief of a cool drink. What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And what use here would it be if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers’ systems and were able to call them all to account on request, point out inconsistencies in every single circle? And what use here would it be to be able to work out a theory of the state, and put all the pieces from so many places into one whole, construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see? What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and for my life? And the better I became at it and the more I saw others appropriate the creatures of my mind, the more distressing my situation would become, rather like that of parents who in their poverty have to send their children out into the world and turn them over to the care of others. What use would it be if truth were to stand there before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not, and inducing an anxious shudder rather than trusting devotion? Certainly I won’t deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge, and that one can also be influenced by it, but then it must be taken up alive in me, and this is what I now see as the main point. It is this my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. That is what I lack, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture and rented rooms but still hasn’t found the beloved with whom to share life’s ups and downs. But to find that idea, or more properly to find myself, it is no use my plunging still further into the world. And that is exactly what I did before, which is why I had thought it would be a good idea to throw myself into jurisprudence, to be able to sharpen my mind on life’s many complications. Here a whole mass of details offered itself for me to lose myself in; from the given facts I could perhaps fashion a totality, an organism of criminal life, pursue it in all its darker sides (here, too, a certain community spirit is much in evidence). That’s also what made me want to become an actor, so that by taking on another’s role I could acquire a sort of surrogate for my own life and in this exchanging of externals find some form of diversion. That’s what I lacked for leading a completely human life and not just a life of knowledge, to avoid basing my mind’s development on – yes, on something that people call objective – something which at any rate isn’t my own, and base it instead on something which is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence,^* through which I am as it were grown into the divine and cling fast to it even though the whole world falls apart. This, you see, is what I need, and this is what I strive for. So it is with joy and inner invigoration that I contemplate the great men who have found that precious stone for which they sell everything, even their lives,^* whether I see them intervening forcefully in life, with firm step and following unwaveringly their chosen paths, or run into them off the beaten track, self-absorbed and working for their lofty goals. I even look with respect upon those false paths that also lie there so close by. It is this inward action of man, this God-side of man, that matters, not a mass of information. That will no doubt follow, but then not in the guise of accidental accumulations or a succession of details side by side without any system, without a focal point upon which all radii converge. This focal point is something I too have looked for. Vainly I have sought an anchorage, not just in the depths of knowledge, but in the bottomless sea of pleasure. I have felt the well-nigh irresistible power with which one pleasure holds out its hand to another; I have felt that inauthentic kind of enthusiasm which it is capable of producing. I have also felt the tedium, the laceration, which ensues. I have tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and have relished them time and again. But this joy was only in the moment of cognition and left no deeper mark upon me. It seems to me that I have not drunk from the cup of wisdom but have fallen into it. I have tried to find that principle for my life through resignation, by supposing that, since everything went according to inscrutable laws, it could not be otherwise, by blunting my ambition and the feelers of my vanity. Because I was unable to make everything suit my ability, I withdrew with a consciousness of my own competence, rather as a worn-out clergyman resigns with his pension. What did I find? Not my ‘I’, for that is what I was trying in that way to find (I imagined, if I may so put it, my soul shut up in a box with a spring lock in front, which the outside surroundings would release by pressing the spring). – So the first thing to be resolved was this search for and discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. A person would no more want to decide the externals first and the fundamentals afterwards than a heavenly body about to form itself would decide first of all about its surface, about which bodies it should turn its light side to and to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces bring it into being and letting the rest develop by itself. One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the course forward from the path he is to take, does his life acquire repose and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, fateful travelling companion – that life’s irony^* which appears in the sphere of knowledge and bids true knowing begin with a not-knowing (Socrates),^† just as God created the world from nothing. But it is especially at home in the navigable waters of morality, for those who have yet to enter the tradewinds of virtue. Here it tosses a person about in the most terrible way, letting him feel happy and content one moment in his resolve to go ahead down the right path, only to hurl him into the abyss of despair the next. Often it lulls a person to sleep with the thought, ‘That’s just the way it is’, only to waken him on a sudden to a rigorous interrogation. Often it seems to let a veil of oblivion fall over the past, only to allow every single trifle to come vividly to light once more. When he struggles along the right path, rejoicing in having overcome the power of temptation, perhaps almost simultaneously, hard upon the most perfect victory, there comes some seemingly insignificant outer circumstance which thrusts him down, like Sisyphus from the top of the hill. Often when the person has focused his energy on something, some little outer circumstance crops up and destroys it all. (As, I would say, someone weary of life and about to throw himself into the Thames is stayed at the crucial moment by the sting of a mosquito.) Often, as with the consumptive, a person feels at his very best when things are at their very worst. In vain he tries to resist, he lacks the strength and it avails him nothing that he has endured the same thing many times before; the kind of practice one acquires in that way is not to the point here. No more than a person well enough practised in swimming can keep afloat in a storm unless he is deeply convinced, and has experience of the fact, that he is indeed lighter than water, can a person who lacks this inner point of orientation keep himself afloat in the storms of life. – Only when someone has understood himself in this way is he in a position to maintain an independent existence and so escape giving up his own I. How often we see (at a time when in our panegyrics we extol that Greek historian for knowing how to adopt a foreign style so delusively like the original author’s, rather than think he should be censured, seeing that the first prize for an author is always for having his own style – that is, with a form of expression and presentation which bears the mark of his own individuality) – how often we see people who either from spiritual laziness live on the crumbs that fall from other people’s tables, or for more egotistical reasons try to identify themselves with others until they resemble the liar who, through frequent repetition of his stories, ends up believing them himself. Notwithstanding my still being very far from this inward self-understanding, I have tried with profound respect for its significance to fence my individuality about and have worshipped the unknown God. I have tried with an untimely anxiety to avoid coming into too close contact with those things whose attraction might exert too much power over me. I have tried to appropriate much from them, studied their individual characters and significance in human life, but at the same time I have taken care, like the gnat, not to come too close to the flame. In association with the ordinary run of men I have had but little to win or to lose. In part, their whole activity – so-called practical life^* – has not interested me much; in part, I was alienated from them even further by the coolness and indifference they showed towards the spiritual and deeper stirrings in man. My companions have with few exceptions exerted no marked influence upon me. A life that has not arrived at an understanding with itself must necessarily present an uneven surface to the world; all they have had to go on are single facts and their apparent disharmony, for they were not sufficiently interested in me to try to resolve this into a higher harmony or see the necessity in it all. Their judgement upon me was therefore always one-sided, and I have vacillated between putting too much and too little weight on their pronouncements. Their influence and the potential deviations resulting from it in the compass of my life are also things I now shun. So I am standing once more at the point where I must begin in another way. I shall now try to look calmly at myself and begin to act inwardly; for only in this way will I be able, as the child in its first consciously undertaken act refers to itself as ‘I’, to call myself ‘I’ in a profounder sense.

But it calls for endurance, and one cannot harvest straightaway what one has sown. I will bear in mind that philosopher’s method, of having his disciples keep silent for three years;34 then it should come. Just as one does not begin a feast with the rising of the sun but with its setting, so also in the spiritual world one must first work ahead for a time before the sun can really shine for us and rise in all its glory. For although it is said that God lets his sun rise upon both the good and the evil, and lets the rain fall on the just and the unjust,³⁵ that isn’t so in the spiritual world. So let the die be cast – I am crossing the Rubicon! This road no doubt leads me into battle, but I will not give up. I will not lament the past – why lament? I will work with vigour and not waste time on regrets like the man stuck in a bog who wanted first to calculate how far he had sunk without realizing that in the time spent on that he was sinking still deeper. I will hurry along the path I have found and shout to everyone I meet not to look back as Lot’s wife did but remember that it is uphill that we are struggling.

1 August 35 I A 75

[In the margin of the above] This also explains a not uncommon phenomenon, a certain covetousness with ideas. Precisely because life is not healthy but knowledge too predominant, the ideas are not understood as the natural flowerings on the tree of life,36 and are not adhered to as such and as those alone which acquire their meaning as such – but as individual glimpses of light, as though such a mass of as it were external ideas (sit venia verbo³⁷ – aphoristically) made life richer. They forget that ideas are like Thor’s hammer, which returns to the place from which it was thrown even if in a changed guise.

35 I A 76

[Addition to marginal note above] A similar phenomenon is the mistaken view people have of knowledge and its results, talking of the objective results and forgetting that the genuine philosopher is in the highest degree sub-object-ive. I need only mention Fichte.³⁸ Wit is treated in the same way; people do not look on it as the Minerva springing of necessity from the author’s whole individuality and environment, as something therefore in a sense lyrical, but as flowers one can pluck and keep for one’s own use. (The forget-me-not has its place in the field, hidden and humble, but in a garden becomes uncomely.)

35 I A 77

[Addition to above] Hence also the blushing which tends to accompany a certain type of witticism, suggesting that it came forth naturally, new-born.

20 September 36 I A 78

Adversity doesn’t just knit people together but elicits also that beautiful inner community, as the frost forms patterns on the windowpane which the warmth of the sun then erases.

14 September 35 I A 85

It is also curious that Germany has its Faust, Italy and Spain their Don Juan, the Jews (??) the Wandering Jew, Denmark and North Germany Eulenspiegel, etc.

1 October 35 I C 61

The critical period39 is related to the present period as a goldmine to the bank which mints the nuggets and puts them into circulation.

7 October 35 I A 87

The legend of the Wandering Jew is fully told in Ein Volksbüchlein, Munich, 1835.

(The Student Association has it.)

This legend, which has an altogether Christian flavour, separates out that ascetic-religious aspect, just as in Faust.

13 October 35 I C 62

Christianity or being a Christian is like every radical cure; one puts it off as long as possible.

9 October 35 I A 89

So, is everything reverie and illusion? – Is the inspiration of the natural philosophers and the ecstasy of a Novalis nothing but the soul-filled exhalations of opium? – Is it matter that I grasp, where I thought to encounter the ideal in its most beautiful and purest forms?

11 October 35 I A 91

Protestantism and the view of modern politics evince a curious coherence: they fight for the same thing, the sovereignty of the people. That is why it is also interesting to observe the genuine royalists approaching Catholicism – genuine, that is, to the extent that they do not wish to have one view on one matter and an essentially different view on another, and where one individual must justify both and on the same principles. […]

13 October 35 I A 93

Philosophy and Christianity can never be united,^* for if I’m to hold fast to what is one of the most essential features of Christianity, namely redemption, then of course for it really to amount to anything it must extend to the whole man. Or am I meant to consider his moral powers defective but his cognition unimpaired? Certainly I can conceive of such a philosophy after Christianity, or after a person has become a Christian, but then it would be a Christian philosophy. The relation would be one not of philosophy to Christianity but of Christianity to Christian knowledge, or, if you absolutely must, to Christian philosophy – unless one is willing to hold that prior to or within Christianity philosophy has to conclude that the riddle of life cannot be solved. For philosophy as an accounting-within-itself of the relation between God and the world would negate itself were it to conclude that it was unable to explain that relation, and then philosophy, at the peak of its fulfilment, would be accomplice to its own total downfall, that is, as the evidence of its inability to answer to its own definition. Yes, philosophy from this point of view would not even serve as a transition to Christianity, for necessarily it would have to abide by this negative conclusion and the whole idea of a redemptive need would have to enter man from quite another side; that is, first of all it would have to be felt and then be recognized. And even if philosophy’s attention were drawn to a large number of people who maintained a lively conviction of their need for redemption, actual redemption, it might very well apply itself to this idea – (though it might also find that difficult, since before the trial Christianity requires one to live within redemption but then requires also a consciousness of redemption, and if the philosopher kept hold of that in the moment of consideration he would give up his philosophy and attach himself to the consciousness, and then he would lack the substrate for his reflection and could at most look back on it as something past, whose true reality he would at that moment have to deny, that is, as a philosopher)^* – and try to understand these people’s conviction, yet for the same reason philosophy would still not acknowledge the necessity of deliverance. Ultimately it is here the yawning chasm lies: Christianity stipulates the defectiveness of human cognition due to sin, which is then rectified in Christianity. The philosopher tries qua man to account for matters of God and the world. The outcome can readily be acknowledged as limited inasmuch as man is a limited being, but also as the most man is capable of qua man. Certainly, the philosopher can acquire the concept of man’s sin, but it doesn’t follow that he knows that man is in need of redemption, least of all a redemption which – corresponding to the ordinary creature’s sinfulness – must be passed on to God, rather than a relative redemption (i.e. one that redeems itself). Yes, that’s just it, he would call on man to forget the past because in the face of the forcefulness of his activity there is no time for such a thing.

17 October 35 I A 94

For all his way of life and faith, the Christian may still easily prove to be someone who has tricked himself into a certain idea. Before he succeeds […] in coming to his Christian conviction, there is many a conflict, many a mental pain in the face of doubt. When he has finally reached it, temptation faces him, that is to say, reason once more presses its claims before going under altogether. But then these objections and questions are ones which the Christian, before he meets them, already knows stem from the devil, so the whole trick is to adopt the method recommended earlier by Ulysses with the sirens: put wax in your ears. Coming as they do from the devil, you must have no truck with them since you take it that his objections have already been dealt with, just as nowadays you assume yourself finished with an opponent once you have attacked his morals. Therefore I take all talk of the devil to be a huge Christian subterfuge. – The reason why these doubts can come up a second time (for what now makes its second appearance under the name of temptation is what from the earlier standpoint we called doubt) is that they were not rejected on the first occasion through a debate but by some other force, or shoot, pushing them aside. It is not because they have been contested that these temptations do not persist throughout the Christian’s life, since Christians, as we saw, would have no truck with them. But you can dull yourself to certain things, you can become spiritually deaf in one ear so that you cannot hear your name being called. Then finally the Christian stands there ready, he points proudly towards his final hour, and he speaks with a certain presumption of the peace with which he wants to face death. But what wonder? If a person has spent all his life familiarizing himself with a definite idea, what wonder if the idea appears to him in the way those with weak vision see everywhere sparkling lights before their eyes? What wonder if this sparkle or speck disturbs his vision of what really lies before him? It takes on the appearance of a happy madness. Certainly one may point to the many brilliant and profound minds who have been Christians, but first I would reserve for myself a little heresy concerning these most distinguished names; and second, we have all seen people who have demonstrated matchless acumen within an idée fixe. For what strikes me as among Don Quixote’s most excellent traits is the ease with which, say, when he sees that he has mistaken windmills for giants, he discovers that it must have been the evil demon that is always on his tail. I wonder if he ever doubted his knightly destiny. Whether he lacked peace and contentment. – Yet that is what the Christians mainly appeal to, and insist that we first be Christians before we judge them.

19 October 35 I A 95

On looking at a fair number of individual samples of the Christian life, what strikes me is that, instead of bestowing strength on them – yes, that in contrast to the pagan, Christianity deprives such people of their manhood and they are like the gelding in relation to the stallion.

35 I A 96

Christianity made an impressive figure when it strode vigorously upon the world and said what it meant. But from that moment on, when either it tried to stake out boundaries with a pope or wanted to hit people over the head with the Bible, or now most recently with the Apostles’ Creed, it is like an old man who thinks he has lived long enough and wants to make an end of himself. That of course is why it occurs to some of its illegitimate children (the rationalists) to put it in custody as incompetent, whereas its true children imagine that, to the world’s amazement, it will rise again at the critical moment in full vigour, like Sophocles – the voice is no doubt Jacob’s but the hands Esau’s.

35 I A 97

I have tried now to show why Christianity and philosophy cannot be combined. To prove the rightness of their separation I have taken account of how Christianity – or rather, the Christian life – must appear from the standpoint of reason. In further confirmation I shall now sketch how man as such outside Christianity must look to the Christian. Here it will suffice to recall how the Christians regarded the pagans, looked on their gods as the work of the devil and their virtues as glittering vices, how one of their coryphaei40 declares man before Christ to be a block of wood and stone, to recall how they did not link the preaching of their gospel to man as such, how they always began with ‘Repent ye’, and how they themselves declared their gospel to be tomfoolery to the pagans and an offence to the Jews. And in case anyone thinks it was only through exaggerating that I managed to present them in such sharp contrast, and that one should also pay attention to the countless nuances to be found here, I shall take a little look just in case there really are any such. And why is it that so many say they are conscious of Christian impulses but neither are nor pretend to be Christians?

Probably it is because Christianity is a radical cure which one shrinks from, even without these people having to envisage such external circumstances as led many early Christians to postpone the decisive step to the last moment – they no doubt lack the strength to make the despairing leap. Add to that the strange suffocating atmosphere one encounters in Christianity, which exposes everyone to a very dangerous climatic fever (of which above – spiritual trials [i.e. I A 95]) before becoming acclimatized. If we look first at life here on earth, they come up with the explanation that all is sinful, nature as well as man; they talk of the broad path in contrast to the narrow one. If we look to the other world, there – so the Christians teach – is where we first find the knot untied (Act Five). And far from having had the grandiose imagination which allowed the northerner to portray Loki bound to a rock with poison dripping down on him yet still allowing his wife to be placed by his side, the Christians knew on the contrary how to deprive the luckless person of every relief – not a drop of water, even, to relieve his burning tongue. Practically wherever the Christian is occupied with the future it is punishment, devastation, ruin, eternal torment, and suffering that hover before his eyes; and just as in this respect the Christian’s imagination is fertile and wayward, so when it comes to describing the bliss of the faithful and the chosen it is correspondingly spare. Bliss is portrayed as a beatific gazing with lacklustre, staring eyes, and large fixed pupils, or a swimming, milky look that prohibits any clear vision. There is no talk of a vigorous life of the spirit, of seeing God face to face, of full comprehension in contrast to our view here on earth, in a glass and a dark discourse – this has not occupied them much. To me it looks like the way in which love is treated in a certain kind of romantic novel: after a prolonged struggle with dragons and wild beasts the lover finally manages to fall into his girl’s arms, and then the curtain falls on a marriage as prosaic as all the others, instead of a new growth in love, an intimate, mutual mirroring in each other which should surely now awaken. A conception I have always found far more salutary is to envisage, gathered together in one place, all the world’s great, especially gifted men, all those who have put a hand to the wheel of human development. The thought of such a college (in the profoundest sense) of the human race has always inspired me, a sort of scholarly republic where – in an eternal struggle between the opposites – we would grow every instant in knowledge, where the often hidden and little-known causes and effects of the past are unveiled in their full light. The Christians, however, have been afraid of granting these great men admission to their fellowship in case it should become too mixed, so that one single solitary chord can always be struck and the Christians sit thus like a Chinese council and rejoice at having erected that high, insurmountable wall against – whom? – the barbarians. And why do I say all this? Not to find fault with the Christians but to demonstrate the opposition admitted de facto within the Christian life, to caution everyone whose breast has not yet been tightly laced in this kind of spiritual corset against imprudently entering upon any such thing, to protect him against such narrow-chested, asthmatic conceptions. Certainly, it must be hard to live in a land where the sun never shines on the horizon; but neither is it all that pleasurable to live in a place where the sun stands so perpendicularly over the crowns of our heads that it allows neither us nor anything around us to cast a shadow.

35 I A 99

The real delight in Lemming’s41 playing (he is a Danish musician, I heard him at the Student Union) was that he stroked the guitar. These vibrations became almost visible, just as waves, for instance, become almost audible when the moon shines on the surface of the sea.

35 I A 103

It would have pleased me greatly had Goethe never continued Faust; I would have called it a wonder-work. But human frailty has got the better of him. It requires some strength to see the hero in a piece lose in his struggle, in this case despair over his doubt. But that is just what made Faust great. And the conversion is precisely what brings him down to the more everyday. His death is the consummate harmony in the work, and we may indeed sit by his grave and weep, but it would never occur to us to lift the curtain which with death made him invisible to our eyes.

1 November 35 I A 104

There are authors who, like those beggars who try to arouse sympathy by exposing the defects and deformities of their bodies, strive to attract attention by revealing the lacerated states of their hearts.

1 November 35 I A 105

There are critics who, with absolutely no eye for the individual, try to look at everything from a general point of view, and who therefore in order to be as general as possible ascend as high as they can until in fact all they see is a wide horizon, just because they have placed themselves too high.

2 November 35 I A 106

Is the Church justified in writing a Bible at the actual moment? Attention has so long been drawn to the great advantage enjoyed by the apostles over every other Christian. And certainly, someone who stands closest to the source receives the strongest and most immediate impression. But does it follow that it was the purest impression? I must needs draw attention here to the very crucial circumstance that now, after the course of 1,800 years, Christianity has saturated all of life, so that everything in the Christian Church is essentially permeated by Christianity (Christian philosophy, Christian aesthetics, Christian history), and then to the fact that it might possibly be easier now to discover what is essentially Christian. One must not study the plant in the bud but in the bloom. […]

3 November 35 I A 108

We often dazzle ourselves by adopting as our own many an idea and observation which either leaps vividly to mind from a time when we have read it, or else is present in the total consciousness of the age – yes, even as I write this observation now – perhaps this too is the result of the experience of the age.

13 November 35 I A 109

It’s also interesting that Faust (who, as the more mediate, it might be more proper to make into the third point of view) embodies both Don Juan and the Wandering Jew (despair). –

Nor should it be forgotten that Don Juan has to be grasped lyrically (therefore with music); the Wandering Jew epically, and Faust dramatically.

December 35 I C 58

What is really important in speculative reasoning is the ability to see the particular within the whole. Just as most people never actually savour a tragedy – for them it falls apart into mere monologues, and an opera into arias, etc. – so also in the physical world; for example, if I walked down a road crossed by two other roads parallel to each other with some ground between them, most people would only see the road, the strip of ground, and then the road. They would be incapable of seeing the whole like a piece of cloth with various stripes on it.

7 January 36 I A 111

The same difficulty that appears in the cognitive sphere with respect to comprehending the mass of empirical data arises also in, for instance, the sphere of emotions. If, for example, the occasion of a death caused a person to recall that in Europe 100,000 people die every day, his grief would seem just ludicrous to him. Hence the need to maintain national peculiarity in cognition!

15 January 36 I A 112

Different ways of grasping life’s dialectic, e.g. in the legends and stories of the Middle Ages in struggles against wild animals and monsters; in China with an examination; in the Church with doubt. (In Greece by travels, Pythagoras, Homer.)

January 36 I A 113

It is indeed often rather sad and depressing if one wants to produce an effect in the world by talking, and yet sees in the end that one has had no effect and the person in question remains set intransigently in his view: but there is also on the other hand something great in the fact that the other person, and thus always every individual, is a world unto himself, has his holy of holies into which no alien hand can reach.

January 36 I A 114

Adversity binds people together and brings beauty and harmony into life’s relationships, just as the winter cold’s imagination conjures flowers on the windowpane which disappear with the warmth.

January 36 I A 115

It’s rather strange with superstition – you would expect a person, once he has seen his morbid dreams fail of fulfilment, to give them up in the future; but on the contrary, the dreams become stronger, just as your desire to gamble increases once you have lost in the lottery.

January 36 I A 116

Sentimentality is to true, genuine feeling as the sparrow to the swallow. The sparrow lets the swallow build its nest and get everything ready and then lays its young there. (Incidentally, I don’t know if that’s quite true of sparrows and swallows, but I do know there are pairs of bird species related in this way.)

January 36 I A 117

It has often struck me when reading a good poem or some other work of genius that it was a good thing after all that I myself was not its author, for then I would not be allowed to vent my joy without fear of being accused of vanity.

January 36 I A 118

People understand me so little that they fail even to understand my complaints that they do not understand me.

February 36 I A 123

Life’s irony must of necessity be most at home in the child, in the age of imagination. Which is why it is so striking in the Middle Ages, why it is present in the Romantic school. Manhood, being more immersed in the world, has not so very much of it.

February 36 I A 125

One could construe the life of man as a great discourse in which the various people represent different parts of speech (the same might apply to states). How many people are just adjectives, interjections, conjunctions, adverbs? How few are substantives, active verbs, how many are copulas?

Human relations are like the irregular verbs in a number of languages where nearly all the verbs are irregular.

March 36 I A 126

The classical is a piece of division of the ideal and the real which works out. The romantic always leaves a fraction.

March 36 I A 135

Ingebjorg’s is a genuinely romantic situation. Sitting on the shore her eyes follow Frithiof’s departing sail.42 Though here too the romantic element would disappear if we imagined her dwelling more on the thought of her loss than on Frithiof’s journey and his undertaking.

March 36 I A 136

Were I to state in a few words what I really consider masterly in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, I would say it is the consummate guidance pervading the whole, the entire Fichtean moral world-order, developed in even more doctrinaire fashion in the novel and present throughout the work, which gradually leads Wilhelm to the point postulated, if I may so put it, by the theory, so that by the end of the novel the world-view the poet has invoked, but which previously existed outside Wilhelm, is now vitally taken up within him; hence the total sense of completeness that this novel perhaps more than any other imparts. Really it is the whole world grasped in a mirror, a true microcosm.

March 36 I C 73

There are metaphysicians of a certain kind who, when unable to make further progress, like Münchausen take themselves by the scruff of the neck and thereby get something a priori.

April 36 I A 153

Humour as opposed to irony, and they could therefore just as well be united in one individual, both being contingent upon one’s not going along with the world. This not coming to terms with the world is first modified in humour by one’s not giving a damn for it, and second by one’s trying on the contrary to influence the world but being ridiculed by it for that very reason. They are the two ends of a see-saw (wave motions). The humorist feels moments when the world makes fun of him, just as the other, who in his struggle with life must often succumb, rises often above it again and smiles at it. (As when Faust does not understand the world, yet smiles at the world which does not understand him.)

April 36 I A 154

I have just come back from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me – but I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit ——— and wanted to shoot myself.

36 I A 161

But if even actual cognition is recognized as being deficient, how can abstract cognition be perfect?

36 I A 160

Damn and hell, I can abstract from everything but not from myself; I can’t even forget myself when I sleep.

36 I A 162

How true is it that I can’t laugh at my own witticisms?43

36 I A 163

The ubiquity of wit.

April 36 I A 164

Conversation with J. Jürgensen,⁴⁴ 18 April 1836

He was drunk, which you could mainly see by watching the corners of the lips. He thought that poetry was really of minor importance, an outgrowth, and he praised philosophy. He praised memory, envied me my youth, talked of the falling of leaves, of the whistling and gusting of the wind. ‘Half of life is for living, the other half for regretting, and I am fast entering the latter.’ ‘In youth one can do much wrong and put it right again.’ – ‘I have led a very agitated life, been involved in everything that matters nowadays, am on personal terms with all gifted people – just ask me about them.’

April 36 I A 166

A wandering musician was playing the minuet from Don Giovanni on some kind of reed pipe (I couldn’t see what it was since he was in another courtyard),^* a pharmacist was pounding his medicine, and the maid was scrubbing in the court, etc. and they noticed nothing, and maybe the flautist didn’t either, and I felt so good.

10 June 36 I A 169

It is dangerous to cut oneself off too much, shun social ties.

36 I A 177

Someone who goes mad every moment he realizes that the earth goes round.

36 I A 191

Grundtvig regards the Apostolic Creed as a countersign^* which Christ whispered in man’s ear and wants to hear again on Judgement Day from the last one.

6 July 36 I A 202

Shouldn’t the irony in Christianity be in the fact that it tried to encompass the whole world while containing in itself the seeds of the impossibility of its doing so? And connected with this is that other thing, the humorous aspect, its view of what it properly calls the world (the latter idea is properly part of the humorous and so in a sense the humorous stands halfway), because everything which had mattered up to then in the world, and still did, was put in relation to the supposed single truth of the Christians, so that, to the Christian, kings and princes, power and glory, philosophers and artists, foes and persecutors, etc. appeared to be nothing and to be laughable because of their opinions of their own greatness.

19 July 36 I A 207

Antiquity has no ideal to strive for, while the romantics do have one. Antiquity must disapprove of every attempt to exceed the actual since it is in the latter that perfection is to be found, or at least as much perfection as there is in the world (these must coincide, otherwise mankind would have to be advised to strive beyond the actual). It has no ideal, in morality, in intellect, or beauty. No ideal, or what amounts to the same, it has an ideal attainable here in the world. Instead of the moral ideal, people here remain satisfied with what is taken to be right for the times according to those times’ own conventions. Instead of an ideal of knowledge we have, as the highest attainment for the times, the obligatory compendium of what an age knows (as a case in question of an ideal of knowledge, I can mention the zeal of the orthodox for an eternal and unchangeable Word of God transcending all time and its vicissitudes, whatever the twists and turns. Yes, if not quite all is given him here in life, the orthodox still thinks the hereafter will come; but NB as an ideal, something which for instance the Hegelian can never believe, i.e. that in the unfolding of time a greater intelligence will come but never as an ideal, neither with regard to the past stage of knowledge, which …[)] [original incomplete]

36 I A 221

… Instead of the ideal of beauty we have national, indeed city, and class taste, and the most immaculate copy of these.

11 August 36 I A 222

It’s rather strange that after being occupied so long with the concept of the romantic I now see for the first time that the romantic becomes what Hegel calls the dialectical, the second position where

Stoicism – fatalism

Pelagianism – Augustinianism

humour – irony

etc.

belong, positions which by themselves have no real subsistence but life is a constant pendulum movement between them.

I now also realize that in transferring Hegelianism to aesthetics and thinking he has found the triad: lyric/epic/lyric-epic (dramatic), Heiberg is probably right, but that this can be carried through on a much larger scale: classical/romantic/absolute beauty, and in a way that gives meaning precisely to the Heiberg-triad. After all, classical beauty, as well as romantic and absolute beauty, has its lyrical – its epic – its dramatic aspect.

Besides, how far is it correct to begin with the lyrical? The history of poetry seems to indicate the epic as a beginning.

19 August 36 I A 225

The Hegelian cud-chewing process with three stomachs – first immediacy – then regurgitation – then down again. Maybe a succeeding master-mind could continue this with four stomachs, etc., down once more and up again. I don’t know whether the master-mind grasps what I mean.

25 August 36 I A 229

Fichte had in good measure this spider-slipperiness with which, as soon as he found the slightest foothold, he plunged down straightaway with all the certainty of the inferential form.

August 36 I A 231

In the end it’s all a question of ear. The rules of grammar end with ear – the edicts of the law end with ear – the figured bass ends with ear – the philosophical system ends with ear – which is why the next life is also represented as pure music, as a great harmony – if only my life’s dissonance may soon be resolved into that.

September 36 I A 235

Irony belongs only to the immediate (where, however, the individual does not become conscious of it as such) and to the dialectical position; while in the third position, on the other hand (that of character), the reaction to the world does not have the form of irony since resignation has now developed in the individual, which is precisely consciousness of the limitation which every effort must have in so far as it is to have its place in a world-order, because as striving it is infinite and unlimited. Irony and resignation are the opposite poles, the opposite directions of motion.

September 36 I A 239

It’s quite strange that, to my knowledge, it has occurred to no one to conjure authors from the grave and let them attend an auction of their own immortal works.

20 September 36 I A 245

The wish of those who in the French Revolution wanted to see the last king hanged with the gut of the last priest recalls Caligula’s wish that all Roman heads sat on one neck so that all could be chopped off at once.

20 September 36 I A 246

The difference I have tried to find in the ancient languages (of quantity) and the modern (of accentuation) with respect to the concept of the romantic is expressed by Steffens45 (in an entirely different context, in Caricaturen des Heiligsten (Caricatures of the Holy), I, p. 350) as follows: ‘The European languages are only sound: the letters, the syllables, the words have meaning only for the ear. The sound fixes on the innermost, liveliest, most labile existence, and above all that language which puts emphasis on expression, where the sounds, rising and falling, emphasized or repressed, cling closely and lightly to the inner meaning of every changing mood, can rightly be called a Christian^* language, and hints at the victory of love over law.’⁴⁶

28 September 36 I A 250

Philosophical knowledge is first complete (with no remainder) in the system – idea and form – therefore no absolute principle? No – it goes only with the form.

6 October 36 I A 253

It’s really curious the remarkable way in which something long past can suddenly leap into consciousness, for instance the memory of something wrong of which one was scarcely aware in the moment of action – lightning flashes which suggest a great thunderstorm. They do not step but really leap forward with an enormous power and claim on the ear. No doubt this is, by and large, how we are to understand that place in the Gospels: that people on doomsday shall give account of every idle word they have spoken.47

8 October 36 I A 254

One must be careful not to enter too early into the holy matrimony of the sciences; it does one good to stay unwed a while, even if it is also not good to end up a bachelor.

8 October 36 I A 255

For the ancients the divine was continually merging with the world, therefore no irony.

August 36 I A 256

What I call the mythologico-poetic in history is the nimbus which hovers over every genuine historical striving, not an abstraction but a transfiguration and not the prosaically actual, and every genuine historical trend will also give birth to such an ideomythology.

17 October 36 I A 264

What Schleiermacher⁴⁸ calls ‘religion’ and the Hegelian dogmaticians ‘faith’ is, after all, nothing but the first immediacy, the prerequisite for everything – the vital fluid – in an emotional-intellectual sense the atmosphere we breathe – and which therefore cannot properly be characterized with these words.

36 I A 273

It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.

36 I A 279

The petty-bourgeois mentality. Hoffmann’s Meister Floh.49 The story of the tailor who got balloon gas [Balonspiritus]. This in itself is not at all humorous, but when it is recounted that he had squeezed so much from his customers that his wife had got a new outfit, when it is related that coming home every Sunday from church he was allowed to go to the pharmacy, in short, when this commensurable finiteness in all life’s affairs is brought into relation with something so extraordinary, and when, with a scientist’s painstaking thoroughness, Hoffmann then tells first how he ascended to the ceiling and bounced down again, and finally was snatched out of a window by the breeze blowing through it – the humour emerges.

36 I A 280

The children’s crusade should be looked on as world history’s great sarcasm over the whole chivalry movement.

36 I A 281

An old saying, that the Anti-Christ would be born to a nun by a monk (was once used with regard to Luther’s marriage).

36 I A 283

Since in my view every development first comes to an end in its own parody, it will appear that politics is what is parodic in the world’s development – first genuine mythology (God’s side), next, human mythology (man’s side), and then a realization of the world’s goal within the world (as the highest), a sort of Chiliasm,⁵⁰ which however brings the individual politicians, carried away by abstract ideas, into contradiction with themselves.

20 November 36 I A 285

Judaism had developed into a parody when Christianity arrived, in the law of the Pharisees, in the prophecies with the idea of an earthly Messiah.

36 I A 287

The petty-bourgeois mentality is really an inability to raise oneself above the absolute reality of time and space, and as such is therefore able to seize upon the highest objects, for example prayers on certain occasions and with certain words. That’s what Hoffmann has always known how to bring out so tellingly.

36 I A 290

Encounter on 30 Nov., when they were doing Two Days, with an unknown but beautiful lady (she spoke German) – she was alone in the stalls with a little brother – she understood the music.

36 I A 297

How beautifully the preparatory relation of Judaism to Christianity is intimated in the legend of the Wandering Jew (cf. Ein Volksbüchlein, p. 27), which tells of his life’s end as constantly to accompany those that come from afar to visit the Holy Land.

4 December 36 I A 299

Mythology is the idea of eternity (the eternal idea), fixation (suppressed being) in the category of space and time – in that of time, for instance Chiliasm, or the doctrine of a heavenly kingdom beginning in time,^* – in that of space, for instance when an idea is comprehended in a finite personality. So just as the poetic is the subjunctive but makes no claim to be more (the poetic reality), the mythological is, on the contrary, a hypothetical principle in the indicative mood […]; mythology is precisely this conflict between them when the ideal, losing its gravity, is fixated in the earthly form.

36 I A 300

The opposite of the petty bourgeois is the Quaker mentality (in the abstract sense), where it embraces also the indeterminacy and contingency to be found in the life of many, the annihilation of any historical development whatsoever.

36 I A 301

The whole idealist development in Fichte certainly found, for example, a self, an immortality, but without fullness, like Aurora’s husband who was immortal, indeed, but lacking eternal youth ended up becoming a grasshopper.

Fichte threw the empirical ballast overboard in despair and capsized.

36 I A 302

Regardless of how little we ourselves strive towards shaping society, at working together to strive for one goal, but on the contrary keep quite egoistically to ourselves and apart, we are nevertheless always interested in lives bound together in that way (monks – thieves – robbers – the petty-bourgeois life – the monsters or parasitical plants of the religious life??? – political life in revolution – chivalry). At least the associative element manifests itself in our day in external ways, for example in fundraising (English Bible societies – associations to support the Greeks – foundations for the morally depraved).

36 I A 304

Schleiermacher as Stoicism reborn in Christianity.

36 I A 305

When the dialectical (the romantic) has lived out its world-historical time (a period I could very appropriately call the period of individuality – something which can also easily be shown historically), sociality must most decidedly come to play its role again, and ideas such as the state (for instance as the Greeks knew it, the Church in the older Catholic meaning of the word) must of necessity return enriched and rounder – that is, with all the content that the surviving distinction of individuality can give to the idea, so that the individual as such means nothing but all are as links in the chain. This is why the concept of the Church is increasingly making its claim, the concept of a fixed objective faith, etc., just as the propensity to found societies is a precursor, though up to now a bad one, of this development.

11 December 36 I A 307