1837–1839
Setting the Stage
The two following years contained three events which had a profound effect on Kierkegaard. One day in May 1837, on a visit to the house of his friend Peter Rørdam, at Frederiksberg then just outside Copenhagen, Kierkegaard met Regine. Regine Olsen (1822–1904) was a daughter of State Councillor Terkild Olsen (1784–1849) and of Regine Frederikke Malling (1778–1856) and was fourteen years old at the time. The meeting is the topic of two entries, one of them dated 8 May. Sixty-nine years later, now eighty-two, Regine could still recall the event. A friend interviewed her on the topic of Søren Kierkegaard, and the meeting is recorded as follows:
You recall having seen S. Kierkegaard the first time when you were 14–16 years old. You met him then at Widow Rørdam’s house (mother of the well-known pastor, Peter Rørdam) where you had been invited to a party for a girl of your own age […] who was visiting. Kierkegaard paid a call on the family, and the liveliness of his mind made a deep impression on you, but you kept it to yourself. You remember him talking incessantly, that his talk seemed just to ooze out of him and was extremely fascinating, though after all these years you can no longer recall the content. You think perhaps the passage in the Papirer [II A 68, p. 85 below]: ‘my God, why should this disposition awaken just now! Oh, how alone I feel!’ etc. refers to the meeting with you …1
For someone deliberately dedicated to a religious ideal, these feelings trumpeted the challenges of life. But Kierkegaard continued his theological studies, and in the school year of 1837–8 was employed as a teacher of Latin at his old school. But then, in the spring of 1838, on 13 March, Kierkegaard’s friend, mentor, and favourite teacher died. Poul Møller was a writer and philosopher, and had been professor of philosophy at the University in Christiania (now Oslo). Møller’s personality, acute powers of psychological observation, and easy style exerted a powerful influence on Kierkegaard, especially in the early pseudonymous works. The Concept of Dread contains a dedication to Møller. There is good reason to believe that at this time Kierkegaard saw in Møller a model which his own developing talents as a writer might well try to emulate. Møller’s death is noted in an entry from April in connection with a period of depression on Kierkegaard’s part, perhaps not unconnected with the death itself.
In May, however, Kierkegaard writes of an ‘indescribable joy’. This ‘full-bodied shout of the soul’ heralded a reconciliation with his father, for whose continued presence on earth he thanks God in an entry from early July. On the same day Kierkegaard re-dedicates himself to the cause of Christianity. One month later Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard died, at the age of eighty-one. In the moment of mourning Kierkegaard writes of what he has gained from his father, though later, as the strain of his destiny as a polemical outsider began to tell on him, once more deplores the fact, as he saw it, that his father had been instrumental in depriving him of an ordinary childhood. In September, almost exactly a month after his father’s death, Kierkegaard published his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living. Published against his Will by S. Kierkegaard. Written mostly prior to his father’s death, the book derives its title not from that event but from the death of Poul Møller, and the allusion strengthens the view that Kierkegaard wished to be counted Møller’s literary heir. This slim work includes an important reference to the notion of a life-view which had so obsessed Kierkegaard since his vacation at Gilleleje, but here in the context of an indictment of Hans Christian Andersen for the lack of any life-view in his novels. What, then, is a life-view?
[It] is more than a compendium or a sum of positions, maintained in its abstract impersonality; it is more than experience, which is as such always atomistic; it is in fact the transubstantiation of experience, it is an unshakeable sureness in oneself, won from all experience … If we are asked how such a view of life comes to be acquired, we answer that for him who does not allow his life to fritter away completely, but seeks as far as possible to turn its individual expressions inwards again, there must of necessity come a moment in which a strange illumination spreads over life – without his needing in even the remotest manner to understand all particulars – for the subsequent understanding of which he now has the key; there must, I say, come a moment when, as Daub observes, life is understood backwards through the idea.2
But as Kierkegaard himself later says, even if life is understood backwards, it still has to be lived forwards.3 In the entries through the autumn of 1838 and winter of 1839, we see Kierkegaard’s disenchantment with the currently debilitating forms of Christianity, to which he now felt it his task to oppose pristine Christianity, this opposition gradually taking the shape of an assault on the pernicious philosophy which in Denmark was providing a specious underpinning for these forms. To Hegelians the life that is to be lived forwards is also to be understood through ‘the idea’. We find a first mention of Johannes Climacus, the Sinai monk who wrote Scala paradisi, and whose name Kierkegaard adopted as a philosophical pseudonym. The entry (II A 335) refers to Hegel as a Climacus who thought he could board heaven by a ladder of arguments. Applied to Christianity, that typically philosophical form of hubris would be a distortion as serious as that in which Christianity simply serves complacency as a way of making life supportable.
Among these reflections on the difference between true and false Christianity, and between Christianity and philosophy, there again intrudes the image of Regine, ‘my heart’s sovereign mistress’.4 The thought of Regine adds a significant complication to the range of choices that Kierkegaard saw himself facing. Having experienced the futility of the project of recapturing lost immediacy, and with a true form of Christian dedication as the alternative, the more concrete choice of a life of solitary dedication to the Christian ideal was now offset by the thought of marriage and a normal home life.
The obvious solution would be to continue with the original intention of becoming a priest, thus combining Christian dedication with a civic responsibility that also left room for married life. But, in marked contrast to that ‘full-bodied shout of the soul’ from May 1838, the entries for the rest of 1839 betray an increasing anxiety. The nature of the uncertainties, the tensions under which Kierkegaard struggled, remain unclear but they may be surmised. Should he take his theology finals, finish his thesis and get a job? Perhaps propose to Regine and ‘realize the universal’ by becoming husband, priest, or teacher? But what then of this budding talent as writer? Being a writer takes time and concentration, and the talent has to be proved. But then again one cannot just be a writer – there must be a life-view. But what if the life-view says you should marry and get a job? What happens then to the writing?
What is indeed clear, however, is that through the death of their father, Peter and Søren, the only surviving members of the immediate family, inherited a considerable fortune. With some of it they bought the family house at the winding-up sale. Economic independence made it possible for Kierkegaard to embark on a writing career without the need to earn a living from that or anything else. Indeed he was able to live reasonably comfortably for the next ten years, covering the costs of publication of his first nineteen books, only one of which sold out. The same economic independence, of course, also made it financially possible for Kierkegaard to set up house with Regine, and the fact that the money was there was no argument against becoming a breadwinning citizen nevertheless and performing a useful function in society.
How half the pleasure is lost when the artistry of conception and execution is lacking, no matter how piquant and interesting the situation, can be seen, for instance, in Mittheilungen aus dem Tagebuche eines Artzes, translated from the English by C. Jürgens, I–III, Brunswig, 1833 …5
I C 123 n.d. 1836–7
Many arrive at a life’s result like schoolboys; they cheat their teacher by cribbing from the key in the maths book, without having done the sum themselves.
17 January 37 I A 322
The fact that Christianity has not got beyond the principle of contradiction shows precisely its romantic character. Wasn’t it just this principle that Goethe wanted to illustrate in his Faust?
22 January 37 I A 324
It’s quite remarkable that Christ lived to be exactly thirty-three years old, a number which on ordinary calculations denotes the age of a generation, so that there is something normal, too, in this, seeing that what lies beyond that number is the contingent.
22 January 37 I A 325
There must be something so blessed that it cannot be uttered in words – why otherwise were those men to whom something really great was revealed struck dumb?
At the highest stage the senses flow into one another. Just as Lemming made the tones almost visible by stroking the guitar,6 so the colours become almost audible in the moonlight on the surface of the water.
January 37 I A 327
More than anything just now people fear the total bankruptcy towards which all Europe seems to be heading and forget the far more dangerous and apparently inevitable insolvency of spirit which waits at the door: a confusion of language more dangerous by far than the Babylonian example, even than the confusion of dialects and national languages from the medieval attempt in that vein – a confusion in the very languages themselves, a rebellion, the most dangerous kind of all, of the actual words which, out of human control, crash as though despairingly into one another, and from this chaos a person snatches, as from a grab-bag, the first and best word to express his supposed thoughts. Great men try in vain to mint new concepts and put them into circulation – it is of no avail; they are used only for a moment, and then only by a few, and simply help to make things worse. For one idea seems to have become the idée fixe of the age: getting the better of one’s predecessor. If the past is to be blamed for taking a certain indolently complacent pleasure in what it had, we could well accuse the present of the same (the minuet of the past and the galop of the present). Under a strange delusion, the one person constantly cries out that he has come beyond the other, just as Copenhageners go out to Dyrehaugen with philosophical demeanours to ‘take a look’, without realizing that in doing so they themselves become objects for those others who have also gone there just to take a look. Thus we see people continually leap-frogging over each other – ‘due to the immanent negativity of the concept’, I heard a Hegelian say recently, as he took me by the hand and made to prepare for his leap. I see someone bustling hurriedly down the street and am certain that in his joy he will shout to me, ‘I’ve got beyond you!’ Unfortunately I didn’t hear who it was – for this actually happened – but I’ll leave a blank for anyone to fill as he chooses. If older critics were accused of the crabwise motion in which they looked to someone still older as a model whom they could appeal to in criticizing later writers, you could hardly make the same accusation of the present. For now, the moment the critic sits down to write, there is little likelihood of the author who is to deliver the ideal still being there; and to his amazement the publisher who is supposed to expedite the critic’s work sees, instead of this, a counter-criticism of a criticism still to be written. Most systems and life-views also date from yesterday […]. In [the] wild hunt for ideas it is still very interesting to observe that happy moment when such a system assumes imperial status. Everything is now set in motion, which usually also means making the system popular – per systema influxus physici,7 it takes hold of everyone. How Kant was treated at that time is fairly well known, so I need only refer to the endless numbers of lexicons, short compendia, popularizations, explanations for everyman, etc. And how has Hegel fared in recent years, Hegel, the one among modern philosophers whose rigorous form would surely most likely command silence? Hasn’t the logical triad been put to the most ludicrous effect? It was no surprise to me that my shoemaker found it could also be applied to the development of boots, since – as he remarked – even here the dialectic, always the first stage in life, expressed itself in the squeaking, however insignificant it may seem, and which certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of some depth psychologist, whereas the unity only comes along later – in which respect his boots far surpassed all others, which usually fell apart in the dialectic – a unity which reached its highest level in the pair of boots Carl XII wore on his famous ride; but since, as an orthodox shoemaker, he went on the principle that the immediate (feet without shoes – shoes without feet) is a pure abstraction, he took it to be the first stage in the development. As for our modern politicians! By adopting Hegel they have truly given a striking example of how to serve two masters, pairing their revolutionary exertion with a life-view which is exactly a remedy for that, a good remedy for removing part of the illusion needed for putting their fantastical exertion in a good light. And the reality of the appearance will surely not be denied when one recalls that the words ‘immediate unity’ occur just as necessarily in every scholarly treatise as a brunette and a blonde in any half-respectably equipped romantic household. […] I altogether share your8 disapproval of the way every Christian concept has become so volatilized, so completely dissolved in a mass of fog as to become unrecognizable. The concepts of faith, incarnation, tradition, inspiration, which in the Christian sphere relate to a particular historical fact, the philosophers have take it upon themselves to give a quite different and ordinary meaning to, so that faith becomes immediate consciousness, which is basically just the vitale fluidum of mental life, its atmosphere; tradition has become the sum concept of a certain worldly experience, while inspiration has become nothing more than God’s breathing the life-spirit into man; and incarnation nothing but the presence of some idea or other in one or more individuals. – And still I haven’t mentioned the concept that has not merely been volatilized like the others, but profaned: the concept of deliverance, a concept which journalism in particular has adopted with a certain partiality and now applies to everyone from the greatest champion of liberation to the baker or butcher who delivers his part of town by selling his wares a shilling cheaper than others. And what is to be done about this? No doubt the best thing would be to get the carillon of time to be silent for a while, but since that presumably is not possible we shall at least cry out to them with our banking people: ‘Economies, determined and sweeping economies.’ Outbidding one’s predecessors won’t do, of course; and instead of following the novelist who, exasperated by a girl’s blushing over her whole face not being a sign of her being a proper girl, swore that every girl in his novels would blush far down her back – instead of following his example, we would rather invoke a happier phenomenon: a return from cursing to the simple statement. – Also, we would that powerfully equipped men came forward to restore the lost power and meaning of words, just as Luther restored the concept of faith for his age. The invention so characteristic of the time is to be seen in everything: the rush-job press, even in the queer reflection the age has entered into, so that by always confining its expression to reflections it never actually manages to say anything. This peculiar discursive style has also supplanted those pithy proverbs that save so much time and talk, and has let a certain oratorical gabbling obtrude in their place, even taking over our mealtimes. Only with the introduction of these economies, together with the restoring of language’s prodigal sons, can there be hope for better times. And here it occurs to me, to touch again on your letter, that Grundtvig really does deserve credit for having tried to bring life to the old clerical vocabulary and advance his theory of the Living Word, though in this connection I cannot omit to remind you that just as we use the word ‘scrawl’ for sloppy writing, we also have a particularly good expression for clumsy talk: ‘hot air’ – and that this really has a greater influence than writing. This is something, despite Pastor Grundtvig’s claim that the written word is null and void, and also, by a strange irony of fate, despite the court judgement confirming his theories, declaring his own (written) words null and void – this I think I am still inclined to maintain.
36–7 I A 328
I will no longer talk to the world; I will try to forget that I ever did. […] The trouble is that as soon as one comes up with anything, one becomes it oneself. The other day I told you about an idea for a Faust, now I feel it was myself I was describing. I have barely to read or think of some illness before having it.
Every time I want to say something, at precisely the same time someone else says it. It’s as if I were a double thinker and my other I was always one step ahead; or while I stand and talk everyone thinks it’s someone else […] – I will run away from the world, not to the monastery – I still have my vigour – but to find myself (every other gabbler says the same), to forget myself; nor over yonder where a babbling brook picks its way through the hay. – I don’t know if that rhyme is due to some poet, but I wish an inflexible irony would force some sentimental poet or other to write it, though in such a way that something else could always be read into it. Or the echo – yes, Echo, you grand master of irony, you who parody in yourself what is highest and deepest on earth: the word that created the world, since you give only the lattice, not the filling – ah yes, Echo, avenge all that sentimental tosh that lurks in woods and meadows, in church and theatre, and which once in a while breaks loose there and altogether deafens me. In the forest I don’t hear trees telling old legends, etc. – no, to me they whisper about all the nonsense they have witnessed for so long, to me they beseech in God’s name that I chop them down and free them from these twaddling nature-worshippers. – Yes, if only all those twaddle-heads sat on one neck, like Caligula I’d know what to do. I see already you begin to fear I shall end up on the scaffold. No, you see that’s where the twaddle-head (I mean the one that embraces them all) would certainly like to have brought me, but you have forgotten that no actual harm is done to the world. Yes, Echo – you whom I once heard castigate a nature-lover when he exclaimed: ‘Hark, the solitary flutings of a nightingale in love, how beautiful!’ and you replied: ‘Fool!’ – yes, avenge, avenge – you are the man!
No, I won’t leave the world – I’ll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn’t I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Indians honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum – don’t you think I may end up there?
– Still, it’s lucky that language has a number of expressions for balderdash and nonsense. If it didn’t, I’d go mad. For what would that prove except that everything people say is gibberish? It’s lucky that language is so cultivated in this respect, since that means one can still hope to hear rational discourse occasionally.
It’s called a tragedy when the hero gives his life for an idea – madness! (So I commend the Christians for calling the days martyrs died their birthdays, for by doing so they cursed the happy conception people usually have.) – No, misunderstanding! On the contrary, I grieve when a child is born and wish, oh God, that at least it may not live to experience confirmation! I weep when I see or read Erasmus Montanus;9 he is right and gives in to the masses. Yes, that’s the trouble. When every confirmed glutton is entitled to vote, when the majority decides the matter – isn’t this giving in to the masses, to numskulls? – Yes, the giants, didn’t they too give in to the masses? Yet – and this is the only comfort left! – every now and then they terrify the Hottentots who trot over them by drawing in their breath and giving vent to a flaming sigh – not to be pitied – no, all condolences declined – but to frighten.
I want – no, I want nothing at all. Amen!
And when at twentieth hand, and much more, one comes across an idea that has sprung fresh and alive from some individual’s head – how much truth is left? At most one can say in the words of the proverb: ‘Well, at least it tastes of fowl’, as the old crone said who had made soup from a branch a crow had sat on.
36–7 I A 333
It is the path we must all take – over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.
36–7 I A 334
It is these petty annoyances that make life so exasperating. In the face of a gale I will gladly struggle on until my veins are ready to burst, but the wind that blows a speck of dust into my eye can irritate me so much that I stamp my foot.
These petty irritations – just as if someone were about to carry out some great work or deed on which his own life and many others’ depended – then a gadfly settled on his nose.
36–7 I A 335
One thought succeeds another; no sooner have I thought it and am about to write it down than there’s a new one – hold it, grasp it – madness – insanity!
36–7 I A 336
I simply can’t stand these pseudo-intellectuals. How often at a party haven’t I deliberately put myself beside some elderly spinster who lives on family gossip and with the utmost gravity listened to everything she had to offer.
36–7 I A 338
I prefer talking with old women who babble about family matters, next with lunatics – and last of all with people who are extremely sensible.
37 I A 339
SOMETHING ABOUT HAMANN10
It is most interesting in our time, when the acknowledged outcome of thought is that the thing is to live for one’s age, and that the abstract immortality one has hitherto rejoiced in was an illusion, to see that there is nevertheless something to living for a posterity and being misunderstood by one’s contemporaries. We move constantly from one of these extremes to the other. While a few stand isolated in the world […] there are an infinite number who really do just live in the age, who are so to speak the piano keys of the body politic, moved at the slightest touch, with no possibility of sustaining a definite impression […]. To live and die in the age in this way has nothing particularly encouraging to it, and yet there isn’t much left for the majority of men once they have pawned their reason for the motto: Live with your age. Certainly, that has not been the idea of the few great men who first expressed this view of life. But the tragedy is just that whenever a rational man opens his mouth, there are immediately millions ready in a trice to misunderstand him. […]
37 I A 340
Isn’t it irony in the highest degree when Hamann says somewhere that he would rather hear the truth forced against his will from the mouth of a Pharisee than from an apostle or an angel?
37 II A 2
Perhaps once the question of humanism and realism were taken up, instead of proceeding towards, for example, living languages, natural science etc. would go back through Greek to Sanskrit, since teaching is meant to allow the individual from a position outside the world to undergo the stages of life which the world itself has gone through up to now, all the way to the point where his cue comes.
37 II A 5
Every step it takes, philosophy casts a slough and into it creep the more foolish adherents.
30 January 37 II A 11
[…] There are two recommended ways of telling children stories, but there are also a multitude of false paths in between.
The first is the way unconsciously adopted by the nanny, and whoever can be included in that category. Here a whole fantasy world dawns for the child and the nannies are themselves deeply convinced the stories are true, […] which, however fantastic the content, can’t help bestowing a beneficial calm on the child. Only when the child gets a hint of the fact that the person doesn’t believe her own stories are there ill-effects – not from the content but because of the narrator’s insincerity – from the lack of confidence and suspicion that gradually develops in the child.
The second way is possible only for someone who with full transparency reproduces the life of childhood, knows what it demands, what is good for it, and from his higher standpoint offers the children a spiritual sustenance that is good for them – who knows how to be a child, whereas the nannies themselves basically are children (that children get to enjoy the benefit of both ways is a great advantage and one mustn’t take it that the holder of the second view never sees the point of the first; quite the contrary, as always in the case of incompetents who cut away the path of development, a person with a mature view of life extends them his recognition).
Here there is no long preparation. The husband returns from the hectic office, changes his socks, brings out a pipe, kisses the little woman on the cheek, and says, ‘Now, my little sweet’ (this is to accustom the child to an atmosphere of love). Then we get something you see depicted in most children’s books: an Uncle Frands* […] whose stories the children have been looking forward to all morning, little Fritz and Marie come running in and clap their hands: ‘Uncle Frands is telling stories.’ The mother places herself between the children with the smallest in her arms, and says, ‘Be good! Listen now to what your dear father has to tell.’
So much for the frame for the storytelling, our storyteller. All ordinary concern for children outside the proper lesson hours, but also within these as far as possible, should be Socratic. One must awaken an appetite in them to ask questions instead of waving aside a sensible question – which perhaps taxes the limits of Uncle Frands’s knowledge, or puts him on the spot in some other way – by saying, ‘The stupid lad, can’t he keep quiet while I’m telling the story?’, and the mother, to prevent more serious scenes, giving assurances that ‘he won’t ever do it again’. What matters is to bring the poetic to bear on their lives in every way, to exert a magical influence; when least expected suddenly to let in a glimpse and then have it vanish again; the poetic is not something to allocate certain hours and days to. In the company of such a person, children do not leap like ungainly calves with legs awry and clap their hands, because they want to hear a story. They come to such a person with an open, frank, trusting nature, confiding in him, letting him in on many small secrets too, telling him about their games, and he realizes he must enter into it, and that he should invest the games with a more serious side. He is never inconvenienced by the children, never pestered by them, they have too much regard and respect for him for that.* He knows what they have to do at school, he doesn’t go over their lessons with them but quietly asks what they are reading, acquainting himself with it not to test them, not to take up some part of it and dramatize it for them, not to give them the opportunity to be brilliant in company, but to let some glimpse of it suddenly emerge, to relate it in an individual way precisely with what they are otherwise engaged in, though always en passant, so that the child’s soul is electrified by it and he feels the omnipresence of something poetic which, though dear to him, he nevertheless dares not approach too nearly […]. In this way a constant mental mobility is nurtured in the child, a permanent attentiveness to what the child hears and sees, an attentiveness one must otherwise elicit by external means, for instance by letting the children enter a very brightly lit room from one more dimly lit where Uncle Frands sits, by boring them all day with the story of ‘how splendid it is to hear Uncle Frands tell stories’, etc.
But for all the pervading clarity, a certain sentimentality can arise from forgetting that the man is the fulfilment of childhood’s promise. In thinking particularly with very bright children that childhood promises something more, one generates an anxiety in their lives which can arise just as much in this way as from trivial tearfulness. Those continual assurances: ‘You are happy, but when you get older […] you’ll be sorry’, etc. have a damaging effect since, to the extent that they take root in the child, they introduce a singular anxiety as to how long it is possible to stay happy (and then they are already unhappy); or to the extent that this constant jeremiad fails to make any impression, it has a damaging effect just like any other talk that is not to the point.
This open-mindedness may seem to conflict with a doubtless very proper demand for rigour and clear definition. In school this is pretty well meant to be part of the child’s essential character (the other is for playtime). In childhood never to have been under the gospel but only under the law is never to be free […]. Perhaps that’s wrong but there is something noble in it, while the wider the law reaches the greater the number of small irritations sown, and nothing is better suited to produce faintheartedness. The eye possesses a power to conjure forth the sapling of the good and to crush evil – but in effect the misconceived strictness and discipline, a daughter of comfort and ease, gives one generation the opportunity to avenge itself on the next for the drubbing and abuse it has itself received, by treating its successor similarly.
But should one then not tell stories? Of course, what the child needs are mythology and good nursery stories – or else one lets the child read and then tell the stories, and one corrects them Socratically (by asking later, so that the child is not corrected under duress by the teacher but to itself seems to be correcting others – and a person who understands in general how to treat children will certainly be in no danger of letting this degenerate into self-importance); it must happen impromptu and not at a definite time and place. Children should experience early in their lives that joy is a fortunate constellation to be appreciated with gratitude, yet know also how to stop in time, and on no account should one forget the point of the story. (A ‘by the way’ which I can touch on straightaway, though it comes up again later, is this perpetual and as good as all-day-long telling of meaningless and trivial stories, giving rise to those novel-readers who daily swallow one volume after another without these leaving any distinct impression.) The storytellers I am discussing elicit a certain creativity in oneself (drawing or sketching or some other way) by telling stories in different ways so as to bring them into relation with what otherwise moves and occupies the children.
Now the question arises: What meaning does childhood really have? Is it just a stage, whose only importance lies in the fact that in some way it determines the subsequent stages? Or has it an independent value? Some have expounded the latter view to the point of assuming that childhood is basically the peak of human attainment beyond which man degenerates. The result of the former view has been that people have tried on the one hand simply to make the time of childhood go by* – and as one confines quadrupeds in the dark in order to fatten them in a way that would otherwise be impossible in a whole year, one can surely find all sorts of ways of doing that – and on the other to put this ‘tiresome time of childhood’ to use and particularly to take care of the child’s physical welfare. From this point of view the principal maxim for bringing up a child goes as follows: ‘The one who doesn’t finish his first dish gets no second.’ (How often are children embittered, especially the lives of little girls, by constantly hearing that one has no use for them – etc.)
False paths crop up by coming beyond the nanny position but not staying the whole course and stopping half-way.
First stage: those who, on coming beyond the immediate position then, instead of – as would be natural – in maturer years appropriating their childhood as something whose nature is transparent to them, are prone to ‘being a child’ (cf. the elixir of youth); these lanky scamps who are so innocent and naive, who would give much to have their beards never become so strong as to need shaving off, so they can stay downy-cheeked, bare-necked striplings always, who have so much become children again that they talk like children, acquire all the turns of phrase of the child’s language and would long ago have got us all to talk like children – a caricature which will indeed become reality once the opposite view now so widespread, that children would like to be old people, has been outlived. It is a tragi-comic sight to see these long, puerile marionettes jumping about on the floor and riding hobbyhorses with the sweet young things, and listen to their tales of ‘innocent and happy childhood’ […]. – (Cf. their confrontation with half-grown girls who want to be adult; they parody one another.)
Their tales ‘for children and childlike souls’ (poetic mouthwash). If that is a mistake one finds most often in younger people, a similar false path is to be found among the older who ‘condescend’ to children in the conviction that the life of the child is so empty, and in itself so contentless, that they would like to as it were blow some body into it. Basically, both parties must assume the emptiness of childhood, otherwise the former wouldn’t take it on themselves to offer something repellent enough to cause instant disgust in any good-natured person, or the latter take it on themselves to blow the spirit of life into childhood. Nor does one destroy the whole impression, having told a story, by ending up with, ‘But you realize of course that it was only a fairy story’ – something which has also cropped up again more recently with people who have no sense at all of the poetic and who therefore corrupt the impression of every anecdote, etc. by initiating an investigation into its factual truth.
The fantastic and one-sided direction which story-telling has taken. People discovered that it was ridiculous and harmful for the future to cram children’s imaginations with such stories, while on the contrary it was perfectly all right to tell them something just to fill time and amuse them. So then – seeing it was simply for amusement and time was not to be wasted on preparation – there came that endless story-nonsense about the dog and the cat, etc., with frightful monotony, but of which children, once pampered, constantly demand ever more versions, and which keep returning with the stereotype significantly changed (e.g. once upon a time there was a red dog and once upon another time a black one) […].
This, too, however, was found to be wrong; there were better ways of using time, even putting it to better use in the shape of a joke and a game. And from here two paths diverge: either educating them, as one calls it, morally, or conveying to them some useful knowledge. I shall dwell a little on the consequences of adopting the latter path. Here, as though by the touch of a wand, there came a scourge of – no, not textbooks, but readers and all sorts of picture-books on natural history to impart the vocabularies of modern languages to children, and Uncle Frands told of his travels in Africa and gave animals and plants names with the help of their classifications, and parents and others asked, ‘What is nose in French?’, etc., or one taught children to strum some piece on the fortepiano, and if the reason is to protect them from being embarrassed when performing, they are not to be made embarrassed either at performing. Out of this a purely atomistic knowledge developed which gave no credence to any deeper relation to children and their existence, which was not appropriated in any way in their souls, thus depriving them of any possible standard and allowing them to assume that they were great naturalists and linguists. As soon as details are used to decide things it is of course entirely accidental how many or how few count among the masters. Hence the coquetry, hence the busy torment, which forgets the one thing necessary. It is not of such atomistic knowledge that it is true that what one learns in youth one does not forget in age.
37 II A 12
What is friendship without intellectual exchange? A refuge for weak souls who cannot find breath in the ether of intelligence but only in animal exhalation? How wretchedly it drags itself along in spite of all the external expedients with which one tries to patch it up (by drinking Dus, etc.)?11 What a caricature it is, except for those who, admit straight out that friendship is nothing but mutual insurance. How disgusting to hear those insipid stereotyped sermons on friendship, on mutual understanding. Certainly friendship calls for an understanding, but not of the kind in which the one always knows what the other is going to say, no indeed, what it needs is that the one never knows what the other is going to say. If it got to that point the friendship would be over. But friendships of that kind also make such people believe that they understand everyone else too. Hence the complacency with which they say that they expected one to answer just as one did, etc., which is often untrue and based on the presumption that everyone’s conversation is just like their own, vapid, trivial, and pointless. They have no suspicion of the whole host of individual traits, etc. that make every remark interesting. It is always well to avoid such people, for in spite of all their understanding they continually misunderstand. […] In any case, as far as their conversation goes, people in their speaking tend usually with the years to become more and more like barrel-organs, in their movements (including the twitches of their facial muscles, etc.) like robots, like sea-captains who, given the opportunity to stroll along the longest and most beautiful avenue, prefer their ‘skipper quantum’.
37 II A 22
That the Faust who is meant to represent this age differs essentially from the earlier Faust […] is so evident that we have only to be reminded of the fact. But where does the difference lie? If we look at this age we find a great number of people who are praktikoi12 in the proper Greek sense, people whom Aristotle already assigns to the lowest rung of development, busy with their job of cultivating their land and what is called educating their children, i.e. to be ‘confirmed consumers’. They pursue carefree lives and even in death do something practical for the world – by decaying and fertilizing the earth. Nothing Faustian is likely to come from that quarter. On the other hand there are a great number who have either turned their heads around to investigate a vanished time or else immersed themselves in natural discoveries. Their busy-ness means that the Faustian element will not appear among these either, in so far as that can only appear when their energy is paralysed in some way or other. But now, finally, the type of people we need to observe come into view; namely, those who seek to comprehend in the totality of a vision the infinite multiplicity of nature, of life, and of history. Yet this, too, is the tragedy of it. For much is already unrolled before their eyes and more is appearing every day, but under all this multifarious knowledge there is a latent feeling of how infinitely little it is, and this is the feeling which paralyses their activity. The Faustian element appears now as despair over the inability to comprehend the whole development in an all-embracing total vision wherein every single nuance is also recognized in its full, that is, in its absolute worth.
But where lies the difference? The original Faust’s despair was more practical. He had studies, but […] the return he received for the knowledge was nothing, since it was not that question he wanted answered but the question of what he himself should do. Because of the far less developed state of the sciences at the time a simple survey would be enough to convince himself of their nothingness, but the special character of the age – active enthusiasm for an ideal – meant that the question had to be transferred to that area, life had to be expiated with knowledge. For our own time the question must retreat much further into the background since, naturally, as the world grows older, the visionary tendency must come to the fore and the question then becomes: how can the true vision enter in spite of man’s circumscribed position? What propels people to this demand for a perfect and true intuition, however, is a despair over the relativity of everything. […] Man longs for a vision which annuls all relativities and shows him the absolute worth of even the most insignificant thing, because for the true (i.e. divine) vision everything is of the same magnitude. That such a Faust does not lack for Wagners is indeed obvious. This now is where his despair lies. The way in which all of life now changes for him also shows him to be different from the first Faust, for while with his activist tendencies the latter sank into sensuality, this Faust will back out of everything, forget if he can that he ever knew anything, and watch cattle – or perhaps, out of curiosity, transport himself into another world.
19 March 37 II A 29
In this respect Christianity has a very reassuring influence, that is, by making the highest degree of relativity operative, by presenting an idea, an ideal, which is so big that all others disappear beside it (the romantic and humorous aspect of Christianity). Therefore it is always far more enjoyable to converse with a Christian, because he has a standard which is definite; he has a fullness in comparison with which the infinite differences in ability, occupation, etc. are nothing. From this comes the stance which, as long as it does not degenerate into arrogance, is so worthy of respect.
37 II A 30
The quiet, the security, one has in reading a classic, or in associating with a fully mature person, is not found in the romantic. There it’s almost like watching a man writing with his hand a-tremble. One fears his pen will any second run away from him and make some grotesque stroke. (This is dormant irony.)
37 II A 37
[In the margin of the above] This must be where the concept of irony begins to evolve. First the fantastic, grandiose ideas are gratified and reflection has not yet disturbed the simple-heartedness of this position. One then observes that this is not how things are in the world, and unable to surrender one’s lofty ideals one must also feel that the world is in some way ridiculing one (irony – romantic, what went before was not romantic but a gratification in the form of deed) (this irony is the world’s irony over the individual and differs from what the Greeks called irony, which was precisely that ironical gratification in which the single individual hovered above the world, and which began to evolve just as the idea of the state was for that reason vanishing more and more from view in Socrates. But in the romantic position, where everything is struggle, irony cannot gain access to the individual but lies outside. I believe this distinction has been too widely overlooked), and finally the third standpoint where irony is outlived.
37 II A 38
The philosophers tend to give with one hand and take away with the other. Thus, for example, Kant who, although he taught us something about the categories’ approximation to what is really true (noumena),13 took it all back by making the approximation infinite. Altogether, this use of the word ‘infinite’ plays a big part in philosophy.
37 II A 47
To the extent that Hegel was fructified by Christianity he tried to skim off the humorous element in it […] and so reconciled himself completely with the world, ending in quietism. The same is true of Goethe in Faust, and it is curious how the second part took so long coming. Part One presented no difficulty, but how to calm the storm once aroused? That was the question. Part Two therefore has a much more subjective side (we have sufficient pronouncements from Goethe on how his own experiences gave birth to this or that work of art); it is as though it was because he himself needed calming down that he makes this confession of faith.
37 II A 48
Hegel’s later perspective swallows up the previous one, not in the way one stage of life follows another, where each retains its validity, but as one honorary title [Justitsraad] swallows up another [Kammerraad].
37 II A 49
Yes, true! The fate of everything I touch is as a poem (Knaben Wunderhorn) has it:
Ein Jäger stiess wohl in sein Horn,
wohl in sein Horn,
Und Alles, was er bliest, das var
verlorn.14
37 II A 51
Faust may be seen as a parallel to Socrates, for just as the latter expresses the severing of the individual from the state, so Faust, after the abrogation of the Church, depicts the individual severed from guidance and left to itself, and this indicates his relation to the Reformation and parodies the latter by one-sidedly stressing the negative side.
37 II A 53
Faust is unable to commit suicide. As the idea transcending all its actual forms, he must complete himself in a new idea (the Wandering Jew).
37 II A 56
Philosophy is life’s dry nurse, it can look after us but not give suck.
37 II A 59
This is how I conceive the relation between satisfactio vicaria15 and man’s own expiation of his sins. It is no doubt true, on the one hand, that sins are forgiven through the death of Christ, but on the other hand a person is not snatched as if by magic out of his old condition, the ‘body of sin’ which Paul talks about (Romans 8:25). He has to go back the way he came, while the consciousness that his sins are forgiven holds him erect, gives him courage, and prevents despair – like someone who, fully aware of his sin, denounces himself and then goes undaunted to meet even a misdoer’s death because he feels that it must be, while the consciousness that the case will now go before another, more lenient judge sustains him. He walks the dangerous way (which indeed can be thorny enough even with the consciousness of the forgiveness of sin, for one so often forgets it) and will not tempt God or demand a miracle of him.
37 II A 63
O God, how easily one forgets such an intention! I have come back again to the world, to reign there yet a while after being dethroned in my own inner realm. Ah! ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’16 Also today (8 May) I have tried to forget myself, not with any noisy to-do – that substitute doesn’t help – but by going out to Rørdam’s to talk with Bolette,17 and by trying to make that devil wit of mine stay at home, that angel who with blazing sword, and as I deserve, interposes himself between me and the heart of every innocent girlish heart – when you overtook me, O God, I thank you for not letting me instantly lose my mind – never have I been more afraid of doing so; be thanked for once more lending me your ear.
8 May 37 II A 67
Again today, the same performance – still, I managed to get out to R — – my God, why should these feelings awaken just now – oh, how alone I feel! – oh, curse that arrogant complacency about standing on one’s own – now everyone will despise me – oh, but you, my God, do not let go of me – let me live and improve (?) myself!18
37 II A 68
When Adam lived in Paradise, it was: Pray; when he was cast out, it was: Work; when Christ came to the world, it was: pray and work (ora et labora).
37 II A 69
During this time I have read various things by A. v. Arnim, among others Armuth, Reichthum, Schuld und busse der Grafinn Dolores, 2 vols., II, p. 21, where he speaks of her seducer […].
16 May 37 II A 70
If one doesn’t strictly uphold the relation between philosophy (the purely human view of the world – the humanist standpoint) and Christianity but, without looking into it all that deeply, begins straight off speculating on dogma, it is easy to arrive at what look like satisfying, generous results. But what it all comes down to can also be just as it once was with marl when, without making any investigation of it and the soil, it was used on all kinds – they got luxuriant crops for a few years but afterwards the earth was found to be barren.
37 II A 77
When he had created the whole world God looked upon it and saw that it was good; when Christ died on the cross, the words went ‘It is finished’.19
9 June 37 II A 93
The old Christian dogmatic terminology is like an enchanted castle where the loveliest princes and princesses rest in a deep sleep; it needs only to be awakened, brought to life, in order to stand in its full glory.
8 July 37 II A 110
To think that writing in Latin can provide an adequate frame of mind for romantic themes is as ridiculous as asking someone to describe a circle with squares – the humorous hyperboles of life’s paradoxes outbid every schema, burst every straitjacket; it is to put new wine in old leathern bottles. And if Latin finally succeeds by forced marriage to the youthful lover it is bound to, that toothless old crone who can’t articulate her speech can excuse him if he looks elsewhere for satisfaction.
8 July 37 II A 111
Humour certainly also existed in the Middle Ages, but it was within a totality, within the Church, directed partly at the world and partly at itself. That too is why it lacks much of the morbidity which in my view is part of this concept, and also why some of the more recent humorists became Catholics, wanting a community again, a sense of direction which they themselves lacked.
11 July 37 II A 114
I’ve often wondered why I am so reluctant to commit single observations to paper. But the more I come to know great men in whose writings there is no sign of a kaleidoscopic jostling together of some bundle of ideas (the example of Jean Paul has perhaps made me prematurely anxious in this respect), and the more I bear in mind that a writer as refreshing as Hoffmann has kept a journal, and that Lichtenberg recommends it, the greater the urge to find out just why I should find this in itself innocent practice so unpleasant, almost repellent. The reason has obviously been that I have thought every time of possible publication, which might have called for a fuller treatment, which I didn’t want to bother with. And enervated by such an abstract possibility (a kind of literary hiccoughing and squeamishness), the aroma of the idea and mood evaporated. I think it would be better instead, by frequent note-taking, to let the thoughts emerge with the umbilical cord of the original mood intact and forget as far as possible any concern for their possible use (which I would never realize anyway by looking up my journals) but more as though unburdening myself in a letter to an intimate friend, so gaining on the one hand the possibility of self-knowledge at a later moment, and on the other fluency, the same articulateness in written expression which I have to some extent in speaking, knowledge of many little traits to which I have given no more than a passing glance, and finally, an advantage, if what Hamann says is true in another sense, in that there are ideas which one gets only once in one’s life. Such backstage practice is certainly necessary for anyone not so gifted that his development is in some way a public phenomenon.
[In the margin] Resolution of 13 July 1837, made in our study at six o’clock in the evening.
13 July 37 II A 118
[Also in the margin of the above] And so the entries I have are either so completely cryptic that I no longer understand them or they are entirely occasional; also I can see that so many entries come from one and the same day, which seems to indicate a sort of day of reckoning. That’s crazy.
The apparent abundance of thoughts and ideas that one feels in abstract possibility is just as unpleasant and elicits a similar anxiety to that which cattle suffer when they are not milked on time. When the outside circumstances won’t help, the best is as it were to milk oneself.
37 II A 119
Sometimes something spiritual happens corresponding in every way with that vegetative, digestive dropping off into a pleasant convalescent dozing. Consciousness appears as an overshadowing moon reaching from the proscenium to the backcloth. One slumbers as though in the totality of things (a pantheistic element but without leaving one strengthened as does the religious version), launched on an oriental dreaming off into the infinite in which everything appears to be fiction – and one is harmonized as in a grand poem: the whole world’s being, that of God, and my own, are poetry in which all the various, the fearful disparities of life, indigestible for human thought, are expiated in a misty, dreaming existence. – Alas, I then unfortunately wake up again, and the very same tragic relativity in everything begins worse than ever, the endless questions about what I am, about my joys and what other people see in me and in what I am doing when maybe millions are doing exactly the same thing.
37 II A 125
The petty bourgeois always skip an element in life, hence their parodic relation to their superiors … For them morality ranks highest, much more important than intelligence, but they’ve never felt that fervour for the great, the talented, even in an exceptional guise. Their morals are a brief summary of the various posters put out by the police; the most important thing is to be a useful member of the state and give evening talks at a club; they have never felt that nostalgia for something unknown, something remote, never felt the depths of being nothing at all, to stroll out of Nørreport with four pennies in one’s pocket and a slender cane in hand. They have no inkling of that life-view (which a Gnostic sect adopted) of getting to know the world through sin – yet they also say that one should spend one’s rage in youth (‘wer niemals hat ein Rausch gehabt, er ist kein braver Mensch’).20 They have never glimpsed the idea behind this, when one has penetrated into that dark realm of sighs, through the hidden, mysterious door, open in all its horror only to intimation, when one sees the crushed victims of seduction and inveiglement and the frigid cold of the tempter.
1 July 37 II A 127
[In the margin of the above] One rebukes others for being too afraid of God. Quite right; properly to love God one needs also to have feared God. The petty bourgeois’ love of God makes its entry when the vegetative processes are in full activity, when hands are folded comfortably across the stomach and, from a head reclining on a soft armchair, sleep-drugged eyes are raised in the direction of the ceiling, towards higher things. Cf. the pantheistic. ‘You’re welcome’ (welcome us).21
37 II A 128
‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ say the petty bourgeois, and by this those well-raised children and now useful members of the state – who are very prone to any passing emotional influenza – mean partly that if someone asks one for a pair of snuffers, even though they are sitting quite far away, one is to say ‘by all means’, get up ‘with the greatest pleasure’ and hand the snuffers to the person, and partly that one must remember to pay the obligatory condolatory calls. But they have never felt what it means for the whole world to turn its back on them, since of course the whole shoal of socializing herring in which they live will never let such a circumstance arise, and should serious help ever be required, sound sense will tell them that the person in sore need of their help, yet not at all likely to have any opportunity to help them in return, is not their ‘neighbour’.
18 July 37 II A 130
I too have combined the tragic with the comic: I make witticisms, people laugh – I cry.
14 July 37 II A 132
Humour is irony carried to its maximum wavelength. Although the essentially Christian is the real primus motor, there are nevertheless those in Christian Europe who have come no further than to describe irony, which is why they have also been unable to perform the absolutely isolated humour that stems from the person alone. They therefore either seek a resting-place in the Church where an entire concord of individuals develops a Christian irony in a united humour over the world, as with Tieck and others,22 or, where the religious doesn’t get going, form a club (the Brothers of Serapion – which in Hoffmann’s23 case was nevertheless not anything palpable but ideal). No, Hamann is still the greatest and most authentic humorist, the authentically humorous Robinson Crusoe, not on a desert island but in the din of life. His humour is not an aesthetic concept but life, not a hero in a controlled drama.
4 August 37 II A 136
Now I see why real humour cannot be captured in a novel, as irony can, and why it thereby ceases to be a life-concept, simply because it is part of that concept not to write, since writing would betray an all too conciliatory attitude to the world (which is also why Hamann remarks somewhere that basically there’s nothing more ludicrous than to write for people). Just as Socrates for the same reason left no books, so Hamann left only as much as the recent scribbling mania proportionally required, and then only pamphlets.
37 II A 138
[In the margin of the above] Nor, therefore, can the humorist ever really become a systematizer, for he looks on every system as a renewed attempt, in the familiar Blicherian manner,24 to blow the world apart with a single syllogism; whereas he himself has caught sight of the incommensurable which the philosopher can never compute and must therefore despise. He lives in life’s fullness and so feels how much is always left over, even if he has expressed himself in the most felicitous manner possible (hence this disinclination to write). The systematizer believes he can say everything, and that whatever cannot be said is wrong and unimportant.
37 II A 140
A remarkable transition occurs when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, because here for the first time one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it is thought, accordingly how thinking in its absoluteness follows upon a seeming reality.
4 September 37 II A 155
The indicative thinks something as actual (the identity of thinking and the actual). The subjunctive thinks something as thinkable.
37 II A 156
The grammar of indicative and subjunctive really contains the most aesthetic concepts, and occasions just about the highest form of aesthetic enjoyment (it borders on the musical, which is the highest). And the hackneyed proposition cogito ergo sum holds true of the subjunctive. It is the subjunctive’s life-principle (one could therefore really present the whole of modern philosophy in a theory about the indicative and the subjunctive, for it is indeed purely subjunctive).
37 II A 159
One should be able to write a whole novel in which the present tense subjunctive was the invisible soul, as light is for painting.
13 September 37 II A 160
This is why one can truthfully say that the subjunctive, which enters as a glimpse of the individuality of the person in question, is a dramatic line whereby the narrator steps aside and makes the remark as being true of the character (poetically), not as factual, not even as if it might be fact; it is presented under the illumination of subjectivity.
13 September 37 II A 161
It would be interesting to follow the development of human nature (in individuals – i.e. the different age-groups) by showing what one laughs at at different ages, basing the experiments in part on one and the same author, for example our literary fountainhead, Holberg, and in part on different kinds of comedy. This, together with research and experiments concerning the age-level at which tragedy is best appreciated and other psychological observations on the relation between comedy and tragedy (e.g. why one reads tragedy alone and comedy together with others), would contribute to the work I believe ought now to be written – namely, the history of the human soul (as it is in an ordinary human being) in the continuity of mental states (not the concepts) consolidating in particular peaks or nodes (i.e. noteworthy world-historical representatives of life-views).
20 September 37 II A 163
It is always our life’s Moses (i.e. all our full poetic vitality) that fails to enter the promised land; it is only our life’s Joshua that gets there. Our life’s poetic twilight dream is related to its reality like Moses to Joshua.
23 September 37 II A 165
One has no neighbour [næste: nearest], for the ‘I’ is oneself and one’s neighbour at once, as indeed one also says: one is nearest oneself (i.e. one is one’s own nearest).
7 October 37 II A 131
My life is unfortunately far too subjunctive; would to God I had some indicative power.
7 October 37 II A 171
It is our age’s tragedy that everyone speaks the truth – how much better it would have been to live in an age when everyone lied but the stones spoke the truth.
10 October 37 II A 178
When an ironist laughs at a humorist’s witticisms and fancies, it is like the vulture tearing at Prometheus’s liver, for the humorist’s fancies are not capricious darlings but sons of pain; with every one of them goes a little piece of his innermost viscera, and it is the emaciated ironist who is in need of the despairing depth of the humorist. Often his laughter is like the death’s head’s grin. Just as a shriek wrung from pain could look like humour to someone at a distance who had no inkling of the situation of the person from whom it came; just as the twitch on a deaf-mute’s or a taciturn man’s face could strike someone as humour, i.e. as laughter in the individual (like the dead man’s grin which is explained as the cramp of rigor mortis, the eternally humorous smile over human wretchedness) – so too with the laughter of the humorist. And crying over such a thing (not a jeremiad, note, for one of the sad things about man is that he troubles himself with so many irrelevancies) probably betrays greater psychological insight than laughing over it.
11 October 37 II A 179
All other religions are indirect speech; the founder steps aside and introduces another speaker, they themselves therefore belong to the religion – Christianity alone is direct speech (I am the truth).
29 October 37 II A 184
There is nothing more dangerous for a person, nothing more paralysing, than a certain isolating kind of fixation on oneself in which world history, human life, society – in short everything – disappears and, like the omfalopsuchitai,25 one is constantly staring in an egoistic circle only at one’s own navel. – This is why there is something so profound in the fact that Christ bore the sin of the world on his own – alone – not just because no one would or could understand him, but also because he had to take upon himself all the guilt which a man only bears to the extent and in the degree appropriate to him as a member of human society.
3 November 37 II A 187
The a priori in faith which hovers over every a posteriori of works is beautifully expressed in the words: I know that nothing in the world – principalities, etc. – will be able to separate me from Christ Jesus, our Lord – where his faith sets him upon a cliff elevated above all empirical facts, while on the other hand he could not possibly have experienced all that this encompasses.
6 November 37 II A 190
Presentiment is the earthly life’s nostalgia for something higher in accordance with the perspicuity which man must have had in his paradisiac life.
6 November 37 II A 191
So it is therefore humour that first is speculative – in the face of all empiricism it is an unshakeable, authentically ingenious frame of mind, whereas irony is continually delivering itself from a new dependence – which looked at from another angle means that it is always dependent.
9 November 37 II A 192
To my mind Erdmann’s account […] of the concept of mysticism is unusually felicitous. ‘The object shall remain what it was, i.e. is the same for the gegenüberstehendes I26 and the I which it was, i.e. the same I itself as the single I in relationship’,27 for the mystic does indeed fail to consider society and has even separated his I polemically, and yet with this isolated I he wants to come into relationship with the universal.
13 November 37 II C 41
The historical anticipation of, and likewise the corresponding position in purely human consciousness to, the Christian ‘Credo ut intelligam’ is the ancient ‘Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu’.28
15 November 37 II A 194
When in its polemic irony (humour) has put the whole world, heaven and earth, under water and, as compensation, enclosed a little world within itself and is then ready to be reconciled with the world again, it lets a raven fly out, and then a dove, which returns with an olive leaf.
15 November 37 II A 195
I would like to write a short story in which a man every day walked past the plaster-cast seller on Østergade, doffed his hat, stood in silence, and then said as he had done regularly every day, ‘O you wonderful Greek nature, why was I not allowed to live under your heaven in the days of your prime?’
11:30 a.m. 7 December 37 II A 200
I have so often wondered when I thanked God for something whether it was more from fear of losing it that I was driven to pray, or whether it was with the religious assurance which has conquered the world.
8 December 37 II A 201
I think that if ever I do become an earnest Christian my deepest shame will be that I did not become one before, that I first wanted to try everything else.
8 December 37 II A 202
I would like to write a short story in which the main character is a man who has acquired a pair of spectacles one lens of which reduces images as powerfully as an oxyhydrogen microscope and the other magnifies on the same scale, so that he apprehends everything very relatively.
10 December 37 II A 203
I am utterly appalled on reading the essay with which Fichte begins his journal. Seeing a man with his intellectual abilities arm himself with such seriousness for battle, with such ‘fear and trembling’ (Philippians),29 what are the rest of us to say? I think I will give up my studies, and now I know what I will be – I will become a witness in the office of a notary public.
12 December 37 II A 204
Once in a while, just after I have gone to bed and am ready to fall asleep, a rooster crows at midnight. It is unbelievable how much that can occupy the imagination. I remember just last night how vividly childhood memories presented themselves, of Frederiksborg where the crowing of the rooster announced a happy new day, how it all came back to me: the rather chill morning air, the dew on the grass which kept us from tumbling about as we wished.
16 December 37 II A 205
And I was mistaken because it was not the morning crowing but the midnight crowing.
4 April 38 II A 206
What does the soul find so recuperative about reading fairy-tales? When I am tired of everything and ‘full of days’, fairy-tales are for me always the refreshing bath that proves so beneficial. There all earthly, all finite cares vanish; joy, yes sorrow even, are infinite (which is just why they are so expanding and beneficial). One sets out to find the bluebird, just like the princess who, chosen to be queen, lets someone else take care of the kingdom so that she herself can seek out her unhappy lover. What infinite sorrow is implied in her saying to the old woman she meets, as she roams about dressed as a peasant girl: ‘I am not alone, good mother, I have with me a great following of trouble, cares and suffering.’ […]
26 December 37 II A 207
April
Again such a long time has passed in which I have been unable to rally myself for the least thing – I must now make another little attempt at it.
Poul Møller is dead.30
38 II A 209
I went over to hear Nielsen31 recite ‘Glæde over Danmark’ [Joy over Denmark] but was so strangely moved by the words: ‘Do you remember the far-travelled man?’
Yes, now he has travelled far – but I for one shall certainly remember him.
2 April 38 II A 216
There is an indescribable joy that is kindled in us just as inexplicably as the apostle’s unmotivated exclamation: ‘Rejoice, and again I say, Rejoice’. – Not a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul ‘with tongue and mouth and from the bottom of the heart’: ‘I rejoice in my joy, of, with, at, for, through, and with my joy’ – a heavenly refrain which suddenly interrupts our other songs, a joy which like a breath of air cools and refreshes, a puff from the trade winds which blow across the plains of Mamre to the eternal mansions.
10:30 a.m. 19 May 38 II A 228
Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot – yet the best remedy is to step on them.
6 July 38 II A 230
How I thank you, Father in heaven, for having kept on earth for a time like the present when my need for this can be so great, an earthly father who, as I so very much hope, will with your help have greater joy in being my father the second time than he had the first.
9 July 38 II A 231
I shall work on coming into a far more intimate relation with Christianity; up to now I have in a way been standing altogether outside it, fighting for its truth. I have borne the cross of Christ in a quite external way, like Simon of Cyrene (Luke 23:26).32
9 July 38 II A 232
Just how intimately and essentially the knowledge one has of oneself depends on the knowledge one believes others have of one can be seen from the fact that nearsighted people think that others at a distance cannot see them either. Neither, similarly, does the nearsighted sinner believe that God sees his straying; whereas the devout Christian, since he is known by God, recognizes his own frailty with a clarity which only sharing the seer’s eye of the spirit which scrutinizes auguries can procure him.
11 July 38 II A 235
The relation between Christianity and Gnosticism is very aptly suggested in the relation between the two results they arrive at: Christianity to logos, Gnosticism to ‘name’ (Christ was the name of the invisible God). The latter is highly abstract, as indeed the whole of Gnosticism was an abstraction, which is why they could not really arrive at a Creation filling space and time but had to regard the Creation as identical with the Fall.
26 July 38 II A 237
My father died on Wednesday (the 8th) at 2:00 a.m. I did so earnestly desire that he should live a few years more, and I regard his death as the last sacrifice his love made for me, because he has not died from me but died for me, so that something might still come of me. Most precious of all that I have inherited from him is his memory, his transfigured image, transfigured not by my poetic imagination (it has no need of that), but many little single traits I am now learning about, and this I will try to keep most secret from the world. For at this moment I feel there is only one person (E. Boesen) with whom I can really talk about him. He was a ‘faithful friend’.
11 August 38 II A 243
It’s a strange contrast: paganism prized the bachelor state, Christianity recommended celibacy.
11 August 38 II A 244
In our Christian times Christianity is close to becoming paganism – at least the metropolises have long ago abandoned it.
11 August 38 II A 245
When certain people claim to have got beyond Hegel, this can at best be regarded as a bold metaphor by which they try to convey and represent the thoroughness with which they have studied him, to describe the enormous run-up they have made to get into him, so that they were unable on the move to stop but have come out of him.
12 September 38 II A 260
The way in which an author’s work should bear the imprint of his likeness, his individuality, is as that of the portrait Christ is said to have sent to King Abgarus of Edessa; it was not a minutely detailed reproduction but, in some inexplicably miraculous way, a sort of emanation on the canvas.
6 October 38 II A 270
Casuistry is Pharisaism in the domain of knowledge.
8 October 38 II A 271
The Catholic Church is the reverse image of Judaism. There, in his majesty, was God who stooped to earth and wanted to be held fast in this majesty of his (thundered in Sinai), and so this historic moment when heaven was upon earth is kept from reflection while one nevertheless clings to it as closely as possible. And just as God rests in his majesty, so too this whole cult alongside the humility suggested by the feeling of being nothing before the Lord places the majestic element precisely on the outside. In the Church it is people who gradually rise up, are raised up, helped up by God – God begins in self-abasement – Christ took on himself the shape of a servant and the Pope still calls himself servus servorum. Judaism takes God down from heaven, Christianity takes man up to heaven.
30 October 38 II A 283
With the Jesuits the monastic orders are a thing of the past, for with them they reached their parody in a purely secular endeavour.
3 November 38 II A 292
Because of the a priori element in intention, good intentions are so tempting – compared with a successive unfolding in time – and have so often in them some narcotic which develops an inner gaze instead of a resilience that begets energy.
2 December 38 II A 303
Just at this moment I feel the awful truth of the words:
Psalm 82:6–7. ‘I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the Most High: But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.’
3 January 39 II A 319
Father in Heaven! When the thought of you awakens in our soul, let it not awaken like a startled bird which then flaps about in confusion, but like the child from sleep with its heavenly smile.
6 January 39 II A 320
Hegel is a Johannes Climacus33 who does not storm the heavens, like the giants, by putting mountain upon mountain, but climbs aboard them by way of his syllogisms.
20 January 39 II A 335
Longing is the umbilical cord of the higher life.
39 II A 343
You, my heart’s sovereign mistress (‘Regina’), stored in the deepest recesses of my heart, in my most brimmingly vital thoughts, there where it is equally far to heaven as to hell – unknown divinity! Oh, can I really believe what the poets say: that when a man sees the beloved object for the first time he believes he has seen her long before, that all love, as all knowledge, is recollection, that love in the single individual also has its prophecies, its types, its myths, its Old Testament? Everywhere, in every girl’s face, I see features of your beauty, yet I think I’d need all the girls in the world to extract, as it were, your beauty from theirs, that I’d have to criss-cross the whole world to find the continent I lack yet that which the deepest secret of my whole ‘I’ magnetically points to – and the next moment you are so near me, so present, so richly supplementing my spirit that I am transfigured and feel how good it is to be here.
You blind god of love! You who see in secret, will you make it known to me? Am I to find here in this world what I seek, am I to experience the conclusion of all my life’s eccentric premises, am I to conclude you in my embrace34 – or:
Do the orders say: march on?
Have you gone on before me, you, my yearning; are you beckoning to me, transfigured, from another world? Oh, I will throw everything overboard to become light enough to follow you.
2 February 39 II A 347
All poetry is life’s glorification [Forklarelse] (i.e. transfiguration) through its clarification [Forklarelse] (through being clarified, illuminated, ‘unfolded’, etc.). It is really remarkable that language has this ambiguity.
5 February 39 II A 352
The profoundly penetrating significance of original sin is shown in the fact that all Christianity in the individual begins with grief – grief after God.
10 February 39 II A 360
Fear and trembling (cf. Philippians 2:12) are not the mainspring of the Christian life, for that is love. But it is the balance in the watch – it is the Christian life’s balance spring.35
16 February 39 II A 370
Our age is progressively losing the teleological element that belongs to a life-view – and among the educated classes you will find many who consider marriage without children to be the best kind – one thinks in this regard of the Jews, who almost entirely gave up their own existence and sought it only in another’s.
25 February 39 II A 374
God can just as little prove his own existence than he can swear; he would have nothing higher to swear upon than himself.
23 April 39 II A 394
So great is my unhappiness at this time that in my dreams I am indescribably happy.
39 II A 415
… For glasses hide much – also a tear in the eye.
11 May 39 II A 417
The whole of existence makes me anxious, from the smallest fly to the mysteries of the Incarnation. It’s all inexplicable, myself most of all. For me all existence is contaminated, myself most of all. Great is my distress, unlimited. No one knows it but God in heaven and he will not comfort me. No one but God in heaven can console me and he will not take pity on me – Young man, you who are still at the beginning of your endeavour, if you have lost your way, turn back! Turn to God and under his tutelage you will take with you a youthfulness fortified for adult deeds. You will never know the suffering of one who, having wasted the strength and courage of youth in rebellion against him, must now, exhausted and faint, begin a retreat through ruined lands and ravaged regions, surrounded on all sides by the abomination of destruction, by gutted cities and the smoking ruins of disappointed hopes, by prosperity trampled down and strength brought low – a retreat as slow as a bad year, long as eternity, interrupted monotonously by the constantly repeated plaint: ‘These days give me no pleasure.’
12 May 39 II A 420
God in heaven, let me really feel my nothingness, not to despair over it but to feel all the more intensely the greatness of your goodness.
(This wish is not, as the scoffer in me would say, an Epicureanism, as when a gourmand starves himself so that food will taste all the better.)
14 May 39 II A 423
These days I feel rather as a chessman must when the opponent says: That piece can’t be moved – like an idle spectator, since my time has not yet come.
21 May 39 II A 435
Eternity is the fullness of time (taking this saying also in the sense in which it is used when it is said that Christ has come in the fullness of time).
21 May 39 II A 437
The misfortune with philosophers with respect to Christianity is that they use continental charts when they should be using local ones, for every dogma is nothing but a more concrete extract of normal human consciousness.
22 May 39 II A 440
The Christian consciousness presupposes a whole preceding human consciousness (it does that, in the particular individual, in both world-historical and individual respects), and so while the Christian stands there with the consciousness of a deluge that has annihilated the existence that went before, the philosopher believes existence has its beginning here.
22 May 39 II A 443
That Christianity is antithetical to pantheism can also be seen from the caricature that accompanies it. Clearly, the caricature of pantheism is the evaporation of the person through sensuality, the poetic world projected by the individual in which true conscious existence is surrendered and everything is poetry, in which at most the individual is like the flower in woven damask. The antithesis of Christianity is hypocrisy, but this is clearly based on the reality of the moral concepts: personality, accountability.
1 July 39 II A 464
Just as for the neurasthenic there are moments when the optic nerves become so microscopically acute that he can see the air and therefore for him it is no longer a medium, spiritually there are ecstatic moments when all existence seems so poetic, so expanded and transparent to contemplation, that even the slightest trifle among bad infinity’s36 churned-out ten-a-penny products seems, at least allegorically, to intimate the deepest truths, indeed only to have reality in so far as it is such an allegory – yes, to have its existence only in and by virtue of that.
20 July 39 II A 487
[In the margin of the above] It is typical of all recent development to be conscious of the medium and it must end in madness, just as though every time a person saw the sun and stars he became conscious of the earth’s rotation.
39 II A 488
In some ways I can say of Don Giovanni what Elvira says to the hero: ‘You, murderer of my happiness’. –
For, to tell the truth, it is this piece which has affected me so diabolically that I can never forget it; it was this piece which drove me like Elvira out of the quiet night of the cloister.
39 II A 491
Philosophy in relation to Christianity is like someone accused before the Inquisition and who makes up a story which coincides in all essentials yet is altogether different.
39 II A 493
It’s terrible how I have to buy every day, every hour – and the price fluctuates so!
39 II A 495
Abstract concepts are just like the straight line, invisible and only to be seen in their concrete instances.
39 II A 496
When one views the historical mission of the religions on their journey through the world, the situation is this: Christianity is the genuine freehold proprietor who sits inside the carriage; Judaism is the coachman; Muhammadanism is a servant who does not sit with the coachman but behind.
39 II A 499
The sad thing with me is that the crumb of joy and reassurance I slowly distil in the painstakingly dyspeptic process of my thought-life I use up straightaway in just one despairing step.
22 July 39 II A 509
The reason why my progress through life is so uncertain is that my forelegs (expectations, etc.) have been weakened in early youth through over-exertion.
22 July 39 II A 510
If one looks at philosophy’s latest efforts (in Fichte, etc.) regarding Christianity, one cannot deny it the seriousness of its attempt to recognize what is unique in Christianity. Along its laborious journey it even takes time to pray just a little; in its haste it pauses a little; it even has the patience and room for a monologue by Christianity, although it does want it to be as brief as possible. In all this, however, it is clear that the aim of philosophy’s efforts is recognition of Christianity’s conformity with ordinary human consciousness and of the, on this view only historically distinct and so conceptually abrogated, concentric duplexity of Christianity and philosophy. But the true Christian view, namely that ordinary human existence does not explain Christianity and that neither is Christianity simply another factor in the world but explains the world, and that the pre-Christian development therefore cannot be regarded as concentric with Christianity since it had no such centre, not even Christ, but was simply the infinitely broken straight line, the repeatedly resumed eccentric attempt – this is not understood. Thus Fichte in his Aphorismen über die Zukunft der Theologie (in his Zeitschrift, III, pp. 200ff.) very competently points out that monotheism can never be explained by polytheism, but however correct he may be in this, one must insist just as rigorously that Christian monotheism can never in all eternity be explained by pagan monotheism, indeed even more rigorously so as not to let the concept of revelation be volatilized and wrested from us by such tricks. Not only does it contain something which man has not given himself, but something that has never occurred to the mind of any man, even as a wish, an ideal or whatever.
28 July 39 II A 517
The philosophers think that all knowledge, indeed even the existence of the Deity, is something man himself produces and that only in a figurative sense can there be talk of revelation, rather as one can say the rain falls from heaven though rain is nothing but mist produced by the earth. But, to keep to the metaphor, they forget that in the beginning God separated the waters of heaven and earth and that there is something higher than the atmosphere.
30 July 39 II A 523
Like a thunderstorm, the genius goes against the wind.
8 August 39 II A 535
… I’m as unspirited as a sheva, weak and mute as a dagesh lene,37 I feel like a letter written back-to-front, yet rampant as a three-tailed pasha.38 Yes, if only misfortunes were like the rewards of those conscious of their own good deeds, that they vanished at the very thought of them. How happy a hypochondriac of my compass would be, for I take all my troubles in advance and yet they all stay behind.
24 August 39 II A 540
[In the margin] As jealous of my self and my scribblings as the National Bank is of its own, and altogether as reflexive as any pronoun.
My consciousness is at certain moments far too roomy, far too general. While usually it can contract convulsively (and feelingly) around each of my thoughts, just now it is so huge, hanging so loose about me that it would suffice for several of us.
30 August 39 II A 549
That’s how it is with the poetic, it makes ever stronger efforts to reach actuality, just as with Pharaoh when, having dreamed for a second time (after being awake), his dream came closer to actuality, that much closer as an ear of corn is a more concrete symbol of a fruitful year than a cow.
31 August 39 II A 551
Most people think, speak, and write in the way they sleep, eat, and drink – with no question ever arising of their relation to the idea. It happens with very few, and then this decisive moment has either an extraordinary propulsive power (the genius) or through anxiety it paralyses the individual (irony).
6 September 39 II A 556
When someone first begins to reflect on Christianity, before he enters into it, it is at first undoubtedly a cause of offence. Indeed, he may wish it had never come into the world, or at least that the question of it had never arisen in his consciousness. So it is nauseating to hear all this talk by interfering busybodies about Christ being the greatest of heroes. A humorous view is greatly to be preferred.
37 II A 59639
Oh, how unhappy I am – Martensen has written a treatise on Lenau’s Faust!40
37 II A 597
Faust wouldn’t want to familiarize himself with evil in order to rejoice over not being that bad (only the petty bourgeois do that). On the contrary, he wants to feel all the sluice gates of sin open within his own breast, the whole kingdom of boundless possibilities. Yet all this will not be enough; his expectations will deceive him.
37 II A 605
I sometimes imagine myself in the presence of a fearful grotesque figure – I would call it a compendium of a human being – a short résumé of emotions and concepts – a likeable [belieblich] long thin man yet whom nature has somehow stopped short in every advance – he ought to have long arms, but see how the part from the shoulder to the elbow is infinitely long yet that from the elbow to the hand so very short, as also the fingers, face, etc. And every speech begins most promisingly so that in one’s hopes one has already established a very high standard, but behold, nothing comes of it.
37 II A 609
Such a sigh as when in winter the ice covers the lake and they let the water drain away.
37 II A 610
I stand like a solitary spruce, egoistically unfettered and pointing upwards, throwing no shadow, and no stock-dove builds its nest in my branches.
(Sunday, 9 July 1837, in Frederiksberg Park after a visit to the Rørdams)
9 July 37 II A 617
Again there is new life in Amagertorv and folk-life, with its motley blanket of flowers, spreads over it. Last night at twelve a man in shabby clothes was arrested because according to the night-watchman he had made abusive remarks to some persons, and the night-watchman, who is meant to report such things, had not witnessed it and the arrestee was beaten, no doubt unjustly, and no one lodged a complaint. No one knows. Today life goes on as usual in the square – and this is Amagertorv – what is that compared with Denmark, Europe, the earth, the whole world?
37 II A 619
But if I have understood (cf. another note [I A 154 above]) the romantic standpoint as a see-saw whose ends designate irony and humour, it follows that its ups and downs can describe quite different paths, from the most heaven-defying humour to the most despairing surrender to irony, though there is also a certain rest and equilibrium in this standpoint (Wieland’s ‘irony’).41 For the individual outlives irony only when, raised up above everything and looking down, he is at last elevated above himself and from that height has seen himself in his nothingness and thereby found his true height. – cf. Princess Brambilla.42
2 June 37
This self-conquest of irony is the crisis of the higher life of the spirit; the individual is now acclimatized – philistinism, which at bottom simply conceals itself in the other standpoint, is overcome, the individual is reconciled.
The standpoint of irony as such is nil admirari; but when it kills itself irony has, with humour, scorned everything including itself.
II A 627
There is so much talk of variety being a necessary part of the romantic, but I could almost say the opposite: the absolute loneliness, where not a breath of wind stirs, where no distant baying of hounds can be heard – and yet the trees incline to one another and repeat their childhood memories about when the nymphs lived in them, and imagination then gorges itself in supreme enjoyment. And what else is romanticism? I would simply ask those concerned a Socratic question: whether the Pompeian taste is not bound and variegated.
37 II A 638
Every flower in my heart becomes an ice fern.
37 II A 641
How awful on Judgement Day, when all souls return to life, to stand completely alone, alone and unknown to all, all.
37 II A 643
Everyone takes his revenge on the world. My revenge consists in bearing my distress and anguish enclosed deeply within me while my laughter entertains everyone. If I see someone suffer I give him my sympathy, console him as best I can, and listen to him calmly when he assures me that I am fortunate. If I can only keep this up until the day I die I shall have had my revenge.
37 II A 649
There are few words with which people say so much without realizing it as ‘to orient’; it is a world-historical memento – all of history moves from the East, mankind’s point of departure.
37 II A 650
I am a Janus bifrons: with the one face I laugh, with the other I weep.
37 II A 662
With humour there is also the joy that has triumphed over the world.
37 II A 672
Now I see why real humour, unlike irony, cannot be captured in a novel and thereby ceases to be a concept of life precisely because not to write is part of the concept – just as Socrates left no writings, nor did Hamann except as far as was required by the recent scribbling mania – pamphlets.
37 II A 658
What will now be the thing – which, when properly done, will be our time’s classicism – is the continuity of mood instead of concept, kept in its necessary relation to a literary scientific development. Beginning with Hellenism or even before, it is constantly making inroads into the path of intelligence, not of emotions (e.g. love of the opposite sex won’t at all be prominent but no doubt what Hamann calls ‘spiritual pederasty’).
37 II A 661
Sympathetic egoism. Irony.
Hypochondriac egoism. Humour
one is one’s own nearest
37 II A 626
The other day I sat in a strange mood, sunken in the way an old ruin might feel, gradually losing myself and my I in a pantheistic disintegration, and read an old ballad (edited by Sneedorf-Birch) about a girl waiting for her lover on a Saturday night; but he didn’t come and she went to bed and ‘wept so bitterly’; she got up again ‘and wept so bitterly’. Suddenly the scene opened wide before me: I saw the Jutland heath with its indescribable loneliness and its solitary skylark. Then one generation after another rose up before me, and all their girls sang for me and wept so bitterly and sank back into their graves again, and I wept with them.
Strangely enough, my imagination works best when I’m sitting by myself in a large gathering, where bustle and noise provide a substrate for my will to hold on to its object; without those surroundings it bleeds to death in the enervating embrace of a vague idea.
30 December 37 II A 679
Hatred of the monarchical principle goes to such extremes in our time that people will want to have four-handed solo parts.
31 December 37 II A 680
Irony is an abnormal development which, like that of the liver of Strasbourg geese, ends by doing the individual to death.
1 January 38 II A 682
The other day I met a lady (Mrs Ross) who really belongs in a hospital ward and whose whole talk had to do with illness and medicines and precautionary measures for her health – but the main point is really whether she could ever talk about allowing close relatives to visit a patient who is practically at death’s door.
3 January 38 II A 685
Vaudeville is the musical association of ideas.
38 II A 688
A man who has himself flayed alive to show how the smile of humour is produced through the contraction of a particular muscle – and accompanies it afterwards with a lecture on humour.
6 January 38 II A 689
I was looking precisely for an expression to designate the class of people I might like to write for, in the conviction that they would share my viewpoint, and now I have found it in Lucian: paranekroi (one who is as dead as I am) and I could wish to publish something for paranekroi.43
9 January 38 II A 690
There’s a splendid dialogue in Lucian between Charon and the cynic Menippus, which begins with Charon demanding an obol for the trouble of taking him over the Styx, but Menippus declares that he isn’t the owner.
10 January 38 II A 691
The humorist, like the predator, always walks by himself.
13 January 38 II A 694
There are those who traffic so irresponsibly and disgracefully in ideas they snap up from others that they should be charged with illegal trafficking in lost and found.
17 January 38 II A 695
Those who have come beyond Hegel are like people who live in the country and must always date their letters ‘per’ some large town. So addresses here go: ‘to N.N. per Hegel’.
17 January 38 II A 697
These tutors44 of modern philosophy strike me as scorers, not even as scorers in sharpshooting contests, who do in a way participate in a kind of danger, although in a very external manner, but like billiard scorers who in their sleep repeat their ‘quatre à pointe’, etc.
8 February 38 II A 701
When, at times, there is such a noise in my head that it is as though my cranium were being lifted up, it is exactly like when the hobgoblins lift a mountain up a little and then hold a ball and make merry inside.
9 February 38 II A 702
[In the margin] God forbid!
The state is just now obviously suffering from intestinal disorders (high-level gripes) [tiers etate Bugvrid]. Before, it was migraine.
19 February 38 II A 705
Our politicians are just like the Greek reciprocals (alleloin)45 which have no nominative, singular, or any subject-cases – we can conceive them only in the plural and in relational cases.
38 II A 710
Life is like music; perfect pitch hovers between true and false and that’s where the beauty lies; for the musician perfect pitch in the more restricted sense, just like logic, ontology, or abstract morality – here the mathematical – would be false.
11 April 38 II A 711
What is man, this stamen in eternity’s flowers (history’s transfiguration)?
12 April 38 II A 712
Real depression, like the ‘vapours’, is found only in the highest circles, in the former case understood in a spiritual sense.
14 April 38 II A 721
The holy spirit is the divine ‘we’ that embraces an I and a third person (an objective world, an existence), the fact that there are two subjects making it a plural, and the fact that there is a first person there, too, giving the latter the advantage.
23 April 38 II A 731
I am living now just about like a distilled copy [brændeviinsaftryk] of an original edition of my authentic I.
38 II A 742
Man hardly ever makes use of the freedoms he has, such as freedom of thought; in compensation he demands freedom of speech instead.
38 II A 746
That God could create beings who were free in relation to him is the cross philosophy couldn’t bear but on which it has been left hanging.
38 II A 752
The politicians accuse me of contradicting them, but it is they who are the masters at that, for they always have one more person to contradict: themselves.
38 II A 754
Paradox is the intellectual life’s authentic pathos, and just as only great souls are prone to passions, so only great thinkers are prone to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing but grand thoughts still wanting completion.
38 II A 755
My good mood, my tranquillity, soars into the sky like a dove pursued by Saul’s evil spirit, by a bird of prey, and it can only save itself by climbing higher and higher, by getting further and further away from me.
17 August 38 II A 760
It is evident that modern philosophy makes the historical Christ into a kind of illegitimate son, an adopted son at most.
38 II A 765
My standpoint is armed neutrality.
38 II A 770
Take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground … naturally it won’t help to be, as many are, unbreeched.
38 II A 772
But Andersen46 isn’t much to worry about either; from what I hear his main strength consists in an auxiliary choir of volunteer undertakers, and a number of itinerant aestheticians who perpetually protest their honesty. At least we know that one cannot possibly accuse them of any reservatio mentalis, for they have nothing at all in mente.
38 II A 781
Paganism is sensuousness, the sensuous life’s ample development – its penalty is therefore, as we see in Prometheus, that the liver is hacked away and constantly grows in a constantly awakening and yet unsatisfied cupidity – Christianity is cerebral, which is why Golgotha signifies skull.
38 II A 789
Christianity lays no stress at all on the idea of earthly beauty, which for the Greeks was everything. Quite the contrary; Paul speaks with a genuine humoristic esprit of the earthen vessel in which the spirit dwells. One question is to what extent Christ should be presented as an ideal of human beauty – and strangely enough, while so much similarity has been found between him and Socrates, this aspect has not been considered; for as we all know, Socrates was uglier than (original) sin.
38 II A 791
The prominent part played by altar service in the Middle Ages was a reversion to paganism, the classical, the abdominal processes. – The sermon, on the other hand, allows the head once more to play a part.
38 II A 792
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD
… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out,
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.
King Lear47
38 II A 804
[On the above] It was then the great earthquake occurred, the terrible upheaval which suddenly pressed on me a new infallible law for the interpretation of all phenomena. It was then I suspected my father’s great age was not a divine blessing but rather a curse; that our family’s excellent mental abilities existed only for tearing us apart one from another; I felt the stillness of death spreading over me when I saw in my father an unhappy person who would survive us all, a monumental cross on the grave of all his own expectations. A guilt must weigh upon the entire family, God’s punishment must be upon it; it was meant to disappear, expunged by God’s mighty hand, deleted like an unsuccessful attempt, and I only occasionally found some little solace in the thought that upon my father had fallen the heavy duty of reassuring us with the consolation of religion, administering to us the last sacrament, so that a better world might still stand open for us even if we lost everything in this one, even if that punishment the Jews always called down upon their foes were to fall on us: that all memory of us would be wiped out and no trace found.
38 II A 805
[On the above] Torn apart inwardly as I was, with no prospect of leading a life of earthly happiness (‘that I might prosper and live long in the land’), with no hope of a happy and pleasant future – which is part and parcel of the historic continuity of the domestic life of the family – what wonder that, in despairing hopelessness, I seized upon the intellectual side of man alone, clung to that, so that the thought of my considerable mental talents was my only consolation, ideas my only joy, people of no consequence for me.
38 II A 806
What has often caused me suffering was that a reflective I has tried as if to imprint on my mind and preserve what my real I, out of doubt, anxiety, disquiet, wanted in its concern with forming a view of the world to forget – to preserve it partly because it was a necessary component, partly because it was a transitional factor of some consequence, for fear that I should fake a result for myself.
So now, for instance, when my life seems set in such a way that I appear to be assigned in perpetuity to reading for exams, and that no matter how long it lasts, my life will in any case progress no further than where I once arbitrarily broke it off (just as one occasionally sees mentally deranged people who forget everything that occurred in between and recall only their childhood, or forget everything except some single moment in their lives) – that I should be thus reminded, by the thought of being a theology student, of that happy time of possibilities (what one might call one’s pre-existence) and of my stopping there, in a state of mind rather like that of a child which has been given brandy and had his growth stunted. When my active I now tries to forget this in order to act, my reflective I would so much rather keep hold of it because it seems interesting and, as reflection raises itself to the level of a general consciousness, abstract from my own personal consciousness.
38 II A 807