1841 TO 1845
IN Copenhagen S.K.’s conduct caused a great scandal. He faced it for a fortnight (that being a part of his plan to deceive Regina) and on October 25 he departed for Berlin with the intention of remaining a year and a half in the city which then was the intellectual capital of Europe. He was especially eager to hear Schelling demolish the Hegelian system, with the applause of the Court as well as of the University. On February 2, 1842, at the end of a long letter to Boesen he said: “This winter in Berlin will always have great importance for me. I have got a great deal accomplished. When you consider that I have heard from three to four lectures daily, have a language lesson daily, and that I have got so much written [i.e. a considerable part of Either/Or], and this in spite of the fact that at first I had to spend so much time writing out Schelling’s lectures, which I did in a fair copy, and have got a great deal read—so that one cannot complain. On top of that, all my pains and all my monologues. I have not long to live—I never expected to—but I live for a brief term and so much the more intensely.”
His enthusiasm for Schelling was short-lived. His first lectures inspired the hope that he had something real to say about “reality,” but that hope was deluded, and on February 27 S.K. wrote to Boesen, “Schelling drivels inordinately … I am leaving Berlin and hastening to Copenhagen … not to bind myself by new ties … but to complete Either/Or.” He got back to Copenhagen on March 6, having been away not quite four and a half months. And we learn from Repetition that some part of this time was profitably spent in the theater, especially in the enjoyment of a kind of farce, the Posse, which was then the vogue in Berlin.
The “monologues” he mentions were of course about Regina, and they were the more painful because they never resulted in a clear verdict with respect to his guilt—hence the title which he already had in mind, “Guilty?”/“Not Guilty?” He was not even clear that the possibility of a rapprochement was definitely excluded. He wrote to Boesen, “I regard the relationship as dissolved only in a certain sense.” But it would be possible to return to her only in case she could be brought to understand him thoroughly and would accept him as he was. His introversion made it impossible to disclose himself to her directly, so he had to resort to what he called “indirect communication,” which he affirmed he had learned from “her.” So Either/Or “was written for Regina”—but not merely “to clarify her out of the situation,” as he said with reference more particularly to “The Diary of the Seducer”—consciously or unconsciously he was practicing the sage counsel we find in Hudibras:
With one hand thrust the lady from,
And with the other pull her home.
On the short voyage to Stralsund he wrote: “You say, ‘What I have lost, or rather deprived myself of!’ Ah, how should you know that or understand it? When this subject is mentioned you would do well to hold your peace. And how should any one know better than I? … What have I lost? The only thing that I loved. What have I lost? In men’s eyes my knightly word. What have I lost? That upon which I have always staked my honor, and in spite of this shock always shall:—being faithful. Yet at the moment I write this my soul is as uneasy as my body, in a cabin shaken by the double motion of the steamboat.”
In Berlin he wrote: … “and I loved her much, she was as light as a bird, as bold as a thought; I let her rise higher and higher, I stretched out my hand and she perched upon it and called down to me, ‘Here it is glorious,’ and she forgot, she did not know that it was I who made her light, I who gave her boldness in thought, faith in me which brought it about that she walked on the water; and I acclaimed her, and she accepted my acclaim.—At other times she threw herself upon her knees before me, wanted only to look up to me, wanted to forget everything else.”
A year later he wrote: “If I had had faith, I should have remained with Regina.” In 1851, when Fritz Schlegel rejected the suggestion that he might approach Regina again on the plane of mere friendship, he made reply by dedicating anonymously to her the Two Discourses at the Foot of the Altar:
To One Unnamed
whose name will some day be named
is dedicated
together with this little work
the whole production of the author from the very beginning.
Already in 1849 he had written the following in his Journal: “My will is unaltered, that after my death the works should be dedicated to her and to my deceased father. She shall belong to history.—My existence shall absolutely accentuate her life, my work as an author may also be regarded as a monument to her honor and praise. I take her with me to history. And I who in my melancholy had only one wish, to enchant her—there it is not denied me, there I walk beside her, like a master of ceremonies I lead her in triumph and say, ‘Please make a little place for her, our own dear little Regina.’ ”
His testament was made in the form of a letter to his brother: “It is naturally my will that my former fiancée, Madame Regine Schlegel, shall inherit absolutely the little I can leave.” Alas, there was very little left, and Regina declined to receive it. But this shows that the theme of the last chapter not only overlaps upon this but pervaded S.K.’s whole life, that this experience was, as he affirms in The Point of View, the decisive “fact” which determined the most important ethical and religious change: “I was so profoundly shaken that I understood perfectly well that I could not possibly succeed in taking the comfortable and secure via media in which most people pass their lives: I had either to throw myself into perdition and sensuality, or to choose the religious absolutely as the only thing—either the world in a measure which would be dreadful, or the cloister. That it was the second I must choose was already substantially determined: the eccentricity of the first movement was merely the expression of the intensity of the second; it expressed the fact that it would be impossible for me to be religious only up to a certain point.”
He said in another place, “My engagement to her and the breaking of it is really my relation to God, my engagement to God, if I may dare to say so.” On the other hand, he frequently affirmed, and with as much reason, that “it was she who made me a poet.”
On February 20, 1843, Either/Or appeared and made a great sensation in Copenhagen, partly because it was such a big book, and partly because it was pseudonymous. It was the biggest book S.K. ever wrote and was published appropriately in two volumes. By resorting to the most amazing devices S.K. was able for some time to throw the public off the track. Not till 1846, in a postscript to the Postscript, did he acknowledge that he was the author of the six pseudonymous works which he had produced up to that date; but when once he was discovered as the author of Either/Or, no one was long deceived by his subsequent pseudonyms. Before this book appeared he wrote with feigned indignation to one of the daily papers, protesting against the attribution to him of several recent anonymous works which in fact no one had thought of ascribing to him. And in the Journal he tells with pride how much pains he took to fool people: “A whole book could be written if I were to relate how inventive I have been in hoaxing people about my mode of existence.”
“At the time I was reading the proofs of Either/Or and was writing the Edifying Discourses I had almost no time at all to walk in the street. So I employed another expedient. Every evening when I left home completely fagged out and had dined at Mimi’s restaurant I was for ten minutes at the theater—not a minute more. Being so generally known as I was, I reckoned that there would be several tale-bearers at the theater who would report, ‘Every night he’s at the theater, he doesn’t do anything else.’ O you dear gossips, how I thank you! Without you I should not have attained my purpose. In fact it was for the sake of my former fiancée I did this. It was my melancholy wish to be as much derided as possible, merely to serve her, merely in order that she might be able to put up a resistance.”
We learn from S.K. that the first half of the second volume, that is, Judge William’s exaltation of the beauty of marriage, was written while he was engaged to Regina but hopeless of realizing the joys he so enthusiastically described. There is profound pathos in this; and we wonder that he could find time for producing such a work when he was not only in constant attendance upon Regina but was busily employed in finishing his treatise on irony. The last half of the second volume was written in Berlin, where, as we have seen, he had many other things to do; and the whole of the first volume was written after his return to Copenhagen. He boasted that the whole book was written in eleven months.
Either/Or not only produced a sensation, being “much read and even bought,” as S.K. put it; but it puzzled and amazed its readers. The reviewers, even such astute reviewers as Heiberg and Goldschmidt, were annoyed because they were unable to understand what it was all about; for no book even remotely like it had ever appeared before. The book claimed to be edited by Victor Eremita, who makes use of the papers of “A” and “B” which were accidentally discovered. “A” is a brilliant young man who depicts in glowing terms the pleasures of the aesthetic life, but reveals from the very outset—in the Diapsalmata, which are Byronic expressions of despair—that this is not the way which leads to happiness. The extremest aberration of the aesthetic life is exemplified in the Seducer, whose diary concludes the first volume. Knowing that he himself might reasonably be identified with “A,” S.K. was careful to point out that this piece had another origin. He experienced more difficulty in writing “The Diary of the Seducer” than any other part of the work, and it gave him many pangs of conscience. It was meant to be deterrent in the highest degree, and he was disgusted to find that it was the most popular, the most attractive element in the book. With very questionable taste it was translated into English and into several other languages apart from its context and before any other complete composition by S.K. was known. “B” is an older man, happily married and occupying a responsible position, who tries to convince his young friend of the superiority of the ethical life. The reader is not told whether Judge William succeeded in convincing his young friend, or was perhaps seduced by him; and so is left free to choose for himself between the contrasted views of life which are here exemplified. Judge William is represented here as a bit prosy, as he might well be in the role of a moralist who is supported by conventional religious beliefs but has no compelling religious enthusiasm. Nevertheless, it was in the second part that Heiberg discovered a profundity of meaning which prompted him to counsel his readers to reread the first part and seek there a meaning which had likely escaped them, as it had escaped him.
Though Either/Or is by no means S.K.’s most admirable work even from a literary point of view, it was in his time the most popular, and perhaps it may be today. Though the brilliant papers of “A” are rather haphazard, and the Judge’s letters too long drawn out, the whole is clearly a proof of genius, its defects are due to the superabundance of ideas which S.K. simply had to “expectorate” or get off his chest. S.K.’s own “verdict” upon Either/Or is exuberant: “There was a young man, as richly gifted as an Alcibiades. He went astray in the world. In his need he looked about for a Socrates, but among his contemporaries he found him not. Then he begged the gods to transform him into one. And, lo, he who had been so proud of being an Alcibiades became so shamefaced and humbled at the gift of the gods that when he had received just what might properly have made him proud he felt himself inferior to all.”
In a certain sense the title is more important than the book. It became the name by which S.K. was commonly known to the man in the street. It represented in fact precisely what he stood for: a decisive choice between practical alternatives. S.K. understood “either/or” as the counterpart of the Hegelian “mediation,” of which he says, “Give that up, and there is no speculation; admit it, and there is no either/or.” He says in the Journal: “The fact that there is a plan in Either/Or which stretches from the first word to the last, likely never occurred to anybody, since the Preface treats the matter jestingly and utters never a word about speculation. What I am essentially concerned about with regard to the book as a whole is that the metaphysical significance at the bottom of it may become duly evident, the fact, namely, that everything brings one up squarely against the dilemma.”
Again he says: “What is either/or?—if it is I who must say it who surely must know. Either/or is the word at which the folding doors fly open and the ideals appear—O blessed sight! Either/or is the pass which admits to the absolute—God be praised! Yea, either/or is the key to heaven.” In another place he says, “Both-and is the way to hell.”
What prompted S.K. to write a book of this character? He himself alleges so many reasons that one may be in doubt which to accept. It was “a good deed” done for Regina, “The Diary of the Seducer” in particular was meant to “clarify her out of the relationship”; it had “a religious purpose”; it exemplified a metaphysical position; it was “an evacuation of the poetical,” “a necessary expectoration”; it was “a deceit” shrewdly planned to beguile men into the truth. We do not have to choose among these many reasons, for they were all operative, and there was one more which S.K. did not like to confess to himself: we have seen that while he sought to repel Regina he also desired to attract her, at least to let her see that he was not so base a scoundrel as he had pretended to be. There was an either/or addressed to her, and he addressed her more particularly in the Two Edifying Discourses which “accompanied” this book.
Reviewing the situation from a remote distance, he said in the year 1849: “It is true that as an author I had from the first a religious purpose; but there is another way of looking at the matter…. When in the Preface to the Two Edifying Discourses I used the expression, ‘that particular individual, “my reader,”’ I had her in mind especially, for that book contained a little hint to her, and especially at that particular time it was prodigiously true of me that I sought a single reader. Gradually this thought was assimilated”—i.e. it was generalized and became his favorite category, hiin Enkelte, the individual in distinction from the mass.
The religious purpose, though it is first made evident in the sermon with which the second part concludes, may also be discovered in the effort to show that the aesthetic life, ending in despair, prompts the individual to choose the ethical life, which at least is on the way to religion.
S.K. published this big book at his own expense, as he did all of his earlier works, to the number of thirteen. The booksellers received a commission of 25 percent, and he pocketed the gain—or the loss. This fact, in conjunction with S.K.’s frequent complaints that he had been obliged to “lay out money” on his works, gave some plausibility to the myth that, on the whole, he spent much more on his books than he received from the sale of them, and that a great part of his fortune vanished in this way. Only recently (in 1935), Professor Brandt and Else Rommel carried out an investigation which exploded this myth and proves that he not only made a considerable profit on the books he published at his own expense, but that, beginning with August 1847, all his subsequent works, nine of them, besides the nine numbers of the Instant, were undertaken by the publishers, who paid him the usual royalties. We must therefore understand his complaint to mean that, as writing was his profession, and as the laborer is worthy of his hire, his remuneration ought to have been sufficient to support him in the affluence which he required if he was to be kept in vein for an intensive production of such quality and such compass—and for this, unfortunately, it was not sufficient in a land so small as Denmark.
It is necessary to deal here, as compendiously as possible, with a question about which several books have been written to no profit—the reason why S.K. wrote anonymously, or rather pseudonymously. He himself alleges several reasons in the following passages, the first of which is from the “First and Last Declaration” which is appended to the Postscript. “My pseudonymity or polynymity has not an accidental reason in my person … but it has an essential reason in the character of the works,” which, as he says, required a thorough abandonment in the direction of one or another tendency such as is hardly to be found in a concrete individual. “So in the pseudonymous works there is not a single word which is mine.” “My wish, my prayer, is that, if it should occur to any one to quote a particular saying from these works, he would do me the favor to cite the name of the pseudonymous author in question.” The next is from The Point of View. “One will perceive the significance of the pseudonyms and why I must be pseudonymous with relation to all aesthetic productions, because I was leading my life in categories entirely different.” But obviously there were many more reasons than these. We can dismiss briefly the superficial reason sometimes alleged, that S.K. was simply following a fashion set by the Romanticists. This does not go far to explain a pseudonymity which was also a polynymity, not only in the sense that S.K. adopted various pseudonyms for different books, for in Repetition there were two authors involved, in Either/Or five, and in the Stages ten. S.K. remarked with roguish delight that the thing is like a Chinese toy—boxes within boxes. In part, therefore, his exuberant use of pseudonyms may be ascribed to his love for intrigue. But it evidently goes far deeper than that and reflects the lines of cleavage which he discovered in his own personality, which perhaps were not more marked or more profound than might be discovered in many men, but which certainly were analysed by his critical introspection more sharply than has ever been the case. No one has ever followed more diligently than he the Socratic maxim, “Know thyself.” Accordingly, his pseudonyms were for the most part personifications of aspects, or at least of possibilities, which he discovered in his own nature. He says in Repetition, “The individual has manifold shadows, all of which resemble him, and from time to time have equal claim to be the man himself.” This expresses the deepest reason for his use of polynymity, and in this use of them the pseudonyms are exceedingly instructive. He hints, for example, that his choice of the name Victor Eremita for the editor of Either/Or signifies that he himself was victor in the conflict which resulted in the choice of the ethical life, and that when he wrote this book he was living as if in a cloister. But this is not all there is to it. His introversion for a long time inhibited him from using what he called “direct communication,” and so, making a virtue of necessity, he practiced and extolled “indirect communication,” using the pseudonyms as instruments to this end. After 1848, when he experienced a metamorphosis which made it possible for him to speak out clearly, he renounced essentially the use of pseudonyms. It must be said, however, that if “indirect communication” was in the first instance forced upon him by his idiosyncrasy, which he learned to regard as a demoniac trait, it was, nevertheless, an apt form for meiotic instruction, the Socratic form; and S.K., even after he had abandoned it, would not admit that he had used it inappropriately. Indeed, in so far as “indirect communication” was imparted by the use of pseudonyms, it was the only way by which S.K. could have accomplished the novel task of “making a map of the emotional cosmos” (to use Swenson’s expression), of delineating the characteristic possibilities of the human soul, and thus devising a new sort of psychology in the interest of a philosophic valuation of life, or a comparative philosophy of values. To this end his characters, unlike those of the novelist, which must be quite humanly inconsistent, a mixture of good and bad, had to be inhumanly consistent, ideal exemplifications of a type, whether in the direction of good or evil, such as human life rarely, if ever, presents. But the pseudonyms also serve another use. Because S.K.’s thought was essentially dialectical, it had to be expressed in the form of dialogue, as was the teaching of Socrates; and because he had a dramatic instinct he took delight in this and was able to do it well. The two lengthy letters by Judge William which fill the second part of Either/Or would have been intolerably dull if S.K. had not contrived to enliven them by quasi-colloquies with the young friend. In Repetition two authors, Constantius and “the young man,” were needed to exemplify contrasted attitudes. In the Stages Judge William’s dissertation on marriage is the answer to the frivolous speeches at the Banquet, and Quidam is necessary to carry the movement on in the direction of religion.
Not quite two months after the publication of Either/Or there occurred on Easter (which that year fell upon April 16) an event, if we may call it such, which again gave a new direction to S.K.’s life. It is thus described in the Journal: “On Easter Sunday at evensong in the Church of Our Lady (during Mynster’s sermon) she nodded to me—I could not tell whether it signified entreaty or forgiveness, but in any case it was so friendly. I had seated myself in a retired place, but she discovered it! Would to God she had not done so! Now the sufferings of a year and a half are wasted, all my prodigious efforts—she still does not think that I was a deceiver, she believes in me. What trials now await her! The next will be the notion that I am a hypocrite. The higher up we get the more terrible it is—to suppose that a man with my sincerity, my religiousness could behave in that way!”
In the preliminary draft of Quidam’s Diary it is said that he was doubtful, in view of the distance, whether he apprehended aright, whether she actually did nod, or whether perhaps she was nodding to somebody else. In any case, it might have been “only for his eye that it had this immense significance.” Certainly this nod had immense significance for S.K. It prompted him to escape again to Berlin—not to forget “her,” but to reflect upon the possibility of reunion, and to write for her two more books, which presented a different either/or. He was not able to leave at once, for not till May 6 could he get ready for the printer the Two Edifying Discourses which were to “accompany” Either/Or. Two days later he was off. Some notion of his intellectual activity is given in a letter to Boesen which was posted on May 25: “I have finished one work which I regard as important [Repetition—written in less than a fortnight!] and am in full swing with a new one [Fear and Trembling], and my library is necessary as well as the printing-press. At the beginning I was ill, now I am well, so to speak—that is, my mind is expanding and presumably killing my body. I have never worked so hard as now. During the morning I go out for a little while. Then I come home and sit in my room uninterruptedly until about three o’clock. I can scarcely see out of my eyes. Thereupon I shuffle by the aid of my cane to the restaurant, but am so weak that I believe if any one were to call out my name aloud, I should fall over dead. Thereupon I go home and begin again. During the past months [in Copenhagen] I have been pumping up a veritable shower bath, now I have pulled the cord, and the ideas stream down upon me—healthy, happy, plump, merry, blessed children, easily brought to birth, and yet all of them bearing the birth marks of my personality.”
The two books which were written with such prodigious speed were from a literary point of view the most perfect he ever wrote. We may say again that no books remotely like them had ever before been produced. They were twins, for they were published on the same date, and both dealt with the same theme, his disappointed love; and yet they are as different one from the other as any two books can be. In both of them there are passages which only Regina could be expected to understand fully, or to understand the reason why they were included. Hence the name Johannes de silentio was adopted for the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling; hence too the choice of the motto for this book: “What Tarquinius Superbus in his garden said by means of the poppies was understood by the son but not by the messenger”; and hence Constantine Constantius, the pseudonymous author of Repetition says in his Letter to the Reader that “Clemens Alexandrinus did very well to write his book in such a way that the heretics could not understand it.”
S.K. took no little pride in inventing the category of “repetition” to supplant the Platonic “remembrance” and the Hegelian “mediation,” but it does not reappear in any of his subsequent works. It had a vivid interest for him at that moment because he treasured the hope of a repetition with “her.”
S.K. returned to Copenhagen sometime in July to get his books printed. But meanwhile something had happened, something he had shrewdly designed to bring about, but which took him completely by surprise when it did occur, and at first aroused his indignation. In June Regina had become engaged to Fritz Schlegel! In 1849, reviewing this experience, he wrote in his Journal: “When she had become engaged to Schlegel she met me in the street and greeted me in as friendly a way and as ingratiatingly as possible. I didn’t understand her, for at that time I knew nothing of the engagement. I merely looked at her questioningly and shook my head. Undoubtedly she supposed that I knew it and was looking for my approval.”
His bitter disillusionment was promptly expressed in the Journal: “The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes with regard to a matter of essential importance, to discover, for example, that the sum and substance of his sentiment is bosh. A person easily incurs this danger in his relation to another person—by believing, for example, in cries and screams. Here is a case where one needs to be stoutly built.”
S.K. certainly was not stoutly built, and yet he possessed a resiliency which enabled him to support this crushing experience and receive education from it. This, in fact, was the culmination of the religious crisis which was initiated by the breach of his engagement. In a remarkable passage in The Concept of Dread he described this experience as “education by possibility.” “No one ever sank so deep in reality that he could not sink deeper, and that there might not be one or another deeper sunken than he. But he who sank in possibility has an eye too dizzy to see the measuring rod which Tom, Dick and Harry hold out as a straw to the drowning man; his ear is closed so that he cannot hear what the market price for men is in his day, cannot hear that he is just as good as the most of them. He sank absolutely, but then again he floated up from the depth of the abyss, lighter now than all that is oppressive and dreadful in life.” He had already said (or at least Judge William said) in Either/Or: “The religious experience is essentially the expression of the confidence that man by God’s assistance is lighter than the whole world, the same sort of faith which makes it possible for a man to swim.” With evident reference to this experience of the swimmer, S.K. in subsequent works frequently described faith as “floating over 70,000 fathoms.”
S.K., impatiently, with a heart which was angry as well as bruised, went about the task of revising Repetition to correspond with the altered situation. He was too impatient to rewrite this book, as he did all the others, sometimes rewriting them twice, before he sent them to the printer. He simply changed a couple of words here and there, tore out the last ten pages or so, and rewrote the ending. These aesthetic works were again accompanied by a religious book which bore his own name, the Three Edifying Discourses, which to maintain the transparent fiction of anonymity were issued by a different publisher but appeared on the same day, October 16, 1843. Two of the discourses dealt with the text, “Love covereth a multitude of sins,” and the other with “Strengthened in the inner man.” By that time S.K. was so much strengthened in the inner man that he was able to write noble sermons ad se ipsum which furnish an invaluable commentary to the two aesthetic books. He called them “discourses,” not sermons, and he gives as his reason the fact that they are “without authority.” But he may have had in his own mind another reason which we can understand better, namely, that they are unlike any sermons that ever were preached or written.
From the fact that S.K. calls these books “aesthetic” it must not be inferred that they deal solely with love and other aesthetic themes; for here, as in Either/Or, there are metaphysical interests which are fundamental, and here for the first time in the pseudonymous works the religious interest is prominent. In particular the Christian idea of faith is illuminated in both books, and illuminated from different sides.
But I cannot stop to describe these books. I am ever mindful of the fact that I am writing a biography—and a very short one. I have devoted to the aesthetic works a disproportionate attention because they illuminate the greatest crisis in S.K.’s life. But even if I were writing a bigger book, I should not be disposed to describe S.K.’s books so fully that the reader might think it unnecessary to read them, now that they are available in English, nor would it be appriate to repeat here the ample introductions with which I have accompanied them. It is true that S.K.’s life consisted in his thought, to a degree which has hardly been equalled; but to delineate the development of his thought more completely than I here essay to do would be incompatible with the aim of writing a short biography, and if such a work needs to be done, it had better be done in a separate volume. The public is always clamoring for results, and the results of S.K.’s thought have often been presented in big volumes. But apart from the consideration that this task is perhaps beyond my powers, I am deterred by a scruple which S.K. pointedly suggests. For in his lifetime he was indignant with people who were “eating” him and putting him into paragraphs; and he insisted that what he offered was not “results,” but a method of reaching them, which every “subjective thinker” must follow for himself.
After the religious crisis which culminated in Regina’s engagement, S.K. was for a long while occupied in writing Edifying Discourses. He soon published a little book of four, then one of two, another of three, and finally, after a collection of four had appeared on August 3, 1844, they were all published together in one volume as Eighteen Edifying Discourses. Each collection had been piously dedicated to his father with the stereotyped phrase:
To the late
Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard
sometime hosier here in the city
my Father
these discourses are dedicated.
Each had also the same preface with slight variations. That of the first read: “In spite of the fact that this little book (which is called ‘discourses,’ not sermons, because the author has no authority to preach; ‘edifying discourses,’ not discourses for edification, because the speaker makes no claim whatever to be a teacher) wishes only to be what it is, a superfluity, and desires only to remain in retirement, as it was in concealment it had its origin, yet I have not taken leave of it without an almost romantic hope. Inasmuch as its publication implies that in a metaphorical sense it is about to start, as it were, upon a journey, I suffered my eye to follow it for a little while. I saw then how it made its way along solitary paths, or went solitary on the highways. After one and another misunderstanding, due to its being deceived by a casual resemblance, it encountered finally that single individual whom it sought, that individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that individual whom it seeks, to whom as it were it stretches out its arms, that individual who is willing enough to let himself be found, willing enough to receive it, whether at the moment of the encounter it finds him joyous and confident or weary and downcast.—In so far as its publication implies in a more literal sense that it stands stock still without budging from the spot, I let my eye rest upon it for a little while. So there it stood like an insignificant little flower in the cover of a great forest, not sought after either for its splendor, or for its sweet scent, or for its nourishing properties. But then I saw also, or fancied that I saw, how a bird which I call my reader suddenly cast an eye upon it, swooped down in its flight, plucked it and carried it off. And when I had seen this, I saw no more. Copenhagen, May 5, 1843.”
In the meantime (not to speak of the Philosophical Fragments, of which I shall speak in the next chapter) S.K. published on June 17, 1844, The Concept of Dread, a profound “psychological” analysis of the experience he had recently gone through on the way to faith. Because it had this relation to the aesthetic period of his life S.K. reckoned it among the “aesthetic” productions, although in other respects it was furthest removed from them and, as he confessed, had a tendency to “lecture,” i.e. to use direct communication. I regret that I can say no more about this book, since it is a work of immense importance, not only for an understanding of S.K.’s thought but for a comprehension of his development in the most critical period. He described it as “a simple deliberation on psychological lines in the direction of the dogmatic problem of original sin,” and he attributed it to a new pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis (i.e. the Watchman of Copenhagen). It was this serious book he dedicated to Poul Møller.
Stages on Life’s Way was published on April 30, 1845, and was accompanied by Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, which was published one day earlier. This big book, the last of the aesthetic works, is in a sense a repetition of Either/Or, for it has the same theme, and most of the pseudonyms of the earlier works reappear as actors in this piece. No other author has had the hardihood to repeat an earlier work in a totally different style. It is a marvel that the venture did not fail. In fact, S.K. produced nothing more brilliant than the speeches of the Banquet, Judge William proves to have something new to say about marriage, and Quidam’s Diary, which occupies two thirds of the book, tells the story of his love candidly, that is, not symbolically as he had told it in Repetition and Fear and Trembling. So in spite of being a repetition this book is very different from the four which preceded it. I have said of them that they are totally different from one another, and totally different from any book that has been written before or since. S.K. doubtless had in mind the extraordinary diversity of his literary production when he boasted that he had written “a literature within a literature.”
What prompted him to write this repetition of Either/Or was the consideration that the earlier book stopped with the ethical and was thus incomplete. He said of it that, like Aladdin’s palace, it was left with an unfinished window, and this lack he proposed to supply by adding a story entitled “Guilty?/Not Guilty?”—the story which is told in Quidam’s Diary, the story of his own love and its tragic ending. He proposed to write it immediately after he reached Berlin in 1843. An entry of May 17 of that year reads: “I have begun a new story entitled Guilty/Not Guilty; naturally it will contain things capable of astonishing the world, for during a year and a half I have been experiencing within myself more poetry than there is in all romances put together.” But then he goes on to say, “But I cannot and will not—my relationship to her shall not be evaporated into poetry, it has an entirely different sort of reality, she has not become a stage princess. If possible she shall become my wife.” So this story was kept for the Stages. It could not be written until Regina was irretrievably lost to him.
It is amazing that the entries in the Journal which were made during the two busy months in Berlin contain hardly any references to the books he was actually writing at that time, but refer to many of the themes which were developed two years later in the Stages—such as “The Two Lepers,” “The Ladies’ Tailor,” “Nebuchadnezzar,” and “The Mad Accountant.” From this we may see how copious was S.K.’s genius, which enabled him in a little more than two years to publish fourteen books, not to speak of the two large volumes which are filled with the Journals of that period and with the Papers, which include an unfinished philosophical work ascribed to Johannes Climacus. Originally the word poet meant creator. S.K. is clearly entitled to this name—not, of course, by the sheer quantity of his production, but by the quality of it, the variety, the spontaneity, the creative exuberance. In Danish, as in German, it does not sound paradoxical to call a man a poet who writes no verse, nor do we think it strange that Plato is called a poet. But if Plato was a poet, so was Kierkegaard; he too poetized philosophy, in the aesthetic works we look for poetry as a matter of course, but perhaps it is to be found at its best where we would least expect it, in the religious discourses. The Discourses which accompany the Stages, though they are not the most poetic, are among the most sublime. As a commentary to this book they are invaluable. One must read them to understand how it is that Quidam’s Diary leads up to and into the religious stage.