Notes
NOTES
PART ONE
Preface
1. See ‘The Fourth Night’, verses 629–30, in The Complaint, or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, by Edward Young, the eighteenth-century English poet. Kierkegaard’s text inverts the lines, here reproduced as in the original.
2. See Hegel’s Logic, tr. William Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, paras. 138ff., pp. 196ff.
3. Xerxes is said to have had the Hellespont whipped because his first bridge over it (of boats) was destroyed by a storm (Herodotus, VII, 35).
4. ‘Diapsalmata’ is the plural Greek form for the Hebrew selah, a word that recurs in the Psalms of David at the end of a verse, and which can easily acquire the meaning, as apparently here, of ‘refrains’, i.e. something (for example a mood) repeated over and over again.
5. ‘To himself.’ Latin version of the Greek title to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180). The work is regarded as a noble expression of philosophical heathenism.
6. The exploits of the dim-witted people of Mols (Molboerne), in Jutland, are legendary in Scandinavia. In one story their plan to farm fish (including, naturally, salt herring) in the village pool was defeated because one of the fish was an eel, which ate all the others. Since burning, hanging, and whipping were too good for it, they decided to drown the eel at sea. On being returned to its element, the eel thrashed its tail joyfully, which the Mols people understood to be its writhing in terrible death pangs. See V. Fausböll, Beretning om de vidtbekjendte Molboers vise Gjerninger og tapre Bedrifter, Fr. Wöldikes Forkgsboghandel, Kjöbenhavn, 1862, pp. 5–6, 45–6. Much the same story is to be found in the English The Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham, from the early seventeenth century.
7. April 7th did in fact fall on a Monday in 1834.
8. A Danish opera based on Walter Scott’s The Monastery.
9. The phrasing is from 1 Corinthians 7.29–31.
1 Diapsalmata
1. By Paul Pelisson (1624–93). It is thought that Kierkegaard got it from Lessing’s Zerstreute Anmerkungen über das Epigramm:
Rank, knowledge, renown,
Friendship, pleasure and means,
All is but wind, but smoke:
To say it better, all is nought.
2. Phalaris, ruler of Agrigentum in Sicily from about 570 to 564 B.C., is said to have kept a brazen bull in which he burnt his victims alive, the first being the bull’s inventor. Reeds were placed in the nostrils of the bull to turn the cries into music.
3. Dean (Jonathan) Swift, the satirist, died insane in 1745.
4. David Hartley (1705–57), English physician and moral philosopher, whose main works were an Enquiry into the Origin of the Human Appetites and Affections, Lincoln, 1747, and Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty and his Expectations, London, 1749 (an abridged version of which was published by his friend, the scientist Joseph Priestley, under the title Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind on the Principle of Association of Ideas, London, 1775.
5. In Hebrew grammar a sheva is a sign consisting of two dots placed under a consonant letter to indicate the absence of a vowel; a dagesh lene is a point placed in a letter indicating that it is unaspirated.
6. Turkish officer whose rank is denoted by the number of horse-tails displayed as symbols of war.
7. Said of the ‘hypocrites’ in an incorrect (but since Kierkegaard’s time corrected) version of Matthew 6.16 in the Danish Bible. According to the text the hypocrites ‘have their reward’, but (it is ironically implied) not as they suppose.
8. Lynceus was the most keen-sighted of the Argonauts. The giants overcome by the gods (with the help of Hercules) were buried beneath mountains (including Etna) and were the cause of volcanic eruptions. Echo was a nymph who engaged Hera in incessant conversation so that Zeus could carry on with the other nymphs. On discovering this ruse, Hera had Echo turned into an echo, in which state she fell in love with Narcissus but, on her love being unrequited, pined away and remained merely a voice.
9. See Goethe’s Faust, part 1, stage instruction before verse 968 (English tr. Bayard Taylor, Euphorion Books, London, n.d., p. 61).
10. In the Middle Ages the Roman poet Virgil was thought to have been a sorcerer.
11. ‘The same in the same.’
12. The story is found in Athenaeus’s Banquet of the Learned, a collection of anecdotes, quotations and discussions, from the fifth century (7 vols., Loeb Library). Trophonius’s cave was his oracle in the grove of Lebadaea where he had been swallowed up by the earth. Trophonius and his brother, Agamedes, had built the treasury of the king of Boeotia in such a way that they could secretly rob it.
13. The text has Justitsraad, a titular counsellor of justice.
14. Fenris or Fenrir, the wolf of sin in Scandinavian mythology, and one of the three children of Loki (the god of strife and spirit of evil). The others were Jørmungand (a monstrous serpent) and Hel (half corpse, half queen). When Fenris gaped, one jaw touched earth and the other heaven. In the Ragnarok Fenris swallows the sun and conquers Odin but, on being conquered by Vidar, who thrust his thick shoe into Fenris’s gaping jaws, was thrown into Niflheim (the ‘mist-home’ of those who die of old age or disease), where Loki was confined.
15. Quoted by Kierkegaard from Møinichen, Nordiske Folks Overtroe, Guder, Fabler og Helte, Kjøbenhavn, 1800, p. 101. Kierkegaard has ‘the bear’s grass’ where the original (and also Kierkegaard’s original manuscript) has ‘the bear’s sinews’. See also P. A. Munch, Norrøne gude- og heltesagn, revised, ed., Anne Holtsmark (ed.), Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, 1967, pp. 50, 53–4.
16. ‘Thou art fulfilled, thy nightwatch of my life.’ The origin is not known.
17. Cf. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer III B 123. The Lüneburger heath is in southern Saxony.
18. See Genesis 2.17, and The Sickness unto Death, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 48: ‘to die death itself’.
19. Kierkegaard is referring to the Megarian philosopher, Stilpo (c.380–c.300 B.C.), who denied the possibility of predication. One cannot say ‘The man is good’, because ‘man’ does not mean the same as ‘good’.
20. A reference to Hegel’s Logic, tr. William Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975. Hegel gives as examples of infinite judgements: ‘The mind is no elephant’, ‘Mind is mind’ (p. 238).
21. Cf. Hegel, ibid., on ‘pure being’ as ‘nothing’, ‘making the beginning’ (pp. 124–6).
22. C. F. Sintenis, German author of a book of devotions called Stunden für Ewigkeit gelbt (‘Hours Lived for Eternity’), Berlin, 1791.
23. ‘Nyboder’ is the name of a row of houses built in Copenhagen for families of sailors in the Royal Danish Navy. There was an orphanage attached which was destroyed by fire in 1817, and several children perished. In his description of Elysium, Virgil describes infants weeping at the frontier (Aeneid, VI, 426ff.).
24. Exodus 12.23.
2. The Immediate Erotic Stages
1. ‘Optimates’ was the name for the aristocratic party in ancient Rome.
2. Perhaps a reference to Christian H. Weisse, whose System der Aesthetik (Leipzig, 1830) Kierkegaard possessed; though perhaps also to the aesthetic views of the local littérateur and Hegelian, J. L. Heiberg.
3. ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, a mock-epic poem, still extant, formerly attributed to Homer but now thought to be of later origin.
4. A Receptionsstykke was the painting artists had to produce for admission to the Art Academy.
5. See Acts 1.9: ‘And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up, and a cloud received him out of their sight.’ Romulus is also said to have been translated to heaven in a cloud. Cf. Papirer I, p. 85.
6. Hegel’s expression is Gestaltung.
7. There is a continual problem in translating the Danish Sandselighed, which covers both ‘sensuous’ and ‘sensual’. But since these two terms are also comparatively ambiguous, and while ‘sensuous’ can have the neutral sense of what pertains in general to the senses, and ‘sensual’ conveys fairly clearly the focus on pleasure from sensation relevant in this context, I have consistently chosen the latter. The word translated as ‘spirit’ here is Genialitet, which can also be translated ‘genius’, but which is also ambiguous. One must be careful to distinguish this from ‘spirit’ (Aand) in the sense that Kierkegaard sharply distinguishes from sensuality. The context should make the meaning clear.
8. An enclitic is typically an unaccented word that can modify the accent of a word it follows.
9. Eros fell in love with Psyche, which gives a point to the remark just below about his love’s being based on the psychic, or qualities of soul, rather than the sensual.
10. The ‘demonic’ in Kierkegaard is conscious fear or hatred of the recognizably good. See, for example, The Sickness unto Death, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 103.
11. Whenever Cato (234–149 B.C.) was called upon to vote in the Roman Senate, even if the subject under debate bore no relation to Carthage, he pronounced the words ‘Carthage is to be destroyed’ (Delenda est Carthago) preceded by ‘In addition I vote for …’.
12. Or ‘stranger at the gate’; a Gentile convert to the Jewish faith who did not submit to circumcision but abstained from offering sacrifice to heathen gods and from working on the sabbath.
13. Leipzig, 1819–21, pp. 82ff. Henrich Steffens (1773–1845) was a philosopher, scientist and novelist, born in Stavanger in Norway, and of Danish and German descent. The work in question treats of the relation of sight and hearing to the other, ‘lower’ senses.
14. The story is told in Owen Tudor, Werke II, p. 260.
15. This treats of a changeling who puts everything, living or dead, under a spell by his playing. Cf. the brothers Grimm’s ‘Der kleine Sackpfeifer’.
16. ‘Opera seria’ is the name applied to Italian opera in the period from about 1650 to 1740, when – especially in the hands of Alessandro Scarlatti – the musical and artistic features were accentuated and given an ever more typical form, including the climactic and general finale.
17. ‘And appears to be floating in the air.’ Cf. Virgil’s Georgics, I, 404.
18. In Thor’s contest with Urgard-Loke/Loki. See P. A. Munch, Norrøne gude- og heltesagn, Universitetsforkget, Oslo, 1967, pp. 100–102.
19. The original, in Leporello’s ‘list aria’, has ‘Delle vecchie fa conquista/Pel placer di porle in lista’, which can be roughly translated as ‘He conquers the old for the pleasure of adding to the list’. Kierkegaard’s is from a Danish version.
20. Where the Countess kissed Cherubino when he was disguised as a girl.
21. Julius Caesar’s cryptic account to the Roman Senate of his victory (47 B.C.) at Zela, in Asia Minor, over Mithridates’ son Pharnaces who had aided Pompey in the civil war.
22. ‘The farmer stands waiting, while the river flows by.’ Horace, Letters, I, 2, 42.
23. 1 Samuel 16.14ff.
24. Perhaps a reference to the Danish poet Hauch’s poem, The Mountain Maiden. Cf. ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ (‘St Anthony of Padua preaches to the Fish’), from the anthology Des Knaben Wunder-horn (1805–8), familiar in Gustav Mahler’s song version.
25. While Kierkegaard refers to the opera as Don Juan, this translation adheres to the familiar Italian title. However, in discussing the traditional motif of the opera it is necessary to use the original name of its hero or villain.
26. Kierkegaard employs the Latin forms sub una specie and sub utraque specie, used in communion at Catholic worship, of the bread alone or the bread and the wine.
27. The Greek word means ‘stumbling block’ or ‘offence’. Here the latter is intended.
28. The mountain of delight and love where Venus holds court and Eckhardt the Faithful warns human beings against entering for fear of perdition.
29. ‘If she wears a petticoat/You know what he does.’
30. Cf. Mark 12.41–44.
31. Armuth, Reichtum, Schuld und Busse der Gräfin Dolores, Werke VIII, p. 25. Kierkegaard goes one better by making Arnim’s Grossmutter (‘grandmother’), a great-grandmother.
32. I have tried to capture the pun here on the Danish gjör Lykke, det lykkes (‘succeed’, ‘have success’) with gjör lykkelig (‘make happy’), by using the related English notion of luck and being lucky.
33. L. Kruse arranged the libretto for the Danish version (Copenhagen, 1807).
34. Among the mysteries, or secret cults, the most important were those at Eleusis in honour of Demeter and Dionysus. The Great Eleusinia were preceded by a preparatory celebration, or the lesser mysteries.
35. Molière’s Don Juan ou le festin de pierre was first produced in 1665.
36. K. A. Musaeus, Volksmärchen der Deutschen, Gotha, 1782–6; J. L. Tieck (1773–1853) was a German poet.
37. For example, to Gluck’s music (first performed in Vienna in 1761).
38. With the creditor Monsieur Dimanche, Act 4, scene 3.
39. In a sentence omitted here Kierkegaard makes use of an ambiguity in the Danish Stemmefleerhed (related to that in the English ‘plurality’) as between a plurality of voices (more than one) and there being a majority of votes, the Danish word for ‘vote’ (Stemme) being the same as that for ‘voice’. The sentence says that in its ordinary use, this notion refers to a unity that is the end result, as is not the case in music.
41. ‘You stay inside with your fair lady.’
42. A reference to Holberg’s Barselstuen, where Jeronimus turned up when he was most needed.
3 Ancient Tragedy’s Reflection in the Modern
1. A Greek expression coined by Kierkegaard, which can be roughly translated as ‘the fellowship of buried lives’.
2. Cf. Aristotle’s Poetics.
3. 1 Chronicles 21.
4. Cf. Cicero, De divinations II, 51; De natura deorum I, 71. Kierkegaard confuses the Roman augurs with the Etruscan prophets and soothsayers, about whom Cato recounts that he could not understand how they could look at one another without laughing.
5. A Danish newspaper in March 1839 had a report to this effect about Thiers.
6. A street warden (Gadecommissair or Gadefoged) was responsible for seeing that the streets were clean.
7. See Aristotle’s Poetics, Chapter 6.
8. ibid., Chapter 13.
9. Pelagius (c. 360–c. 431), reputedly of British origin, denied the doctrine of original sin, played down the importance of divine ‘grace’, and rejected the subordination of ethics to religious dogma. His individualistic view ran counter to that of Augustine, who nevertheless held Pelagius in great respect.
10. Chr. D. Grabbe, Faust und Don Juan: Eine Tragödie, Frankfurt, 1829.
11. For example the Latin partim, an adverb meaning ‘partly’, was once an accusative of the substantive pars (‘part’).
12. Aristotle, Poetics, Chapter 6, and G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, vol. II, p. 1197.
13. Hegel, op. cit., p. 1198. Kierkegaard quotes the German.
14. Hebrews 10.31.
15. Exodus 20.5; 34.7.
16. The Philoctetes is a tragedy by Sophocles. Philoctetes was the most famous archer in the Trojan War and one of Helen’s suitors. He was left on the island of Lemnos because a wound in his foot produced such a stench, and remained there for ten years before being rescued by Ulysses and Diomedes.
17. Philoctetes, verses 732ff.
18. The principle of inertia: that by which matter continues in its existing state, whether rest or motion, unless affected by an external force.
19. Labdacus, son of the Theban king, Polydorus, numbered Oedipus, Polynices, Eteocles and Antigone among his descendants (known collectively as Labdacidae).
20. ‘Whom the god would destroy, he first makes mad.’
21. Robert, first Duke of Normandy, was given to the devil by his mother before his birth and kter lived up to the relevant expectations. The story is found in a thirteenth-century verse romance.
22. In Northern mythology Hogne was the son of Grimhild and a troll.
23. Matthew 6.19–20.
24. An attempt to predispose in favour of one’s case.
25. Virgin mother.
26. Antigone, verse 850. The present translator’s own translation. Kierkegaard quotes the Greek with a German translation in a footnote.
27. ‘Which she does not meditate upon in her heart.’
28. Sophocles, The Trachinian Maidens, verse 1159. Hercules died from the blood of a centaur which had been poisoned when Hercules killed him with a poisoned arrow.
4 Shadowgraphs
1. Kierkegaard quotes these two poems in German. The second, Gestern liebt’ich, is from Lessing’s Song from the Spanish., Sämmtliche Schriften (Maltzahn) I, p. 240.
2. 1 Kings 19.11–12: ‘And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.’
3. Cf. Psalms 18.15: ‘Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.’
4. In Hesiod’s Theogony (verses 123ff.) the night is the daughter of chaos and mother of the ether and day.
5. Art here is of course painting and sculpture. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) was a German scholar and critic who, in the essay referred to here, attacked the neo-classical conception of antique beauty. Laocoön was a Trojan priest whose destruction, along with his two sons, by two serpents is the subject of a famous work of ancient art, found in 1506 and now in the Vatican. The effect of Lessing’s essay was partly to free art from religious and social pressures and to focus attention on the artistic process itself.
6. For a parallel see Kierkegaard’s later work, The Sickness unto Death, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1989, p. 104, where the topic is not sorrow or grief but despair.
7. Veronica is said to have dried the face of Jesus on his way to Golgotha, his image being allegedly left on the cloth. ‘Veronica’ means ‘true image’.
8. In Homer and Virgil, Proteus is the prophetic old man of the sea, whom one could only consult at midday when he rose from the sea and slept in the shade of the rocks. He assumed all possible shapes to slip free and avoid having to prophesy but, as here, told the truth when he saw there was nothing else for it.
9. 1 Samuel 28.7–19.
10. Tantalus, son of Zeus, divulged secrets entrusted to him by the latter, and after death was punished in the underworld by being afflicted with a raging thirst and at the same time placed in a lake whose waters receded every time he tried to drink (Homer, Odyssey, XI, 582ff.). Sisyphus, king of Corinth, was also punished in the underworld after his death for fraud and avarice. He had to roll a marble block to the top of a hill, whereupon it constantly rolled down again (Homer, Odyssey, XI, 593).
11. The wise man was Simonides. See Cicero, De natura deorum, I, 60.
12. See 1 Peter 3.4: ‘But let it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible, even the ornament of a quiet and meek spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.’
13. ‘Persecuted church.’
14. ‘Mediation’ is the Hegelian term for a process of resolving conceptual oppositions or mutual exclusions into higher conceptual unities. For instance, the belief that public service or conformity with public regulations conflicts with personal freedom can be ‘mediated’ in the realization that, properly understood, the latter depends on the former, so that freedom is merely ‘abstract’ if not so conceived.
15. In the Danish adaptation. There is no such hint in the original text, though in the final version Elvira says at the very end that she will retire to a convent to end her life there.
16. Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin. Oehlenschläger (1779–1850) was a Danish poet.
17. The Danish adaptation of Lorenzo da Ponte’s libretto.
18. As she does in Kruse’s version.
19. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 469.
20. This is a gibe at Hegelians who believed all contradictions and either/or’s could be ‘mediated’. See note 14 above.
21. In Kierkegaard’s time the name of homes for the rehabilitation of female moral down-and-outs.
22. Kierkegaard’s word is smugler (‘smuggler’).
23. Bayard Taylor’s translation, Euphorion Books, London, n.d., Part 1 scene xx, p. 123.
24. The story of Margrete is Goethe’s own addition to the Faust legend.
25. Privatdocent is an unsalaried academic position paid by attendance.
26. Faust Part 1, scene xvi, tr. Bayard Taylor, op. cit., pp. 113–16.
27. ‘Dear God! However is it such/ A man can think and know so much? / I stand ashamed and in amaze, / And answer “Yes” to all he says, / A poor, unknowing child! and he – / I can’t think what he finds in me!’, Faust, Part 1, scene xiii, tr. Bayard Taylor, ibid., p. 108.
28. In Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre, IV, Chapter 13, towards the end.
29. A character in Swedish folklore. Cf. ‘The Blue Bird’ in Bäckström’s Svenska Folkböcker.
5 The Unhappiest One
1. Freely translated from Christen Henriksen Pram’s allegorical heroic poem. ‘Stærkodder’, Copenhagen, 1785, 77th song, p. 142.
2. Orestes was pursued by the Eumenides (avenging deities or furies) after killing his mother, but took refuge in the temple of Athena, where he was acquitted. They begin to pursue this unhappiest man only when he gets to his ‘temple’.
3. Cf. Romans 1.1: ‘Paul a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated [aphorismenos] unto the gospel of God …’.
4. Herodotus tells (Histories, I, 86) how the sage Solon told the victorious Croesus, last king of Lydia (560–546 B.C.), that no man should be considered happy until he had finished his life happily. Later, in defeat and condemned to be burnt to death, Croesus recalled Solon’s warning as he stood beside the pyre and called out his name three times.
5. The unhappy consciousness is a form of consciousness that Hegel thought characteristic of the belief that human value is not an inherent possession of humanity but vested in a transcendent God. Christianity, with its belief in the restoration of human value by worship, revelation and grace, is a typical, if not indeed the paradigmatic example. One way of describing the unhappy consciousness is in terms of the fundamental separation of the individual conscious subject (subjectivity) and the eternal scheme of things (substance). Hegel’s philosophy made a case for the mutual identity of these in the notion of the absolute, a case that Kierkegaard devoted much of his earlier writings to attacking.
6. ‘The third nut is death.’ Clemens Brentano, ‘The Three Nuts’.
7. Ancaeus was son of Poseidon and king of Samos. Just as he was about to taste a new wine which the oracle had warned him against, he was killed by a wild boar. Kierkegaard quotes the proverb in Greek.
8. Latona (Leto), daughter of the Titan Coeus and Phoebe, and mother of Apollo and Artemis, by Zeus. Persecuted by Hera for her relation to Zeus, she wandered from place to place until she came to Delos, then a floating island, where she gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. Contrary to the mention of darkness here, the Hyperboreans were said to live beyond the North Wind in a land of perpetual sunshine.
9. In retribution for her pride at giving birth to such a large number of children (reputedly fourteen), compared with Leto’s two (see previous note), Niobe’s children were all slain by Artemis and Apollo. On Mount Sipylus Zeus changed her into a great stone which in the summer always shed tears.
10. Job 1.21.
6 Crop Rotation
1. Kierkegaard frequently lampoons the way in which the ‘negative’, or antithesis, in the Hegelian dialectic is made to generate on its own the ‘movement’ leading to the resolution of oppositions in a higher unity. He writes elsewhere of the ‘indefatigable activity’ of the negative in Hegel’s philosophy, and of how it ‘gives logical thoughts feet to walk on’ (The Concept of Dread, tr. W. Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957, p. 12).
2. According to the first-century Roman satirist Juvenal, bread and circuses were all the Roman citizen desired (Satires X, 81).
3. Denmark had instituted a legislative assembly, or States General, eight years previously.
4. Saxo Grammaticus tells us this in the beginning of Book 6, Gesta Danorum.
5. ‘For just anyone.’
6. Aristotle (Politics, I, 2, 1253a) says that ‘the state belongs to the class of objects which exist by nature, and … man is by nature a political animal’, by which he means that man’s natural habitat is the polis, or city-state.
7. ‘Idleness is the devil’s pillow.’
8. See note 10, p. 613. The ‘demonic’, for Kierkegaard, is a refusal to acknowledge goodness or truth. Boredom becomes true for someone only when it is opposed or annulled from a point of view that favours industry, or idleness.
9. In Hegelian philosophy a concept contains its opposite, not just in the uncontroversial sense that in order to define, say, ‘full’ one must also have (‘posit’) the concept of emptiness, but also in the sense that identifying a case of fullness is somehow to have the opposite concept of emptiness simultaneously and ‘interestingly’ in mind.
10. ‘Tired of Europe.’ The expression was a catchword at the time.
11. An expression of Hegel’s. The ‘bad infinite’ is the notion of an endless progression or infinite perpetuation, as against the notion of an infinite that somehow contains all that is finite.
12. Kierkegaard’s misreading of a passage from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (VI, 2), which says, ‘To recover your life is in your power. Look at things as you used to look at them, for in this lies the recovery of your life.’ Aurelius was adopted by Pius Antoninus and was commonly called ‘the philosopher’.
13. The gifts were fire and bund hope. See Aeschylus, Prometheus, verses 25off. ‘Prometheus’ means ‘forethought’.
14. ‘To wonder at nothing.’
15. The river Lethe in Hades from which the shades drank and obtained oblivion.
16. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 417ff. On the advice of the Sibyl, Aeneas gives Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the entrance of Hades, drugged honey-cakes to lull it to sleep.
17. At drikke Duus, (‘to drink thou’s’) was part of a ceremony of discarding the formal pronoun of address.
18. See Ludvig Holberg’s one-act comedy Mester Gert Westphaler, scene viii.
19. ‘To want the same and not want the same makes for a firm friendship’ (Sallust, Catilina, 20).
20. As in S. S. Blicher’s ‘Kjœltringsliv (‘Life of a Scoundrel’). Blicher (see footnote to the motto to the translator’s introduction, p. 1 above) was a priest who became a gifted short-story writer whose growing literary preoccupations led to his being defrocked the year before his death (1848).
21. Jens Baggesen (1764–1826) was a Danish poet.
22. J. H. W. Tischbein (1751–1829), the famous German painter and friend of Goethe.
23. ‘Ready to march.’
7 The Seducer’s Diary
1. ‘His ruling passion is the young beginner.’ From Leporello’s ‘list’ aria.
2. ‘Running commentary No. 4.’
3. ‘Excitement of the brain.’
4. As Christ, according to the Gnostics, is said to have done. They believed it would be unfitting for the Logos to assume actual flesh and blood, so the body was said to be ‘parastatic’ (lit. ‘near to’).
5. Ixion, king of the Lapithae, was taken to heaven by Zeus to purify him after he had killed his father-in-law. But there he attempted to win the love of Hera (Juno), and Zeus created a cloud resembling Hera, by which Ixion fathered a centaur.
6. ‘Action at a distance’ (with its correlate ‘action by contact’) is a concept that has been used in natural science to denote phenomena such as magnetism, gravitation, and even human speech, where there is, or has been assumed that there is, no intervening medium in which an action takes place continuously.
7. J. W. Goethe, Jery und Bätely, Werke XI. ‘Go then – scorn fidelity. Remorse will follow.’
8. 1 Samuel 12.
9. In Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Die wilde Engländerin’, in Das Zauberschloss (Schriften, Berlin, 1853, XXI, p. 238) a beautiful English noblewoman, out riding with a lord, quarrelled with her companion. On dismounting too quickly she had her riding habit torn off, whereupon she hid for a week but then realized she loved the lord and would marry him. The real entanglement, however, was that she had been put off marriage by reading an anatomy textbook as a child and had devoted herself instead to the study of astronomy and other sciences, refusing all suitors. Although a suitor, her companion on this occasion had been allowed to accompany her only because he also had scientific interests.
10. Georges Cuvier, a French scientist, who claimed one could reconstruct a whole animal from a single bone.
11. A parodying reference to Hegel’s famous remark, ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’. See Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr. T. M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1952, p. 10. It is often forgotten that by ‘real’ Hegel meant not just whatever happens to exist, but what is ‘actual’ in the sense of ‘actualized’, again in the sense of ‘having realized its inherent, even essential, possibilities’.
12. In the Danish adaptation of Don Giovanni.
13. In Holberg’s Erasmus Montanus, Act 5, scene v. This version departs slightly from the original.
14. An esplanade along Copenhagen’s seafront.
16. Genesis 39.7–19. It was Joseph who left his garment in Potiphar’s wife’s hand.
17. ‘Klintekong’, or King of the Cliff, was a mythical figure.
18. It was believed in antiquity that the kingfisher built its nest on the sea.
19. The hospital attendants wore green uniforms.
20. A bayadère is a Hindu dancing-girl.
21. As in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice.
22. Ovid, Ars amandi, II, 235: ‘Night and winter, and long roads and cruel pains, in this unwarlike camp there is all manner of exertion.’
23. Preciosa is a lyric drama by Wolff, with music by Weber.
24. Where Øster Voldgade now lies. The path lay behind the fortifications. Kierkegaard often walked here, and sometimes met Regine.
25. In Raphael’s painting, Psyche is carried up to heaven by cupids.
26. Genesis 41.32: ‘And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it to pass.’
27. Shakespeare, King Lear, Act I, scene i. Cordelia says: ‘I cannot heave my heart into my mouth’. Kierkegaard read Shakespeare only in German translation.
28. The source of the name is not clear.
29. The practice of buying up goods privately before they reach the public market, to enhance the price. The Danish Forprang can be translated as ‘forestalling’, which indeed derives its sense from this context (see OED). Prang means unlicensed dealing.
30. ‘What before was impulse is now method.’ Ovid, Remedia amoris, verse 10.
31. Literally ‘go aground’ and by extension ‘go to rack and ruin’. In Hegel, however, the expression is used in the positive sense of something’s more nearly reflecting its ‘ground’ or ‘essence’. See Hegel’s Logic, tr. W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, section 120, p. 175.
32. ‘Fritz’ was the name of Regine Olsen’s second fiancé, who later became her husband. Originally Kierkegaard had used this name instead of Edvard, but for obvious reasons changed it. The reason for the original choice of name is found in this reference to a comedy, La Fiancée, with music by Auber and libretto by the influential dramatist A. E. Scribe, translated by J. L. Heiberg, in which Fritz is jilted by his girlfriend because of his awkwardness or stupidity.
33. ‘The one is madly in love,/The other would like to be.’ From Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem, ‘Vor der Stadt’.
34. From a Norwegian peasant song. See A. Caen, Folke-Visebog, 1847, Vol. I, pp. 114ff.
35. Phaethon was given permission by his father, the sun god Helios, to drive the chariot of the sun across the heavens for one day, but Phaethon was too weak to control the horses and when they got off track the chariot almost set the earth on fire.
36. ‘Ulysses was not handsome, but he was eloquent, and he caused the sea goddesses [Circe and Calypso] to be tormented with love.’ Cf. Ovid, Ars amandi, II, 123.
37. 1 Samuel 3.4–10.
38. Thekla’s song is from Schiller’s tragedy The Piccolomini. It combines the thoughts of love and death, as does also ‘Lenore’.
39. Vilhelm is the dead lover in Bürger’s ‘Lenore’.
40. ‘According to mankind’s universal agreement.’
41. ‘Spontaneous generation.’
42. Plato’s Apology, 39c.
43. Trop is a carnival tout in Heiberg’s The Reviewer and the Beast. Dyrehaug was a summer pleasure-ground whose facilities were transferred in 1843 (the year Either/Or was published) to the centre of Copenhagen to form the famous Tivoli.
44. ‘Close at hand’ or ‘at a distance’.
45. Ovid, Amores, I, 4, 16 and 44.
46. ‘The secretly blushing cheek reflects the glow of the heart.’
47. Student accommodation in the centre of Copenhagen on Købmagergade.
48. A pun in Danish on at frie til hende (‘to propose to her’) and at frie hende (‘to set her free’).
49. As Don Giovanni does when the statue of the Commendatore knocks.
50. A slight confusion on Kierkegaard’s part. It was Rachel, not Rebecca, who was involved, and Jacob who ‘stole Laban’s heart’, Rachel only taking over the household gods. See Genesis 31, 9–34. The Hebrew expression is not reproduced in the King James version, as it is in the Danish Bible. One deceived people by stealing their hearts, because the heart was the seat of intelligence.
51. ‘Agnete, she swayed, she sank, she fell.’ Baggesen, Agnete fra Holmegaard (Danske Vœrker, II, p. 195).
52. A reference to Kierkegaard’s contemporary, the Danish writer J. L. Heiberg: ‘a curate can become old, and keep himself alive with hope’ (Prosaiske Skrifter, X, p. 25).
53. Though Cardea, as guardian of door hinges, was the protectress of family life (Cardo = ‘hinge’), Janus was of course the guardian deity of gates.
54. Aeolus, ruler of the Aeolian islands, to whom Zeus had given charge of the winds, which Aeolus kept locked up in a cave.
55. Ariadne helped Theseus escape from the Labyrinth and the Minotaur with the help of a spool of thread.
56. Cf. Mark 3.24.
57. Genesis 30.28–40.
58. A mural painting from Herculaneum, now in Naples, showing Theseus, who had abducted Ariadne, leaving her on Naxos.
59. As is told of Echo, who fell in love with Narcissus.
60. In 1837 this newspaper (issue 86, pp. 219ff. and 235ff.) published a piece satirizing servant girls for dressing like ladies.
61. A dig at N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), leader of a populist religious movement who frequently described his own goals as ‘matchless’ and a ‘golden age’.
62. The terminology is self-consciously, and ironically, Hegelian.
63. Proverbs 24.26, following Luther’s translation: ‘Eine richtige Antwort ist wie ein lieblicher Kuss.’
64. Plato, Phaedrus, Chapters 31ff.
65. ‘Pendet ab ore magistri.’
66. Sound-image (klangfigur) or so-called Chladni figure (after their discoverer, the German acoustician, E. F. F. Chladni, 1756–1827), which occurs on, for example, a glass plate, covered lightly with sand and held at one point, when sounded with a violin bow.
67. A huge statue on the Nile which gave out musical sounds when the rays of the morning sun fell on it. The Greeks called ‘Memnonium’ or ‘Memnonia’ certain ancient buildings and monuments which they supposed were erected in honour of Memnon, the beautiful son of Tithonius and Eos (goddess of the dawn) and king of the Ethiopians.
68. ‘The wife’s dowry is quarrels.’ Ars amandi, II, 155.
69. See Homer, Iliad, XIV, 214ff. Venus’s (Aphrodite’s) magic girdle made anyone who wore it an object of love and desire. The girdle contained ‘yearning and bantering speech’ and ‘the flattering prayer which beguiled even the wise man’.
70. Tusindfryd (‘a thousand joys’) is the Danish name for the English daisy (Bellis perennis).
71. ‘The die is cast.’ Said to be Caesar’s words on crossing the river Rubicon, which separated his own province from Italy proper, and so declaring war on the republic.
72. In The Arabian Nights, Scheherazade, by enthralling the Sultan with her stories, persuades him to spare her life for a thousand and one nights. The Sultan had vowed to take a new sultana every evening and strangle her the next day, a vow which, out of gratitude to Scheherazade, he eventually revoked.
73. ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear’, a favourite line of Caligula’s.
74. The water-lily.
75. ‘Upriser’ (from the Greek anaduomein – to come or rise up, especially from the sea). The model is Aphrodite.
76. Ovid, Metamorphoses, IV, 64ff. The lovers lived in adjoining houses and conversed secretly through an opening in the wall since their parents would not allow them to marry.
78. Horace, Odes, II, 8.
79. From the Danish poet and playwright A. G. Oehlenschläger’s Palnatoke, Act 5, scene ii. The play concerns the conflict between Christianity and Paganism.
80. In terms of the category most appropriate to her. The passage that follows is a playful but intelligible excursion into Hegelian dialectics, in which the categories of being-for-self and being-for-another are fundamental (see, for example, Hegel’s Logic, tr. W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, sections 91–6, pp. 135–42).
81. See Ovid, Fasti, VI, 292.
82. Exodus 20.5: ‘Thou shall not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’
83. The original sense of the term ‘existence’ is something like ‘a standing out from’, from the Latin prefix ex (‘out of’) and the verb sistere (‘to stand, place, set’). Existential writers, including Kierkegaard himself in later work, draw on this sense to distinguish the form of human being from that of other kinds of entity. Human being is a kind of ‘rising up out of’ the world of things, which involves a questioning about those things and also a questioning about what to make of human being in particular cases. Here, however, Kierkegaard is exploiting the original sense to make a distinction within human being, according to which woman can only ‘rise up out of the world’ with the help of the man, implying a sense of ‘existence’ in which woman-being does not yet amount to ‘existence’ but is only ‘being’ (for-another).
84. This passage makes use of the same pun as earlier between at frie (‘to court’, or also, ‘to pop the question’) and at frie (or at befrie) (‘to set free’).
85. Or a version of that game.
86. A beauty contest won by Aphrodite, to whom a temple called Kallipygos (‘well put together’) was erected in celebration.
87. ‘Terrible to relate.’ Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, II, 204: Horresco referens.
88. Euripides, Medea, verses 250ff.
89. Actaeon, a famous huntsman, one day saw Diana (Artemis) bathing with her nymphs. She punished him by changing him into a stag, and in that form he was torn to pieces by hounds.
90. The original reads, ‘the girl seems in both directions, after all, to be only a child’. The Danish for ‘penitent’ here is skriftebarn, which might be translated ‘child confessee’, corresponding to skriftefader (‘father-confessor’).
91. An application of the Hegelian notion of Aufheben, associated with the ‘annulling’ or ‘cancelling’ of an opposition between thesis and antithesis in a ‘higher’ synthesis which nevertheless preserves the rational aspect of each of the former (see note 4, p. 618). Johannes has made sure that Cordelia’s case is not ‘dialectical’ in a Hegelian sense. Feeling that love and betrothal are incompatible, she simply ‘cancels’ the second because she has come (been made) to think of it as an inescapable impediment to the free expression of the former.
92. Pygmalion, king of Cyprus, made an ivory image of a maiden which he then fell in love with. Aphrodite granted his prayer to be able to breathe life into it.
93. A surprise attack on the Capitoline Hill by the Gauls was repulsed after the Romans had been alerted to it by the cackling of geese.
94. In a collection of magazine articles by a German writer, Matthias Claudius (1741–1815), a parody of a learned dispute is accompanied by a comic picture of the person presiding over it, Herr Lars Hochedeln. (‘Asinus omnia sua secum portans oder Sämmtliche Werke des Wandsbecker Bothen’, I-II, p. 131) (Vienna, 1844).
95. The Alpheus is the main river of the Peloponnese. In places it runs underground, which led to the story of the river-god Alpheus’s pursuit of the nymph Arethusa who was finally changed by Artemis into the fountain of Arethusa in the island of Ortygia at Syracuse. The god continued his pursuit under the sea and tried to join his stream with the fountain.
97. Apuleius, of Madauia in Africa, was born about A. D. 124. His Metamorphoses, known as The Golden Ass, is one of the two surviving examples of the Latin novel (the other is Petronius’s Satyricon). ‘Cupid and Psyche’ is an episode in this work.
98. Myrtle was sacred to Venus and is an emblem of love.
99. See Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium, Chapters 14 and 15.
100. ‘I accept the omen.’ Cicero, De divinatione, I, 103.
101. Alectryon, a friend of Ares (Mars, to the Romans), was meant to keep watch during a tryst between Ares and Aphrodite, but fell asleep so that Apollo (the sun-god) and Hephaestus (Vulcan) took them by surprise.
102. Clytie, a sea-nymph, daughter of Oceanus, was changed into the plant heliotropum when the sun-god Apollo was untrue to her. The word means ‘turning to the sun’.
103. The Thessalian girl Caenis was changed into a man (Caeneus) by her lover, Poseidon. After many vicissitudes he eventually recovered his female form in the underworld.
PART TWO
1 The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage
1. Homer, Odyssey, X, 237ff. Circe, daughter of Helios the sun-god, lived on the island of Aeaea. Odysseus’s companions tasted the magic cup Circe offered them and were turned into swine.
2. Philippians 4.7: ‘And the peace of God which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.’
3. Lord Byron, ‘To Eliza’, in Poetical Works, 1886, I, p. 83: ‘Though some women are angels, yet wedlock’s the devil.’
4. Papirer III, B 41, 5, p. 129 indicates that the reference is to Alexandre Dumas’s Gabrielle de Belle-Isle, a five-act play performed in Danish translation in 1841–2.
5. Matthew 6.34: ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself: sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’
6. The ‘bad’ or ‘false’ infinite in Hegel’s philosophy is the idea of trying to attain the infinite by prolonging a numerical series indefinitely, while the good or true infinite is a whole of which the finite forms the parts. See Hegel’s Logic, tr. W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, section 94. See note 11, p. 621.
7. The Danish distinguishes love in a general sense (kjœrlighed) from love in a sense that focuses on its amorous and romantic manifestations (elskov). In the following passages the distinction is left largely to the context.
8. In The Marriage of Figaro.
9. Matthew 16.26.
10. Jupiter’s love for Semele invoked the jealousy of Hera, who (disguised as Semele’s old nurse) persuaded Semele to invite Jupiter to appear before her in the same splendour as she herself was accustomed to. Jupiter appeared as the god of thunder and Semele was consumed by the lightning.
11. It was by solving the riddle posed by the Sphinx that Oedipus obtained the kingdom of Thebes and married Jocasta.
12. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 258: ‘Away, away, ye unconsecrated.’
13. Luke 7.47: ‘Wherefore, I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.’
14. Genesis 2.18.
15. Genesis 5.2: ‘Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.’
16. 1 Timothy 2.11ff.
17. Luke 16.1ff.
18. ‘It is an old story.’
19. Genesis 2.18.
20. Genesis 2.24.
21. Kierkegaard’s expression is ‘a Kirsten Gifte-knivs’, a character from Ludvig Holberg’s Den forvandlede Brudgom, and a current term for ‘match-maker’.
22. ‘In itself.’ A reference to Immanuel Kant’s notion of the ‘thing-in-itself, of which there can be no experience since, as a very condition of the latter, it lies beyond all possible experience.
23. Following Hegel’s aesthetics (see Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975).
24. ‘Everything must be doubted.’
25. To be ‘a priori’ is to be true independently of whatever may be proved or disproved in experience.
26. 1 Timothy 4.4.
27. Phanerogamous plants are flowering plants, while cryptogamous plants (for example mosses and lichens) have no stamen and pistils and so no flowers.
28. A. G. Oehlenschläger’s Skattegraveren (‘The Treasure-Digger’): ‘But if you utter one word, it vanishes again.’
29. Caligula is said to have expressed the wish that the Roman people had only one neck, so that they could all be decapitated with one blow.
30. The Emperor Domitian.
31. Catherine II of Russia’s minister had false façades of flourishing villages put up near the road she travelled on with him on her inspection of the newly conquered provinces bordering the Black Sea.
32. ‘From the poetic point of view.’
33. That custom is second nature (Vanen er den anden Natur) is a saying in Danish.
34. Leibniz held that no two things can be alike. This is related to his claim for the identity of things that have all their properties in common, which again is related to the idea that if two things differ, the difference must be present in the nature of the things themselves.
35. Presumably an allusion to Leibniz.
36. Cf. A. G. Oehlenschläger’s Valravnen.
37. 1 Peter 3.4.
38. Don Quixote.
39. ‘When ten times repeated they please.’ Horace, Ars poetica, 365.
40. Ecclesiastes.
41. ‘Self-tormentor.’ The title of a Greek comedy by Terence (b. 195 B.C.).
42. ‘I have spoken and freed my mind.’ Words used by Roman orators to conclude their speeches.
43. Erzählungen und Mährchen, Prenzlau, 1826, pp. 323ff.
2 Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in
the Development of Personality
1. Originally ‘Hep’, said to be composed of the initial letters of Hierosolyma est perdita (‘Jerusalem is lost [to the infidels]’) and was the cry of the German knights when persecuting the Jews. Incidentally, ‘Hurrah’ is said to derive from the Sclavonic for ‘On to paradise!’.
2. Luke 8.30: ‘And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him.’ Cf. Mark 5.9.
3. Cf. Joshua 6.
4. In the Parmenides (Chapter 19), Plato defines the present instant as the boundary between past and future.
5. P. A. Wolff, Mythologie der Feen und Elfen, Weimar, 1828, translated from a work in English.
6. 1 Corinthians 1.23.
7. Ecclesiastes 1.2: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ The Latin is the title of a poem by Goethe (‘Ich hab’ mein Sach auf nichts gestellt, luchhe’).
8. Lad gaa (‘let [it] go’).
9. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, ‘Freiheit’. Kierkegaard cites it in the German.
10. ‘Weak aspiration.’
11. See note 20, Part 1, p. 618.
12. See note 14, Part 1, p. 618.
13. The Danish Moment is translated here as ‘element’ to avoid confusion with ‘moment’ as ‘instant in time’, but I have retained ‘discursive moment’ – Trans.
14. Freedom of the will or ‘negative’ freedom as distinct from ‘positive’ freedom, as in Vilhelm’s notion of choice of oneself.
15. Revelation 14.13: ‘… Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them.’
16. From a saying that the Lord fills the stomach before the eyes.
17. Matthew 20.3: ‘And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing idle in the market-place.’
18. Volksmährchen der Deutschen, Gotha, 1787, 1, pp. 164ff; here, p. 220.
19. Horace, Letters, I, 46: ‘Fleeing poverty, over the sea, over the rocks, through fire.’
20. That is, a philosophical system, like Hegel’s science of the spirit.
21. ‘Nothing for appearances, everything for conscience.’
22. Quietism is a form of religious mysticism involving contemplation and inactivity.
23. Matthew 16.26. The Authorized Version has ‘lose his soul’.
24. Matthew 12.36: ‘But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.’
25. The for-itself is conscious being, the in-itself is substantial being. In Hegelian philosophy the Absolute is the in-and-for-itself, or the identity of substance and subjectivity. Kierkegaard here appropriates the language to assert the not merely subjective, that is the substantial character, of good.
26. Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 407ff. The beautiful Narcissus, unable to love, was caused by Nemesis to see his own image reflected in a fountain. He fell in love with the image and pined away in his infatuation, until changed into the plant that bears his name.
27. 1 Samuel 15.22.
28. Romans 8.16: ‘The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’
29. ‘Innermost sanctuary’ or ‘Holy of holies’.
30. Matthew 10.37: ‘He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me, is not worthy of me.’
31. ‘Persecuted church.’
32. 2 Timothy 4.7: ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’
33. Matthew 23.24: ‘Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.’
34. Hexebrev, or ‘witch’s letter’, is a bound collection of truncated pictures of people or animals, from which, by turning the pages and combining the different parts, new images can be constructed.
35. ‘Know thyself’: the inscription on the temple in Delphi.
36. ‘In terms of possibility’, a phrase in Aristotle’s philosophy.
37. Exodus 3.2: ‘And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.’
38. The Adamites. A sect, or sects, in Middle Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, founded in 1400 by one Picard, of Bohemia, self-styled ‘Adam, son of God’, and dedicated to a state of primitive innocence. Apart from going naked, they had wives in common, and claimed there was no distinction between good and evil.
39. A primer of morals for the young by the conservative theologian Bishop Nicolaj Edinger Balle (1744–1816), used in primary schools, both in Denmark and Norway.
41. ‘Without further ado.’
42. ‘Taught by God.’
44. ‘Speak, so that I can see you.’
46. The mysteries were secret cults of purification in honour of the Greek gods. The ‘greater’ mysteries (the Great Eleusinia) took place in September.
47. Kant’s categorical imperative, or the idea that moral duties are absolute and not conditional upon some goal.
48. Hebrews 9.27.
49. ‘What you are seeking is here.’ Horace, Letters, I, 2, 29.
3 Last Word
1. A. G. Oehlenschläger, Ludlams Hule, Samlede Vœrker XVII, p. 176.
2. ‘Not unpraiseworthy’, a mediocre examination grade.
4 The Edifying in the Thought that Against God We Are Always in the Wrong
1. Luke 13.1–4.
2. Genesis 32.24–30. Jacob wrestled with God.
3. Cf. Job 40.2.