Introduction
In what sense the subject of this deliberation is a matter of psychological interest, and in what sense having interested psychology it points precisely in the direction of dogmatics.
That every scientific problem within the wide embrace of science has its appointed place, its aim and limit, and for just that reason its harmonious fusion within the whole, its justified consonance in what the whole tells us, this consideration is not merely a pium desiderium [pious wish] that ennobles the man of science with its inspiring or wistful fervor, not merely a sacred duty that binds him in service to the whole and bids him forsake anarchy and the adventurer’s urge to lose sight of the land; it is also in the interest of every more specialized deliberation, because by forgetting where it belongs it also, as language with its well-aimed ambiguity is wont to put it, forgets itself, becomes something else, attains a suspect perfectibility in being able to become whatever it likes. Occasionally, by not being called to scientific order, and not seeing to it that the particular problems don’t hurry past one another as though it were a matter of being first to arrive at a masked ball, one may achieve a certain brilliance, sometimes cause amazement through having already grasped what is far beyond one, sometimes be able with loose words to discover agreement in things that differ. Afterward, however, this profit brings upon itself its own revenge, like all illegal acquisition that cannot be brought under civic or scientific ownership.
Thus by captioning the last section of the Logic “Actuality” one gains the advantage of appearing to have reached the highest, or if you prefer, the lowest, through logic. The loss is, however, obvious since neither logic nor actuality is served thereby: not actuality since contingency, an essential ingredient in actuality, is something that logic cannot let in; and no good is done to logic since if logic has thought actuality, it has ingested something it cannot assimilate, anticipated something for which it merely prepares the way [prædisponere]. The penalty is clear: every deliberation about what is actual is held back, yes, and perhaps for some time made impossible, since the word “actuality” must first be given time to as it were come to its senses, time to forget the mistake.
Similarly in dogmatics, to call faith the immediate with no more precise definition gives one the advantage of convincing everyone of the necessity of not stopping with faith, yes, gains one even the concession of the orthodox on this point since perhaps the latter fails to see through the misunderstanding straightaway, that it is not due to what comes later but to this πρωτον πσευδος[basic error]. There is no mistaking the loss, since faith loses through being deprived of what is lawfully its own: its historical presupposition. Dogmatics loses by having to start somewhere else than where it has its beginning, within an earlier beginning; instead of presupposing an earlier beginning, it ignores it and begins without further ado as if it were logic, for logic does indeed begin with the most elusive product of the finest abstraction: the immediate. What is logically correct, namely, that the immediate is eo ipso [by that very fact] canceled, becomes in dogmatics mere chat; for it could occur to nobody to want to stay with the immediate (not further defined), seeing indeed that it is nullified the very moment it is mentioned, just as a sleepwalker wakes up the moment someone mentions his name.
Thus when, in the course of investigations that are little more than propaedeutic, one sometimes finds the word “reconciliation” used to designate speculative knowledge, or the identity of the knowing subject and the thing known, the subject-objective, etc., it is easy to see that the author is brilliant, and that with his brilliance he has explained all riddles, especially for those who in science do not take even the precaution they observe in everyday life of listening carefully to the words of the riddle before guessing it. Otherwise one acquires the incomparable merit of having, by way of this explanation, proposed a new riddle, namely, how it could occur to anyone that this might be the explanation. That thinking is, in general, in possession of reality was the assumption of all ancient philosophy, as well as of the philosophy of the Middle Ages. With Kant this assumption was put in doubt. Suppose now that the Hegelian school had really thought through Kant’s skepticism (though this may always remain a big question in spite of all Hegel and his school with the help of the catchphrase “Method and Manifestation” have done to hide what Schelling owned to more revealingly with the catchphrase “intellectual intuition and construction,” namely, that it was a new point of departure) and had reconstructed the earlier view in a higher form in which thought does not possess reality on the strength of a presupposition; is, then, this reality that is consciously brought about by thinking a reconciliation? Philosophy is simply brought to the point where one began in the old days when reconciliation had its enormous significance. We have an old and respectable philosophical terminology: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. A newer one has been invented in which mediation takes third place. Is this such an extraordinary step forward? Mediation is equivocal, for it suggests simultaneously the relation that holds between the two terms and also the result of the relation, that in which they relate to each other as the terms that have come into that relation. It describes movement but at the same time rest. Whether this is a perfection only a far profounder dialectical test of mediation will decide, but for that we are unfortunately still waiting. So they do away with synthesis and say Mediation. So be it. But brilliance demands more, so they say Reconciliation.
What follows from that? It does no good to their propaedeutic investigations, for these naturally profit just as little as truth profits in clarity or a man’s soul in blessedness through acquiring a title. On the contrary, two sciences, ethics and dogmatics, are fundamentally confused, particularly when having had the word reconciliation brought in, they now point out that logic and λóγος (the dogmatic) correspond and that logic is the proper doctrine of λóγος.* Ethics and dogmatics fight over reconciliation in a fateful confinium [frontier zone]. Repentance and guilt extort reconciliation ethically, whereas dogmatics, in its willingness to accept the proffered reconciliation, now has a historically concrete immediacy with which to begin its discourse in the great conversation of science. What will follow now? Presumably language will come to celebrate a great sabbatical year† in which speech and thought take a rest so as to begin with the beginning. In logic the negative is used as the quickening power that brings movement into everything. And movement one must have in whatever way one can, by fair means or foul. The negative helps, and if the negative cannot, then wordplay and platitudes can, just as the negative itself has become a play on words.* In logic, no movement may come about, for logic is, and everything logical simply is,† and this, logic’s impotence, is logic’s passing over into coming about, where human life [Tilværelsen] and actuality step forward. So when logic gets absorbed in the concretion of the categories, what was at the beginning remains constantly the same. In logic every movement, if for a moment we are to use that expression, is an immanent movement, which in a deeper sense is no movement, as one will easily convince oneself by reflecting that the very concept of movement is a transcendence that can find no place in logic. The negative, then, is the immanence of movement, it is the vanishing factor, what is annulled. If everything happens in this way, then nothing happens at all and the negative becomes a phantom. But precisely in order to get something to happen in logic, the negative becomes something more; it becomes what produces opposition and not a negation but a contraposition. The negative is then not the muteness of the immanent movement, it is the “necessary other,” which may no doubt be most necessary for logic in order to set things going, but which the negative is not. If we leave logic and proceed to ethics, here again as in the whole Hegelian philosophy we find the negative indefatigably active. To our amazement, we find that the negative here is the evil. Confusion is now in full swing, there are no bounds to brilliancy, and what Mme. de Staël-Holstein has said of Schelling’s philosophy, that it makes a person clever for a lifetime, is true in every way of the Hegelian. One sees how illogical the movements in logic must be, since the negative is the evil, and how unethical they must be in ethics, since the evil is the negative. In logic it is too much, in ethics too little. If it has to fit both places, it fits nowhere. If ethics has no other transcendence, it is essentially logic; if logic is to have as much transcendence as ethics requires to preserve common decency, then it is no longer logic.
What is expounded here is perhaps rather elaborate for its place (though in relation to the subject it deals with it is very far from too long), but it is by no means extraneous since the detail is chosen in allusion to this work’s topic. The examples are from the larger world, but what occurs in the larger must repeat itself in the smaller, and the misunderstanding is similar even if the resulting harm is less. He who sets himself up as a writer of the System has his responsibility in the large things, but he who writes a monograph can be, and ought to be, trustworthy in the small.*
The present work has set itself the task of treating “anxiety” psychologically in such a way as to have in mind and view the dogma of hereditary sin. Accordingly, it has to take account, although tacitly, of the concept of sin. Sin, however, is no matter for psychological concern, and it would only be to abandon oneself to the service of a misunderstood cleverness if one were to treat it so. Sin has its definite place, or rather it has none at all, but that is its characteristic. Treating it in another place, through framing it in a nonessential refraction in reflection, is to corrupt it. Its concept is then corrupted, and at the same time the mood properly corresponding to the correct concept† disturbed; instead of the genuine mood’s perseverance we have the false moods’ short-lived antics. Accordingly, when sin is drawn into aesthetics, the mood becomes either frivolous or melancholic, for the category under which sin lies is contradiction and this is either comic or tragic. The mood is thus corrupted, since that corresponding to sin is earnestness. Its concept is also corrupted, for whether it becomes comic or tragic it becomes something that subsists, or something inessential that is nullified, whereas sin according to its concept is to be overcome. The comic and the tragic in a deeper sense have no enemy but either a bogeyman to weep at or a bogeyman to laugh at.
If sin is dealt with in metaphysics, the mood becomes that of a dialectical parity and disinterest which weighs up sin as something that cannot stand up to thought. The concept is corrupted, for it is true indeed that sin is to be overcome, not however as something to which thought cannot give life, but as that which is there and as such each person’s concern.
If sin is dealt with in psychology, the mood becomes that of the persistent observer, of the dauntless spy, not of the victorious flight of earnest out of it. The concept becomes another one, for sin becomes a state but sin is no state. Its idea is that of the continual nullifying of its concept. As a state (de potentia [potentially]) it is not, whereas de actu or in actu [actually] it is, and is again and again. The mood of psychology would be an antipathetic curiosity, but the right mood is earnest’s stout-hearted resistance. Psychology’s own mood is the anxiety of finding out, and in its anxiety it delineates sin while being alarmed again and again by the sketch it itself produces. When dealt with in this way, sin becomes the stronger, for properly speaking psychology relates to it in a feminine way. There is certainly an element of truth in this state of mind, and it no doubt emerges more or less in every person’s life before the ethical appears; yet with such treatment sin does not become what it is, but a more or less.
So, as soon as one sees the problem of sin being dealt with, from the mood it is possible straightaway to see whether the concept is the right one. Whenever, for instance, sin is talked about as a sickness, an abnormality, a poison, a disharmony, the concept is being falsified.
Properly speaking, sin belongs in no science. It is a theme for the sermon, where the individual talks as an individual to the individual. In our own age, scientific self-importance has fooled the priests into becoming a kind of professorial deacon who also serves science and thinks preaching beneath his dignity. So no wonder preaching has come to be regarded as a very poor art. It is, however, the most difficult of all arts, and is in fact the art extolled by Socrates, that of being able to converse. Of course it does not follow that there has to be someone in the congregation who answers, or that it might help always to have someone brought in to respond. What Socrates really criticized the Sophists for, when distinguishing between their ability to speak but not converse, was that they were able to say a great deal about everything but lacked the element of appropriation. Appropriation is precisely conversation’s secret.
To the concept of sin corresponds the mood of earnest. The science in which sin might most plausibly find a place would surely be ethics. However, there is a great difficulty here. Ethics is still an “ideal” science, but not only in the sense that every other science is ideal [involves forming abstract concepts]; it wants to bring ideality into actuality. On the other hand its movement is not that of raising up actuality into ideality.* Ethics points to ideality as a task and assumes that a person is in possession of the required conditions. Ethics unfolds a contradiction here precisely in making clear the difficulty and the impossibility. What is said of the law is true also of ethics, that it is a disciplinarian who in making a demand merely judges and does not beget.* Only Greek ethics was an exception, due to its not being ethics in the proper sense but retaining an aesthetic element. This is shown clearly in its definition of virtue, and in what Aristotle says often but also affirms in Ethica Nicomachea with charming Greek naïveté, that virtue by itself does not after all make a person happy and content; he must have health, friends, and earthly goods, and be happy in his family. The more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not let itself be put off by the babble that it is no use asking the impossible; for even listening to such talk is unethical, is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity. Ethics has nothing to do with haggling, nor is this the way to reach actuality. If that is to be reached, the whole movement must be reversed. This feature of ethics, namely, its being ideal in this way, is what tempts one to employ now metaphysical, now aesthetical, now psychological categories in treating it. But of course ethics, above all sciences, must resist temptations, and for that reason too it is impossible for anyone to write an ethics without having entirely different categories up his sleeve.
Sin belongs then to ethics only because it is upon this concept that with the help of repentance it runs aground.† If ethics is to include sin, its ideality is at an end. The more it remains in its ideality, without ever becoming inhuman enough to lose sight of actuality, but in correspondence with it by being willing to submit itself as a task for everyone in such a way as to make each person the true human being, the whole human being, the human being κατ’ ἐξοχήν [in an eminent sense], the more it intensifies the difficulty. In the struggle to realize the task of ethics, sin appears not as something that belongs only by chance to a chance individual; it pulls itself back ever more deeply as an increasingly more profound presupposition, as a presupposition that goes beyond the individual. Now everything is lost for ethics, and ethics has helped in the losing of everything. A category has come to light that lies entirely outside its scope. Hereditary sin makes everything still more desperate, that is, it removes the difficulty, not however with the help of ethics but with that of dogmatics. As all ancient thought and speculation were founded upon the assumption that thought is in possession of reality, so also was all ancient ethics based upon the assumption that virtue is realizable. Sin’s skepticism is altogether foreign to paganism. For the ethical consciousness sin is what error is with regard to knowledge: the particular exception that proves nothing.
With dogmatics begins the science which, in contrast to that ideal science strictly so called, begins with actuality. It begins with the actual in order to raise it up into ideality. It does not deny the presence of sin; on the contrary it assumes it and explains it by presupposing hereditary sin. However, since dogmatics is very seldom dealt with in its purity, hereditary sin will often be found to have been brought within its bounds in a way that prevents the heterogeneous primitivity of dogmatics from leaping to the eye and obscures that impression, as also happens when one finds in it a dogma about angels, about the Holy Scripture, etc. Hereditary sin is therefore not to be explained by dogmatics; the explanation is that it is something presupposed, like that vortex that the Greek speculation about nature talked so much about, a moving something which no science can get a hold of.
That such is the case with dogmatics will be readily admitted if time is taken once more to understand Schleiermacher’s immortal service to this science. He was abandoned long ago when they chose Hegel; and yet Schleiermacher was a thinker in the beautiful Greek sense who could talk of what he knew, whereas Hegel, in spite of his remarkable ability and colossal learning, nevertheless reminds us again and again by his performance that he was in the German sense a professor of philosophy on a large scale, who must à tout prix [at all costs] explain everything.
So the new science begins with dogmatics in the same way that science of the immanent begins with metaphysics. Here ethics finds its place again as the science that has the dogmatic consciousness of actuality as a task for actuality. This ethics does not ignore sin, and its ideality consists not in making demands ideally but in a penetrating consciousness of actuality, of the actuality of sin, yet not, be it noted, with metaphysical irresponsibility or psychological concupiscence.
The difference in the movement is easy to see, also that the ethics of which we are now speaking belongs in another order. The first ethics ran aground on the sinfulness of the individual. So far from being able to explain this, the difficulty had to become still greater and ethically more enigmatic, in that the sin of the individual expanded to become the sin of the whole race.* Now came dogmatics and lent a hand with hereditary sin. The new ethics presupposes dogmatics and along with it, hereditary sin, and now, with that, explains the sin of the individual while at the same time presenting ideality as a task, not however by a movement downward from above, but upward from below.
Aristotle, as we know, used the name πρωτη ϕίλοσοϕία [the first philosophy] to denote more especially metaphysics, although he included also a part of what to our notion belongs to theology. That in paganism theology should be treated there is entirely as it should be; it is the same lack of infinite reflection that made the theater, in effect, a kind of divine worship. Through abstracting from this ambiguity, we might retain this name and understand by πρωτη ϕίλοσοϕία* the totality of science. We might call it pagan, its nature being that of immanence, or use the Greek term “recollection,” and understand by secunda philosophia that whose nature is transcendence or repetition.†
The concept of sin does not then properly belong in any science; only the second ethics can deal with its manifestation, though not with its coming to be. For any other science to deal with it is to confuse the concept. Coming closer to our theme, this would be the case if psychology were to do so.
What psychology deals with must be something resting, something that remains in agitated repose, not something restless that is constantly reproducing itself or being repressed. But the abiding state out of which sin constantly comes into being, not by necessity, for a becoming by necessity is simply a state of being (as for example the entire history of the plant), but by freedom—this abiding state, this predisposing assumption, sin’s real possibility, this is an object of interest for psychology. What can occupy psychology, and what it can occupy itself with, is how sin can come to be, not that it comes to be. It can, in its psychological interest, bring things to the point of sin seeming to be there; but the next step, the fact that it is there, differs qualitatively from this. How this presupposition for psychology’s painstaking contemplation appears ever expansively, this is what interests psychology. Yes, psychology wants as if to abandon itself to the illusion that sin is there. But this latter illusion is psychology’s impotence and shows that it has served its turn.
That human nature must be so constituted as to make sin possible is, psychologically speaking, quite true; but to want to have this possibility of sin become its actuality is upsetting for ethics, and to dogmatics it sounds like blasphemy; for freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual in the same sense in which an earlier philosophy has said that if God’s existence is possible, then it is necessary.
As soon as sin is actually posited, ethics is on the spot and now follows every step it takes. How it came into being does not concern ethics, except insofar as it is certain that sin came into the world as sin. But still less than any concern with the genesis of sin is ethics concerned with the still life of its possibility.
If one now asks more specifically in what sense, and to what extent, psychology pursues its object of observation, it is clear from the foregoing, as in itself, that every observation of the actuality of sin as an object of thought is irrelevant to it, and nor as an object of observation does it belong to ethics, for the latter is never observing, but accusing, judging, acting. It follows furthermore from the foregoing, as is evident in itself, that psychology is not concerned empirically with the actual detail assigned to it except insofar as this lies outside sin. As a science, indeed, psychology cannot have anything to do empirically with the detail assigned to it, and yet this detail may receive its scientific representation the more concrete psychology becomes. In our times, this science, which is after all allowed above all others to just about intoxicate itself in the spuming manifold of life, has become as spare in its diet and as ascetic as any flagellant. This is not the fault of the science but of its devotees. With respect to sin, however, the whole content of actuality is properly denied to it; what belongs to it is only its possibility. To ethics, of course, the possibility of sin never occurs, and ethics does not let itself be fooled into wasting its time on such reflection. Psychology, on the other hand, loves it; it sits sketching the contours and calculating the angles of possibility and would, no more than Archimedes, let itself be disturbed.
But while psychology thus delves into the possibility of sin, it is unawares in the service of another science which is only waiting for it to finish so as to begin and to help psychology in obtaining the explanation. This other science is not ethics, for ethics has nothing at all to do with this possibility. No, it is dogmatics, and here the problem of hereditary sin arises once more. While psychology fathoms the real possibility of sin, dogmatics explains hereditary sin, that is, the ideal possibility of sin. The second ethics has, on the other hand, nothing to do with sin’s possibility or with hereditary sin. The first ethics ignores sin, the second ethics has the actuality of sin within its scope, and here again psychology can intrude only through a misunderstanding.
If what has been expounded here is correct, it is easy to see with what justification I have called this book a psychological deliberation, and also how this deliberation, insofar as it brings to consciousness its relation to science, belongs to psychology and points in turn toward dogmatics. Psychology has been called the doctrine of the subjective spirit. If we pursue this science a little more closely we will see how, when it comes to the problem of sin, it must first switch over to the doctrine of Absolute Spirit. There lies dogmatics. The first ethics presupposes metaphysics, the second ethics dogmatics, but it also completes it in such a way that, here as everywhere, the presupposition comes out.
This was the task of the introduction. The introduction may be correct—while the deliberation itself on the concept of anxiety may be entirely incorrect. Whether that is so remains to be seen.
* [John 1:1–2,14]
† [Leviticus 25:2–7]
* Exempli gratia: Wesen ist was ist gewesen, ist gewesen is a tempus præteritum of seyn, ergo Wesen is das aufgehoben Seyn, the Seyn that has been [e.g., Essence is what has been; “has been” is the past tense of “to be,” ergo, essence is annulled being, being that has been]. This is a logical movement! If anyone were to take the trouble in the Hegelian Logic (in itself and with the contributions of the School) to pick out and assemble all the strange pixies and goblins who, like hirelings, help the logical movement along, a later age would perhaps be astonished to discover that witticisms long considered discarded once played a great role in logic, not as incidental explanations and clever observations, but as masters of movement that made Hegel’s logic a marvel and gave logical thought feet to walk on, though without anybody noticing, since amazement’s long cloak hid the trolley, just as Lulu [in a romantic opera where a character is transformed into a dwarf] comes running without anyone seeing the machine. Movement in logic, this is Hegel’s merit, compared with which it is hardly worth mentioning the unforgettable merit that is his, and that he has turned down in order to run aimlessly [1 Cor. 9:26], for having in manifold ways enriched the categorial definitions and their arrangement.
† Logic’s eternal expression is what the Eleatic [pre-Socratic fifth-century BC] School [founded by Parmenides in Elea] transferred through a misunderstanding to existence: nothing arises, everything is.
* [Matthew 25:21–23]
† The fact that science too, as much as poetry and art, assumes a mood on the parts of both producer and recipient, that an error in modulation is just as disturbing as an error in the exposition of thought, has been entirely forgotten in our age, when people have altogether forgotten inwardness and how to define appropriation in their joy at all the magnificence they thought to possess, or through greed lost like the dog which preferred the shadow [a story from the fabulist Phaedrus (c. 15 BC to AD 50), who borrowed from Aesop]. However, every error begets its own enemy. An error of thought has dialectics outside; the absence of mood or its falsification has the comical outside, as its enemy.
* Closer consideration of this provides ample opportunity to realize how brilliant it was to caption the last section of Logic “Actuality,” seeing that not even ethics gets that far. The actuality with which logic ends means, therefore, in regard to actuality, no more than the “being” with which it begins.
* [Galatians 3:24]
† Several observations on this point are to be found in Johannes de Silentio’s Fear and Trembling (Copenhagen 1843). The author several times lets the wishful ideality of the aesthetical run aground on the ideality required by the ethical, in order through these collisions to allow the religious ideality to come in view, which is precisely that of actuality and is therefore just as desirable as that of aesthetics, and not impossible like that of ethics, and bring it to view in such a way that it emerges in the dialectical leap and with the positive mood, “See, everything has become new!” [2 Cor. 5:17] and in the negative mood which is the passion of the absurd, to which the concept of “repetition” corresponds. Either the whole of human existence [Tilværelsen] terminates in what the ethical requires or the condition is provided [cf. Philosophical Crumbs, 1844, SKS 4, 224–226] and, with it, all of life and existence begin afresh, not through an immanent continuity with the foregoing (which is a contradiction), but by a transcendence that separates the repetition from the first existence by a chasm such that it is only a figure of speech to say that the foregoing and the subsequent state are related to one another as the totality of the living creatures in the ocean are related to those in the air and on the land, although according to the opinion of some natural scientists that prototype is supposed to prefigure in its imperfection everything revealed in the latter. Regarding this category one may compare Repetition by Constantin Constantius (Copenhagen 1843). This is in fact a whimsical book, as its author meant it to be, but it is nevertheless, so far as I know, the first to have grasped repetition energetically and to bring out the concept’s pregnance with sufficient clarity to throw light on the relation between the pagan and the Christian, by pointing to the invisible summit and the discrimen rerum [turning point] where science breaks against science until the new science comes forth. But what he has discovered he has hidden again by arraying the concept in the jest of an analogous notion. What has moved him to do this is hard to say, or rather difficult to understand; for he says himself that he writes this “in such a way that the heretics would not understand him.” [Repetition, in Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs, trans. Piety, p. 76]. Since he has wanted to occupy himself with this subject only aesthetically and psychologically, everything has had to be planned humoristically, and the effect thus brought about of the word at one moment signifying everything and at the next moment the most trivial thing of all, and the transition, or rather the perpetual falling down from the clouds, is justified by its burlesque contrast. But he has stated the whole thing pretty clearly on page 34: “Repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics becomes stranded. Repetition is the solution [Løsnet—also: catchword] in every ethical contemplation. Repetition is the conditio sine qua non [the indispensable condition] for every dogmatic problem” [Piety, trans., p. 19]. The first sentence alludes to the proposition that metaphysics is disinterested, just as Kant affirmed of ethics. As soon as interest emerges, metaphysics steps aside. That is why the word “interest” is italicized. In actuality, all the interest of subjectivity comes in and then metaphysics runs aground. If repetition is not posited, ethics becomes a binding power. Presumably it is for this reason that he says that “it is the solution in every ethical view.” If repetition is not posited, dogmatics just cannot exist since repetition begins in faith, and faith is the organ for the problems of dogmatics.—In the realm of nature, repetition is in its unshaken necessity. In the sphere of spirit, the task is not to exact change from repetition and during repetition to feel relatively comfortable, as if spirit stood in only an external relation to the repetitions of the spirit (in consequence of which good and evil alternate like summer and winter); the task is to transform repetition into something inward, into freedom’s own task, into freedom’s highest interest as to whether it really can, while everything changes, realize repetition. At this point the finite spirit despairs. Constantin Constantius has intimated this by stepping aside and letting repetition emerge in the young man on the strength of the religious. That is why Constantin says several times that repetition is a religious category, too transcendent for him, the movement on the strength of the absurd, and on page 142 [Piety, trans., p. 75] it is further said that eternity is the true repetition. All of this Professor Heiberg has failed to observe but, with his knowledge (which like his New Year’s Gift is singularly elegant and tidy), has been kindly willing to help it become a tasteful and elegant triviality by bringing the question, with great pomposity, to the point where Constantin begins, to bring it to where (to recall a recent book) the aesthetic writer in Either/Or had brought it in “Crop Rotation.” If Constantin should really feel flattered to savor the rare honor that brings him into an undeniably elect company in this way, then to my way of thinking, since it was he who wrote the book, he must have become, as one says, raving mad. If, on the other hand, an author like him who writes in order to be misunderstood were to forget himself and had too little ataraxia [peace of mind] to account it to his credit that Professor Heiberg had not understood him—then again he must be raving mad. This I have no need to fear, for the fact that up to now he has not replied to Professor Heiberg indicates sufficiently that he has understood himself.
* [Romans 5:12]
* Schelling recalled [in the then still unpublished 1841–42 Berlin lectures that Kierkegaard had attended] this Aristotelian term to serve his distinction between negative and positive philosophy. By negative philosophy he understood “logic.” That was clear enough. What was less clear to me, however, was what he really understood by positive, beyond it being clear that positive philosophy was what he wished to provide. However, having nothing to go on except my own interpretation, there is no point in going into this.
† Constantin Constantius has reminded us of this by pointing out that immanence runs aground upon “interest.” It is only with this concept that actuality comes genuinely into view.