Esquisse
1842
Letter to his brother.
Berlin, Feb. 27, 1842.
Dear Peter,
Schelling drivels on quite intolerably. If you want to form some idea what it is like then I will ask you to submit yourself to the following experiment as a sort of self-inflicted punishment. Imagine Parson R.’s meandering philosophising, his entirely aimless, haphazard knowledge, and Parson Hornsyld’s untiring efforts to display his learning, imagine the two combined and in addition an impudence hitherto unequalled by any philosopher; and with that picture vividly before your poor mind go to the workroom of a prison and you will have some idea of Schelling’s philosophy and the temperature one has to hear it in. Moreover, in order to intensify it he has conceived the idea of lecturing for longer than usual, and so I have decided not to attend his lectures for as long as I meant to. The question is, which is the better idea. . . . Consequently I have nothing more to do in Berlin. My time is too precious to allow me to take in drop by drop what I should hardly have to open my mouth to swallow all at once. I am too old to attend lectures and Schelling is too old to give them. His whole doctrine of potency betrays the greatest impotence. . . .
Disjecta Membra17
The nature of original sin has often been considered, and yet the principal category has been missing—it is dread, that is what really determines it; for dread is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; dread is an alien power which takes hold of the individual, and yet one cannot extricate oneself from it, does not wish to, because one is afraid, but what one fears attracts one. Dread renders the individual powerless, and the first sin always happens in a moment of weakness; it therefore lacks any apparent accountableness, but that want is the real snare.
Woman has more dread than man; that is why the serpent chose her for his attack and deceived her through her dread.
Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est a story
His home did not offer many diversions, and as he almost never went out, he early grew accustomed to occupying himself with his own thoughts. His father was a very severe man, apparently dry and prosaic, but under his frieze coat he concealed a glowing imagination which even old age could not dim. When occasionally Johannes asked his permission to go out, he generally refused to give it, though once in a while he proposed instead that Johannes should take his hand and walk up and down the room. At first glance this would seem a poor substitute, and yet, as with the frieze coat, there was something totally different concealed beneath it. The offer was accepted, and it was left entirely to Johannes to determine where they should go. So they went out of doors to a nearby castle in Spain, or out to the seashore, or about the streets, wherever Johannes wished to go, for his father was equal to anything. While they went up and down the room his father described all that they saw; they greeted passers by, carriages rattled past them and drowned his father’s voice; the cake-woman’s cakes were more enticing than ever. He described so accurately, so vividly, so explicitly even to the least details, everything that was known to Johannes and so fully and perspicuously what was unknown to him, that after half an hour of such a walk with his father he was as much overwhelmed and fatigued as if he had been a whole day out of doors. Johannes soon learned from his father how to exercise his magical power. What first had been an epic now became a drama; they talked while walking up and down. If they went along familiar ways, they watched one another sharply to make sure that nothing was overlooked; if the way was strange to Johannes, he invented something, whereas his father’s almighty imagination was capable of shaping everything, of using every childish whim as an ingredient in the drama which was being enacted. To Johannes it seemed as if the world were coming into existence during the conversation, as if his father were our Lord and he were his favourite, who was allowed to interpose his foolish conceits as merrily as he would; for he was never repulsed, his father was never put out, he agreed to everything, and always to Johannes’s satisfaction. . . .
While thus there was being developed in him an almost vegetative tendency to drowse in imagination, which was in part aesthetic, in part more intellectual, another side of his soul was being strongly shaped, namely, his sense for the sudden, the surprising. This was not accomplished by the magic means which commonly serves to rivet the attention of children, but by something far higher. His father combined an irresistible dialectic with an all-powerful imagination. When for any reason his father engaged in argument with anyone, Johannes was all ears, all the more so because everything was conducted with an almost festive orderliness. His father always allowed his opponent to state his whole case, and then as a precaution asked him if he had nothing more to say before he began his reply. Johannes had followed the opponent’s speech with strained attention, and in his way shared an interest in the outcome. A pause intervened. The father’s rejoinder followed, and behold! in a trice the tables were turned. How that came about was a riddle to Johannes, but his soul delighted in the show. The opponent spoke again. Johannes could almost hear his heart beat, so impatiently did he await what was to happen.—It happened; in the twinkling of an eye everything was inverted, the explicable became inexplicable, the certain doubtful, the contrary evident. When the shark wishes to seize its prey it has to turn over upon its back, for its mouth is on its underside; its back is dark, its belly is silver-white. It must be a magnificent sight to witness that alternation of colour; it must sometimes glitter so brightly as to hurt the eyes, and yet it is a delight to look upon. Johannes witnessed a similar alternation when he heard his father engage in argument. He forgot again what was said, both what his father and what the opponent said, but that shudder of soul he did not forget.
. . . What other children get through the fascination of poetry and the surprises of fairy-tales, he got through the repose of intuition and the alternations of dialectic. This was the child’s joy, it became the boy’s game, it became the youth’s delight. So his life had a rare continuity; it did not know the various transitions which commonly mark the different periods of growth. When Johannes grew older he had no toys to lay aside, for he had learned to play with that which was to be the serious business of his life, and yet it lost thereby nothing of its allurement.
. . . Wherever he surmised a labyrinth, there he must find a way. If once he began such an enterprise, nothing could make him leave off. If he found it difficult, if he grew tired before having finished, he used to adopt a very simple method. He shut himself up in his room, made everything as festive as possible and then said in a loud and clear voice, I will it. He had learned from his father that one can do what one wills; and his father’s life had not discredited this theory. This experience had imparted to Johannes’ soul an indescribable sort of pride. It was intolerable to him that there should be anything one could not do if only one willed it. But his pride was not at all indicative of a feeble will; for when he had said those energetic words he was ready for anything, he then had a still more lofty goal, namely, to penetrate by sheer will the jungle growth of difficulty. This was again an adventure which aroused his enthusiasm. So his life was at all times romantically adventurous, although for his adventure he did not need forests and distant travel, but only what he possessed—a little room with one window.
Although his soul was early attracted to the ideal, yet his trust and confidence in reality was in no wise weakened. The ideal which he was nourished upon lay so close to him, all came about so naturally, that this became his reality, and again in the reality around him he might expect to discover the ideal. His father’s melancholy contributed to this. That his father was an extraordinary man was something Johannes got to know later. That he astonished him, as no other man did to the same degree, he knew; but he was acquainted with so few people that he possessed no scale with which to measure him. That his father, humanly speaking, was something out of the ordinary was the last thing he would learn in the paternal house. Once in a while, when an old friend visited the family and entered into a confidential conversation with his father, Johannes would hear him say, “I am good for nothing, cannot accomplish anything, my one wish is to find a place in a charitable institution.”18 That was not a jest, there was no trace of irony in his father’s words, on the contrary there was a gloomy seriousness in them which alarmed Johannes.
. . . Johannes, whose whole view of life was, so to say, hidden in his father, inasmuch as he himself saw only very little, found himself involved in a contradiction, which baffled him for a long time, the suspicion that his father contradicted himself, if not in other ways, at least by the virtuosity with which he could triumph over an opponent and put him to silence. So Johannes’s confidence in reality was not weakened; he had not imbibed the ideal from writings which taught him that the glory they describe is, indeed, not to be found in the world; he was not formed by a man who knew how to make his knowledge precious, but rather to make it as unimportant and worthless as possible.
My judgment on Either-Or
There was once a young man, as fortunately gifted as an Alcibiades. He went astray in the world. In his need he looked around him for a Socrates, but among his contemporaries he found none. Then he prayed the gods to change him into one. And behold! He who had been so proud of being an Alcibiades was so shamed and humbled by the grace of the gods that at the very moment of receiving that of which he might have felt proud, he felt himself to be less than all others.
If I have proved nothing else with Either-Or at least I have proved that a work can be written in Danish literature without the warm embraces of sympathy, without the incitement of expectation, that one can work against the current, that one can be industrious without showing it, that one can collect one’s thoughts in silence while almost every duffer of a student considers one an idler. Though the book itself were meaningless its genesis would be the neatest epigram I have composed on a garrulous philosophic age.
Experience, it is said, makes a man wise. That is very silly talk. If there were nothing beyond experience it would simply drive him mad.
If people insist on calling my crumbs of wisdom sophistry I should just like to draw their attention to the fact that it lacks at least one of the characteristics, according to the definitions of both Plato and Aristotle: that one earns money with it.
Esquisse
In his early youth a man once let himself be carried away while in a state of intoxication, and visited a prostitute. The whole thing is forgotten. Now he wants to marry. Then comes dread. The possibility of his being a father, that somewhere in the world there might be living a creature owing its existence to him, tortures him day and night. He cannot confide in anyone, he has not even any absolute assurance of the fact.—It must therefore have occurred with a prostitute, in the wild recklessness of youth; had it been a little love affair or a real seduction one could not imagine his being ignorant, but it is precisely. his ignorance which is the disturbing element in his torture. On the other hand his doubt could only really appear when he falls in love, precisely because of the thoughtlessness of the whole affair.
After my death no one will find among my papers a single explanation as to what really filled my life (that is my consolation); no one will find the words which explain everything and which often made what the world would call a bagatelle into an event of tremendous importance to me, and what I look upon as something insignificant when I take away the secret gloss which explains all.