Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  Cheer up, then, venture boldly. Have the courage to will the difficult; then in turn the difficulty will be of assistance, for the difficulty is not an old grump, is not a chicaner, but an omnipotence that wills to do it so very well. Whereas the person who in his eternal resolution relates negatively to the temporal becomes solitary in the moment of resolution and (even if he actually is great, even if he were a Prometheus) is chained, not to a mountain, but is imprisoned in temporality as if by chains, the married man, upon opening his eyes again [VI 108] (insofar as they seemed to be shut in the eternity of resolution), again stands where he was before, in the very same place, at his beloved’s side, where he indeed prefers to be, and suffers no lack of the eternal, for it is with him in temporality.

  The negative resolution is for the eternal only; the positive, for both the temporal and the eternal, and thus the person is simultaneously temporal and eternal. Therefore, the ideality of the genuine resolution lies first of all in a resolution that is just as temporal as eternal, which is, if I may put it this way, both signed and countersigned, a precaution used for bonds and which the bank even uses for its larger bank notes. The genuinely idealizing resolution then has this characteristic: it is signed in heaven, and then it is countersigned in temporality. But not only this, time after time as life goes on the married man keeps on getting new countersignatures, the one just as precious as the other. Every married man understands what I mean; why should I think anything else: that he was a disgrace, an ingrate, who grudgingly regarded the further assurances as troublesome. A married man with integrity understands that a wife is the principal countersignature, that anyone in the circle growing up under marriage’s eye is a new countersignature and a new endorsement. Oh, what a blessed assurance! Oh, what a rich man! Oh, what an assured blessedness—to possess all one’s abundance in a single bond that cannot vanish before one’s eyes as does the eternal resolution for the person who relates negatively to the temporal. 30The latter is a poor wretch or a mutineer, and such a person is also a poor wretch; he is a poor wretch who goes through time with his eternal resolution but never gets it countersigned—on the contrary, wherever he goes it is protested. He is an outcast of the race and even though consoled by the eternal is nevertheless a stranger to joy, weeps, and perhaps gnashes his teeth, for the person who in eternity does not wear the wedding garment is thrown out,31 but here on earth the wedding garment is indeed the wedding garment.

  The genuinely idealizing resolution must be just as sympathetic as it is autopathetic. But the person who is negative toward the temporal has no channel for his sympathy; consequently, instead of becoming a refreshment for him when it pours out its blessed overabundance and then accumulates anew, his sympathy becomes a torment that eats away his soul because it cannot express itself. To be suffocated is terrible, [VI 109] but to have sympathy and not be able to give vent to it is equally terrible. I am assuming, namely, that he has sympathy, for otherwise he is not worth talking about. To have sympathy is an essential quality of being human; any resolution that disregards this is in the larger sense not idealizing, and neither is it idealizing if sympathy does not acquire its adequate expression. Let the bachelor become a fool who wastes his sympathy on dogs and cats and pranks; let the recluse who made a negative choice be a noble soul, let his sympathy seek and find tasks far greater than having a wife and children—he still has no joy from it. If heaven’s dew was not allowed to fall on the grass and not allowed to have the joy of seeing the flower refreshed by its deliciousness, if it was supposed to diffuse itself over the wide ocean or evaporate before it reached the flower, would that not be terrible? If the milk in the mother’s breast flowed in abundance but there was no infant, if the wasted milk was as priceless as Juno’s milk, after which the Milky Way is named32—ah, how sad! So also with a man whose sympathy is not allowed to see a wife burst into leaf like the tree33 planted within the blessed hedgerow of sympathy, is not permitted to see the tree blossom and bear its fruit, which ripens under the solicitude of sympathy! How unfortunate the man who does not have this expression for his sympathy and the still more glorious expression for everything his sympathy expresses: that all this is his duty. This contradiction is sympathy’s most blissful delight, a bliss that can make him seem to lose his mind for joy. Let a poor wretch who does not have an understanding with the temporal in the resolution of marriage nurse the sick, feed the poor, clothe the naked; let him visit the prisoner, let him comfort the dying34—I commend him, he will not miss his reward,35 but neither is he in divine madness an unprofitable servant. His sympathy is continually seeking its deepest expression but does not find it, seeks it far and wide as his solicitude goes from house to house, whereas the married man finds opportunity in his house, in his home, where to him it is bliss to will to do everything, and an even greater bliss, a divine poscimur [we are called upon],36 that he is and remains without meritoriousness.

  [VI 110] The genuinely idealizing resolution must be just as concrete as it is abstract. To the degree that a resolution is drawn up negatively, to the same degree it is solely abstract. But no matter what a resolution pertains to, there is nothing between heaven and earth so concrete as a marriage and the marital relationship, nothing so inexhaustible; even the most insignificant thing has its significance, and while the marriage commitment flexibly spans a lifetime (just like that hide that measured out the circumference of Carthage37), it encircles the moment, and every moment, just as flexibly. There is nothing as piecemeal as a marriage, and yet there is no one who can stand a divided heart less than marriage—God himself is not as jealous.38 Every obligatory relation can be approximately exhausted in stipulations; every task, every achievement, in short, what generally occupies one’s time, has its time, but marital life evades such stipulation. Indeed, woe to the person for whom it is a burden; even to be sentenced for life does not give an adequate conception of the torment of his sentence, for that is an abstract term, but such a marital criminal daily feels the horror of being sentenced for life. The more concrete a person becomes in the ideality, the more perfect is the ideality. Consequently, the person who will not marry has rejected the most idealizing resolution. Moreover, it is really an inconsistency to refuse to get married and then to want to decide on some positive objective in temporality. What interest can anyone who refuses to let marriage have its reality [Realitet]39 have in the idea of the state, what love can he have for his fatherland, what civic patriotism can he have for everything that pertains to the woes and welfare of society! The more abstract the ideality, the more imperfect it is!

  Abstraction is ideality’s first expression, but concretion is its essential expression. Marriage expresses this. When they fall in love, the lovers will to belong to each other forever, in the resolution they resolve to will to be everything to each other, and this prodigious abstraction has its concrete expression in what is so insignificant that no third party dreams of it. The highest expression of falling in love is that the lover feels like nothing before the beloved, and vice versa, because to feel oneself to be something conflicts with falling in love. The resolution has no words, because words themselves are almost too concrete. The vow is silent or that immortal “yes”—and this abstraction is expressed in such a way that if [VI 111] all the writers of shorthand joined together they would be unable to describe what takes place in a week of marriage. This is the marital happiness. I do not mean it in the sense in which one speaks of a particular happy couple—no, this is the happiness of being a married man. What life is happier than his for whom everything has meaning; how could life become long for the person to whom the moment has meaning? And if this happiness is not safe and secure, for indeed an old proverb says that Ehestand [marriage] is Wehestand [misery],40 and marriage declares itself in this way; how secure it must indeed feel so that it dares to invite people to attempt it! Is there any other arrangement in life, any other relationship, that begins in this way—alas, all other beginnings are flattering enough and are silent about the
difficulties. To excuse the note he has sent to the Count, Figaro tells the Countess that she is the only woman in the kingdom to whom he dared permit himself to do such a thing with certainty;41 similarly, marriage, I believe, is unique in that it dares to say of itself with certainty that it is a torment; it would be incautious of anything else in life to betray anything.

  The genuinely idealizing resolution must be just as dialectical with regard to freedom as to the divine dispensation. No resolution is made without venturing. Now that the resolution has been made, the more abstract it is, the less dialectical it is with respect to the divine dispensation. The ideality of the resolution thereby gradually acquires a certain falseness; it becomes a bit proud, haughty, inhuman; the whole argument of providence in particular is regarded as extrajudicial. The more concrete the resolution is, the more it has to do with a relation to the divine dispensation. This gives it the ideality of humility, meekness, and gratitude. But a married man who is that with his whole life and soul is certainly the one who has ventured and ventured most of all. He ventures out of infatuation’s hiding place with the beloved one, with the beloved ones—what cannot happen there? He does not know; if he would devote himself to this thought, his hair would certainly turn gray in a single night. He does not know what would happen, but this he does know—he can lose everything; and this he does know—he cannot evade a single thing, for the resolution holds him firmly there where his love imprisons [VI 112] him but also holds him undaunted there where falling in love laments.

  There is an old saying that perhaps has fallen somewhat into discredit, but never mind; the saying goes like this: What does one not do for the sake of wife and children? Antwort [Answer]: One does everything, everything. —And what does one then do against the divine dispensation, who fathoms its secret? One flexes one’s muscles, one works, one fights, one suffers—ah, there is nothing one will not put up with. The more positive a person’s resolution is, the more declinable he himself becomes, and only a married man is declined by the divine dispensation in all genera [genders], numeri [numbers], and casibus [cases]. —From a purely external point of view, there certainly are hundreds and hundreds more who have risked more than a married man, risked kingdoms and countries, millions and millions of millions have lost thrones and principalities, fortunes and prosperity, and yet the married man risks more. For the person who loves risks more than all these things, and the person who loves in as many ways as it is possible for a man to love risks most of all. Suppose that the married man is a king, a millionaire—there is no need for that, there is no need for that; all those other things merely confuse the clarity of the arithmetical problem—suppose that he is a beggar, he risks the most. Suppose that the brave one dares to do the hero-dance on the battlefield, or dance upon the heaving sea, or leap across the abyss—there is no need for that, there is no need for that, for everyday use there is no need for that. In a theater it might be needed, but mankind would be in a bad way if life and our Lord did not have a few reserve battalions of heroes who are not applauded even though they risk more. A married man risks every day, and every day the sword of duty hangs over his head, and the journal is kept up as long as the marriage keeps on, and the ledger of responsibility is never closed, and the responsibility is even more inspiring than the most glorious epic poet who must testify for the hero. Well, it is true that he does not take the risk for nothing—no, like for like; he risks everything for everything, and if because of its responsibility marriage is an epic, then because of its happiness it certainly is also an idyll.

  Thus marriage is the beautiful focal point of life and existence, a center that reflects just as deeply as that which it manifests is high: a disclosure that in its concealment manifests the heavenly. And every marriage does this, just as not only the ocean but the quiet lake does, provided the water is not turbid. To be a married man is the most beautiful and meaningful task; the person who did not become married is an unfortunate whose life either did not permit him that or who never fell in love, or he is a suspicious character whom we eventually [VI 113] ought to take into custody. Marriage is the fullness of time.42 He who did not become a married man is always regarded as unhappy by others or he is that also to himself; in his eccentricity he wants to feel time as a burden. This is what marriage is like. It is divine, for falling in love is the wonder; it is earthly, for falling in love is nature’s most profound myth. Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus,43 fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration;44 therefore marriage is sacred and blessed by God. It is civic, for by marriage the lovers belong to the state and the fatherland and the common concerns of their fellow citizens. It is poetic, inexpressibly so, just as is falling in love, but the resolution is the conscientious translator that translates the enthusiasm into actuality, and this translator is so scrupulous, oh, so scrupulous! The voice of falling in love “sounds like the fairies’ from the grottoes on a summer night,”45 but the resolution has the earnestness of perseverance that sounds through the fleeting and the transitory. The movement of falling in love is light, like dancing in the meadow, but the resolution catches hold of the weary one until the dance begins again. This is what marriage is like. It is happy like a child, and yet solemn, for it continually has the wonder before its eyes. It is modest and concealed, yet festivity lives within, but just as the storekeeper’s door to the street is locked during a divine service, so is marriage’s door always shut, because a divine service is going on continually. It is concerned, but this concern is not unbeautiful, since it rests in understanding of and feeling for the deep pain of all life. Whoever does not know this pain is unbeautiful: it is solemn and yet mitigated in jest, for not to will to do everything is a poor jest, but to do one’s utmost and then to understand that it is little, so little, nothing at all compared with love’s desire and with resolution’s demand—that is a blessed jest. It is humble and yet courageous; indeed, courage such as this is found only in marriage, because it is formed from the strength of the man and the frailty of the woman and is rejuvenated by the child’s freedom from care. It is faithful; truly, if marriage were not faithful, where then would there be faithfulness! It is secure, at peace, enfranchised in life; no danger is a real danger, but only a spiritual conflict. It is content with little, it also [VI 114] knows how to use much; but it knows how to be beautiful in scarcity and knows how to be no less beautiful in abundance! It is satisfied and yet full of expectancy; the lovers are sufficient unto themselves and yet exist only for the sake of others. It is plain and everyday—indeed, what is as plain and everyday as marriage; it is totally temporal, and yet the recollection of eternity listens and forgets nothing.

  This will have to be enough on the subject of marriage. At this moment I have no more that I want to say; another time, perhaps tomorrow, I shall say more, but “always the same and about the same thing,”46 for it is only gypsies and robbers and swindlers who have the motto: Never go back where you have once been.47 Yet it seems to me to be sufficient, and the only thing I would like to add is that if marriage were only half as good, it would already be attractive in my eyes, all the more so since I certainly do feel that I have not been eulogizing myself but rather have been passing judgment. But then a man can indeed also be a happy husband without having achieved perfection if only he has his eyes on perfection and humbly feels his own imperfection. All I wanted to do here was to jack up the price a bit,48 for when one is dealing with chicaners who cavil at everything, with freebooters who devastate and burn, with spies who lurk at the door, with vagabonds who want to burst right in from the street, then one commands respect for what is holy, and incidentally plays a little blind man’s buff with them, since one is well aware that they are standing and fumbling at the street door, the blind door of marriage, but along that path one learns nothing about marriage.

  Now for
the objections. Even if a married man cannot sharpen them as a chicaner can, he knows very well where the trouble lies, knows how to include such things in stating the case for marriage, or at least has acquired ordinary competence in taking a hint. To elaborate the objections as such is only a waste of time, even if one had the talent for it. But this much is certain: anyone who raises an objection is always to be pitied. Either he has gone astray in desire and thereupon become callous or he is infatuated with the understanding. With regard to any objection based on the latter, the only reply, à la Hamann, is “Bah!” Let him go on talking as long as [VI 115] he wants to; then ask if he has finished, and then say that magic word. Having closed the door in this manner, one then has a second reply. The Sophist Gorgias is supposed to have said about tragedy that it is a deception in which the one deceiving seems more justified than the one not deceiving and the deceived wiser than the one not deceived.49 This last remark is an eternal truth and a proper response whenever the understanding goes astray in its own thoughts and precisely out of fear of being deceived is thereby deceived. It is indeed true that it takes a quite different kind of wisdom to remain in the blessed deception of ardor and of mystery and of erotic love and of illusion and of the wonder than to run away from house and home split naked, half-sappy from sheer sapience. The contrast arises in such a strange way. At times absentmindedness is due to a deficiency of memory, and yet there are cases of a man’s becoming absentminded because he has too much memory.