Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  If the objection is going to start at the bottom, it should, insofar as it is leveling its charge against marriage, first of all level its charge at falling in love, for first things must still always come first. This seldom happens. Ordinarily the objections just take love under their wing, and their amorous kiss is a real Judas kiss50 with which they betray marriage. The enemies who level charges against love are less harmful and only very seldom have a hearing. As soon as the understanding wants to try to explain or think through love, the ludicrousness of it becomes apparent, something that is best expressed by saying that understanding becomes ludicrous. But the matter takes on a different aspect with regard to the person who is doing the talking. If it is a degenerate who ends a perhaps dissolute life by wanting to ridicule everything that always knew how to elude his profane touch, even if he has dabbled quite enough in so-called falling in love, then any response is superfluous. But a more acceptable form of objection is conceivable; it is so acceptable that one can decide to feel sorry for the poor mixed-up fellow and explain his mistake. Then it must be a young man who actually was pure in regard to the erotic, but a young man who, like a prematurely wise child, has skipped a stage in the development of the soul and has begun his life with reflection. Such a thing is certainly conceivable in our reflective age; in a certain sense he can even be regarded as a justified individuality, insofar as all the profuse [VI 116] talk about reflection, the idolization of it, the necessity of it, sharpened by doubting everything, for him expresses itself in his being more earnest than many an irresponsible systematician who wants to make a hit in a book by doubting everything, gets the preposterous idea of wanting to think the erotic, think himself into it—that is, think himself away from it. Such an individuality is an unhappy individuality, and to the extent that he actually is pure, I cannot consider his unhappiness without sympathy. He is indeed like that solitary fairy who has lost her swan’s wings and now sits there abandoned, vainly, despite all her efforts, trying to fly.51 He has lost the immediacy that carries a person through life, the immediacy without which falling in love is impossible, the immediacy, continually presupposed, that has continually taken him a little further; he is excluded from the benevolence of immediacy, for which one cannot really manage to give thanks since the benevolence always hides itself.

  Just as it is sad to see the misery of that solitary fairy, so, too, it is sad to see all the mental exertions of such a person, whether he suffers in silence or with a demonic virtuosity in reflecting he knows how to conceal his nakedness with clever words.

  All falling in love is a wonder—marvel not, then, that the understanding stands still while the lovers kneel in adoration before the wonder’s sacred symbol. In this connection, one should here, as everywhere, continually watch one’s expressions. There is a category called “to choose oneself,” a somewhat modernized Greek category52 (it is my favorite category and encompasses an individual’s existence), but it should never be applied to the erotic, as in speaking of choosing a beloved, for the beloved is the god’s [Gudens] gift and just as the person choosing, who chooses himself, is presupposed to exist, so also must the beloved be presupposed to exist as the beloved if the category “to choose” is to be used univocally in both connections. If that phrase “to choose” is used to mean wanting to set someone up as the beloved, instead of wanting to accept the beloved, then a deluded reflection promptly has something to hold to. The young man then dissolves love into loving the lovable—after all, he must choose. Poor fellow, that is an impossibility; and not only that, who would still dare to [VI 117] choose if it is supposed to be understood in this way; who would dare to be so doting on his own manliness that he would not grasp that he who proposes must first be proposed to by the god himself, and any other proposing is a foolish having it all one’s own way. I decline to choose in this way; instead I thank the god for the gift—he chooses better—and to thank is more blessed. I do not wish to become a laughingstock by starting a silly, critical lecture on the beloved, that I love her for this reason and for that reason and finally for this reason—because I love her. If done right, a lecture of this sort to the lovers themselves can be very amusing by quite humorously placing the whole substance of erotic love in relation to a triviality, as if the husband were to tell his wife that he really loved her because she had blond hair. That kind of talk is a humorous jest that long ago lost sight of the importance of all reflection. I give the god what is the god’s,53 and every human being ought to do that. But he does not do it when he denies him the sacred tribute of admiration and wonder. Precisely when the understanding stands still, it behooves one to have the courage and the heart to believe the wondrous and, continually strengthened by this vision, to return to actuality and not just sit still and want to fathom it. Nevertheless, I still prefer a futile attempt of a sharply sustained critique that drives the reflecting one to despair and perhaps precisely thereby saves him to a silly garrulous reflection, a lady’s maid who wants to dress up erotic love and know more than the wonder. Surely erotic love is a wonder, not some town gossip; its priest is a worshiper, not a streetwalker.

  In paganism, therefore, love was attributed to Eros. Since the resolution of marriage adds the ethical, that somewhat arch assignation to a deity thereby becomes in marriage a purely religious expression for one’s receiving the beloved from the hand of God. As soon as God is present in the consciousness, the wonder is there, for God cannot be there in any other way. The Jews expressed this by saying that the person who saw God must die.54 This was only a figurative expression; it is literal and true that one loses one’s mind in the same way as the lover does when he sees the beloved and, which he also does, sees God. To be sure, I have been a married man for several years. Perhaps one will laugh at my enthusiasm—but laugh then—a married man is always in love, and otherwise he never comes to understand what it means to fall in love.

  [VI 118] The rueful knight of reflection goes further; he wants to fathom the synthesis at the basis of erotic love. He does not perceive that a veil is hung before his eyes and that once again he faces the wonder. God creates out of nothing, but here, if I dare say so, he does more—he dresses an instinct in all the beauty of erotic love so that the lovers see only the beauty and are unaware of the instinct. Who lifted the veil? Who would dare to do that? The ideal beauty is veiled beauty, and presumably the moon shines half as beautifully through the cloud veil, and the sky dreams half as yearningly through the curtain of blossoms, and the sea in its half transparency tempts half as strongly as the beloved, as the wife, through the veil of modesty. I dream—I, a poor married man? But what shall I say about the mystery that was, is, and will remain a mystery to me through the years, for I do not know that any explanation is coming; I do not even comprehend this loathsome presumptuousness that believes nature’s veil to be more precious than morality’s.

  So, then, that poor fellow whom reflection reduces to beggary, as always, goes further: his dreaming makes him unhappier; his wealth makes him poorer. He pauses at what he presumably would call the consequences of erotic love. And who does not also pause here; indeed, it is as if the natural course of life paused while the god creatively intervenes. O blessed wonder! Who is not grateful to see the god here, grateful that he does not sink into depression as does reflection’s weary warrior. Who is not grateful out of joy over life, not as if the child were a wonder child (vanity, vanity), but it is a wonder that a child is born. Anyone who refuses to see the wonder here must indeed—if he is not utterly lacking in spirit—say with Thales that out of love of children he will not have any children:55 the saddest of sayings (for it implies that it is a greater crime or misfortune to give a human being life than to take a human being’s life) and the most disastrous self-contradiction!

  Falling in love, then, is claimed as the wonder, and everything that belongs to love belongs to the wonder. Love, then, is assumed as given. Any attempt on the part of reflection, however flattering or shocking, however rash or insipid, is st
raightway condemned as false. —The question remains: How can this immediacy (falling in love) find its equivalent in [VI 119] an immediacy reached through reflection? Here the crucial battle will take place.

  But first of all I would like to point out another aspect of the matter.56 Love is ordinarily praised enough. Even a seducer does not lack the audacity to join in. But the moment or the brief period of falling in love is supposed to be woman’s culmination, and therefore the point is to leave off again. In that case the objections take another direction, and the amorous, seductive worship of the sex ends with insults.

  Incidentally, I was brought up in the Christian religion, and although I can scarcely sanction all the improper attempts to gain the emancipation of woman, all paganlike reminiscences also seem foolish to me. My brief and simple opinion is that woman is certainly just as good as man—period. Any more discursive elaboration of the difference between the sexes or deliberation on which sex is superior is an idle intellectual occupation for loafers and bachelors. A well-brought-up child is recognized by his being satisfied with what he receives, and likewise a well-brought-up married man is recognized by his being happy and grateful for what has been allotted to him—in other words, that he is in love. We sometimes hear a married man lament that marriage gives him too much to attend to—how much more he has if he also is shameless enough either to want to be only his wife’s censor and critic, who torments her every other moment of the day with his insipid claims that she must smile this way, hold her head up this way, curtsy this way, dress this way, and pronounce this way—or he wants to be a married man and also a critic and censor.

  As a critic of marriage, I am a tiro [novice]; I have no shallow introductory studies from a man-about-town period, which at times is more poisonous than one thinks. My love story is in a certain sense short. I have minded my own business and tended to my studies; I have not inspected the girls at parties and on the promenades, at theaters and concerts. I have not entered into it recklessly, nor have I done it with the idiotic seriousness in which a marriageable male is pleased to think that a girl must be extraordinary to be good enough for him. Thus without any experience I became acquainted with her who now is mine. I have never been in love before, and my prayer is that I may not fall in love later on, but if for a [VI 120] moment I were to think what for me is indeed unthinkable—that death took her from me, that my life underwent a change such that I would be dedicated to being a husband a second time, I am convinced that my marriage has not spoiled me or made me more competent to criticize, select, and inspect. No wonder one hears so much silly talk about love, since to hear so much talk is already an indication that reflection is universally forcing its way in to disturb the quiet, more modest life where love prefers to reside because in its modesty it is so close to piety.

  Thus I am well aware that Messrs. Esthetes will promptly declare me incompetent for discussion, and all the more so when I do not conceal that despite being married for eight years I still do not definitely know in a critical sense what my wife looks like. To love is not to criticize, and marital faithfulness does not consist of detailed criticism. Yet this ignorance of mine is not entirely due to my being uncultured; I, too, am able to observe the beautiful, but I observe a portrait, a statue, in that way, not a wife. I thank her in part for that, for if she had found any vain delight whatsoever in being the object of a philanderer’s critical adoration, who knows whether I, too, might not have become a philanderer and as usual ended up becoming a grumpy critic and husband. Neither do I see myself able to move easily and routinely in some of the termini [technical terms] the connoisseurs sling about; I do not ask for that and do not go to banquets with connoisseurs. To put it as mildly as possible, to me such connoisseurs seem like those who sit and change money in the forecourt of the sanctuary;57 and just as it must be nauseating for someone entering the temple in an exalted frame of mind to hear the jingling of coins, so is it nauseating to me to hear the noise of words such as “slim,” “shapely,” “svelte,” etc. When I read these words in a primitive58 poet, flowing out of originality of mood and of the mother tongue, I am delighted, but I do not profane them, and, as far as my wife is concerned, I am not sure to this day whether she is slim. My joy and my being in love are not that of a horse dealer or the irascible unwholesomeness of a cunning seducer. If I were to express myself about her in that way, I am sure I would talk nonsense. Having refrained from it up to now, I am very likely saved from it for the rest of my life, for just the mere presence of an infant [VI 121] makes being in love even more bashful than it is intrinsically. I have often pondered this, and for that reason I have always found it unbecoming for an older man with children to marry a very young girl.

  Precisely because my love [Kjærlighed] is everything to me, all critical output is in my opinion sheer nonsense. If I were to praise the female sex in the esthetic way people speak about praising, I would do it only humorously, for all this slimness and svelteness and the eyebrows and flashing eyes do not constitute falling in love, still less a marriage, and only in marriage does being in love have its true expression; outside marriage it is seduction or flirtation. There is a little book by Hen. Cornel. Agrippa of Nettesheim: De nobilitate et praecelientia foeminei sexus, eiusdemque supra virilem eminentia libellus [On the Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex, and the Superiority of the Same over the Male Sex].59 This little book in a very naive way says the most remarkable things in honor of women. Whether the author has demonstrated what he wanted to demonstrate, I am not exactly sure, although he speaks bona fide [in good faith] and well and is good-natured enough to believe that he has demonstrated it; I do, however, fully approve of the poem (at the end of the book) that refuses to have anything to do with any turgid [vaniloquax] praise of man. When in the absolute assurance of the happiness of being in love and of marriage one reads this naive argumentation, when one adds a very pathos-filled ergo [therefore] or quod erat demonstrandum [that which was to be demonstrated] to each argument, whereas the genuine pathos is the rich substance of that assurance, which needs no proof, then a purely humorous effect is produced.

  I shall explain this a bit more precisely. A speech was delivered to the Twenty-eighth of May Society60 by a young scholar who in his enthusiasm for the natural sciences was of the opinion that every new discovery, for example, the recent discovery that soap could be made from flintstone, led us closer to God and convinced us of his goodness, wisdom, etc. [VI 122] If the speech is supposed to be considered a serious attempt to come closer to God, it is, it seems to me, very miserable. It is different, however, if an individuality who is a millionaire and “better” than the Bank of England when it comes to his faith in the goodness and wisdom of God, if he, when reflection began to show signs of wanting to demonstrate something with regard to this, were to interrupt its demonstration with the argument that now we are even able to wash our hands in soap made of flintstone. He could then end his speech something like this: Look! Now I am washing my hands; if this is not a convincing demonstration, then I despair of producing any. In that little book it is adduced as proof that in Hebrew woman is called Eve (life), man is called Adam (earth)61—ergo. Something like this is excellent as a jest in an altercatio [exchange of words] in which everything is absolutely decided and signed and sealed with both the notary public’s seal and God’s. So it is also when the author cites as another demonstration that when a woman falls into the water she floats on top whereas a man, if he falls into the water, sinks—ergo. This demonstration lends itself to other uses, which helps explain the fact that so many witches were burned in the Middle Ages.

  It is a few years since I read that little book, but it was highly amusing to me. The most comical things in the natural sciences and philology appear in the most naive way. Various things imprinted themselves on my memory, and while I never speak to my wife about her being slender etc., which would certainly displease her and be a failure for me, yet sometimes, if I do say so myself, I am very good at the kind of ar
guments and observations that please her, probably because they demonstrate nothing at all and therefore simply demonstrate that our marriage needs no prolix critique but that we are happy.

  In that connection, it has often amazed me that no poet really portrays a married couple conversing. If they are ever portrayed—and they are meant to be a happy couple—they usually talk like a couple in love. Ordinarily they are only minor characters and so much older that they are the father and mother of the lover the poet is portraying. If a marriage is to be portrayed, it at least must be unhappy in order to be able to come under consideration. They are viewed so differently: falling in love is supposed to be happy and have dangers outside; [VI 123] marriage must have its dangers within in order to be poetic. I regard this as a sad indirect demonstration that marriage is far from enjoying the recognition that it deserves, for it indeed seems as if a married couple were not just as poetic as a couple of lovers. Let the lovers talk with all the effervescence of infatuation, which appeals to the young man and the young maiden; married folk are not so bad, either.