Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  The experts will perhaps also agree with me that Goethe’s women are his best-drawn characters. But on closer scrutiny the best of them are not perceived in true feminine ideality but in the light in which an equivocator sees them, one who is especially adept at discovering what is lovely, at kindling a blaze, but also knows how to look at this conflagration with an exclusive superiority. They are lovely, very much so, superbly portrayed, and yet it is not so much they who are dishonored as it is womanhood that is dishonored in their persons, because in relation to them the condescending sensibleness that knows how to enjoy, to relish, but also how to distance them and itself when the pleasure is over, almost seems to be justified or at least excusable.

  In Aus meinem Leben, that poet is a master in this distance theory. He himself has been so good as to explain the procedure.109 Yet it must be remembered that the poet does not wish to be instructive—far from it; he is well aware that this is not something given to everyone. It is a natural characteristic; he is a privileged individuality. Admittedly, that poet is a hero, and I who am so rash as to talk about him am a bourgeois-philistine, but fortunately there are certain things that every child can understand and about which it makes no difference whether one is a hero, a judge, or a pauper. Hence, every time a human relationship is about to overwhelm him, he must distance it from himself by poetizing it. How different temperaments are, or are they perhaps not so different! What does it mean to poetize a human relationship? Whether or not one obtains a poetic masterpiece out of it is beside the point—alas, in this respect there is a glaring difference between a hero and a poor judge, and also an inmate of the workhouse. To poetize an actual human relationship by means of distancing (which, please note, one must defend as guarantor) is neither more nor less than to falsify the ethical in it and to give it a false stamp as an event and an intellectual pursuit. Indeed, if one has a lightning conductor such as that in one’s pocket, no wonder that one is safe in the storm! How [VI 148] many bunglers and dabblers have servilely and obsequiously admired this natural characteristic? And yet every person has this natural characteristic more or less; to put it very simply, it is the natural and covetous person’s warding off of the ethical. This talent to poetize, that is, to distance the actual life relationship in poetic contours, is often found among criminals; it is frequently found among the depressed also, but with the difference that the esthetically depressed thereby gain a mitigation, but the ethically depressed an aggravation. Possibly the cheerful Goethe was a little depressed, just as the wise Goethe had a fair share of superstition. Thus the natural tendency to poeticize an actual human relationship is both rather common and dubious. Of course, not everyone who “poetizes” therefore writes masterpieces—who would be so foolish as to say anything like that? But with regard to the ethical, that distinction whereby one person is a hero, yes, perhaps even as unique as a hero, another a bungler, is totally irrelevant. The ethical is so incorruptible that if our Lord himself had been obliged to allow himself a little irregularity in creating the world, ethics would not let itself be disturbed, although heaven and earth and everything found therein is nevertheless a quite fine masterpiece.

  Now, if that poet-existence in Aus meinem Leben is poetic, then goodbye to marriage, which then at most becomes a refuge for the declining years. If that existence is poetic, then what does one do for woman? Then she, too, must take care to become poetic. It is bad enough for a man who is tried and experienced in the erotic—indeed, is a burned-out case—brazenly to take a young girl for a wife in order to be rejuvenated a little and to have the best nursing care now that he is beginning to become old; but it is revolting for an elderly woman, an experienced spinster, to marry a young man in order to assure herself of a safe shelter and a sophisticated stimulation now that the poetic is beginning to vanish.

  Marriage likes deserters just as little as it allows one to serve two masters.110 Solomon puts it beautifully when he says that he who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains a good gift from God111—or, to modernize the saying a bit, to him who falls in love, the god has been gracious. If he marries the beloved, he does a good deed and does well to finish what he has begun.112

  [VI 149] What has just been said will not, of course, in any miserable way recommend the resolution of marriage. The resolution of marriage is its own best recommendation, since, as stated, it is the only adequate form of being in love.

  Consequently, the point now is to see how the resolution can intervene, how the reflection that is presupposed in the resolution can reach a point where it coincides with the immediacy of falling in love. As soon as falling in love is eliminated, it becomes ludicrous to want to reflect upon whether one ought to marry or not. This is quite true, but this does not justify the elimination of being in love, which is done every time one tries to keep the resolution separate from falling in love and then makes reflecting upon it ludicrous.

  That such reflection upon whether to marry is silly when there is no love has already been correctly perceived and profoundly propounded by a few wise men of antiquity, but not, as we will see, in order to put weapons into the hands of the mockers. It is told that Socrates is supposed to have answered someone who asked him about marriage: Marry or do not marry—you will regret both.113 Socrates was an ironist who presumably concealed his wisdom and truth ironically lest it become local gossip, but he was not a mocker. The irony is superb. The questioner’s stupidity lies precisely in asking a third person for something one can never learn from a third person. But not all are as wise as Socrates, and they often become quite earnestly involved with the one who poses a stupid question. If the falling in love is lacking, then reflection cannot be exhausted at all, and if one is in love, one does not ask such a question. If a mocker wants to use the Socratic saying, then he acts as if it were a discourse and makes it into something other than what it is: namely, a deeply ironic, infinitely wise answer to a foolish question. By changing the answer to a question into a discourse, one can produce a certain crazy comic effect, but one loses the Socratic wisdom and does violence to the trustworthy testimony that expressly introduces the story thus: Someone asked him (Socrates) whether one should marry or not. To which he answered: Whether you do the one or the other, you will regret it. If Socrates had not been so ironic, he presumably would have expressed it this way: As far as you are concerned, you can do [VI 150] as you wish—you are and remain a dunce. For not everyone who regrets demonstrates thereby that now, in the moment of regret, he is a stronger and better individuality than in the moment of the thoughtless action; sometimes regret can demonstrate most of all that the regretter is a fusspot. —There is a story about Thales that when his mother was urging him to marry he first answered that he was too young, that the time had not yet come, and when she later repeated the request, he replied that the time was now past.114 There is an irony also in this answer that chastises the worldly common sense that would make marriage an undertaking like buying a house. In other words, there is only one age at which it is timely to marry, and that is when one is in love; at any other age one is either too young or too old.

  Such things are always pleasant to consider, for if frivolousness in the realm of the erotic is disastrous, then a certain kind of commonsensicality is even more disastrous. But this one saying of Socrates, properly understood, is able to cut down, like death with his scythe, the whole luxuriant growth of commonsensical chatter that wants to talk itself into a marriage.

  Here, then, I pause at the crucial point: a resolution must be added to falling in love. But a resolution presupposes reflection, but reflection is immediacy’s angel of death.115 So the matter stands, and if it was right that reflection should attack falling in love, then there will never be a marriage. But that is precisely what it should not do—indeed, what is more, even prior to and simultaneously with this process, which through reflection comes to the resolution, there is the negative resolution that fends off any reflection of this nature as a spiritual temptation. While reflection’
s destroying angel of death ordinarily goes about calling for death to the immediate, there is still one immediacy it allows to stand—the immediacy of falling in love, which is a wonder. If reflection attacks falling in love, this means that one is supposed to inspect whether the beloved meets the ideal abstract conception of an ideal. Any reflection of this sort, even the scantiest, is an offense just as it is also a stupidity. Even if the lover had, on the face of it, the purest enthusiasm in wanting to discover the loveliness, suppose [VI 151] that he had a voice “so sweet, oh, so sweet,” suppose that he had a lightness of desire, suppose that he had a poet’s eloquence in reflecting so keenly that even the most delicate feminine soul would hear only the sweet melody and sense only the sweet fragrance of the offering and would not discover the offense—it is still an attempt to deplete erotic love. But just as the god of love is blind and love is itself a wonder, something that both the lover and the most preposterous reflection acknowledge or must acknowledge, just so the lover should preserve himself in this clairvoyance.

  There is a modesty to which even the most adoring admiration is an affront; it is a kind of unfaithfulness to the beloved. Even if this admiration, as the lover believes, binds him even more inseparably to her, it nevertheless has already, so to speak, separated him; it is a kind of unfaithfulness, because there is a criticism dormant in this admiration. Moreover, beauty is transitory and loveliness can vanish. Thus it is an affront to the beloved to want to have all her lovableness consist in the synthesis that is the basis of the modesty in falling in love. On the other hand there is feminine lovableness, which again is essentially that of the wife and mother, that does not require this bashfulness, whereas, even if she had the face of an angel, wanting to admire this beauty is an offense that already suggests that the equality in falling in love is no longer in balance.

  But, I hear the lover say: precisely in this admiration I feel the sublimity of the beloved, and thus there is basically no reciprocity, none at all, in my being loved in return. Oh, even the person who calculates in infinite quantities nevertheless calculates! Hence, whether the beloved is the fairest among women116 or she is not so favored, the only appropriate, brief, pithy, adequate phrase for the whole content of falling in love is: I love her. Truly, someone who at the beginning had nothing else to say and later just as taciturnly kept his soul terse in true expressions of love is more faithful to her than someone who could invite the races of men and of gods to a banquet of descriptions of the beloved’s loveliness and do it so consummately that they all, all, would go away overwhelmed and envious.

  But what dares to be scrutinized, dares to be admired, is the lovable substance of her nature. Here to admire is not an affront, although admiration will learn from love not to become an insipid babbler of words or a birthday poet but an incorruptible little humming of quiet joy. This substance of the soul gains its only real opportunity to disclose itself in marriage, which has at its disposal the cornucopia of tasks, the best gift one receives on the wedding day. Even if the beloved, just to delight the one for whom she would sacrifice [VI 152] her life, since there is no opportunity for a greater proof, demonstrates it equally well in lesser ways, even if she adorned herself only to please him and now, she, the beautiful one, in her lovely apparel was so lovely that the old men followed her sadly with their eyes as they followed Helen walking through the hall117—if with one single nerve in his eyes the lover looked at her in the wrong way and admired instead of comprehending the proper expression of being in love, that it was to please him—then he has taken a wrong turn, he is on the way to becoming a connoisseur.

  Thus if one imagines a time of love, especially a time such as the engagement, consequently outside of marriage, one may often make a mistake, precisely because erotic love lacks the essential tasks and therefore at times can make both parties faultfinding. What Bedreddin says about Gulnare’s gaze,

  Gently as when the grave opens and sends

  The redeemed soul to paradise,

  She opens her lovely eyelids

  And heavenward turns her gaze,118

  could be understood of the whole disclosing of the lovable content of the soul with respect to the immediacy of falling in love. This immediacy is the obscure element, but just as gently as when the grave opens, the transfigured one extricates herself from the concealment of love into a beauty of soul, and in this transfiguration she belongs to the husband.

  Since reflection does not dare to set foot in the holy place of love and on the consecrated ground of immediacy, what direction shall it then take until it arrives at the resolution? Reflection turns toward the relation between falling in love and actuality. For the lover, the most certain of all things is that he is in love, and no meddlesome thoughts, no stockbrokers run back and forth between falling in love and a so-called ideal—this is a forbidden road. Nor does reflection inquire whether he should marry; he does not forget Socrates. But to marry is to enter an actuality in relation to a given actuality; to marry involves an extraordinary concretion. This concretion is the task of reflection. But is it perhaps so concrete (defined in [VI 153] terms of time, place, surroundings, the stroke of the clock, seventeen relationships, etc.) that no reflection can penetrate it? If this is assumed, one has thereby also assumed that, on the whole, no resolution is possible. A resolution is still always an ideality; I have the resolution before I begin to act in virtue of this resolution. But how, then, have I come to the resolution? A resolution is always reflective; if this is disregarded, then language is confused and resolution is identified with an immediate impulse, and any statement about resolution is no more an advancement than a journey in which one drives all night but takes the wrong road and in the morning arrives back at the same place from which one departed. In a perfectly ideal reflection the resolution has ideally emptied actuality, and the conclusion of this ideal reflection, which is something more than the summa summarum [sum total] and enfin [finally], is precisely the resolution: the resolution119 is the ideality brought about through a perfectly ideal reflection, which is the action’s acquired working capital.

  “But,” someone says, “that is all very fine, but it will take a long time, and meanwhile the grass is growing—a husband of that sort certainly does not become an apprentice [Pebersvend] but the oldest journeyman in the shop [Oldgesel].” By no means. Moreover, the same charge can be made against any resolution, and yet resolution is the true beginning of freedom, but it is required of a beginning that it be timely, that it have a proper relation to that which is to be carried out, that it not come to be like an introduction that anticipates the whole book or a petition that cuts short the entire parliamentary debate. But delight actuates any work, and the delight of one in love, which during all this is the same, quickens him early and late, keeps him awake and unremitting in his chivalrous wanderings, for truly this expedition of the lover to find the resolution is more chivalrous than a crusade against the Turks, than a pilgrimage, more winsome to the eyes of erotic love than any feat whatsoever, for it is concentric with erotic love itself.

  So, led by the hand of his guardian spirit, the happy young man [Ungersvend] (that a young man in love is happy goes without saying) goes his way and surveys that ideal image of actuality that appears to him, while the beloved sits waiting, safe and happy; for every time he has returned to her (in order once again, after having rested in his wanderings, once again to continue until he finds the jewel, the wedding gift, the resolution, the most beautiful and the only worthy gift), she has [VI 154] never seen a change in him, as little as his amorousness has changed, not even to becoming an admiring amorousness.