Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  Otherwise it is a matter of persevering in the dialectical with deliberation as the antecedent and with repentance as the consequent. Only the person who in deliberation has exhausted the dialectical, only he acts, and only the person who in repentance exhausts the dialectical, only he repents. Thus it seems inexplicable how that powerful thinker Fichte could assume that there was no time for the man of action to repent,561 and all the more so because this energetic and, in the noble Greek sense, honest philosopher had a great conception of a person’s actions taking place only in the internal. Yet this may be explained by the fact that with his energy he did not particularly realize (at least not in his earlier period) that this internal action is essentially a suffering, and that therefore a person’s highest inward action is to repent. But to repent is not a [VI 443] posviitive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself.

  There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human being who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is [er], but it does not exist [er ikke til], for when it exists it does so in the esthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is, it is the abstraction from or a prius [something prior] to the esthetic, the ethical, the religious. The ethical sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful.

  Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway—which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all—just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical. No wonder, then, that one fears it, for if one gives it a finger it takes the whole hand. Just as Jehovah in the Old Testament visits the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the latest generations,562 so repentance goes backward, continually presupposing the object of its investigation. In repentance there is the impulse of the motion, and therefore everything is reversed. This impulse signifies precisely the difference between the esthetic and the religious as the difference between the external and the internal.

  The infinite annihilating power of this repentance is best seen in the sympathetically dialectical character that it also has. Attention is rarely paid to this. I shall not discuss here such shabbiness as wanting to repent of a specific act and then being a jolly fellow again or wanting to have repented and to be believed, although every such expression is adequate demonstration that the one who resolves, the one who gives assurances, the one who believes it has no concept of meaning, but even the more competent expositions of repentance fail to see the dialectical side with regard to the sympathetic. An example to throw some light on this. A gambler comes to a standstill, repentance seizes him, he renounces all gambling. Although he has been standing on the brink of the abyss, repentance nevertheless hangs on to him, and it seems to be successful. Living withdrawn as he does now, possibly saved, [VI 444] he one day sees the body of a man drawn out of the Seine: a suicide, and this was a gambler just as he himself had been, and he knew that this gambler had struggled, had fought a desperate battle to resist his craving. My gambler had loved this man, not because he was a gambler, but because he was better than he was. What then? It is unnecessary to consult romances and novels, but even a religious speaker would very likely break off my story a little earlier and have it end with my gambler, shocked by the sight, going home and thanking God for his rescue. Stop. First of all we should have a little explanation, a judgment pronounced on the other gambler; every life that is not thoughtless eo ipso indirectly passes judgment. If the other gambler had been callous, then he could certainly conclude: He did not want to be saved. But this was not the case. Now, my gambler is a man who has understood the old saying de te narratur fabula [the tale is told of you];563 he is no modern fool who believes that everyone should court the colossal objective task of being able to rattle off something that applies to the whole human race but not to himself. So what judgment shall he pass, and he cannot keep from doing it, for this de te is for him the most sacred law of life, because it is the covenant of humanity. If a religious speaker, who in his lack of being able to think is still able to prate, was deeply moved and benevolently wanted to help him with half categories, then my gambler is sufficiently mature to see the mirage—consequently he must press through. At the moment when he is to judge, he holds to the humble expression of a doctrine of predestination (the proud expression lies in the esthetic with artificial religious gilding) if he hopes for his own salvation. The person who does not have sympathy but has a fear of water naturally finds it unreasonable to take another person’s fate so hard, but not to do so is unsympathetic and excusable only insofar as the reason is stupidity. Life certainly must still have laws; the ethical order of things is no hullabaloo in which one person escapes unscathed from the worst and another scathed from the best. But now the judgment. The idea, of course, is not that it is a proclivity to condemn that makes him so keen. But he himself cannot be saved by chance; that is thoughtlessness. And if he says that the other gambler went down despite his good intentions, then he himself goes down; and if he says that consequently the other was [VI 445] unwilling, then he shudders, because he still saw the good in him and because it seems as if he is making himself better.

  I have deliberately sharpened the issue. Aided by the dialectical in repentance in the direction of sympathy, anyone who is not stupid is immediately shipwrecked. Although I am not a gambler, that phenomenon is sufficient, unless, of course, I am an angel. Though I have ever so little guilt on my conscience, if I have only a smidgen of thought in my brain, all human cobwebs, all of Tom, Dick, and Harry’s small talk about rescue, break like sewing thread until I find the law of life. A man who goes undauntedly through life on the category that he is not a criminal but not faultless, either, is of course comic, and one must help the esthetic in having him extradited if he sneaks into the religious in order to be there also, extradited for comic treatment.

  It is queer enough to see an author who certainly is unaware of the dialectic of repentance in the direction of sympathy but yet is aware of something resembling it, an expression of sympathy—to see such an author cure this suffering by making the sickness even worse. Börne, in all seriousness and not without some emotion at the thought of how easy it is for people in small towns to become misanthropes or even blasphemers and mutineers against the wise governance of providence, explains that in Paris the statistics on miseries and crimes contribute to curing 564the impression to which they probably have contributed—and contribute to Börne’s becoming a philanthropist. Well, well, what a priceless invention statistics are, what a glorious fruit of culture, what a characteristic counterpart to the de te narratur fabula of antiquity. Schleiermacher so enthusiastically declares that knowledge does not perturb religiousness, and that the religious person does not sit safeguarded by a lightning rod and scoff at God;565 yet with the help of statistical tables one laughs at all of life. And just as Archimedes was absorbed in his calculations and did not notice that he was being put to death,566 so, in my opinion, Börne is absorbed in collecting statistics and does not notice—but what am I saying! Oh, a person who is far from being as sensitive as B. will surely discover when life becomes too difficult for him, but as long as a person is himself saved [VI 446] from misfortune (for B. surely can easily save himself from sin by means of a non-Socratic ignorance) he certainly owes it to his good living to have means with which to keep horror away. After all, a person can shut his door on the poor, and if someone should starve to death, then he ca
n just look at a collection of statistical tables, see how many die every year of hunger—and he is comforted.*

  * As an example of a not imperceptible kind of mystification in which sympathy is confused with egotism, I shall quote the passage (Sämtl. W., VIII, p. 96). He speaks of the danger of living in small towns and goes on to say: Grosze Verbrechen geschehen so selten, dasz wir sie für freie Handlungen erklären, und die Wenigen, die sich ihrer schuldig machen, schonungslos verdammen [Major crimes occur so rarely that we regard them as free acts, and the few who are guilty of them we condemn mercilessly]. (This, however, is unnecessary unless one is egotistically cowardly or very stupid. And divine justice does not let itself be intimidated as does a military tribunal by a mutiny that gets everybody pardoned because, after all, not everyone can be executed.) . . . . . Aber ganz anders ist es in Paris [But it is entirely different in Paris]. (In other words, there one believes in the saving power of mutiny.) Die Schwächen der Menschen erscheinen dort als Schwächen der Menschheit [The weaknesses of human beings appear there as the weaknesses of humanity] (well, let it have it; it is, especially when B. is talking, an imaginary quantity that can be treated cavalierly en carnaille [in a vulgar way], for B., I daresay, is not embarrassed by the difficult question of how the human race results from individuals and from reciprocation); Verbrechen und Miszgeschicke (the one as good as the other) als heilsame Krankheiten, welche die Uebel des ganzen Körpers, diesen zu erhalten, auf einzelne Glieder werfen [crimes and misfortune (appear) as salutary ailments that urge the maladies of the whole body upon individual members in order to preserve the whole body]. (And B. imagined himself persecuted as a demagogue! He is so aristocratic that here he is obviously ridiculing the tribune’s speech about the whole body’s suffering when one member suffers.567) Wir er-kennen dort (in Paris) die Naturnothwendigkeit des Bösen [There ( . . . ) we recognize the necessity of evil] (”Heaven help us, how grand everything is in Paris; there nothing at all is ordinary, but everything is exactly as in summer amusement park time”568); und die Nothwendigkeit ist eine beszre Trösterin als die Freiheit [and necessity is a better comforter than freedom] (especially for those who have stopped grieving and thus need no consolation). Wenn in kleinen Städten ein Selbstmord vorfällt, wie lange wird nicht darüber gesprochen, wie viel [VI 447] wird nicht darüber vernünftelt [When a suicide occurs in small towns, how long one talks on and on about it, how much one reasons and palavers]! (However, I believe that one is through with it more quickly than if one were to introduce reason into this wisdom. Poor Paris! I wonder if it is not also true that when a coward, hiding in the crowd like an urchin under his mother’s skirts, writes something in which he is not, as he usually is, wittily entertaining but instructive, the same thing happens to him as to the one who committed suicide—no one pays any attention to him.) . . . . . Liest man aber in Paris die amtlichen Berichte úber die geschehenen Selbstmorde . . . . . wie so viele aus Liebesnoth sich tödten, so viele aus Armuth, so viele wegen unglücklichen Spiels, so viele aus Ehrgeiz,—so lernt man Selbstmorde als Krankheiten ansehen [If one reads the official announcements about suicides occurring in Paris . . . . . how so many kill themselves because of the torments of love, so many because of poverty, so many because of unlucky gambling, so many because of ambition]—then one learns to regard suicide as ailments (indeed, according to the above als heilsamen Krankheiten [as healing ailments]), die wie Sterbfälle durch Schlagflusz oder Schwindsucht in einem gleichbleibenden Verhältnisse jährlich wiederkehren [that as an invariable condition return annually like deadly diseases through strokes or consumption]! And having learned this, one has become a philanthropist, a pious person who does not mock God or presumably even rebel against his wise order. For piety dwells in Paris and Börne is a spiritual counselor!

  Statistical summaries are of no use to an imaginatively [VI 447] constructing psychologist, but then he does not need such an immense conflux of people, either.

  569Once again, imaginatively constructing, I have laid out an issue for the religious: the forgiveness of sin. To place immediacy and the forgiveness of sins together in an immediate relationship can certainly occur to many people; probably they are also able to talk about it—why not? Indeed, probably they are also able to induce others to believe that they themselves have experienced something similar and existed in this way; probably they are even able to induce many to want to do the same and to want to think they have done the same—why not! The only difficulty here is that it is an impossibility. But when it is a matter of the physiology of walking, one does not have so much free play, and if someone were to claim that he walked on one arm or even that everyone walked in this manner, he would soon be discovered to be a tattle carrier [Rγgter], but a cattle driver [Røgter] in the world of spirit is more free and easy.

  An immediate relationship between immediacy and the forgiveness of sin means that sin is something particular, and this particular the forgiveness of sin then takes away. But this is not forgiveness of sin. Thus a child does not know what forgiveness of sin is, for the child, after all, considers himself to be basically a fine child. If only that thing had not happened yesterday, and forgiveness removes it and the child is a fine child. But if sin is supposed to be radical (a discovery owed to repentance, which always precedes the forgiveness), this [VI 448] means precisely that immediacy is regarded as something that is not valid, but if it is to be considered thus, then it must be presumed to have been canceled.

  But how does one manage to exist by virtue of such an idea, somewhat more concretely understood, for to rattle something off is not difficult? —I am well aware that speculators and prophetic seers who scan the future of all humankind will regard me at best as a normal-school graduate perhaps capable of writing a catechetical commentary on a textbook for the public schools. Be that as it may—after all, that is always something. If only the normal-school graduates will not in turn exclude me from their society because they know ever so much more, and finally, if I were satisfied with being a pupil, just so the enlightened normal-school graduate, the world-historically concerned parish clerk, would not say: That is really a stupid boy—he asks such foolish questions. That is of little concern to me; my sole thought is some day to dare in conversation to come closer to that Greek wise man whom I admire, that Greek wise man who laid down his life for what he had understood and once again would joyfully have risked his life in order to understand more, since he considered being in error the most terrible thing of all. And I am sure that Socrates would say: Surely, what you are asking about is a difficult matter, and it has always amazed me that so many could believe that they understood a teaching such as that; but it has amazed me even more that some people have even understood much more. The latter I would certainly like to engage in conversation, and although as a rule I have not made a practice of personally paying for banquets and musicians, I still would have clubbed together with such people in order to be initiated into their exalted, not merely suprahuman but also supradivine wisdom. For Gorgias and Polos and Thrasybolus570 and others, who in my day had booths in the marketplace in Athens, were still only suprahuman wise men, like the gods, but these men, who speed past the gods and for this reason certainly accept not only money but also adoration, from these men one must be able to learn a great deal.

  The difficulty with the forgiveness of sins, if it is not to be decided on paper or be decided by declarations of a living word, moved now in joy, now in tears, is to become so transparent to oneself that one knows that one does not exist at any [VI 449] point by virtue of immediacy, yes, so that one has become another person, for otherwise forgiveness of sin is my point of view: the unity of the comic and the tragic.

  But since immediacy is indeed something simple but also something highly compounded, with this one difficulty (of being annulled), together with the other, which is just like it (that immediacy is even canceled as sin), the signal is given for the difficileste [most difficult] questions, all of which are included in the one: how an immedia
cy comes again (or whether the cancellation of immediacy for the existing person means that he does not exist [er til] at all*), how such an immediacy