Stages on Life’s Way
Page 72
This is the process in all the pseudonyms’ endeavors.
But, of course, such a grand endeavor is probably also an abstract life—then it is more concrete to seize with muddled categories a particular idea, to turn the whole thing wrong, to confuse all the spheres—and then “momentarily” make a big hit as a profound thinker.
If I were to take a particular example for the pseudonyms, I could use the passage in Either/Or155 where the esthete divides men into two classes, those who work in order to live and those who do not need to, and then shows that it would be a self-contradiction if the purpose of life is supposed to be to work in order to live, since the purpose of living, after all, cannot be to produce the prerequisites for living.
On this basis the piece could be constructed. But then the piece would also have to point out the religious. In Either/Or the ethicist rounds off life with marriage, but the whole work is also only an element in the endeavor.
[X1 A 377 244] Obviously there should have been three sisters, a third, a Christian “Mary”; then perhaps the play would have had value. [In margin: or an “Anna” (patience in expectancy)156 in order to show the abstraction of the religious life to be true abstraction.]
Here Quidam of the imaginary psychological construction has the great merit of making clear that “the wish” must be preserved in suffering. The ethicist rightfully condemns waiting for fantasies and wasting life as being esthetically eccentric, but from behind the ethical emerges the religious again: that to live abstractly (ideally) is to live. Only one man has lived absolutely ideally abstractly in this way: the God-Man.
Oh, but what do they know, these poets who assume the pose of being so profound!—JP VI 6410 (Pap. X1 A 377) n.d., 1849
. . . Phase IV
I see that there must be a separation.
Here—honest with her and traitorous to myself—I advised
her not to attempt to fight with the weapon of pride, for that would make it much easier for me, but with submission.
But there had to be a break—I send her back her ring in a letter, which word for word is printed in the imaginary psychological construction.157. . . —JP VI 6482 (Pap. X1 A 667) n.d., 1849
. . . 8. But there was a divine protest, so it seemed to me. Marriage. I would have to keep too much from her, base the whole marriage on an untruth.
I wrote to her and sent back her ring. The note is found verbatim in the imaginary psychological construction.158 I deliberately made it purely historical, for I have spoken to no one about it, not one single person, I who am more silent than the grave. If she should happen to see the book, I simply wanted her to be reminded of it.
9. In margin: Some of the lines are also factual. For example, the one about its not being quite as stated, that one gets fat when one marries,159 that I knew a person (here I mentioned my father to alter the story) who was married twice and did not get fat. The lines: that one can break an engagement in two ways, with the help of love as well as the help of respect. Her remark: I really believe that you are mad.160 . . . —JP VI 6472 (Pap. X5 A 149) n.d., 1849
The Fashion Designer (in Stages)161 gets the idea of starting a fashionable boutique, one section devoted entirely to dressing corpses; thus for the corpse to be dressed in vogue is equivalent to being buried in Christian ground, that is, the latest interpretation.—JP VI 6331 (Pap. X5 A 152) n.d., 1849
[In margin: Stages on Life’s Way]
They are indeed remarkable words with which the book ends, the last in Frater Taciturnus’s closing words about himself: Do not incite him, for then he could become dangerous.162
—Pap. X2 A 405 n.d., 1850
The Turn the World is Taking
As I demonstrated in the last section of the review of Two Ages,163 the punishment will conform to the guilt, and for this very reason [the punishment will be] to have no government, so that the tension but also the forward step will necessarily be that everyone must himself learn in earnest to be master, to guide himself without the supportive indulgence of having leaders and rulers (which was an amelioration, but rejected by the generation). Thus religiously the step forward164 and the tension will be that everyone must carry within himself the ambivalence of realizing that Christianity conflicts with the understanding and then still believe it. This is the signal that the age of immediacy is over. Just as in the imaginary psychological construction Quidam is no spontaneously unhappy lover (he himself perceives that the matter is comic and yet tragically clings to it by virtue of something else, but therefore with a constant split, which is the sign that immediacy is over), so also with the religious. —JP VI 6604 (Pap X2 A 622) n.d., 1850
See 68:31-33:
A Misprint in Stages on Life’s Way
No doubt there are many and various misprints in my books, and I actually have never been very concerned about them. But curiously enough, there is one in Stages on Life’s Way165 that I have not forgotten over the years and that I would like to eradicate.
It is in “The Banquet,” in one of the lines spoken by the Fashion Designer. There it reads: Pro dii immortales [By the immortal gods], what, then, is a woman when she is not in fashion; per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods], what is she when she is not in fashion! Obviously there should be no “not” in the second clause; it should read: what is she when she is in fashion.
Oddly enough, indifferent as I am about such things, this misprint has plagued me year after year, and it has always bothered me not to have it corrected. The lines become so very trivial when the “not” is used twice, which certainly was not the case in the manuscript, and on the other hand it is so characteristic if the latter “not” is not there.
In that very phrase is implied the demonic sarcasm as well as the proof that the Fashion Designer is not a fool who too solemnly believed in the reality of his craft, as if he solemnly believed that woman amounted to something when she is in fashion. No, “what is she when she is not in fashion” is ironic sarcasm; now comes the far more profound “per deos obsecro, what is she when she is in fashion.”—JP VI 6858 (Pap. XI1 A 49) n.d., 1854
Woman
What the Judge in the second part of Either/Or166 says in his way about women is to be expected from a married man who, ethically inspired, champions marriage.
Woman could be called “the lust for life.” There is undoubtedly lust for life in man, but essentially he is structured [lagt an paa] to be spirit, and if he were alone, left all alone to himself, he would not know (here the Judge is right) how to begin, and he would never really get around to beginning.
But then “the lust for life,” which is within him indefinitely, becomes manifest to him externally in another form, in the form of woman, who is the lust for life: and now the lust for life awakens.
Likewise, much is true in what the Seducer (in Stages)167 says about woman being bait. And strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless a fact that the very thing that makes the seducer so demonic and makes it hard for any poet to contrive such a character is that in the form of knowledge he has at his disposal the whole Christian ascetic view of woman—except that he employs it in his own way. He has knowledge in common with the ascetic, the hermit, but they take off from this knowledge in completely different directions.—JP IV 4999 (Pap. X1 A 164) n.d., 1854
A Breach [et Brud]—A Bride [en Brud]
With his demonic wisdom, the Seducer says: A bride and a breach correspond to one another as male and female.168
With a quite different meaning, Christianity says (when one reflects on its calling the believer a bride and Christ the bridegroom): A breach and a bride—that is, in order to become a bride you must make a breach between the world and everything and yourself. Consequently, not a [en] bride and a [et] breach but a [et] breach and a [en] bride.—JP III 3778 (Pap. XI1 A 283) n.d., 1854
EDITORIAL APPENDIX
Acknowledgments
Collation of Stages on Life’s Way in the
Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s Collected Works
N
otes
Notes to Supplement
Bibliographical Note
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Preparation of manuscripts for Kierkegaard’s Writings is supported by a genuinely enabling grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant includes gifts from the Dronning Margrethes og Prins Henriks Fond, the Danish Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the Augustinus Fond, the Carlsberg Fond, the Konsul George Jorck og Hustru Emma Jorcks Fond, Lutheran Brotherhood Foundation, and the A. P. Møller og Hustru Chastine Mc-Kinney Møllers Fond.
The translators-editors are indebted to Grethe Kjær and Julia Watkin for their knowledgeable observations on crucial concepts and terminology.
John Elrod, Per Lønning, and Sophia Scopetéa, members of the International Advisory Board for Kierkegaard’s Writings, have given valuable criticism of the manuscript on the whole and in detail. Rune Engebretsen, Catherine Gjerdingen, Craig Mason, Jack Schwandt, and Julia Watkin have helpfully read the manuscript. Kathryn Hong, copy editor for KW, Kierkegaard Library, scrutinized the manuscript and prepared the index. The Greek has been checked by James May. Translations of German quotations are by Rune Engebretsen. The entire work has been facilitated by George Coulter and Lavier Murray.
Acknowledgment is made to Gyldendals Forlag for permission to absorb notes to Søren Kierkegaards samlede Værker.
Inclusion in the Supplement of entries from Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers is by arrangement with Indiana University Press.
The book collection and the microfilm collection of the Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, have been used in preparation of the text, Supplement, and Editorial Appendix.
The original manuscript was typed by Dorothy Bolton. Word processing of the final manuscript was done by Kennedy Lemke and Francesca Lane Rasmus. The volume has been guided through the press by Cathie Brettschneider.
COLLATION OF STAGES ON LIFE’S WAY IN THE DANISH EDITIONS OF KIERKEGAARD’S COLLECTED WORKS
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