Kierkegaard’s Existential Quest

By Rick Anthony Furtak

In Rilke’s sonnet, the headless, and thus eyeless, figure of a god (or, of God) radiates a gaze that does not come from any particular direction, like the now-spireless twelfth-century Romanesque church at Sæding in Denmark, the hometown of Kierkegaard’s father.^[2]

1.

The author of a modern book called Philosophy and the Meaning of Life writes, “a man cannot be said to believe in Judgement Day unless he lives for it.” He adds that this “is the kind of confidence that a [person] cannot fully explain: it meets needs of which [they are] not wholly conscious: it is a stance which [they] can take and which [they are] lost if [they do] not take.”^[3] Kierkegaard comments in one of his Lily and Bird Discourses (on Matthew 6:24-34) that this is the real either/or: “either God—or, well, then the rest is unimportant.”^[4] He bids us to believe “that God cares for you,”^[5] to trust, with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that “the world is deep,”^[6] i.e., that there is an underlying meaning to whatever transpires in time. (This ostensibly atheistic but religion-obsessed author wrote youthful poems to an unknown God.)^[7] Socrates, during his trial and on the last day of his life (as creatively imagined by Plato), evinces the subjective belief which is the Kierkegaardian “other side of the truth.”^[8]

And his most Socratic author, Johannes Climacus, in the Postscript, is also preoccupied with this topic.^[9] In proffering their diverse accounts of reality and knowledge, most philosophers or speculative thinkers have been “wholly indifferent to subjectivity.”^[10] They are alike in being governed by the assumption that we must transcend our distinct standpoint in order to find the truth, so they attempt to describe being and knowing in such a way as to eliminate the human perspective. “Objective thought,” in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is “unaware of the subject.”^[11] Anticipating Husserl’s criticism of “objective-scientific ways of thinking,”^[12] Søren Kierkegaard as well as his pseudonym Johannes Climacus argue against “objective thinking” that is “not the least bit concerned about the thinker.”^[13] These are Kierkegaard’s words, yet he is echoed by Climacus, who claims repeatedly that “subjectivity is truth.”^[14] If too “abstract” or “pure” a notion of existence is philosophically taken for granted, then the existing individual will not get clear about “what it means for him to be there,”^[15] to be-in-the-world. For the existential philosopher, who is concerned with the kind of “edifying truth” that can inform a life in pursuit of wisdom, the “truth which builds up” is the only “truth for you” that is worthy of the name.^[16] This truth does not and cannot carry the self-contained security of a mathematical proof, for it requires the passionate, love-based interest of the person to whose life it pertains. Following in the footpath of Socrates involves realizing that our life prior to doing philosophy has largely been wasted, and hence that “a change of priorities is needed,” which will “make life worth living”^[17] henceforth.

In the remaining sections of this essay, we will be dealing in an explicit and sustained manner with Kierkegaard’s (life and) writings, yet the example of Socrates will be continuing to haunt us, as it haunted Kierkegaard. For Socrates does not only represent the kind of “negative” freedom that amounts to “arbitrariness”;^[18] instead, he exemplifies “true earnestness,” in which “the subject no longer arbitrarily decides . . . but feels the task to be something that he has not assigned himself but that has been assigned to him.”^[19] As Kierkegaard felt. ^[20]

2.

In The Book on Adler, which was published only after Kierkegaard’s death, Søren claims that “religiousness lies in subjectivity, in inwardness, in being deeply moved, in being jolted, in the qualitative pressure on the spring of subjectivity.”^[21] “Just as it is an excellence to be truly in love, truly enthusiastic, so it is also an excellence, in the religious sense, to be shaken. . . . And this emotion is in turn the true working capital and the true wealth.”^[22] Kierkegaard^[23] spells out the idea at greater length:

To be shaken (somewhat in the sense in which one speaks of shaking someone in order to awaken him) is the more universal basis of all religiousness; being shaken, being deeply moved, and subjectivity’s coming into existence in the inwardness of emotion, are shared by the pious pagan [i.e., Socrates] and the pious Jew [e.g., Philo of Alexandria] in common with a Christian.^[24]

On the same page, he continues to say that Christianity’s distinct conceptual categories do, and ought to, shape any distinctly Christian experience. Yet he asserts in terms that could not be more transparent that he identifies God with Love, referring in Works of Love to “love, which is God,”^[25] adding that “God is Love,”^[26] and even going so far as to claim that, as middle term between lover and beloved, “the love is God.”^[27]

“God is Love, and therefore we can be like God only in loving.”^[28] “Love is the source of all things and, in the spiritual sense, love is the deepest ground of the spiritual life.”^[29] These statements make it unmistakably clear that “love” is the only substantive divine name, as Kierkegaard sees it. “Love is a passion of the emotions,” or in an equally valid translation, an “emotional passion.”^[30] Plainly this is the same point being made in the passages from The Book on Adler that I cited just above.

Love’s hidden life is in the innermost being, unfathomable, and then in turn is in an unfathomable connectedness with all existence. Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has ever seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love [or, in God as love]. If there were no gushing spring at the base, if God were not Love, then there would be neither the little lake nor a human being’s love. Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love.^[31]

Love is the enigmatic power at the basis of the psyche, and the deepest ground of human being. We are who we are only by virtue of being in love, in a relation of dependency. Kierkegaard presents what may be called a transcendental argument: love is that by virtue of which we inhabit a meaningful world. In his words, “a life without loving is not worth living.”^[32] Even though some readers like to impose upon his thought a focus on Jesus,^[33] it is the first person of the Trinity that is primary for the Kierkegaard of Works of Love.

Without it, everything would be confused; our experience would not be organized in terms of what stands out in our consciousness as significant. In the terms of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, love unifies the manifold of sensory impressions; in the terms of analytic philosophy of mind, it can resolve the “frame problem” of how we focus on some things and overlook others.^[34] When we’re talking about “the love that sustains all existence,” we should realize that, “if for one moment, one single moment, if it were to be absent, [then] everything would be confused.”^[35] Love gives us focus and orientation, and—most crucially—provides us with insight into who we are as distinct, particular human beings. Love sets the agenda for our life and defines its meaning. Being human in the world is the “most basic” thing that we do, so “to question this is to question existence itself, injecting uncertainty, insecurity, an inarticulate sense of incompleteness and wonder into every gesture, every act,” as Clare Carlisle writes in her biography of Kierkegaard. What does it mean to be a human being? “Though the question makes no claim, propounds no thesis, it can transform everything.” She continues:

The question of existence is perennial, ready to strike at any moment, but it is also constantly changing. Each time it is asked, it concerns a particular person at a particular moment of his [or her] life, in a particular time and place. Kierkegaard does not live in the world that Socrates inhabited, although Copenhagen, like Athens, has a harbor, a marketplace, and buildings dedicated to worship.^[36]

It does not make sense to speak of the divine as if it could be encountered as an object, like “a rare, enormously large green bird with a red beak, perched on a tree on the city wall, and perhaps even whistling in a hitherto unknown-of way,” as Climacus puts it.^[37] When C. Stephen Evans contends that “only an objectively existing being could create a world,”^[38] he must be mistaken. He ought to have considered that, for instance, Schopenhauer’s Will is exactly not an object, yet is capable of giving rise to the concrete world of subjects as well as the objects that we encounter in our everyday lives. Evans’ point is well taken, that God is real—yet it is untrue to the spirit of Kierkegaard’s writings to reduce being to objective being. To characterize love as the ground of existence is to make, in the words of Thomas Langan, “an ontological claim of the most fundamental kind, about the dynamic energy that founds all things.”^[39] Love forms the heart as it proceeds from the heart,^[40] such that only the one who loves knows who he is and what he must do.^[41] “The love-relation requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love—but the love is God.”^[42] The first person of Love is God the Father; the second person is Christ (“this is my son, my beloved”); and the third, the Holy Spirit, is love itself.^[43] Love is the sacred force that connects us to the earthly realm in which our duty is to love the person we happen to see.^[44] By loving others, not as gods but through the God of love, we become subject to existential imperatives which are unique for each of us.^[45] To admit one’s radical dependence on a God of love is not to debase oneself but to make an ennobling concession.^[46] To need Love is our highest perfection; and this is how a God of love provides us with the grounding conditions of a meaningful life.

When we view things with loving eyes, every aspect of the world is enriched. Love is not an “objective” entity, but a subjective mode of comportment that enables things to manifest themselves as meaningful. “If you yourself have never been in love,” Kierkegaard writes, “you do not know whether anyone has ever been loved in this world,” for only “if you yourself have loved” have you perceived reality beyond yourself as significant, just as “the blind person cannot know color differences.”^[47] It is not an accidental fact about us that we are loving or caring beings: rather, it is a grounding condition of the cosmos of our possibilities. Heidegger phrases it this way: “It is not the case that objects are first present as bare realities, as objects in some natural state, and that they then in the course of our experience receive the garb of a value-character, so they do not have to run around naked.”^[48] Instead, we are always already rooted and grounded in love,^[49] and therefore things are not naked. Human existence would be empty and vain if nothing were loved or cared about for its own sake, so we must love in order to avoid an absurd predicament. Love is the divinity that shapes our ends, in Hamlet’s vocabulary.

3.

Whenever we love, then, we are divinely inspired, much in the way that Nietzsche has in mind when he pays tribute to Schopenhauer “as educator”:

What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making you happy? Place this series of revered objects before you, and perhaps their nature and their sequence will reveal to you a law, the fundamental law of your authentic self. . . . Your true being does not lie deeply hidden within you, but rather immeasurably high above you, or at least above what you commonly take to be your ego.^[50]

It may be that Kierkegaard loved his vocation as a writer more than he loved his beloved fiancée Regine Olsen. Or perhaps what set off the trumpeters of the apocalypse was something else that he admitted to her in an October 1840 letter, written during the time of their engagement: “I have now read so much by Plato on love.”^[51] For, like Plato’s hero and character Socrates, Kierkegaard is a supernaturalist—that is to say, a type of idealist—for whom “meaning in life is a relationship with a spiritual realm,” as Thaddeus Metz describes this philosophical position.^[52] The God of Love issues imperatives of the heart that pertain to the individual as such.^[53] Just as Kierkegaard accounts for love as an emotional urge,^[54] he cites this motivating, inspiring power as the source of his feeling of personal destiny.

Was Kierkegaard a religious mystic? Mystics take seriously what they experience, and Kierkegaard did this all the time. Bergson points out that “the impulse given by feeling can . . . resemble obligation,” and that this is especially true of “the passion of love.” He adds, “anyone engaged in writing has been in a position to feel the difference between an intelligence left to itself and that which burns with the fire of an original and unique emotion.”^[55] And Kierkegaard does in an entry of May 19, 1838, report a feeling of “indescribable joy,” not “a joy over this or that, but a full-bodied shout of the soul,”^[56] which reverberated in another conversion experience ten years later on April 19, 1848,^[57] which led him to write: “My entire nature is changed.”^[58] And he indubitably felt driven by an urgent sense of purpose, by his daimon, as we will shortly see.

Spiritually I have been a youth, and in a good sense. Overwhelmed by God, annihilated into something less than a sparrow before him, I have nonetheless acquired a certain cheerful courage, so that in youthful fashion I dare involve myself with him . . . Call it madness, but in my final moments I will pray to God that I might be permitted to thank him yet again for having made me mad in this way. In truth, if God cannot make a person mad in this way, it is very questionable whether that person will ever have a proper understanding that he exists before God.”^[59]

Experiencing what he described as terrible suffering, he became an author. “I have struggled and suffered fearfully,” trying to answer the imperative “You shall” in “an almost melancholic and foolish manner,”^[60] as he writes in an entry dated June 4, 1849. Yet God has been with him during the whole process of his life, and “this is why in the midst of all my sufferings I am nonetheless so indescribably happy and glad,”^[61] even though “to be known by God makes life so infinitely burdensome.”^[62] Meaning in life is more important than happiness in the contemporary sense of enjoying oneself; if you are capable of that, well, then: lucky you.

4.

In an 1847 journal entry, Kierkegaard writes of his literary purpose:

Only when I am productive do I feel well. Then I forget all the unpleasant things of life, all the sufferings; then I am happy and at home with my thoughts. If I stop for a just a couple of days, I immediately become ill, overwhelmed, oppressed; my head becomes heavy and burdened. After having gone on day after day for 5 or 6 years, this urge, so copious, so inexhaustible, still surges just as copiously—this urge must also of course be a calling from God.^[63]

One would think. For Kierkegaard, in order for there to be meaning in life, there needs to be a unifying meaning of one’s life as a whole. His life was defined by his task as an author, and (to be more concrete), to write in such a way as “to make aware of the religious.”^[64] And the criterion for this was unmistakably emotional, as he says in the Point of View for My Work as an Author: “I feel a need and therefore regard it now as my duty.”^[65] “My work as an author was the prompting of an irresistible inner need.”^[66] What are you going to do with an irresistible inward affective imperative? Surely not resist it. As William Blake writes, “those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”^[67]One can no more resist a strong inward prompting to be an author than one can resist falling in love by virtue of one’s macho will. Just as love is an urge, the imperatives of conscience—what Socrates called his daimon—are known through emotional feeling, or experience that announces itself in the imperative voice. In an entry dated October 13, 1853, Kierkegaard writes that “such a powerful productive impulse had awakened within me that I was unable to resist it.”^[68] He feels a need and therefore regards it as a duty—not at all a Kantian duty relevant to anyone and everyone, but his duty, as the particular existing person named Søren Kierkegaard.

In The Sickness unto Death, his pseudonym Anti-Climacus points out that a person can “forget” his or her “name, divinely understood.”^[69] What is it to forget our name, divinely understood? (“Forget one’s name, divinely understood” is another line of Kierkegaard’s that translates into iambic pentameter.) Sharon Krishek cogently argues that, “just as there are universal qualities that are essential to being a person [any person], there are particular qualities that are essential to being the self that one is,” where selfhood is “a quality that determines our identity but yet is primarily in a state of potential.”^[70] This sets the agenda for his account of how each human being has the potential to actualize her or his God-given potentiality in the concrete circumstances of his or her life. “God creates persons,” not as impartial vehicles of reason,^[71] “but as individual persons,” as Krishek claims.^[72] Kierkegaard was nothing if not an individual. As “Anti-Climacus” affirms, “every person certainly is angular,”^[73] and must through his or her situation actualize his or her utterly unique potential. Kierkegaard himself introduces the category of “the single individual” (TA, 93n), that is, hiin Enkelte, and claims that none of us is exempt from becoming singular persons, creatures who have Eiendommelighed^[74]—that is, unique or authentic individuality.^[75] And this distinctness is based upon what we have loved, as Nietzsche might agree, at least in his essay on Schopenhauer that I cited above.

5.

There is something to be said for objectivity in all of this. But not as much as current philosophers such as Anthony Rudd and Susan Wolf would have us believe. The former points out that, for instance, “my experience of loving another person might enable me to see the value which resides in all persons,” which is true enough according to Kierkegaard, but he adds that among “persons who have about equally praiseworthy characteristics,” I find myself bizarrely being “drawn to, attracted by, some of them, rather than others, even though I don’t think they are really better persons,” and regards this as somewhat unfair: “we can transcend our finitude sufficiently to recognize that other persons have, objectively, as much value as the ones that we do love,” yet it is morally important that I “love them as they deserve,” no more.^[76] This is akin to saying that I value a kind of music that leaves me cold emotionally, which I feel is valueless.^[77] If emotions or passions are perceptions of significance,^[78] and embodied recognitions of meaning and value,^[79] then whatever seems neutrally valenced to us is something we are experiencing as meaningless and insignificant.

According to Kierkegaard’s pseudonym “Johannes de silentio,” the conclusions of passion “are the only dependable ones—that is, the only convincing ones.”^[80] For Susan Wolf, meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness,^[81] and this accords with Scheler’s insightful observation that “the highest thing of which a [human being] is capable is to love things as much as possible as God loves them,” which we cannot do merely by virtue of being finite; that love enables “knowledge of personal destiny”; and that what we can come to know through love is simply our “range of contact with the universe.”^[82] All of this is incontestably agreeable. Yet Wolf is way too concerned that we undertake “projects of objective value,” and not get preoccupied by the project of “collecting a big ball of string,”^[83] which is a straw man position, since nobody ever does organize their life around making big balls of string. Not, that is, unless it seems like a worthy enterprise to set a world record, without growing one’s fingernails out to an absurd length or something like that. Kierkegaard did not worry about such things. His books were not books that “someone” ought to write, but ones that he had a sacred imperative from Providence, or Governance, to compose. And at the basis of his passion was that supreme “passion of the emotions,” namely Love. “These which present themselves to me as three, namely, the lover, the lovable, and the bond, are the absolute and most simple essence itself,”^[84] and by consenting to accede to where love is leading,^[85] we learn who we are and who we aspire to be.

The main problem with “the present age,” for Kierkegaard, is that it is “without passion,” devoid of passionate inspiration,^[86] “flaring up in superficial, short-lived enthusiasm and prudentially relaxing in indolence.”^[87] It stifles heroic ventures. We must “give up all imaginary and exaggerated ideas about a dreamworld where the object of love should be sought and found,” he says,^[88] but rather find lovable the person, the calling, that present themselves to us—to submit to our finitude. He admires Socrates as depicted in the Phaedo for his passionate fidelity to his mission, as demonstrated in the conduct of his life.^[89] The damning fact about Adolph Peter Adler is that, after claiming to have had a revelation, he did not stick to his story but recanted—just like Don Quixote, who was a knight errant when he lived in accordance with the belief that he was.^[90] “As soon as a person is really deeply moved by something, when he is in mortal danger, when the extraordinary appears before him, when he stands impassioned with his future fate in his hands, there is immediately an either/or.”^[91] Magister Adler “does not understand himself in what has happened to him,” for “he has not even made up his mind about what is to be understood by a revelation” and whether or not he himself had one.^[92] Kierkegaard, by contrast, kept reaffirming his account of himself, even amidst its endless visions and revisions. His own loving subjectivity was fired by an intensive passion for writing, as we have seen; it is as hard to imagine what he would be like without this life-defining passion. That is one reason why it is hard to decide how to interpret his May 17, 1843, remark that, “had I faith, I would have stayed with Regine.”^[93] Remained with her, and still written all of his iridescent books?

v.

Becoming what we are involves an ambivalent mixture of inner enthusiasm and external accident, since in Krishek’s terms we are neither more eternal than temporal nor more temporal than eternal, but a “synthesis” of these dual factors.^[94] We are composed like works of art, but we are not the artist^[95]—at most, we are co-authors of our biography.^[96] Nietzsche, that champion of the will, acknowledges the passivity of inspiration when he states in Beyond Good and Evil that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish,”^[97] or that, in being inspired, we must speak of “revelation,” meaning “that something suddenly . . . becomes visible, audible, [and] shakes one to the depths,” like “lightning.”^[98] He also expresses gratitude for his entire life, says that “the fortunateness of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality,” and adds that “amor fati is my innermost nature.”^[99] Although any idea of a supernatural capacity would be regarded by Nietzsche as most likely “a kind of philosophical fantasy,”^[100] like the fiction of transcendental freedom—when it comes to how the divine inhabits the finite, he and Kierkegaard are very much on the same page.

That is why a conviction [Overbeviisning] is called a conviction, because it is above proof [Beviisning]. For a mathematical proposition there is a proof, though in such a way that no counterproof is thinkable. It is precisely for this reason that one cannot have a conviction with respect to something mathematical.^[101] But with respect to every existential proposition, every proof also has something that is counterproof; there is a pro and a contra [a reference to Aristotle’s logic]. This is something of which the person of conviction is not unaware; he knows very well what doubt has to say: contra. But despite this—or rather, precisely because of it—he is a person of conviction because, deciding and willing, he has vaulted higher than the dialectic of proofs and is convinced.^[102]

“The idea for which he was willing to live and die was in fact the production of dazzling literary work,” as one biographer concludes.^[103] He refers to the following passage dated August 1, 1835, written during a stay at the Gilleleje Inn on the Zealand coast north of Copenhagen:

Just as a child takes time to learn to distinguish itself from objects, . . . what I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my own destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And what use would it be in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, [to] construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see? . . . What use would it be if truth were to stand there before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledged it or not, inducing an anxious shiver rather than trusting devotion?^[104]

As he proceeds to write in this journal entry or letter draft, he needs to ground his orientation in “something which is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence, through which I have, as it were, grown into the divine, clinging fast to it even if the whole world were to fall apart. This, you see, is what I need, and this is what I strive for. . . . It is this inward action of the human, this God-side of man, that matters.”^[105] Kierkegaard clearly seeks to find his daimon—his fate, genius, calling, or destiny.^[106] And, doubtless thinking of Socrates, he says on the same page that “the genuine philosopher is in the highest degree subjective”; and, further: “How near is man to madness in any case despite all his knowledge? What is truth other than living for an idea? Everything must in the final analysis be based on a postulate.^[107] But the moment when it no longer stands outside him but he lives in it, only then, for him, does it cease to be a postulate.”^[108] And, “one must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else (gnothi seauton). Only when the person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning.”^[109]

To highlight some aspects of this: self-knowledge, not in the sense of how do indexical pronouns refer,^[110] but as a kind of emotional conviction about my purpose, to which I can devote myself, an existentially pertinent truth that is not coldly indifferent to me, but a subjective conviction, is the one thing needful in order to live meaningfully and feel grounded. Moreover, the source of subjective conviction is divine, and its inspiration may be described as a form of divine madness.

What answer did Kierkegaard receive on his pilgrimage to Gilleleje? Maybe nothing too convincing—not yet, at least. But he must have had an inkling of the subjective truthfulness that he sought, because two and a half years later when he falls in love with Regine he asks himself whether this love, rather than his literary mission, ought to govern his life.

Oh, can I really believe the poets’ tales that when one sees the beloved for the first time one believes one has seen her long before; that all love, like all knowledge, is recollection; that love too has its prophecies, its types, its myths, its Old Testament in the single individual. . . . You blind god of love! You who see in secret, will you tell me openly? Shall I find what I am seeking here in this world, shall I experience the conclusion of all my life’s eccentric premises, shall I enclose you in my arms—or: Does the order say: onward?^[111]

As he writes in Works of Love, “what is the eternal foundation must also be the foundation of every expression of the particular.”^[112] Love as divine basis manifests itself in forming the heart as it flows from the heart into the concrete passions that define the meaning of our lives. Knowing oneself means wholeheartedly knowing what one loves. As it turns out, Kierkegaard’s religious imperative did indeed tell him to march on, beyond his nearly consummated marriage and into his vastly productive literary career.

Notes

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Rick Anthony Furtak (South Bend, IN: Saint Augustine’s Press, 2022), p. 39.

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2. See Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: Existence and Identity in a Post-Secular World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), p. 48: “Without a spire pointing to any particular part of the vast Jutland sky,” one can find God looking down from any point in the “numinous skyscape.”

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3. Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 208, 213.

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4. SKS 11, 26 / WA, 21 (emphasis in original).

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5. SKS 11, 46 / WA, 43.

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6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 133, 181, 261, 264.

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7. See, e.g., William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books, 1958), pp. 186f.

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8. SKS 5, 467 / TD, 98–101.

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9. Paul Muench, “Kierkegaard’s Socratic Pseudonym,” in Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”: A Critical Guide, ed. Rick Anthony Furtak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 25–44.

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10. SKS 7, 76 / CUPH, 64.

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11. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 240.

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12. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 129f.

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13. SKS 18, 253, JJ:344 / KJN 2, 233.

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14. SKS 7, 186 / CUPH, 171.

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15. SKS 7, 174 / CUPH, 159–160.

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16. SKS 7, 229 / CUPH, 215; see also SKS 3, 332 / EO2, 324.

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17. George Rudebusch, Socrates (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 28.

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18. SKS 1, 270 / CI, 228.

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19. SKS 1, 276 / CI, 235.

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20. I am indebted to perceptive comments from an anonymous reviewer of this essay.

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21. SKS 15, 260 / BA, 104.

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22. SKS 15, 264 / BA, 108 (emphasis added).

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23. Since the work was not published in Kierkegaard’s lifetime, it was never assigned a pseudonym, although he considered assigning it to one when he considered (and decided against) publishing it, out of respect for Adler.

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24. SKS 15, 268 / BA, 112–113.

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25. SKS 9, 264 / WL, 265 (emphasis in original).

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26. SKS 9, 190 / WL, 190.

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27. SKS 9, 124 / WL, 121.

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28. SKS 9, 69 / WL, 62–63.

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29. SKS 9, 231 / WL, 215 (translation modified).

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30. SKS 9, 116 / WL, 112.

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31. SKS 9, 18 / WL, 8–10 (translation modified; emphasis added).

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32. SKS 9, 45 / WL, 38; see also SKS 9, 368 / WL, 375.

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33. Robert C. Roberts, in his otherwise excellent Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 294, insists that love for a person is only religious if it is filtered through a theologically over-burdened framework which sees the beloved as personifying Christ and being “loved by him” [sic]. He conveniently overlooks the equation of God with love (see 1 John 4:8) and forcibly thrusts an evangelist’s Jesus into the picture.

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34. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1965), A821–822/B849–850.

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35. SKS 9, 299 / WL, 301.

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36. Clare Carlisle, Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), pp. 12–13.

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37. SKS 7, 222–223 / CUPH, 205.

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38. Evans, “Realism and Antirealism in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 154–176, 158. See also my and Shahrzad Safavi’s co-authored review of Kierkegaard’s Mirrors by Patrick Stokes and Kierkegaard by C. Stephen Evans, Southwest Philosophy Review 26, no. 2 (2010): pp. 119–123.

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39. Thomas Langan, Being and Truth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996), p. 311. Love is present in each person “in such a way that it demands that I recognize and affirm this same validity and dignity in every other human being” (Arnold B. Come, “Kierkegaard’s Ontology of Love,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love, ed. Robert L. Perkins [Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999], p. 92).

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40. SKS 9, 17 / WL, 12–13.

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41. SKS 3, 124–125 / EO2, 125.

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42. SKS 9, 124 / WL, 121.

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43. Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, “On the Vision of God,” in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), pp. 233–289, for the most exactly articulated formulation of this Trinitarian theology of which I am aware. This suggests that the Greek Orthodox Church was right in the theological matter that gave rise to the Great Schism, and that in the catechism the Love that proceeds “from the Father” is correct, and the blasphemous innovation “and from the Son” false. See too M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 72: “God is not the ‘middle term’ by being the direct object of our love in such a way as to marginalize the beloved; God is the ‘middle term’ by being the center of the relationship.” Lover, beloved, and love itself incarnate the three persons of the trinity, love as “middle term” being the incarnation of the Holy Spirit.

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44. SKS 9, 155–174 / WL, 154–174.

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45. See Jos Huls, “Love Founded in God,” HTS Theological Studies 67, no. 3 (2011): pp. 1–10, 6.

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46. See SKS 5, 291–292 / EUD, 297–326.

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47. SKS 10, 244 / CD, 237.

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48. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 69.

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49. See SKS 5, 65 / EUD, 55.

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50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 174.

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51. SKS 28, 219 / LD, 66.

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52. Thaddeus Metz, Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 79.

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53. See Richard Swinburne’s discussion of how, for the Christian, mortal life has “a cosmic significance” instead of “a significance very limited in time and space” (“How God Makes Life a Lot More Meaningful,” in God and Meaning: New Essays, ed. Joshua Seachris and Stewart Goetz [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016], p, 154).

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54. See, e.g., Pia Søltoft, “Kierkegaard and the Sheer Phenomenon of Love,” in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, ed. Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart, and Karl Verstrynge (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 289–306.

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55. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), pp. 39, 46. A rare, accurate conception of the Christian idea that love itself is divine can be found in Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 42–45.

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56. SKS 17, 254–255, DD:113 / KJN 1, 245–246.

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57. Cf. Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 400–401.

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58. SKS 20, 357, NB4:152 / KJN 4, 357.

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59. SKS 22, 313, NB13:65 / KJN 6, 315–316.

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60. SKS 22, 70, NB11:123 / KJN 6, 65.

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61. SKS 22, 302, NB13:43 / KJN 6, 304.

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62. SKS 18, 264, JJ:374 / KJN 2, 243.

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63. SKS 20, 83, NB:108 / KJN 4, 82 (my emphasis).

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64. SKS 13, 19 / PV, 12 (emphasis in original).

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65. SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23.

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66. SKS 16, 12 / PV, 24.

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67. William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H. Dettmar, vol. 2A (New York: Longman, 2010), p. 191.

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68. SKS 25, 258, NB28:54 / KJN 9, 260.

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69. SKS 11, 149 / SUD, 33–34.

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70. Sharon Krishek, Lovers in Essence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 17, 52.

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71. In Max Scheler’s terms, a person is not “an indifferent thoroughfare for impersonal rational activity.“ See his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 372. He is responding to Kant, who claims that, since we cannot love by force of will, so much the worse for love; this view could not be more emphatically anti-Kierkegaardian.

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72. Krishek, Lovers in Essence, p. 19.

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73. SKS 11, 149 / SUD, 33.

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74. SKS 9, 268–269 / WL, 252–253.

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75. Arnold B. Come is especially articulate in teasing out this critical notion: see Kierkegaard as Humanist (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), pp. 353–354.

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76. Anthony Rudd, Self, Value, and Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 133–134, 137.

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77. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 278. Her example is of Indian classical music, which she claims to value but which leaves her cold.

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78. See Rick Anthony Furtak, Wisdom in Love: Kierkegaard and the Ancient Quest for Emotional Integrity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), passim.

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79. Cf. Rick Anthony Furtak, Knowing Emotions: Truthfulness and Recognition in Affective Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), esp. 71–99.

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80. SKS 4, 189 / FT, 100.

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81. Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

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82. Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1973), pp. 99, 106–107, 111.

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83. Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, p. 104.

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84. Nicholas of Cusa, “On the Vision of God,” p. 268.

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85. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads, III.5. This treatise is a commentary on Plato’s Symposium.

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86. SKS 8, 74 / TA, 74.

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87. SKS 8, 66 / TA, 68 (emphasis in the original).

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88. SKS 9, 162 / WL, 161 (emphasis in the original).

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89. See SKS 7, 184–185 / CUPH, 169–170.

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90. See SKS 7, 179 / CUPH, 164.

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91. SKS 15, 170n / BA, 48n.

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92. SKS 15, 271 / BA, 115.

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93. SKS 18, 177, JJ:115 / KJN 2, 164.

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94. SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 13.

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95. Cf. Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Marlowe, 1995), p. xi.

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96. Cf. SKS 8, 295 / UDVS, 198–199.

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97. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), § 17.

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98. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Classics, 1979), p. 72.

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99. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, pp. 7–8, 94. Cf. Brian Leiter, “The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche,” in Willing and Nothingness: Schopenhauer as Nietzsche’s Educator, ed. Christopher Janaway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 222.

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100. Robert B. Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 3–4.

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101. Only phenomena so poor in existential relevance can be so rich in certainty, as Kant realized. Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 9: in speaking of love, “I will not be able to hide myself behind the I of philosophers, that I who is supposed to be universal, a disengaged spectator. . . . In contrast, I am going to speak of that which affects each of us as such.”

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102. SKS 20, 78–80, NB:102 / KJN 4, 78 (emphasis added).

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103. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 59.

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104. SKS 17, 24, AA:12 / KJN 1, 19 (emphases in original).

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105. SKS 17, 26, AA:12 / KJN 1, 20-21 (emphases in original).

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106. Cf. James Hillman, The Soul’s Code (New York: Warner Books, 1997), p. 10.

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107. See also, e.g., Johann Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). It must be said, however, that Preuss himself is a dogmatic secularist who for his audience’s sake impertinently proffers the assurance that what Fichte has in mind is not a “capitulation into faith,” as if faith were so easy, while to be an inconsequential professor without faith in anything is of course difficult—and admirable.

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108. SKS 17, 30, AA:12.5 / KJN 1, 21.

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109. SKS 17, 27, AA:12 / KJN 1, 22.

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110. John Perry’s example of self-knowledge is how I can know that the person at the grocery store leaving a trail of sugar is I myself (John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” in Self-Knowledge, ed. Quasim Cassam [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], pp. 167–183). His paper features the amusing misprint of “trial” for “trail” in its opening sentence.

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111. SKS 18, 9, EE:7 / KJN 2, 4–5 (emphasis in original).

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112. SKS 9, 143 / WL, 141.

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