Stages on Life’s Way

by Søren Kierkegaard

  Oh, any expression of grief, even the most painful, is nevertheless a relief compared with having none at all. To live as if I were a mute and yet have torment in my soul and the language within, not such as is learned from a phrase book but as the heart invents it; to be as if mute, indeed, as if disabled,172 and yet have sufferings that crave the eloquence of a mime! To have to be suspicious of the voice lest it tremble if one were to speak of her, something that could be to her ruin; to have to be suspicious of the feet lest they go off the usual path and leave a betraying clue; to have to be suspicious of the hand lest it suddenly move to the heart and suggest what is hidden there, of the arms lest they reach out to her! To sit at home in sackcloth and ashes or, rather, naked in all one’s misery, and when one wants to dress to have no clothes in which to disguise oneself except the clothes of joy and good cheer!

  “Where exactly do you suffer?” the physician asks the patient. “Alas, dear doctor, everywhere,” he answers. “But how are you suffering?” continues the physician, “so that I can diagnose the illness.” No one asks me this, nor do I need it. I know very well how I suffer—173I suffer sympathetically. This is exactly the suffering that is really able to shake me deeply. Even though I am depressingly and sincerely convinced that I am good for nothing, as soon as there is danger I really have the strength of a lion. When I suffer autopathetically, [VI 250] I am able to stake all my will, and depressed as I am and depressingly brought up, the appalling finds me all the more prepared for what is even more appalling. But when I suffer sympathetically, I have to use all my power, all my ingenuity, in the service of the appalling to reproduce the other’s pain, and that exhausts me. When I myself suffer, my understanding thinks of grounds for comfort, but when I suffer sympathetically, I dare not believe a single one of them, for I cannot, of course, know the other one so accurately that I can know whether the presuppositions are present that are the condition for its effectiveness. When I suffer autopathetically, I know where I am; I place signs along the road of suffering so that I can have something to hold to, but when I suffer sympathetically I go astray, for I cannot really know where the other one actually is, and at every moment I must start all over again, prepared at the next moment to be able to think an even more appalling possibility, the dreadfulness of which I must endure in order not to shirk anything.

  As soon as she is free, I certainly shall not be without sorrow, but then I shall have reached the point she most likely thought I was at when she begged me to remember her once in a while. Yes, then I shall remember her, but then I shall also have found relief; I shall be sad and say with Ossian: Sweet is the sorrow of melancholy.174 Then I shall have peace, for the person who depressingly recollects is also blessed and soothed and is as happy as the weeping willow when it is swayed by the evening breeze. But not at present. I do not fear the whole world; at least I do not think that I do—but I do fear this girl. A glimpse of her in passing, and she determines my fate until the next time. Thus she is essentially everything, everything, absolutely everything; if she is free, she is essentially nothing at all. She is the lovable, it is true, but this does not essentially mean anything. If she were lovelier than an angel, that would not concern me; a girl’s beauty does not essentially concern me. I have been in love, but my soul is structured too eternally for it to despair over an unhappy love affair, 175but on the other hand I can certainly despair over an unhappy responsibility, an unhappy understanding with the eternal meaning in life. Only the person who himself is being tried can grasp how dialectically difficult my position is. When an inexperienced person reads through a legal document, he presumably understands [VI 251] it, but only the practiced lawyer can reconstruct its coming into existence, only he can read the invisible writing of the surmounted difficulties, only he is informed about the contribution past generations have made to the drawing up of this document. He knows this boundary dispute between ingenuity and ingenuity, the ingenuity in the service of righteousness and the ingenuity in the service of deceit, and thus for him the single phrases do not have relative meaning but absolute meaning; therefore to him the particular expression does not have significance to a certain degree but has absolute significance, and to him a document such as this is also a contribution to the history of the human race. The inexperienced person certainly can understand it, but he cannot draw it up—indeed, he can scarcely copy it with certainty.

  April 2. Morning.

  176 A year ago today. It was either the first or the second of this month that I decided to check on where we were. I arranged an occasion and posed a situational question to give her the chance to express her feelings. What happens? In the most candid way of the world, indeed, with an unbecoming intensity bordering on bad temper, she declares that she does not care for me at all, that she had accepted me out of sympathy and could not at all understand what I wanted with her. 177In short, a little improvisation ad modum [in the manner of] Beatrice in Viel Lärmen um Nichts [Much Ado about Nothing].178

  O depression, how you do make fun of the one who is depressed! What the poet says is true: Quem deus perdere vult primum dementat [Whom a god would destroy he first makes mad].179 These days I have been wandering through the valley of the shadows of concerns in order to try to do everything as well as possible. I would not dare to admit to anyone how much I have humiliated myself. I have sat in the darkness of death deeply wounded by the thought that I could not make her happy—and what was right under my nose never occurred to me, what I can perfectly understand, now that she says it, that she does not care for me at all.

  But it may have been only a rash remark, an intense outburst; perhaps she was irritated, by what, however, I am not sure. I am not going to let myself be irritated. 180If only I were absolutely confident in my view of life so that I would dare to use force, then the whole thing would be tomfoolery. But, on [VI 252] the other hand, she does open up for me a bright prospect. This much is sure, that marriage is and remains for me the most difficult of tasks. I have now come to understand this much, that if I had understood myself this way earlier, I would not have entered into this. And now she seems to be far the stronger in relation to me than I in relation to her.

  The exploration became an explosion, and I received the full force of it right in my face. Just as someone who has been sitting in the dark for a long time cannot immediately see when a bright light shines, so it was with me: although she was sitting at my side, I could scarcely see her. This ideal figure whom I embraced with the concerned responsibility of an eternal commitment became, I must say, somewhat smaller, so insignificant that I could scarcely discern her. My depression is as if blown away; I see what I have before me—by Jove, such a little miss!

  Yet I ought to repeat the attempt in order to see if this is in earnest or not. That is, I miss a consistency of action: that she revokes the whole thing and I am rejected. But it seems that she does not have this in mind at all; what does something like this mean? We shall see.

  April 2. Midnight.

  181What if she actually became insane! Probably there has never been any question of danger to her life; at least now it seems to have been avoided (even if for me there always remains a troubling consistency that confused a cum hoc [simultaneous with this] with a propter hoc [because of this], but insanity! Let us see what happened.

  182First and foremost, my exit as a scoundrel will make a substantial change, since it will set her into a quite different kind of pathological motion; it will stir up her wrath, bitterness, and defiance toward me, and her pride in particular will quicken her to go to extremes to keep herself afloat. If I had been true to her, then it would satisfy love, as well as the other aspects of the soul, to have its all in the beloved and therefore to lose its all in the beloved, but since I did not turn out to be a worthy object of her love, it would take a rare heroism to [VI 253] reject the consolation that offers itself most easily: to make the unworthy one as insignificant as possible. In this regard I have supported her to the best of my ability, and I b
elieve that if I had not taken this precaution, in which I also respected the judgment of the universal on me, I would have been directly to blame if she became insane, because my wanting to be a worthy object of her love and then wanting to behave in this manner poses for her a dialectical task that counts on a single individuality’s relationship with God in such a way that only with God can he grasp the issue. Therefore it is his duty to be reconciled (indeed, to assist in the process) to being regarded as a depraved person in the eyes of everyone involved in this affair, above all in her eyes. Toward those not involved, he certainly can keep silent. This I have done.

  Psychologically speaking, it is possible for a feminine psyche to become insane in two ways. The first is by the transition of the sudden, when the understanding comes to the end of its rope. One can become blind because of the sudden change of light and darkness; the heart can stop beating because of a sudden change of temperature, because the breathing is hindered by the incoming air. So also with the understanding in relation to the shift of the sudden—reflection cannot breathe, and the understanding stands still. Thus the insanity is petrifying. There is no relation or, rather, there is an absolute misrelation between what the understanding is capable of doing and the task here enjoined. The insanity manifests this misrelation. One moment decides it all; just one moment more, then this would not have happened.

  It occurs in the other way when a secret passion wears out the will through reflection, and the sufferer sinks slowly into insanity. The sufferer does not become petrified but becomes deranged in a composite of conceptions that displace one another with natural necessity but have no relation to the freedom that once freely gave rise to the conceptions, until they now unfreely give rise to themselves.

  The former could not possibly be the case with her; the transition was as shaded as possible; moreover, it also would have to be manifest that it had happened. The second way, which is almost the more dangerous, seems to be the one, if anything, that could commence. That is, in a certain sense the situation was made as dialectical for her as it was possible for my reflection to make it. I do not think that I have neglected to set forth any possibility; I have always tossed it off so hypothetically that it was left to her herself to find an explanation. This I have deliberately done; humanly speaking, I believe it is the only thing to do. Ah, but it was hard work, and [VI 254] it was almost rather to be feared that I myself would have lost my mind. She was not very reflective by nature or, rather, almost not reflective at all, but still one can never know what influence an event can have. Just a tenth of the reflection-possibilities I have set in motion—if she herself had found them out—would be sufficient to disturb a feminine head. But in her eyes the reflection-possibilities must have ceased to be tempting. That was my aim, and, humanly speaking, it is correct. Secret sorrow must itself invent and produce the reflection-possibility; then it is seductive for sorrow to hold on to it; and this is the earnest money of insanity. This is not the case with her. She can produce whatever reflection-possibility she wants to—it does not have the refreshing coolness of novelty, the alluring attraction of surprise; it has no secret prepossessing power, for she is acquainted with it. In the next place, I have introduced every reflection-possibility as completely as possible—to me, at least. I have wanted to give her the impression of a superior reflection. One does that as well as one can. Then the moment she wants to begin reflecting, it will occur to her: Ah, what’s the use of my reflecting; if I could reflect as he does, but of what help was it to him? For a feminine psyche, reflection is like candy for the child. A little of it is tempting but en masse the candy loses its seduction.

  Furthermore, if she thinks of me at times, if she hopes for a possibility of the reestablishment of the relationship, then a new kind of reflection could sneak in, one of which she herself would be the inventor. In this respect, I have worked and I work with all my powers to keep my existence completely unchanged. But meanwhile she may come to a conclusion from something she hears about me or from something in my external appearance she thinks she sees. Quite so, but at the very same moment she will consider that my reflection has shown her so much possibility that she cannot possibly keep up. This cannot humiliate or insult her, for it is in the order of nature that a reflective individuality has more, much more reflection than a girl. If she had not, as I hope, even to the point of nausea, acquired a concrete idea of what reflection is capable of doing, then it perhaps might still have tempted her. Now I believe it does not. I have done everything to make reflection disgusting to her (because the omnipotence of reflection when it broods on one idea naturally becomes omnipotence in dialectical rubbish when the one idea is taken away) and to make every attempt at reflection to appear futile to her even before she starts on it. I myself have suffered enough under this and still suffer; one can suck poison out of another person and oneself die—in order to divest another person of [VI 255] reflection one can become all too reflective. But if reflection is disgusting to her, then she will be close to a resolution and will not walk at all on the slippery path that can lead to insanity. If she becomes free, she will become free through her own resolution and not free by way of some observation and view I have slipped to her.

  In all human probability, she could not become insane from love. Precisely because she was not very reflective, the transition of the sudden would have been the most dangerous for her. This has been prevented, and I have done my best to preclude the mistake of reflection. If insanity does come, then it would have to be an offended feminine pride over being rejected, which, despairing of taking revenge, inclosed itself within itself until it lost its way. Alas, I am well aware of the judgment of the world. I perhaps have felt the pain more agonizingly than she; I shudder to think that someone by daring to give her a proud look—or, what is just as terrible, a sympathetic look—would lead her to understand that she was insulted and consequently to prolong the insult. In olden days, it was sometimes the custom, so they say, that a prince was educated along with a boy of humbler birth, who had to take punishment every time the prince deserved it. People have spoken of the cruelty to the poor lad who had to take the thrashings; to me it seems to be far more cruel to the poor prince, who, if he had any sense of honor, must have felt the blows far more forcefully, far more painfully, far more crushingly than they were felt physically. I also know how it pained me to expose her to this pain. I know that I was willing to do everything to prevent it by giving the separation a false expression, so that in the eyes of the world I became the one who suffered, for if it is only I myself, I know how much it pains and what I have to do about it—but it could not be done. Several times in our conversations I dropped a few hints in a joking and chatty tone in order to make her aware—but in vain. Just a word from her and it would have happened, even if I had had enough foresight to undertake in a joking and chatty tone what for me was an indescribable relief. More than that I dared not do. Ah, if I had talked about it with all my passion, she would eo ipso have detected from my eagerness how much she preoccupied me, and then everything would again have been postponed and drawn out, and she again would have allowed herself every resource to move me, [VI 256] that is, to torture me, for I must not be moved.

  It is a comic contradiction to talk with pathos or with systematic decisiveness about something of which a person is not himself convinced or does not himself understand, but it is a tragic, a deeply tragic contradiction to have to talk in vague terms, in joking hints, in chatty platitudes about what preoccupies and worries one to death. It is a comic contradiction to be willing to stake four shillings183 when there is enormously much to win, but it is a tragic, a deeply tragic contradiction to have to make the form of the stake as if counters were being played for when one is all too aware of how much is at stake. I suppose it would be one of the most terrible collisions, perhaps the most horrible, if one were to imagine that concern for a person made it necessary for an apostle to talk in ambiguous terms and in a light chatty tone about the truth of Chris
tianity.

  But to the subject. I am loath to think that insanity would advance along this path, not because it is terrible, for the terrible requires of my honor that I must think it, but because a less favorable light would fall on her conduct toward me. Every outburst of passion by which she placed a murder on my conscience, every such passionate outburst that my honor, until some other information is at hand, bids me regard as truth, despite all objections by the understanding, every such outburst that, if clearly an exaggeration, nevertheless can be associated with feminine purity and feminine lovableness, every such outburst, on the presupposition that pride was the mainspring, would be an ugly falsehood on the part of self-love against me. Admittedly I have taken the liberty of many a falsehood against her, but it truly was in order to save her, and it was motivated by sympathy. Therefore I am so loath to imagine this terrible thing. Furthermore, here again I have done everything I could and I do it undauntedly. If my existence expressed something positive, it would indeed be conceivable that this could incite her pride. If I could maintain a masculine existence that is precisely that through its relation to the other sex, consequently by handsomeness, poise, charming personality, affability, etc., then the prior judgment on me could actually be prejudicial against her, it would be able to incite her that the person to whom the sex granted competency to judge passed this judgment on her. But fortunately I am removed from this as far as any person can be. If I were an artist, who consequently has a sense for beauty and femininity, if I were a poet, who is indeed the darling of the sex, then the fact that the person whom the sex acknowledged did judge this way about her could possibly inflame her pride. If I were a thinker, a scholar, then it would already be more [VI 257] difficult to imagine how such an existence could further tempt the offended feminine pride. But an existence such as that would nevertheless be something. But the something that I am is precisely nothing. With her in mente, it satisfies me and my guardian spirit to hold my whole existence at the critical null point between cold and warm, at the critical null point between being something and being nothing, between being perhaps, perhaps wise and then perhaps, perhaps silly and stupid. An existence such as that is utterly incongruous with a feminine existence, it cannot engross a woman, far less incite her. I am not so feebleminded that she could have sympathy for me, but I am just half-crazy enough that she can disinterestedly say, “Oh, he is mad, you know”; and if an offended pride is interested in opposition to me, it will easily be able to feel superior to a Sonderling [eccentric] like that. It already takes considerable dialectic to conceive of a null-point existence and to maintain it, but then in turn to conceive of such an existence as a polemic against oneself—that would take an extraordinary dialectician. A woman rarely has much dialectic. She did not have it; if she later has become such an extraordinary dialectician, then she is lucky, and if she has not, then my method of approach is proper and well calculated.