In Fear and Trembling, I am just as little, precisely just as little, Johannes de Silentio as the knight of faith he depicts, and in turn just as little the author of the preface to the book, which is the individuality-lines of a poetically actual subjective thinker.
By taking the risk, the pseudonymous author (Hilarius Bookbinder) has won an indirect victory over the inquisitive public.
[7] He continued writing for 494 pages in Hong's translation and in his "Concluding Word" says, "My dear reader-but to whom am I speaking?
"[10] In a conscious reference to Plato's Symposium, it is determined that each participant must give a speech, and that their topic shall be love.
[12] He has Victor Eremita,[13] the Young Man,[14] the Fashion Designer,[15] Constantine,[16] Johannes the Seducer[17] speak about love.
Stages on Life's Way, Hong p. 13.The second section of the book begins with the party's interruption by the nearby passing, and stopping, of a carriage containing one William Afham and his wife.
"[24] Howard Hong said the three sections of Stages on Life's Way were meant to complement the Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions published only one day earlier.
[26] In this book the writer of the preface, Hillarius Bookbinder, finds a small packet of papers left over from an old customer, Mr. Literatus, and parts one and two of Stages On Life's Way are found there.
He believes "God sanctions intrigues" but that it would do no good for a leper to find a way to move his sores to the inside of his body.
"[34] The guilty-not guilty discussions by Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira, and Margarete were written in Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843).
If we consider the distinctive characters among those unhappy lovers whom “song and sage” reward with renown, we shall promptly see that the passion is immediate and that the contradiction is from the outside, somewhat as the pastor on the behalf of the engaged couple publicly invited objections, for he, too, cannot imagine that in the lover’s own passion there would be a contradiction, because in that case he might feel constrained like the poet, thus by a poetic call, to say of the guilty party: He does not love.
"[36] His task resulted in an editorial from the Danish newspaper The Corsair directed at Frater Taciturnus which brought Kierkegaard into open conflict with Peder Ludvig Møller and Meïr Goldschmidt.
Victor Eremita was praised for his work on Either/Or once again in November and then in December Moller wrote A Visit in Soro and Frater Taciturnus replied with The Activity of a Traveling Estetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner.
The editor of The Corsair is Mr. Goldschmidt, university student, a bright fellow, without an idea, without scholarship, without a point of view, without self-control, but not without a certain talent and a desperate esthetic power.
It is expedient for my life as an author to be abused and that is why I wished it and asked for it as soon as I was finished, for by the time Frater Taciturnus wrote, Johannes Climacus had already been delivered to the printer a few days before.
I had also hoped to benefit others by this step; they do not want it — well, I will go on asking for abuse because it suits my idea and in order to get some good, after all, out of the existence of a paper like that.
My idea requires it; its consistency satisfies me beyond measure — I cannot do otherwise, I beg forgiveness of all the better people who are undialectical or do not have the presuppositions to understand that I must do as I am doing — and then forward: Would that I might be abused.
They both stand in direct relation to the thinker, who, here in Scandinavia, has had the greatest share in the intellectual education of the younger generation, namely, Søren Kierkegaard.
Love's Comedy, although its tendency is in the opposite direction, finds its point of departure in what Kierkegaard, in Either-Or and Stages on the Path of Life, has said for and against marriage.
He had not at that time written anything, but he was known and respected as a severe Doctor of Divinity, and great was the surprise of his friends to hear of his engagement to a charming though somewhat commonplace young girl.
His own romance ended sadly, and he lived and died a bachelor, spending his last days in a hospital, and this although he had once declared that marriage was and would always remain the most perfect state.
He wrote the following in his introduction to Works of Love: For Kierkegaard in both his Either/Or and his Stages on Life's Way has depicted the strictly ethical category and has done it almost wholly in Kantian terms.
This failure to follow duty in old-fashioned terms is called sin, and Kierkegaard has shown the ethical category shattering on that rock of sin, and no ethical appeal to reason or duty or ultimate pleasure is sufficient to stay the condition where "I do those things which I ought not to do and leave undone those things which I ought to do, and there is no health in me.
"[40] John Daniel Wild wrote the following in 1959: In classical thought, the world (kosmos) is viewed as a hierarchy of beings whose structure is already fixed apart from human choice.
The term world in these passages does not refer to a fixed, objective cosmos, existing in complete independence of man.
[41] Naomi Lebowitz said, "Kierkegaard takes his most cherished model Socrates, who hid his beauty behind the Silenus skin of a "hectoring satyr".
He spends his whole life, says Alcibiades in the Symposium, a favorite dialogue of Kierkegaard, pretending and playing with people, and I doubt whether anyone has ever seen the treasures which are revealed when he grows serious and exposes what he keeps inside.
"[45] Paul Sponheim, in his introduction to Lowrie's translation of Stages, compares the book with Fear and Trembling.
[46] Thom Satterlee, a Danish translator and novelist has Soren Kierkegaard as one of the characters in his 2013 book, The Stages.
Only a few times did it happen that the father stopped, faced the son with a sorrowful countenance, looked at him and said: Poor child, you are in a quiet despair.