Kester, I've not read Kierkegaard, but the following is challenging me today to do so. Given other circumstances it feels needful even. (Sorry this is a bit long.)
From the introduction written by Douglas Steere in Harper's 1938 translation: Perhaps Descartes was on the right road when he sought to isolate the individual I in man from all other experience and make it the starting point for his system. But he was wrong and even culpable in not pressing on in his exploration of the I beyond its capacity to think, for thought, Kierkegaard would insist, is not its most unique endowment. Here in the core of the I is a center from which choice springs, from which responsibility for one’s acts springs, from which the ultimate sense of uneasiness and weariness with anything that is short of the highest of all in reality ultimately issues, from which remorse and repentance arises.
Allow this center in a man to remain dulled by the crowd; allow it to continue dissipated by busyness; permit it to go on evading its function by a round of distractions, or to lull itself by a carefully chosen rotation of pleasures; abandon it to its attempt to drug, to narcotize suffering and remorse which might reveal to it its true condition; let it wither away the sense of its own validity by false theories of man’s nature, of his place in the social pattern, of his way of salvation; in short, allow any of these well-known forms of domestication of man’s responsible core as an individual, to continue unchallenged, and you as a thinker and a friend of men have committed the supreme treason!
"In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy," wrote Nietzsche, and in Kierkegaard the reader finds that he is confronted with a merciless enemy to every form of gregarious domestication within himself. Kierkegaard does not risk smothering his reader with leniency. He is prepared to be hard, to wound in order to heal, to use the knife. Kierkegaard conceived it his function as a writer to strip men of their disguises, to compel them to see evasions for what they are, to label blind alleys, to cut off men’s retreats, to tear down the niggardly roofs they continue to build over their precious sun-dials, to isolate men from the crowd, to enforce self-examination, and to bring them solitary and alone before the Eternal. Here he left them. For here that in man which makes him a responsible individual must itself act or it must take flight. No other can make this decision. Only when man is alone can he face the Eternal. And the act that is called for at this point is not one of mere noetic recognition. When all is known that can be known, the responsible core of the will in the man has still to yield. He must act, he must choose, he must risk, he must make the leap. For in an existence where qualitative differences remain, there is no other entry into the deepest level of existential living as an individual. Only by this leap on faith could one know the release of guilt, the sense of commitment, the acceptance of a vocation, of a calling in whose service is perfect freedom. For in any lesser service there is servility. Only the Omnipotent One dares exercise that restraint of true love that makes Its associates free and heightens, not debases, the individual core of responsibility and integrity within them. "The consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is the one thing needful."
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Kester, I've not read Kierkegaard, but the following is challenging me today to do so. Given other circumstances it feels needful even. (Sorry this is a bit long.)
From the introduction written by Douglas Steere in Harper's 1938 translation:
Perhaps Descartes was on the right road when he sought to isolate the individual I in man from all other experience and make it the starting point for his system. But he was wrong and even culpable in not pressing on in his exploration of the I beyond its capacity to think, for thought, Kierkegaard would insist, is not its most unique endowment. Here in the core of the I is a center from which choice springs, from which responsibility for one’s acts springs, from which the ultimate sense of uneasiness and weariness with anything that is short of the highest of all in reality ultimately issues, from which remorse and repentance arises.
Allow this center in a man to remain dulled by the crowd; allow it to continue dissipated by busyness; permit it to go on evading its function by a round of distractions, or to lull itself by a carefully chosen rotation of pleasures; abandon it to its attempt to drug, to narcotize suffering and remorse which might reveal to it its true condition; let it wither away the sense of its own validity by false theories of man’s nature, of his place in the social pattern, of his way of salvation; in short, allow any of these well-known forms of domestication of man’s responsible core as an individual, to continue unchallenged, and you as a thinker and a friend of men have committed the supreme treason!
"In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy," wrote Nietzsche, and in Kierkegaard the reader finds that he is confronted with a merciless enemy to every form of gregarious domestication within himself. Kierkegaard does not risk smothering his reader with leniency. He is prepared to be hard, to wound in order to heal, to use the knife. Kierkegaard conceived it his function as a writer to strip men of their disguises, to compel them to see evasions for what they are, to label blind alleys, to cut off men’s retreats, to tear down the niggardly roofs they continue to build over their precious sun-dials, to isolate men from the crowd, to enforce self-examination, and to bring them solitary and alone before the Eternal. Here he left them. For here that in man which makes him a responsible individual must itself act or it must take flight. No other can make this decision. Only when man is alone can he face the Eternal. And the act that is called for at this point is not one of mere noetic recognition. When all is known that can be known, the responsible core of the will in the man has still to yield. He must act, he must choose, he must risk, he must make the leap. For in an existence where qualitative differences remain, there is no other entry into the deepest level of existential living as an individual. Only by this leap on faith could one know the release of guilt, the sense of commitment, the acceptance of a vocation, of a calling in whose service is perfect freedom. For in any lesser service there is servility. Only the Omnipotent One dares exercise that restraint of true love that makes Its associates free and heightens, not debases, the individual core of responsibility and integrity within them. "The consciousness of one’s eternal responsibility to be an individual is the one thing needful."
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