Philosophical Fragments Soren Kierkegaard

Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose. The person who lives esthetically also does that, and the popular expression heard in all ages and from various stages is this: One must enjoy life. There are, of course, many variations of this, depending on differences in the conceptions of enjoyment, but all are agreed that we are to enjoy life. But the person who says that he wants to enjoy life always posits a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself. I beg you to keep rather fixed the phrases of this last sentence, for they have been carefully chosen. Either/Or II p. 180ff see also Fear and Trembling p. 98-100 and Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses p. 27, 132-139

If a man esthetically ponders a host of life tasks, then he … does not readily have one Either/Or but a great multiplicity, because the self-determining aspect of the choice has not been ethically stressed and because, if one does not choose absolutely, one chooses only for the moment and for that reason can choose something else the next moment. What is important in choosing is not so much to choose the right thing as the energy, the earnestness, and the pathos with which one chooses. In the choosing the personality declares itself in its inner infinity and in turn the personality is thereby consolidated. Either/Or II Part II p. 167

His self is, so to speak, outside him, and it has to be acquired, and repentance is his love for it, because he chooses it absolutely from the hand of God. What I have expressed here is not academic wisdom; it is something every person can express if he wants to, something every person can will if he so wills. This, you see, is why it is so hard for individuals to choose themselves, because the absolute isolation here is identical with the most profound continuity, because as long as one has not chosen oneself there seems to be a possibility of one way or another of becoming something different. So here you have my humble view of what it is to choose and to repent. It is improper to love a young girl as if she were one's mother or one's mother as if she were a young girl; every love has its distinctiveness; love of God has its absolute distinctiveness, and its expression is repentance. (…) The Either/Or I erected between living esthetically and living ethically is not an unqualified dilemma, because it actually is a matter of only one choice. Through this choice, I actually choose between good and evil, but I choose the good, I choose eo ipso the choice between good and evil. The original choice is forever present in every succeeding choice. I as free spirit am born out of the principle of contradiction and am born through choosing myself. Either/Or Part II p. 217-219

In Fragments Climacus makes clear that he means to give the Danish term for belief, Tro, a double sense. "In the most eminent sense" it will refer to the Christian's faith, his capacity to believe against reason and the awful paradox of God's entry into time through Christ. As the mental act that somehow holds together oppositions of incalculable severity, Tro, in this sense is "the category of despair." But there is another "direct and ordinary sense" of Tro that refers not to the relationship of mind to the Christian paradox, but to "the relationship of the mind to the historical." In this second sense of belief, Tro is "the category of doubt." In both senses Tro is founded on opposition, ultimately on the opposition which is consciousness itself. Also in both senses, Tro is seen as a mental act that respects yet defeats the opposition which upon which it is founded. "Defeat" may be too strong a word, for uncertainty is never really defeated by Tro, but only ignored, uncoupled, put out of circuit. Thus Climacus argues that "in the certainty of belief there is always a negated uncertainty, in every way corresponding to the becoming of existence. Belief believes what it does not see; it sees that the star is there, but what it believes is that the star has come into existence."[24] The essential claim, then, is that the existence of anything cannot be known, but must be believed. Kierkegaard, by Josiah Thompson, Alfred A. Knopf, 1973, p. 173 (See p. 170-180))

Indeed, from what does that confusion of thoughtlessness come but from this, that the individual's thought ventures, observing, out into life, wants to survey the whole of existence, that play of forces that only God in heaven can view calmly, because in his providence he governs it with wise and omniscient purpose, but which weakens a human being's mind and makes him mentally deranged, causes him misplaced care, and strengthens with regrettable consolation. Misplaced care, namely in mood, because he worries about so much; regrettable consolation, namely in slack lethargy, when his contemplation has so many entrances and exits that it eventually wanders. And when death comes it still deceives the contemplator, because all his contemplation did not come a single step closer to the explanation but only deceived him out of life. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions p. 93