Three Upbuilding Discourses
Encyclopedia
Søren Kierkegaard arrived at Bianco Luno Press to publish his Three Upbuilding Discourses and stood at the end of a long line of authors. Another person walked in behind him and immediately tried to go to the front of the line, but the first person in line wouldn’t let him in, so he tried the second, and then the third, and so on until he came to Soren. He took one look at Soren and said, “On wild trees, the flowers are fragrant, on cultivated trees, the fruits." Soren let him stand in front of him. By this time a very pensive individual had stepped in line behind him and said, “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.” These were code words for the spy network Magister Kierkegaard set up in opposition to the “deified established order”. His trusted spies were Johannes de Silentio, and Constantin Constantius. Johannes handed him a note and said nothing more. The note said, “in modern philosophy, every assistant professor, tutor, and student, every rural outsider and tenant incumbent in philosophy is unwilling to stop with doubting everything but goes further. … people are unwilling to stop with faith.” Constantin said, “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy-assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, that he has forgotten something. … Hope is a new garment. … Recollection is a discarded garment. ... Repetition is an indestructible garment. ... it takes courage to will repetition.” Soren thought for a moment and said, The Bible says the world has four corners but science now says the world is round. What if someone where to say, “Boom! The earth is round!” and to continually repeat this generation after generation? Wouldn't it seem to be some kind of insanity, since everyone knows the earth is round? Kierkegaard wondered how this kind of statement could effect faith. He gave his soldiers their orders and they departed. This whole scene is for illustrative purposes only. The three of them never have met at Bianco Luno Press, the books were printed there but Three Upbuilding Discourses was published by Bookdealer P. G. Philipsen Fear and Trembling
, by Johannes de Silentio, and Repetition
, by Constantin Constantius, were both published by C.A. Reitzel's. No good spy master would get all his books published at the same place. All three books were published by the same person, Soren Kierkegaard, and all three were published on the same date, October 16, 1843.
Kierkegaard continues his discussion of the difference between externalities and inwardness in the discourses. But now he moves from the inwardness of faith to that of love. Everything is always changing in the external world but in the inner spiritual world there is one thing that never changes according to Kierkegaard. He says, “What is it that never changes even though everything is changed? It is love, and that alone is love, that which never becomes something else.” Love is dependent on how a person sees and when the individual sees with love that individual can see away sin in himself as well as the sin of the whole world, just as Christ did.
However, for one to be able to do this one must be “strengthened in the inner being.” When the inner being “announces itself it craves an explanation, a witness that explains the meaning of everything for it, and its own meaning by explaining it in the God who holds everything together in his eternal wisdom and who assigned to man to be lord of creation by his becoming God’s servant, and explained himself to him by making him his co-worker, and through every explanation that he gives a person, he strengthens and confirms him in his inner being." In this concern
the inner being announces itself-the inner being that is concerned not about the whole world but only about God and about itself, about the explanation that makes the relation
understand
able to it, and about the witness that confirms it in the relation.”
The Preface: dedicated “to that single individual
whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader …”
The Three Discourses:
The Biblical text for the discourse or discourses
He has two discourses with the same title in Three Upbuilding Discourses. When he wrote Four Upbuilding Discourses
he went back and wrote two discourses titled, Every Good Gift And Every Perfect Gift Is From Above, which was one of his discourse titles from the earlier Two Upbuilding Discourses
. Kierkegaard goes forward in the repetition of each discourse and adds a little more thought to the preceding discourse.
"The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen. Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you."
Kierkegaard’s thesis is that love never becomes something else because of external circumstances. He discusses “how love hides a multitude of sins” and that “does not depend merely upon what one sees, but what one sees depends upon how one sees; all observation is not just a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth, and insofar as it is that, how the observer himself is constituted is indeed decisive. When one person sees one thing and another sees something else in the same thing, then the one discovers what the other conceals. Insofar as the object viewed belongs to the external world, then how the observer is constituted
is probably less important, or, more correctly then what is necessary for the observation is something irrelevant to his deeper nature. But the more the object of observation belongs to the world of the spirit, the more important is the way he himself is constituted in his innermost nature, because everything spiritual is appropriated only in freedom; but what is appropriated in freedom is also brought forth. The difference, then, is not the external but the internal, and everything that makes a person impure and his observation impure comes from within.” The heart “determines what he hides and what he covers.”
Kierkegaard further explains this whole concept in Works of Love,
Kierkegaard asks, What is in your heart? He says, “When evil lives in the heart, the eye sees offense, but when purity lives in the heart, the eye sees the finger of God.” (…) “When fear lives in the heart, a person easily discovers the multiplicity of sin, discovers deceit and delusion and disloyalty and scheming, discovers that; Every heart is a net, Every rogue like a child, Every promise like a shadow. But the love that hides a multitude of sins is never deceived”. “When love lives in the heart, a person understands slowly and does not hear at all words said in haste and does not understand them when repeated because he assigns them good position and a good meaning. He does not understand a long angry and insulting verbal assault, because he is waiting for one more word that will give it meaning.”
He says, He concludes by drawing attention to two opposite powers. One is the “power in sin that has the perseverance to consume every better feeling a person has” and the other is “a heavenly power that starves the multiplicity of sin out of a person.”
Kierkegaard says love is no dream or mood or the kind of self-love that only thinks of love in relation to itself. Kierkegaard uses the Socratic Method
to question himself in relation to love and advises all to do likewise.
Christ said to love your neighbor as yourself, which implies two commands. Kierkegaard thinks of this in relation to the title of his work. If there is this power of love that can hide my sins from God, then can I use this same power and hide my sins from my own self? Can I use this same power to hide my neighbor's sins from myself and from the rest of the world? He asks about the judgment from without, the judgment of the world, and says that it always finds what it seeks. It depends upon how it sees. But now how does this love arise in a person’s soul? This love that is able “to interpret itself to itself; make itself understandable to the single individual even if not another soul understood it”.
Kierkegaard says, “one must have the courage to will love” because “God’s love awakens crying like a newborn baby, not smiling like the child that knows its mother. But now when God’s love wants to hold fast to the Lord, the enemy rises up against one in all its terror, and the power of sin is so strong that it strikes with anxiety. But love does not shut its eyes in the hour of danger; it volunteers itself.” Remembering is great to the understanding but love has to forget its own sins as well as the neighbor’s sins, according to Kierkegaard, and this is just foolishness to the understanding.
Kierkegaard continued his discourse on love in his 1847 book, Works of Love
where he said,
I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Kierkegaard uses The Apostle Paul as an example in this discourse. He uses Abraham
in Fear and Trembling and Job in Repetition and in Four Upbuilding Discourses. They’re all examples of individuals who saw their expectancy crash but survived the shipwreck intact because they were “strengthened in the inner being.” Kierkegaard had already mentioned the category of an eternal choice in Either/Or. He said, “Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously
chooses. Then when a choice is eventually made-…one discovers that there is something that must be done over again, must be withdrawn, and this is often very difficult. There are stories about human beings whom mermaids or mermen have subjected to their power with their demonic music. To break the spell, so says the story, it was necessary for the person under the spell to play the same piece backward without making a single mistake. This is a very profound thought but very difficult to do, and yet this is the way it is. The error one has absorbed has to be rooted out in this way, and every time one makes a mistake one must begin all over again. As you see, this is why it is important to choose and to choose in time. I congratulate you for being still so young that even though you will always miss out on something, you nevertheless-if you have the energy or, more accurately, will to have the energy for it-can win what is the main concern of life, you can win yourself, gain yourself.” Either/Or II Hong p. 164-165
Kierkegaard discusses the “main concern of life” in this discourse.
He begins with Paul in Rome as a prisoner “with a teaching” “and the unshakable conviction that this teaching would be victorious over the whole world”. Paul was a witness, not a doubter, who “lets everything around it change and give itself up as a willing prey to life’s fickle, capricious changes, without being alarmed by such a world, without being concerned for itself.” But this concern “announces itself within the individual in such a way that he “craves an explanation
, a witness that explains the meaning of everything for it, and its own meaning by explaining it in the God who holds everything together in his eternal wisdom and who assigned to man to be lord of creation by his becoming God’s servant, and explained himself to him by making him his co-worker, and through every explanation that he gives a person, he strengthens and confirms him in his inner being”. This is what strengthened Paul in prison. He didn’t “run away from every explanation.” He didn’t “fill time with perpetual deliberation.” In his “concern the inner being announces itself-the inner being that is concerned not about the whole world but only about God and about itself, about the explanation that makes the relation understandable to it, and about the witness that confirms it in the relation.”
Kierkegaard asks,
Each single individual must decide this for himself and that depends on how one sees. "If he understood himself or tried to understand himself, if he truly was concerned about understanding himself, if the inner being announced itself within him in that concern, then he will understand prosperity, then he will understand the significance of its being denied him, then he will not occupy himself with flights of fancy and fortify himself with dreams but in his adversity will be concerned about himself."
In 1846 Kierkegaard wrote, “inwardness in erotic love does not mean to get married seven times to Danish girls, and then to go for the French and Italian, but to love one and the same and yet be continually renewed in the same erotic love, so that it continually flowers anew in mood and exuberance-which, when applied to communication, is the inexhaustible renewal and fertility of expression. Inwardness cannot be communicated directly, because expressing it directly is externality (oriented outwardly, not inwardly
), and expressing inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there (The direct outpouring of feeling is no proof at all that one has it, but the tension of the contrastive forms is the dynamometer
of inwardness), and the reception intrinsic to inwardness is not a direct reproduction of what was communicated, since that is an echo. But the repetition of inwardness is the resonance in which what is said disappears, as with Mary when she hid the words in her heart.” For Kierkegaard the outward forms of religion are meaningless without the inner dimension. He says, "the work is willing to hold fast to this [first] love."
Another author, 90 years later, related the Discourses to Kierkegaard's other works.
Reviewers were enthralled with Fear and Trembling and Repetition. The discourses present modes of thought that are conducive to the Spiritual world where forgiveness overcomes wrath. Revenge is always sweet. Suffering is the act of loving without being affected by outward circumstances.
, the Corsair affair, or his attack upon the church; all deal with his outer being.
Fear and Trembling
Fear and Trembling is an influential philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio...
, by Johannes de Silentio, and Repetition
Repetition (Kierkegaard)
Kierkegaard said "Seneca has said that when a person has reached his thirtieth year he ought to know his constitution so well that he can be his own physician; I likewise believe that when a person has reached a certain age he ought to be able to be his own pastor...
, by Constantin Constantius, were both published by C.A. Reitzel's. No good spy master would get all his books published at the same place. All three books were published by the same person, Soren Kierkegaard, and all three were published on the same date, October 16, 1843.
Kierkegaard continues his discussion of the difference between externalities and inwardness in the discourses. But now he moves from the inwardness of faith to that of love. Everything is always changing in the external world but in the inner spiritual world there is one thing that never changes according to Kierkegaard. He says, “What is it that never changes even though everything is changed? It is love, and that alone is love, that which never becomes something else.” Love is dependent on how a person sees and when the individual sees with love that individual can see away sin in himself as well as the sin of the whole world, just as Christ did.
However, for one to be able to do this one must be “strengthened in the inner being.” When the inner being “announces itself it craves an explanation, a witness that explains the meaning of everything for it, and its own meaning by explaining it in the God who holds everything together in his eternal wisdom and who assigned to man to be lord of creation by his becoming God’s servant, and explained himself to him by making him his co-worker, and through every explanation that he gives a person, he strengthens and confirms him in his inner being." In this concern
Anxiety
Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state characterized by somatic, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components. The root meaning of the word anxiety is 'to vex or trouble'; in either presence or absence of psychological stress, anxiety can create feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness,...
the inner being announces itself-the inner being that is concerned not about the whole world but only about God and about itself, about the explanation that makes the relation
Intimate relationship
An intimate relationship is a particularly close interpersonal relationship that involves physical or emotional intimacy. Physical intimacy is characterized by romantic or passionate love and attachment, or sexual activity. The term is also sometimes used euphemistically for a sexual...
understand
Understand
Understand is a commercial static code analysis software tool produced by SciTools. It is mostly used to reverse engineer, automatically document, and calculate code metrics for projects with large code-bases....
able to it, and about the witness that confirms it in the relation.”
Structure
The dedication: To the late Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, formerly a clothing merchant here in the city, My Father, these discourses are dedicated.The Preface: dedicated “to that single individual
Individual
An individual is a person or any specific object or thing in a collection. Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs, goals, and desires. Being self expressive...
whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader …”
The Three Discourses:
- Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins,
- Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins,
- Strengthening In The Inner Being
The Biblical text for the discourse or discourses
He has two discourses with the same title in Three Upbuilding Discourses. When he wrote Four Upbuilding Discourses
Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1843
Kierkegaard writes these discourses because he's not sure that the other two have done their job. He revisits the story of Job once more but here he puts the emphasis not on what he said but what he did...
he went back and wrote two discourses titled, Every Good Gift And Every Perfect Gift Is From Above, which was one of his discourse titles from the earlier Two Upbuilding Discourses
Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1843
Soren Kierkegaard published Two Upbuilding Discourses three months after the publication of his big book, Either/Or, which ended without a conclusion to the argument between A, the aesthete and B, the ethicist, as to which is the best way to live one's life. Kierkegaard hoped the book would...
. Kierkegaard goes forward in the repetition of each discourse and adds a little more thought to the preceding discourse.
Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins
- 1 Peter 4:7-12, The Holy Bible NIV
"The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen. Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you."
Kierkegaard’s thesis is that love never becomes something else because of external circumstances. He discusses “how love hides a multitude of sins” and that “does not depend merely upon what one sees, but what one sees depends upon how one sees; all observation is not just a receiving, a discovering, but also a bringing forth, and insofar as it is that, how the observer himself is constituted is indeed decisive. When one person sees one thing and another sees something else in the same thing, then the one discovers what the other conceals. Insofar as the object viewed belongs to the external world, then how the observer is constituted
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
is probably less important, or, more correctly then what is necessary for the observation is something irrelevant to his deeper nature. But the more the object of observation belongs to the world of the spirit, the more important is the way he himself is constituted in his innermost nature, because everything spiritual is appropriated only in freedom; but what is appropriated in freedom is also brought forth. The difference, then, is not the external but the internal, and everything that makes a person impure and his observation impure comes from within.” The heart “determines what he hides and what he covers.”
Kierkegaard further explains this whole concept in Works of Love,
The one who loves sees the sin he forgives, but he believes that forgiveness takes it away. This cannot be seen, whereas the sin can indeed be seen; on the other hand, if the sin did not exist to be seen, it could not be forgiven either. Just as one by faith believes the unseen into what is seen, so the one who loves by forgiveness believes away what is seen. Both are faith. Blessed is the believer, he believes what he cannot see; blessed is the one who loves, he believes away that which he indeed can see! Who can believe this? The one who loves can do it. But why is forgiveness so rare? Is it not because faith in the power of forgiveness is so meager and so rare? … When love forgives the miracle of faith happens (and every miracle is then a miracle of faith-no wonder, therefore, that along with faith miracles have also been abolished!): that what is seen is, by being forgiven, not seen. It is blotted out, it is forgiven and forgotten, or, as Scripture says, of what God forgives, it is hidden behind his back. Works of Love, Chapter V, Love Hides a Multitude of Sins, Hong p. 295
Kierkegaard asks, What is in your heart? He says, “When evil lives in the heart, the eye sees offense, but when purity lives in the heart, the eye sees the finger of God.” (…) “When fear lives in the heart, a person easily discovers the multiplicity of sin, discovers deceit and delusion and disloyalty and scheming, discovers that; Every heart is a net, Every rogue like a child, Every promise like a shadow. But the love that hides a multitude of sins is never deceived”. “When love lives in the heart, a person understands slowly and does not hear at all words said in haste and does not understand them when repeated because he assigns them good position and a good meaning. He does not understand a long angry and insulting verbal assault, because he is waiting for one more word that will give it meaning.”
He says, He concludes by drawing attention to two opposite powers. One is the “power in sin that has the perseverance to consume every better feeling a person has” and the other is “a heavenly power that starves the multiplicity of sin out of a person.”
Love Will Hide a Multitude of Sins
- The Epistle: 1 Peter 4:7:12
Kierkegaard says love is no dream or mood or the kind of self-love that only thinks of love in relation to itself. Kierkegaard uses the Socratic Method
Socratic method
The Socratic method , named after the classical Greek philosopher Socrates, is a form of inquiry and debate between individuals with opposing viewpoints based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to illuminate ideas...
to question himself in relation to love and advises all to do likewise.
Christ said to love your neighbor as yourself, which implies two commands. Kierkegaard thinks of this in relation to the title of his work. If there is this power of love that can hide my sins from God, then can I use this same power and hide my sins from my own self? Can I use this same power to hide my neighbor's sins from myself and from the rest of the world? He asks about the judgment from without, the judgment of the world, and says that it always finds what it seeks. It depends upon how it sees. But now how does this love arise in a person’s soul? This love that is able “to interpret itself to itself; make itself understandable to the single individual even if not another soul understood it”.
Kierkegaard says, “one must have the courage to will love” because “God’s love awakens crying like a newborn baby, not smiling like the child that knows its mother. But now when God’s love wants to hold fast to the Lord, the enemy rises up against one in all its terror, and the power of sin is so strong that it strikes with anxiety. But love does not shut its eyes in the hour of danger; it volunteers itself.” Remembering is great to the understanding but love has to forget its own sins as well as the neighbor’s sins, according to Kierkegaard, and this is just foolishness to the understanding.
Kierkegaard continued his discourse on love in his 1847 book, Works of Love
Works of Love
Works of Love is a work by Søren Kierkegaard written in 1847. It is one of the works which he published under his own name, as opposed to his more famous "pseudonymous" works. Works of Love deals primarily with the Christian conception of love in contrast with erotic love or preferential love ...
where he said,
Strengthening In The Inner Being
- Ephesians 3:13 to the end The Bible (NIV)
I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Kierkegaard uses The Apostle Paul as an example in this discourse. He uses Abraham
Abraham
Abraham , whose birth name was Abram, is the eponym of the Abrahamic religions, among which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
in Fear and Trembling and Job in Repetition and in Four Upbuilding Discourses. They’re all examples of individuals who saw their expectancy crash but survived the shipwreck intact because they were “strengthened in the inner being.” Kierkegaard had already mentioned the category of an eternal choice in Either/Or. He said, “Already prior to one’s choosing, the personality is interested in the choice, and if one puts off the choice, the personality or the obscure forces within it unconsciously
Unconscious mind
The unconscious mind is a term coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
chooses. Then when a choice is eventually made-…one discovers that there is something that must be done over again, must be withdrawn, and this is often very difficult. There are stories about human beings whom mermaids or mermen have subjected to their power with their demonic music. To break the spell, so says the story, it was necessary for the person under the spell to play the same piece backward without making a single mistake. This is a very profound thought but very difficult to do, and yet this is the way it is. The error one has absorbed has to be rooted out in this way, and every time one makes a mistake one must begin all over again. As you see, this is why it is important to choose and to choose in time. I congratulate you for being still so young that even though you will always miss out on something, you nevertheless-if you have the energy or, more accurately, will to have the energy for it-can win what is the main concern of life, you can win yourself, gain yourself.” Either/Or II Hong p. 164-165
Kierkegaard discusses the “main concern of life” in this discourse.
He begins with Paul in Rome as a prisoner “with a teaching” “and the unshakable conviction that this teaching would be victorious over the whole world”. Paul was a witness, not a doubter, who “lets everything around it change and give itself up as a willing prey to life’s fickle, capricious changes, without being alarmed by such a world, without being concerned for itself.” But this concern “announces itself within the individual in such a way that he “craves an explanation
Explanation
An explanation is a set of statements constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes, context, and consequencesof those facts....
, a witness that explains the meaning of everything for it, and its own meaning by explaining it in the God who holds everything together in his eternal wisdom and who assigned to man to be lord of creation by his becoming God’s servant, and explained himself to him by making him his co-worker, and through every explanation that he gives a person, he strengthens and confirms him in his inner being”. This is what strengthened Paul in prison. He didn’t “run away from every explanation.” He didn’t “fill time with perpetual deliberation.” In his “concern the inner being announces itself-the inner being that is concerned not about the whole world but only about God and about itself, about the explanation that makes the relation understandable to it, and about the witness that confirms it in the relation.”
- Can prosperity serve for strengthening the inner being?
- Can fortune or misfortune serve for strengthening the inner being?
- Can adversity serve for strengthening the inner being?
Each single individual must decide this for himself and that depends on how one sees. "If he understood himself or tried to understand himself, if he truly was concerned about understanding himself, if the inner being announced itself within him in that concern, then he will understand prosperity, then he will understand the significance of its being denied him, then he will not occupy himself with flights of fancy and fortify himself with dreams but in his adversity will be concerned about himself."
In 1846 Kierkegaard wrote, “inwardness in erotic love does not mean to get married seven times to Danish girls, and then to go for the French and Italian, but to love one and the same and yet be continually renewed in the same erotic love, so that it continually flowers anew in mood and exuberance-which, when applied to communication, is the inexhaustible renewal and fertility of expression. Inwardness cannot be communicated directly, because expressing it directly is externality (oriented outwardly, not inwardly
Internalism and externalism
Internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings...
), and expressing inwardness directly is no proof at all that it is there (The direct outpouring of feeling is no proof at all that one has it, but the tension of the contrastive forms is the dynamometer
Dynamometer
A dynamometer or "dyno" for short, is a device for measuring force, moment of force , or power. For example, the power produced by an engine, motor or other rotating prime mover can be calculated by simultaneously measuring torque and rotational speed .A dynamometer can also be used to determine...
of inwardness), and the reception intrinsic to inwardness is not a direct reproduction of what was communicated, since that is an echo. But the repetition of inwardness is the resonance in which what is said disappears, as with Mary when she hid the words in her heart.” For Kierkegaard the outward forms of religion are meaningless without the inner dimension. He says, "the work is willing to hold fast to this [first] love."
Criticism
The titles of Kierkegaard’s works have undergone much change in the 100 years before they were translated into English. The Upbuilding Discourses are mentioned in an 1852 book of literature and romance under the title “Instructive Tales”."Soren Aaby Kierkegaard, "the solitary philosopher," has also probed the depths of the same metaphysic systems in the society of the great advocates of them, having especially devoted himself to the study of Schelling; and in his singular but remarkable works, "Enten—Eller"; that is, Either—Or, a Life's Fragment, by Victor the Hermit; Reiteration; "An Attempt in Experimental Psychology; Fear and Trembling; a Dialectic Lyric, by John de Silentio ; and his Instructive Tales, dedicated to that individual, has with wonderful eloquence, and with the warmth of an actual experience of the Fear and Trembling and the Gospel of Suffering of which he speaks, proclaimed his firm adhesion to that true spirit of the North, which of old saw, in the myth of Valhalla, combat and death as leading only to victory and life.The literature and romance of northern Europe: constituting a complete history of the literature of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, with copious specimens of the most celebrated histories, romances (1852), by Howitt, William, 1792-1879; Howitt, Mary Botham, 1799-1888, joint author p. 239-240
Another author, 90 years later, related the Discourses to Kierkegaard's other works.
Since the pseudonymous works are in the form of “indirect communication,” they stand in need of interpretation, and the Discourses, which always were in the form of “direct communication,” afford in some instances (especially in the case of Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and the Stages) a very precious and specific illumination of S.K.’s meaning, not merely a proof of his religious intent in general.
Reviewers were enthralled with Fear and Trembling and Repetition. The discourses present modes of thought that are conducive to the Spiritual world where forgiveness overcomes wrath. Revenge is always sweet. Suffering is the act of loving without being affected by outward circumstances.
Influence and Reception
Kierkegaard sold 139 copies of the book. The Three Discourses wasn't translated into English until 1946 when David F. Swenson translated and published all the discourses in four volumes. and then Howard V. Hong translated and published them in 1990 into one volume. In 1852 these discourses were called Instructive Tales by William Howitt. Scholars relate most of Kierkegaard's work to his relationship to Regine OlsenRegine Olsen
Regine Schlegel née Olsen was a Danish woman who was engaged to the philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard from September 1840 to October 1841...
, the Corsair affair, or his attack upon the church; all deal with his outer being.
Web
- William Howitt
Sources
- Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, by Soren Kierkegaard], Princeton University Press. Hong, 1990
- Fear and Trembling/Repetition; Copyright 1843 Soren Kierkegaard – Kierkegaard’s Writings; 6 – copyright 1983 – Howard V. Hong
- Edifying Discourses, by Soren Kierkegaard, Vol. I, Translated from the Danish by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Augsburg Publishing House, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1943
- Kierkegaard's Writings, III, Part I: Either/Or. Part I. Translated by Howard and Edna Hong. Princeton, 1988, ISBN 9780691020419 (Hong)
- Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard Princeton University Press 1942, 1970 ISBN 0691019576