“. . . now is supposed to be objective. And if one uses one's own person maieutically it is taken to be in the manner of Andersen. All this was needed to throw light on my position in the development. Objectivity is taken to be higher than subjectivity. Quite the contrary; that is to say, an objectivity which takes shape in a corresponding subjectivity, that is the goal. The System was something inhuman to which no person could correspond either as author or executor.”
— Soren Kierkegaard, Journals
IF.1
if she could stay with me and live in a little cupboard
if I could convince her that I was a scoundrel
if I work even harder
if that way had not been used
if that was what I wanted
if she had neither relatives nor friends
if she had understood me at the time
if she understands
if she or I must first be dead
if I fail in this
“[In the margin]”
[In the margin] She took out a small note on which there was. something written by me which she was accustomed to carrying in her breast; she took it out and quietly tore it into small pieces and said: So, after all, you have also played a terrible game with me.
[In the margin] She said: Only that it won't be too late when you regret it - she meant death. I had to make a cruel joke about that and asked whether she meant I should come like Wilhelm in Lenore.
[In the margin] To extricate myself from the relationship as a cad, an arch-cad if possible, was the only way to get her afloat and on course for a marriage. But it was also a piece of recherché gallantry. With my light hand I could have got out of it much more cheaply. The notion that behavior of this kind is chivalrous has been enlarged upon by the young man in Constantin Constantius and I agree with him. So we parted.
[In the margin: It's true, the day I picked up all my things from her I wrote a letter to the Councillor which was returned unopened.] I spent the nights crying in my bed, but in the daytime was my usual self, even more flippant and witty than called for. My brother told me he would go to the family and prove to them that I was no cad. I said: If you do that I'll blow your brains out. The best proof of how deeply concerned I was.
[In the margin:] The Seducer's Diary was definitely intended for her sake, to repulse her - and I know what agonies I endured when it was published, because the idea was like my own goal, to arouse everybody's indignation against me, something that misfired completely, especially as far as the public is concerned, which received me jubilantly, something that has helped to aggravate my scorn of the public - but so far as anyone was put in mind of 'her', it was also altogether the most recherché gallantry imaginable.
To reduplicate is to be what one says. [...]
IF.2
if I wanted to recount how ingenious I have been in fooling people about my life
if it is no longer true
if the dialectic turns away
if these great riches of thought still latent in my soul
if I were just a little less faithful
if it had been possible
if I should ever repeat it as author
IF.3
if in creating man God himself lost a little of his power
if that should tempt him
if he were all there was
if everything had to do with him
if it is a madman, what else is it but madness to fasten one's attention uninterruptedly upon him
if it needs to be emphasized again and again that it is the highest
if my aloneness were no higher than marriage but something much lower
if you want to
if it comes to that
if it comes
if that can be done
if no one
if I should ever repeat it
as author
list in volatile sway
Suppose I had married her. Let us assume it. What then?
Just as a woman who is not happy in her house sits long by the window, so the soul of a melancholic sits by the eye to look for diversions. Another form of melancholy is the one that closes the eye altogether, so as to have darkness all around.
This girl had to be very costly to me, or I had to make myself very costly for her religiously.
How true, therefore, the remark I have often made concerning myself, that like S. who saved her life by telling fairytales, I save my life, or keep myself alive, by writing.
There is- and this is both the good and the bad in me - something spectral about me, something that makes it impossible for people to put up with me every day and have a real relationship with me.
It is so second nature for me to hide what is best in inwardness.
I once put up with being regarded as a scoundrel, notwithstanding I am not exactly that. So let me also put up with seeming to be an oddity as an author, notwithstanding that is not exactly what I am.
After her engagement to Schlegel, she met me on the street, greeted me in as friendly and ingratiating a manner as possible. I did not understand her, for at that time I knew nothing of the engagement. I just looked questioningly at her and shook my head. No doubt she thought I knew about it and sought my approval. [...]
Then I have been continually vexed by doubts concerning the publishing of my finished products.
I had a tall palisander commode made when I lived in the second-floor apartment at Norregade. It was made to my own design, prompted in turn by something my beloved said in her anguish.
O ye fools!
Never was the book as serious as at that time. Just that fact is the true expression of the fear.
Had the author himself looked serious, the fear would have been less.
The reduplication is what is monstrous in the fear.
(something inside me, indeed . . . )
it was prevented / and I didn't go / ahead and publish / The Point of View of My Activity as an Author /
(something inside me, indeed, was always against it) / the book itself / is true / but material like that /
can only be published after my death / in the way of stressing that / I am a penitent / on the subject /
of my sin and guilt / my inner wretchedness / I must be careful with / this thought of dying / the belief /
that I am going to die in half a year / then / I live / to be eighty-two / (something inside me, indeed /
was always. . . ) / material
completed / put in its desk / sealed and marked / 'To be opened / after my death' /
(something inside me, indeed, was always against it)
My relation to her. 24 Aug. 1849. Something literary …
Yet I can't risk writing anything down about my relation to her. I bear the responsibility
for all her later life, and so even now any direct communication could cause boundless confusion.
IF. 4
if the world’s nonsense was the only outside danger
if I had a friend to whom I said, “How annoying”
if I were able to travel without becoming productive
if what Miss Dencker told me is true
if that helps make the thought clearer
if only it were she who broke with me
if it were she herself who took the bold step of being the one who requests it
if one considers the relationship between masculinity and femininity and not a particular silly girl
if only I could win
IF.5
if you insist on reasons
if I’d read that first, I would not have been able to write it
IF. 6
if the place and context here did not require a signature
if this is a mistake
if the particular individual
if the universal says everything
if the universal is the demand
if the universal is the rule
if human science refuses
if they fight
if you step aside for it
if it would also take the trouble to understand itself
IF.7
if vanished from the world
if no trace at all is left
if it understands itself and its limits
if it does not
if in respect of love a because seems a minus
if I could easily do all this so gently for her that there was no danger
if anything is to help me
if only one persists in one’s calculations
if one does it in another way
if one just calculates correctly
if I could
if I did everything to try and minimize the affront
if people have an emotional conception of me as something out of the ordinary
IF.8
if I should need a new pseudonym in the future
if I dared to become reconciled with her
if she so desires
if she received from me any assurance
if she found out how things really were
if he is able to build the tower that high
if possible like a voice in the clouds
if she really does wish it
if she believed you
if she takes it that lightly
IF.9
if at times it has appeased my anger to be like an epigram for my contemporaries
if one gets him to act against his convictions
if you do that I’ll blow your brains out
if she could bear the rest
if only she might stay with me
if we didn’t meet
IF.10
if one uses one's own person maieutically
if we should happen at the moment of contact to exchange identities
if in all innocence and purely intellectually
if I’d wanted it
if that was what i wanted
*
All text is excerpted directly from Kierkegaard’s Journals, including the “if” inventories.