"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

aversions.

His next great work, Stadier paa Livets Vei "Stages on Life's
Road," forms a sort of resumВ of the results so far gained. The
three "spheres" are more clearly elaborated.

The aesthetic sphere is represented existentially by the
incomparable In Vino Veritas, generally called "The Banquet,"
from a purely literary point of view the most perfect of
Kierkegaard's works, which, if written in one of the great
languages of Europe, would have procured him world fame.
Composed in direct emulation of Plato's immortal Symposion, it
bears comparison with it as well as any modern composition can.
Indeed, it excels Plato's work in subtlety, richness, and refined
humor. To be sure, Kierkegaard has charged his creation with such
romantic superabundance of delicate observations and rococo
ornament that the whole comes dangerously near being
improbable; whereas the older work stands solidly in reality.

It is with definite purpose that the theme of the speeches of the
five participants in the banquet is love, i.e., the relation of the two
sexes in love; for it is there the main battle between the Сsthetic
and the ethical view of life must be fought out. Accordingly, Judge
William, to whom the last idyllic pages of "The Banquet" again
introduce us, in the second part breaks another shaft in defense of
marriage, which in the ethical view of life is the typical realization
of the "general law." Love exists also for the ethical individual. In
fact, love and no other consideration whatsoever can justify
marriage. But whereas to the aesthetic individual love is merely
eroticism, viz., a passing self-indulgence without any obligation,
the ethical individual attaches to himself the woman of his choice
by an act of volition, for better or for worse, and by his marriage
vow incurs an obligation to society. Marriage is thus a synthesis of
love and duty. A pity only that Kierkegaard's astonishingly low
evaluation of woman utterly mars what would otherwise be a
classic defence of marriage.

The religious sphere is shown forth in the third part, Skyldig
Ikke-Skyldig "Guilty Not-Guilty," with the apt subtitle "A History
of Woe." Working over, for the third time, and in the most intense
fashion, his own unsuccessful attempt to "realize the general law,"
i.e., by marrying, he here presents in the form of a diary the
essential facts of his own engagement, but in darker colors than in
"Repetition." It is broken because of religious incompatibility and
the lover's unconquerable melancholy; and by his voluntary
renunciation, coupled with acute suffering through his sense of
guilt for his act, he is driven up to an approximation of the
religious sphere. Not unjustly, Kierkegaard himself regarded this
as the richest of his works.