Original Content
The way I have tried to show in the preceding pages is how these matters actually appeared to me. In now trying to come to an understanding with myself about my life, things look different. Just as a child takes time to learn to distinguish itself from objects and for quite a while so little distinguishes itself from its surroundings that, keeping the stress on the passive side, it says things like ‘me hit the horse’, this same phenomenon repeats itself in a higher spiritual sphere. Therefore I thought I might gain more peace of mind by taking up a new line of study, directing my energies towards some other goal. I might even had managed for a while in that way to banish a certain restlessness, though no doubt, it would have returned with greater effect like a fever after the relief of a cool drink. What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And what use here would it be in this respect if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers’ systems and were able to call them all to account on request, point out inconsistencies in every single circle? And what use would it be in that respect to be able to work out a theory of the state, and put all the pieces from so many places into one whole, construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see? What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and for my life? And the better I became at it and the more I saw others appropriate the offspring of my mind, the more distressing my situation would become, rather like that of parents who in their poverty have to send their children out into the world and turn them over to the care of others. What use would it be if the truth were to stand there before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I acknowledge it or not, and inducing an anxious shudder rather than trusting devotion? Certainly I won’t deny that I still accept an imperative of knowledge, and that through it one can also influence others, but then it must be taken up alive in me, and this is what I now see as the main point. It is this my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. That is what is lacking, and this is why I am like a man who has collected furniture and rented rooms but still hasn’t found the beloved with whom to share life’s good and bad fortune. But to find that idea, or more properly to find myself, it is no use my plunging still further into the world. And that is exactly what I have done before, which is why I had thought it would be a good idea to throw myself into jurisprudence,to be able to sharpen my mind on life’s many complications. Here a whole mass of details offered itself for me to loose myself in; from the given facts I could perhaps fashion a totality, an organism, of this life of thieves, pursue in all its darker aspects (here, too, a certain community spirit is highly remarkable). That is also why I could wish to become an actor, so that by taking on another’s role I could acquire a sort of surrogate for my own life and in these varying externals find some form of diversion. That’s what I lacked for leading a completely human life and not just a life of knowledge, to avoid basing my minds development on – yes, on something that people call objective – something which at any rate isn’t my own, and to base it instead on something which is bound up with the deepest roots of my existence, through which I have, as it were grown into the divine, clinging fast to it even if the whole world were to fall apart. this, you see, is what I need, and this is what I shall strive for. So it is with joy and inner invigoration that I contemplate the great men who have found that precious stone for which they sell everything, even their life, with firm step, without wavering, going down their chosen path, or running into them off the beaten path, self-absorbed and working for their own lofty goals. I even look with respect upon those false paths that also lie there so close by. It is this inward action of the human, this God-side of man, that matters, not a mass of information. That will no doubt follow, but then not in the guise of accidental accumulation or a succession of details side by side without any system, without a focal point upon with all radii converge. Such a focal point is something I too have looked for. Vainly I have sought an anchorage, not just in the depths of knowledge, but in the bottomless sea of pleasure. I have felt the well-nigh irresistible power with which one pleasure holds out its hand to another; I have felt that false kind of enthusiasm which it is capable of producing. I have also felt the tedium, the laceration, which ensues. I have tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge and have relished them time and again. But this joy was only in the moment of cognition and left no deeper mark upon me. It seems to me that I have not so much drunk from as fallen into the cup of wisdom. I fancied, I withdrew with a consciousness of my own competence, rather as a doddering clergyman resigns with his pension. What did I find? Not my “I,” for that is exactly what I was trying in that way to find (I imagined, if I may so put it, my soul shut up in a box with a spring). -So the first thing to be resolved was this search for and discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven. A person would no more want to decide the externals first and the fundamentals afterward than a heavenly body about to form itself would decide first of all about its surface, about which bodies it should turn its light side to, and to which its dark side, without first letting the harmony of centrifugal and centripetal forces bring it into being and letting the rest come by itself. One must first come to know oneself before knowing anything else (γνῶθι σεαυτὸν). Only when a person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning; only then is he free of that irksome, fateful traveling companion – that life’s irony which appears in the sphere of knowledge and bids true knowing begin with not knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing. – Kierkegaard, Journals – August 1, 1835