KSRK: Quidam’s Diary (May 27th and 30th)

In these passages Quidam takes a much closer look at his ‘inclosing reserve’, without, I don’t think, ever mentioning it by name. One sign of this is an abundance of biblical references, and quotations from Christian scriptures in particular. This includes more meditation on ethics, and marriage and the nature of women (“woman”) as well.

May 27. Is the following a sign of self-contradiction? Or is it the paradoxical relationship of every individual to God?

Forget her? – It is impossible. My edifice has collapsed. I was depressed, but in this depression I was an enthusiast, and that bleak idea of my youth that I was good for nothing was perhaps only a form of enthusiasm because I required an ideality, under which I sank. This secret I wanted to hide within myself and within this secret an ardor that certainly made me unhappy but also indescribably happy.

In the next paragraph he identifies ‘Governance’ as something like the ‘inclosing reserve’ he mentioned earlier:

I can conceal it from others, but I have lost the very substance of my existence, the secure place of resort behind my deceptive appearance, lost what I shall never regain, precisely what I myself must prevent myself from regaining, for my pride still remains but has had to referre pedem and now has the task, among other things of never forgiving myself.

And then makes the connection to the religious:

Only religiously can I now become intelligible to myself before God; in relation to people, misunderstanding is the foreign language I speak. I wanted to have the power to be able to express myself in the universal any time I wished; now I cannot do it.

This is of course an isolating mode of being (“I am continually being forced back into this solitary understanding…”), and it makes perfect sense that he should quote Peter from John 6:68: “to whom should I go but to you.”

Why does he lead his life this way?

my idea was to structure my life ethically in my innermost being and to conceal this inwardness in the form of deception. Now I am forced even further back into myself; my life is religiously structured and is so far back in inwardness that I have difficulty in making my way to actuality.

It seems to me that this is in many ways another ‘key’ to understanding Kierkegaard. He insists that he is a prisoner of misunderstanding, and that his own understanding of this cannot be an illusion. But why not? And why exactly does he “choose not to go to God,” especially since it is before God that he claims he can become intelligible to himself. He seems to be contradicting himself within the space of a paragraph.

Other questions remain. What exactly does he mean by ‘religiously structured’? Does he go to mass every day? Does he pray the hours? If so, is this not a way of going to God? Are his ‘religiously structured’ life and his ‘Governance’ (or ‘inclosing reserve’, which seems to be his methodical containment of his depression) the same thing, and if not, how are they different?

Whatever the answers, if there are answers to these questions, his discourse leads to some mighty arresting statements. Such as:

To whom, indeed, would it occur to want to be self-important in relation to God, but my relationship is of such a nature that it is as if God had chosen me, not I god.

There is also an extremely perceptive analysis of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Or so it seems to me. Briefly, the hunchback king was able to seduce the Lady Anne by scoffing at nature, because he “wanted to demonstrate, despite language and all the laws of life, that he could be loved.” This leads to observations about evil: “the anticipation of suprahuman powers; and it tempts with mirages, as if an insane revenge were the true way to save one’s pride and avenge one’s honor.”

The counter example is, interestingly enough, Falstaff, eschewing honor for life, as if it were just one more aspect of the vanity of men.

Go to the battlefield and look at the fallen, go to the disabled-soldiers’ hospital and look at the wounded – you will never find a dead or wounded man as maltreated as one with whom honor has finished.

And then he puts this in a religious context:

But the person who, rather than sneaking through life with honor, preferred to lose his honor and give it to God, he too, falls on the field of honor. If there is a new heaven and a new earth to expect, then there is also a new honor.

If I understand this correctly, here it is claimed that there is a higher honor due to God that must remain inexplicable (and maybe inapplicable) to men. For such a man, “the severest judgment of language and of rage upon his conduct would be a restitution of honor.”

May 30. Perhaps, at last, just maybe, Quidam says what the real problem is:

For a marriage, a wedding is required. What is a wedding? It is the making of a vow that is mutually binding. But a mutual commitment certainly requires mutual understanding. But she does not understand me at all. What does my vow become, then? It becomes nonsense. Is it a marriage? No, it is a profanation! If we were to be wedded ten times, I would not be married to her, but she would be to me. But if she is altogether unconcerned about this? Is one merely to ask about carrying through one’s passionate wish and ask nothing about the idea; is one merely to believe in one’s passionateness and have no faith or confidence that the person one loves can mean well, as they say, even though he does not have the same meaning?

To merely love passionately, as she does, without understanding, without even seeking understanding, seems to Quidam a mark of pride. And yet he finds a way to praise her for it, since in its ‘subtlety of nature’ it is perhaps the essence of the feminine.

About his beloved in particular, there is this arresting passage:

No I do not believe I would like this in anyone else, but when she does it, she does it in such a way, or I look upon it in such a way, that she loses nothing at all in my eyes. She uses every means against me, and it never occurs to her to suggest by a single word that she could believe me and therefore would give in, that she would resign herself and thereby give me my freedom, that she will scorn me and on that condition give me up.

What does he want? “… it is not my victory I am seeking; it is the victory of the idea, and I am willing to be annihilated.”

Ah, yes: the victory of the idea…