The following is a summary of quotes of Kierkegaard. Quotes collected in Part 1 are based on my primary interest and concern. Part 2 are other selections. Quotes in Part 3 are the original quotes out of Kierkegaard's almost 20 books as collected by my friend who has strong interest in him. In Part 3, I put my emphasis with underline and bold letters there. My friend's notes are found as notes following the text.

Recognizing my limited understanding, please be advised not to pay much attention as to the way I summarized here. These are mainly for my personal purpose with limited consideration for potential readers. Nevertheless, I still hope any readers to get something in order to enrich your life! (Total of 29 pages in this file.)

--- Kio Suzaki (9/7/00)

Here is a related site:

http://www.ccel.org/k/kierkegaard/selections/

Contents

Part 1 Quotes of My Primary Interest *

* Joy is the present tense, with the whole emphasis upon the present. (CD, Lowrie, pp. 349-50)

* The subjective existing thinker who has the infinite in his soul has it always, and therefore his form is continually negative. (CUP, Hong, p.84) ((What about the states of in and out?))

* One who is existing is continually in the process of becoming; the actually existing subjective thinker, thinking, continually reproduces this in his existence and invests all his thinking in becoming. (CUP, Hong, p. 86) ((Sounds like a description of Buddha nature itself...))

* At its highest, inwardness in an existing subject is passion.. (CUP, Hong, p. 198-99)

* to exist is to become. (CUP, Hong, p. 199)

* The transparency of thought in existence is inwardness. (CUP, Hong, p. 255)

* the ideal task: simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. (CUP, Hong, pp. 431-32) ((Connecting science and spirituality, it appears…))

* The consciousness of sin, however, is a change of the subject himself…(CUP, Hong,p. 584)

* it is only by repenting oneself that one becomes concrete, and it is only as a concrete individual that one is a free individual. (E/O, Hannay, p. 540)

* The infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith, … only in the infinite resignation do I become clear to myself with respect to my eternal validity, and only then can there be any question of grasping existence by virtue of faith. (F&T, Lowrie, p.57)

* In the ethical way of regarding life it is therefore the task of the individual to divest himself of the inward determinants and express them in an outward way, (F&T, Lowrie, p.79) ((***In and out…***))

* increasing profundity is understanding more and more that one cannot understand. And there once again comes in 'being like a child,' but raised to the second power. (J, Dru, pp. 172-73)

* To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. (JfY, Hong, p.104)

* The condition for a person's salvation is the faith that there is, everywhere and at every moment, an absolute beginning. … (P&J, Hannay, p.463-64) ((Re: Zero base mind))

* The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you."(J&P, Hannay, p. 600)

* the suffering also in one sense comes from the individual himself, from his subjectivity being unable to surrender itself immediately and wholly to God. (J&P, Hannay, p. 626)

* The wish is not the cure. This happens only by the action of the Eternal. The wish is, on the contrary, the life in suffering, the health in suffering. (PoH, Steere, p.149)

* we compare the heart with the sea, because the purity of the sea lies in this consistency in depth and transparency. No storm may perturb it; no sudden gust of wind may stir its surface, no drowsy fog may sprawl out over it; no doubtful movement may stir within it; rather it must lie calm, transparent to its depths." (PoH, Steele, p.176) ((Shall we sail on the ocean or play as child as well??))

* To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But merely going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. (PoH, Steere, pp. 217-18) ((***One can go in and out…, but not merely out…))

* in every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. (SuD, Hong, pp. 16-17) ((***Here is the relationship to Tears.. Also, new beginning…Buddha nature***))

* to repent is … a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself. (Stages, Hong, p. 476-77)

* every human relation between man and man a relationship of conscience." (WoL, Hong, p.137)

* the presence of spirit is the quiet, whispering secret of transferred language - audible to him who has an ear to hear." (W0L, Hong, p. 199)

==================================================================

* The present is the eternal, or rather, the eternal is the present, and the present is full." (CoA, Thomte, p.86)

* If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself ..(COA, Thomte, pp. 91-92)

* There is an old saying that to understand and to understand are two things, and so they are. Inwardness is an understanding, but in concreto the important thing is how this understanding is to be understood. (CoA, Thomte, p. 142)

* The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, .. This self-consciousness, therefore, is action, and this action is in turn inwardness, and whenever inwardness does not correspond to this consciousness, there is a form of the demonic as soon as the absence of inwardness expresses itself as anxiety about its acquisition. (CoA, Thomte, p. 143)

* The direction of unreflectiveness is always oriented outward, thereunto, toward, in striving to reach its goal, toward the objective. … the truth is the subject's transformation within himself." (CUP, Hong, p. 37-38)

* Whereas objective thinking invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off results and answers, subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result, partly because this belongs to him, since he possesses the way, partly because he as existing is continually in the process of becoming, as is every human being who has not permitted himself to be tricked into becoming objective, into inhumanly becoming speculative thought." (CUP, Hong, p.73)

* Ordinary communication, objective thinking, has no secrets; only doubly reflected subjective thinking has secrets; that is, all its essential content is essentially a secret, because it cannot be communicated directly. (CUP, Hong, p. 79)

* the negative is present in existence and present everywhere (because being there, existence, is continually in the process of becoming), the only deliverance from it is to become continually aware of it. (CUP, Hong, pp. 81-82)

* To subjective reflection, truth becomes appropriation, inwardness, subjectivity, and the point is to immerse oneself, existing, in subjectivity." (CUP, Hong, pp. 191-92)

* When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual's relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth. (CUP, Hong, p. 199)

* Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said… At its maximum, this i[how]i is the passion of the infinite, and the passion of the infinite is the very truth. But the passion of the infinite is precisely subjectivity, and thus subjectivity is the truth. (CUP, Hong, p. 202-03)

* An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person." (CUP, Hong, p. 203)

* For the person who does not know himself, his life is, in a deeper sense, indeed a delusion." (EUD, Hong, p.312)

* abolish his particularity in order to become the universal. (F&T, Lowrie, p.65) ((And..?))

* faith is immediateness after reflection. (J, Dru, p.140)

* Yet in respects the criterion of the truth of this faith will be the confidence which, in the opposite direction, has the courage profoundly to comprehend one's earlier wretchedness. (P&J, Hannay, pp. 463-64)

* Everything depends upon passionate concentration. (Papers and Journals, Hannay, pp. 483-84)

* the God-man, the sign of a contradiction, denies direct communication – and calls for faith." (PiC, Hong, p. 141) ((Faith: Direct experience?))

* He does not fear the mark of the commitment that, as it were, draws the suffering over him; for he knows that this mark is the breaking through of the Eternal." (PoH, Steere, p.170)

* The outward impossibility of ridding oneself of suffering does not hinder the inward possibility of being able really to emancipate oneself within suffering." (PoH, Steere, p. 173) ((Subjectivity is truth.))

* If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise. (R, Hong, p. 149) ((Repetition - but always new.))

* the self must be broken in order to become itself, but quit despairing over that. (SuD, Hong, p.65)

=============

"For if the 'all' which I gain is truly all, then that which in another sense is called all, the all which I lose, must be the false all; but when I lose the false all, I lose in fact nothing; and when I gain the true all, I lose in fact the false all – so I lose nothing." (CD, Lowrie, p. 150)

Note: K’s point again; lose the error and find the truth.

#

What is joy? Or what is it to be joyful? It is to be present to oneself; but to be truly present to oneself is this thing of ‘today’, that is, this thing of being today, of truly being today. And in the same degree that it is more true that thou art today, in the same degree that thou art quite present to thyself in being today, in that very same degree is the baleful tomorrow non-existent for thee. Joy is the present tense, with the whole emphasis upon the present. (CD, Lowrie, pp. 349-50)

#

"Oh, absolute joy, that His is the kingdom and the power and the glory – for ever and ever, for eternity! ‘For eternity’ – behold, this day, the day of eternity, never comes to an end. Only hold fast therefore to this, that His is the kingdom and the power and the glory in eternity, and thus for thee there is a day which never comes to an end, a day in which thou canst remain eternally present to thyself…Consider what applies to thee, if not as a man, at least as a Christian, that even the danger of death is for thee so unimportant that it is said, ‘Even now today art thou in paradise,’ And thus the transition from time to eternity (the greatest possible transition) is so swift – and though it were to occur in the midst of universal destruction, it is yet so swift that thou even now today art in Paradise, for the fact that thou dost Christianly remain in God. (CD, Lowrie, p. 355)

Note: Presence to self is in the presence of God and defines K’s God-relation. Presence to self is transparency is inwardness is subjectivity.

"Just as Adam lost innocence by guilt, so every man loses it." (CoA, Thomte, p.35)

#

"And this is the wonder of life, that each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science knows, since he know who he himself is, and that is the profundity of the Greek saying know yourself.*

* The Latin saying unum noris omnes (if you know one, you know all) light-mindedly expresses the same and actually expresses the same, if by unum is understood the observer himself, and one does not inquisitively look for an omnes but earnestly holds fast to the one that actually is all." (CoA, Thomte, p.78-79)

#

"Time is, then, infinite succession; the life that is in time and is only of time has no present. In order to define the sensuous life, it is usually said that it is in the moment and only in the moment.. By the moment, then, is understood that abstraction from the eternal that, if it is to be the present, is a parody of it. The present is the eternal, or rather, the eternal is the present, and the present is full." (CoA, Thomte, p.86)

#

The moment signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and precisely in this lies the imperfection of the sensuous life. The eternal also signifies the present as that which has no past and no future, and this is the perfection of the eternal." (CoA, Thomte, p. 87)

#

"If I am anxious because of a past offense, it is because I have not placed it in an essential relation to myself as past and have in some deceitful way or another prevented it from being past." (COA, Thomte, pp. 91-92)

Note: Holding the past as one’s past is the temporal connection, which keeps it alive. Not putting the woman down.

#

"There is an old saying that to understand and to understand are two things, and so they are. Inwardness is an understanding, but in concreto the important thing is how this understanding is to be understood. To understand a speech is one thing, and to understand what it refers to, namely, the personal, is something else; for a man to understand what he himself says is one thing, and to understand himself in what is said is something else." (CoA, Thomte, p. 142)

Note: Refer to CUP, p. 86 re "stirring the waters."

#

"The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the individual himself—not the pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no author, not even the one with the greatest power of description, has ever been able to describe such a self-consciousness, although every single human being is such a one. This self-consciousness is not contemplation, for he who believes this has not understood himself, because he sees that meanwhile he himself is in the process of becoming and consequently cannot be something completed for contemplation. This self-consciousness, therefore, is action, and this action is in turn inwardness, and whenever inwardness does not correspond to this consciousness, there is a form of the demonic as soon as the absence of inwardness expresses itself as anxiety about its acquisition." CoA, Thomte, p. 143)

Note: Tie this and above quote to all quotes re transparency and to quotes from PoH re "the individual." The theme of being doubly reflected runs through all of this. Also tie to subjective thinker define of CUP. A veritable gold mine of connections.

"As soon as subjectivity is taken away, and passion from subjectivity, and infinite interest from passion, there is no decision whatsoever. All decision, all essential decision, is rooted in subjectivity. At no point does an observer (and that is what the objective subject is) have an infinite need for a decision, and at no point does he see it." (CUP, Hong, p. 33)

#

"If truth is spirit, then truth is inward deepening and is not an immediate and utterly uninhibited relation of an immediate Geist (spirit, mind) to sum total of propositions, even though this relation is confusingly given the name of the most decisive expression of subjectivity; faith. The direction of unreflectiveness is always oriented outward, thereunto, toward, in striving to reach its goal, toward the objective. The Socratic secret—which, unless Christianity is to be an infinite retrogression, can be infinitized in Christianity only by an even deeper inwardness—is that the movement is inward, that the truth is the subject's transformation within himself." (CUP, Hong, p. 37-38)

Note: Just to think of inwardness as a direction has no halt to the thought. Inwardness defined by a transformation has a halt. The direction of that inwardness is the existential direction. Inwardness, defined existentially, is in the direction of transformation. That direction can not be known until it is known.

#

"In all knowing in which it holds true that the object of cognition is the inwardness of the subjective individual himself, it holds true that the knower must be in that state." (CUP, Hong, p.53)

Note: But how is that to be known? If the concentricist thinks the quote is fact, then the fact that we have an existential tautology here should imply a separatist position, else why say it. Is the statement empirical or merely grammar? Again, K may be read both ways.

#

"If the subjective individual himself has not worked himself through and out of his objectivity, all appeal to another individuality will be only a misunderstanding. And if the subjective individual has done that, he will certainly know his own course and the dialectical suppositions in and according to which he has his religious existence." (CUP, Hong, 66-67)

#

"Whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, the subjective thinker as existing is essentially interested in his own thinking, is existing in it. Therefore, his thinking has another kind of reflection, specifically, that of inwardness, of possession, whereby it belongs to the subject and to no one else. Whereas objective thinking invests everything in the result and assists all humankind to cheat by copying and reeling off results and answers, subjective thinking invests everything in the process of becoming and omits the result, partly because this belongs to him, since he possesses the way, partly because he as existing is continually in the process of becoming, as is every human being who has not permitted himself to be tricked into becoming objective, into inhumanly becoming speculative thought." (CUP, Hong, p.73)

#

"The reflection of inwardness is the subjective thinker's double-reflection." (CUP, Hong, p. 73)

Note: (ref. WoL, p. 331-33)

#

"The difference between subjective and objective thinking must also manifest itself in the form of communication. This means that the subjective thinker must promptly become aware that the form of communication must artistically possess just as much reflection as he himself, existing in his thinking, possesses. Artistically, please note, for the secret does not consist in his enunciation the double-reflection directly, since such an enunciation is a direct communication." (CUP, Hong, p. 73-74)

Note: The difference between indirect and direct communication is defined by the presence or absence of the subjective thinker, and not by definition. The subjective thinker discovers that inwardness can only be captured in words by the metaphor, and, given that, such metaphors are only accessible to a subjective thinker.

#

"Objective thinking is completely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness and appropriation; its communication is therefore direct. It is obvious that it does not therefore have to be easy. But it is direct; it does not have the illusiveness and the art of double-reflection." (CUP, Hong, p. 75)

#

"Ordinary communication, objective thinking, has no secrets; only doubly reflected subjective thinking has secrets; that is, all its essential content is essentially a secret, because it cannot be communicated directly. This is the significance of the secrecy. That this knowledge cannot stated directly, because the essential in this knowledge is the appropriation itself, means that it remains a secret for everyone who is not through himself doubly reflected in the same way, but that this is the essential form of the truth means that this cannot be said in any other way." (CUP, Hong, p. 79)

Note: secret weapon—indirect communication is only between the doubly reflected, those whose reflection is transparent to itself (ref. WoL, 331-33). Throw this quote into their lap and ask them to say what it means.

#

"The negative thinkers therefore always have the advantage that they have something positive, namely this, that they are aware of the negative; the positive thinkers have nothing whatever, for they are deluded. Precisely because the negative is present in existence and present everywhere (because being there, existence, is continually in the process of becoming), the only deliverance from it is to become continually aware of it. By being positively secured, the subject is indeed fooled." (CUP, Hong, pp. 81-82)

Note: to be aware of the negative is to be aware of the eternal, for the eternal continually negates the temporal, or, so long as the temporal is, the negative is required, which is the view of the eternal from the temporal.

#

"The subjective existing thinker who has the infinite in his soul has it always, and therefore his form is continually negative. When this is the case, when he, actually existing, renders the form of existence in his own existence, he, existing, is continually just as negative as he is positive, for his positivity consists in the inward deepening in which he is cognizant of the negative. Among the so-called negative thinkers, however, there are a few who, after gaining an inkling of the negative, succumb to the positive and go roaring out into the world in order to recommend, urge, and offer their beatifying negative wisdom for sale…The hawkers are not existing thinkers. Perhaps they were so once, until they found a result; from that moment they no longer exist as thinkers but as hawkers and auctioneers." (CUP, Hong, p.84)

Note: Positive as inwardness process using condition of negativity. Hawker is guru.

#

"One who is existing is continually in the process of becoming; the actually existing subjective thinker, thinking, continually reproduces this in his existence and invests all his thinking in becoming. This is similar to having style. Only he really has style who is never finished with something but ‘stirs the waters of language’ whenever he begins, so that to him the most ordinary expression comes into existence with newborn originality." (CUP, Hong, p. 86)

Note: Is this related to the WOL, transferred language passage?. In any case, it fits nicely into the experience that only during the writing process do, for example aasor and I, some people understand what they’re saying. And it’s the same structure as the knight of faith recapturing immediacy via the absurd.

#

"If anyone says that this is only an exercise in elocution, that I have only a bit of irony, a bit of pathos, a bit of dialectic with which to work, I shall answer: What else should the person have who wants to present the ethical? Should he perhaps have managed to put it objectively in paragraphs and geläufigt [glibly] by rote, and thus contradict himself by the form? I believe that if the ethical is quod erat demonstrandum [ that which was to be demonstrated], then irony, pathos, and dialectic are quod desideratur [that which is wanted]. Yet I do not at all think that I have exhausted the ethical by my scribblings, because it is infinite." (CUP, Hong, p. 153)

#

"When for the existing spirit i[qua]i existing there is a question about truth, that abstract reduplication of truth recurs, but existence itself, existence itself is the questioner, who does indeed exist, holds the two factors apart, one from the other, and reflection shows two relations. To objective reflection, truth becomes something objective, an object, and the point is to disregard the subject. To subjective reflection, truth becomes appropriation, inwardness, subjectivity, and the point is to immerse oneself, existing , in subjectivity." (CUP, Hong, pp. 191-92)

#

"We return, then, to the two ways of reflection and have not forgotten that is the existing spirit who is asking, simply an individual human being, and are not able to forget, either, that his existing is precisely what will prevent him from going both ways at once, and his concerned questions will prevent him from light-mindedly and fantastically becoming a subject-object." (CUP, Hong, p.193)

#

"In order to clarify the divergence of objective and subjective reflection, I shall now describe subjective reflection in its search back and inward into inwardness. At its highest, inwardness in an existing subject is passion; truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in its relation to an existing subject. In forgetting that one is an existing subject, one loses passion, and in return, truth does not become a paradox; but the knowing subject shifts from being human to being a fantastical something, and truth becomes a fantastical object for its knowing." (CUP, Hong, p. 198-99)

#

"When the question about truth is asked objectively, truth is reflected upon objectively as a object to which the knower relates himself. What is reflected upon is not the relation but that what he relates himself to is the truth, the true. If only that to which he relates himself to is the truth, the true, then the subject is in the truth. When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual's relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.*

*The reader will note that what is being discussed here is essential truth, or the truth that is related essentially to existence, and that specifically in order to clarify it as inwardness or as subjectivity that the contrast is pointed out." (CUP, Hong, p. 199)

#

Let us take the knowledge of God as an example. Objectively, what is reflected upon is that this is the true God; subjectively, that the individual relates himself to a something i[in which way]i that his relation is in truth a God-relation. Now, on which side is the truth? Alas, must we not at this point resort to mediation and say: it is on neither side; it is in the mediation? Superbly stated, if only someone could say how an existing person goes about being in mediation, because to be in mediation is to be finished; to exist is to become. An existing person can not be in two places at the same time, cannot be subject-object. When he is the closest to being in the two places at the same time, he is in passion; but passion is only the momentary, and passion is the highest pitch of subjectivity. (CUP, Hong, p. 199)

#

"Objectively the emphasis is on what is said; subjectively the emphasis is on how it is said…Ethically-religiously, the emphasis is again on: i[how]i. But this is not to be understood as manner, modulation of voice, oral delivery, etc., but it is to be understood as the relation of the existing person, in his very existence, to what is said. ((Just like Picasso to the object of painting.)) Objectively, the question is about categories of thought; subjectively, about inwardness. At its maximum, this i[how]i is the passion of the infinite, and the passion of the infinite is the very truth. But the passion of the infinite is precisely subjectivity, and thus subjectivity is the truth. From the objective point of view, there is no infinite decision, and thus it is objectively correct that the distinction between good and evil is canceled., along with the principle of contradiction, and thereby also the infinite distinction between truth and falsehood. Only in subjectivity is there decision, whereas wanting to become objective is untruth. The passion for the infinite, not its content, is the deciding factor, for its content is precisely itself. In this way the subjective how and subjectivity are the truth." (CUP, Hong, p. 202-03)

Note: Tie to CoA, p. 142, and to subj. thinker.

#

"When subjectivity is truth, the definition of truth must also contain in itself an expression of the antithesis to objectivity, a memento of that fork in the road, and this expression will at the same time indicate the resilience of the inwardness. Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person." (CUP, Hong, p. 203)

#

"The thesis that subjectivity, inwardness, is truth contains the Socratic wisdom, the undying merit of which is to have paid attention to the essential meaning of existing, of the knower's being an existing person…'But to go beyond Socrates, when one has not comprehended the Socratic—that, at least, is not Socratic.' See 'The Moral' in Fragments. Just as in Fragments, let us from this point try a category of thought that actually does go beyond. Whether it is true or false is of no concern to me, since I am only imaginatively constructing, but this much is required, that it at least be clear that the Socratic is presupposed in it, so that I at least do not end up behind Socrates again." (CUP, Hong, p.204)

#

"Having gone through phantasmal, nebulous images, through the distractions of a luxuriant thought-content…one comes to a very specific human being existing on the basis of the ethical. There is a change of scenery, or, more correctly, now the scene is there; instead of a world of possibility, animated by imagination and dialectically arranged, an individual has come into existence—and the only truth that builds up is truth for you—that is, truth is inwardness, the inwardness of existence, please note, and here in ethical definition." (CUP, Hong, p.254)

#

"The transparency of thought in existence is inwardness." (CUP, Hong, p. 255)

#

"If it were to be pointed out clearly in E/O where the discrepancy lies, the book would have needed to have a religious instead of an ethical orientation…it is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, although it is quite correct that one must first have understood the existence-relation between the esthetic and the ethical to be at this point—that is, by being there in passion and inwardness, one indeed becomes aware off of the religious—and of the leap. Furthermore, the definition of truth as inwardness, that it is upbuilding, must be explicitly understood before it is even religious, to say nothing of being Christianly religious." (CUP, Hong, pp. 257-58)

Note: The point of the book is to lay out E/O, not to paint the Judge as lacking. (refer to quote above)

#

"In the world of spirit, the different stages are not like cities on a journey, about which it is quite all right for the traveler to say directly, for example: We left Peking and came to Canton and were in Canton on the fourteenth. A traveler like that changes place, not himself: and thus it is all right for him to mention and to recount the change in a direct, unchanged form. But in the world of spirit to change place is to be changed oneself, and therefore all direct assurance of having arrived here and there is an attempt à la Münchhausen." (CUP, Hong, p. 281)

#

"For the existing person, existing is for him his highest interest, and his interestedness in existing is his actuality. What actuality is cannot be rendered in the language of abstraction. Actuality is an inter-esse [between-being] between thinking and being in the hypothetical unity of abstraction. Abstraction deals with possibility and actuality, but its conception of actuality is a false rendition, since the medium is not actuality, but possibility." (CUP, Hong, p. 314)

#

"From the ethical point of view, actuality is superior to possibility. The ethical specifically wants to annihilate the disinterestedness of possibility by making existing the infinite interest. Therefore the ethical wants to prevent every attempt at confusion, such as, for example, wanting to observe the world and human beings ethically. That is, to observe ethically cannot be done, because there is only one ethical observing – it is self-observation." (CUP, Hong, p. 320)

Note: The reflection that is transparency, eternal consciousness, etc.) ((Should not self be gone then????))

#

"The ethical can only be carried out by the individual subject, who is then able to know what it means to live within him – the only actuality that does not become a possibility by being known and cannot be know only by being thought, since it is his own actuality, which he knew as thought-actuality, that is, as possibility, before it became actuality…" (CUP, Hong, p.320-21)

Note: The transition is from thought-actuality to actuality. Call that the act of re-cognition. Where before was the thought of being, which was operable because the movement from thought to action requires will, is now the one whose act is transparency, and that acts

"With regard to every actuality outside myself, it holds true that I can grasp it only in thinking. If I were actually able to grasp it, I would have to be able to make myself into the other person, the one acting, to make the actuality alien to me into my own personal actuality, which is an impossibility. That is, if I make the actuality alien to me into my own actuality, it does not mean that by knowing it I become he, but it means a new actuality that belongs to me as different from him." CUP, Hong, p.321

#

"The individual's own ethical reality is the only reality." (CUP, Hong, p. 327)

#

"If existing can not be thought, and the existing person is thinking nevertheless, what does this mean? It means that he thinks momentarily; he thinks before and he thinks after. His thinking cannot attain absolute continuity. Only in a fantastical way can an existing person continually be sub specie aeterni." (CUP, Hong, p.329)

#

"To give thinking supremacy over everything else is gnosticism; to make the subjective individual's ethical actuality the only actuality could seem to be acosmism. That it will so appear to a busy thinker who must explain everything, a hasty pate who traverses the whole world, demonstrates only that he has a very poor idea of what the ethical means for the subjective individual." (CUP, Hong, p. 341)

#

"Instead of having the task of understanding the concrete abstractly, as abstract thinking has, the subjective thinker has the opposite task of understanding the abstract concretely. Abstract thinking turns from the concrete human beings to human-kind in general; the subjective thinker understands the abstract concept to be the concrete human being, to be this individual existing human being." (CUP, p. 352)

#

"In a certain sense, the subjective thinker speaks just as abstractly as the abstract thinker, because the latter speaks about humanity in general, subjectivity in general, the other about one human being (unum noris omnes [if you know one, you know all]). But this one human being is an existing human being, and the difficulty is not left out. To understand oneself in existence is also the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, as shown above, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again this oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereby everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction." (CUP, Hong, p. 353)

#

"In relation to an eternal happiness as the absolute good, pathos does not mean words but that this idea transforms the whole existence of an existing person. Esthetic pathos expresses itself in words and can in truth signify that the individual abandons himself in order to lose himself in the idea, whereas existential pathos results from the transforming relation of the idea to the individual's existence. If the absolute i[telos]i does not absolutely transform the individual's existence by relating to it, then the individual does not relate himself to the existential pathos but with esthetic pathos." (CUP, Hong, p.387)

#

"All relative willing is distinguished by willing something for something else, but the highest telos must be willed for its own sake. And this highest telos is not a something, because then it relatively corresponds to something else and is finite. But it is a contradiction absolutely to will something finite, since the finite must indeed come to an end, and there must come a time when it can no longer be willed. But to will absolutely is to will the infinite, and to will an eternal happiness is to will absolutely, because it must be capable of being willed at every moment. And the reason it is so abstract and viewed esthetically, the meagerest of conceptions is that it is the absolute telos for a person who wills and strives absolutely—and does not thoughtlessly imagine that he is finished and does not foolishly become involved in haggling, whereby he only loses the absolute telos. And the reason it is foolishness in the finite sense is precisely that it is the absolute telos in the infinite sense. The person who wills does not want to know anything about this telos except that it exists, because as soon as he finds out something about it, he already begins to be slowed down in his pace." (CUP, Hong, p.394)

#

"The individual himself can then easily examine how he relates himself to it. He needs only to allow resignation to inspect his entire immediacy with all its desires etc. If he finds a single point, an obduracy, he is not relating to himself to an eternal happiness. Nothing is easier – that is, if it is difficult, it is just because his immediacy is unwilling to expose itself to inspection; but that, of course, is already more than sufficient evidence that the individual is not relating himself to an eternal happiness. When resignation makes a visitation to immediacy, it gives notice that the individual must not have his life in it, and resignation gives it notice of what can happen in life." (CUP, Hong, p.394-95)

#

"From the preceding portion is must be recalled that existential pathos is action or the transformation of existence…Not the individual begins, not, please note, by simultaneously relating himself absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to the relative ends, but he begins by practicing the absolute relation through renunciation. The task is ideal and perhaps is never accomplished by anyone; it is only on paper that one begins summarily and is promptly finished. In order to relate himself absolutely to the absolute telos, the individual must have practiced renunciation of the relative ends, and only then can there be any question of the ideal task: simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute and relatively to the relative. Not prior to this, because before this has been done the individual is continually more of less immediate and to that extent relates himself absolutely to relative ends." (CUP, Hong, pp. 431-32)

#

"Let us take irony. As soon as an observer discovers an ironist, he will be attentive, because it is possible that the ironist may be an ethicist. But he can be fooled, because it is not certain that the ironist is an ethicist. The immediate person is distinguishable at once, and as soon as he is recognized it is certain that he is not an ethicist, because he has not made the movement of infinity. The ironical rejoinder, if it is correct (and the observer is assumed to be a tried and tested man who knows all about who knows all about tricking and unsettling the speaker in order to see if what he says is learned by rote or has bountiful ironic value such as an existing ironist will always have), betrays that the speaker has made the movement of infinity, but no more." (CUP, Hong, p. 502)

#

"The irony emerges by continually joining the particulars of the finite with the ethical infinite requirement and allowing the contradiction to come into existence." (CUP, Hong, p. 502)

#

"Thus the essential consciousness of guilt is the greatest possible immersion in existence… expresses the relation by expressing the misrelation. Yet even though the consciousness is ever so decisive, it is always the relation that carries the misrelation, except that the existing person cannot get a firm hold of the relation because the misrelation continually places itself in between as the expression for the relation. But on the other hand, they still do not repel each other (the eternal happiness and the existing person) so that a break establishes itself as such; on the contrary, it is only by being held together that the misrelation repeats itself as the decisive consciousness of essential guilt, not of this or that guilt." (CUP, Hong, pp. 531-32)

#

Religiousness A must be present in the individual before there can be any consideration if becoming aware of the dialectical B." (CUP, Hong, p. 556)

#

"The upbuilding element in the sphere of Religiousness A is that of immanence, is the annihilation in which the individual has set himself aside in order to find God, since it is the individual himself who is the hindrance. ** (**The esthetic always consists in the individual's fancying that he has been busy searching for God and taking hold of him, consequently in the illusion that the undialectical individual is really clever if he can take hold of God as something external.) Here the upbuilding is quite properly distinguishable by the negative, by the self-annihilation that finds the relationship with God within oneself, that suffering through sinks into the relationship with God, finds its ground in it, because God is in the ground only when everything in the way is cleared out, every finitude, and first and foremost the individual in his finitude, in his caviling against God. Esthetically, the sacred resting place of the upbuilding is outside the individual; he seeks that place. In the ethical-religious sphere, the individual himself is the place, if the individual has annihilated himself.

This is the upbuilding of Religiousness A. If one does not pay attention to this and to have this of the upbuilding in between, everything is confused again as one defines the paradoxical upbuilding, which then is mistakenly identified with an external esthetic relation. In religiousness B, the upbuilding is something outside the individual; the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the relationship with God within himself but relates himself to something outside himself in order to find the upbuilding. The paradox is that this apparently esthetic relationship, that the individual relates himself to something outside himself, nevertheless is to be the absolute relationship with God, because in immanence God is neither a something, but everything, and is infinitely everything, nor outside the individual, because the upbuilding consists in his being within the individual. The paradoxical upbuilding therefore corresponds to the category of God in time as an individual human being, because, if that is the case, the individual relates himself to something outside himself." CUP, Hong, Note pp. 560-61)

#

"All interpretations of existence take their rank in relation to the qualifications of the individual's dialectical inward deepening. Presupposing what has been developed on this subject in this book, I shall now only recapitulate and point out that of course speculative thought plays no role, since, as objective and abstract, it is indifferent to the category of the existing subjective individual and at the most deals only with pure humanity. Existence-communication, however, understands something different by unum (one) in saying unum noris, omnes (if you know one, you know all), understands something different by "yourself" in the phrase "know yourself," understands thereby an actual human being and indicates thereby that the existence-communication does not occupy itself with the anecdotal differences between Tom, Dick, and Harry.

If in himself the individual is undialectical and has dialectic outside himself, then we have the esthetic interpretations. If the individual is dialectically turned inward in self-assertion in such a way that the ultimate foundation does not itself become dialectical, since the underlying self is used to surmount and assert itself, then we have the ethical interpretation. If the individual is defined as dialectically turned inward in self-annihilation before God, then we have Religiousness A. If the individual is paradoxical-dialectical, every remnant of the original immanence is annihilated, and all connection is cut away, the individual is situated a the edge of existence, then we have the i[paradoxical-religious]i. This paradoxical inwardness is the greatest possible, because even the most dialectical qualification, if it is still within immanence, has, as it were, a possibility of escape, of shifting away, of a withdrawal into the eternal behind it; it is as everything were not actually at stake. But the break makes the inwardness the greatest possible.*

*According to this plan, one will be able to orient oneself and, without being disturbed by anyone's use of Christ's name and the whole Christian terminology in an esthetic discourse, will be able to look only at the categories." (CUP, Hong, pp. 571-72)

#

"The individual is therefore unable to gain the consciousness of sin by himself, which is the case with guilt-consciousness, because in guilt-consciousness the subject's self-identity is preserved, and guilt-consciousness is the change of the subject within himself. The consciousness of sin, however, is a change of the subject himself, which shows that outside the individual there must be the power that makes clear to him that he has become a person other than he was by coming into existence, that he has become a sinner. This power is the god in time." (Ibid., 584)

"But he probably would think about it more earnestly, and when he had considered it very deeply he perhaps would say, 'He was right, after all; that is the way it is. Those were brave words, full of pith and meaning; this is the way a person should be spoken to, for wishes are futile.' Probably he would then quietly begin to move his inner being, and every time his soul would pause at a wish, he would call to it and say: You know that you must not wish – and thereupon he went further. When his soul became anxious, he called to it and said: When you are anxious, it is because you are wishing; anxiety is a form of wishing, and you know you must not wish – then he went further." (EUD, Hong, pp. 11-12)

Note: This first discourse, The Expectancy of Faith, is a record of K's entry into the process that I recognize as identical to my entry into the same process. There is an insight, however it is worded, that the reach into the future to change oneself is an empty gesture, which brings the act of reaching itself into view.

#

"If, however, this view, that to need God is man's highest perfection, makes life more difficult, it does this only because it wants to view man according to his perfection and bring him to view himself in this way, because in and through this view man learns to know himself. For the person who does not know himself, his life is, in a deeper sense, indeed a delusion." (EUD, Hong, p.312)

#

When a person turns and faces himself in order to understand himself, he steps, as it were, in the way of his first self, halts that which was turned outward in hankering for and seeking after the surrounding world that is its object, and summons it back from the external. In order to prompt the first self to this withdrawal, the deeper self lets the surrounding world remain what it is – remain dubious. This is indeed the wau it is; the world around us is inconstant and can be changed into the opposite at any moment, and there is not one person who can force this change by his own might or by the conjuration of his wish. The deeper self now shapes the deceitful flexibility of the surrounding world in such a way that it is no longer attractive to the first self. Then the first self either must proceed to kill the deeper self, to render it forgotten, whereby the whole matter is given up; or it must admit that the deeper self is right, because to want to predicate constancy of something that continually changes is indeed a contradiction, and as soon as one confesses that it changes, it can, of course, change in that same moment. However much that first self shrinks from this, there is no wordsmith so ingenious or no thought-twister so wily that he can invalidate the deeper self's eternal claim. There is only one way out, and that is to silence the deeper self by letting the roar of inconstancy drown it out." (EUD, Hong, p. 314)

#

"Inwardness is the eternal, and desire is the temporal, but the temporal cannot hold out with the eternal. Desire glows less and less fervently, and at last its time is over, but the time of inwardness is never over. Inwardness, its need for God, has then conquered, and the supplicant does not seek God in the external world, does not create him in his desires, but finds him in his inner being…" (EUD, Hong, p. 461)

"For a moment it can seem, for a moment it can look as if what the choice is between lies outside the chooser; he has no relation to it, he can sustain an indifference in the face of it." (E/O, Hannay, p.482)

#

"You will see from this why my view of a choice differs from yours, in the event that I can speak of your having such, for the difference is precisely that yours prevents a choice." (E/O, Hannay, p.483)

#

"There, now you have chosen—not indeed the better part, that you will agree; but really you have made no choice at all, or you have chose only figuratively. Your choice is an aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice is no choice. In general, the act of choosing is a literal and strict expression of the ethical…The aesthetic choice is either wholly immediate thus no choice, or it loses itself in multiplicity." (E/O, Hannay, p.485)

#

"In the ethical the personality is centered in itself; the aesthetic is thus excluded absolutely, or it is excluded as the absolute, but relatively it always stays behind. The personality, through choosing itself, chooses itself ethically and excludes the aesthetic absolutely; but since it is, after all, he himself the person chooses, and through choosing himself does not become another nature but remains himself, the whole of the aesthetic returns in its relativity. So the either/or I have presented is in a sense absolute, for the options are choosing and not choosing…I am no ethical rigorist inspired by a formal abstract freedom; once the choice is posited the whole of the aesthetic returns, and you shall see that only then is life beautiful, and that only in this way can a person succeed in saving his soul and gaining the whole world, in using the world and not abusing it." (E/O. Hannay, p.491-92)

#

"What then is melancholy? It is hysteria of the spirit. There comes a moment in a man's life when immediacy is as though ripened and when the spirit demands a higher form of in which it will apprehend itself as spirit. In immediacy spirit coheres, as it were, with the whole of earthly life, and now the spirit wants to gather itself out of this dispersion, and make itself self-transparent; the personality wants to be conscious of itself in its eternal validity. If this does not happen and the movement halts and is pressed back, melancholy sets in…But melancholy is sin, really it is a sin as great as any, for it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely, and this is the mother of all sins. This sickness, or more properly, this sin, is extremely common in our time, and accordingly it is under this that the whole of German and French youth groan…I gladly admit that being melancholy is in a sense not a bad sign…people whose souls have no acquaintance with melancholy have no presentiment of metamorphosis." (E/O, Hannay, p.499-500)

#

So then choose despair, since despair is itself a choice, for one can doubt without choosing to, but despair one cannot without choosing to do so. And when one despairs one chooses again, and what then does one chose? One chooses oneself, not in one’s immediacy, not as this contingent individual, one chooses oneself in one’s eternal validity.(E/O, Hannay, p. 513)

#

"Once the individual has grasped himself in his eternal validity, this overwhelms him with all its fullness. The temporal vanishes from sight. At first, it fills him with an indescribable bliss and gives him an absolute sense of security." (E/O, Hannay, p. 528-9)

#

"I can not return often enough to this proviso that choosing oneself is identical with repenting oneself, however simple in itself it may be." (E/O, Hannay, p. 541)

#

So the mystics fault is not that he chooses himself, for in my opinion he does well to do that, his mistake is that he does not choose himself properly; he chooses in respect to his freedom, and yet he does not choose ethically. One can only choose oneself in respect to one’s freedom when one chooses oneself ethically; but one can only choose oneself ethically by repenting oneself, and it is only by repenting oneself that one becomes concrete, and it is only as a concrete individual that one is a free individual. (E/O, Hannay, p. 540)

Ethical repentance has but two movements; either it abolishes its object or it bears it. These two movements also indicate a concrete relation between the repenting individual and the object of his repentance, whereas fleeing expresses an abstract relation…for when I choose myself repentantly, I gather myself together in all of my finite concretion, and in thus having chosen myself out of the finite, I am in the most absolute continuity with it.(E/O, Hannay, p.541)

#

I want now to recall the definition of the ethical I gave earlier, that it is that whereby a man comes to be what he becomes. So it wants not to make the individual into another but into himself; it wants not to do away with the aesthetic but to transfigure it. To live ethically, it is necessary for a person to become aware of himself.(E/O, Hannay, pp. 544-45)

#

So, wanting to be in the wrong expresses an infinite relationship, wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, expresses a finite relationship! So the edifying, then, is to always be in the wrong, for only the infinite edifies, the finite does not." (E/O, Hannay, p. 603)

#

"He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He constantly makes the movement of infinity, but he does this with such correctness and assurance that he continually gets the finite out of it…" (F&T, Lowrie, p.51)

#

"The infinite resignation is the last stage prior to faith, so that one who has not made this movement has not faith; for only in the infinite resignation do I become clear to myself with respect to my eternal validity, and only then can there be any question of grasping existence by virtue of faith." (F&T, Lowrie, p.57)

#

"For the act of resignation faith is not required, for what I gain by resignation is my eternal consciousness, and this I am able to make if it is required, and which I train myself to make, for whenever finiteness would get mastery over me, I starve myself until I can make the movement…" (F&T, Lowrie, p.59)

Note: starve means return to resignation.

#

"The ethical as such is the universal…Conceived immediately as physical and psychical, the particular individual is the individual who has his telos in the universal, and his ethical task is to express himself constantly in it, to abolish his particularity in order to become the universal. As soon as the individual would assert himself in his particularity over against the universal he sins, and only by recognizing this can he again reconcile himself with the universal. Whenever the individual after he has entered the universal feels an impulse to assert himself as the particular, he is in temptation, and he can labor himself out if this only by penitently abandoning himself as the particular in the universal." (F&T, Lowrie, p.65)

#

. "Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior – yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute." Ibid., p.66)

#

"In the ethical way of regarding life it is therefore the task of the individual to divest himself of the inward determinants and express them in an outward way, Whenever he shrinks from this, whenever he is inclined to persist in or to slip back into the inward determinants of feeling, mood, etc., he sins, he is in temptation. The paradox of faith is this, that there is an inwardness which is incommensurable for the outward, in inwardness, be it observed, which is not identical with the first, but is a new inwardness. This must not be overlooked." (F&T, Lowrie, p.79) ((***In and out…***))

#

"Every movement of infinity occurs with passion, and no reflection can bring about a movement." (F&T, Hannay, p. 71) (?)

#

"Abraham cannot be mediated, which can also be put by saying he cannot speak. The moment I speak I express the universal, and when I do not no one can understand me. So the moment Abraham wants to express himself in the universal, he has to say that his situation is one of temptation, for he has no higher expression of the universal that overrides the universal he transgresses." (F&T, Hannay, p. 89) (?)

Note: Can transferred language save Abraham?

#

. "For faith is not the first immediacy but a subsequent immediacy. The first immediacy is the aesthetical, and about this the Hegelian philosophy may be in the right. But faith is not the aesthetical – or else faith has never existed because it has always existed." (F&T, Lowrie, p.92)

"The paradox is not a concession but a category, an ontological definition which expresses the relation between an existing cognitive spirit and eternal truth." (J, Dru, p.118)

#

"The thing that grips me more and more is my original, my first, my deepest, unaltered opinion that I have honestly not chosen this life because it would be brilliant, but as a penitential consolation in all my wretchedness. I have often enough explained the dialectics of the paradox: it is not higher than the universal but beneath it, and then again only a little higher. But the first, the pressure is so great that the joy which comes from the last cannot be taken in vain. That is the thorn in the flesh." (J, Dru, p. 122)

#

"Oh, the sadness of having understood something true—and then of only seeing oneself misunderstood. Oh, sadness—for what is irony in the mystery of the heart but sadness. Sadness means to be alone in having understood something true and as soon as one is in the company with others, with those who misunderstand, that sadness becomes irony." (J, Dru, p. 132)

#

"That means to say, that most people never attain to faith. For a long time they live on in immediateness and finally they attain to a certain amount of reflection, and so they die. The exceptions begin the other way round, from childhood up dialectical, i.e., without immediateness, they begin with dialectics, with reflection and in that way live on year after year...and then, at a ripe age, the possibility of faith shows itself to them. For faith is immediateness after reflection. The exceptions, naturally, have a very unhappy childhood and youth; for to be essentially reflective at an age which is naturally immediate, is the depths of melancholy. But they are recompensed; for most people do not succeed in becoming spirit, and all of their fortunate years of their immediateness are, where spirit is concerned, a loss and therefore they never attain to spirit. But the unhappy childhood and youth of the exception is transfigured into spirit." (J, Dru, p.140)

#

"Faith is immediacy after reflection." (J, Dru, p. 142)

#

"The truth that is troubled is the truth which while itself eternally certain of being the truth, is essentially concerned with communicating it with others, concerned that they should accept it for their own good in spite of the fact that the truth does not force itself upon them. This is the dialectical point. Mere dabblers, half-men, desire to communicate simply in order to reassure themselves. The purely intellectual effort is only concerned with discovering the truth. The 'troubled' truth is certain enough of being the truth, or 'troubled' to communicate it. That is Christianity…." (J, Dru, p.169)

Note: This point will set to rest any point that communication is for reassurance only (Mel's assumption).

#

"The majority of men in every generation, even those who, as it is described, devote themselves to thinking (dons and the like), live and die under the impression that life is simply a matter of understanding more and more, and if it were granted to them to live long longer, that life would continue to be one long continuous growth in understanding. How many of them ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment where everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand more and more that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance, and that is what the philosophy of our times requires as a corrective…It is quite literally true that the law is: increasing profundity is understanding more and more that one cannot understand. And there once again comes in 'being like a child,' but raised to the second power." (J, Dru, pp. 172-73)

#

"The moment I take Christianity as a doctrine and so indulge my cleverness or profundity or my eloquence or my imaginative powers in depicting it: people are very pleased; I am looked upon as a serious Christian. The moment I begin to express existentially what I say, and consequently bring Christianity into reality: it is just as though I had exploded existence—the scandal is there at once." (J. Dru, p. 174)

Note: The distinction makes the point of a transferred language.

#

"Instead of authority, I make use of the very reverse, I say: the whole thing is my own education. That, once again, is a truly Socratic discovery. Just as he was ignorant, in my case it is: instead of being the teacher, being the one who is educated." Just above that, he says, "To me there is something so inexplicably happy in the antithesis Climacus--Anti-Climacus, I recognize myself, and my nature so entirely in it that if someone else had discovered it I should have thought he had spied upon me." (J, Dru, p. 175)

#

"The transformation which really lies in changing from immediacy to spirituality, that mortification is not serious, becomes in fact an illusion, a form of experimentation if there is not some third and compelling factor, which is not the individual himself." (J, Dru, p. 181-82)

Note: if the transform is kept to oneself, the transcendental trap is engendered and the temporal is still ground. K calls release to ground of presence the God-relation as the non-self factor since the self factor is released.

#

To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged. (JfY, Hong, p.104)

"There is only one kind of knowing that brings a person completely to himself--self-knowledge; this is what it means to be sober, sheer transparency." (Judge for Yourself, Hong, p. 105)

#

" The only fundamental basis for understanding is that one understands only in proportion to becoming himself that which he understands." (Papers, V B 40)

#

"What then is the Unknown? It is the limit to which the Reason repeatedly comes, and in so far, substituting a static form of conception for the dynamic, it is different, the absolutely different. But because it is absolutely different, there is no mark by which it could be distinguished. When qualifies as absolutely different it seems on the verge of disclosure, but this is not the case; for the reason cannot even conceive an absolute unlikeness. The reason cannot negate itself absolutely, but uses itself for the purpose, and thus conceives only such an unlikeness within itself as it can conceive by means of itself. Unless the Unknown (the God) remains a mere limiting conception, the single idea of difference will be thrown into a state of confusion, and become many ideas of many differences. The Unknown is then a condition of dispersion and the Reason may choose at pleasure from what it has at hand and the imagination may suggest." (PF, Swenson/Hong, pp. 55-56)

#

"But how does the learner come to realize an understanding with this Paradox?...It comes to pass when the Reason and the Paradox encounter one another happily in the Moment, when the Reason sets itself aside and the Paradox bestows itself. The third entity in which this union is realized (for it is not realized in the Reason, since it is set aside; not in the Paradox, which bestows itself –hence it is realized in something) is that happy passion to which we will now assign a name, thought it is not the name that so much matters. We shall call this passion: Faith." (PF, Swenson-Hong, pp. 72-3),

#

P&J:

What did I find? Not my ‘I’, for that is what I was in that way to find (I imagined, if I may put it so, my soul shut up in a box with a spring lock in front, which the outside surroundings would release by pressing the 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 afterwards than a heavenly body about to form itself would decide first of all about its surface…One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else. (gnothi seauton). Only when the person has inwardly understood and then sees the course forward from the path he is to take, 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 a not-knowing (Socrates), just as God created the world from nothing." (P&J, Hannay, pp. 34-5)

#

"A remarkable transition occurs when one begins to study the grammar of the indicative and the subjunctive, because here for the first time one becomes conscious that everything depends on how it is thought, accordingly how thinking in its absolute follows upon a seeming reality." (P&J, Hannay, pp. 90-91)

#

"The indicative thinks something as actual (the identity of thinking and the actual). The subjunctive thinks something as thinkable." (P&J, Hannay, p. 91)

#

"When the individual, having given up all efforts to find himself in life outside himself, in relation to his surroundings, turns now after this shipwreck towards the highest, then after this emptiness the absolute rises not only in its fullness before him but also in the responsibility he feels is his." (J&P, Hannay, p.132)

"If a person has one thought, but an infinite one, he can be borne along by it through his entire life, lightly and on wings, just as the Hyperborean, Abaris, traversed the whole world borne by an arrow." (J&P, Hannay, p.152)

#

The relation between the aesthetic and the ethical – the transition – pathos filled , not dialectical – and which starts a qualitatively different dialectic." (P&J, Hannay, p.178)

#

"The condition for a person's salvation is the faith that there is, everywhere and at every moment, an absolute beginning. When someone who has egotistically indulged himself in the service of illusions is to start upon a purer striving, the crucial point is that he believes absolutely in the new beginning, because otherwise he muddles the passage into the old. Similarly, with the conversion in the stricter sense: faith in the possibility of the new, the absolute beginning, for otherwise it remains essentially the old. It is this infinite intensiveness in faith's anticipation which has the confident courage to believe in it, to transform the old into the completely forgotten – and then believe absolutely in the beginning. ((Zero base mind))

"Yet in respects the criterion of the truth of this faith will be the confidence which, in the opposite direction, has the courage profoundly to comprehend one's earlier wretchedness. A person who does not sense this profoundly and have the courage cannot properly make the new beginning , and the reason for his not sensing it profoundly is precisely that he secretly harbours the thought that, if he considered it properly, it would be too bad for there to be any new beginning for him. Therefore to make it look a little better and be more certain of achieving a new beginning, he does not look too closely – and for this very reason he does not make the new beginning. A beginning always has a double momentum: towards the past and towards the new; it pushes off in the direction of the old as much as it begins the new." (P&J, Hannay, pp. 463-64)

A COMMENT ON SOMETHING IN FEAR AND TREMBLING

Johannes de silentio rightly says that to show the various psychological points of view requires passionate concentration. Similarly with the decision whether or not to assume that this and that is humanly speaking impossible for me. I am not thinking here of the higher clashes where what is expected is in total conflict with the order of nature (e.g. that Sarah gets a child though far beyond natural child-bearing age). Which is why Johannes de silentio reiterates that he cannot understand Abraham, since here the clash is at such a height that the ethical itself is a spiritual trial.

No, on a more modest scale, there are many, surely by far the majority, who are able to live without having consciousness really penetrate their lives. For them is is surely possible never to come to a decision in passionate concentration on whether to cling expectantly to this possibility or give it up. Thus they live on in unclarity.

Not so with those individualities whose nature is consciousness. They could quite well give up this and that, even if it is their dearest wish, but they must have clarity about whether they expect it or not. It is forever impossible to get immediate or half-reflective natures to grasp this. So they never really get as far as distinguishing between resignation and faith.

This is precisely what Johannes de silentio has urged again and again. Everything depends upon passionate concentration. So if someone comes along and wants to correct him by bringing the matter back into ordinary intellectual unclarity (which is undeniably the common state of man) – then, yes, of course he manages to be understood by many. That's how it always is when what a real thinker has put a fine point on is corrected with the help of what 'he rejected even before he began'." (Papers and Journals, Hannay, pp. 483-84)

#

"Imitation: Christ comes into the world as the prototype, constantly insisting: Follow my example. People soon turned the relation around, they preferred to i[worship]i the prototype… The divine invention is one thing, that the only kind of worship God demands is imitation. The one thing man wants is to worship the prototypes." (J&P, Hannay, p.585)

"The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you." (J&P, Hannay, p. 600)

#

"Tempting Thought: When I say it is not truly Christian explanation that the suffering associated with being a Christian comes from the devil, but that the suffering comes from the God-relation itself, this must of course be understood with the addendum that the suffering also in one sense comes from the individual himself, from his subjectivity being unable to surrender itself immediately and wholly to God. […] No religious person, not the purest, is a subjectivity so cleansed and undefiled, a pure transparency in willing as God wills, that there is no residue of his original subjectivity, something still not altogether penetrated, still not altogether conquered, and perhaps still not really even discovered in the depths of his soul: this is where the reactions come from." (J&P, Hannay, p. 626)

"What modern philosophy understands by faith is really what is called having an opinion or what in everyday language some people call 'to believe.' Christianity is made into a teaching; this teaching is then proclaimed to a person, and he believes that this is what the teaching says. Then the next stage is to 'comprehend' this teaching, and this philosophy does. All of this would be entirely proper if Christianity were a teaching, but since it is not, all of this is totally wrong. Faith in a significant sense is related to the God-man. But the God-man, the sign of a contradiction, denies direct communication – and calls for faith." (PiC, Hong, p. 141) ((Faith: Direct experience?))

"And therefore, Christianly understood, truth is obviously not to know but to be the truth, for knowing the truth is something that entirely of itself accompanies being the truth, not the other way around… And that is why it becomes untruth when knowing the truth is separated from being the truth or when knowing the truth is made identical with being it, since it is related the other way around." (PiC, Hong, p. 205) ((Again, this seems to relate to direct experience))

"And there stands Christianity with its requirements for self-denial: Deny yourself – and then suffer because you deny yourself." (PiC, Hong, p.213)

#

"The first condition for becoming a Christian is to be become unconditionally turned inward…The one who is infinitely turned inward learns to understand the task to the utmost – if he becomes turned inward to the utmost: that to be a Christian is to believe in Christ and to suffer for the sake of this belief, or that to be a Christian is self-denial in the Christian sense. (PiC, Hong, p.225)

#

"If there is something eternal in man, it must be able to exist and to be grasped within every change. Nor can it be wisdom to say, indiscriminately, that this eternal has its time like the perishable, that it makes its circle like the wind that never gets further; that it has its course like the river that never fills up the sea. Nor can it be wisdom to talk of this eternal element in the same vein as if one were talking about the past, as if it is past and past in the sense that it can never, not even in repentance, relate to a present person but only to an absent one. For repentance is precisely the relation between something past and someone who has his life in the present time." (PoH, Steere, p.36.)

#

"For in relation to the eternal, a man ages neither in the sense of time nor in the sense of an accumulation of past events." (PoH, Steere, p. 38)

#

"To will only one thing: but will this not inevitably become a long-drawn-out affair? If one should consider this matter properly must he not first consider, one by one, each goal in life that a man i[could conceivably set up]i for himself, mentioning separately all of the many things that a man might will? And not only this; since each of considerations readily becomes too abstract in character, is he not obliged to go the next step to attempt to will, one after the other, each of these goals in order to find out what the single thing he is to will, if it is a matter of willing only one thing? Yes, if someone should begin in this fashion, then he would never come to an end. Or more accurately, how could he ever arrive at the end since at the outset he took the wrong way and then continued to go on further and further along this false way?" (PoH, Steere, pp.53-54, italics mine)

Note: Unequivocal; any goal seeking that requires the notion of what the goal is is the wrong way to will one thing, for the one thing can not be imagined.

#

"The person who wills one thing that is not the Good, he does not truly will one thing. It is a delusion, an illusion, a deception, a self-deception that he wills only one thing. For in his innermost being he is, he is bound to be, double-minded." (PoH, Steere, p. 55)

#

"Here, once again, let us not multiply distractions but rather let us simplify that which is really important. Let us center all the talk about suffering upon i[the wish]i…For we are not talking about wishes, but rather about "the wish" with the real emphasis of distinction, just as we are not talking about passing sufferings, but of the real sufferer. The wish is not the cure. This happens only by the action of the Eternal. The wish is, on the contrary, the life in suffering, the health in suffering. It is the perseverance in suffering, for it is as one thinker has said, 'The comfort of temporal existence is a precarious affair. It lets the wound grow together, although it is not yet healed, and the physician knows that the cure depends upon keeping the wound open.' In the wish the wound is kept open, in order that the Eternal may heal it. If the wound grows together, the wish is wiped out and then eternity cannot heal, then temporal existence has in truth bungled the illness." (PoH, Steere, p.149)

#

"But the sufferer who sincerely wills the Good, uses this cleverness to cut off evasions and hence to launch himself into the commitment and to escape the disillusionments of choosing the temporal way. He does not fear the mark of the commitment that, as it were, draws the suffering over him; for he knows that this mark is the breaking through of the eternal. He does not fear the mark of the commitment that, as it were, draws the suffering over him; for he knows that this mark is the breaking through of the Eternal." (PoH, Steere, p.170)

#

"On the other hand (and this is what we must primarily consider, for we are speaking of the true sufferer), the sufferer can voluntarily accept that suffering which in one sense is forced upon him, in so far as he does not have it in his power to get rid of it…Can a prisoner say, 'Of my own free will I accept my imprisonment'—the very imprisonment which is already his condition?…but by his patience the prisoner affects his freedom…The outward impossibility of ridding oneself of suffering does not hinder the inward possibility of being able really to emancipate oneself within suffering." (PoH, Steere, p. 173) ((Subjectivity is truth.))

#

"Purity of heart: it is a figure of speech that compares the heart to the sea, and why just is this? Simply for the reason that the depth of the sea determines its purity and its purity determines its transparency. Since the sea is pure only when it is deep, and is transparent only when it is pure, as soon as it is impure it is no longer deep but only surface water, and as soon as it is only surface water it is not transparent. When, on the contrary, it is deeply and transparently pure, then it is all of one consistency, no matter how long one looks at it; then its purity is this constancy of depth and transparency. On this account we compare the heart with the sea, because the purity of the sea lies in this consistency in depth and transparency. No storm may perturb it; no sudden gust of wind may stir its surface, no drowsy fog may sprawl out over it; no doubtful movement may stir within it; rather it must lie calm, transparent to its depths." (PoH, Steele, p.176)

#

"The talk asks you, then, whether you live in such a way that you are conscious of being an individual…This consciousness is the fundamental condition for truthfully willing only one thing." (PoH, Steere, p.184)

#

"Here in the temporal conscience is prepared to make each person into an individual." (PoH, Steere, p.186)

#

"Do you now live so that you are conscious of yourself as an individual: that in each of your relations in which you come into touch with the outside world, you are conscious of yourself, and at the same time you are related to yourself as an individual?…It asks you only about the ultimate thing: whether you yourself are conscious of that most intimate relation to yourself as an individual." (PoH, Steere, p.187)

#

"But in eternity, you are the individual, and conscience when it talks to you is no third person, any more than you are a third person when you talk with conscience. For you and conscience are one." (PoH, Steele, p.189)

Note: see WoL pp. 137 & 140.

#

"In eternity there are chambers enough so that each may be placed alone in one. For wherever conscience is present, and it is and shall be present in each person, there exists in eternity a lonely prison, or the blessed chamber of salvation. On that account this consciousness of being an individual is the primary consciousness in a man, which is his eternal consciousness."(PoH, Steere, p.193)

#

"But what it profit a man if he goes further and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further; when it must also be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause? For pausing is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also a movement. It is the inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. But merely going further is to go straight in the direction of superficiality. By that way one does not come to will only one thing. Only if at some time he decisively stopped going further and then again came to a pause, as he went further, only then could he will one thing. For purity of heart is to will one thing." (PoH, Steere, pp. 217-18) ((***One can go in and out…, but not merely out…))

#

"If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise. Recollection is the ethnical view of life, repetition the modern; repetition is the interest [Interesse] of metaphysics, and also the interest upon which metaphysics comes to grief; repetition is the watchword [Løsnet] in every ethical view; repetition is the conditio sine qua non [the indispensable condition] for every issue of dogmatics." (R, Hong, p. 149) ((Repetition - but always new.))

"Modern philosophy makes no movement; as a rule it makes only a commotion, and if it makes any movement at all, it is always within immanence, whereas repetition is and remains a transcendence." (Ibid., p.186)

--"Once the misrelation, despair, has come about, does it continue as a matter of fact? (I.e., is the mis-take of the self static) No, it does not continue as a matter of course…To despair, however, is a different matter. Every actual moment of despair is traceable to possibility; every moment he is in despair he is bringing it upon himself. It is always in the present tense; in relation to the actuality there is no pastness of the past; in every actual moment of despair the person in despair bears all the past as a present in possibility. The reason for this is that to despair is a qualification of the spirit and relates to the eternal in man. A person cannot rid himself of the relation to himself any more than he can rid himself of his self, which, after all, is one and the same thing, since the self is the relation to oneself." (SuD, Hong, pp. 16-17) ((***Here is the relationship to Tears.. Also, new beginning…***))

#

"Immediacy probably does not know it, but reflection never snares so unfailingly as when it fashions its snare out of nothing, and reflection is never so much itself as when it is – nothing. It requires extraordinary reflection, or, more correctly, it requires great faith to be able to endure reflection upon nothing – that is, infinite reflection." (SuD, Hong, pp. 25-26)

#

"So he despairs. In contrast to the despair of self-assertion, his despair is despair in weakness, a suffering of the self; but with the aid of the relative reflection that he has, he attempts to sustain his self, and this constitutes another difference from the purely immediate man. He perceives that abandoning the self is a transaction, and thus he does not become apoplectic when the blow falls, as the immediate person does; reflection helps him to understand that there is much he can lose without losing the self. He makes concessions; he is able to do so – and why? Because to a certain degree he has separated his self from externalities, because he has a dim idea that there may even be something eternal in the self. Nevertheless, his struggles are in vain; the difficulty he has run up against requires a total break with immediacy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that. He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from every externality, this naked abstract self, which, compared with immediacy's fully dressed self, is the first form of the infinite self and the advancing impetus in the whole process by which a self infinitely becomes responsible for its actual self with all of its difficulties and advantages." (SuD, Hong, pp. 54-55) Note: the backing out to return.

#

"This is a curious entanglement, a curious kind of knot, for the whole trouble is really the way your thinking twists around; otherwise it is even normal, in fact, this is the course you have to take: you must go through the despair of the self to the self. You are quite right about the weakness, but that is not what you are to despair over; the self must be broken in order to become itself, but quit despairing over that.'—if someone were to speak to him in that way, he would understand it in a dispassionate moment, but his passion would soon see mistakenly again, and then once more he would make a wrong turn—into despair." (SuD, Hong, p.65)

#

"To understand/and to understand are therefore two things? Certainly they are; and he who understands this (but not, be it noted, in the first sort of understanding) is initiated into all the secret mysteries of irony." (SuD, Lowrie, p. 221 or Hong, p. 90)

#

"This contrast [sin/faith], however, has been advanced throughout this entire book, which at the outset introduced the formula for the state in which there is no despair at all: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula in turn, as has been frequently pointed out, it the definition of faith." (SUD, Hong, p.131)

#

"To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair, and hence the second form of despair (in despair at not willing to be oneself) can be followed back to the first (in despair at not willing to be oneself), just as in the foregoing we resolved the first into the second (cf. I). A despairing man wants despairingly to be himself. But if he despairingly wants to be himself, he will not want to get rid of himself. Yes, so it seems; but if one inspects more closely, one perceives that after all the contradiction is the same. That self which he despairingly wills to be is a self which he is not (for to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair): what he really wills is to tear himself away from the Power which constituted it." (SUD, Lowrie, p. 153 or Hong, p. 20)

"Immediacy is not actually over until the immediate infinity is grasped by an equally infinite reflection. At the same moment, all tasks are transformed and made dialectical in themselves; no immediacy is allowed to stand by itself or to be exposed to struggle only with something else, since it must struggle with itself." (Stages, Hong, p.412)

#

"In order to stick to the task, one must constantly make double-movements. Anyone who cannot do it with ease does not see the task at all, and he is lucky if he has not lost his delight in poetry. But if he can do it, then he also knows that infinite reflection is not something alien but is immediacy's transparency to itself." (Stages, Hong, p.413-14)

#

"But to repent is not a positive movement outwards or off to, but a negative movement inwards, not a doing but by oneself letting something happen to oneself. There are three existence-spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious…The ethical sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical sphere is the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack of gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious condition: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway—which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all – just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical." (Stages, Hong, p. 476-77) ((Perhaps, indicating the passage - the process, here??))

#

"Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?" (WoL, Hong, p. 23)

#

"Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term." (WoL, Hong, pp. 112-13)

#

"If one were to indicate and describe in one simple word the victory Christianity has won over the world, or even more accurately, the victory in which it more than overcome the world, the infinite transformation which Christianity aims at (since Christianity has never wanted to conquer in a worldly way), by which everything indeed remains as it was (for Christianity has never been a friend of the trumpery of novelty) and yet in the transformation of infinity becomes new—I know of nothing briefer, but also nothing more decisive, than this: it has made every human relation between man and man a relationship of conscience." (WoL, Hong, p.137)

#

"Christianity wants above all to make the infinite change (which is the hidden man of inwardness towards the God-relationship and therein different from the inwardness which is orientated outwards and away), and therefore wants to transform all love into a matter of conscience." (WoL, Hong, p.140)

#

"All human language about the spiritual, yes, even the divine language of Holy Scriptures, is essentially transferred or metaphorical language. This is quite in order or corresponds to the order of things and of existence, since even though man is spirit from the moment of birth he first becomes conscious as spirit later, and therefore prior to this he has lived for a certain time within sensuous-psychic categories. The first portion of life shall not, however, be cast aside when the spirit awakens, any more than the awakening of spirit announces itself in sensuous or sensuous-psychic modes in contrast to the sensuous or sensuous-psychic. The first portion is taken over by spirit, and, thus used, thus laid at the base, it becomes transferred. Therefore the spiritual man and the sensuous-psychic man say the same thing in a sense, and yet there remains an infinite difference between what they say, since the latter does not suspect the secret of transferred language, even though he uses the same words, but not metaphorically. There is a world of difference between the two; the one has made a transition or has let himself be led over to the other side; whereas the other has remained on this side. Yet there is something binding which they have in common - they both use the same language. One in whom the spirit is awakened does not therefore leave the visible world. Although now conscious of himself as spirit, he is still continually in the world of the visible and is himself sensuously visible; likewise he also remains in the language, except that it is transferred. Transferred language is, then, not a brand new language; it is rather the language already at hand. Just as spirit is invisible, so also is its language a secret, and the secret rests precisely in this that it uses the same language as the simple man and the child but uses it as transferred. Thereby the spirit denies (but not in a sensuous or sensuous-psychic manner) that it is the sensuous or sensuous-psychic. The distinction is by no means directly apparent. Therefore we quite rightly regard emphasis upon a directly apparent distinction as a sign of false spirituality - which is mere sensuousness; whereas the presence of spirit is the quiet, whispering secret of transferred language - audible to him who has an ear to hear." (W0L, Hong, p. 199)

#

"The temporal has three times and therefore essentially never is completely nor is completely in any one of the periods; the eternal is. A temporal object can have a multiplicity of varies characteristics; in a certain sense it can be said to have them simultaneously, in so far as in these definite characteristics it is that which it is. But reduplication in itself is never a temporal object; as the temporal disappears in time, so also it exists only in its characteristics. If, on the other hand, the eternal is in a man, the eternal reduplicates itself in him in such a way that at every moment it is in him it is in him in a double mode: in an outward direction and in an inward direction back into itself, but in such a way that it is one and the same, for otherwise it is not reduplication." (WOL, Hong, p. 261) ((***In and Out issue***))

#

"To hope is related to the future, to possibility, which again, distinguished from actuality, is always a duality, the possibilities of advancing or of retrogressing, of rising up or of going under, of the good or of the evil. The eternal is, but when the eternal touches time or is in time, they do not meet each other in the present, for then the present would itself be the eternal. The present, the moment, is so quickly past, that it really is not the present; it is only the boundary and is therefore transitional; whereas the past is what was present. Consequently if the eternal is in the temporal, it is in the future (for the present can not get hold of it, and the past is indeed past) or in possibility. The past is actuality; the future is possibility. Eternally, the eternal is the eternal; in time the eternal is possibility, the future." (WOL, Hong, pp. 233-34) ((How about the eternal is the Buddha nature, unborn, or eternal hope?))

#

"It is one thing to think in such a way that one's attentiveness is solely and constantly directed towards an external object; it is something else to be turned in thought that constantly at every moment one himself becomes conscious, in reflection, conscious of one's own condition or how it is with oneself under reflection. But only the latter is essentially what thinking is: it is, in fact, transparency. The first is unclear thinking which suffers from a contradiction: that which in thinking clarifies something else is itself basically unclear. Such a thinker clarifies something else by his thought, and lo, he does not understand himself; externally in the direction of the object he perhaps utilizes his natural talents very penetratingly but in the direction of inwardness he is very superficial, and therefore all his thought, however fundamental it seems to be, is still basically superficial…In physical powers as such there is indeed nothing selfish, but in the human spirit as such there lies a selfishness which must be snapped if the God-relationship is to be won in truth. One who thinks only one thought must experience this; he must experience the occurrence of a halting wherein everything is, as it were, taken from him…When one thinks only one thought, one must in relationship to this thinking discover self-renunciation, and it is self-renunciation which discovers that God is." (WoL, Hong, pp. 331-33) ((I still feel external-internal point little vague, here. I feel In and Out process need to be clarified, somehow.))

"Consequently, in order to praise love, there is need for inward self-denial and outward sacrificial disinterestedness." (WoL, Hong, p. 343.) ((Should this be disinterestedness? Yes, in a way. But, wouldn't there be com-passion????))

#

"Do we truly know 'something' about being, or do we merely discern what happens to us and our thinking when we try to comprehend being? Indeed, the only thing we attain is an insight into our incapacity to comprehend being. As long as we let it rest with an account of the aforementioned impasse, we ascertain an 'aporia.' With this determination, which looks like an important insight, we close our eyes to the abode in which, despite all looking away, we remain. For we lay a claim to being in all our components toward beings. But we can consider still another possible attitude, where we neither close our eyes to the impasse nor pass it and its discernment off as the ultimate culmination of wisdom, where we first actually look around in this situation where there is no way out.

In saying something about being we make it into a "being" and thus cast it away. But being has always already cast itself toward us. Casting-away and at the same time casting toward," no way out in any direction. What if the absence of every way out were a sign that we may no longer think of ways out, and that means we must first establish a footing and become at home in this supposedly impassible place, instead of chasing after the usual "escape routes? What if the "escape routes" we lay claim to stem from claims that remain inappropriate to the essence of being, and originate from our passion for beings? What if the impasse into which being places us when we want to comprehend it must first be perceived as a sign that points toward where we are already placed in principle, since we comport ourselves toward beings?" (Heidigger, Basic Concepts) ((Being vs. direct experience. Samadhi????))