Soren Kierkegaard

of these high-intensity sketches of the individual’s heroic battle against
temptation—with temptation usually the victor, thus consigning the indi-
vidual to sin; one such depiction can be found inTheSicknessuntoDeath: “If
a person who has been addicted to one sin or other, but who has successfully
resisted temptation for a long time—if he has a relapse and succumbs once
again to temptation, the dejection that then ensues is by no means always
sorrow over the sin .It can be many other things as well .Indeed, it can be
resentment at Governance, as if Governance had caused him to succumb
to temptation, as if, in view of the fact that he had successfully resisted
temptation for so long, Governance ought not to be so hard on him.” Al-
though these linesinprinciplecould be about everything other than a failed
attempt to resist sexual “temptation,” it is hard to escape the impression that
the primary occasion and principal background for this text is preciselythis
“temptation.” “The sexual as such is not the sinful,”TheConceptofAnxiety
repeats again and again, almost like a mantra, but when we read this we
must ask ourselves whether the author really means what he has written
or whether he perhaps seemsmorecredible when he informs us that “the
prohibition awakens the desire.”
There are, however, also passages that depict the joys of sublimation .In
the workFor Self-Examinationfrom 1851, Kierkegaard concerns himself
with a person’s frequently incorrigible forgetfulness concerning his own
promises of reform, and he gives the following example as an illustration:
“Imagine a person who has been and who remains addicted to a passion.
Then comes a moment—and such moments come for everyone, perhaps
many times, alas, perhaps many times in vain!—then comes a moment when
he has come to a halt, as it were .A resolution of improvement awakens.
Imagine, then, that he said to himself one morning (let us suppose him to
be a gambler, for example), ‘I vow solemnly and sacredly that I will never
again have anything to do with gambling, never again—tonight will be the
last time.’ Oh, my friend, he is lost! I would sooner venture to maintain the
opposite position, however strange it might sound: that if there were a
gambler who said to himself at such a moment, ‘All right, you will be al-
lowed to gamble every single day for the rest of your life, but tonight you
must refrain from it’—that if he did this, my friend, he would surely be
saved! Because the resolution that the first gambler made was a trick played
on him by desire; the resolution made by the second gambler tricks desire;
the one is tricked by desire, the other tricks desire... .Because if it is com-
pelled to wait, desire loses the desire.” What is noteworthy here is not
only that Kierkegaard has managed to portray sublimation in a manner so
grounded in experience; it is also striking that this sketch is placed right in