Soren Kierkegaard

thirtieth birthday. It would have been difficult for the preface to have been
more reverential, but Kierkegaard nonetheless suddenl yhad doubts about
its propriety. For it seemed to him that the preface “concealed within itself
a certain spiritual eroticism,” which was quite unseeml yfor the genre, so
he decided to change his text: “I rush over to the printer’s. What happens?
The typesetter pleaded in favor of the preface. I did laugh a bit at him, but
in m yheart of hearts I thought that he, indeed, might be the ‘individual.’
Delighted b ythis thought I at first decided to have onl ytwo copies printed
and present one of them to the typesetter. It was really rather beautiful to
see how moved he was—a typesetter, who you might think would have
become just as wear yof a manuscript as the author!”
If the little preface concealed within itself a spiritual eroticism, that eroti-
cism was ver ywell hidden. With a self-abnegating gesture, he sent the two
discourses out into world of readers, poeticall yimagining the book’s adven-
tures in foreign parts, where it would wend “its wa ydown lonel yroads or
walk alone on the main thoroughfare,” finall yencountering “that individual
whom I with jo yand thankfulness call m yreader, that single individual
whom it seeks, toward whom it stretches out its arms, so to speak; that
single individual who is kind enough to permit himself to be found, kind
enough to receive it....Andwhen I had seen that, I saw no more.”
The fear of spiritual eroticism thus had less to do with what was being
communicated than with the person to whom the communication was di-
rected—because it was Regine whom the edifying discourses embraced
with such passionate longing. “I came to understand the matter of ‘that
single individual’ quite earl yon,” Kierkegaard wrote in an 1849 journal
entr yin which he squarel yadmitted that when he used the expression “that
single individual” for the first time, in the preface toTwo Edifying Discourses,
it was a “little nod to her” and thus was not understood in the sense it later
took on, of referring to a particular category. In this same journal entry,
incidentally, Kierkegaard informs us that “The Seducer’s Diary” was an-
other little nod to Regine. Sheer disgust at the stor ywas supposed to have
freed her from their relationship, while the discourses, on the other hand,
were supposed to show her that in the final analysis “The Seducer’s Diary”
had had a religious intent.
The discourses were reviewed inTheological Journal, where it was stated
that the author, familiar to those who had readOn the Concept of Irony,
was Magister Kierkegaard, whose spiritual individualit ywas characterized
in particular b ya tendenc yto track down illusions and contradictions ever y-
where, and this placed him closer to critical scholarship than to the dogmatic
disciplines. Kierkegaard was not entirel ydevoid of “substance and depth,”
however, because even though dialectical pla ycertainl ygot the upper hand