Soren Kierkegaard

thereafter he grimaced, adding, “When I heard that, I thought the follow-
ing—either, I thought, this is the man we need, the chosen one, who in
his divine originality possesses the springs needed to refresh the exhausted
soil of Christendom, or he is an... ignorant prankster.”
This was not a full explanation of his interest in Adler, however, and the
manuscript also contains a number of more unofficial reasons and expecta-
tions. For the time being, we will simply give vent to our suspicions by
advancing this supposition: May not Kierkegaard have recognized in Adler,
if not his own self, then at any rate certain sides of himself which he did
not wish to lay bare? Did Kierkegaard actually know from his own experi-
ence that Adler’s revelation had nothing whatsoever to do with a revelation,
but that something entirely different was involved, something about which
Kierkegaard could not speak without revealinghis ownsecret?
The reader senses an answer in the conclusion of the third chapter of the
book on Adler, in which Kierkegaard explains that if one “wanted to define
Adler’sgeniustotally and essentially, one would have to say that it isdizzi-
ness.” Conceding that the term “dizziness” might seem strange, Kierkegaard
explained himself further: “Physiology has correctly pointed out that dizzi-
ness occurs when the eyes have no fixed point upon which to rest. One
thus becomes dizzy when looking down from a high tower, for when the
gaze plunges downward it finds no boundary, no limitation. For a similar
reason one becomes dizzy at sea, because everything is continually chang-
ing, so that once again there is no boundary, no limitation.” It is clear
that Kierkegaard is familiar withThe Concept of Anxiety, in which Vigilius
Haufniensis put forth similar definitions, but Kierkegaard was not ashamed
to repeat the words of his pseudonymous colleague: “What makes one dizzy
is the extensive, the infinite, the unlimited, the indeterminable, and dizzi-
ness itself is the senses’ lack of restraint. Indeterminableness is the basis of
dizziness, but it is also the temptation to surrender oneself to it. For, while
indeterminableness is certainly opposed to human nature,... it is precisely
because indeterminableness is against nature that it is also tempting. The
dialectic of dizziness thus contains within itself this contradiction: that one
wants what one does not want, what one shudders at, while this shudder
only deters one—temptingly.”
Kierkegaard’s elucidation of dizziness and its dialectic is intended to serve
a polemical purpose, but to some extent it fails in doing so. Indeed, Adler
didnotwrite in such an infinitely dizzying manner, but this was theeffect
he had on Kierkegaard!
Quite near the beginning of his manuscript Kierkegaard calls Adler a
“dizzy-brilliant author”; then he appears as “the man of movement”; next
he becomes “a stirring stick”; and all the while his work is called an “all-