Soren Kierkegaard

and with respect to being a human being in a straightforward sense.” This
had been heard previously, which is clear from the metaphors, but then
Kierkegaard continued: “From my early years, I have winced at a thorn in
the flesh, and to this was also connected a consciousness of guilt and sin. I
have felt myself to be heterogeneous. This pain, my heterogeneity, I have
understood as my relation to God.”
Thus, first came the pain, the life of suffering, the feeling of being hetero-
geneous; thereafter—or, more correctly,therefore—came the relation to
God. In other words,here it wasnot the relation to God that gave riseto the
suffering—which was what Kierkegaard had insisted on in arguing against
Schopenhauer—but precisely the reverse: It was the suffering that gave rise
to the relation to God! It is therefore more than reasonable to suspect that
Kierkegaard has transferred to Christianity hisownheterogeneity, his radical
incommensurability. The problem is not that the lust for life must be killed
or mortified. No, the problem is theunsuccessfulmortification, where the
nature that was to be killed has refused to die and has turned outward in
aggression against everyone, with an intensified requirement to oppose na-
tureandtodieawayfromtheworld.Withthismaneuverallformsofuniver-
sally valid authority disappear, and this is why there is nothing remaining
that is capable of correcting the denatured subject, who is referred only to
himself:“Doesn’tChristianity makemeintoanenormous egotist,ordoesn’t
it develop my egoity quite abnormally, because by frightening a person with
the greatest of terrors, it causes him to concern himself only and exclusively
with his own salvation, absolutely oblivious to the possible imperfections
and weaknesses of all other people?” The question stands there for a second,
crying out to heaven, and the reader feels an increasing desire to reject it as
absurd. But it is too late, for Kierkegaard has already written: “To this the
answer must be: ‘The Truth’ cannot behave otherwise.”
To this must be said: Kierkegaard, the later Kierkegaard, could not be-
have otherwise. This position, this abnormally developed “egoity,” has
emerged out of an extreme intensification of the thesis that subjectivity is
truth. What has been lost is the dialectical dynamic that had issued from the
antithesis—in which subjectivity isuntruth. It is not Kierkegaard who is
mad, it is his theology, and this is attributable precisely to the loss of this
dialectical dimension.
And thanks to this loss, Kierkegaard finally gained clarity about his ex-
traordinary task.