Soren Kierkegaard

Thus, little by little, the existential emotion at the beginning of the entry
is replaced by a soft-focus retrospective view of previous events and the
wish, in this connection, to study the science of law or the art of acting. It
is certainly Kierkegaard who is doing the writing, but the text frees itself
from his actual life situation and becomes a little fictive tale which in a
way isitselfa “surrogate” for his own life. There is not much existential
clarification in the tale, but it is clear that Kierkegaard became himself in
dialogue with the texts, fictive or less fictive, that he set down on paper. It
was in fact these texts that constituted his own actual “concave mirror.”
And if we dare, we might even find ourselves struck by the idea that this
textual double-reflection foreshadows Kierkegaard’s subsequent pseudony-
mous practice. For here, too, he balances between notorious presence and
indubitable absence.
The young man who returned to the city on August 24 was thus not
identical to the slightly younger man who had left the city on June 17. He
had been enriched by a series of flickering perceptions, and he had summa-
rized them somewhere deep inside his green, cloth-bound journal with
these paradoxical words: “What did I find? Not my ‘I. ’” He had come to
thenegativerealization that his identity would not emerge by cultivating the
natural sciences, because those disciplines do not narrow the scope of the
problem but enlarge it, just as he had also come to understand that in itself
nature is nothing, that nature always refers the observer back to himself and
to his cultural framework. He had come to thepositiverealization that no
one begins with a given or a priori possession of his true “I,” but that this
could only be acquired by traveling via detours and dead ends, both cultur-
ally and personally. For the nonce Kierkegaard had not accomplished any-
thing except to overexert himself by attempting to lift his own lightness,
to outrun himself in attempting to catch up with this “I.” In this respect
Kierkegaard readily calls to mind one of the creatures he discussed in a
journal entry dating from this same year. These creatures, “when they really
want to accomplish something, take such grandiose steps that they utterly
fail to succeed in their object. They are like the dwarf in the fairy tale who,
when he wanted to pursue the fleeing prince and princess, put on seven-
league boots; he reached Turkey before he remembered that the fugitives
most likely had not used this means of transportation.”
It would take time. And for Kierkegaard, time was writing. The idea for
which he was willing to live and die was in fact the production of dazzling
literary work.
But of course he could not know that yet, university student that he was.