SØREN KIERKEGAARD

The Seducer’s Diary

Edited by VICTOR EREMITA

Abridged and translated by ALISTAIR HANNAY

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This translation first published in Penguin Books 1992

This edition published in Penguin Books 2007

Translation copyright © Alistair Hannay, 1992

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196435-5

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian, generally recognized as the first existentialist philosopher. Kierkegaard’s childhood was an isolated and unhappy one, clouded by the religious fervour of his father. Towards the end of his university career, he started to criticize the Christianity upheld by his father and to look for a new set of values. In 1841 he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen and devoted himself to writing. During the next ten years he produced a flood of discourses and no fewer than twelve major philosophical essays, many of them written under noms de plume. Either/Or, from which The Seducer’s Diary is taken, is the earliest of his major works. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is an exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical.

I cannot conceal from myself, can scarcely master, the anxiety which grips me at this moment, as I resolve for my own interest to make a fair copy of the hasty transcript I was able at that time to secure only in the greatest haste and with much disquiet. The situation confronts me just as alarmingly, but also just as reproachfully, as it did then. Contrary to his custom, he had not closed his escritoire, so its whole contents lay at my disposal; but it is futile for me to gloss over my behaviour by reminding myself that I did not open any drawer. One drawer was pulled out. In it I found a pile of loose papers and on top of them lay a book in broad quarto, tastefully bound. On the side facing up was a vignette of white paper on which he had written in his own hand ‘Commentarius perpetuus No. 4’. In vain have I tried, however, to make myself believe that had that side of the book not been turned up, and had the strange title not tempted me, I should not have succumbed to the temptation, or at least would have attempted to resist it. The title itself was curious, not so much in itself as because of its setting. From a quick glance at the loose papers I saw that these contained constructions of erotic situations, some hints about some relationship or other, sketches of letters of a quite peculiar character, with which I later became familiar in their artistically consummate, calculated carelessness. When now, having seen through the designing mind of this depraved person, I recall my situation; when, with an eye open for every artifice, I approach that drawer in thought, it makes the same impression upon me as it must make upon a police officer when he enters the room of a forger, opens his repositories and finds in a drawer a pile of loose papers, handwriting samples; on one there is part of a foliage motif, on another a signature, on a third a line of reversed writing. It shows him clearly that he is on the right track, and his joy over this is mingled with a certain admiration for the study and industry here clearly in evidence.

For me it might have been a little different, being less used to tracking down criminals and not armed with, well, a police badge. The fact that I was following unlawful paths would have been an additional weight on my mind. On this occasion, as usually happens, I was no less at a loss for thoughts than for words. An impression remains with one until reflection reasserts itself and, diverse and speedy in its movements, ingratiates itself with the unfamiliar stranger and talks him round. The more reflection develops, the quicker it can pull itself together; like a passport clerk for foreign travellers, it becomes so used to seeing the most fantastic figures that it is not easily taken aback. But however strongly developed my own reflection, I was at first still greatly astonished. I remember very well that I turned pale, that I nearly fell over, and how that fact alarmed me. What if he had come home, had found me in a faint with the drawer in my hand? At least a bad conscience can make life interesting.

The title of the book in itself made no particular impression on me; I thought it was a collection of excerpts, which to me seemed quite natural since I knew that he had always embraced his studies with enthusiasm. Its contents, however, were of quite another kind. It was neither more nor less than a diary, painstakingly kept; and just as I did not think, from what I knew of him before, that his life was in such great need of commentary, so I do not deny, after the insight I had now gained, that the title had been chosen with much taste and understanding, with true aesthetic, objective mastery of himself and the situation. The title is in perfect harmony with the entire contents. His life has been an attempt to realize the task of living poetically. With a keenly developed sense for what is interesting in life, he had known how to find it, and having found it he had constantly reproduced the experience in a semi-poetic way. His diary, therefore, was not historically exact or a straightforward narrative, not indicative, but subjunctive. Although of course the experience was recorded after it happened – sometimes perhaps even a considerable time after – it was often described as if taking place at the very moment, so dramatically vivid that sometimes it was as though it was all taking place before one’s very eyes. But that he should have done this because the diary served any ulterior purpose is highly improbable; it is quite obvious that, in the strictest sense, its only importance was for him personally. And to assume that what I have before me is a literary work, perhaps even intended for publication, is precluded by the whole as well as by the details. Certainly he did not need to fear anything personally in publishing it, for most of the names are so unusual that there is altogether no likelihood of their being authentic. But I have formed a suspicion that the Christian name is historically correct, so that he himself would always be sure of identifying the actual person, while every outsider must be misled by the surname. Such at least is the case with the girl I knew, around whom the chief interest centres, Cordelia – that was her correct name; not, however, Wahl.

How, then, can we explain that the diary has nevertheless acquired such a poetic flavour? The answer is not difficult; it can be explained by his poetic temperament, which is, if you will, not rich, or if you prefer, not poor enough to distinguish poetry and reality from each other. The poetic was the extra he himself brought with him. This extra was the poetical element he enjoyed in the poetic situation provided by reality; this element he took back in again in the form of poetic reflection. That was the second enjoyment, and enjoyment was what his whole life was organized around. In the first case he savoured the aesthetic element personally; in the second he savoured his own person aesthetically. In the first case the point was that he egoistically, personally, savoured what in part reality gave him and what in part he himself had impregnated reality with; in the second case his personality was volatilized and he savoured, then, the situation and himself in the situation. In the first case he was in constant need of reality as the occasion, as an element; in the second case reality was drowned in the poetic. The fruit of the first stage is thus the mood from which the diary results as the fruit of the second stage, the word ‘fruit’ being used in the latter case in a somewhat different sense from that in the first. The poetic is thus something he has constantly possessed by virtue of the ambiguity in which his life passed.

Behind the world we live in, in the distant background, lies another world standing in roughly the same relation to the former as the stage one sometimes sees in the theatre behind the real stage stands to the latter. Through a thin gauze one sees what looks like a world of gossamer, lighter, more ethereal, of a different quality from the real world. Many people who appear bodily in the real world do not belong there but to this other world. Yet the fact that someone fades away in this manner, indeed almost disappears from reality, can be due to either health or sickness. The latter was the case with this person, with whom I was once acquainted but without getting to know him. He did not belong to reality yet had much to do with it. He was constantly running around in it, yet even when he devoted himself to it most, he was already beyond it. But it was not the good that beckoned him away, nor was it really evil – even now I dare not say that of him. He has suffered from an exacerbatio cerebri for which reality afforded insufficient incitement, at best only temporarily. Reality was not too much for him, he was not too weak to bear its burden; no, he was too strong, but this strength was a sickness. As soon as reality lost its power to incite he was disarmed; that is where the evil in him lay. He was conscious of this, even at the moment of incitement, and it was in his consciousness of this the evil lay.

I once knew the girl whose story forms the substance of the diary. Whether he has seduced others I do not know; it does seem so from his papers. He seems also to have been adept at another kind of practice, wholly characteristic of him; for he was of far too spiritual a nature to be a seducer in the usual sense. From the diary we also learn that at times his desire was for something altogether arbitrary – a greeting, for instance – and under no circumstance would accept more, because in the person in question this was what was most beautiful. With the help of his mental gifts he knew how to tempt a girl, to draw her to him, without caring to possess her in any stricter sense. I can imagine him able to bring a girl to the point where he was sure she would sacrifice all, but when matters had come that far he left off without the slightest advance having been made on his part, and without a word having been let fall of love, let alone a declaration, a promise. Yet it would have happened, and the unhappy girl would retain the consciousness of it with double bitterness, because there was not the slightest thing she could appeal to. She could only be constantly tossed about by the most divergent moods in a terrible witches’ dance, at one moment reproaching herself, forgiving him, at another reproaching him, and then, since the relationship would only have been actual in a figurative sense, she would constantly have to contend with the doubt that the whole thing might only have been imagination. She would be unable to confide in anyone, for really there was nothing to confide. When you have dreamed, you can tell others your dream, but what she had to tell was no dream, it was reality, and yet, as soon as she wanted to speak of it to another to ease her troubled mind, it was nothing. She herself felt this very keenly. No one could grasp it, hardly even herself, and yet it lay with an unsettling weight upon her.

Such victims were therefore of a quite special nature. They were not unfortunate girls who, social outcasts or thinking themselves such, openly fumed and fretted and now and then, when their hearts became too full, gave vent in hate or forgiveness. No visible change occurred in them; they lived in their normal circumstances, as respected as ever, and yet they were changed, well-nigh inexplicably to themselves, incomprehensibly to others. Their lives were not, as with those others, snapped off or broken, they were bent in on themselves; lost to others, they sought vainly to find themselves. Just as you might say that your path through life left no trace (for your feet were so formed as to leave no footprints – this is how I best picture to myself his infinite self-reflection), so it could be said that no victim fell to him. He lived in far too spiritual a manner to be a seducer in the ordinary sense. Sometimes, however, he assumed a parastatic body and was then sheer sensuality. Even his affair with Cordelia was so complicated that it was possible for him to appear as the one seduced; yes, even the unlucky girl was sometimes in confusion about it; here, too, his footprints are so indistinct that any proof is impossible. The individuals were merely his incitement; he cast them off as a tree sheds its leaves – he is refreshed, the leaf withers.

But how, I wonder, do things look in his own head? Just as he has led others astray, so in my view he ends by going astray himself. It is not in external respects that he has led the others astray, but in ways that affect them inwardly. There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in his error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape. This, on an even more terrible scale, I think, is how it will go with him. I can imagine nothing more agonizing than an intriguing mind which has lost the thread and then turns all its wits upon itself, as conscience awakens and the question is one of extricating oneself from this confusion. It is to no avail that he has many exits from his fox’s earth; the moment his anxious soul thinks it sees daylight appearing, it proves to be a new entrance, and like startled game, pursued by despair, he is thus constantly seeking an exit and forever finding an entrance through which he returns into himself. Such a man is not always what we could call a criminal; often he himself is deluded by his intrigues, and yet he is overtaken by a more terrible punishment than the criminal, for what is the pain even of remorse compared with this conscious madness? His punishment has a purely aesthetic character, for even to talk of his conscience awakening is to apply too ethical an expression to him. For him conscience takes the form simply of a higher level of consciousness which expresses itself in a disquietude that still fails to accuse him in a deeper sense, but which keeps him awake with no support beneath him in his barren restlessness. Nor is he mad; for in their diversity his finite thoughts are not petrified in the eternity of madness.

Poor Cordelia! For her, too, it will be hard to find peace. She forgives him from the bottom of her heart, but she finds no rest, for then doubt awakens: it was she who broke off the engagement, it was she who caused the disaster, it was her pride that yearned for the uncommon. Then she repents, but she finds no rest, for then the accusing thoughts acquit her: it was he with his artfulness who placed this plan in her mind. Then she turns to hatred, her heart finds relief in curses, but she finds no rest; she reproaches herself again, reproaches herself because she has hated, she who is herself a sinner, reproaches herself because, however sly he may have been, she will still always be guilty. It is grievous for her that he has deceived her; it is even more grievous, one could almost be tempted to say, that he has aroused in her this many-tongued reflection, that he has developed her aesthetically enough no longer to listen humbly to one voice, but to be able to hear these many points of view all at once. Then memory awakens with her soul, she forgets the offence and the guilt, she remembers the beautiful moments, and she is numbed in an unnatural exaltation. In such moments she not only remembers him, she understands him with a clairvoyance which only goes to show how far she has travelled. Then she no longer sees the criminal in him, or the noble person; her sense of him is purely aesthetic. She once wrote me a note in which she expressed her feelings about him. ‘Sometimes he was so spiritual that I felt myself annihilated as a woman, at other times so wild and passionate, so filled with desire, that I almost trembled before him. Sometimes I seemed a stranger to him, at other times he gave of himself completely, when I then flung my arms around him, sometimes everything was suddenly changed and I embraced a cloud. I knew that expression before I knew him, but he has taught me what it means; when I use it I always think of him, just as every thought I think is only in connection with him. I have always loved music and he was a matchless instrument; always alive, he had a range that no instrument has, he was the epitome of all feelings and moods, no thought was too elevated for him, none too despairing, he could roar like an autumn storm, he could whisper inaudibly. No word of mine was without effect, and yet I cannot say that my word did not fail of its effect, for it was impossible for me to know what effect it would have. With an indescribable but secret, blessed, unnameable anxiety I listened to this music I myself called forth, yet did not call forth; there was always harmony, he always carried me away.’

Terrible for her, it will be more terrible for him; I can infer this from the fact that even I cannot quite control the anxiety that grips me every time I think of the matter. I, too, am carried along into that nebulous realm, that dream world where every moment one is afraid of one’s own shadow. Often I try in vain to tear myself away, I follow as a figure of menace, as an accuser who cannot speak. How strange! He has spread the deepest secrecy over everything, and still there is a deeper secret, and it is this, that I am in on it; and indeed I have myself become privy to it unlawfully. To forget the whole thing would be impossible. I have sometimes thought of speaking about it to him. Still, how would that help? He would disavow everything, maintain that the diary was a literary effort, or impose silence upon me, something I could not deny him considering how I came to know of it. Nothing, after all, is so pervaded by seduction and damnation as a secret.

I have received from Cordelia a collection of letters. Whether these are all of them I do not know, although it occurs to me she once let it be understood that she herself had confiscated some. I have copied them and will now insert them in my own clean copy. It is true the dates are missing, but even if they were there it would not help much, since the diary as it proceeds becomes more and more sparing. Indeed, in the end, with the odd exception, it gives no dates, as though the story as it progressed acquired such qualitative importance, and in spite of being historically real, came so near to being idea, that time specifications became for this reason a matter of indifference. What did help me, however, was the fact that at various places in the diary are some words whose significance at first I did not grasp. But by comparing them with the letters I realized that they furnish the motives for the latter. It will therefore be a simple matter to insert them in the right places, inasmuch as I shall always introduce the letter at the point where its motive is indicated. Had I not found these clues, I would have incurred a misunderstanding; for no doubt it would not have occurred to me, as now from the diary seems probable, that at times the letters followed upon each other with such frequency that she seems to have received several in one day. Had I followed my original intention I should have apportioned them more evenly, and not suspected the effect he obtained through the passionate energy with which he used this, like all other means, to keep Cordelia on the pinnacle of passion.

Apart from complete information on his relationship to Cordelia, the diary also contained, interspersed here and there, several small descriptions. Wherever these were found there was an ‘NB’ in the margin. These depictions have absolutely nothing to do with Cordelia’s story but have given me a vivid conception of what is meant by an expression he often used, though previously I understood it differently: ‘One ought always to have an extra little line out.’ Had an earlier volume of this diary fallen into my hands, I should probably have come across more of these, which somewhere in the margin he calls ‘actions at a distance’; for he himself admits that Cordelia occupied him too much for him really to have time to look about.

Shortly after he had abandoned Cordelia, he received some letters from her which he returned unopened. These were among the letters Cordelia turned over to me. She had herself broken the seal, and so there seems no reason why I should not venture to make a transcript. She has never mentioned their content to me; on the other hand, when she referred to her relationship to Johannes she usually recited a little verse, I believe by Goethe, which seemed to convey a different meaning according to her moods and the difference in delivery these occasioned:

These letters go as follows:

If Cordelia did not possess the compass she admired in her Johannes, one still sees clearly that she was not without modal variation. Each of her letters clearly bears the stamp of her mood, even though to some extent she lacked lucidity in her presentation. This is especially the case in the second letter, where one suspects rather than grasps her meaning, but to me it is this imperfection that makes it so touching.