But I must ask you Socrates, what do you suppose is the upshot of all this? As I said a little while ago, it is the scrapings and shavings of argument, cut up into little bits. – Greater Hippias, 304a
Although an outsider, I have at least understood this much, that the only unforgivable high treason against Christianity is the single individual’s taking his relation to it for granted.
inspiration is indeed an object of faith, is qualitatively dialectical, not attainable by means of quantification
The more objective the observer becomes, the less he builds an eternal happiness, that is, his eternal happiness, on his relation to his observation, because an eternal happiness is a question only for the impassioned, infinitely interested subjectivity.
We have become so objective that even the wife of a civil servant argues from the whole, from the state, from the idea of society, from geographic scientificity to the single individual.
The speculative thinker just wants to look at Christianity.
Whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, the subjective thinker as existing is essentially interested in his own thinking, is existing in it. Therefor his has another kind of reflection, specifically, that of inwardness, of possession, whereby it belongs to the subject and no one else. The subjective existing thinker is aware of the dialectic of communication.
Truth is subjectivity.
It is subjectivity that Christianity is concerned with, and it is only in subjectivity that its truth exists, if it exists at all; objectively, Christianity has no existence.
The basis of the paradox of Christianity is that it continually uses time and the historical in relation to the eternal.
Contingent truths of history can never become the demonstrations of necessary truths of reason.
When someone is to leap he must certainly do it alone and also be alone in properly understanding that it is an impossibility. … the leap is the decision.
A system that is not entirely finished is a hypothesis, whereas a half-finished system is nonsense and a fragment of a system is also nonsense. Consequently, (a) a logical system can be given; (b) but a system of existence cannot be given.
But who is the systematic thinker? Well, it is he who himself is outside existence and yet in existence, who in his eternity is forever concluded and yet includes existence within himself-it is God.
Let me be as if created for the sake of a whim; this is the jest. Yet I shall with the utmost strenuousness will the ethical; this is the earnestness.
Philosophy (Hegel) seeks speculatively to confuse the ethical for the single individual with the world-historical task for the human race. The ethical is the highest task assigned to every human being.
What does it mean to die? What does it mean to be immortal? What does it mean to marry? I am indeed the one who continually says that between the simple person’s and the wise person’s knowledge of the simple there is only the ludicrous little difference-that the simple person knows it, and the wise person knows that he knows it or knows that he does not know it.
When an assistant professor, every time his coattails reminds him to say something, says de omnibus dubitandum est [everything must be doubted] and briskly writes away on a system in which there is sufficient internal evidence in every other sentence that the man has never doubted anything-he is not considered lunatic.
He wants to convince [others] that he is not a lunatic and therefore paces up and down the floor and continually says, "Boom! The Earth is round!". But is the earth not round? ... is he a lunatic, the man who hopes to prove that he is not a lunatic by stating a truth universally accepted and universally regarded as objective?
The speculative thinker believes only to a certain degree-he puts his hand to the plow and looks around in order to find something else to know. In a Christian sense, what he finds to know is hardly anything good.
Every human being is spirit and truth is the self-activity of appropriation.
Either/Or has the existence-relation between the esthetic and the ethical materialize into existence in the existing individuality. The book is an indirect polemic against speculative thought, which is indifferent to existence. That there is no conclusion and no final decision is an indirect expression for truth as inwardness and in this way perhaps a polemic against truth as knowledge.
That Either/Or ends precisely with the upbuilding truth was remarkable to me. … The Christian truth as inwardness is also upbuilding but this by no means implies that every upbuilding truth is Christian; the upbuilding is a wider category.
Just as “fear and trembling” is the state of the teleologically suspended person when God tempts him, so also is anxiety the teleologically suspended person’s state of mind in that desperate exemption from fulfilling the ethical. When truth is subjectivity, the inwardness of sin as anxiety in the existing individual is the greatest possible distance and the most painful distance from the truth.
My Fragments approached Christianity in a decisive way, without, however, mentioning its name or Christ’s name. … In an age of knowledge, in which all are Christians and know what Christianity is, it is only too easy to use the holy names without meaning anything thereby, to rattle off the Christian truth without having the least impression of it.
Suffering is the 70,000 fathoms of water upon whose depths the religious person is continually. But suffering is precisely inwardness and is separated from esthetics and ethical existence-inwardness.
Hegelian philosophy culminates in the thesis that the outer is the inner and the inner is the outer. With this, Hegel has finished. … The religious definitely establishes the contrast between the outer, and the inner, which is defined as contrast.
Existing is something quite different from knowing.
Abstraction does not care about whether a particular existing human being is immortal, and just that is the difficulty. It is disinterested, but the difficulty of existence is the existing person’s interest, and the existing person is infinitely interested in existing.
Be cautious with an abstract thinker who not only wants to remain in abstraction’s pure being but wants this to be the highest for a human being, and wants such thinking, which results in the ignoring of the ethical and a misunderstanding of the religious, to be the highest human thinking.
God does not think, he creates; God does not exist, he is eternal.
It is not denied that with regard to evil there are cases in which the transition is almost undetectable, but these cases must be explained in a special way. This is due to the fact that the individual is so in the power of habit that by frequently having made the transition from thinking to acting he has finally lost the power for it in the bondage of habit, which at his expense makes it faster and faster.
One says: To renounce everything is an enormous abstraction-that is why one must proceed to hold on to something. But if the task is to renounce everything, what if one began by renouncing something?
Revelation is marked by mystery, eternal happiness by suffering, the certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity; if this is not maintained, then the esthetic and the religious merge in common confusion. … The religious lies in the dialectic of inwardness deepening and therefore, with regard to the conception of God, this means that he himself is moved, is changed. An action in the eternal transforms the individual’s existence.
The highest His Imperial Highness is able to do, however, is to make the decision before God. The lowliest human being can also make his decision before God.
Irony is the cultivation of the spirit and therefore follows next after immediacy; then comes the ethicist, then the humourist, then the religious person.