Endnotes to Problemata: Problema I

1. In Greek philosophy, a being’s τέλος (telos) is its end, goal, or purpose (in the sense that the oak tree is the τέλος of the acorn). In ethics, the human τέλος would be that end for which all human choices are, or should be, made, and all else is chosen either as a means to, or part of, that end.

 2. Both “single individual” and “particular individual” are den Enkelte in Danish, which can mean either of these things, depending on what aspect (singularity or particularity) an author is emphasizing in a particular context. The reader should be forewarned that throughout the text I have translated these two phrases as context demands even though it is consistently den Enkelte behind them.

 3. I have consistently translated the distinction between vil gjøre sig gjeldende and føler en Tilskyndelse til at gjøre sig gjeldende in terms of the former being an intention and the latter being an inclination or felt impulse. Other translations have obscured this difference to the point that English readers will find it hard to tell what difference, if any, Silentio finds between temptation and sin. This translation is informed by what Silentio writes in the Preliminary Expectoration, when he says that the ethical expression for what Abraham did is that han vilde myrde Isaak, where vilde indicates not that he wanted to murder Isaac, but that he intended to murder him. I have endeavored throughout Problema I to keep this distinction between impulse and intention clear so that the argument, though necessarily obscure and difficult, can become as lucid and easy to follow as possible.

 4. See G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 157–86, §§129–41, particularly 167, §139: “Where . . . the will is in a state of pure inwardness, the self-consciousness is capable of making into its principle either the universal in and for itself, or the arbitrariness of its own particularity, giving the latter precedence over the universal and realizing it through its actions—i.e., it is capable of being evil.”

 5. Ophæves, here used as an equivalent to Hegel’s aufheben and carrying the multiple meanings of “to cancel,” “to preserve,” and “to elevate,” i.e., to preserve something by canceling it in its lower condition and raising it to a higher one. In everyday life, one can see the idea in how someone could convert fresh fruit into a jam (which involves destroying the fruit) and placing it up on a shelf (literally elevating it) where it can be preserved for later use. In the realm of ethics it means that the passions in their “immediate” form, right as they come from nature, have to be canceled, so that they can be preserved in an ethical form, and here the example might be how marriage cancels immediate forms of sexual appetite but also preserves them by placing them in a new, ethical context. Kierkegaard discusses this term in more detail in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1:222–23. 

6. Det Sædelige, the Danish term used to translate Hegel’s somewhat technical term, Sittlichkeit. Like Sittlichkeit, it indicates ethical life as embodied within the life, norms, and mores of a community, as opposed to ethics conceived as an abstract ethical system or as set of personal convictions. 

7. Hegel discusses the concept of “religion” in Philosophy of Right §270, where he describes the object of religion as “absolute truth” and religion itself as “the relation to the absolute in the form of feeling, representational thought, and faith.” Hegel concludes that, in this sense, “religion constitutes the foundation” of the ethical life that is then “unfolded” and “organized” in the ethical life of a community. In this sense, religion underwrites and justifies ethical life, but does not create a distinct realm alongside it or independent of it any more than the “essence” of a dog is another dog that we can compare with concrete dogs. He regarded using religion this way as a “fanaticism that . . . repudiates all political institutions and legal order as restrictive limitations on inner emotions and as incommensurate with the infinity of these.” Hegel discusses the faith of Abraham in his 1824 lectures on philosophy of religion (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2., ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987]). Here he identifies “the fear of the Lord” as the essence of the Judaism of Abraham and Job (p. 443). “Human beings depend on the particular” but “the fear of the Lord sets us free from all particular interests” (p. 444). This first of all involves an “absolute trust, or infinite faith,” in which one gives up what is one’s own to immerse oneself in the Lord “having this unity as one’s object and essence” (p. 444). This trust needs to find expression in “a concrete shape,” “a particular kind of existence,” which is “the family” (pp. 446–47). 

8. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), The Art of Poetry, trans. Albert S. Cook (Boston: Ginn, 1892), 172: “And in all times a forward scribbling fop / Has found some greater fool to cry him up.” Silentio cites Boileau in French: “Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot, qui l’admire.” Boileau, L’Art poétique, 1:232, Œuvres de Boileau, 4 vols. (Paris: 1830), 2:190. 

9. Silentio later in this Problemata identifies the Virgin Mary as a second example of a knight of faith. 

10. There are several versions of the myth of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia. Silentio refers to the version recounted by Euripides (480–406 BC) in Iphigenia in Aulis. The Greek fleet carrying the army assembled by Agamemnon, the most important of the Greek kings, to punish the Trojans for abducting Helen could not sail from Aulis to conquer Troy because of a dead calm. The soothsayer Calchas then urged Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis in hopes of persuading her to grant them a fair wind. For a contemporary English translation, see Iphigenia in Aulis in Euripides V, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 85–170.

 11. In the English translation listed above, see p. 112, lines 446–50: O fortunate man of mean, ignoble birth, freely you may weep and empty out your hearts, but the highborn— we suffer, decorum rules our lives and we, by service to the mob, become its slaves. 02-DSHPC167-Kierkegaard-Body.indd 64 02/21/24 3:46 PM Endnotes to Problemata: Problema I 65 

12. The number 687 refers to the line of the Danish translation of the play published as Iphigeneia in Aulis in Euripides, trans. Christian Wilster (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1840). In the English edition cited above, see p. 124, surrounding line 680: O for this happy ignorance that is yours! Now go into the pavilion—to be seen embarrasses maidens. But first give me a kiss and your right hand, for soon you go to live apart from your father for too long. O breast and cheeks! O golden hair! What bitter burden Helen and her Troy city have laid upon us!

 13. Reference to Jephthah, known through the biblical book of Judges. The Ammonites have begun to make war upon Israel and some of the elders of the town of Gilead go to Jephthah to ask him to lead Israel (to become a “Judge,” or leader, over Israel) against Ammon. Jephthah, who was the son of a prostitute, had been driven out of the town of Gilead by his brothers who did not want to share their father’s inheritance with him (11:2–3). He left to dwell in the wilderness where it is said that “worthless fellows collected around Jephthah and went out with him,” which suggests he was something resembling a bandit leader prior to his summons to return home to defend Gilead. Jephthah initially attempts diplomacy but the king of the Ammonites did not listen to him. This leads to his famous vow and its consequence (Judges 11:29–40): And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whatever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me when I return in peace from the Ammonites shall be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.” So Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to fight against them, and the Lord gave them into his hand. And he struck them from Aroer to the neighborhood of Minnith, twenty cities, and as far as Abel-keramim, with a great blow. So the Ammonites were subdued before the people of Israel. Then Jephthah came to his home at Mizpah. And behold, his daughter came out to meet him with tambourines and with dances. She was his only child; besides her he had neither son nor daughter. And as soon as he saw her, he tore his clothes and said, “Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low, and you have become the cause of great trouble to me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow.” And she said to him, “My father, you have opened your mouth to the Lord; do to me according to what has gone out of your mouth, now that the Lord has avenged you on your enemies, on the Ammonites.” So she said to her father, “Let this thing be done for me: leave me alone two months, that I may go up and down on the mountains and weep for my virginity, I and my companions.” So he said, “Go.” Then he sent her away for two months, and she departed, she and her companions, and wept for her virginity on the mountains. And at the end of two months, she returned to her father, who did with her according to his vow that he had made. She had never known a man, and it became a custom in Israel that the daughters of Israel went year by year to lament the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days in the year. I Commentators have interpreted the tragedy of Jephthah in different, conflicting ways. One important question is whether Jephthah’s decision to bind God by a vow displays faith in and submission to God or misunderstanding of, and lack of faith in, God.

 14. Lucius Junius Brutus (died c. 500 BC) led the party that expelled the Tarquins from Rome after the rape of Lucretia and laid the foundations for post-monarchical, republican Rome in 509 BC. When his sons plotted to restore the Tarquins, Brutus had them executed. See Livy, The Rise of Rome: Books One to Five, trans. T. J. Luce (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 76 (Titus Livius, Ab Urbe Condita 2:5). 

15. Lictors were Roman officials whose function was to attend a magistrate, to bear the fasces before him, and to execute sentences of judgment upon offenders. Twelve lictors would normally attend a consul such as Brutus. 

16. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for example, identified God’s will with human duty in his Conflict of the Faculties, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; rev. ed., 2008), and for this reason condemned Abraham: Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: “That I ought not to kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God—of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even if this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven” (283). 

17. Before Moses went up on Mount Sinai to receive the Law from the Lord, God told him to “set limits for the people all around, saying, ‘Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death. No hand shall touch him, but he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live’” (Exodus 19:12–13). 

18. A complex figure combining biblical imagery of Mount Moriah (where Abraham was tested) with Greek imagery of Aulis (where Artemis demanded that Agamemnon sacrifice Iphigenia in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis). 

19. The first edition (1609) of William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Sonnets was prefaced by a “Dedication” to an unnamed individual. to the onlie begetter of these insuing sonnets mr. w. h. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our everliving poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth t. t. 02-DSHPC167-Kierkegaard-Body.indd 66 02/21/24 3:46 PM Endnotes to Problemata: Problema I 67 It is unknown who authored the dedication—“t. t.” seems to stand for Thomas Thorpe, the book’s publisher—but the current consensus is that Shakespeare at least approved it. Kierkegaard may or may not have known the details of this debate. However, in one of his later works, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (contained in Without Authority, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 163; see SKS 12, 279), he included the following dedication, which may seem to echo that attached to Shakespeare’s sonnets: TO ONE UNNAMED, WHOSE NAME WILL ONE DAY BE NAMED, is dedicated, along with this little writing, the entire authorship, as it was from the beginning. The “named” recipient of the vast majority of Kierkegaard’s dedications was Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, his father. The “unnamed” recipient, of course, to whom he dedicated the entire authorship, was Regine Olsen, a fact declared openly following Kierkegaard’s death. He had hidden this in plain sight in the Forewords or Prefaces to his various collections of discourses. Although differing in details, these opening Forewords, or second dedications, consistently said something like the following: Although this little book . . . in the situation of actuality is like a fancy, a dream in the daytime, yet it is not without confidence and not without hope of fulfillment. It seeks that single individual, to whom it gives itself wholly, by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart, that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that single individual, who willingly reads slowly, reads repeatedly, and who reads aloud—for his own sake. If it finds him, then in the remoteness of separation the understanding is complete when he keeps the book and the understanding of himself in the inwardness of appropriation. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (SKS 8, 121 / UD, 5) His reader, of course, is both “someone every human being is or can be” (The Point of View for My Work as an Author (SKS 16, 95 / PV, 115)) yet also, specifically, Regine herself (JP, 382). 

20. An allusion to Mark 3:22–27, in which Jesus is accused of casting out demons by the power of the devil. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

 21. The Pythagoreans gave several reasons for saying this, none easy for readers today to appreciate. Kierkegaard, studying Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann’s Geschichte der Philosophie (11 vols. [Leipzig: Bei Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1798–1819], 1:105–6) jotted down the following summary of The Pythagorean School in one of his notebooks: 02-DSHPC167-Kierkegaard-Body.indd 67 02/21/24 3:46 PM 68 Endnotes to Problemata: Problema I “Numbers Are the Principles of Things.” Things are themselves numbers, and empty space is the reason that they do not form a continuum, a cohesive quantity. The element of number is the even and the odd. One is not a number, for every number is a plurality of units. The even numbers are imperfect and incomplete; the odd numbers are perfect and complete. The odd number has beginning, middle, and end because it cannot be divided into equal parts; the even number has no middle. the limitless and the limited (τπεπερασμενν—ταπειρν) are the principles of things. (SKS 19, 423; NB14:2 / KJN 3, 423) Perhaps the fundamental reason, and the most fitting for Silentio’s discussion, was that even numbers were seen as “limitless” (see Aristotle, Metaphysics A [986a6] for more on this point) and therefore lacking a governing principle or τέλος. 

22. Docenter (pl.) literally means tutors and refers more precisely to university teachers who assisted the professors in the teaching of the discipline. However, Johannes de Silentio seems to be using the term to refer to the professoriate more broadly, in terms of professors’ detached objectivity, authoritative evaluations of the past, and lifetime appointments, especially in state-funded institutions where they function as civil servants within an official bureaucracy. In a contemporary context, this is best exemplified by those who have achieved tenure, i.e., associate professors. With some hesitation, I have therefore translated Docenter as “associate professors” rather than the more common “assistant professors,” since it would be baffling to speak of the latter as possessing “secure” positions. 

23. At the beginning of Luke’s gospel, God sends the angel Gabriel to Mary. He greets her, saying: “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28). 

24. “The way of women”: a biblical euphemism for menstruation; here the point is its cessation during pregnancy. This connection is made more explicit in Kierkegaard’s Book on Adler, where he uses Mary as an example of humility and faith: she has received the annunciation from the angel but cannot immediately see any miraculous event or verify whether she is actually pregnant until the requisite time has elapsed. “The necessary slowness is also a cross, which the chosen one has to bear with faith and humility.” In a marginal note he adds, “I wonder if she became preoccupied with asking what time it was, when the month was over—out of fear that it might be revoked.” “Only humility is capable of bearing, as did Mary, the fact that the miraculous must take its time” (SKS 15, 145 / BOA, 250). 

25. Mary made this response to the angel Gabriel’s announcement that she would bear a child by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:38). 

26. When Jesus is being led to crucifixion, “There followed him a great multitude of the people and of women who were mourning and lamenting for him. But turning to them Jesus said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children’”