Abstract

Kierkegaard presents two radically different conceptions of love in his writings, in threedifferent ways . Kierkegaard’s prime literary model for eros is Plato’sSymposium, which culminates in Diotima’s argument for a continuum between immediate, sensate, eroticlove and the divine. Kierkegaard repeatedly parodies the notion of eros as a scala paradisi in hispseudonymous “first authorship,” in order to show its inadequacy from the point of view of Christian faith.In his “second authorship” Kierkegaard presents a very different notion of love from this pagan, aestheticnotion — the Christian notion of agape, the selfless love of one’s neighbor. Eros and agape arecharacterized in mutually exclusive terms . But the conceptual presentationof agape, as a divine gift and as a self-effacing duty to others, results in aporia. It suffers from irresolvableconceptual puzzles and is emotively counter-intuitive . As long as we try to grasp agape conceptually or intuitively via Kierkegaard’swritings, the latter will themselves constitute a scala paradisi — and must be thrown away.The only proper presentation of agape is as edification, using God’s own words of love. Kierkegaard’s“Edifying Discourses” presuppose that “the single individual” to whom they are addressed has alreadyreceived agape as a divine gift. The proper work of Christian love, then, is to build up this love thatalready exists in the reader.This paper traces these two notions of love in Kierkegaard’s writings, and their three modes ofpresentation, though it focuses in particular on the parodies of eros in the “aesthetic authorship” and theaporias of agape in the “second authorship.” It leaves the “Edifying Discourses” to build up the reader ontheir own terms. The paper also shows how Kierkegaard superimposes Hegel’s dialectic of selfhood on hisparodies of the Symposium, with particular attention to Hegel’s discussion of mutual recognition in theconstitution of selfhood, and the relations between self-recognition and work in the master/slave dialectic.These Hegelian inflections are in turn explored in the aporetic treatment of love and self in the “secondauthorship.”