I trust that I am not the only devotee of the Kierkegaard list who from time to time becomes lost who from time to time is overwhelmed by the obscurity and difficulty of the experiences and ideas that we try to explain to each other. The meaning of the words which seem to flow so readily accompanies them only haltingly. It is easy to say: God is Truth, God is self, God is subjectivity, subjectivity is truth. Christians are unchristian. All our statements about deity and matters divine are overshadowed (uebertoent) by the injunction: Thou shalt not take the nemae of the Lord thy God in vain. All our pronouncements about what is good echo back to us: judge not that ye be not judged.
I was reminded of this circumstance, when I tried, for the nth time, to wend my way into the labyrinth of Kierkegaard's Begrebet Angest, and was put off by the personified Ethics and Aesthetics, sentries positioned as it were before the garden of understanding, who would not let me pass until I had acknowledged their authority; which I, loyal to my experience that there is no absolute ethics, nor absolute esthetics, could not do. I was turned away, and replaced the volume among the many other unread volumes on my bookshelf. and went outside to rake up the leaves.
I acknowledge that it may all my own fault; a reflection of my own shortcomings, that I may not be qualified for philosophy; to the extent that philosophy requires abstract thought, and that abstract thought requires one to invest with reality the passing thought and the word that evokes it. This is the (einzigartige) unique task of philosophy, which different authors have met in different ways and to different degrees.
It is also the undertaking of Kierkegaard.