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     From the translator's footnotes to my German edition of the
Diary of the Seducer, I glean the following relevant comment by
Kierkegaard concerning his plans for Either Or:

     "In Victor Eremita's preface to the Diary
     of the Seducer it should be remarked:
     If I could find in Denmark a highly educated
     aestheticist, I should ask him to answer the
     question, whether he thought that this work
     issued from the hand of a happy or of an
     unhappy individual, whether it reflected
     the observation of happy or of unhappy love,
     whether it was an unusually faithful, or a
     totally unfaithful individual." (Papirer III B 170)

     This comment gives insight into Kierkegaard's notion of the
various inquiries that might appropriately be addressed to a
specialist in aesthetics: inquiries about happiness, about love,
about personal loyalty, - a diversity of concerns that one might
do well to keep in mind when one inquires about "Kierkegaard's
aesthetics" or when one tries to understand what Assessor Wilhelm
might mean by the aesthetic validity of marriage which he
purports to expound in the second part of Either Or.

     This comment also suggests that the ambivalence of much, if
not all of Kierkegaard's writings may be premeditated and
deliberate, and that it might be incongruous to try to interpret
Either Or as a morality tale, where a young man, like Hercules at
the Crossroads, is confronted with a clear choice between good
and evil, between right and wrong.  I suspect that a similar
calculated reliance on ambiguity could be traced into
Kierkegaard's philosophical, and even into his religious
writings.

     It dawned on me, as I read Kierkegaard's questions to the
hypothetical aestheticist, that Kierkegaard has in fact
improvised an immensely effective - and popular parlor game, a
sophisticated spiritual and intellectual inkblot test, the
nucleus of which is a studied ambiguity that gives each
participant the opportunity to project in his manner, be it
impassioned and impetuous, be it detached and deliberate, his
view of himself and the world into the approximated translations
of an obscure text, to discover himself in discovering the "true"
Kierkegaard, to define truth in presuming to ascertain what
Kierkegaard really meant, where what Kierkegaard "really meant"
is within broad limits what the reader wants to believe to be
true.

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