What's the most prominent learning "Diary of a Sudecer" might provide to its readers?
For those who are not aware, âDiary of a Seducerâ (or âThe Seducerâs Diaryâ) is the last part of the first half of Søren Kierkegaard's Either/Or (1843).
Throughout this book, Kierkegaard writes under various pseudonyms, a device intended to put distance between himself and the views contained therein. For the Diary, he creates even more distance, by having it be âdiscoveredâ by the writer of that section in the papers of another man he calls âJohannesâ (the seducer). Even so, it is important to keep in mind that there is something of Kierkegaard in all of his personas, no matter how many levels of pseudonymous nesting he has constructed.
Kierkegaard, known for his appreciation of irony, has several different and seemingly contradictory goals in his presentation of the Diary.
Like the other parts of the first half of Either/Or, the Diary aims to show us that there is something appealing and valuable about the aesthetic view of life. The seducer's quest is for the beautiful and the interesting, and his entire life (as it is shown to us) is built around trying to bring these ideals into reality, to experience them fully and completely, if only for a single moment. Kierkegaard wants us to see that there is something important and true in both the desire for the aesthetic ideal and the drive to achieve it even at great cost.
But at the same time, the cost here seems too much. The seducer manipulates both his target (a teenage girl named Cordelia) and others with virtually no concern for their well-being. In the depths of his depravity, the seducer is willing to inflict almost any level of psychological damage in order to attain his own aesthetic goals. His only desire is to possess what is beautiful and interesting, an obsession that is often pathological.
The purpose of this is not only to turn the reader against the idea of a purely aesthetic life. Kierkegaard had a much more personal goal in mind, as well.
Less than two years prior to the publication of Either/Or, Kierkegaard broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen, and he wanted to make it clear to her that the break was final. The Diary was meant to aid in this goal, by mirroring aspects of his relationship with Olsen, and to convince her that he was a scoundrel, an immoral person, and certainly not someone that she would ever want to marry.
In his Journals and Papers, Kierkegaard writes: âWhen I left âher,â I begged God for one thing, that I might succeed in writing and finishing Either/Or (this was also for her sake, because The Seducerâs Diary was, in fact, intended to repel, or as it says in Fear and Trembling, âWhen the baby is to be weaned, the mother blackens her breast.â)...â In another entry he tells us that âthere was nothing else for me to do but to venture to the uttermost, to support her, if possible, by means of deception, to do everything to repel her from me, to rekindle her pride.â
If his goal with the Diary was to appear repulsive to women, Kierkegaard certainly succeeds. Beyond the manipulation itself and the total disregard for basic morality that it requires, the seducer often belittles and dehumanizes women, treating them as nothing but means to his own pleasure.
But while we might reject the seducer himself as a horrible person, Kierkegaard doesn't want us to reject the aesthetic life entirely. There is something good about the pursuit of the beautiful and interesting; the problem is that the seducer goes much too far. As such, the negative moral judgment that is produced in the reader by the seducer's actions can be seen as setting the stage for the second half of Either/Or on the ethical life.
Kierkegaard writes (again in Journals and Papers): âThe schism: something is true in poetry that is untrue in life, is cancelled. All romantic love is essentially deceit. The seducer does not lack the erotic, wants to sacrifice everything for his idea, but he does not believe in the durability of love, it is his heresy; but the same is true of any hero in a novel, only we do not come to see it. âThe Seducerâs Diaryâ thus forms the transition to the ethicist and is very far from being immoral.â
Kierkegaard goes on to show us that the purely ethical life is lacking as well. In fact, his overall project in Either/Or can be seen as a dual critique of German Romanticism (the aesthetic life) and Kantian/Hegelian rationalism (the ethical life). On this view, while Kierkegaard thinks there is something of value in both of these schools of thought, his aim is to push us towards a kind of transcendence of the merely aesthetic and the merely ethical, by seeing them as stages on the way to the life of faith, a point that he would go on to make more explicit in his later work Stages on Life's Way (1845).
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