Mediation
Kierkegaard believed "each generation has its own task and need not trouble itself unduly by being everything to previous and succeeding generations". In an earlier book he had said, "to a certain degree every generation and every individual begins his life from the beginning", and in another, "no generation has learned to love from another, no generation is able to begin at any other point than the beginning", "no generation learns the essentially human from a previous one. He was against the Hegelian idea of mediation because it introduces a "third term" that comes between the single individual and the object of desire.
The individual does not relate himself to the ideal through the generation or the state or the century or the market price of human beings in the city where he lives-that is, by these things he is prevented from relating himself to the ideal-but relates himself to it even though he errs in his understanding of it. … Because of the jumbling together of the idea of the state, of sociality, of community, and of society, God can no longer catch hold of the single individual. … The immorality of our age could easily become a fantastical-ethical debilitation, the disintegration of a sensual, soft despair, in which individuals grope as in a dream for a concept of God without feeling any terror in so doing. God in the indefinite. … Let us sin, sin outright, seduce girls, murder men, rob on the highway-that at least can be repented, and God can at least catch hold of such a criminal. Let us mock God outright, this is always preferable to the debilitating importance with which one wants to demonstrate the existence of God. One demonstrates the existence of God by worship-not by demonstrations. Soren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong p. 543-545
Kierkegaard is wondering if one generation can learn wonder, love, anxiety, peace, patience, hope, from a previous generation or if each "single individual" in each generation must learn these things, for the most part, on their own. He asked the same question in Philosophical Fragments about how someone learns to become a Christian. Are we Christian because of our family and personal history or because we have made a "decisive resolution"? What kind of goods is the Christian looking to gain? Isn't hope a good and despair an evil in yourself that you work to change into a the good called hope? Isn't patience a good and impatience an evil that can be changed if you want to change it? Isn't your soul a good? Is the soul given to the chosen few or is it given as a free gift to all, without merit? Is our future a matter of fate, of choice, or a combination of both? Kierkegaard answers this way:
If a person does not first make clear to himself the meaning of “self,” it is of no use to say of sin that it is selfishness. Only when the concept of the particular is given can there be any talk of selfishness, however, no science can say what the self is without stating it quite generally. And this is the wonder of life, that each man who is mindful of himself knows what no science knows, since he knows who he himself is, and this is the profundity of the Greek saying know yourself, which too long has been understood in the German way as pure self-consciousness, the airiness of idealism. It is about time to seek to understand it in the Greek way, and then again as the Greeks would have understood it if they had possessed Christian presuppositions. However, the real “self” is posited only by the qualitative leap. In the prior state there can be no question about it. Therefore, when sin is explained by selfishness, one becomes entangled in indistinctness because, on the contrary, it is by sin and in sin that selfishness comes into being.
- Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, Nichol p. 78-79
His soul is a self-contradiction between the external and the internal, the temporal and the eternal here, therefore, the same thing can be possessed and the same thing gained at the same time. Indeed, what is more, if the soul is this contradiction, it can be possessed only in such a way that it is gained and gained in such a way that it is possessed. The person who possesses the external does not need to gain it-in fact, he is even unable to do that. He can give away what he possesses and then see whether he can gain the same thing again; he can use what he possesses to gain something new, but he cannot simultaneously possess and gain the very same thing. ... If the person who wants to gain his soul does not want to understand that when he has won patience he has won what he needed, what was of more value than any other winning, then he will never gain it. It is already obvious here how secure this gain is, since in a profound sense it is so cunning that the more the world deceives, the more patience wins. In this gain, the very condition is also the object and is independent of anything external. The condition, therefore, after it has served the gaining, remains as that which is gained; this is different from what happens when the merchant sold his merchandise and the fisherman has caught his fish-they lay aside patience and also their tools so the they may enjoy what they gained. In the external, patience is some third element that must be added, and, humanly speaking, it would be better if it were not needed; some days it is needed more, some days less, all according to fortune, whose debtor a person becomes, even though he gained ever so little, because only when he wants to gain patience does he become one’s debtor. Soren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Hong p. 163-168
Man is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal. In the former, the two factors are psyche and body, and spirit is the third, yet in such a way that one can speak of a synthesis only when the spirit is posited. The latter synthesis has only two factors, the temporal and the eternal. Where is the third factor? And if there is no third factor, there really is no synthesis, for a synthesis that is a contradiction cannot be completed as a synthesis without a third factor, because the fact that the synthesis is a contradiction asserts that it is not. What, then, is the temporal? The Concept of Anxiety p. 85
June 3 Midnight: So once again I am sitting on watch. If I were to say that to a third party, it no doubt would need an explanation, for it is readily understood that the pilot along the coast, the sentinel at the top of the tower, the lookout at the bow of a ship, and the robber in his lair sit and watch because there is something to watch for. But someone sitting alone in his room-for what can he be watching? And someone who anticipates that everything-that is, the minor little affair that everyone else would perhaps disregard-will pass quietly, he, of course, is on watch for nothing. No wonder it is a strain for his soul and his head, because to look for something is good for the eyes, but to look for nothing strains them. And when the eyes look for nothing for a long time they finally see themselves or their own seeing; in the same way the emptiness surrounding me presses my thinking back into myself. Soren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life's Way, Hong p.356-357
Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. … A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety. The Concept of Anxiety p. 96-97
Read more about this topic: The Concept Of Anxiety