His campaign of the "indirect communication" was thus fully determined upon; but there was still lacking the impetus of an elemental passion to start it and give it driving force and conquering persistence. This also was to be furnished him.
Shortly before his father's death he had made the acquaintance of Regine Olson, a beautiful young girl of good family. There followed one of the saddest imaginable engagements. The melancholy, and essentially lonely, thinker may not at first have entertained the thought of a lasting attachment; for had he not, on the one hand, given up all hope of worldly happiness, and on the other, begun to think of himself as a chosen tool of heaven not to be bound by the ordinary ties of human affection? But the natural desire to be as happy as others and to live man's common lot, for a moment hushed all anxious scruples. And the love of the brilliant and promising young man with the deep, sad eyes and the flashing wit was ardently returned by her.
Difficulties arose very soon. It was not so much the extreme youth and immaturity of the girl—she was barely sixteen—as against his tremendous mental development, or even her "total lack of religious pre-suppositions"; for that might not itself have precluded a happy union. Vastly more ominous was his own unconquerable and overwhelming melancholy. She could not break it. And struggle as he might, he could not banish it. And, he reasoned, even if he were successful in concealing it from her, the very concealment were a deceit. Neither would he burden her with his melancholy by revealing it to her. Besides, some mysterious ailment which, with Paul, he terms the "thorn in his flesh," tormented him. The fact that he consulted a physician makes it likely that it was bodily, and perhaps sexual. On the other hand, the manner of Kierkegaard's multitudinous references to woman removes the suspicion of any abnormality. The impression remains that at the bottom of his trouble there lay his melancholy, aggravated admittedly by an "insane education," and coupled with an exaggerated sense of a misspent youth. That nothing else prevented the union is clear from his own repeated later remarks that, with more faith, he would have married her.
Though to the end of his life he never ceased to love her, he feels that they must part. But she clings to him with a rather maudlin devotion, which, to be sure, only increased his determination. He finally hit on the desperate device of pretending frivolous indifference to her affections, and acted this sad comedy with all the dialectic subtleness of his genius, until she eventually released him. Then, after braving for a while the philistine indignation of public opinion and the disapproval of his friends, in order to confirm her in her bad opinion of him, he fled to Berlin with shattered nerves and a bleeding heart.
He had deprived himself of what was dearest to him in life. For all that, he knew that the foundations of his character remained unshaken. The voluntary renunciation of a worldly happiness which was his for the taking intensifies his idea of being one of the "few in each generation selected to be a sacrifice." Thereafter, "his thought is all to him," and all his gifts are devoted to the service of God.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, more than at any other time, Denmark was an intellectual dependency of Germany. It was but natural that Kierkegaard, in search for the ultimate verities, should resort to Berlin where Schelling was just then beginning his famous course of lectures. In many respects it may be held deplorable that, at a still formative stage, Kierkegaard should have remained in the prosaic capital of Prussia and have been influenced by bloodless abstractions; instead of journeying to France, or still better, to England whose empiricism would, no doubt, have been an excellent corrective of his excessive tendency to speculation. In fact he was quickly disappointed with Schelling and after four months returned to his beloved Copenhagen (which he was not to leave thereafter except for short periods), with his mind still busy on the problems which were peculiarly his own. The tremendous impulse given by his unfortunate engagement was sufficient to stimulate his sensitive mind to a productivity without equal in Danish literature, to create a "literature within a literature." The fearful inner collision of motives had lit an inner conflagration which did not die down for years. "My becoming an author is due chiefly to her, my melancholy, and my money."
About a year afterwards (1843) there appeared his first great work, "Either-Or," which at once established his fame. As in the case of most of his works it will be impossible to give here more than the barest outline of its plan and contents. In substance, it is a grand debate between the æsthetic and the ethic views of life. In his dissertation Kierkegaard had already characterized the æsthetic point of view. Now, in a brilliant series of articles, he proceeds' to exemplify it with exuberant detail.
The fundamental chord of the first part is struck in the Diapsalmata aphorisms which, like so many flashes of a lantern, illuminate the æsthetic life, its pleasures and its despair. The æsthetic individual—this is brought out in the article entitled "The Art of Rotation"—wishes to be the exception in human society, shirking its common, humble duties and claiming special privileges. He has no fixed principle except that he means not to be bound to anything or anybody. He has but one desire which is, to enjoy the sweets of life—whether its purely sensual pleasures or the more refined Epicureanism of the finer things in life and art, and the ironic enjoyment of one's own superiority over the rest of humanity; and he has no fear except that he may succumb to boredom.
As a comment on this text there follow a number of essays in "experimental psychology," supposed to be the fruit of the æsthete's (A's) leisure. In them the æsthetic life is exhibited in its various manifestations, in "terms of existence," especially as to its "erotic stages," from the indefinite longings of the Page to the fully conscious "sensual genius" of Don Juan—the examples are taken from Mozart's opera of this name, which was Kierkegaard's favorite—until the whole culminates in the famous "Diary of the Seducer," containing elements of the author's own engagement, poetically disguised—a seducer, by the way, of an infinitely reflective kind.
Following this climax of unrestrained æstheticism we hear in the second part the stern demands of the ethical life. Its spokesman, Judge William, rises in defense of the social institutes, and of marriage in particular, against the slurs cast on them by his young friend A. He makes it clear that the only possible outcome of the æsthetic life, with its aimlessness, its superciliousness, its vague possibilities, is a feeling of vanity and vexation of spirit, and a hatred of life itself: despair. One floundering in this inevitable slough of despond, who earnestly wishes to escape from it and to save himself from the ultimate destruction of his personality, must choose and determine to rise into the ethical sphere. That is, he must elect a definite calling, no matter how humdrum, marry, if possible, and thus subject himself to the "general law." In a word, instead of a world of vague possibilities, however attractive, he must choose the definite circumscription of the individual who is a member of society. Only thus will he obtain a balance in his life between the demands of his personality on the one hand, and of the demands of society on him. When thus reconciled to his environment—his "lot"—all the pleasures of the æsthetic sphere which he resigned will be his again in rich measure, but in a transfigured sense.