The Erotic Phenomenology in Kierkegaard’s Mozart

Abstract

1843 was a crowded and eventful year for Kierkegaard. His decision to break his engagement to Regina Olsen, two years before, came as the culmination of his agonizing self-questioning, and it prompted still further questioning which now flowed into some of his highest creativity. Could the decision about Regina be justified on rational grounds? In Fear and Trembling (May, 1843), his “sacrifice” of Regina was transformed into Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, with the conclusion that a choice is truly “religious” when it is based on no criteria whatever. Could love itself be reiterated, recaptured, without being corrupted by the experience of love itself? In Repetition (May), he asks whether a return to innocence is at all possible, a return to Adam’s state prior to the fall, and the question therefore touches on the possibility of spiritual redemption itself. In Either/Or (February), he weighs the choice between the “aesthetic” life of cool detachment and the “ethical” life of obligation, as in marriage. The choice is by no means a “neat” one for him; he can in no way remain objective and uninvolved. There is some help for him in the fact that these books, crowding upon one another (along with the Edifying Discourses to accompany each) in such a compressed space in that one year, are written pseudonymously, giving him a distance denied by time.