Love and Authenticity

[A]nd if someone truly experiences love, no one must envy him: for each and every individual in his entire generation is sustained by this experience. And this holds true also of hope: if someone gains it — what blessed gain!-then it benefits everyone at the same time….

This is the crucial difference between spiritual and earthly values: the more one possesses in an earthly way, the less another one is bound to have….

Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, Vol. 5

Here Kierkegaard grasps the very essence of agape, of genuine, unselfish love. In the Journals and Papers of his last years we discover an increasing, deepening awareness of this transcendental love, of this intersubjective relatedness to all fellow human beings. Anna Paulsen describes sensitively Kierkegaard's earlier struggle to distance himself from the aesthetic stage in which the individual, detached from God, tends to experience the “Other” exclusively as an object (Paulsen, 1973). Discussing his anguish and guilt over breaking his engagement to Regina Olsen, she concludes that he had feared lest he would turn Regina into an (erotic) object, since he still experienced himself, at the time, trapped by the aesthetic mode-or stage-of existence. Recognizing that the crucial question in marriage is whether a person is capable of tolerating an individual “Thou” at his side, Kierkegaard underlines two possible failures in this respect: One consists in needing to shape and control the partner; the other consists in becoming compliant, dependent, self-effacing, and unwilling to be the Self one is. Neither the benevolent tyrant nor the kindly submissive person respect and tolerate genuine selfhood in the other. Freedom is threatened. Love remains aesthetic, remains Eros.

Generalizing, Kierkegaard emphasizes that only genuine individualities can provide a healthy, strong social texture. Inauthentic relationships are based on dominance, submission, or mutual dependence (fusion); in