Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

rdf:langString Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

rdf:langString The Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (Danish: Opbyggelige Taler), sometimes called the Eighteen Edifying Discourses, is a collection of discourses produced by Søren Kierkegaard during the years of 1843 and 1844. Although he published some of his works using pseudonyms, these discourses were signed his own name as author. His discourses stress love, joy, faith, gratitude, thanksgiving, peace, adversity, impartiality, and equality before God and recommends them to the single individual. These discourses are not the same as a sermon because a sermon is preached to a congregation while a discourse can be carried on between several people or even with oneself. These discourses or conversations should be "upbuilding", which means one would build up the other person, or oneself, rather than tear down in order to build up. Kierkegaard said: "Although this little book (which is called 'discourses,' not sermons, because its author does not have authority to 'preach', "upbuilding discourses," not discourses for upbuilding, because the speaker by no means claims to be a 'teacher') wishes to be only what it is, a superfluity, and desires only to remain in hiding". He also wrote that he was without authority and he explained what he meant in his Journals The reason I have always spoken of myself as being without authority is that I personally have felt that there was too much of the poetic in me, furthermore that I feel aided by something higher, and also that I am put together backwards, but then, too, because I perceive that the profound suffering of my life and also my guilt make me need an enormous measure of Christianity, while at the same time I am fearful of making it too heavy for someone who may not need so great a measure. Of course neither the God-man nor an apostle can have such a concern-but then I am just a poor human being. * Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers VI 289 n. 6587 (1850) Martin Buber discussed his idea of the Single One this way: Kierkegaard’s “to become a Single One” is, as we have seen, not meant Socratically. The goal of this becoming is not the “right” life, but the entry into a relation. “To become” means here to become for something, “for” in the strict sense which simply transcends the circle of the person himself. It means to be made ready for the one relation which can be entered into only by the Single One, the one; the relation for whose man exists. This relation is an exclusive one, the exclusive one, and this means, according to Kierkegaard, that it is the relations which in virtue of its unique essential life expels all other relations into the realm of the unessential. “Everyone should be chary about having to do with ‘the others’, and should essentially speak only with God and with himself,” he says in the exposition of the category. Everyone, so it is to be understood, because everyone can be the one. Martin Buber, Between Man And Man, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith, 1947 p. 50