HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

Works of Love was published (September 29, 1847) about six months after the publication of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (March 13, 1847), a volume Kierkegaard dedicated to that single individual, Reflecting in his usual dialectical way upon the emphasis on individuality, the individual, and the single individual, Kierkegaard wrote a journal entry in which he anticipated the response to the discourses and formulated the title for his next book:

Despite everything people ought to have learned about my maieutic carefulness, by proceeding slowly and continually letting it seem as if I knew nothing more, not the next thingnow on the occasion of my new upbuilding discourses they will probably bawl out that I do not know what comes next, that I know nothing about sociality.

Now I have my theme of the next book. It will be called:

Works of Love

The writing of the First Series of Works of Love was finished in April 1847,

Preparation, however, for writing Works of Love preceded the actual writing by many years. Kierkegaards appraisal of Socrates in his dissertation (1841)

Works of Love , then, is Kierkegaards climactic consideration of erotic love and Christian love against the background of the multifarious characterizations of love in the earlier pseudonymous and signed works. The two Danish words for two kinds of love, Elskov and Kjerlighed , lend themselves to the clarifying of contrast and definition in a way not available with the single ambiguous omnibus word in English.

Kierkegaard was of the opinion, however, that the availability of the two words in Danish did not guarantee an understanding of distinctions. Therefore Works of Love is called deliberations and not discourses, because a deliberation does not presuppose the definitions as given and understood. Therefore a deliberation must first fetch people up out of the cellar, call to them, turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy with the dialectic of truth.

Works of Love , then, aims to find a reader where he is, in the ambiguities of his understanding of the nature of love. The substance within which the reader comes to see himself is a positive love ethics, in complementary contrast to the ethical discourse on purity of heart, Christian love is not simply the same as erotic love and friendship or the heightening of the immediacy of these interests. Rather it is ethical-religious love, which dethrones and catches up immediacys love, since ones beloved and friend are also neighbors.