D. Worlds Apart
V. The Asymmetries of Seduction
cheerful girl. Now, I am a fairly old hand at the game, and yet I never approach a young girl other than as nature’s Venerabile [something worthy of veneration] and first learn from her. Then insofar as I may have any formative influence upon her, it is by teaching her again and again what I have learned from her. (390f.)
The contrast between the conception of men and women on display in this passage versus the one above gives a good idea of the capriciousness of Johannes’s mind. These vacillations between idolization of and condescension towards women blur the distinction between teacher and student — even, one suspects, inside his own head. The dual directionality of the educational aspect of the diary parallels the likewise mutual attentions inherent to the erotic. To have personal involvement to this extent also has implications for evaluating Johannes’s degree of detachment — from Cordelia, from the situation, from his own emotions — at the end of the seduction. This is significant because Cordelia’s personality changes over the course of the relationship, showing that infatuation makes one susceptible to alterations at a basic level of self and raising the question of the incident’s effect on Johannes.
her. While this is going on, Johannes sits back at a remove and delivers commentary on the development of the relationship between Cordelia and the simulation; it is not only his brief encounters with random women in the streets of Copenhagen that can be termed “actiones in distans.” Inasmuch as Johannes’s presence in the relationship is only as a simulation, he maintains a distance between himself and his persona that would theoretically enable him to cast off the persona after the relationship ends and thus avoid any unpleasant thoughts or emotions. For a Kierkegaardian aesthete, who values the dimensions of self that are freeing and unrestricting, an escape from consequences is highly appealing.
It should be remembered, however, that the aesthete is an unreliable narrator. His resolution at the end of the diary that “from now on she can no longer occupy my soul” (445) is little deterrence to questions about the effects of the incident on him, which even A, the editor, recognizes: “But how may things look in his own head? Just as he has led others astray, so he, I think, will end by going astray himself.” (308) Johannes intends to use infatuation for his own aesthetic ends, but one may wonder whether the emotion does not turn the tables on him.47 Does he really succeed in keeping himself outside of the relationship he has created? A sign of
Johannes’s entanglement in the situation is that what he wants for Cordelia is basically the same as what he wants for himself. That is, he wants to instill in her the same aesthetic principles that he values, and he invests as much time in her as she in him. At one point, Johannes hides a note in Cordelia’s knitting, with the explanation: “It always seems as if I were the one who paid attention to her; the advantage I have is that I am placed in her thoughts everywhere, that I surprise her everywhere.” (410) On one level, the implied deception is real, since the note does not signify what Cordelia believes it to signify: while she takes it as a sign of Johannes’s affection, he intends it as means of appearing to have affection for her and thereby encouraging her affection
47 See also Bradley R. Dewey, who makes the case that Johannes is “demonically entrap[ped]” by his own practices. “The Erotic-Demonic in Kierkegaard’s ‘Diary of the Seducer,’” Scandinavica 10 (1971): 2.
for him. On another level, however, Johannes is only deceiving himself here: he in fact does pay attention to Cordelia, since a great deal of thought and planning is required both to compose the note and to arrange for its ‘delivery.’ Another sign that Johannes is not as much in control of his own practice as he imagines is this double-edged statement: “She will believe me, partly because I rely on my artistry, and partly because at the bottom of what I am doing there is truth.” (384) The
“truth” is to be found not only in the (very compelling) appeal of aesthetic values, but also in the nature of Johannes’s seduction. Whereas in an ‘ordinary’ seduction, infatuation is absent on one or both sides, in this intellectual–spiritual seduction, it is present on both sides — that is its
“truth.” And it is an actual infatuation, not a simulation, despite the amount of manipulation used to generate it.48
When Johannes knows that the end of the relationship is approaching, he engages in some lengthy reflections on the nature of women, which are actually a blatantly obvious rationalization of his behavior in seducing them. Johannes, ever the master of reflection, demonstrates what philosophical acrobatics are possible through the power of ‘deliberation’: “The more I deliberate on the matter, the more I see that my practice is in complete harmony with my theory. My practice, namely, has always been imbued with the conviction that woman is essentially being- for-other.” (432) Although he is not quite so obvious as to say it explicitly, the clear implication is that woman exists so that man can do what he wishes with her — seducing her, for example.
These prime examples of self-deception show why Kierkegaard is considered a forerunner of existentialism, with its close scrutiny of ‘bad faith.’ Despite having just finished teaching Cordelia to think like an aesthete, despite having “awakened multiple-tongued reflection” (309), Johannes claims that women are basically vegetables: “Woman’s being (the word ‘existence’ already says too much, for she does not subsist out of herself) is correctly designated as gracefulness, an
48 Even Johannes himself realizes and acknowledges that his infatuation is real: “That I actually am in love I can tell partly by the secrecy with which I treat this matter, almost even with myself” (336).
expression that is reminiscent of vegetative life; she is like a flower, as the poets are fond of saying, and even the intellectual [aandelige] is present in her in a vegetative way.” (431) By dehumanizing women, Johannes can pretend that the seduction will not have emotional, mental, or other significant consequences for Cordelia. As offensive as it is to seduce a person, and as doubly offensive as it is to claim that it was all right to do it, nevertheless this rationalization also seems to indicate some stirring of the ethical in him — otherwise, why would he demonstrate such strong signs of a subconscious effort to avoid imagining Cordelia as a person? Neither Johannes’s disavowal of his own responsibility nor his devaluation of Cordelia remains coherent in the face of his earlier statements — for example: “Do I love Cordelia? Yes! […] I am one of the few who can do this, and she is one of the few qualified for it; so are we not suited to each other?” (385) Although contradictions like these can be explained away by again returning to the argument that aesthetes do not insist on consistency, it is this very type of circular reasoning that leads A to suspect in his preface that all is not well with Johannes. In this way, The Seducer’s Diary is a demonstration — as opposed to an explanation — of a flaw in the aesthetic viewpoint.
The outcome for Johannes suggests, further, that infatuation is so close to a person’s fundamental beliefs, desires, and conception of self that when one becomes as deeply involved in it as both Johannes and Cordelia do during this relationship, it is impossible not to be affected by the specific processes that characterize the emotion. In so doing, The Seducer’s Diary proclaims its own impossibility as a narrative; it postulates a situation which must on some level appear absurd to the reader. How could Johannes’s degree of empathetic involvement in another person’s interiority coexist with such a lack of ethical scruples? The text only makes sense as a thought experiment. The seducer makes a comment about himself that applies equally well to the diary as a whole, as well as to Kierkegaard’s texts in general: “I am a friend of freedom of thought, and no thought is so absurd that I do not have the courage to stick to it.” (369) Since emotion is an
evaluation capable of accommodating many factors at once, sometimes it can provide insight into complex interconnections which one’s linear thought operation cannot comprehend; as Cordelia writes in one of her letters to Johannes after the end of the relationship: “That you did love me, I know, even though I do not know what it is that makes me sure of it.” (313)