reconstruct of the actuality of his relationship with Cordelia. Johannes himself is the pre-eminent illustration of the theme first introduced by Victor Eremita’s thought “that the outer is certainly not the inner” (6).
Only in the fourth diary entry does Johannes catch sight of Cordelia for the first time, and there his infatuation begins. It looks as though he chooses her at random, since his interest is set off by a very brief sighting in a public space. The fact that she turns out to have superior personal qualities (which make her especially suitable to Johannes’s purpose) appears, on the surface, to be a matter of chance. While the initial encounter did indeed happen by chance, Johannes’s
recognition of something special in Cordelia is not chance at all, but rather the result of long practice in the evaluation of strangers. After all, wandering about in public places observing people is Johannes’s specialty.
Infatuation has an ambiguous history, having often been known to overwhelm a person and drive him or her to perform uncharacteristic actions; on balance, it is doubtful whether it has resulted in more benefit or harm. Foolishness implies, at the very least, a mistake or error. It would be too severe to claim that infatuation always leads to error. However, the other terminological option —
“falling in love” — employs the metaphor of falling, which itself suggests, among other things, the possibility of personal injury. Given the choice between harsh terms, ‘infatuation’ seems to be the less ambiguous and more versatile.
By contrast, ‘love’ will be defined here as a long-term attitude towards a person; love has more of a history. Infatuation can — though not necessarily must — lead to love through a process of transition. It will suffice merely to mention this distinction, since love is not the main focus here, but rather serves as a contrasting term, bracketing out some things that are not part of the present discussion. Of course, love is a very complicated emotion in itself, and has been the exclusive topic of numerous studies.23 The concept of love as distinct from infatuation does also exist in the universe of Either/Or, as evidenced by the fact that Judge William from Part II declares himself a strong advocate of marital love, which would fall into this category of a long- term emotion.24
To some extent, these romantic processes are not merely a matter of definition, since they have roots in biology. Experimental results have shown that infatuation correlates to increases in hormone levels, and that these increases have a limited duration.25 However, because the current
23 Philosophical works dealing with love include, among others, Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:
The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: UP, 2001); Robert Solomon, About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); and Aaron Ben-Ze’ev and Ruhama Goussinsky, In the Name of Love: Romantic Ideology and Its Victims (Oxford: UP, 2008).
24 Judge William emphasizes several times that love has a history; for example: “Marital love manifests itself as historical by being a process of assimilation; it tries its hand at what is experienced and refers what it has experienced to itself.” Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part II, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: UP, 1987), 97.
25 Donatella Marazziti and Domenico Canale, “Hormonal Changes When Falling in Love,”
Psychoneuroendocrinology 29, no. 7 (2004): 933f.
state of scientific understanding cannot provide lines of demarcation for these terms, a more speculative, conceptual definition will serve the present purpose. Attempts to explain the phenomenon of infatuation solely in terms of biological sexual drives fail to do justice to the cognitive intricacies involved and can come to seem like a means of blaming the body and vindicating the mind in a dubious dualism, or of shifting responsibility entirely onto genetics while ignoring the individual’s powers of self-creation. On the other hand, it is justifiable to consider infatuation as an intellectual–emotional matter without reference to the physicality of love: hormones, pheromones, beauty, attractiveness. Contemporary society has ample empirical evidence from the phenomenon of online dating that an infatuation can form in the absence of physical interaction with its object. Even before the present era, fictional texts had the power to inspire states of infatuation in their readers. Thus, while physical characteristics can and often do contribute to the formation of an infatuation, they are not a prerequisite.
The Seducer’s Diary is heavily skewed towards the cognitive aspects of infatuation, which is not surprising considering the non-physicality of the literary medium. Yet the reasons for the seduction being constructed in this way go deeper: in an essay in Part I of Either/Or entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical Erotic,” the author A mentions the possibility of an
“intellectual–spiritual”26 seduction, as opposed to the “sensuous” seductions being discussed in his piece on Mozart’s Don Giovanni. (97) This is just such a possibility to pique the interest of the aesthete, since it would be much more complex and interesting than a merely sensuous seduction, so it is no wonder that A becomes entangled (to whatever degree one wishes to believe) in the narrative of Johannes the Seducer. When Johannes describes his budding infatuation as being “in
26 In the original Danish, this is one word, aandelig, which has both of these meanings. (For readers familiar with German but not Danish, it may be helpful to mention that this word corresponds to geistig.) Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vol. 2, Enten – Eller. Første Del, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon, and Finn Hauberg Mortensen (Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret and Gads Vorlag, 1997), 101.
motion within oneself” (326), he is describing the activity of creating narratives; the content of these narratives centers around interactions with the object of one’s infatuation.27 Infatuation involves an evaluation of another person in relation to one’s own latent beliefs about what one wants out of life. The Encyclopedia of Human Emotions identifies passion and physiological arousal as key features of infatuation, but also acknowledges that cognitive factors play a role, particularly “intrusive thinking and preoccupation with the other,” “intense longing for union with the other,” and “idealization of the other.”28 These are some of the patterns of thought that Johannes simulates in himself and encourages in Cordelia in order to further her infatuation with him. The emotion develops from a critical mass — varying widely according to individual
psychological makeup — of evaluations to the effect that associating with the person under consideration will produce desirable outcomes. This could mean anything across a broad range of possibilities, both actual and anticipated, including but not limited to: the fun of engaging in activities of mutual interest; enjoyment derived from the partner’s sense of humor, wit, charisma, sociability, kindness, inventiveness, or other personal qualities; stimulating conversation; sexual gratification; financial security; pride in the physical appearance, success, accomplishments, social standing, etc. of one’s partner; the possibility of raising children together; a reduction in
loneliness; ego gratification due to compliments, attention, or affection given by the partner.
Whether these things have the potential to contribute to an infatuation and to what extent depends on how highly a particular individual values them. The diversity of this list attests to the complexity of the set of evaluations that indicate whether or not a person is viewed as a good fit with one’s romantic aspirations; when it is furthermore considered that many of these evaluations
27 According to Joseph Kupfer, infatuation involves daydreams, which would be a form of imagined life (narrative). See Kupfer, “Romantic Love,” Journal of Social Philosophy 24, no. 3 (1993): 112.
28 David Levinson, James J. Ponzetti Jr., and Peter F. Jorgensen, ed., Encyclopedia of Human Emotions (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 402.
may take place at a subconscious level, it becomes easier to understand why infatuations often seem to arise suddenly and out of nowhere.
For Johannes, Cordelia provides the occasion for aesthetic enjoyments of various kinds, and he recognizes immediately that she can be that occasion. For Cordelia, on the other hand, the infatuation which she gradually develops for Johannes is based on concrete beliefs about her life.
Therefore, seducing her requires that Johannes become very well acquainted with her psychology.