t seems impossible for the Kierkegaard of Works of Love to imagine a world where the erotic or the aesthetic can provide any sense of cohesion whatsoever. He argues that only the love of God can abide, and that any attempt to find comfort in the work of a divine where love does not abide, is false—ethically and morally false, but also inaccurate—there is no veracity in it, so when he writes: “That love abides, or more correctly, whether it actually abides in this and that case or whether it cease, is something that occupies people’s thoughts in very many ways, is often the subject of their conversation, and is most often the principal content of all poet’s tales. That love abides is then represented as praiseworthy, but as disgraceful that it does not abide, that it ceases, that it changes. Only the first is love; the second proves by the change not to be love—and therefore not to have been love either.” (303).
There are a number of problems with this, a number of roadblocks—some more complicated than others. There is the question of ablation of self; of how to properly ablate and how to know if the ablation of self occurs—but also the idea that in the midst of sexual love, even in the moment of bodies interacting, together, this becomes a kind of ablation of self. The self leaves and enters into the body of the lover—just as the moment of rapture that occurs when the sublimity of an aesthetic experience forces one out of the moment—that sublimity—of the sound, or the sight, or touch, by being grounded in the body, separates the body from the time and place that it is living. Kierkegaard seems to think that the erotic and the aesthetic are selfish, that they force the physical appetites outside of a search for the divine, but there is potential in the body, and it’s recognition of its own ablation through instead of against sensual pleasure.
If this is true---if the temporal and the sensual can successfully ablate the self—if the daily pleasures can allow us to evade the suffering of the world—then Kierkegaard’s supposition that “Yet even if we wanted to forget actuality, forget how the world is, and poetically transfer the whole relation into the realm of the imagination, it lies in the very nature of the matter that in the relation between human beings unselfishness is required for truthfully praising love” (371) seems to be missing the point. The eternal, becomes a mystery that cannot be solved, or at least solved through suffering, does not allow us to live in the world, does not give us a proper or effective framework for handling suffering.
Acknowledging that Kierkegaard is correct—that the eternal cannot be known, and that the world is filled with suffering—and that even aesthetic/sexual pleasure is temporary and unstable, the reader wonders if opposite conclusions can be reached. In the lover’s bed, or in the concert hall, or in the museum, a brief moment of transcendence, against the pains of the world, as a way to alleviate suffering, becomes a way of recognizing the inaccessibility of the eternal. In this sense, instead of seeking the stability of the eternal, of a perfect kind of love that will last forever—but only if one properly bifurcates the self, foreground the instability of the temporal, of an imperfect kind of love that will never last, but will acknowledge the chaos of the world. So suffering exists, and pleasure exists, but suffering and pleasure are transient, and the moral act is not to destroy the transicence, but to move past it, to ride that transience, until it ends—the flux of the world and the desire for the divine moving in and out of each other, with a refusal of the utopic.