"The break is not a break": Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Poesis as abiding love

If my friend says in his mind, I will never see you again, I translate it of necessity into ever. That is its definition in Love's lexicon.

--Henry David Thoreau, journal, 24 February 1857

In the chapter "Love Abides," in his Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses (1847), Soren Kierkegaard admits that while "you know indeed that God is," nevertheless at times "it seems to you as if he had receded into himself, as if he were absent in heaven far away from all these insignificant things which are hardly worth living for." In this moment of apparent abandonment, as in other despairing scenarios, Kierkegaard urges that one's consolation ought to be, "O, consider, then, that love endures!" What exactly it means for love to endure is precisely what the chapter proceeds to explicate and illustrate. In abiding love, the past is nullified by reconceiving any break not as a conclusion but as the inauguration of a possibility. The lover is one who refers to love itself before relating himself to another person, since only love is eternal, abiding, and hence capable of sustaining the lover's fortitude and faithfulness through any rupture. In the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, however, the nightmare of God's disappearance has indeed occurred. In addition, humanity has, in turn, turned away from the divine and even against its own Being, so that a double infidelity has been accomplished. Across his investigations and elucidations of the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, Heidegger puts forward the poet as the most venturesome mortal and the one who is alone capable of restoring humans and the gods to their respective Being. While the nomenclature of Heidegger's account of poetry is largely taken from specific poems, which he evokes in the service of his ontological and aesthetic preoccupations, even as he appropriates their very terms for his analyses; and while Heidegger was notoriously quiet on the subject of love as such---one may nonetheless ascertain an itinerary governing his notion of poesis as abiding love. Heidegger's poet, pursuing a "logic of the heart," abides in the holy in a manner that formally and thematically parallels the abiding in love by Kierkegaard's lover. Because of his selfless fidelity, the Heideggerian poet transcends his ontological imperative, as he founds a "sacred" ground for the mutual play of abiding love between mortals and men.

In truly Christian love, according to Kierkegaard, there is never any possible break. It is not that lovers are incapable of disagreement or incompatibility but, rather, that two people in love are each individually referred to a third term, which is love itself. "When one speaks of reaching a breaking-point," Kierkegaard argues, "this is because one is of the opinion that in love there is only a relationship between two rather than a relationship among three." Kierkegaard admits that a couple may divide, resolved to never see one another again. However, "The earnestness of Christianity immediately concentrates the attentiveness of the eternal upon the single individual, upon each single individual of the pair." By this personal, continuous referral to the eternal, "when two persons relate themselves in love to each other, each one of them all by himself is related to love." Because each lover is first committed to love itself, "Now the break does not come easily at all," since "before one comes to break his love in relationship to the other, he must first fall away from LOVE." Hence the eternal, in reigning over the relationship, insures that a forsaken but faithful lover, by abiding in love, finds that love, in turn, supports him: "in and through the break the innocent sufferer shall certainly be the stronger, if he also does not fall away from love." Whereas in a relationship between only two people one of them may wield power over the other by breaking it off, "when there are three, one person cannot do this," because "[t]he third ... is love itself, which the innocent sufferer can hold to in the break, and then the break has no power over him." Hence the "true lover," Kierkegaard concludes, "can never reach the breaking-point, for love abides."

When one breaks a relationship it is, Kierkegaard grants, "in a certain sense" broken, and "the break simply exists." However, this "certain sense" is itself simple, and Kierkegaard evokes it as a foil, to juxtapose against it the more profound Christian love that "does not recognise, does not understand, is not willing to understand" such a vulgar "sense." What makes this "certain sense" unsophisticated and, indeed, un-Christian is its unmitigated orientation toward the past. To consider a broken relationship as broken is a giving up--at once a misgiving and an overly "certain" view--as well as a giving in to the protocols of common "sense." Christian love, though, presents a radical critique of this sensibility, exposing it as nonsense. "[I]f the lover does not fall away from love," Kierkegaard proposes,