And yet the difficulty of
existence lies just in the interest of the existing being--the man who
exists is infinitely interested in existing. Abstract thought besteads
immortality only in order that it may kill me as an individual being
with an individual existence, and so make me immortal, pretty much in
the same way as that famous physician in one of Holberg's plays, whose
medicine, while it took away the patient's fever, took away his life at
the same time. An abstract thinker, who refuses to disclose and admit
the relation that exists between his abstract thought and the fact that
he is an existing being, produces a comic impression upon us, however
accomplished and distinguished he may be, for he runs the risk of
ceasing to be a man. While an effective man, compounded of infinitude
and finitude, owes his effectiveness precisely to the conjunction of
these two elements and is infinitely interested in existing, an abstract
thinker, similarly compounded, is a double being, a fantastical being,
who lives in the pure being of abstraction, and at times presents the
sorry figure of a professor who lays aside this abstract essence as he
lays aside his walking-stick. When one reads the Life of a thinker of
this kind--whose writings may be excellent--one trembles at the thought
of what it is to be a man. And when one reads in his writings that
thinking and being are the same thing, one thinks, remembering his life,
that that being, which is identical with thinking, is not precisely the
same thing as being a man" (_Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift_,
chap.
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