1. Kierkegaard spent four hundred pages trying to say what love is. IMO he failed magnificently. Following fragments are my own failure.
2. Kierkegaard distinguishes between Elskov and Kjerlighed i.e. erotic love and the love of God. The former is preferential; the latter is duty. The former selects; the latter is commanded.
3. Preferential love is at bottom self-love. The beloved is called "the other I," the friend "the other self." But if the object of my love is another version of myself, how have I left my own house? The neighbor alone stands outside the circle of the I. I will show in 24 that even this shattering may be a form of gift.
4. In the former kind, lovers claims eternal faithfulness, but by what authority? They swear by their love to love forever, instead of swearing by eternity to love. In my experience poetry cannot vouch for itself.
5. Spontaneous love promises but does not endure. It has existence but not what Kierkegaard calls "enduring continuance." It is subject to change, to jealousy, to habit, to despair. Only that which becomes duty can become eternal. Yet I wonder, as I will in 26, whether a love that cannot fail is still recognizable as love at all.
6. The poet is not a Christian, qua poet.
7. "You shall love." The command seems to contradict love or whatever I think love is. Love ought to be free, spontaneous, unchosen. How can duty coexist with devotion? Consider only when love becomes duty is it secured against change. The will that says "I shall" stakes everything on the eternal; the feeling that says "I want" is hostage to tomorrow. One might object, as I do in 30, that this security comes at too high a price.
8. It's claimed that preferential love makes one blind. But this blindness is only a sharper sight for the one beloved and a deeper blindness to all others (do not that I'm not speaking about lust, but actual preferential love). All forms of blindness have their justification and neither can claim the whole truth.
9. IMHO Self-love wants the exceptional. It seeks what is rare and admirable and distinguished. But is it a perfection in love that it can love only the extraordinary? If so, then God is poorly placed, since for Him the extraordinary does not exist; all are equal before Him. To love only the rare is not strength but limitation. This much is true. See also 28.
10. The aforementioned kind of love and friendship are good fortune. One cannot deserve them and also one cannot command them into existence. They happen or do not happen.
11. Someone who cannot give up his beloved has made an idol and the friend who cannot release his friend has formed an alliance against the world. This is the critique. And yet, as I will suggest in 32, there may be a kind of devotion that the critique cannot reach.
12. "One hundred cannons cannot wake you, but the eternal can." I think Kierkegaard knew what habit is.
13. Death can take love and betrayal can remove friend.
14. He never had to renounce Regine.
15. Only one being can be loved more than oneself, and this has to do with the command being "as yourself" and not more.
16. If you search the New Testament and you will not find a single word about erotic love in the poet's sense, not a single verse on friendship in the Greek sense.
17. Unlike the other, the commanded love does not require that you wander the earth searching for the beloved, as the romantic imagination suggests. Open your door: the neighbor stands there. There is no delay, no quest, no riddle. And yet this shortest path is the hardest, precisely because it offers no selection, no drama, no story worth telling.
18. Other loves are defined by their objects; the beloved must be good and beautiful and the friend must be wise, the admired one must be exceptional. But the divine has no such qualifications; therefore love for God is defined only by love itself.
19. Health and love are not the same kind of thing, and what counts as weakness in the body may be depth in the soul.
20. Spontaneous love is in despair, even when happy since it stakes everything on what can change. Only the love that becomes duty escapes despair, because it has undergone eternity's change. This is the argument for duty, and it is powerful. But despair, as may not be the worst thing; there are worse fates than mourning what was loved and lost.
21. The equality of Christianity is not the equality of politics. This is a noble vision, whatever one thinks of its practicability.
22. The beloved is called "the other I." But God is "the other you." The I and the other I form a closed circuit; the I and the you break the circuit open.
23. Love of the divine sees it only with closed eyes. The open eye has its own wisdom.
24. In erotic love, the two become one I. In loving God, the two remain two, eternally distinct spirits. The I does not swallow the you; the you stands as an independent claim. This is where preferential love begins to reassert itself, for in the fusion of erotic love something is created that meeting alone cannot produce. The one I is also the generation of a new reality, sometimes a child, sometimes a shared life, sometimes simply a We that neither party could have produced alone.
25. Is there not something right in the devotion?
26. If love cannot fail, if the neighbor can always be replaced (as in 13), what exactly is being risked?
27. Kierkegaard writes elsewhere that to love is to presuppose that love is in the other. This is why divine love can never fail since it does not wait for the other to be lovable but sees already. So to presuppose love in the other is perhaps to fail to see the other at all i.e. to see only what I have projected. The "as yourself" in the commandment may cut both ways, it may be permission to love the self rightly.
28. Preferential love has something to say for itself: dissimilarity is not only a costume. The particular face of the beloved and the specific voice of the friend are not accidents but maybe a medium through which love arrives. To love God is to love anyone; to love the beloved is to love this one, irreplaceable, never to be seen again. There is a loss in universality that no amount of eternal security can compensate.
29. Kierkegaard says that if you invite only friends and relatives, that is dinner; if you invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, that is the banquet.
30. Preferential love is competitive. The lovers stand together against the world and friends form an alliance that excludes all others. But divine love forms no alliance.
31. The command to love is an offense since love must be free. It offends the natural man, who wants to choose whom he loves. But offense is not the same as error; what offends may also be true.
32. God need not reciprocate. You love because you shall, and in this shall you are freed from the endless anxious judgment of whether the other is worthy. A devotion that does not judge the beloved worthy but simply loves and without duty and without command. Also without shall.
33. Kierkegaard says that love is known by its fruits. But giving to the poor and clothing the naked, all can be done without love. Joy of preferential love may be more real than any duty because it does not need to justify itself.
34. Love must be commanded but once commanded it must become free. I do not know how to solve this. Preferential loves know nothing about this because they were never commanded, they flourish, and (as in 5) die.
35. It might be one of the only things, or maybe the only thing, that makes life bearable. Divine love cannot be lost because God is always there; erotic love can be lost utterly, and therefore it is, in its own way, more serious.
36. The other kind of love and friendship are good fortune but not virtue.
37. The commandment remains. Maybe I am to fulfill it or maybe not. This too is the work of love. But so is the other work: staying up at night, waiting for what may not come, refusing to be comforted by the God who is always already there.

These notes were extracted from Emacs org-noter file of (Kierkegaard 1995) which I've been reading since the 3rd of Jan and until 4 days ago. Few of the are so based off the book, and I don't attribute them to be my genuine thoughts. #Modus Vivendi #Philosophy #Love