Two Upbuilding Discourses, 1843

Soren Kierkegaard published Two Upbuilding Discourses three months after the publication of his big book, Either/Or, which ended without a conclusion to the argument between A, the aesthete and B, the ethicist, as to which is the best way to live one's life. Kierkegaard hoped the book would transform everything for both of them into inwardness. In 1832 Hegel began an argument with Christianity by saying that knowledge is not something hurtful to faith but helpful. He says, philosophy (the love of knowledge) "has the same content as religion." This is due, in part, to the efforts of "Anselm and Abelard, who further developed the essential structure of faith" in the Middle Ages. Hegel wants people to base their belief in God on knowledge rather than faith, but, Kierkegaard wants each single individual to act out their faith before God. Faith isn't won by mental toil, it's won by personal struggle and the help of God. Kierkegaard steers his readers away from the outer world of observation to the inner world of faith.

Upbuilding was translated Edifying in 1946 when David F. Swenson first translated them. They became Upbuilding Discourses in Howard V. Hong's translation of 1990. Kierkegaard compared the poet, A in Either/Or, to the upbuilding speaker in a book published in 1846, "the decisive difference between the poet and the upbuilding speaker remains, namely, that the poet has no end or goal other than psychological truth and the art of presentation, whereas the speaker in addition has principally the aim of transposing everything into the upbuilding. The poet becomes absorbed in the portrayal of the passion, but for the upbuilding speaker this is only the beginning, and the next is crucial for him-to compel the stubborn person to disarm, to mitigate, to elucidate, in short, to cross over into the upbuilding." And what did edifying or upbuilding mean to Kierkegaard? He explained this in relation to love in 1847, "To build up is to presuppose love; to be loving is to presuppose love; only love builds up. To build up is to erect something from the ground up – but, spiritually, love is the ground of everything. No human being can place the ground of love in another person’s heart; yet love is the ground, and we build up only from the ground up; therefore we can build up only by presupposing love. Take love away – then there is no one who builds up and no one who is built up."