Moore's law (updated)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A plot of CPU transistor counts against dates of introduction.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. The period is often quoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Intel executive David House (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).

Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. Digital electronics has contributed to world economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth.

Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend and not a physical or natural law. Although the rate held steady from 1975 until around 2012, the rate was faster during the first decade. In general, it is not logically sound to extrapolate from the historical growth rate into the indefinite future. For example, the 2010 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors predicted that growth would slow around 2013, and in 2015 Gordon Moore foresaw that the rate of progress would reach saturation: "I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so."

Intel stated in 2015 that the pace of advancement has slowed, starting at the 22 nm feature width around 2012, and continuing at 14 nm. Brian Krzanich, the former CEO of Intel, announced, "Our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." Intel is expected to reach the 10 nm node in 2018, a three-year cadence. Intel also stated in 2017 that hyperscaling would be able to continue the trend of Moore's law and offset the increased cadence by aggressively scaling beyond the typical doubling of transistors. Krzanich cited Moore's 1975 revision as a precedent for the current deceleration, which results from technical challenges and is "a natural part of the history of Moore's law".

History

Gordon Moore in 2004

 

In 1959, Douglas Engelbart discussed the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in the article "Microelectronics, and the Art of Similitude". Engelbart presented his ideas at the 1960 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where Moore was present in the audience.

For the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, which was published on April 19, 1965, Gordon E. Moore, who was working as the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor at the time, was asked to predict what was going to happen in the semiconductor components industry over the next ten years. His response was a brief article entitled, "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits". Within his editorial, he speculated that by 1975 it would be possible to contain as many as 65,000 components on a single quarter-inch semiconductor.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

His reasoning was a log-linear relationship between device complexity (higher circuit density at reduced cost) and time.

At the 1975 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, Moore revised the forecast rate. Semiconductor complexity would continue to double annually until about 1980 after which it would decrease to a rate of doubling approximately every two years. He outlined several contributing factors for this exponential behavior:

• die sizes were increasing at an exponential rate and as defective densities decreased, chip manufacturers could work with larger areas without losing reduction yields;
• simultaneous evolution to finer minimum dimensions;
• and what Moore called "circuit and device cleverness".

Shortly after 1975, Caltech professor Carver Mead popularized the term "Moore's law".

Despite a popular misconception, Moore is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months. 

An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, with a Zilog Z80 4 MHz CPU, and a 2007 Apple iPhone with a 412 MHz ARM11 CPU; the Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, costs approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone.

 

Moore's law came to be widely accepted as a goal for the industry, and it was cited by competitive semiconductor manufacturers as they strove to increase processing power. Moore viewed his eponymous law as surprising and optimistic: "Moore's law is a violation of Murphy's law. Everything gets better and better." The observation was even seen as a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, the rate of improvement in physical dimensions known as Dennard scaling has slowed in recent years; and the industry shifted in about 2016 from using semiconductor scaling as a driver to more of a focus on meeting the needs of major computing applications.

In April 2005, Intel offered US$10,000 to purchase a copy of the original Electronics issue in which Moore's article appeared. An engineer living in the United Kingdom was the first to find a copy and offer it to Intel.

Moore's second law

As the cost of computer power to the consumer falls, the cost for producers to fulfill Moore's law follows an opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. Rising manufacturing costs are an important consideration for the sustaining of Moore's law. This had led to the formulation of Moore's second law, also called Rock's law, which is that the capital cost of a semiconductor fab also increases exponentially over time.

Major enabling factors

The trend of scaling for NAND flash memory allows doubling of components manufactured in the same wafer area in less than 18 months.

 

Numerous innovations by scientists and engineers have sustained Moore's law since the beginning of the integrated circuit (IC) era. Some of the key innovations are listed below, as examples of breakthroughs that have advanced integrated circuit technology by more than seven orders of magnitude in less than five decades:

• The foremost contribution, which is the raison d'être for Moore's law, is the invention of the integrated circuit, credited contemporaneously to Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.
• The invention of the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process by Frank Wanlass in 1963, and a number of advances in CMOS technology by many workers in the semiconductor field since the work of Wanlass, have enabled the extremely dense and high-performance ICs that the industry makes today.
• The invention of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) technology by Robert Dennard at IBM in 1967 made it possible to fabricate single-transistor memory cells, and the invention of flash memory by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in the 1980s led to low-cost, high-capacity memory in diverse electronic products.
• The invention of chemically-amplified photoresist by Hiroshi Ito, C. Grant Willson and J. M. J. Fréchet at IBM c. 1980 that was 5-10 times more sensitive to ultraviolet light. IBM introduced chemically amplified photoresist for DRAM production in the mid-1980s.
• The invention of deep UV excimer laser photolithography by Kanti Jain at IBM c.1980 has enabled the smallest features in ICs to shrink from 800 nanometers in 1990 to as low as 10 nanometers in 2016. Prior to this, excimer lasers had been mainly used as research devices since their development in the 1970s. From a broader scientific perspective, the invention of excimer laser lithography has been highlighted as one of the major milestones in the 50-year history of the laser.
• The interconnect innovations of the late 1990s, including chemical-mechanical polishing or chemical mechanical planarization (CMP), trench isolation, and copper interconnects—although not directly a factor in creating smaller transistors—have enabled improved wafer yield, additional layers of metal wires, closer spacing of devices, and lower electrical resistance.

Computer industry technology road maps predicted in 2001 that Moore's law would continue for several generations of semiconductor chips. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade. The semiconductor industry technology roadmap used a three-year doubling time for microprocessors, leading to a tenfold increase in a decade. Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics could continue during the following decade, and in 2008 as predicting the trend through 2029.

Recent trends

An atomistic simulation for electron density as gate voltage (Vg) varies in a nanowire MOSFET. The threshold voltage is around 0.45 V. Nanowire MOSFETs lie toward the end of the ITRS road map for scaling devices below 10 nm gate lengths. A FinFET has three sides of the channel covered by gate, while some nanowire transistors have gate-all-around structure, providing better gate control.

 

One of the key challenges of engineering future nanoscale transistors is the design of gates. As device dimension shrinks, controlling the current flow in the thin channel becomes more difficult. Compared to FinFETs, which have gate dielectric on three sides of the channel, gate-all-around structure has ever better gate control.

• In 2010, researchers at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland announced a junctionless transistor. A control gate wrapped around a silicon nanowire can control the passage of electrons without the use of junctions or doping. They claim these may be produced at 10-nanometer scale using existing fabrication techniques.
• In 2011, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh announced the development of a single-electron transistor, 1.5 nanometers in diameter, made out of oxide based materials. Three "wires" converge on a central "island" that can house one or two electrons. Electrons tunnel from one wire to another through the island. Conditions on the third wire result in distinct conductive properties including the ability of the transistor to act as a solid state memory. Nanowire transistors could spur the creation of microscopic computers.
• In 2012, a research team at the University of New South Wales announced the development of the first working transistor consisting of a single atom placed precisely in a silicon crystal (not just picked from a large sample of random transistors). Moore's law predicted this milestone to be reached for ICs in the lab by 2020.
• In 2015, IBM demonstrated 7 nm node chips with silicon-germanium transistors produced using EUVL. The company believes this transistor density would be four times that of current 14 nm chips.

Revolutionary technology advances may help sustain Moore's law through improved performance with or without reduced feature size.

• In 2008, researchers at HP Labs announced a working memristor, a fourth basic passive circuit element whose existence only had been theorized previously. The memristor's unique properties permit the creation of smaller and better-performing electronic devices.
• In 2014, bioengineers at Stanford University developed a circuit modeled on the human brain. Sixteen "Neurocore" chips simulate one million neurons and billions of synaptic connections, claimed to be 9,000 times faster as well as more energy efficient than a typical PC.
• In 2015, Intel and Micron announced 3D XPoint, a non-volatile memory claimed to be significantly faster with similar density compared to NAND. Production scheduled to begin in 2016 was delayed until the second half of 2017.

While physical limits to transistor scaling such as source-to-drain leakage, limited gate metals, and limited options for channel material have been reached, new avenues for continued scaling are open. The most promising of these approaches rely on using the spin state of electron spintronics, tunnel junctions, and advanced confinement of channel materials via nano-wire geometry. A comprehensive list of available device choices shows that a wide range of device options is open for continuing Moore's law into the next few decades. Spin-based logic and memory options are being developed actively in industrial labs, as well as academic labs.

Alternative materials research

The vast majority of current transistors on ICs are composed principally of doped silicon and its alloys. As silicon is fabricated into single nanometer transistors, short-channel effects adversely change desired material properties of silicon as a functional transistor. Below are several non-silicon substitutes in the fabrication of small nanometer transistors. 

One proposed material is indium gallium arsenide, or InGaAs. Compared to their silicon and germanium counterparts, InGaAs transistors are more promising for future high-speed, low-power logic applications. Because of intrinsic characteristics of III-V compound semiconductors, quantum well and tunnel effect transistors based on InGaAs have been proposed as alternatives to more traditional MOSFET designs.

• In 2009, Intel announced the development of 80-nanometer InGaAs quantum well transistors. Quantum well devices contain a material sandwiched between two layers of material with a wider band gap. Despite being double the size of leading pure silicon transistors at the time, the company reported that they performed equally as well while consuming less power.
• In 2011, researchers at Intel demonstrated 3-D tri-gate InGaAs transistors with improved leakage characteristics compared to traditional planar designs. The company claims that their design achieved the best electrostatics of any III-V compound semiconductor transistor. At the 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Intel mentioned the use of III-V compounds based on such an architecture for their 7 nanometer node.
• In 2011, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed an InGaAs tunneling field-effect transistors capable of higher operating currents than previous designs. The first III-V TFET designs were demonstrated in 2009 by a joint team from Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University.
• In 2012, a team in MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories developed a 22 nm transistor based on InGaAs which, at the time, was the smallest non-silicon transistor ever built. The team used techniques currently used in silicon device fabrication and aims for better electrical performance and a reduction to 10-nanometer scale.

Research is also showing how biological micro-cells are capable of impressive computational power while being energy efficient.

Scanning probe microscopy image of graphene in its hexagonal lattice structure

 

Various forms of graphene are being studied for graphene electronics, eg. Graphene nanoribbon transistors have shown great promise since its appearance in publications in 2008. (Bulk graphene has a band gap of zero and thus cannot be used in transistors because of its constant conductivity, an inability to turn off. The zigzag edges of the nanoribbons introduce localized energy states in the conduction and valence bands and thus a bandgap that enables switching when fabricated as a transistor. As an example, a typical GNR of width of 10 nm has a desirable bandgap energy of 0.4eV.) More research will need to be performed, however, on sub 50 nm graphene layers, as its resistivity value increases and thus electron mobility decreases.

Driving the future via an application focus

Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore, expect Moore's law will end by around 2025.

In April 2005, Gordon Moore stated in an interview that the projection cannot be sustained indefinitely: "It can't continue forever. The nature of exponentials is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens." He also noted that transistors eventually would reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels:

In terms of size [of transistors] you can see that we're approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it'll be two or three generations before we get that far—but that's as far out as we've ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they'll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.

In 2016 the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, after using Moore's Law to drive the industry since 1998, produced its final roadmap. It no longer centered its research and development plan on Moore's law. Instead, it outlined what might be called the More than Moore strategy in which the needs of applications drive chip development, rather than a focus on semiconductor scaling. Application drivers range from smartphones to AI to data centers.

A new initiative for a more generalized roadmapping was started through IEEE's initiative Rebooting Computing, named the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems (IRDS).

Consequences

Technological change is a combination of more and of better technology. A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that the peak of the rate of change of the world's capacity to compute information was in 1998, when the world's technological capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers grew at 88% per year. Since then, technological change clearly has slowed. In recent times, every new year allowed humans to carry out roughly 60% more computation than possibly could have been executed by all existing general-purpose computers in the year before. This still is exponential, but shows that the rate of technological change varies over time.

The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity, and Moore's law factors into productivity. Moore (1995) expected that "the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities". The reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, however, with economists reporting that "Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation."

An acceleration in the rate of semiconductor progress contributed to a surge in U.S. productivity growth, which reached 3.4% per year in 1997–2004, outpacing the 1.6% per year during both 1972–1996 and 2005–2013. As economist Richard G. Anderson notes, "Numerous studies have traced the cause of the productivity acceleration to technological innovations in the production of semiconductors that sharply reduced the prices of such components and of the products that contain them (as well as expanding the capabilities of such products)."

Intel transistor gate length trend – transistor scaling has slowed down significantly at advanced (smaller) nodes

 

An alternative source of improved performance is in microarchitecture techniques exploiting the growth of available transistor count. Out-of-order execution and on-chip caching and prefetching reduce the memory latency bottleneck at the expense of using more transistors and increasing the processor complexity. These increases are described empirically by Pollack's Rule, which states that performance increases due to microarchitecture techniques approximate the square root of the complexity (number of transistors or the area) of a processor. 

For years, processor makers delivered increases in clock rates and instruction-level parallelism, so that single-threaded code executed faster on newer processors with no modification. Now, to manage CPU power dissipation, processor makers favor multi-core chip designs, and software has to be written in a multi-threaded manner to take full advantage of the hardware. Many multi-threaded development paradigms introduce overhead, and will not see a linear increase in speed vs number of processors. This is particularly true while accessing shared or dependent resources, due to lock contention. This effect becomes more noticeable as the number of processors increases. There are cases where a roughly 45% increase in processor transistors has translated to roughly 10–20% increase in processing power.

On the other hand, processor manufacturers are taking advantage of the 'extra space' that the transistor shrinkage provides to add specialized processing units to deal with features such as graphics, video, and cryptography. For one example, Intel's Parallel JavaScript extension not only adds support for multiple cores, but also for the other non-general processing features of their chips, as part of the migration in client side scripting toward HTML5.

A negative implication of Moore's law is obsolescence, that is, as technologies continue to rapidly "improve", these improvements may be significant enough to render predecessor technologies obsolete rapidly. In situations in which security and survivability of hardware or data are paramount, or in which resources are limited, rapid obsolescence may pose obstacles to smooth or continued operations.

Because of the toxic materials used in the production of modern computers, obsolescence, if not properly managed, may lead to harmful environmental impacts. On the other hand, obsolescence may sometimes be desirable to a company which can profit immensely from the regular purchase of what is often expensive new equipment instead of retaining one device for a longer period of time. Those in the industry are well aware of this, and may utilize planned obsolescence as a method of increasing profits.

Moore's law has affected the performance of other technologies significantly: Michael S. Malone wrote of a Moore's War following the apparent success of shock and awe in the early days of the Iraq War. Progress in the development of guided weapons depends on electronic technology. Improvements in circuit density and low-power operation associated with Moore's law also have contributed to the development of technologies including mobile telephones and 3-D printing.

Other formulations and similar observations

Several measures of digital technology are improving at exponential rates related to Moore's law, including the size, cost, density, and speed of components. Moore wrote only about the density of components, "a component being a transistor, resistor, diode or capacitor", at minimum cost. 

Transistors per integrated circuit – The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits every two years. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. The graph at the top shows this trend holds true today.

• As of 2017, the commercially available processor possessing the highest number of transistors is the 48 core Centriq with over 18 billion transistors.

Density at minimum cost per transistor – This is the formulation given in Moore's 1965 paper. It is not just about the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest. As more transistors are put on a chip, the cost to make each transistor decreases, but the chance that the chip will not work due to a defect increases. In 1965, Moore examined the density of transistors at which cost is minimized, and observed that, as transistors were made smaller through advances in photolithography, this number would increase at "a rate of roughly a factor of two per year".

Dennard scaling – This suggests that power requirements are proportional to area (both voltage and current being proportional to length) for transistors. Combined with Moore's law, performance per watt would grow at roughly the same rate as transistor density, doubling every 1–2 years. According to Dennard scaling transistor dimensions are scaled by 30% (0.7x) every technology generation, thus reducing their area by 50%. This reduces the delay by 30% (0.7x) and therefore increases operating frequency by about 40% (1.4x). Finally, to keep electric field constant, voltage is reduced by 30%, reducing energy by 65% and power (at 1.4x frequency) by 50%. Therefore, in every technology generation transistor density doubles, circuit becomes 40% faster, while power consumption (with twice the number of transistors) stays the same.

The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling appears to have broken down, so even though Moore's law continued for several years after that, it has not yielded dividends in improved performance. The primary reason cited for the breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore, further increases energy costs.

The breakdown of Dennard scaling prompted a switch among some chip manufacturers to a greater focus on multicore processors, but the gains offered by switching to more cores are lower than the gains that would be achieved had Dennard scaling continued. In another departure from Dennard scaling, Intel microprocessors adopted a non-planar tri-gate FinFET at 22 nm in 2012 that is faster and consumes less power than a conventional planar transistor.

Quality adjusted price of IT equipment – The price of information technology (IT), computers and peripheral equipment, adjusted for quality and inflation, declined 16% per year on average over the five decades from 1959 to 2009. The pace accelerated, however, to 23% per year in 1995–1999 triggered by faster IT innovation, and later, slowed to 2% per year in 2010–2013.

The rate of quality-adjusted microprocessor price improvement likewise varies, and is not linear on a log scale. Microprocessor price improvement accelerated during the late 1990s, reaching 60% per year (halving every nine months) versus the typical 30% improvement rate (halving every two years) during the years earlier and later. Laptop microprocessors in particular improved 25–35% per year in 2004–2010, and slowed to 15–25% per year in 2010–2013.

The number of transistors per chip cannot explain quality-adjusted microprocessor prices fully. Moore's 1995 paper does not limit Moore's law to strict linearity or to transistor count, "The definition of 'Moore's Law' has come to refer to almost anything related to the semiconductor industry that when plotted on semi-log paper approximates a straight line. I hesitate to review its origins and by doing so restrict its definition."

Hard disk drive areal density – A similar observation (sometimes called Kryder's law) was made in 2005 for hard disk drive areal density. Several decades of rapid progress in areal density advancement slowed significantly around 2010, because of noise related to smaller grain size of the disk media, thermal stability, and writability using available magnetic fields.

Fiber-optic capacity – The number of bits per second that can be sent down an optical fiber increases exponentially, faster than Moore's law. Keck's law, in honor of Donald Keck.

Network capacity – According to Gerry/Gerald Butters, the former head of Lucent's Optical Networking Group at Bell Labs, there is another version, called Butters' Law of Photonics, a formulation that deliberately parallels Moore's law. Butters' law says that the amount of data coming out of an optical fiber is doubling every nine months. Thus, the cost of transmitting a bit over an optical network decreases by half every nine months. The availability of wavelength-division multiplexing (sometimes called WDM) increased the capacity that could be placed on a single fiber by as much as a factor of 100. Optical networking and dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) is rapidly bringing down the cost of networking, and further progress seems assured. As a result, the wholesale price of data traffic collapsed in the dot-com bubble. Nielsen's Law says that the bandwidth available to users increases by 50% annually.

Pixels per dollar – Similarly, Barry Hendy of Kodak Australia has plotted pixels per dollar as a basic measure of value for a digital camera, demonstrating the historical linearity (on a log scale) of this market and the opportunity to predict the future trend of digital camera price, LCD and LED screens, and resolution.

The great Moore's law compensator (TGMLC), also known as Wirth's law – generally is referred to as software bloat and is the principle that successive generations of computer software increase in size and complexity, thereby offsetting the performance gains predicted by Moore's law. In a 2008 article in InfoWorld, Randall C. Kennedy, formerly of Intel, introduces this term using successive versions of Microsoft Office between the year 2000 and 2007 as his premise. Despite the gains in computational performance during this time period according to Moore's law, Office 2007 performed the same task at half the speed on a prototypical year 2007 computer as compared to Office 2000 on a year 2000 computer. 

Library expansion – was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years, if sufficient space were made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission media. Automated, potentially lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of information growth in an era that now sometimes is called the Information Age. 

Carlson curve – is a term coined by The Economist to describe the biotechnological equivalent of Moore's law, and is named after author Rob Carlson. Carlson accurately predicted that the doubling time of DNA sequencing technologies (measured by cost and performance) would be at least as fast as Moore's law. Carlson Curves illustrate the rapid (in some cases hyperexponential) decreases in cost, and increases in performance, of a variety of technologies, including DNA sequencing, DNA synthesis, and a range of physical and computational tools used in protein expression and in determining protein structures. 

Eroom's law – is a pharmaceutical drug development observation which was deliberately written as Moore's Law spelled backwards in order to contrast it with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time. It states that the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years.

Experience curve effects says that each doubling of the cumulative production of virtually any product or service is accompanied by an approximate constant percentage reduction in the unit cost. The acknowledged first documented qualitative description of this dates from 1885. A power curve was used to describe this phenomenon in a 1936 discussion of the cost of airplanes.

Creative industries

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The creative industries refers to a range of economic activities which are concerned with the generation or exploitation of knowledge and information. They may variously also be referred to as the cultural industries (especially in Europe (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 14) or the creative economy (Howkins 2001), and most recently they have been denominated as the Orange Economy in Latin America and the Caribbean (Buitrago & Duque 2013).

Howkins' creative economy comprises advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software, toys and games, TV and radio, and video games (Howkins 2001, pp. 88–117). Some scholars consider that education industry, including public and private services, is forming a part of creative industry. There remain, therefore, different definitions of the sector (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 12)(DCMS 2006).

The creative industries have been seen to become increasingly important to economic well-being, proponents suggesting that "human creativity is the ultimate economic resource" (Florida 2002, p. xiii), and that "the industries of the twenty-first century will depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation" (Landry & Bianchini 1995, p. 4).

Definitions

Various commentators have provided varying suggestions on what activities to include in the concept of "creative industries" (DCMS 2001, p. 04) (Hesmondhalgh 2 002, p. 12)(Howkins 2001, pp. 88–117)(UNCTAD 2008, pp. 11–12), and the name itself has become a contested issue – with significant differences and overlap between the terms "creative industries", "cultural industries" and "creative economy" (Hesmondhalgh 2002, pp. 11–14)(UNCTAD 2008, p. 12). 

Lash and Urry suggest that each of the creative industries has an "irreducible core" concerned with "the exchange of finance for rights in intellectual property", (Lash & Urry 1994, p. 117). This echoes the UK Government Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) definition which describes the creative industries as:

"those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property" (DCMS 2001, p. 04)

As of 2015 the DCMS definition recognizes nine creative sectors, namely:

1. Advertising and marketing
2. Architecture
3. Crafts
4. Design: product, graphic and fashion design
5. film, TV, video, radio and photography
6. IT, software and computer services
7. Publishing
8. Museums, galleries and libraries
9. Music, performing and visual arts

To this list John Howkins would add toys and games, also including the much broader area of research and development in science and technology (Howkins 2001, pp. 88–117). It has also been argued that gastronomy belongs in such a list.

The various fields of engineering do not appear on this list, that emerged from the DCMS reports. This was due, probably, to the fact that engineers occupy relevant positions in "non-cultural" corporations, performing activities of project, management, operation, maintenance, risk analysis and supervision, among others. However, historically and presently, several tasks of engineers can be regarded as highly creative, inventive and innovative. The contribution of engineering is represented by new products, processes and services. 

Hesmondhalgh reduces the list to what he terms "the core cultural industries" of advertising and marketing, broadcasting, film, internet and music industries, print and electronic publishing, and video and computer games. His definition only includes those industries that create "texts"' or "cultural artefacts" and which engage in some form of industrial reproduction (Hesmondhalgh 2002, pp. 12–14). 

The DCMS list has proven influential, and many other nations have formally adopted it. It has also been criticised. It has been argued that the division into sectors obscures a divide between lifestyle business, non-profits, and larger businesses, and between those who receive state subsidies (e.g., film) and those who do not (e.g., computer games). The inclusion of the antiques trade often comes into question, since it does not generally involve production (except of reproductions and fakes). The inclusion of all computer services has also been questioned (Hesmondhalgh 2002, p. 13).

Some areas, such as Hong Kong, have preferred to shape their policy around a tighter focus on copyright ownership in the value chain. They adopt the WIPO's classifications, which divide up the creative industries according to who owns the copyrights at various stages during the production and distribution of creative content. 

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has denominated them for Latin America and the Caribbean as the Orange Economy which is defined as the "group of linked activities through which ideas are transformed into cultural goods and services whose value is determined by intellectual property." 

Others have suggested a distinction between those industries that are open to mass production and distribution (film and video; videogames; broadcasting; publishing), and those that are primarily craft-based and are meant to be consumed in a particular place and moment (visual arts; performing arts; cultural heritage).

How creative workers are counted

The DCMS classifies enterprises and occupations as creative according to what the enterprise primarily produces, and what the worker primarily does. Thus, a company which produces records would be classified as belonging to the music industrial sector, and a worker who plays piano would be classified as a musician. 

The primary purpose of this is to quantify – for example it can be used to count the number of firms, and the number of workers, creatively employed in any given location, and hence to identify places with particularly high concentrations of creative activities. 

It leads to some complications which are not immediately obvious. For example, a security guard working for a music company would be classified as a creative employee, although not as creatively occupied. 

The total number of creative employees is then calculated as the sum of:

• All workers employed in creative industries, whether or not creatively occupied (e.g. all musicians, security guards, cleaners, accountants, managers, etc. working for a record company)
• All workers that are creatively occupied, and are not employed in creative industries (for example, a piano teacher in a school). This includes people whose second job is creative, for example somebody who does weekend gigs, writes books, or produces artwork in their spare time

Properties or characteristics

A toy cat produced in a South-African township, made from used plastic bags and old wire

 

According to Caves (2000), creative industries are characterized by seven economic properties:

1. Nobody knows principle: Demand uncertainty exists because the consumers' reaction to a product are neither known beforehand, nor easily understood afterward.
2. Art for art's sake: Workers care about originality, technical professional skill, harmony, etc. of creative goods and are willing to settle for lower wages than offered by 'humdrum' jobs.
3. Motley crew principle: For relatively complex creative products (e.g., films), the production requires diversely skilled inputs. Each skilled input must be present and perform at some minimum level to produce a valuable outcome.
4. Infinite variety: Products are differentiated by quality and uniqueness; each product is a distinct combination of inputs leading to infinite variety options (e.g., works of creative writing, whether poetry, novel, screenplays or otherwise).
5. A list/B list: Skills are vertically differentiated. Artists are ranked on their skills, originality, and proficiency in creative processes and/or products. Small differences in skills and talent may yield huge differences in (financial) success.
6. Time flies: When coordinating complex projects with diversely skilled inputs, time is of the essence.
7. Ars longa: Some creative products have durability aspects that invoke copyright protection, allowing a creator or performer to collect rents.

The properties described by Caves have been criticized for being too rigid (Towse, 2000). Not all creative workers are purely driven by 'art for art's sake'. The 'ars longa' property also holds for certain noncreative products (i.e., licensed products). The 'time flies' property also holds for large construction projects. Creative industries are therefore not unique, but they score generally higher on these properties relative to non-creative industries.

Difference from the 'cultural industries'

There is often a question about the boundaries between creative industries and the similar term of cultural industries. Cultural industries are best described as an adjunct-sector of the creative industries. Cultural industries include industries that focus on cultural tourism and heritage, museums and libraries, sports and outdoor activities, and a variety of 'way of life' activities that arguably range from local pet shows to a host of hobbyist concerns. Thus cultural industries are more concerned about delivering other kinds of value—including cultural wealth and social wealth—rather than primarily providing monetary value.

The creative class

Some authors, such as the American economist Richard Florida, argue for a wider focus on the products of knowledge workers, and judge the 'creative class' (his own term) to include nearly all those offering professional knowledge-based services.

The creative class and diversity

Florida's focus leads him to pay particular attention to the nature of the creative workforce. In a study of why particular US cities such as San Francisco seem to attract creative producers, Florida argues that a high proportion of workers from the 'creative class' provide a key input to creative production, which enterprises seek out. He seeks to quantitatively establish the importance of diversity and multiculturalism in the cities concerned, for example the existence of a significant public gay community, ethnic and religious variety, and tolerance. (Florida 2002)

Economic contribution

Globally, Creative Industries excluding software and general scientific research and development are said to have accounted for around 4% of the world's economic output in 1999, which is the last year for which comprehensive figures are currently available. Estimates of the output corresponding to scientific Research and Development suggest that an additional 4-9% might be attributable to the sector if its definition is extended to include such activities, though the figures vary significantly between different countries.

Taking the UK as an example, in the context of other sectors, the creative industries make a far more significant contribution to output than hospitality or utilities and deliver four times the output due to agriculture, fisheries and forestry. In terms of employment and depending on the definition of activities included, the sector is a major employer of between 4-6% of the UK's working population, though this is still significantly less than employment due to traditional areas of work such as retail and manufacturing.

Within the creative industries sector and again taking the UK as an example, the three largest sub-sectors are design, publishing, and television and radio. Together these account for around 75% of revenues and 50% of employment. 

The complex supply chains in the creative industries sometimes make it challenging to calculate accurate figures for the gross value added by each sub-sector. This is particularly the case for the service-focused sub-sectors such as advertising, whereas it is more straightforward in product-focused sub-sectors such as crafts. Not surprisingly, perhaps, competition in product-focused areas tends to be more intense with a tendency to drive the production end of the supply chain to become a commodity business.

There may be a tendency for publicly funded creative industries development services to inaccurately estimate the number of creative businesses during the mapping process. There is also imprecision in nearly all tax code systems that determine a person's profession, since many creative people operate simultaneously in multiple roles and jobs. Both these factors mean that official statistics relating to the Creative Industries should be treated with caution.

The creative industries in Europe make a significant contribution to the EU economy, creating about 3% of EU GDP – corresponding to an annual market value of €500 billion – and employing about 6 million people. In addition, the sector plays a crucial role in fostering innovation, in particular for devices and networks. The EU records the second highest TV viewing figures globally, producing more films than any other region in the world. In that respect, the newly proposed 'Creative Europe' program (July 2011) will help preserve cultural heritage while increasing the circulation of creative works inside and outside the EU. The programme will play a consequential role in stimulating cross border co-operation, promoting peer learning and making these sectors more professional. The Commission will then propose a financial instrument run by the European Investment Bank to provide debt and equity finance for cultural and creative industries. The role of the non-state actors within the governance regarding Medias will not be neglected anymore. Therefore, building a new approach extolling the crucial importance of a European level playing field industry may boost the adoption of policies aimed at developing a conducive environment, enabling European companies as well as citizens to use their imagination and creativity – both sources of innovation -, and therefore of competitiveness and sustainability. It supposes to tailor the regulatory and institutional frameworks in supporting private-public collaboration, in particular in the Medias sector. The EU therefore plans to develop clusters, financing instruments as well as foresight activities to support this sector. The European Commission wishes to assist European creators and audiovisual enterprises to develop new markets through the use of digital technology, and asks how policy-making can best help achieve this. A more entrepreneurial culture will have to take hold with a more positive attitude towards risk-taking, and a capacity to innovate anticipating future trends. Creativity plays an important role in human resource management as artists and creative professionals can think laterally. Moreover, new jobs requiring new skills created in the post-crisis economy should be supported by labour mobility to ensure that people are employed wherever their skills are needed.

In the US

In the introduction to a 2013 special issue of Work and Occupations on artists in the US workforce, the guest editors argue that by examining the work lives of artists, one can identify characteristics and actions that help both individual workers and policy makers adapt to changing economic conditions. Elizabeth Lingo and Steven Tepper cite multiple sources to suggest artists' skill sets allow them to "work beyond existing markets and create entirely new opportunities for themselves and others". Specifically, Lingo and Tepper suggest artistic workers are "catalysts of change and innovation" because they "face special challenges managing ambiguity, developing and sustaining a relative identity, and forming community in the context of an individually based enterprise economy" (2013). Because of these adaptive skills, the suggestion is that "studying how artists cope with uncertainty and the factors that influence their success should be relevant for understanding these broader social and economic trends facing today's (and tomorrow's) workforce."

This view of artist-as-change-agent changes the questions researchers ask of creative economies. Old research questions would focus on topics like "skills, work practices, contracts, wage differentials, employment incentives, formal credentials, employment pipelines, and labor flows of differentiated occupational categories". Examples of new questions include:

1. How do artists both create changes in the labor market itself and the way cultural work is done?
2. What is their process of innovation and enterprise?
3. What is the nature of their work and the resources they draw upon?
4. How do different network structures produce different opportunity spaces?
5. How do artistic workers create and manage planned serendipity—the spaces and exchanges that produce unexpected collaborations and opportunities?
6. How do creative workers broker and synthesize across occupational, genre, geographic, and industry boundaries to create new possibilities? (Tepper & Lingo, 2013)

Wider role

As some first world countries struggle to compete in traditional markets such as manufacturing, many now see the creative industry as a key component in a new knowledge economy, capable perhaps of delivering urban regeneration, often through initiatives linked to exploitation of cultural heritage that leads to increased tourism. It is often argued that, in future, the ideas and imagination of countries like the United Kingdom will be their greatest asset; in support of this argument, a number of universities in the UK have started to offer creative entrepreneurship as a specific area for study and research. Indeed, UK government figures reveal that the UK's creative industries account for over a million jobs and brought in £112.5 billion to the UK economy (DCMS Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001), although the data sets underlying these figures are open to question.

In recent years, creative industries have become 'increasingly attractive to governments outside the developed world'. In 2005, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) XI High Level Panel on Creative Industries and Development commissioned several studies to identify challenges and opportunities facing the growth and development of creative industries in developing industries. As Cunningham et al. (2009) put it, 'the harnessing of creativity brings with it the potential of new wealth creation, the cultivation of local talent and the generation of creative capital, the development of new export markets, significant multiplier effects throughout the broader economy, the utilisation of information communication technologies and enhanced competitiveness in an increasingly global economy'. A key driver of interest in creative industries and development is the acknowledgement that the value of creative production resides in ideas and individual creativity, and developing countries have rich cultural traditions and pools of creative talent which lay a basic foundation for creative enterprises. Reflecting the growing interest in the potential of creative industries in developing countries, in October 2011 a Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy was created within the Indonesian government with well-known economist Dr Mari Pangestu appointed as the first minister to hold the position.

Leap of faith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

A leap of faith, in its most commonly used meaning, is the act of believing in or accepting something outside the boundaries of reason.

Overview

The phrase is commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard; however, he never used the term, as he referred to a qualitative leap. A leap of faith according to Kierkegaard involves circularity insofar as the leap is made by faith. In his book Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he describes the core part of the leap of faith: the leap. “Thinking can turn toward itself in order to think about itself and skepticism can emerge. But this thinking about itself never accomplishes anything.” Kierkegaard says thinking should serve by thinking something. Kierkegaard wants to stop "thinking's self-reflection" and that is the movement that constitutes a leap. He is against people thinking about religion all day without ever doing anything; but he is also against external shows and opinions about religion. Instead, Kierkegaard is in favor of the internal movement of faith. He says, "where Christianity wants to have inwardness, worldly Christendom wants outwardness, and where Christianity wants outwardness, worldly Christendom wants inwardness." But, on the other hand, he also says: "The less externality, the more inwardness if it is truly there; but it is also the case that the less externality, the greater the possibility that the inwardness will entirely fail to come. The externality is the watchman who awakens the sleeper; the externality is the solicitous mother who calls one; the externality is the roll call that brings the soldier to his feet; the externality is the reveille that helps one to make the great effort; but the absence of the externality can mean that the inwardness itself calls inwardly to a person - alas - but it can also mean that the inwardness will fail to come." The "most dreadful thing of all is a personal existence that cannot coalesce in a conclusion," according to Kierkegaard. He asked his contemporaries if any of them had reached a conclusion about anything or did every new premise change their convictions. 

David F. Swenson described the leap in his 1916 article The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard using some of Kierkegaard's ideas.

H2 plus O becomes water, and water becomes ice, by a leap. The change from motion to rest, or vice versa, is a transition which cannot be logically construed; this is the basic principle of Zeno's dialectic, and is also expressed in Newton's laws of motion, since the external force by which such change is effected is not a consequence of the law, but is premised as external to the system with which we start. It is therefore transcendent and non-rational, and its coming into existence can only be apprehended as a leap. In the same manner, every causal system presupposes an external environment as the condition of change. Every transition from the detail of an empirical induction to the ideality and universality of law, is a leap. In the actual process of thinking, we have the leap by which we arrive at the understanding of an idea or an author. The Anti-Intellectualism of Kierkegaard, by David F. Swenson, The Philosophical Review V. XXV 1916 p. 577-578

This is how the leap was described in 1950 and then in 1960.

Kierkegaard agreed with Lessing, a German dynamist, that truth lies in the search for an object, not in the object sought. It is another case of “act accomplishing itself.” If God held truth in one hand and the eternal pursuit of it in the other, He would choose the second hand according to Lessing. Religious truth concerns the individual and the individual alone, and it is the personal mode of appropriation, the process of realization, the subjective dynamism that counts. Of Lessing, Kierkegaard writes approvingly. But if we are constantly occupied in the immanent striving of our own subjectivity, how are we to ascend to knowledge of a transcendent God whom traditional thought declares to be known even by reason. Lessing and Kierkegaard declare in typical fashion that there is no bridge between historical, finite knowledge and God’s existence and nature. This gap can only be crossed by a “leap.” Faith is a completely irrational experience, and yet it is, paradoxically, the highest duty of a Christian. Though as Thomte observes, it is not a spontaneous belief, faith is nevertheless something blind, immediate, and decisive. It has the character of an “act of resignation.” It is unmediated and a-intellectual, much like Kant’s proof for the existence of God. Nature makes no leaps, according to the maxim of Leibniz. But faith, according to Kierkegaard must do so in a radical way. Idea-Men of Today by Vincent Edward Smith 1950 p. 254-255

Like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, who plays an important role in the spiritual struggle for meaning on the part of the modern writer, cast off the bondage of logic and the tyranny of science. By means of the dialectic of "the leap," he attempted to transcend both the aesthetic and the ethical stages. Completely alone, cut off from his fellow-men, the individual realizes his own nothingness as the preliminary condition for embracing the truth of God. Only when man becomes aware of his own non-entity — an experience that is purely subjective and incommunicable — does he recover his real self and stand in the presence of God. This is the mystique which has been rediscovered by twentieth-century man, the leap from outwardness to inwardness, from rationalism to subjectivity, the revelation, that is ineffable, of the reality of the Absolute. Literature and Religion: a Study in Conflict 1960 by Charles Irving Glicksberg p. 12

The leap into sin and into faith

Kierkegaard describes "the leap" using the famous story of Adam and Eve, particularly Adam's qualitative leap into sin. Adam's leap signifies a change from one quality to another, mainly the quality of possessing no sin to the quality of possessing sin. Kierkegaard maintains that the transition from one quality to another can take place only by a "leap" (Thomte 232). When the transition happens, one moves directly from one state to the other, never possessing both qualities. "The moment is related to the transition of the one to the many, of the many to the one, of likeness to unlikeness, and that it is the moment in which there is neither one nor many, neither a being determined nor a being combined."(Thomte Note 82-85). "In the Moment man becomes conscious that he is born; for his antecedent state, to which he may not cling, was one of non-being. In the Moment man also becomes conscious of the new birth, for his antecedent state was one of non-being."

Johann Kaspar Lavater (right) trying to convert Moses Mendelssohn to Christianity as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing looks on.

 

Kierkegaard felt that a leap of faith was vital in accepting Christianity due to the paradoxes that exist in Christianity. In his books, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard delves deeply into the paradoxes that Christianity presents. Moses Mendelssohn did the same thing when Johann Kaspar Lavater demanded he discuss why he didn't want to become a Christian. Both Kierkegaard and Mendelssohn knew the difficulties involved when discussing religious topics:

"As I so sedulously sought to avoid an explanation in my own apartment amidst a small number of worthy men, of whose good intentions I had every reason to be persuaded, it might have been reasonably inferred that a public one would be extremely repugnant to my disposition; and that I must have inevitably become the more embarrassed when the voice demanding it happened to be entitled to an answer at any rate." Moses Mendelssohn, Letter to J. C. Lavater, December 12, 1769

Kierkegaard's use of the term "leap" was in response to "Lessing's Ditch" which was discussed by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in his theological writings. Kierkegaard was indebted to Lessing's writings in many ways. Lessing tried to battle rational Christianity directly and, when that failed, he battled it indirectly through, what Kierkegaard called, "imaginary constructions". Both may be indebted to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

Rousseau used the idea in his 1762 book Emile like this:

If I relate the plain and simple tale of their innocent affections you will accuse me of frivolity, but you will be mistaken. Sufficient attention is not given to the effect which the first connection between man and woman is bound to produce on the future life of both. People do not see that a first impression so vivid as that of love, or the liking which takes the place of love, produces lasting effects whose influence continues till death. Works on education are crammed with wordy and unnecessary accounts of the imaginary duties of children; but there is not a word about the most important and most difficult part of their education, the crisis which forms the bridge between the child and the man. If any part of this work is really useful, it will be because I have dwelt at great length on this matter, so essential in itself and so neglected by other authors, and because I have not allowed myself to be discouraged either by false delicacy or by the difficulties of expression. The story of human nature is a fair romance. Am I to blame if it is not found elsewhere? I am trying to write the history of mankind. If my book is a romance, the fault lies with those who deprave mankind.

This is supported by another reason; we are not dealing with a youth given over from childhood to fear, greed, envy, pride, and all those passions which are the common tools of the schoolmaster; we have to do with a youth who is not only in love for the first time, but with one who is also experiencing his first passion of any kind; very likely it will be the only strong passion he will ever know, and upon it depends the final formation of his character. His mode of thought, his feelings, his tastes, determined by a lasting passion, are about to become so fixed that they will be incapable of further change. Emile by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Foxley translation

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) used the term in his 1784 essay, Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? Kant wrote:

Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical tools designed for reasonable use--or rather abuse--of his natural gifts, are the fetters of an everlasting nonage. The man who casts them off would make an uncertain leap over the narrowest ditch, because he is not used to such free movement. That is why there are only a few men who walk firmly, and who have emerged from nonage by cultivating their own minds. It is more nearly possible, however, for the public to enlighten itself; indeed, if it is only given freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. There will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the self-appointed guardians of the multitude. Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage, they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man's value and of his duty to think for himself.

Lessing said, "accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." Kierkegaard points out that he also said, "contingent truths of history can never become the demonstrations of necessary truths of reason." Kierkegaard liked Lessing because he "had a most uncommon gift of explaining what he himself had understood. With that he stopped; in our day people go further and explain more than they themselves have understood."

We all believe that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia. But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great permanent worth, the loss of which would be irreparable? Who, in consequence of this belief, would forswear for ever all knowledge that conflicted with this belief? Certainly not I. Now I have no objection to raise against Alexander and his victory: but it might still be possible that the story was founded on a mere poem of Choerilus just as the twenty year siege of Troy depends on no better authority than Homer's poetry. If on historical grounds I have no objection to the statement that Christ raised to life a dead man; must I therefore accept it as true that God has a Son who is the same essence as himself? On The Proof of the Spirit and of Power, Lessing's Theological Writings, Chadwick p. 51-56.

Lessing opposes what I would call quantifying oneself into a qualitative decision; he contests the direct transition from historical reliability to a decision on an eternal happiness. He does not deny that what is said in the Scriptures about miracles and prophecies is just as reliable as other historical reports, in fact, is as reliable as historical reports in general can be. But now, if they are only as reliable as this why are they treated as if they were infinitely more reliable-precisely because one wants to base on them the acceptance of a doctrine that is the condition for an eternal happiness, that is, to base an eternal happiness on them. Like everyone else, Lessing is willing to believe that an Alexander who subjugated all of Asia did live once, but who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great, permanent worth, the loss of which would be irreparable? Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong p. 96, 130-131

Kierkegaard has Don Juan in Either/Or escort young girls "all in the dangerous age of being neither grown-up nor children" to "the other side of the ditch of life" as he, himself, "dances over the abyss" only to "instantly sink down into the depths." He has Don Juan "preach the gospel of pleasure" to Elvira and seduces her from the convent and wonders if there is a priest who can "preach the gospel of repentance and remorse" with the same power as Don Juan preached his gospel. Both Lessing and Kierkegaard are discussing the agency one might use to base one's faith upon. Does history provide all the proofs necessary to cross that "ugly, broad ditch"? Or is there "no direct and immediate transition to Christianity". Does one become a Christian "in the fulness of time" as Kierkegaard puts it or is "there only one proof of spirit and that is the spirit’s proof within oneself. Whoever demands something else may get proofs in superabundance, but he is already characterized at spiritless."

He also writes about this in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

If naked dialectical deliberation shows that there is no approximation, that wanting to quantify oneself into faith along this path is a misunderstanding, a delusion, that wanting to concern oneself with such deliberations is a temptation for the believer, a temptation that he, keeping himself in the passion of faith, must resist with all his strength, lest it end with his succeeding in changing faith into something else, into another kind of certainty, in substituting probabilities and guarantees, which were rejected when he, himself beginning, made the qualitative transition of the leap from unbeliever to believer - if this is so, then everyone who, not entirely unfamiliar with learned scientificity and not bereft of willingness to learn, has understood it this way must also have felt his hard-pressed position when he in admiration learned to think meanly of his own insignificance in the face of those distinguished by learning and acumen and deserved renown, so that, seeking the fault in himself, he time and again returned to them, and when in despondency he had to admit that he himself was in the right. .... When someone is to leap he must certainly do it alone and also be alone in properly understanding that it is an impossibility. … the leap is the decision. .... I am charging the individual in question with not willing to stop the infinity of reflection. Am I requiring something of him, then? But on the other hand, in a genuinely speculative way, I assume that reflection stops of its own accord. Why, then, do I require something of him? And what do I require of him? I require a resolution. And in that I am right, for only in that way can reflection be stopped. But, on the other hand, it is never right for a philosopher to make sport of people and at one moment have reflection stop of its own accord in the absolute beginning, and at the next moment taunt someone who has only one flaw, that he is obtuse enough to believe the first, taunts him so as to help him in this fashion to the absolute beginning, which then occurs two ways. But if a resolution is required, presuppositionlessness is abandoned. The beginning can occur only when reflection is stopped, and reflection can be stopped only by something else, and this something else is something altogether different from the logical, since it is a resolution. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Hong p. 11-12, 102, 113

The implication of taking a leap of faith can, depending on the context, carry positive or negative connotations, as some feel it is a virtue to be able to believe in something without evidence while others feel it is foolishness. It is a hotly contested theological and philosophical concept. For instance, the association between "blind faith" and religion is disputed by those with deistic principles who argue that reason and logic, rather than revelation or tradition, should be the basis of the belief "that God has existed in human form, was born and grew up". Jesus is the "paradox", the "absolute paradox". When Christianity becomes a scholarly enterprise one tends to "reflect oneself into Christianity" but Kierkegaard says, one should "reflect oneself out of something else and become, more and more simply, a Christian."

Kierkegaard was concerned that individuals would spend all their lives trying to define Christianity, love, God, the Trinity, sin, et cetera, and never get to the business of "actually" making a decision in time to become a Christian who could then act on the basis of that decision. He discussed the inner and the outer relationship existing in belief. "Compared with the Hegelian notion that the outer is the inner and the inner the outer, it certainly is extremely original. But it would be even more original if the Hegelian axiom were not only admired by the present age but also had retroactive power to abolish, backward historically, the distinction between the visible and invisible Church. The invisible Church is not a historical phenomenon; as such it cannot be observed objectively at all, because it is only in subjectivity." There has to be a balance between objective and subjective knowledge. Hegel went to the extreme objective side so Kierkegaard decided to go to the extreme subjective side.

The decision rests in the subject; the appropriation is the paradoxical inwardness that is specifically different from all other inwardness. Being a Christian is defined not by the “what” of Christianity but by the “how” of the Christian. This “how” can fit only one thing, the absolute paradox. Therefore there is no vague talk that being a Christian means to accept and accept, and accept altogether differently, to appropriate, to have faith, to appropriate in faith altogether differently (nothing but rhetorical and sham definitions); but to have faith is specifically qualified differently from all other appropriation and inwardness. Faith is the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest. This formula fits only the one who has faith, no one else, not even a lover, or an enthusiast, or a thinker, but solely and only the one who has faith, who relates himself to the absolute paradox. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Vol I Hong p. 610-611

Even some theistic realms of thought do not agree with the implications that this phrase carries. For instance, C. S. Lewis argues against the idea that Christianity requires a "leap of faith," (as the term is most commonly understood). One of Lewis' arguments is that supernaturalism, a basic tenet of Christianity, can be logically inferred based on a teleological argument regarding the source of human reason. Nonetheless, some Christians are less critical of the term and do accept that religion requires a "leap of faith". 

What is often missed is that Kierkegaard himself was an orthodox, Scandinavian Lutheran in conflict with the liberal theological establishment of his day. His works built on one another and culminated with the orthodox Lutheran conception of a God that unconditionally accepts man, faith itself being a gift from God, and that the highest moral position is reached when a person realizes this and, no longer depending upon her or himself, takes the leap of faith into the arms of a loving God. In a Lutheran context, the leap of faith becomes much clearer.

Suppose that Jacobi himself has made the leap; suppose that with the aid of eloquence he manages to persuade a learner to want to do it. Then the learner has a direct relation to Jacobi and consequently does not himself come to make the leap. The direct relation between one human being and another is naturally much easier and gratifies one’s sympathies and one’s own need much more quickly and ostensibly more reliable. It is understood directly, and there is no need of that dialectic of the infinite to keep oneself infinitely resigned and infinitely enthusiastic in the sympathy of the infinite, whose secret is the renunciation of the fancy that in his God-relationship one human being is not the equal of another, which makes the presumed teacher a learner who attends to himself and makes all teaching a divine jest, because every human being is essentially taught solely by God. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Vol I Hong p. 610-611

Jacobi, Hegel, and C.S. Lewis wrote about Christianity in accordance with their understanding but Kierkegaard didn't want to do that. He felt that it was too dangerous to put in writing what was most holy to himself. He said, "Not even what I am writing here is my innermost meaning. I cannot entrust myself to paper in that way, even though I see it in what is written. Think what could happen! The paper could disappear; there could be a fire where I live and I could live in uncertainty about whether it was burned or still existed; I could die and thus leave it behind me; I could lose my mind and my innermost being could be in alien hands; I could go blind and not be able to find it myself, not know whether I stood with it in my hands without asking someone else, not know whether he lied, whether he was reading what was written there or something else in order to sound me out." Kierkegaard was of the opinion that faith is something different from other things: unexplainable and inexplicable. The more a person tries to explain personal faith to another, the more entangled that person becomes in language and semantics but "recollection" is "das Zugleich, the all-at-once," that always brings him back to himself.

The world has perhaps always had a lack of what could be called authentic individualities, decisive subjectivities, those artistically permeated with reflection, the independent thinkers who differ from the bellowers and the didacticizers. The more objective the world and individual subjectivities become, the more difficult it becomes with the religious categories, which are precisely in the sphere of subjectivity. That is why it is almost an irreligious exaggeration to want to be world-historical, scholarly-scientific, and objective with regard to the religious. But I have not summoned Lessing in order to have someone to appeal to, because even wanting to be subjective enough to appeal to another subjectivity is already an attempt to become objective, is a first step toward getting the majority vote on one’s side and one’s God-relationship transformed into a speculative enterprise on the basis of probability and partnership and fellow shareholders is the first step toward becoming objective. Concluding Unscientific Postscript p. 66

The appropriation of faith

Kierkegaard stuck to his concept of Christianity as an inner struggle where the single individual stands before God rather than before others. Because standing before God is where the decisive struggle occurs for each single individual. Each single individual who has an "interest" in becoming a Christian has a God-relationship which is different from any other individual. The more we look to "others" for our God-relationship, the more we have a simulated, mediated relationship with an idea. The idea, or ideal, isn't the highest. But getting the idea off the paper or the drawing board and putting it to use in life is the absolute for the Christian. In Works of Love (1847) he wrote, "Love for the neighbor does not want to be sung about, it wants to be accomplished." Christ didn't say one should think about loving the neighbor, he said, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22.39) He put it this way in Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845) in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) in Sickness Unto Death (1849) and again in Works of Love (1847).

Ah, it is much easier to look to the right and to the left than to look into oneself, much easier to haggle and bargain just as it is also much easier to underbid than to be silent-but the more difficult is still the one thing needful. Even in daily life everyone experiences that it is more difficult to stand directly before the person of distinction, directly before his royal majesty, than to move in the crowd; to stand alone and silent directly before the sharp expert is more difficult than to speak in a common harmony of equals-to say nothing of being alone directly before the Holy One and being silent. Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions p. 31

Where is the boundary for the single individual in his concrete existence between what is lack of will and what is lack of ability; what is indolence and earthly selfishness and what is the limitation of finitude? For an existing person, when is the period of preparation over, when this question will not arise again in all its initial, troubled severity; when is the time in existence that is indeed a preparation? Let all the dialecticians convene-they will not be able to decide this for a particular individual in concreto. Søren Kierkegaard Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hong p. 490

The lowest form of offense, humanly speaking the most innocent, is to leave the whole issue of Christ undecided, to pronounce in effect: 'I don't presume to judge the matter; I do not believe, but I pass no judgement." ..... The next form of offense is the negative, but passive form. Certainly it feels it cannot take no notice of Christ, leaving this business of Christ in abeyance and carrying on a busy life is something it is incapable of. But believing is something it cannot do either; so it stays staring at one and the same point, at the paradox. .... The final stage of offense is the positive form. It declares Christianity to be untruth and a lie. It denies Christ (that he has existed and that he is the one he claims to be) either Docetically or rationalistically, so that either Christ does not become a particular human being, but only appears to do so, or he becomes only a particular human being. Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness Unto Death, Hannay p. 163-165

But when it is a duty to love, then no test is needed and no insulting foolhardiness of wanting to test, then love is higher than any test; it has already more than stood the test in the same sense as faith “more than conquers.” Testing is always related to possibility; it is always possible that what is being tested would not stand the test. Therefore, if someone wanted to test whether he has faith, or try to attain faith, this really means he will prevent himself from attaining faith; he will bring himself into the restlessness of craving where faith is never won, for “You shall believe.” Works of Love, p. 33

Suppose that there were two men: a double-minded man, who believes he has gained faith in a loving Providence, because he had himself experienced having been helped, even though he had hardheartedly sent away a sufferer whom he could have helped; and another man whose life, by devoted love, was an instrument in the hand of Providence, so that he helped many suffering ones, although the help he himself had wished continued to be denied him from year to year. Which of these two was in truth convinced that there is a loving Providence that cares for the suffering ones? Is it not a fair and a convincing conclusion: He that planted the ear, shall he not hear.(Psalms 94:9).^[30] But turn it around, and is the conclusion not equally fair and convincing: He whose life is sacrificing love shall he not trust that God is love? Yet in the press of busyness there is neither time nor quiet for the calm transparency which teaches equality, which teaches the willingness to pull in the same yoke with other men, that noble simplicity, that is in inner understanding with every man. There is neither time nor quiet to win such a conviction. Therefore, in the press of busyness even faith and hope and love and willing the Good become only loose words and double-mindedness. Or is it not double-mindedness to live without any conviction, or more rightly, to live in the constantly and continually changing fantasy that one has and that one has not a conviction!

In this fashion feeling deceives the busy one into double-mindedness. Perhaps after the flaming up of the contrition of repentance, if this turns into emptiness, he had a conviction, at least so he believed, that there is a mercy that forgives sins. But even in the forgiveness he strongly denied any implication that he had been guilty of anything. Hence he had, so he thought, believed in a conviction that such a mercy exists, and yet in practice he denied its existence; in practice his attitude seemed designed to prove that it did not exist. Suppose that there were two men, that double-minded one, and then another man who would gladly forgive his debtor, if he himself might only find mercy. Which of these two was in truth convinced that such a mercy exists? The latter had indeed this proof that it exists, that he himself practices it, the former has no proof at all for himself, and only meets the contrary proof which he himself presents. Or the double-minded one perhaps had a feeling for right and wrong. It blazed strongly in him, especially if someone would describe in a poetical manner the zealous men, who by self-sacrifice in the service of truth, maintained righteousness and justice. Then some wrong happened to this man himself. And then it seemed to him as if there must appear some sign in heaven and upon earth since the world order could no more sleep than he until this wrong was put right again. And this was not self-love that inflamed him, but it was a feeling for justice, so he thought. And when he obtained his rights, no matter how much wrong it had cost those around him, then once again he praised the perfection of the world. Feeling had indeed carried him away, but also it had so enraptured him that he had forgotten the most important of all: to support righteousness and justice with self-sacrifice in the service of the truth. For which of these two is really convinced that justice exists in the world: the one that suffers wrong for doing the right, or the one that does wrong in order to obtain his right? Søren Kierkegaard, (1846) Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Steere p. 111-113

Kierkegaard, Goethe, Marx, and Tolstoy

Kierkegaard questioned how a person changes. Some, like Hegel and Goethe, believed that an external event was required for a new epoch to begin. Kierkegaard disagreed because something might never happen in an external way that would cause a person to change and a possibility for a better life might be lost. Marx followed after Hegel and Goethe but Tolstoy agreed more with Kierkegaard in his "view of life".

Goethe may have been mocking the idea that the birth of Christ was what made him important or he may have seriously thought that his, Goethe's, own birth made him important. Kierkegaard didn't believe that Christ had this "upside-downness that wanted to reap before it sowed or this kind of cowardliness that wanted to have certainty before it began." Goethe began his autobiography with the certainty that his life was going to have a great effect on the world stage.

Within the first twenty pages of his autobiography Goethe had pointed to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake as another great life changing event in his life. Goethe's book was translated Truth and Poetry but was also translated Truth and Fiction. Both authors seemed to be against having a fictional existence. Goethe believed the existence of Christ was being fictionalized while Kierkegaard believed the existence Goethe wrote about in his own autobiography was fictional – and much of it was.

On the 28th of August, 1749, at mid-day, as the clock struck twelve, I came into the world, at Frankfort-on-the-Maine. My horoscope was propitious: the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked on him with a friendly eye, and Mercury not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the Moon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more, as he had then reached her planetary hour. She opposed herself, therefore, to my birth, which could not be accomplished until this hour was passed. These good aspects, which the astrologers managed subsequently to reckon very auspicious for me, may have been the causes of my preservation; for, through the unskillfulness [sic] of the midwife, I came into the world as dead, and only after various efforts was I enabled to see the light. This event, which had put our household into straights, turned to the advantage of my fellow-citizens, inasmuch as my grandfather, the Schultheiss (judge), John Wolfgang Textor, took occasion from it to have an accoucheur established, and to introduce or revive the tuition of midwives, which may have done some good to those who were born after me.

Count Leo Tolstoy said he found out "there was no God" in 1838 when he was 12 years old. He had to work through this idea for the next 38 years until he could come away with a method by which he could believe, not only in God but in Christ. Kierkegaard heard the same from Hegelian philosophers and worked through his doubt to belief but he opposed that method. His thought was to start with faith and proceed forward making positive steps rather than always falling back to start over after doubt had prevailed. He said, "False doubt doubts everything except itself; with the help of faith, the doubt that saves doubts only itself."

Kierkegaard didn't want to argue about his faith any more than he wanted to argue about why he may or may not get married or become a professor. He just wanted to make the movement from "possibility to actuality" and knew that he would just be wasting time if he tried to explain himself.

I think that, just as a Christian always ought to be able to explain his faith, so also a married man ought to be able to explain his marriage, not simply to anyone who deigns to ask, but to anyone he thinks worthy of it, or even if, as in this case, unworthy, he finds it propitious to do so. Either/Or Part II, p. 88-89, Hong

Tolstoy tried to explain the method he used to come to grips with the Christian religion. He acted on his beliefs by freeing his serfs, writing books to help them learn to read and giving them land to farm and live on. He didn't argue and reason with his neighbors; he just did what he set out to do. 

Karl Marx complained about Hegelian philosophers in Theses on Feuerbach in this way, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change it." Walter Kaufmann changed the quote to reflect the Kierkegaardian difference in his 1959 book, From Shakespeare to Existentialism:

His [Kierkegaard's] relation to philosophy is best expressed by changing one small word in Marx's famous dictum: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways: the point, however, is to change"-not "it," as Marx said, but ourselves." p. 202

Only in changing oneself is one equal with another, according to Kierkegaard because, in Christianity, all are equal before God. The world is too abstract to change; but the single individual, you yourself: that is something concrete. Kierkegaard put it this way in his Upbuilding Discourses of 1843-1844 and in his Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits of 1847:

The idea so frequently stressed in Holy Scripture for the purpose of elevating the lowly and humbling the mighty, the idea that God does not respect the status of persons, this idea the apostle wants to bring to life in the single individual for application in his life. [...] In the hallowed places, in every upbuilding view of life, the thought arises in a person’s soul that help him to fight the good fight with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, and in the fight to free himself for equality before God, whether this battle is more a war of aggression against the differences that want to encumber him with worldly favoritism or a defensive war against the differences that want to make him anxious in worldly perdition. Only in this way is equality the divine law, only in this way is the struggle the truth, only in this way does the victory have validity- only when the single individual fights for himself with himself within himself and does not unseasonably presume to help the whole world to obtain external equality, which is of very little benefit, all the less so because it never existed, if for no other reason than that everyone would come to thank him and become unequal before him, only in this way is equality the divine law.

Are you now living in such a way that you are aware as a single individual, that in every relationship in which you relate yourself outwardly you are aware that you are also relating yourself to yourself as a single individual, that even in the relationship we human beings so beautifully call the most intimate (marriage) you recollect that you have an even more intimate relationship, the relationship in which you as a single individual relate yourself to yourself before God?

The idea behind world history and constant quantification dehumanizes the quality known as the single individual and can produce "soul rot due to the monotony of self-concern and self-preoccupation" with anxiety about where you fit within the system. Language comes to the aid with copious quantities of words to explain everything. But Kierkegaard says: "the pathos of the ethical is to act."

The observer stares numbly into the immense forest of the generations, and like someone who cannot see the forest for the trees, he sees only the forest, not a single tree. He hangs up curtains systematically and uses people and nations for that purpose - individual human beings are nothing to him; even eternity itself is draped with systematic surveys and ethical meaninglessness. Poetry squanders poetically, but, far from fasting itself, it does not dare to presuppose the divine frugality of the infinite that ethically-psychologically does not need many human beings but needs the idea all the more. No wonder, then, that one even admires the observer when he is noble, heroic, or perhaps more correctly, absentminded enough to forget that he, too, is a human being, an existing individual human being! By steadily staring into that world-historical drama, he dies and departs; nothing of him remains, or he himself remains like a ticket the usher holds in his hands as a sign that now the spectator has gone. If, however, becoming subjective is the highest task assigned to a human being, then everything turns out beautifully. From this it first follows that he no longer has anything to do with world history but in that respect leaves everything to the royal poet. Second, there is not squandering, for even though individuals are as innumerable as the sands of the sea, the task of becoming subjective is indeed assigned to every person. Finally, this does not deny the reality of the world-historical development, which, reserved for God and eternity, has both its time and its place.

As a rule repentance is identified by one thing, that it acts. In our day, it perhaps is less subject to being misunderstood in this way. I believe that neither Young nor Talleyrand nor a more recent author was right in what they said about language, why it exists, for I believe that it exists to strengthen and assist people in abstaining from action. What to me is nonsense will perhaps have a great effect and perhaps most of my acquaintances, if they were to read these letters, would say: “Well, now we have understood him.”

You are the one

The difference between Kierkegaard and Marx is that one applied everything to himself while the other applied everything to someone else or to the whole world. Appropriating information or a life-view is difficult and it's more difficult the less one relies on the opinions of others. Abraham just heard God's promises and they were unreasonable but he had faith. This idea that the world has to be reasonable or respond to human reason is one that omits the world of the spirit. The world is abstract, the church is abstract, the world of the spirit is abstract but the single individual is concrete if one wills to be that. And the single individual relates himself or herself to the world, the church, the world of the spirit, the environment, the established order, the educational facilities in a unique way according to Kierkegaard. The leap means to stop relating yourself to a crowd or a race and then to the world, the church, the world of the spirit, the environment, etc. Once the individual chooses to do that, the leap is made, resolutions become possibilities and one's personality can be developed in freedom.

Kierkegaard started out, in Either/Or Part 1, by saying, "“You know how the prophet Nathan dealt with King David when he presumed to understand the parable the prophet had told him but was unwilling to understand that it applied to him. Then to make sure, Nathan added: You are the man, O King. In the same way I also have continually tried to remind you that you are the one who is being discussed and you are the one who is spoken to.” He discussed this again in another way in Either/Or Part II where he begins: "The esthetic view also considers the personality in relation to the surrounding world, and the expression for this is in its recurrence in the personality of enjoyment. But the esthetic expression for enjoyment in its relation to the personality is mood. That is, the personality is present in the mood, but it is dimly present. ... The mood of the person who lives ethically is centralized. He is not in the mood, and he is not mood, but he has mood and has the mood within himself. What he works for is continuity, and this is always the master of mood. His life does not lack mood-indeed, it has a total mood. But this is acquired; it is what would be called aequale tempermentum [even disposition]. But this is no esthetic mood, and no person has it by nature or immediately." Later, in 1845, he repeated the same point in Stages on Life's Way with a story about an individual with an addiction to gambling and another individual who was a gambler but wasn't in despair because of it:

A gambler comes to a standstill, repentance seizes him, he renounces all gambling. Although he has been standing on the brink of the abyss, repentance nevertheless hangs on to him, and it seems to be successful. Living withdrawn as he does now, possibly saved, he one day sees the body of a man drawn out on the Seine: a suicide, and this was a gambler just as he himself had been, and he knew that this gambler had struggled, had fought a desperate battle to resist his craving. My gambler had loved this man, not because he was a gambler, but because he was better than he was. What then? It is unnecessary to consult romances and novels, but even a religious speaker would very likely break off my story a little earlier and have it end with my gambler, shocked by the sight, going home and thanking God for his rescue. Stop. First of all we should have a little explanation, a judgment pronounced on the other gambler; every life that is not thoughtless eo ipso indirectly passes judgment. If the other gambler had been callous, then he could certainly conclude: He did not want to be saved. But this was not the case. No, my gambler is a man who has understood the old saying de te narratur fabula [ the tale is told to you]; he is no modern fool who believes that everyone should court the colossal task of being able to rattle off something that applies to the whole human race but not to himself. So what judgment shall he pass, and he cannot keep from doing it, for this de te is for him the most sacred law of life, because, it is the covenant of humanity. Søren Kierkegaard Stages on Life's Way p. 477-478 Hong

The visible Church has suffered so broad an expansion that all the original relationships have been reversed. Just as it once required energy and determination to become a Christian, so now, though the renunciation be not praiseworthy, it requires courage and energy to renounce the Christian religion, while it needs only thoughtlessness to remain a nominal Christian. The baptism of children may nevertheless be defensible; no new custom needs to be introduced. But since the circumstances are so radically changed, the clergy should themselves be able to perceive that if it was once their duty, when only a very few were Christians, to win men for Christianity, their present task must rather be to win men by deterring them-for their misfortune is that they are already Christians of a sort. Everyone knows that the most difficult leap, even in the physical realm, is when a man leaps into the air from a standing position and comes down again on the same spot. The leap becomes easier in the degree to which some distance intervenes between the initial position and the place where the leap takes off. And so it is also with respect to a decisive movement in the realm of the spirit. The most difficult decisive action is not that in which the individual is far removed from the decision (as when a non-Christian is about to decide to become one), but when it is as if the matter were already decided. What is baptism without personal appropriation? It is an expression for the possibility that the baptized child may become a Christian, neither more nor less.

• Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 326-327 (Problem of the Fragments) 1846, Swenson and Lowrie translation, 1941 Princeton University Press

Throughout his writings Kierkegaard reiterated his emphasis on the single individual learning how to make a resolution. One example is the following prayer from his April 26, 1848 book Christian Discourses.

Father in heaven, Thy grace and mercy change not with the changing times, they grow not older with the course of years, as if, like a man, Thou wert more gracious one day than another, more gracious at first than at the last; Thy grace remains unchanged as Thou are unchangeable, it is ever the same, eternally young, new every day-for every day Thou sayest, ‘yet today’ (Hebrews 3:13). Oh, but when one givest heed to this word, is impressed by it, and with a serious, holy resolution says to himself, ‘yet today’-then for him this means that this very day he desires to be changed, desires that this very day might become important to him above all other days, important because of renewed confirmation in the good he once chose, or perhaps even because of his first choosing of the good. It is an expression of Thy grace and mercy that every day Thou dost say, ‘yet today’, but it would be to forfeit Thy grace and mercy and the season of grace if a man were to say unchangeably from day to day, ‘yet today’; for it is Thou that bestowest the season of grace ‘yet today’, but it is man that must grasp the season of grace ‘yet today’. Thus it is we talk with Thee, O God; between us there is a difference of language, and yet we strive to make ourselves understood of Thee, and Thou doest not blush to be called our God. That word which when Thou, O God, dost utter it is the eternal expression of Thy unchangeable grace, that same word when a man repeats it with due understanding is the strongest expression of the deepest change and decision-yea, as if all were lost if this change and decision did not come to pass ‘yet today’. So do Thou grant to them that today are here assembled, to them that without external prompting, and hence the more inwardly, have resolved ‘yet today’ to seek reconciliation with Thee by the confession of their sins, to them do Thou grant that this day may be truly blessed to them, that they may hear His voice whom Thou didst send to the world, the voice of the Good Shepherd, that He may know them, and that they may follow Him.

• Soren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses April 26, 1848 Lowrie 1961 Oxford University Press p. 275-276