Two Upbuilding Discourses (1844) is a book by Søren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard wrote the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses in 1843–1844. These discourses were translated from Danish to English in the 1940s, from Danish to German in the 1950s, and then to English again in 1990. These discourses were published along with Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works.
His Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1844 are:
Kierkegaard stressed the value of patience in expectancy when facing life situations in these two short essays.
He provides examples of how different people react to danger and anxiety. He regards the single individual very highly and says, "Let us praise what is truly praiseworthy, the glory of human nature; let us give thanks that it was granted also to us to be human beings."[1]
Kierkegaard provides three examples of people reacting to anxiety and despair, all of them as praiseworthy as the physical endurance to defeat an external enemy.
This act of self-discovery is the essence of what Kierkegaard wrote about. He says, "People are prone to pay attention to earthly dangers[2] but these are external dangers. Kierkegaard says, we need to preserve something internal; our souls."[3]
Kierkegaard's intention in the preceding discourse was to speak as if patience were outside a person.
These discourses were translated by David F. Swenson in the mid-1940s. He wrote in his preface to this discourse: "The discourses appearing in the present volume constitute the fourth and fifth groups in the series of eighteen devotional addresses, and both groups were published in 1844. It may be of some interest to consider more particularly than has hitherto been done, the plan and purpose of these productions, paralleling as they do in time of publication the publication of the esthetic works. Unlike the latter, these addresses were published under Kierkegaard's own name, because as religious works he assumed personal responsibility for the views expressed, since their purpose was to indicate that from the beginning his writing had a religious motivation and plan, of which the esthetic works were also a part."[4]
David J. Gouwens, Professor of Theology at Brite Divinity School,[5] says that Kierkegaard was always more interested in the "how" than in the "why".[6] Robert L. Perkins has termed Kierkegaard’s “second authorship”, with respect to the straightforward religious literature published (with some exceptions) under Kierkegaard’s own name after Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846).