“Year after Year, at My Own Expense”

“Year after Year, at My Own Expense”

1847

“Perhaps You Would Also Like Me to Listen to Your Brain Beating?”

The 1840s were the first decade of steam power in Denmark, and during his wanderings along the ramparts Kierkegaard could see how, one after the other, the windmills went over to steam-driven grindstones. This efficient power source penetrated from the suburbs to the outskirts of the city and was soon within the ramparts of the city itself; factory chimneys sprung up everywhere. People complained about the noise and the stinking coal smoke, but manufacturers and clever investors saw that there was quick money to be made, and before long the entire town was full of smoke and steam, all the way from Marstrand Bakery’s little flour mill down in Silkegade to Burmeister’s sprawling machine works out in Christianshavn.

The urban scene was also being transformed by a new form of transportation for which someone had come up with a Latinate and democratic name, “omnibus,” because these carriages were available to everyone. The first of these were horse-drawn and drew attention to themselves with their brightly painted coachwork and with fancy names such as the Sun, the Red Lady, the Lion, the Eagle, and the North Star. The first omnibuses ran from Amagertorv, in the middle of town, to Frederiksberg, a nearby suburb, but soon they were traveling out to Lyngby, Charlottenlund, and the Deer Park.

During these years, the steam train was literally breaking new ground. An enterprising man named Søren Hjorth had studied steam carriages in England as early as 1834, and on his return to Denmark he and other enthusiasts began to plan a railroad from Copenhagen to Roskilde; it was opened in 1847 with much ceremony and with the king in attendance. For a long time this little fragment of railroad was the only line in Scandinavia and was thus a great tourist attraction, so when university students from Uppsala, Sweden visited the city in 1852, a trip on the steam train to Valby, about three miles from the center of town, was one of the diversions with which Copenhageners could impress their dumbfounded Scandinavian cousins.

There was also progress in smaller things. In the early 1840s the innumerable writers of the day could celebrate the replacement of the old-fashioned, ink-splattering quill pen by the much more serviceable metal pen. The Danish metal pen was the invention of H. C. Thønnesen, a goldsmith, whose continued experimentation resulted in a metal pen with a built-in inkholder, though this forerunner of the fountain pen was a bit too radical for the times and sales were slow. A portrait painter from Vienna named Weninger had greater success when he established his business in a courtyard on Bredgade; here the upper bourgeoisie could take up their positions and have themselves photographed—or daguerrotyped, as it was then called. For a fee of eight rixdollars Weninger could produce a reasonably clear portrait in fifteen seconds. A few months later he had competition from a Dane named Alstrup, who installed himself in a small shop at the Royal Gardens and produced pictures for five rixdollars apiece. The pictures cost a good bit of money but took almost no time. (In 1840, when the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen had been the first Dane to have himself immortalized in this manner, the old man had had to sit absolutely still for a very long time—while making a pair of horns with the little and index fingers of his left hand in order to ward off the camera’s evil eye!)

It was not customary to smile at the photographer. Perhaps there was not so much to smile about—or with—because Aunty Toothache, as Hans Christian Andersen called her, was a frequent and unwelcome visitor, and expansive smiles were in short supply. There was thus a considerable demand, and a woodcarver named Iversen began to satisfy it in 1844, when he broadened his practice to include the production of artificial teeth. Public health officials protested against this unauthorized undertaking, but Iversen fought back and won his case in the Supreme Court, after which others also had a desire to embark upon an adventure in dentures. These included one Lars Peter Petersen, who was granted permission to implant walrus teeth; they cost a mere four marks each and were wrapped in silk in order to minimize soreness of the gums. History does not mention how a person looked when outfitted in this manner, but it is unlikely that these Danish pioneers enjoyed much in the way of success, for in 1851 it was ballyhooed as an important breakthrough when the English began to produce artificial teeth that not only were implanted in a sort of gumlike rubbery substance called gutta-percha, but could also be used for chewing.

In general it was fairly easy to obtain licenses for the production of pretty much everything under the sun, but naturally there was some hesitation with respect to certain requests. Thus when an architect by the name of Holm applied for the right to a twenty-year monopoly on the manufacture of “machines propelled by the weight and pressure of flowing matter,” the authorities quite understandably requested additional information. This was also the case when someone named Martinussen sought a patent on his “Parisian Work-Machine for the Maintenance of Shoes and Clothing and for the Removal of Spots.” Similarly, a pharmacist only just barely squeezed through the eye of the needle when he applied for a license to extract paraffin and oil from peat, just as serious questions were put to a brandy distiller who proposed the extraction of alcohol from night soil. But when a manufacturer of machinery applied for permission to produce something as odd as a “bellows to blow air into slaughtered calves and sheep,” the authorities took a deep breath and denied his request.

Nor was Kierkegaard having any of it. Although he himself had invented an “air pump” in his magister dissertation, it had been a spiritual construction and was fashioned in such a manner that Socrates, when he used the handle, was able to deflate even the most hairsplitting Sophist. Kierkegaard did little in other respects to contribute to modern industrial society, something he himself was quick to lament. Thus, one day, out in Frederiksberg Gardens (or rather, deep inside Concluding Unscientific Postscript), he (alias Johannes Climacus) sat thoughtfully smoking a cigar and attempted to take stock of his situation. He was no longer quite young, he had passed the time with a bit of studies about one thing or another, but he had not been of any use to the human race. And this pained him. For he saw himself surrounded on every side by energetic people who were doing everything they could to make existence more tolerable: “Some by means of railroads; others with omnibuses and steamships; others with the telegraph; others with easily understood surveys and brief bulletins about everything worth knowing; and finally, the true benefactors of the age, who by virtue of thought systematically make spiritual existence easier and easier, yet more and more meaningful. And what about you? Here my introspection was interrupted because my cigar was finished and I had to light a new one.”

No sooner was the cigar lit than Climacus hit on the idea that his contribution to the modern world could be to make everything more and more difficult, thereby supplying existence with its lost gravity. And for this purpose he chose to place “emphasis on his own little self.” True, to some extent this meant making a virtue of necessity, but since he had no particular expertise concerning “China, Persia, the System, astrology, or veterinary science,” he would, in order to do at least something, perfect his “pen’s capacity to depict, as concretely as possible, the everyday side of life, which quite often is different from the Sunday side.”

Here, disguised as Climacus and with teasing gestures, Kierkegaard has formulated a movement from the objective and the abstract to the subjectively concrete—the movement typical of most of his writings. There can thus be no doubt about where Kierkegaard’s priorities lay, but this does not mean that he fell into the naive notion that the possibility of becoming oneself had nothing to do with the surrounding society or with the changes that were taking place. On the contrary, the close connection between one’s self and one’s surroundings can be seen in a series of journal entries from 1847 in which Kierkegaard comments on “natural science,” assigning it the following report card: “Of all the sciences, natural science is the most vapid, and it has amused me to consider how year after year something that once caused astonishment becomes trivial…. What excitement was aroused by the use of the stethoscope! Soon we will have come to the point that every barber uses one, and after he has shaved you he will ask, Perhaps you would also like to be stethoscoped? Then someone else will invent an instrument for listening to the beating of the brain. It will arouse enormous excitement until, in fifty years’ time, every barber can do it. Then, at the barbershop, after you have had a haircut and a shave and have been stethoscoped (because by then this will be quite ordinary), the barber will ask, Perhaps you would also like me to listen to your brain beating?”

It is clear that Kierkegaard would not have answered the barber’s question in the affirmative. And although this prophetic vignette is characterized by a certain “amusement,” it is also true that the merriment was accompanied by a sense of malaise that not even grotesque and wry facial expressions could manage to conceal. The question Kierkegaard poses to the newly shaved and stethoscoped customer—whether he would like to have someone listen to the beating of his brain—seems most of all to echo his fear that the natural sciences will be increasingly capable of infringing on the integrity and self-determination of the human person. The barber was eager and his question was meant as a helpful service, but it seemed much more like a threat and an intrusion. The sound of a brain beating was no longer the business of the individual, but could now be detected by an instrument, an inanimate tattletale. And beneath all the humor we notice Kierkegaard shuddering at the thought of spirit being reduced to mechanics. In this harsh illumination, the scene in the barbershop anticipated the clinical debates of later times concerning the minimum criteria for the prolongation of a life in which the only thing remaining is the infinitesimally faint beating of the brain.

In the progress of the natural sciences, Kierkegaard saw a series of tendencies toward a domination by expertise that would take away the rightful authority people have over their own persons—an all-powerful expertise that would deprive the less knowledgeable of the right to have any say in the matter. Increased knowledge is not necessarily accompanied by a corresponding increase in justice, as is clear from the following journal entry, which characteristically alternates between sarcasm and an emphasis on matters of principle: “The natural sciences will be the source of the most lamentable divide—between the simple people, who simply believe, and the learned and half-learned, who have looked through a microscope. Then things will no longer be as they were in the past, when a person could dare to speak of the simplest but highest of all things, addressing himself outspokenly and frankly to everyone, to all people, regardless of whether they are black or green or have large heads or small. He would first have to see whether they have brains enough—to believe in God. If Christ had known about the microscope, He would have first have examined the apostles.”

Here Kierkegaard ruminates critically on the issues that are central to his understanding of the natural sciences: The gulf between the expert and the nonexpert, the end of the principle of equality, the decline in plainspokenness, and not least, a situation in which a person’s relation to Christianity would come to depend on technical qualifications and professional competence—and here again, Kierkegaard mentions the brain, which can only be judged by those few who have an understanding of such matters. The natural sciences were thus beginning to deprive a person of his fate, whether that fate was simply chosen or merely accidental, and with the clear-sightedness of the pessimistic prophet, Kierkegaard saw that there would be a “new cultural consciousness” that would “make natural science its religion.” For the same reasons, Kierkegaard placed himself in emphatic opposition to a banal future in which people would brush things aside by insisting that everything is the fault of something or someone else, the fault of society or of the circumstance that their brains are too small: “Let us imagine the greatest criminal who has ever lived and also imagine that by that time physiology will have upon its nose an even more splendid pair of spectacles than ever before, so that it could explain the criminal, explain that the whole thing was a matter of natural necessity, that his brain had been too small, et cetera. How dreadful is that immunity from all future prosecution in comparison to the judgment Christianity passes on him: that he will go to Hell if he does not repent.”

It might seem strange that Kierkegaard here heaps such scorn on the ability of a more and more splendidly bespectacled “physiology” to see what had previously been hidden, because Kierkegaard had himself supplied Vigilius Haufniensis with a similar pair of spectacles that enabled him to inspect a number of the psychosomatic conflicts that Kierkegaard had quite literally felt in his own body.

To some extent, this sharp antithesis between “physiology” and “Christianity” must be attributed to Kierkegaard’s very clear sense that modern natural science wanted to make explanation identical with exculpation, diagnosis with judgment: “In the end, physiology will expand so much that it will annex ethics. Indeed, there are already signs of a new attempt to treat ethics as physics, so that the whole of ethics becomes an illusion, and the ethical side of the human race will be treated statistically, as a matter of average numbers…. What do I need to know about the afferent and efferent nerve impulses, about the circulation of blood, about the microscopic condition of a human being in the uterus? The ethical has tasks enough for me. Do I need to know about how the digestive processes work in order to be able to eat? Or about the processes of the nervous system—in order to believe in God and love humanity?”

Kierkegaard did not think that he needed to know about the “afferent and efferent nerve impulses,” and in fact he did not know very much about these phenomena. When he turned to such concepts it was, among other things, to indicate the way in which the natural sciences could have an alienating effect simply because of their very language. The irritation summoned up by this language was channeled into scornful commentaries about the hectic busyness typical of the modern researcher: “Absolutely no benefit can be derived from involving oneself with the natural sciences. One stands there defenseless, with no control over anything. The researcher immediately begins to distract one with his details: Now one is to go to Australia; now to the moon; now into an underground cave; now, by Satan, up the arse—to look for an intestinal worm; now the telescope must be used; now the microscope: Who in the Devil can endure it!”

Kierkegaard could not endure it, thus the protest, and in a journal entry from 1851, the crisis and the collision course was emphasized even more pointedly: “My thought is that we must set our course in the direction of the existential; that is where we are bound. Thus one cannot use science to combat the preoccupation with science that (as they say about food) makes a person bloated. Satire must be employed, God-fearing satire.” The possibility of dialogue seems to have been unambiguously abandoned. One cannot combat natural science on its own terms; the battle must be joined on other territory, by means of God-fearing satire. Kierkegaard did not indicate what this satire might consist in, but an earlier journal entry gives us a quite concrete notion of what he had in mind. Here we have the draft of a “comedy” that includes the following: “It was market day for the Sophists; and on this day each one came and set up his booth. A great many curious people flocked to the place. We hear three trumpet blasts, then a herald comes in advance of a sort of triumphal chariot in which the great scientist is standing. The herald cries out, ‘Here we can demonstrate with necessity how in 1,000 years there will be a Spanish astronomer, who will prophesy as a necessary fact that a new star will appear in 1,000 years. The fact of its existence can be speculatively demonstrated, but it is so far away that it will take a long time yet. This remarkable exhibit, ladies and gentlemen, is also remarkable because His Majesty the King of France has permitted himself to be convinced of it and has declared it to be the most remarkable thing he has heard—and the Pope as well.’ The piece could end with a rebellion by a group of laborers who knock over all the booths and smash everything to pieces. This was what had happened: A man had invented a gigantic microscope that was to surpass every remarkable thing that had ever been seen, whether one looked at the microscope itself or looked through it. But an enormous apparatus was necessary for this, and it had been worked on for six months at an enormous cost. There were still three months of work left to be done. But what happened? On that day news arrived from China that on that very day (because owing to many remarkable discoveries, communication will have attained astonishing speed) someone had invented a microscope capable of even greater magnification, which could be constructed quite simply. The consequences of this were that the gigantic microscope had become worthless (before it was completed), the entrepreneur was ruined, and the workers were without bread.”

It is probably unnecessary to remark that the comedy never made it off Kierkegaard’s desk. And despite all the heralds, circus barkers, and other sideshow amusements, the comedy’s theatrical qualities are not particularly striking. What is striking, on the other hand, is the ending, which is anything but comic and which transforms the play into a revolutionary drama about an uprising of the proletariat against a late-capitalist system that, in the truest sense, was the author of its own downfall, so that even the entrepreneur is ruined. But the comedy is not a revolutionary drama. In themselves, the proletarian rumpus and revolutionary uprising are rather neutral, serving as indicators of a future tendency in the alienating encounter of man and machine. Thus what Kierkegaard had in mind was not in fact the myth of the classless society but quite a different myth, that of the Tower of Babel. The invention of the “gigantic microscope” that would “surpass every remarkable thing that had ever been seen” is the modern era’s realization of the old dream of storming Heaven and forcing one’s way into the innermost precincts of the greatest secrets. “The gigantic microscope” is a symbol of presumptuous inquisitiveness that wants to employ advanced technology in order to peer over God’s shoulder.

Kierkegaard’s journal entries on natural science serve up a great many microscopes of varying size and focal length, aimed in every imaginable direction. Here, as in earlier entries, it is obvious that Kierkegaard had mixed feelings, ranging from genuine interest to undisguised disdain. What the new era offered was in fact not merely the making visible of what had previously been invisible, but the making unlikely of things that had previously been likely precisely because they were invisible—for instance, the circumstance that God established and governs the world, including the lives of peoples and individuals. People had stopped merely interpreting the world. They had begun to change it.

Preeminent in contributing to these changes were the natural sciences, which according to Kierkegaard made the frightful error of failing to limit themselves to “plants and animals and stars” but wanted as well to intrude “upon the domain of the spirit.” He noted bitterly: “Most of what flourishes luxuriantly nowadays under the name of science (especially the natural sciences) is not science at all, but curiosity. In the end all corruption will come from the natural sciences. Many people admiringly … believe that if investigations are made with a microscope, this is scientific seriousness. Foolish superstition about the microscope. No, with the help of microscopic observation, curiosity merely becomes even more comical. When a man makes the statement, both simple and profound, that ‘I cannot see with my naked eye how consciousness comes into being,’ this is perfectly proper. But when a man has a microscope in front of his eye and then looks and looks and looks—and yet cannot see it, this is comical. And what makes it especially ridiculous is that it is supposed to be serious.” The journal entry continues: “If God walked about with a cane in His hand, things would be especially rough for these serious observers who employ the microscope. God would take his cane and knock all the hypocrisy out of them and out of those who do research in the natural sciences. The hypocrisy is this, that the natural sciences are said to lead to God. Yes, indeed, they do lead to God, in a superior manner, but this is simply impertinence. One can easily prove to oneself that the researcher in the natural sciences is hypocritical in this way. For if one were to say to him that a conscience and Luther’s Small Catechism is all anyone needs, the scientific researcher would turn up his nose. In his superior manner he wants to transform God into a coy beauty, a Devil of an artist who cannot be understood by everyone. Stop! The divine and simple truth is that no one, absolutely no one, can understand Him, that the wisest person must cling humbly to the same thing to which the simplest person clings.”

What Kierkegaard is defending here is the principle of equality, but of course the problem is that God does not walk around like some sort of dramatic personage, carrying a “cane in His hand” in order to enforce the justice He requires. On the contrary, God is a hidden God, and the only thing visible is the frightful fact that the development of science seems to have its own intrinsic law, which in principle cannot acknowledge other boundaries than those it cannot itself transgress. It was this relentless and inexorable progress of transgression that Kierkegaard criticized, but in vain. It is not surprising that as the years passed, his capacity for objectivity steadily faded, ending in the harsh testiness of an old man.

The Press: “The Government’s Filth Machine”

The collision with The Corsair left Kierkegaard with a terrific loathing for the daily press and its practitioners, “those who rent out opinions,” as he called them, using an expression he found in Schopenhauer and became infatuated with. Schopenhauer had noted quite correctly that although most people avoid walking around in a borrowed hat or coat, they are only too happy to go around with borrowed opinions, which have been served up to them by journalists: “The great mass of people naturally have no opinion but—here it comes!—this deficiency is remedied by the journalists who make their living by renting out opinions.” This bizarre situation also has a logic of its own: “Gradually, as more and more people are wrenched free of the condition of innocence in which they were by no means obliged to have an opinion and are forced into the ‘condition of guilt’ … in which they must have an opinion, what can the unfortunate people do? An opinion becomes a necessary item for every member of the enormous public, so the journalist offers his assistance by renting out opinions.” In so doing the journalists make people laughable in two respects: first by convincing them of the necessity of having an opinion, then by renting out an “opinion which despite its insubstantial quality is nonetheless put on and worn as—a necessary item.”

Thus Kierkegaard came surprisingly early to the realization that the press lives by creating its own stories—“it acts as if it were reporting on an actual situation, and it intends to produce that situation”—with the result that reality itself becomes pale and imaginary. “There is something the journalist wants to publicize, and perhaps absolutely no one thinks or cares about it. So what does the journalist do? He writes an article in the most exalted manner in which he states that this is a need profoundly felt by everyone, et cetera. Perhaps his journal has a large circulation, and now we have set things in motion. The article is in fact read, it is talked about. Perhaps another newspaper writes in opposition. There ensues a polemical controversy that causes a sensation.”

With all this business the journalists have merely transformed themselves into “nonsense mushrooms”—an expression Kierkegaard used for them as early as 1838, employing a term he had in fact unearthed in Miss Nielsen’s Cookbook. The journalists also incur a moral responsibility because they are capable of completely altering a person’s fate overnight: “Take a young girl. Someone names her, using her full name, and then relates that she had got a new dress last Sunday. This of course is not the most unsavory sort of evil—and nonetheless she is made ridiculous. Everything private, the condition of privacy itself, is entirely incompatible with being mentioned all over the country in a newspaper.” The vignette itself is so shy and retiring that the reader can scarcely get a glimpse of the problem, but it is there. Even though an announcement such as this is ethically neutral in itself, the mere fact of its publication becomes a violation of privacy. Kierkegaard saw more and more clearly that the media’s transformation of the population into “the public” was accompanied by increasing infantilization, by the deprivation of the individual’s rightful authority, a condition that was all the more catastrophic because it was said to be identical to the public’s self-determination and its supposed possession of influence. And Kierkegaard had no doubts concerning the consequences of the new shape of public life. It will in fact be “Denmark’s mortal wound: narrowness, each person’s fear of his peers, town gossip, backbiting, an absence of the outspokenness one needs to stand by an opinion, … espionage within family life, snooping in domestic matters, in sum, whatever it takes to please the esteemed public.” The press was simply “the government’s filth machine”

The press bore a considerable share of the blame for this corruption, and Kierkegaard did not show a second’s hesitation: “Woe, woe to the daily press! If Christ came to the world now, as sure as I live, he would take aim not at the Chief Priests and so forth, but at the journalists.” And if Christ wouldn’t, Kierkegaard certainly would: “God in Heaven knows that bloodthirstiness is alien to my soul,” he wrote in 1849, “but yet, yet in the name of God I would take upon myself the responsibility for giving the order to fire as soon I had conscientiously taken the greatest pains to ascertain that not one single other person, indeed not one living being, was in front of the gun barrels excepting—journalists.” It is not strange that Kierkegaard, with Giødwad in mind, found it “inconceivable that I have had a friend who was a journalist.”

It may be true that Kierkegaard did not say anything about the press that has not been said by others, but he said it before they did. His critique of his times was so far beyond his own times that it was only many years later that it became possible to establish the legitimacy of his views. Take, for example, this curious little caprice: “Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little speaking tube that was so powerful it could be heard all over the entire country. Wouldn’t the police forbid it out of fear that its use would result in the whole of society becoming mentally deranged? In the same way, of course, guns are forbidden.” Kierkegaard jotted this down at about the same time that Karl Marx proclaimed the age of the proletariat and declared that religion was the opium of the people. Kierkegaard would only have given his assent, merely adding that the proletariat of the future would not be organized and active but, on the contrary, it would be an incoherent and anesthetized media proletariat that deifies everything easy and vile.

This tendency is revealed when the voice of the individual disappears into the chattiness of the age. People neither speak nor remain silent. They do something in between, they chatter. “In this chatter the distinction between the private and the public is abolished in a private-public chattiness that roughly corresponds to what ‘the public’ is. For ‘the public’ is the public sector that takes an interest in what is most private.” And it was in connection with this anonymous chatter that the idea of a far-reaching “speaking tube” presented itself to Kierkegaard as the most frightful symbol of modern times. In a terrifying vision of the audiovisual chaos of a future time, when the earth would be surrounded by satellites circling through the atmosphere, Kierkegaard prophetically proclaimed: “And just as the public is a sheer abstraction, in the end human speech will also become an abstraction. No one will speak any more, but in time an objective reflection will emit an atmospheric something or other, an abstract sound that will make human speech superfluous, just as machines have made laborers superfluous. In Germany there are even handbooks for lovers, so the whole business will probably end with a loving couple sitting and talking to each other anonymously.”

What Kierkegaard here sensed as a premonition was that the voice for which he understood himself to be a humble speaking tube—the voice of God—would fade into the impersonal chattiness of modern speaking tubes. This was the innermost theme of his critique of his own and of future times. Our own day’s enormous supply of both speaking and picture tubes has demonstrated with more clarity than we might want that Kierkegaard’s concern was justified. For it was not only the rampant cheapening of everything that alarmed Kierkegaard, but also the absence of the eternal from the human horizon, the loss of the possibility of a radically new departure, the loss of the true destiny of man. One spring day in 1845 he exemplified this point by sketching the following grotesque scene: “You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of the Transfiguration and must depart—but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill.”

Nor did Kierkegaard have any particular confidence that his critical appeal to his times would be heard, much less have any effect. “I think,” he had Climacus write in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “that trying to restrain one’s times in straightforward fashion is like when a passenger in a carriage holds onto the seat ahead of him in order to stop the carriage…. No, the only thing to do is to get out of the carriage oneself and restrain oneself.”

While traveling in one of the new omnibuses—say, the North Star—Kierkegaard here indicated the dilemma to which his own and every subsequent social critique had to be referred: If a critic wants to have the impact needed in speaking critically about the media, the critique must take place in the media. If we want to escape from this dilemma, we must therefore obey Kierkegaard’s instructions, we must get out of the carriage and hold onto ourselves. And this means that we must hold fast to the little bit of freedom that the power-hungry media world still must grant the individual: the local world, conversation, silence. “God’s true intention was that a person was to speak individually with his neighbor or at most with several neighbors. Man is not greater than that. In every generation there are a few people who are so gifted and mature that they are justified in using a gigantic means of communication such as the press. But that before long everyone, and especially all the second-raters, should use such a means of communication when they have nothing at all or only nonsense to communicate—what a disproportion!”

To Travel Is to Write—and Vice Versa

Just about everyone did it, for shorter or longer periods of time and with varying results, but they all did it—they traveled. But not Kierkegaard. The painters went south, toward the light, the scents, and the sounds of Italy, Turkey, and Greece. Intellectuals journeyed to the universities and the libraries of Germany and France. Some traveled as far away as was humanly possible, P. W. Lund made his way to the fossils and giant anthills of Brazil, and Poul Martin Møller had been in China where he wrote poetry about the black Danish bread he missed so sorely. And finally there was Hans Christian Andersen—teased by Kierkegaard because he was more apt to “rush off in a coach and tour Europe than to look into the history of hearts”—who in fact did travel so far and wide (including into the history of the heart, for that matter) that he spent all of ten years outside the borders of his native land.

Railroads were the great construction projects of the age. They began in England in 1830 and soon spread to the European continent, making it possible for the younger generation to travel to lands that their fathers had had to content themselves with dreaming and poetizing about. Kierkegaard never saw the part of the world that lay south of Berlin. So he had to read his way to an understanding of how things really were in the Greece where Socrates (the spiritual ancestor he so greatly revered) had once perambulated. Ironically enough, a novelistic possibility Kierkegaard had sketched in his journal one December morning in 1837 came in fact to resemble his own prosaic reality: “I would like to write a novella in which there would be a man who walked past the plasterer’s shop on Østergade every day, doffed his hat, and stood quietly for a moment with the words he uttered regularly each day, O, you wonderful Grecian clime, why was it not permitted me to live under your skies in the days of your prime?” The plasterer in question was Giuseppe Barsugli, and prior to the opening of the Thorvaldsen Museum in 1848, his display windows in Østergade were one of the few public places where Copenhageners could get a notion of sculpture. Thus one did not have to travel. One could help oneself in other ways, merely thinking oneself southward, as happened in the month of May that same year, 1837, when the bemused student carried out a little experiment on his windowsill: “It is curious how the blue-violet hue of Italy, which is otherwise absent in this country, can be produced by looking through a window into the air on a clear evening, with a candle between oneself and the window.”

Kierkegaard moreover had rich opportunities to plan expeditions with an especially academic meticulousness. His relatively large collection of geodetic reference materials thus included C. F. Weiland’s Compendious General Atlas of the Entire World; a globe by G. F. von Oldenburg (with floor stand) of which he was the proud owner; F. W. Streit’s Map of Europe affixed to a wooden roller; an impressive, lacquered General Map of Denmark, also fastened to a rod; and he was also the owner of J. H. Mansa’s Map of the Northeastern Portion of Zealand glued to a piece of linen but ready to be packed up and put into its traveling case when it was time for a trip to Gilleleje, for example.

Kierkegaard kept his longing to travel under control by reminding himself that deep down there was really no reason to travel, for when he reached his destination his poetic sensibilities dilated so greatly that he was simply unable to focus on his foreign surroundings and instead isolated himself in his hotel room, and “suffering a bit from melancholia, … I plunge into the most enormous [literary] productivity.” The first trip to Berlin, in 1841, was a minor exception to this rule, but otherwise his later journeys pass almost entirely unnoticed in his journals. In early May 1846, in the middle of his row with The Corsair, when he traveled to Berlin for the fourth and final time and spent a couple of weeks there, he did fill his journal with a dozen stirring sketches about the theology of the Creation story, but they could just as well have been written in Copenhagen.

The innumerable travel routes of the day were thus merely the routes by which a restless individual fled from himself. This was something that even a figure like Aesthete A, from the early days of Kierkegaard’s career as a writer, found amusing: “One is weary of living in the country and travels to the capital. One is weary of one’s native land and travels abroad. One is ‘europamüde’ [German: ‘weary of Europe’] and travels to America, et cetera. One abandons oneself to the fanatical hope of endless traveling from star to star.” Nothing but castles in the air. And then there were the practical considerations that always presented themselves before a journey—not to mention inconveniences of virtually every sort, including involuntary physical contact with the fellow passengers with whom one always had to share a cabin or a carriage seat. Thus when Constantin Constantius wanted to undertake a “journey of discovery” to satisfy himself about “the possibility and meaning of repetition,” he traveled by steamship to Stralsund and transferred to the “rapid mail coach” to Berlin, describing his trip as follows: “Among connoisseurs there are various opinions as to which seat is the most comfortable in a stagecoach. My view is the following: The whole business is miserable. On my last trip I had an end seat on the front bench inside the coach (this is viewed by some as a great advantage) and was then so tossed about with my close companions for thirty-six hours that when I arrived at Hamburg I had not only lost my mind, but also my legs. For thirty-six hours the six of us sitting inside the coach had become so kneaded together into one body that I came to understand what had happened to the people from Mols who had sat together for so long that they could not tell which legs were their own.”

It never occurred to Kierkegaard that his art might have benefited from a proper journey abroad, and his future readers might also have derived advantages from such a journey.

“The Air Bath”

On August 2, 1847, Kierkegaard finished the printer’s manuscript of Works of Love. When he was working on the eighth of the book’s ten sections, he was so exhausted that he thought of taking a trip to Berlin, but out of fear that this might affect his focus on the work at hand he subdued his desire to travel abroad: “I stuck it out. God be praised, it went well. Oh, while people mock and laugh at me for all the work I do, I sit and thank God who grants me its success. Indeed, take everything else I ever had: What is best is still an original—and, thank God, unfailingly blesséd—conception that God is love. However dismal things have looked for me much of the time, I summon up all the most blessedly wonderful thoughts I can muster about what a loving person is—and I say to myself, This is how God is at every moment.”

The very next day the desire to travel awoke anew, now with the somewhat more modest destination of Stettin, but once again he succeeded in subjugating the impulse. Kierkegaard told himself with a shudder that, of course, “the whole of my constitution, all the habits of my physical life, are diametrically opposed to the madness of traveling during the dog days, when the temperature is 84° (F.), when I hardly even dare to take a carriage ride at noon. Rather, I feel much, much better when I refrain from moving at all. What is the sense of traveling at this time of year to a sandy desert where the heat of the sun is intolerable? What is the sense of trifling with one’s sleep, for I never sleep while on board and am therefore very exhausted the next day? And in foreign surroundings, which always make the temperature 20° hotter?”

Kierkegaard was a true master of the art of not packing any suitcase at all. He conscientiously listed his flimsy and transparent excuses in his journal. First of all, it was less than a week from today to August 9, the anniversary of his father’s death, and he couldn’t possibly be sitting all the way down in Stettin on that day. Furthermore, he was involved in negotiations with the book dealer Reitzel, who wanted to purchase the remaining copies of his writings, “and I know how careless he is; if I set a bad example, then Good Night!” And finally he was expecting a man who might perhaps purchase the house on Nytorv. And although it is fine to have a “an idea of flight once in a while,” rather than this “forced journey” it would be preferable to take a little vacation in Denmark, so he could laze about, read a bit, and in general “let the head rest.” Possible reading on his summer vacation might include his newly purchased copy of Southern Travel Pictures by J. L. Ussing, which depicted, among other things, life in Constantinople and Thessaly. After all, to read was also to travel.

So Kierkegaard decided to remain in Copenhagen, but on August 14 he was again haunted by Berlin and lamented his indecision: “As soon as I have thrown myself into a coach or aboard a ship, there I am, there is a sort of decision in it. The negative decision is far more difficult.” The anniversary of his father’s death had now disappeared as an argument for remaining at home, and the business with Reitzel had become unimportant. The remaining pretext was the man who was to look at the house, but he still had not shown up; under the circumstances this was both intolerable and yet convenient: “My ideality suffers so indescribably from the slovenliness, indecision, and nonsense that constitute the secret of practical life. A man does not turn up at the appointed time, or bungles something, or wastes my time: All this sort of thing is a torment to me. I would much rather take on any task, the most trivial sort of work as a copyist, provided only that I am permitted to do it by myself. Because then I could at any rate do it properly and precisely. But this beastly indeterminacy is a nightmare for me.” If we were to think he was projecting, we would not be far off the mark.

Two days later Kierkegaard had wrenched himself out of his indeterminacy. He remained home and the next day he would go to the press with the completed manuscript of Works of Love. His fickleness about travel would not go unpunished, however, and he thus devised and carried out a peculiar bit of self-chastisement that proved to be very effective: “In order to assure myself that what had prevented me from traveling had not been any possible distaste for all the fuss associated with getting ready for a journey, I have—with my usual mistrust of myself—commenced a bath cure that I knew was very repulsive to me.” First plans about Berlin, then Stettin, then a little vacation in Denmark. None of it came to anything, and the whole matter ended in a penitential bath cure.

The seventy thousand foreign fathoms had to wait. Instead, the ethereal intellect took an “air bath,” which was what he called his gently undulating carriage rides—in 1847 alone, he went on no fewer than thirty-seven of these outings. They did not require all sorts of odds and ends and complicated trappings; he merely had to reserve some time with Søren Lassen, the hired coachman in Lille Helligejststræde, who was also known as the academic carriage man because he specialized in serving the well-to-do. The destination might be somewhere in northern Zealand, Fredensborg or Frederiksborg; when he was in high spirits it might be a two-day journey, but as a rule Lassen set out for more local destinations such as Nyholte, Lyngby, Rudersdal, the Deer Park, Bellevue, the Hermitage, Fortunen, or wherever else a good restaurant was to be found.

Secretary Israel Levin, who sometimes went along on these trips, has provided us with the following vignettes that are both connected and separated by a series of breathless dashes: “The drives up to Northern Zealand had to go at an extremely fast pace; the ‘air bath’ did him good.—The carriage arrived precisely on time, and he himself was always punctual to excess.—And then off we drove.—We arrived in Fredensborg.—The coachman hurried into the inn and merely said, ‘the magister.’—This started everything in motion.—Kierkegaard stepped inside and in his thin voice said only, ‘Good mor-ning,’—and then disappeared into the forest.—After we returned we had soup and chicken or duck.—Then Kierkegaard took out 10 rixdollars and said, ‘Here my little girl, be so kind as to pay everyone.’—Home again in a rush.—The coachman laughed because he got a 5 rixdollar tip.—On these trips he could be amiability itself, so engaging, sparkling with wit, emotion, and thoughts. Once I said, ‘That was an excellent outing, only it seemed to me to be too short. I wish I could repeat it.’ ‘Done!’ said Kierkegaard, ‘See if the carriage is still there.’ But the carriage had driven off. ‘Then come again tomorrow at ——— o’clock.’ I came the next morning. ‘No, none of that today.’—‘But the enjoyment—I had been looking forward to it.’ ‘Ah. You have had all the enjoyment. Pleasure resides in the imagination. You were happy yesterday evening; you dreamed about it last night; you were happy this morning on your way over here; you have had enjoyment enough.’ ”

At the end of the day, when they returned home from their expedition, the servants would have completely aired out the apartment and lit the stove. “Kierkegaard walked back and forth in the room, waved his handkerchief and looked at the thermometer,” for it had to read exactly sixty-three degrees, “and goodness knows how they managed it, but it was always just as it was supposed to be.” Before starting to work, Kierkegaard and Levin each took a perfume flask of cologne and sprayed some of the precious drops on the stove so that the scent filled the room and the ambience was just right—for an edifying discourse!

Either and Or

On Sunday, October 3, 1847, Kierkegaard’s outing took him to Lyngby, more specifically Sorgenfri Palace, where he was to call on King Christian VIII. This was the third time that the mightiest man in the realm had wished to converse with his remarkably gifted subject. Kierkegaard flinched a bit. He had tried to get out of it by mentioning his delicate health, but the king was unyielding, and when a king calls one does not send one’s regrets. By now Kierkegaard had become a little more familiar with the entire ritual, which he had bungled quite thoroughly during his first visit, in mid-March of that year. On that occasion, he was granted an audience after a long period of nervous waiting in the anteroom, after which, in his befuddlement, he bowed at an entirely inappropriate time and subsequently made as if to leave on three occasions, only to understand, too late, the king’s mild reproof to effect that he, the king, had plenty of time. When that audience ended, Kierkegaard had been unable to bring himself to kiss the monarch’s outstretched hand and had to be satisfied with making yet another awkward bow.

This time Kierkegaard brought along a copy of Works of Love which, with appropriate humility, he presented to the king, who glanced at the table of contents and immediately commented on the book’s ingenious architecture: “You shall love. You shall love your neighbor. You shall love your neighbor.” During their previous conversation the king had declared that Kierkegaard was too profound for him. Kierkegaard had responded to this with unfortunate amiability: “Of course, Your Majesty does not have time to read books, nor is what I write intended for you.” The king had been surprised at such breeziness, so in an attempt to make up for his clumsiness, Kierkegaard on this occasion read aloud a beautiful and easily comprehensible passage about love as a matter of conscience, which very appropriately mentioned a king. So everything seemed to be all right again.

When the reading was over, the king directed their conversation to the matter of his government and wished to hear what Kierkegaard thought a king’s role ought to be. Having learned from his mistakes, Kierkegaard asked whether he should speak plainly, and the king answered in the affirmative. “So I said to him that he had permitted himself to be seduced by his personal gifts and that in this respect a king’s situation was something like that of a woman, who ought to conceal her personal talents and simply be the mother of the house.” Kierkegaard meant that the king had done himself injury by granting audiences to just about anybody, and in so doing had rendered difficult his relations with the upper reaches of the civil service, who could not tolerate letting the king be influenced by more or less random individuals. The king had to understand that it would not be possible to govern in royal fashion if he felt responsible for every single one of his subjects. And he was also to bear in mind that everyone who had an audience with him went around spreading all sorts of complete nonsense about it.

The king was not entirely delighted with Kierkegaard’s judgment of him and he therefore wanted to know what an ideal regent would be like. There was no need to ask Kierkegaard twice about this, and it soon became clear that his ideas were more royal than those of the king himself: “First of all, it would be good if he were ugly. Next, he should be deaf and blind, or at least act as if he were, because this would get him out of many difficulties…. Finally, a king must not say much but must have a proverb he utters upon every occasion, and which is therefore meaningless.” The king enjoyed this description heartily, and when Kierkegaard added that a king also ought to remember to be sick once in a while because it aroused sympathy, the king exulted with mischievous laughter: “Aha, that is probably why you say that you are sickly—you want to make yourself interesting.”

Just as Kierkegaard was about to remark on the king’s quick sense of humor, the door to an adjacent room opened. The king disappeared for a moment and reappeared with the queen, Caroline Amalie, on his arm. She looked oddly unprepossessing, Kierkegaard thought, almost disheveled. But of course that did not keep him from bowing, true to form, in the wrong manner. Things got no better when the king proudly showed her his copy of Works of Love, thus putting Kierkegaard in an embarrassing position because he had not brought a copy for the queen. He begged to be forgiven for this but the king simply made the genial reply that he and his wife could certainly manage to share the one copy. The queen, too, wished to demonstrate her amiability, and with a slight flutter of nervousness she said that she knew him well, she had seen him strolling upon the ramparts. Indeed, not only that: Even though she had found it difficult, she had also read a bit of his Either and Or.

Oh, what a blunder! “Either and Or!” It was something a seamstress could have said, Kierkegaard thought, while noting the king’s desperate attempt to catch his eye. After a painful pause that seemed to last an eternity, the king composed himself and asked his literary ignoramus of a wife whether Juliane might not be wondering what had become of her. To this the queen simply answered with a blank yes. And as quickly as she could, she took leave of her spouse and of the genius.

All in all, however, the visits had a very beneficial effect on Kierkegaard, who could even refer to them as a sort of “family visit.” Their effect on the king is uncertain, however, for when we look in his diaries, which teem with entries about the enormous numbers of stags, does, rabbits, and foxes he felled on his hunting trips, the entry for Sunday, October 3, 1847, states that the king went to church on that day to hear Bekker preach, after which he had “audiences” and had then gone for a ride “in the Deer Park.” Thus Kierkegaard is here entirely submerged into the undifferentiated “audiences,” which would scarcely have pleased him, just as it would have annoyed him that the king’s favorite preachers were Mynster, Martensen, and Paulli. But a king is not just anybody, and Christian VIII was not just another king. He was clever, intellectual, and well-informed, and there was a certain briskness to his repartee. Thus, during their first conversation, when Kierkegaard had complained of being “a genius in a provincial town,” the king had replied that he should not complain about that at all, for it made it possible for him to do much more for the individual!

The king’s intellect could also build up a sort of tension that made Kierkegaard anxious. Never before had he seen an older man so fired up; indeed, the king veritably seethed with passion like a young woman: “He was a sort of voluptuary of the intellect and spirit…. Christian VIII was brilliantly gifted but had in fact got lost in his great intelligence, which lacked a moral background of corresponding proportions.” This latter remark is Kierkegaard’s polite way of referring to the circumstance that the king had not been satisfied with Caroline Amalie alone and therefore had quite a number of royal bastards on his conscience. So Kierkegaard was surely right in remarking that “No woman, not even the most brilliantly gifted woman, could have had real power over him. For one thing, he was too intelligent for that, and for another he was a little too given to the masculine superstition that men are more intelligent than women.” If, on the other hand, the king had traveled to southern climes and encountered a crafty Jesuit who understood how to make himself intriguing, it would have been extremely easy for the priest to dupe Denmark’s Christian and make such a fool of him that he would begin to see ghosts in broad daylight.

At present the king was face to face with Kierkegaard, who was not a Jesuit or a ghost, but neither was he a quite ordinary person, and in any case he knew how to benefit from royal favor. With ill-concealed satisfaction he noted that the distinguished people who had previously taken pleasure at his public misfortune in the wake of The Corsair would change their tune when they learned that he hobnobbed confidentially with an absolute monarch. Furthermore—as we learn in a subordinate clause—Kierkegaard was using these official visits to make himself worthy of a possible “official position.” At one point in their second conversation, the king had spoken enthusiastically about Sorø and had asked whether Kierkegaard might not be interested in an appointment at that honorable academy. Sorø was too far away—and furthermore Carsten Hauch and other sinister sympathizers of P. L. Møller were down there—so Kierkegaard had to find a way out of it. Kierkegaard had learned from the newspaper that the king had been out fishing that very morning, and he therefore answered with a little parable to the effect that “in addition to their regular lures, fishermen have an odd little lure with which they sometimes catch the best fish—and I am such an odd little lure.”

The king then let Sorø be and—implying some possible bit of generosity—asked whether Kierkegaard had any travel plans at all. No, none whatever, answered Kierkegaard, but were he to travel it would at most be a little jaunt to Berlin. “You must surely have many interesting acquaintances there,” the king obligingly responded. “No, Your Majesty, in Berlin I live entirely isolated and work hardest of all.” The king clearly did not grasp a word of this. “But then you could just as well travel to Smørum-Ovre [a tiny, rural village],” he exclaimed, heartily amused at his own wit. “No, Your Majesty, whether I travel to Smørum-Ovre or Smørum-Nedre, I would have no anonymity, no concealment by four hundred thousand people.” Kierkegaard intended this as a pointed little remark, but the king had apparently given up the thought of investing in the eccentric little magister and he therefore merely replied, “Yes, that’s quite true.”

A new topic seemed necessary, hence the king asked something about Schelling’s philosophy, and Kierkegaard quickly tried to give him an idea of what it entailed. Schelling’s relation to the Prussian court, which of course had previously been steeped in Hegelian philosophy, was also on the king’s mind, and Kierkegaard was quick to remark that “Schelling’s situation was probably like that of the Rhine, which becomes stagnant at its mouth—so he is becoming anemic in his capacity as a Royal Prussian Excellency.” And since they were speaking of prophetic visions, the king found it appropriate to direct “the conversation to communism, which clearly made him worried and fearful.” As far as Kierkegaard could see, there was no ground for alarm, since the impending movement would have nothing to do with kings: “It will be a battle between one class and another, but it would always be in the interest of the hostile parties to have good relations with the monarch. The same problem had occurred in ancient times and was recurring now, and it was easy to see that the king would in a way be beyond the fray. There would be hostilities like those in a house, between the cellar and the ground floor and between these two and the next floor, et cetera, but they would not attack the landlord.” After several tactical remarks about how one always ought to struggle only indirectly against “the multitude,” which should be regarded as the “woman” in this drama, Kierkegaard concluded his improvised lecture with the remark that what the times really required was quite simply an “upbringing,” for what in larger countries easily ends in “violence” will in Denmark merely end up as “naughtiness.” Of course he was right about this, and when the king seemed to be reassured and went on to praise his little court philosopher for his brilliant words of wisdom, Kierkegaard seized on the opportunity to play his trump card: “Your Majesty can certainly see by looking at me that what I say is true, because for me everything really stems from having been well brought up—and therefore it really stems from my father.”

Kierkegaard’s visit in October 1847 was to be his last. Christian VIII died three months later. He, too, had been well brought up, and in January 1848 he had therefore been incautious enough to defy the fierce winter cold and gone on board the frigate Valkyrie to say farewell to the crew, who were about to sail the ship to the Far East. The king, warm from the walk out to the ship, removed his hat and stood bareheaded as he addressed the crew, but since he was already somewhat weak he got a bad cold, which his court physician tried to cure by bleeding him. This led to an infection that developed into blood poisoning, and the king died of it on January 20 at the age of sixty-one. The very next day Frederick VII, the son of Christian VIII, was proclaimed the new king. He had been a drinker and carouser since his early youth, and as the years went by he had developed into an out-and-out psychopath, utterly devoid of self-restraint. He had participated in parties and celebrations of every description and on a number of occasions had been captain of the popinjay at the shooting range; he was such a jolly fellow and man of the people that when the university students had wanted to sail to Stockholm, he lent them a warship. He had never been able to find satisfaction in any of the royal marriages that people tried to arrange for him every so often, and he ended up falling in love with a former ballet dancer, Louise Rasmussen, who made a living as a milliner. She had a shop on Vimmelskaftet with a mechanical wax mannequin in the window—but now she suddenly had to take on the role of Countess Danner.

Regine Schlegel

The next time Kierkegaard went to Lyngby, November 3, 1847, it had nothing to do with royalty but was simply to get away from Copenhagen. For on that day Regine Olsen was married to Frederik Schlegel at the Church of Our Savior out in Christianshavn—and had thereby definitively broken the pact Kierkegaard thought they had made with each other. “Invoking a curious sort of freemasonry, I can make these words of the poet into a motto for a portion of my life’s sufferings / Infandum me jubes Regina renovare dolorem,” he wrote in his journal. Kierkegaard was citing the poet Virgil, and the words from the Aeneid mean, “You command, Regina, that I must renew an unspeakable suffering.” Kierkegaard went on, more in bitterness than in relief: “The girl has caused me troubles enough. And now she is—not dead—but happily and well married. Six years ago today I said as much—and was called the most dastardly of all dastardly villains. Remarkable.”

A bit over a month earlier, on September 29, Kierkegaard had published Works of Love, in which he described the phenomenon of “covetousness,” which in his vocabulary is the word for envy or jealousy. “Immediate love can be transformed within itself; by means of spontaneous combustion it can become covetousness…. The covetous person does not hate the object of love, by no means, but he tortures himself over the fire of reciprocal love, which ought to have a cathartic effect and purify his love. Almost importunately, the covetous person gathers every ray of love from the beloved person, but with the burning glass of his covetousness he focuses all these rays upon his own love, and he slowly burns up.” We might think that Kierkegaard wrote these lines on the basis of his own painful experience, but two years later, when he once again touched on his “relation to her,” he was amazed by his own “objectivity” with respect to Regine and to “him,” the other fellow: “Schlegel is surely a likable man. I really think she feels quite happy with him. But this girl is an instrument he does not know how to play. She is capable of sounds that [only] I knew how to summon forth.” Kierkegaard thus had no reason to be “covetous.” Indeed, he protests in plain terms that Regine’s marriage is to him “a matter of the greatest indifference; I am concerned only about whether it is possible that this will make her happy and her life more beautiful.” For these same reasons he was unable to free himself from Regine, and in his journal entry about his dialectical emotional life, he revealingly called this “the final word, for now.”

Regine had married well. Fritz, as his friends called him, was born January 22, 1817, and thus celebrated his birthday the day before Regine’s—she was born on January 23, 1822. So it had practically been written in the stars that they would end up together! Regine’s spouse was the son of a bureau chief in the Finance Ministry. He matriculated into the university from the Metropolitan School in 1833 and took his law degree in 1838. Then he rose quickly through the ranks of government. In 1842 he was a trainee in the Finance Ministry, where he became an office head in 1847, and the next year he was appointed chief of the Colonial Office, which is roughly the same as being a department head in the Finance Ministry today. He could subsequently deck himself out with titles such as supreme president (in the Copenhagen city government) and privy councillor. Fritz was not merely a diplomat by profession, he was a diplomatic being, an understanding man who continued to love where Kierkegaard had broken off. During their engagement Fritz and Regine had read aloud to each other from Kierkegaard’s writings, and Fritz, who was interested in literature, was most definitely not blind to the greatness of those writings. In 1875, when he called on a certain Inspector Ottesen, who had portraits of Grundtvig and Kierkegaard hanging side by side on the wall, he said “Long after Grundtvig’s influence is over and done, Kierkegaard’s will still be alive!” He was also a connoisseur of art, and at his death he left a valuable collection of etchings and engravings and, as previously mentioned, a substantial library.

Schlegel was practically the exact opposite of Kierkegaard: stable, harmonious, healthy, un-ironic, and patient; he was thus made for marriage, the incarnation of Judge William—though probably more boring. As a part of his discussion of covetousness in Works of Love, Kierkegaard described how habit could creep into love so that it loses “its ardor, its joy, its pleasure, its originality, its freshness of life.” What is said between the lines is that habit constitutes a special danger for the erotic intensity of a shared marital life, and in dramatic tones Kierkegaard continued: “There is a beast of prey known for its cunning, that sneaks up and attacks those who are asleep. Then, while it sucks the blood out of the sleeping person, it wafts a cool breeze upon him, making his sleep even lovelier. This is what habit is like—or it is even worse. For the other beast seeks its prey among those who are asleep, but it has no way of lulling to sleep those who are awake. Habit, on the other hand, does. It sneaks up on a person, lulling him to sleep, and when this is accomplished it sucks the blood out of the sleeping person while wafting a cool breeze upon him, making his sleep even lovelier. This is what habit is like.”

And Kierkegaard’s love for Regine never became soporifically trivial like this. That was why it was so salutary for Regine to run into him somewhere in town and, for a few seconds, once again experience something that the peaceable Fritz probably never understood.

“A People’s Government Is the True Image of Hell”

Fate curiously decreed that while Kierkegaard was writing Works of Love, Karl Marx—who came into the world on Kierkegaard’s fifth birthday—was down in Brussels with Friedrich Engels, writing The Communist Manifesto. And of course, this latter work had more far-reaching consequences than Kierkegaard had envisioned when he reassured the king that the entire matter was really nothing but a minor domestic squabble in the lower reaches of the house. The Communist Manifesto appeared in February 1848 and a Danish edition was published four years later, but Kierkegaard never read it, so it is not quite clear what Kierkegaard had in mind when he wrote about “communism.” Still, there can be no doubt that he was against it, very much so, in fact, as can be seen in his general disdain for the political process he called “leveling,” which led to the introduction of democracy in 1849.

“The state turned upside down and came to stand on its head,” is Kierkegaard’s graphic description of the somersault in which the priorities that for generations had been seen as something close to eternal verities were overturned in the course of a few years. That the truth concerning a question should be decided by anything as accidental as a numerical figure, in which every person’s vote was worth the same as every other person’s, seemed just as unnatural then as it seems the most natural of things today. It is no great feat to depict Kierkegaard as a medieval obscurantist who got goose bumps at the mere thought of anything as riotous and easygoing as enlightened absolutism. Similarly, it is easy to portray him as a reactionary antidemocrat, utterly indifferent to even the most reasonable demands for improvements in the conditions for those at the bottom of the social pecking order, because as a member of an economic and intellectual upper crust Kierkegaard had all he needed in his religious inwardness. If this were all that concerned us, we could cite Climacus, who at one point in Concluding Unscientific Postscript praises the freedoms of a well-ordered state and concludes: “Of all forms of government, the monarchical is the best; more than any other form, it favors and protects the tranquil imaginings and the innocent follies of private individuals. Only democracy, the most tyrannical form of government, obligates everyone to active participation, something one is reminded of frequently enough by the associations and general assemblies of our time. Is it tyranny when one person wants to rule, leaving the rest of us others out? No, but it is tyranny when all want to rule.” A journal entry from 1848 makes it clear that Kierkegaard was in complete agreement with Climacus: “Of all tyrannies, a people’s government is the most excruciating, the most spiritless, the absolute ruin of everything great and lofty. A tyrant, after all, is only a single human being. Ordinarily he does have an idea, even if it is most unreasonable…. But in a people’s government one’s ‘equal’ is the ruler. He concerns himself with such things as whether my beard is like his, whether I go to the Deer Park at the same times he does, whether I am just like him and the others…. A people’s government is the true image of Hell.”

Kierkegaard’s critique of the dawning age of popular government is unmistakable, but this does not mean that he simply preferred the old to the new, the authoritarian to the democratic, or regimentation to self-determination. Antitheses of this sort are all too simple and do not at all capture the radicality of the alternative beginning to take shape in him.

His evolving thoughts on the subject found particular expression in A Literary Review, published on March 30, 1846. Its fifty pages take the form of a very positive review of Mrs. Gyllembourg’s novella Two Ages, which included a retrospective consideration of her Stories from Everyday Life. But Kierkegaard went further and also reviewed his own age. And things did not look so rosy. True, he assures us that his interpretation of Mrs. Gyllembourg’s novella does not bring “anything out of it that is not in it,” but it is clear to everyone that the review contains quite lengthy passages in which he reads his own views into Mrs. Gyllembourg’s text. When she expressed her thanks for the copy of A Literary Review that Kierkegaard had sent her, she too makes this clear, noting that when she “compares it with this book, which is so lavishly furnished with such profound, apt, and witty observations, my novella seems to me a simple romance from which a poet has taken the motif for a fully formed drama.”

Mrs. Gyllembourg’s modesty was charming but was also quite in order, for the truth is that her novella was no masterpiece, nor was Kierkegaard’s interest particularly piqued by its literary qualities so much as by the epochs that form the background of the book: the passionately revolutionary 1790s and the reasonable, timorous 1840s. For all its flaws and faults, Mrs. Gyllembourg preferred the former of the two ages, and so did Kierkegaard, because, as he writes in summing up the difference between them: “In general, compared with a passionate age, one can say of a passionless but reflective age that it gains in extensity what it loses in intensity.”

The fact that the age is without passion is the negative judgment that provides A Literary Review with its polemical pulse. It is thus not surprising that most of all it is the cautious, banal bourgeois (in a number of more or less caricatured variants) who gets the short end of the stick, because he is neither cold nor hot but always squeezes through some expedient loophole: “Exhausted by chimerical exertions, the age thus rests for a moment in total indolence. Its condition is like that of a person who is sleeping as dawn approaches: great dreams, then torpor, then a witty or clever idea to excuse the fact that one remains in bed.”

The self-satisfied burgher in his supine ease is the emblem of the collapse of the vertical dimension, the fall of all previously unshakable authorities, religious as well as political. The center is now everywhere. Unlike the age of revolution, when the various embodiments of authority were openly and consciously denounced, the age of reasonableness is characterized by the gradual hollowing-out of the legitimacy of institutions and the substance of symbols: “People do not want to abolish the monarchy, by no means. But if little by little they could transform it into an imaginary notion, then they could gladly shout, Hurrah for the King! … They wish to permit the continued existence of the whole of Christian terminology while being covertly of the opinion that nothing decisive is in fact meant by it.” The reader is almost tempted to believe that Kierkegaard’s diagnoses of the age are postmodern, long before it became modern to be postmodern.

Kierkegaard was one of the first to see how everything was becoming increasingly theatrical and was thus being transformed into stage sets, externality, kitsch, a “mirage.” Society no longer consisted of individuals or groups divided into a social hierarchy; no, it consisted of an undifferentiated mass, “the public.” With frightening clairvoyance, Kierkegaard called the phenomenon of the public “the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant.” The most dangerous because it will march as soon as someone says “March!” and the most insignificant because it would never dream of asking the least question, which makes its power more or less proportionate to its anonymity.

Kierkegaard’s analyses of the public as the great “master of leveling” constitute a brilliant outline of the mechanisms of mass psychology, but they also lay bare a phenomenon that has had a prominent place in our language since the time of Karl Marx, the phenomenon of alienation. Like Marx, Kierkegaard included a number of economic and material factors in his analyses, but they were never connected to any pragmatic political program and they did not tend in the direction of anything that might even hint at social or economic reforms. Not in 1846, at any rate. To become oneself is an individual project, not a collective concern, which is why material circumstances are devoid of decisive significance.

At the same time, as a consequence of the changes set in motion by the transition from absolutism to democracy, the old fear of higher authorities had been replaced by a fear of being different from the others, a fear of falling outside the average. Previously the individual’s identity had been largely determined by his place within the social pyramid, from the bottom of which the dregs of society could gaze upward through the great hierarchical structure to persons of greater and greater authority, culminating in the king, who was a sort of earthly analogue to God and was therefore king by the grace of God.

With the collapse of this pyramid, people were left in a flattened and chaotic landscape, or a vacuum, where they begin to compare themselves to one another, becoming rivals. Thus leveling did not lead to the equality of everyone but to a cramped and crabbed pettiness, the war of all against all: “A relationship has become a problem, in which instead of relating to one another, the parties are wary of one another as in a game.” In short, the place of authority has been usurped by conformism, respect has turned into envy, and what was once fear of God has become fear of man. Kierkegaard makes use of a physical principle in explaining this: “Close air always becomes noxious.”

To illustrate how the heroic loses its representative character, Kierkegaard presents the reader with a diptych that illustrates the same scene in the age of passion and the age of reasonableness. A rare treasure that is “the desire of everyone” is located so far out on thin ice that whoever goes out to retrieve it places himself in mortal peril. But the hero, who of course dares where others are scared, rushes off, attended by the breathless crowd upon whose reactions Kierkegaard comments: “[The crowd] would tremble for him and with him in the mortal peril of his decision; it would mourn him in his death; it would deify him if he gained the treasure.” Then Kierkegaard repeats the scene, but what had previously been a breathless crowd now becomes a spiritless public that rationally calculates the extent to which such a feat of daring will pay off: “They would go out there. They would stand where it was safe and sound, and putting on the airs of experts, they would evaluate the skillful skaters who could skate almost to the outermost edge … and then turn back. Among the skaters there would be someone or other who was exceptionally talented; he would even manage the tour de force of going to the extreme edge, making yet another attempt, replete with the deceptive appearance of danger, so that the spectators shout ‘Ye gads, he’s crazy, he’s risking his life!’ But see, he was so remarkably skilled that in fact he was able to turn away at the extreme outermost edge, that is, where the ice is still quite safe and the mortal peril has not yet begun. Just as in a theater, the crowd would shout ‘Bravo!’ and salute him with acclaim; they would return home, bringing with them the great heroic artist, and they would honor him with a sumptuous banquet. Reasonableness had become so predominant that it had transformed the challenge itself into an unreal stunt, and reality into theater.”

While the passionate hero had been honored because he alone ventured where none of the others dared go, the hero of reasonableness was celebrated because he understood how to simulate the seriousness of the danger—that is, how to “transform an inspired feat of daring into a stunt.” A twisted transformation of this sort is greeted with approval because, first of all, collective self-deception is easier to endure than envy of that single individual, and second, leveling has broken down the representative function formerly exercised by the hero in the days when he could “exalt the idea of what it is to be a human being.”

“This Is the Idea of the Religious”

In his analyses of the condition of his times, Kierkegaard did not permit himself the least scintilla of naïveté. He acknowledged the reality of leveling and had no illusions that what was past could be reconstituted. Thus it is all the more surprising to see that, to a certain extent, he approved of leveling. It was of course true that in itself the dissolution of tangible powers and authorities was a catastrophe because their absence set in motion a strange societal free-for-all. But it was also true that this dissolution made it possible for the individual, now freed from all institutional—and especially ecclesiastical—baggage, to relate himself to God firsthand. Displaying his typical zigzag between social-psychological pessimism and visionary religious thinking, Kierkegaard writes: “No age can halt the skepticism of leveling, nor can the present age…. It can only be halted if the individual, in the separateness of his individuality, acquires the fearlessness of religion.”

This was at once Kierkegaard’s nightmare and his paradoxical hope. Alienation has the task of promoting the individual’s separation from society and of leaving the person thus separated to look after his own religious upbringing. The individual is not to be represented by other and superior authorities but is to represent himself—which is to say, be himself—and this must take place without the safety net that various institutions had previously extended beneath the individual: “Leveling itself became the strict taskmaster who takes charge of upbringing. And the person who learns the most from this upbringing and becomes the most he can be, does not become the remarkable one, the hero, the extraordinary—this is prevented by leveling…. No, he only becomes an essentially human being in the full sense of equality. This is the idea of the religious.” Thus leveling confronts the individual with a radical choice: either to be lost in the “dizziness of abstract infinity” or to be saved “infinitely in the essentiality of the religious.” And to this extent the developments of modern times signal a kind of progress, namely, that the “individuals who are saved acquire the specific gravity of the religious, acquire its essentiality firsthand from God.”

At the same time, however, Kierkegaard’s paradoxical hope, the notion of a sort of democratized religiosity, presupposes that a difference will have to be introduced into the undifferentiated. Someone must make the age aware of its condition, and this can only be done by showing it something utterly different from itself. And this is the sort of difference that is developed in the latter part of A Literary Review, where Kierkegaard, bordering on the cryptic, writes: “Only by means of a suffering action would the unrecognizable one dare to help leveling in its progress, and with this same suffering action he will pass judgment on the instrument used. He does not dare to defeat leveling straightforwardly. That would be the end of him, because it would be acting with authority. But he will defeat it in suffering and will thereby express once again the law of his existence, which is not to command, govern, or lead, but to serve in suffering, to help indirectly.”

What, we might ask, is such a “suffering action”? And how can anything as contradictory as a “suffering action” promote leveling while at the same time passing judgment on it? This is not immediately obvious, but it gradually emerges that the “suffering action” is Kierkegaard’s more or less metaphorical paraphrase of martyrdom! Thus deep within the text a subtle symmetry reveals itself: To the passionate age corresponds the hero, to the passionless age corresponds the antihero, the martyr. And while the hero distinguishes himself with his will to power, the martyr is distinguished by his will to powerlessness—though it should be noted that as a will this will to powerlessness is no less heroic than that of the hero. Therefore such a will can also contain what Kierkegaard called “the power for a catastrophe,” that is, the catastrophe it would be for society’s self-understanding if a martyr were suddenly to stand in the midst of society.

Kierkegaard did not wish to develop this matter further in A Literary Review, and scarcely had he put a period at the end of the sentence about suffering action before he launched into a new section in which he repeated the familiar practice of his pseudonyms: With an odd grimace, Kierkegaard insisted that the whole affair had in fact been nothing but “foolery,” of no more significance than “playing skittles or tilting at a barrel.” Nonetheless, this was more than a trivial experiment, and in 1849 Kierkegaard self-consciously noted that: “What is really remarkable is to read the description of the future that is found toward the end of A Literary Review of “Two Ages” and then to consider how quickly and precisely it was fulfilled two years later, in 1848.” He wrote something similar in The Point of View for My Work as an Author, where he again emphasized that the concluding section of A Literary Review, the part about suffering action, was of decisive significance.

We may therefore ask what actually did happen in 1848?

“100,000 Rumbling Nonhumans”

“1st Act. Two dogs have begun to fight. The event causes a great sensation. An incredible number of heads appear at windows to have a look. While it lasts, all work comes to a stop. People drop everything. 2nd Act. Two ladies come out of the doors of the two houses nearest the battle, each from her own door. These two ladies appear to be the owners of the dogs. One lady insists that the other lady’s dog started the fight. The ladies get so vehement about this that they start fighting. I did not see any more than this, but it could easily be continued. Thus, 3rd Act. Two men arrive, the husbands of the two ladies. One insists that the other’s wife started it. The two men get so vehement about this that they start fighting. After that one may assume that more men and woman join in—and now it is a European war. The cause of it is the question of who started it. You see, this is the formula for war in the second degree. War in the first degree is war, in the second degree it is war about who started the first war.”

Kierkegaard sent this little three-act play to his walking companion J.L.A. Kolderup-Rosenvinge in the early part of August 1848. The battle of the dogs—surely something Kierkegaard had witnessed—is a striking illustration of Kierkegaard’s a-plague-on-both-your-houses attitude with respect to the political turmoil that characterized Europe at the time. As a mitigating circumstance we may note that his arrogance included a dash of humor and that in this same letter he openly acknowledged his lack of acumen about realpolitik: “No, politics is not for me. For me, at least, it is impossible to follow politics, even domestic politics, nowadays.”

Five months earlier, however, the same Kierkegaard who in August 1848 would term the whole affair a dogfight, had had a hard time finding the humor in it, and on Monday, March 27, he noted in his journal: “And so I sit here. Outside everything is in motion. The issue of nationality reverberates through everything. Everyone speaks of sacrificing life and blood, and maybe he is even willing to do so, but with the support of all-powerful public opinion. And so I sit here in a quiet room. Most likely I will soon be denounced for indifference concerning the national cause: I know of only one danger, that of the religious. But no one concerns himself with that. And no one suspects what is taking place within me. This is how my life is nowadays. Always misunderstanding. In my suffering I am not understood—and I am hated.”

A couple of weeks earlier, on March 11, there had been what was termed “the Casino meeting,” so called because it had taken place in the Casino Theater’s new building on Amaliegade; 2,300 people had purchased tickets to gain entrance to the large room in order to hear the levelheaded H. N. Clausen and the brilliant Orla Lehmann speak about linking Slesvig and Denmark together under a free constitution. The next evening there was excitement at the Hippodrome on Nørregade, where young, ambitious laborers as well as socialists and the genuinely rebellious proletariat gathered to hear orators, including the republican Goldschmidt, make the case for liberty, equality, fraternity and—lest it be forgotten—universal suffrage. On March 20 the leading liberals met at the offices of Fædrelandet and formulated a battle plan: That same evening the representatives to the city government would be convened in an emergency session and would sign an “address” that would demand the resignation of the existing ministry, and the next day the address would be communicated to the incompetent Frederick VII. Furthermore, there would be yet another “Casino meeting” in order to adopt a resolution calling for a free constitution for Denmark-Slesvig. Orla Lehmann wrote the draft of the epoch-making address, which he concluded with an unmistakable threat of revolution if the king, who had only been on the throne a couple of months, did not comply: “We implore Your Majesty not to drive the nation to the self-help of desperation!”

At dawn the next day, Tuesday, March 21, the streets were already packed with people. Close to ten thousand had assembled in front of Christiansborg Castle. A similar number had gathered on Nytorv in front of the city hall, where the doors opened at noon and L. N. Hvidt, chairman of the representatives to the city government, emerged and announced that the city government had also joined in supporting the demand for a change of ministry. This set off an exultant cheer from the assembled multitude, which soon after began to move up Vimmelskaftet in a column, six people wide and locked arm in arm, that headed for Christiansborg Castle where the deputation, with Hvidt as its spokesman, had gone inside with the address. The crowd was quiet and the wait seemed an eternity, but at last Hvidt emerged, his long hair all awry, and proclaimed the king’s reply: “The ministry is dissolved!” Only those standing nearby could hear his weak voice, but when they understood what had happened they immediately cried “Long live the king!”—after which everyone in the square and the adjoining streets joined in the cheer. The king did not come out on the balcony to receive the homage of the people, however, so the square in front of the castle quickly emptied out, with many following Hvidt back to the city hall where he again announced the king’s reply. Then Hvidt went, as was his wont, to the Stock Exchange for an hour and from there to the National Bank to take care of his job as director of the bank. That evening he dined at the Ørsteds’. So there was no more revolution that day, and it could hardly have come off more peacefully!

The next day, March 22, a temporary “March ministry” was formed and absolutism had thus been de facto replaced by constitutional government. As the minister for church and educational affairs they named D. G. Monrad, who was brought to the capital from his parsonage down on the island of Lolland, where he had been pottering away at a translation of the 1,001 Nights. He could forget all about that, however, because now he was “Cultus Minister.”

From the windows in his apartment at 2 Nytorv, Kierkegaard had been able to observe the teeming masses of people, but he intelligently remained inside the house. Nor was Grundtvig, the darling of the people—who himself had done so much to make the event possible—having any of it. He remained in his apartment at the corner of Vimmelskaftet and Knabrostræde. And indeed, the majority of the established intellectuals did the same thing—they stayed home. All day long Kierkegaard heard noises that made him uneasy and he noted the following in his journal: “Every movement and change that takes place with the help of 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 noisy, grumbling, rumbling, and yodeling people (everything just like the grumbling and wind of the belly) is eo ipso untruth, a fake, a retrogression. For God is present here only in a very confused fashion or perhaps not at all, perhaps it is rather the Devil…. A mediocre ruler is a much better constitution than this abstraction, 100,000 rumbling nonhumans.” When rebellion broke out in Holstein on March 23, Kierkegaard was not slow to see the connection: “The unfortunate thing right now is that the new ministry needs a war in order to stay in power, it needs all possible agitation of nationalistic sentiments.” Then Kierkegaard broadened his view to the world-historical stage and passed a judgment that would have made Hegel roll over in his grave: “In the end, all of world history becomes nonsense. Action is completely abolished…. The castle in Paris is stormed by an indeterminate number of people, who do not know what they want, with no definite ideas. Then the king flees. And then there is a republic. Nonsense.”

One evening Kierkegaard spoke with one of the leaders of the liberal movement, A. F. Tscherning, and told him that the French Republic had come into being entirely by accident, “like a betrothal entered into at a ball during a giddy moment when people didn’t know what they were doing.” Tscherning indicated that he “very well” understood what Kierkegaard said, but the very next day he in fact became a member of the National Constitutional Convention in exactly the same accidental way, while simultaneously becoming Minister of War, with his own offices on Amaliegade! It gave Kierkegaard a loathing for politicians. The entire situation reminded him most of all of a chaotic family: “It is like the situation in a family when the parents have been unable to get the children to obey. So the parents say, well, now you will be in charge and have us obey, and things will go better. And since the parents have some respect for what it means to obey, things actually do go better for a little while.” But only for a little while, then the rumpus spreads in every direction. “No. Upbringing, upbringing is what the world needs. This is what I have always spoken of. This is what I said to Christian VIII. And this is what people regard as the most superfluous of things.”

“Perhaps the Alarm Will Be Sounded in the Camp and I Will Be the Manhandled Victim”

During these turbulent times Kierkegaard sat reading the proofs of Christian Discourses. He had delivered the manuscript to the press on March 6, 1848, when all had still been well, but soon afterward there was complete political chaos, and under the date March 27 we read the following in his journal: “Once again for a moment I have anxiously considered my responsibility in letting the Christian Discourses, especially the third part, appear at this time. What was written there had been written under quite different circumstances; to let them be read under the present circumstances is actually dangerous for me. But I cannot do otherwise. It is Governance that has arranged it this way for me.” Christian Discourses came out on April 26. In November, when Kierkegaard put the finishing touches on The Point of View for My Work as an Author, he looked back on the “the world-historical events of recent months that overturned everything,” and in this context he emphasized the following: “During this catastrophe I sat reading the page proofs of a book that had of course been written earlier…. I experienced the triumph of not having had to modify or change the least little bit of it. Indeed, the triumph was that what I had written earlier, were it to be read now, would be much, much better understood than when it had been written.” The reader might ask, just what is he getting at here?

What Kierkegaard had in mind was a biographical reading of his Christian Discourses, a reading that linked the written words to Kierkegaard himself. This was the thought that gave rise to his feelings of triumph and thus to his unending worries. For the intimate connection between life and writings—to publish is to make the public assertion that one is oneself what has been written—is what forced him to consider whether he was to write leniently or strictly. At first he saw it as his task “to be as lenient as possible,” but in the very next journal entry he put forward precisely the opposite point of view: “But no, no, no, no. I had almost failed to appreciate how Governance had added what I needed to the third part. But the thing is, I wanted to be a little clever, I wanted to arrange something myself…. Without the third part, Christian Discourses is much too lenient, untrue to my character; it is lenient enough anyway.”

Thus it was the third part of Christian Discourses that had been the particular focus of concern, and within this part, consisting of seven finely sculpted discourses, some still bearing visible traces of pietism, it was surely the second discourse that was the cause of greatest concern, because it was there that Kierkegaard had emphasized that a Christian must turn his back on the world so definitively that even matters of importance to the nation must give way. This is illustrated by the case of Saint Peter, who is held up as an example for every Christian to follow: “He abandoned the faith of his fathers, and thus the people to whom he belonged, the land of his birth, whose love binds with the strongest bonds. Because now he no longer belonged to any people, he belonged only to the Lord Jesus…. In love of Christ or in hatred of the world he left everything, his station in life, his livelihood, family, friends, human language, love of mother and father, love of fatherland.”

The danger was right here, for in this negative definition of the national cause the discourse risked placing its author on the front line. Thus Kierkegaard did indeed fear that the book’s publication would have catastrophic consequences. Many things hinted at this possibility. Just under a month before Christian Discourses was published, Kierkegaard interpreted it as a meaningful portent that he had “chanced” to read a sermon by Mynster, “and look, it was about Nicodemus.” Nicodemus was the Pharisee who did not dare to visit Christ in the daytime but went to him by night so that he could inquire about his heavenly mission under cover of darkness, and seen with Kierkegaard’s eyes, Nicodemus was another name for timorousness and cowardice. It was thus terrifying two days later when Kierkegaard “read the sermon that came next in my collection of Luther’s sermons,” and it was again Nicodemus who peered out from the pages of the volume. This decided the matter. To ignore two such unmistakable signals would be reckless, for they could only mean that Kierkegaard must publish Christian Discourses, and he therefore complied, albeit in fear and trembling: “Perhaps not a soul will read my Christian Discourses. Perhaps the alarm will be sounded in the camp and I will be the manhandled victim. Perhaps. Oh, it is difficult to bear such a possibility.”

Kierkegaard’s metaphors were military, but there was not much in the way of alarms sounding in the camp. This could be owing to, among other things, the quiet little fact that Christian Discourses probably had very few readers, for a considerable number of copies remained unsold at the time of their author’s quite unbloody demise. It is obvious that Kierkegaard’s ideas about the possible effect of the discourses were totally out of proportion, and he himself could see this in his somewhat more sober moments. “Perhaps there is also a good deal of hypochondria in this fear of mine,” he wrote, but then he quickly added that “of course, this has nothing to do with the matter one way or the other.” And he was right about that. For the point was not the disproportion between Kierkegaard’s tragicomic pathos and any factual dangers, but rather the relation between the textual premises and his own existential conclusion—and therefore he gradually wrote himself more and more into the role of martyr, which thereby turned out to be a role written for him in more than one sense.

Thus we should not waste much time being amazed at the fact that it was precisely during the revolution—which, of course, was pretty much the epitome of the multitude and the mass—that Kierkegaard saw the category of that single individual confirmed and validated. For a category such as this was not merely a universal principle for everyone who might want to realize it in his or her life; no, if the category of that single individual had suddenly become the significant point in the midst of this historical vortex, it was because it was only through the efforts of Kierkegaard, the discoverer of this category, that the vortex could be brought to a standstill. This certainly does look like a rather circular conclusion, which properly speaking it is, but this was nonetheless the way in which Kierkegaard came to a conclusion—and concluded that he could include himself in the vortex of world history.

“You Are Expecting a Tyrant, While I Am Expecting a Martyr”

The idea of a martyr (as opposed to a tyrant) comes up in Kierkegaard’s correspondence with the previously mentioned Kolderup-Rosenvinge, professor of the history of jurisprudence, senior government official, and dry-as-dust conservative. The letters exchanged by the two men are marked by a sort of aristocratic clubbiness, larded with quotations from classical literature, unctuous phrases, and similar staples of affectation. If someone needs a quick introduction to Kierkegaard at his weirdest and worst, this correspondence is a good place to begin. Hans Brøchner was also puzzled about what Kierkegaard saw in Kolderup-Rosenvinge, who (according to Brøchner) was “rather dull and in many ways extremely narrow-minded,” but when Brøchner asked about the man, Kierkegaard emphasized his general level of cultivation. Kierkegaard indeed “set great store by people from the older generation who had retained the humane interests of earlier times and the refined bearing so sorely lacking in the younger generation.”

The letters are of interest quite apart from all this, because it is here that Kierkegaard summarized his views on the revolutionary events of February, March, and June 1848, developing a sort of “vortex theory.” In August 1848, Kierkegaard wrote: “You will surely grant that I am correct in viewing the entire development in Europe as an enormous skepticism or as a vortex. What does a vortex seek? A fixed point at which it can stop. (And you see, this is why—be it said in parentheses—I seek ‘that single individual.’)” Kierkegaard’s version of the events is not rich in political detail but focuses on “that single individual” as the figure in which the mad vortex of the age could be brought to a standstill. This could only be brought about if a nonpolitical point situated outside the movements themselves could be established: “And it is therefore my view of the entire European confusion that it cannot be stopped except by religion. And I am convinced that just as the remarkable thing about the Reformation was that it looked like a religious movement but turned out to be a political one, so will the movements of our times, which look to be merely political, suddenly reveal themselves to be religious or a need for religion.”

It is curious that Kierkegaard ventured an opinion such as the above in the middle of a letter that is otherwise characterized by unserious intellectual blather. And Kolderup-Rosenvinge probably also viewed the vortex theory as a somewhat tedious joke by his learned interlocutor. It was clearly not intended as such, as is clear from Kierkegaard’s later variations on the same theme. Kierkegaard senses a reversal that could make it clear that an apparently political movement is at root a repressed need for religion. Here, as earlier, the more or less unspoken precondition for the reversal is the presence of a person who takes action. In this connection Kierkegaard mentions Socrates, who, if the truth be known, did not stop a political vortex, but he did stop something similar, a “sophistical vortex.” And the consequences of stopping it did indeed cost Socrates his life, since death was the most important part of the realization of his plan: “The dead Socrates brought the vortex to a halt, which the living Socrates had been unable to do; but the living Socrates had understood intellectually that only a dead man could win—a sacrifice—and he understood ethically that he must stake his entire life on becoming just that.”

Kierkegaard appears to have understood something similar. He, too, believed that only a dead man could win, and in this letter he communicated as much—albeit rather indirectly—to the dignified gentleman who accompanied him on his walks, though the latter apparently did not grasp the entire point. In his next letter Kierkegaard therefore formulated himself with less beating about the bush. Kolderup-Rosenvinge had expressed confidence in the dictatorial Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac, the leader of military forces during the “June Days” of 1848 in Paris, in which eight thousand workers were killed by thirty thousand soldiers and guardsmen, and in response to Kolderup-Rosenvinge’s sentiments Kierkegaard wrote: “You are expecting a tyrant, while I am expecting a martyr.” It could hardly have been expressed more directly—unless Kierkegaard had added that, if the truth must out, he was himself the person he expected.

In other words, what lay behind the text about the inevitability of martyrdom was something quite other than mere academic interest. On the contrary, in the truest sense, it was a matter of dire seriousness. Martyrdom is the “suffering action” that provides the power to make real a utopia. In October 1848, when Kierkegaard had to compose a preface for A Cycle of Ethical-Religious Essays, the situation got endowed with a special significance of its own: “The catastrophe … will help me to become better understood than I have been until now, or at least to be more passionately misunderstood. The question is not about a unicameral or a bicameral or a tenchambered legislature; it is not about the convening of a committee or the naming of ministers…. Governance has lost patience and will not tolerate it any longer…. The problem is a religious, a Christian problem…. Because, if eternity can be recovered for us, the prospect of it at every instant, its earnestness and its blessedness, its relief; if eternity can be recovered for every individual person: then there will be no need of bloodshed…. In many ways the times will be reminiscent of Socrates’ time (except that these times are much more passionate and violent, because this is the sophistry of violence, the sophistry of the tangible)—but there will be nothing reminiscent of Socrates.”

If this was a prophetic passage, its fulfillment depended in large measure on the prophet himself. He had become aware that a new era could only begin if someone took upon himself the task of reestablishing eternity in time. And such a reestablishment could not be accomplished without violence: “In order to recover eternity, blood will once again be required, but blood of another sort, not the blood of thousands of slaughtered victims, no, the more costly blood, that of the individuals—that of the martyrs, those mighty dead who can do what no living person, who has people cut down by the thousands, can do; who can do what those mighty dead themselves were unable to do when they were alive but were able to do only when dead: compel a raging mob into obedience, precisely because this raging mob has been permitted, in disobedience, to put the martyr to death.”

God Hates Pyramids

Kierkegaard was not the only person who sat reading page proofs while mobs of people surged past in the streets below. H. L. Martensen was also in the process of seeing an important book through the press, and he wrote about it retrospectively in 1882: “During the unrest of 1848 I had a tranquil task that directed my thoughts away from the world-historical bustle to other regions: reading the page proofs of my Dogmatics, which was then ready for publication.”

We are immediately struck by the fact that, unlike Kierkegaard, Martensen in no way connected his own situation to the political tumult taking place at the time; on the contrary, his tranquil task led him away from the bustle of the world. There was no direct connection between the textual and the actual, between author and task, as was the case with Kierkegaard and his Christian Discourses. On the other hand, while Kierkegaard did not concern himself in any serious way with the material causes underlying the conflicts of the day, we may at first be surprised by Martensen’s keen sense of the social and political situation, which is not exactly what we might have expected, given Martensen’s own social position. His career had been marked by a brilliant and rapid ascent, and throughout his adult life he had been quite at home in conservative and ecclesiastical circles that viewed democratic tendencies with disapproval, were revolted by the idea of parliamentary government, and abominated the thought of the emancipation of women.

In his memoirs, when Martensen looked back upon the events of 1848, he could not but agree with a remark he attributed to one of his acquaintances, who had spoken of the political revolt “in a somewhat crass fashion, yet not without humor”: “This is yet another new and violent fit of vomiting; it is characteristic of the makeup of our society that from time to time it becomes nauseated and must throw up.” Martensen was likewise fully convinced that a revolution is always an “abnormality in human society,” and he had strong words of condemnation for the “demonic powers” by which the masses seemed to have been possessed.

Indeed, Martensen was not one to storm the barricades with mud and blood on his hands, but he had a clear sense that “this strange revolution was not merely political, but social.” This was a point of view he developed in his 1874 work, Socialism and Christianity, which he incorporated more or less unchanged as a series of chapters in his Social Ethics in 1878. By then the events of 1848 were thirty years in the past, but according to Martensen himself, he had nonetheless had “a sense, even then, that if one did not understand the social side of the matter, one really had no understanding of the entire affair. I was compelled to recall what Franz von Baader had said many years earlier about the proletariat, about the faulty relationship between the haves and the have-nots. I was compelled to recall his statement that our present-day social culture is like … a pyramid, with a few privileged people at the tiny summit, while the broad base was formed by an infinite swarm of have-nots and people in need, left entirely to their own devices.”

In his Socialism and Christianity, Martensen quoted Ferdinand Lasalle, the founder of German Social Democracy, as well as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, and Martensen’s sympathy for these political thinkers influenced his choice of words in his memoirs, when he reflected upon the events of 1848: “The social problem is the question of the rich and the poor, of labor and capital, of social distress, and of a more equal and equitable distribution of the earthly goods of life. This was the problem—fermenting and stirring, unclarified—at the bottom of the February revolution.” And Martensen continued, almost as though he was writing a banner that would wave over the heads of the workers’ movements of the future, “Liberalism wants individualism. Socialism wants society and solidarity.” In Martensen’s view, the rising tide of liberalism was merely another form of egoism; it was greed disguised as ideology: “It is becoming increasingly evident that liberalism will dissolve society into nothing but individuals with their individual interests, which for a great many people are simply financial interests. Socialism, when it is understood according to its true meaning, will bind society together in solidarity, will subordinate the individual to society. Even though liberalism has the upper hand at present, it is not difficult to see that socialism has the future on its side.”

Martensen—who could never understand what on earth possessed Kierkegaard to make him want to speak with those ordinary people down there on the street—could handle this ideological phraseology like a true professional. Kierkegaard’s political concepts, on the other hand, cannot be said to have been particularly well developed: In 1846 the differences between socialism and liberalism were unclear, and it was similarly difficult to differentiate between socialism and communism. Thus Kierkegaard had not boned up on his ideologies, but he had preserved a certain visionary suppleness when confronted with the traditional political spectrum, and this enabled him to leap with ease from utter anarchy to the most Machiavellian inflexibility. Martensen could compare the “social culture” of the day to a pyramid, with the privileged occupying the top and the broad base made up of those with nothing. Without having read a line of Marx, Kierkegaard could write something similar and, like Martensen, he would use the metaphor of a pyramid: “Man is ‘a social animal,’ and he believes in the power of uniting, of forming groups. Therefore the human idea is this: Let us all unite—if possible, all the kingdoms and countries of the earth—and the pyramid-shaped association thus formed, which grows higher and higher, bears upon its summit a super-king. It must be assumed that he is closest to God…. For Christianity, things are precisely the reverse of this. This very sort of super-king would stand furthest from God, just as God is very much opposed to the entire enterprise of the pyramid. The despised person, rejected by the human race, a poor, single, solitary wretch, an outcast—this, according to Christianity, this is what God chooses and what is closest to Him. He hates the business of the pyramid…. As God is infinite love, His fatherly eye readily sees how easy it is for this human pyramid idea to become cruel to the less fortunate, to the neglected, and so on, of the human race…. So God pushes the pyramid over and everything collapses. A generation later people begin all over again with the pyramid business.”

Liberty, Equality, and Mercy

So Kierkegaard was aware quite early of a number of the problems that the new age, modernity, the future, would have to live with—or die of. “The question of equality,” he wrote in 1848, “has become an object of debate in Europe. Consequently all the older forms of tyranny (emperor, king, aristocracy, clergy, even the tyranny of money) will now be powerless. But there is a form of tyranny that corresponds to equality: the fear of man.” Kierkegaard believed that he himself was a part of this process, and he continued his attack in a determined manner: “Here in this country and elsewhere, the communists are fighting for human rights. Good, that is what I do as well. And this is exactly why I am fighting with all my strength against the tyranny of the fear of man…. What communism makes such a fuss about is what Christianity assumes to be self-evident, that all people are equal before God, thus, they are essentially equal.” Or, brief and to the point: “What is humanness [Danish: Menneskelighed]? It is human equality [Danish: Menneske-Lighed]. Inequality is inhumanness.”

Kierkegaard’s alternative to communism, socialism, liberalism, and his own old-fashioned conservative tendencies was thus something as radical and bold as mercy! It was not without reason that he insisted that the eighth chapter in the second part of Works of Love was written in direct “opposition to communism.” In a way, we might add that this is true of the entire book, but the chapter in question is indeed one of the most materially relevant in the book, even if it bears a quite immaterial title, “Mercifulness: A Work of Love Even if It Has Nothing to Give and Is Incapable of Doing Anything.” The chapter contrasts the true essence of mercy with “this unending worldly talk of beneficence and benevolence and philanthropy and giving and giving,” and Kierkegaard dismisses the latter alternative with his uniquely solicitous brutality: “Oh, let newspaper columnists and tax collectors and directors of poor relief speak of philanthropy and count and count, but let us never fail to notice that Christianity speaks essentially of mercifulness.” This does not mean that the merciful are freed from philanthropic deeds; on the contrary, “It goes without saying that if the merciful person has something to give, he will more than gladly give it.” Kierkegaard’s point is that one can be “merciful without having the least thing to give,” and that in itself being merciful is a “far greater perfection than having money and therefore being able to give.” Or, to express the same thing a bit more freely: “Because a person has a heart in his breast, it does not necessarily follow that he has money in his pocket, but the former is of course what is more important, and it is of decisive significance with respect to mercifulness…. For Eternity has the keenest eye and the most sophisticated understanding with respect to mercifulness, but no understanding whatever of money.” With these words the ideological perspective is deconstructed and then reconstructed into a direct theological provocation—one that is almost scandalous and of course arouses offense. And Kierkegaard in fact heads off a number of objections with a little dialogue that is both indignant and (we will soon see) equally calculated to arouse indignation: “ ‘The poor person, the wretched person, he could indeed die—so what is most important is that help be given.’ No, Eternity answers, what is most important is that mercifulness be practiced or that the help is the help of mercifulness. ‘Raise money for us, provide hospitals for us. That’s what is most important!’ No, says Eternity, what is most important is mercifulness. In the eternal sense, that a person dies is no misfortune, but it is a misfortune if mercifulness is not practiced…. Oh, if only I could depict the expression on the face of Eternity when the rich man answers the question of whether he has been merciful by saying, ‘I have given a hundred thousand to the poor!’ Because, amazed, Eternity will look at him as someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about; and then Eternity will again ask him the question, ‘Have you been merciful?’ ”

It hardly likely that it is only Eternity that has an amazed expression on its face; the reader is likely to have one as well, if not at this point, then surely when Kierkegaard continues his discourse about mercy with such theological radicalism that it might seem for a moment to be utterly unmerciful: “So the discourse addresses itself to you, you poor and wretched person! … Be merciful, be merciful to the rich! Remember that this is something you have within your power, even though he has the money! … Oh, be merciful! If the rich man is scanty and stingy—or even if he is not stingy with money, if he is terse and rebuffs you—then you should be rich in your mercifulness!”

The revolution presents itself in the form of a transvaluation of all values; this is what Christianity sets in motion when the individual practices works of mercy and thereby renders superfluous all political slogans about liberty, equality, and fraternity. Mercy is connected to a specific situation, an actual encounter, and an attitude, which is also why it will eternally maintain its immunity to ideology. For this same reason, for Kierkegaard, a society organized along Christian lines is some sort unimaginable nonsense, as is made abundantly clear in this journal entry from 1848 which provides a parodic depiction of the world after the worst imaginable ideological catastrophe: “The shape of the world would resemble—well, I don’t know what I would compare it to—it would resemble one gigantic Christiansfeldt [a strict pietistic community in southern Jutland]. And there will also be a conflict between the two greatest possible opponents about how to interpret this phenomenon: Communism, which would say, This is right, according to the ways of worldliness; there must be absolutely no difference between one person and other; riches and art and science and government, et cetera, are all evil; all people should be as alike as workers in a factory, as inmates in a poorhouse; they should be dressed alike, should eat the same food, prepared in one huge pot, at the same hour, in equal portions, et cetera et cetera. Pietism, which would say, This is right, according to Christianity; there must be no difference between one person and another; we should all be brothers and sisters, owning everything in common; riches, social station, art, science, et cetera, are all evil; all people should be as alike as they once were in the little town of Christiansfeldt; they should dress alike, pray at specified times, get married by drawing lots, go to bed at a certain hour, eat the same food, from one bowl, in accordance with a specified tempo, et cetera et cetera.”

When strict uniformity is imposed on people, it is a matter of indifference whether it happens in the name of Christianity or communism; its very unfreedom is a clear demonstration of its untruth.

And it would in fact be interesting to know what other activities might be hidden behind the repeated “et cetera et cetera.”

From the Financial Papers of One Still Living

Wednesday, May 5, 1847: “How strange, that I have turned thirty-four. It is utterly inconceivable to me. I was so sure that I would die before or on this birthday, that I could actually be tempted to suppose that my birthday was erroneously recorded and that I will still die on my thirty-fourth.”

Kierkegaard noted this day in a little cluster of journal entries dealing with a number of subjects, including the matter of the difference between sin and spiritual struggle, and the matter of death, both actual death and, especially, symbolic death: “When I left her, I chose death—and for this very reason I have been able to work so prodigiously. She screamed, in parody, ‘I’ll die,’ while I acted as if the pleasures of my life had only just begun; all this was perfectly in order: She is a woman and I am an ironist.” It cannot be denied that the passage ends in a rather abrupt bit of cynicism, but farther down the page, separated by a pound sign (#), Kierkegaard moderated his position: “And yet the cause lies even deeper. Naturally, what induced me to leave her, my deepest unhappiness, now took on a quite different significance for me, since that was the reason I had to make her unhappy and take a murder on my conscience. Therefore, from that moment on my misery conquered me; it could not be otherwise. In order to justify my conduct toward her I constantly had to be reminded of my fundamental unhappiness. That is how things are.” It was following these lines that the birthday celebrant wrote of his amazement at having reached the age of thirty-four.

The failure of death to arrive in 1847 was an unexpected hitch in his calculations, and in more ways than one: Of the 31,355 rixdollars he had inherited, 17,760 had been invested in royal bonds and in shares in a fire insurance company. He had cashed these in, one after another, between 1839 and 1847. On March 2, 1847, he sold his last share, and on December 14 of the same year he sold his last bond. As a rule Kierkegaard enjoyed handsome capital gains on most of these transactions. A low estimate of his total investment income would be about 6,500 rixdollars, but now he was strapped for cash, and he needed to gain access to the money that was tied up in his childhood home at 2 Nytorv. In the arrangements governing their inheritance in 1839, the two brothers had each received a fifty-percent share in the house. Peter Christian took administrative responsibility for the property, but three years later when he was appointed parish pastor in Pedersborg, the job fell to the younger brother, who soon began to complain about it: “You know how worried I was about assuming management of the place,” he wrote to Peter Christian in mid-January 1843, informing him on the same occasion that he had convinced their brother-in-law, the businessman Johan Christian Lund, to manage the house, “until he succeeds in selling it as advantageously as possible.” This was the first time this possibility had come up in the two brothers’ discussions, but Søren Aabye was so tired of the irritating details involving the house that he would indeed have “sold it for nothing, if only I could get rid of it.” This did not mean that he was blind to the business side of the matter, however: “It cannot be denied that the location has great advantages; in the right hands it could fetch a tidy sum.”

Five months later, on May 3, 1843, he himself fetched some of that sum. Rather surprisingly, he purchased Peter Christian’s half of the house, thus becoming the sole owner. According to the terms of the sale, Peter Christian received 1,500 rixdollars in cash and a first mortgage of 7,000 rixdollars at an interest rate of four percent per annum. The house was put on the market in the latter part of 1847, and the sale was completed on Christmas Eve. Two days before the closing documents were signed, Peter Christian was informed of the details. The younger brother insisted repeatedly that his older brother could not but be pleased with the way the transaction had been handled. “God knows that these days I am so mixed up by all these business matters that I am only too prone to pedantry,” he explained, and then continued in a peculiarly unpedantic confusion: “I don’t even remember how it was your first mortgage was arranged, but in any case the entire matter is purely a formality.” It is not certain that Peter Christian would have agreed with this. And he probably found it a typical bit of hastiness when, in the next sentence, Søren Aabye wrote “that” instead of “whether”: “Therefore, let me know that you are satisfied by return mail.”

With the assistance of an attorney by the name of Kraft, the property was transferred to Christiane Elisabeth Bützow, who was a stockbroker’s widow and therefore quite well-heeled. The sale price was 22,000 rixdollars, of which 10,000 was to be paid in cash and the rest in mortgages at four percent per annum in the amounts of 5,000 and 7,000 rixdollars, to be held by Søren Aabye and Peter Christian, respectively. The younger brother thus made a nice profit on the house during the four years he owned it—he himself put the figure at 2,200 rixdollars. The sources do not tell us what Peter Christian thought of his net yield on the transaction, but shortly after the brothers met in connection with the sale of the house, Søren Aabye made one of his first genuinely bitter journal entries concerning Peter Christian, whose “pettiness and envy” was emphasized so much that we may assume that Peter Christian had blurted out a couple of remarks to the little brother who had shown himself to be a bit too deft in economic matters. Peter Christian had apparently lost 1,000 rixdollars in the deal.

This was the not the first time the two brothers had had financial dealings with each other. At times the thrifty older brother had apparently served as an interest-free credit institution. On March 26, 1839, Søren Aabye borrowed 300 rixdollars from Peter Christian, who noted it in his account book: “To my brother Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, to be subtracted from his share of this year’s income from the house … 300 rixdollars.” On October 20 the outstanding balance of the loan was brought down to 150 rixdollars, but on December 13 it was up to 450, and Peter Christian noted: “Instead of his entire debt of 450 rixdollars, on the 14th of the month he transferred to me three shares in the General Fire Insurance Company … which I purchased for 150 rixdollars apiece.” When the debt-encumbered aesthete apparently was unable to raise the money to repurchase his three shares, Peter Christian sold them in mid-September 1840 and remitted to Søren Aabye the portion of the sale price that exceeded 450 rixdollars. According to Peter Christian’s account book, earlier in the year, on January 20, 1840, Søren Aabye had borrowed the sum of 200 rixdollars, and on February 26 he had in addition borrowed twice that amount, this latter sum in order to cover only some of the debts the big-spending dandy’s creditors were pressing him to pay. Similar transactions between the two brothers took place in 1841 and 1842, but they seem to have come to a halt after that time, and from 1843 to 1848 Søren Aabye would borrow money from the National Bank, where he usually put up his stocks and bonds as collateral.

Money in Books

Surviving beyond his thirty-fourth birthday meant there would be a new deadline (if we may call it that) in Kierkegaard’s life, and this also led to some sudden rearrangements of the accounts in Kierkegaard’s other home, his writings. In the latter part of April 1847, Councillor of State Christian Molbech tried to purchase a copy of Either/Or as a present for a German friend. To his great surprise, the work was sold out, and this, as he told its author, must be a “phenomenon in our recent literary history that may need to be examined.” Kierkegaard’s initial reaction was an angry toss of his head at Molbech’s ignorance: The first edition of Either/Or had been sold out as early as December 1844, and when shortly thereafter Reitzel had suggested to the author that there be another printing, he had opposed the idea on principle. Molbech therefore ought not start studying some phenomenon in literary history, but he should instead learn the demanding dialectic of reversedness, with which he would surely have difficulties: “People have the same experience with this sort of dialectic as dogs have with learning to walk on their hind legs: For a moment they succeed, but then they go right back to walking on all fours.” Molbech was in reality one of those on all fours, for he could not conceive that Kierkegaard would work against himself and in service to an idea by not permitting a reprinting of Either/Or. And in fact Kierkegaard sent Molbech one of his own copies of Either/Or, which though not brand new was better than nothing—and if he wanted an “entirely new copy,” all he had to do was ask, and Kierkegaard would “ ‘take the hint’ with the speed of an obedient genie.” Thus Kierkegaard wished to work counter to himself in the service of an idea, but not counter to Councillor of State Molbech.

At the beginning of August 1847—that is, after the notorious thirty-fourth birthday—despite of all his declarations of principle, Kierkegaard negotiated with Reitzel concerning the remaining unsold copies of the other books Reitzel had on a commission basis, and he concluded one of his letters with the following half-promise: “As for Either/Or, it can certainly be left for another occasion.” Clearly, Kierkegaard was no longer entirely opposed to the idea of a new printing. Reitzel must have hesitated a bit, however, because by the end of that same month Kierkegaard was already well along in similar negotiations with the book dealer P. G. Philipsen, who on August 23, in accordance with a conversation he had had with Kierkegaard, sent him his calculations along with a price quote from the printer Bianco Luno. Philipsen proposed that a new printing of Either/Or have a press run of one thousand copies, nearly twice the size of the first printing, which would enable him to reduce the retail price by at least a rixdollar. Luno wanted 948 rixdollars and 60 shillings for printing and paper, to which would be added expenses for binding and advertising, and the net result was that Kierkegaard would receive 500 rixdollars, of which 400 would be paid on January 1, 1849, and the remaining 100 when the entire printing was sold out.

Kierkegaard could not accept this offer. He wanted 700 rixdollars, to which Philipsen replied on August 28, a bit confused—in the company of the well-spoken writer he had apparently forgotten all his calculations and other such tedious details—yet with businesslike firmness: “Esteemed Mr. Magister! You have good reason to smile at my vacillation. When I am with you, I forget all my figures. I see and hear nothing but the author of Either/Or and say yes to everything that flows from your lips. Here in my office I am finally able to make my estimate. I have once again calculated my expenses and all the risks very carefully, and as a result I am compelled to stand by my letter of the 23rd of this month and can only assume the publication of Either/Or in accordance with the conditions stated in it.” Kierkegaard was quite understandably less than delighted by Philipsen’s offer of 500 rixdollars for one thousand copies, for a few years earlier, when he had served as his own publisher, he had earned approximately 1,000 rixdollars on the first printing, which was only 525 copies. And his negative response to Philipsen’s offer came only two days later: “Esteemed sir! Since you do not want what I want, then you will not publish Either/Or, and with this the matter is settled.”

Kierkegaard now turned to Reitzel, and in an undated letter he communicated his acceptance of Reitzel’s offer of 550 rixdollars for 750 copies. This was the equivalent of 733 rixdollars for one thousand copies and was thus clearly a better offer than Philipsen’s. Furthermore, Reitzel was prepared for prompter payment of the money, of “which 300 rixdollars would be paid on June 11, 1849 and the remaining 250 rixdollars at the end of July 1849.” Time was money, and Kierkegaard was short of both. “Therefore I accept without further ado your offer for Either/Or, even though the royalties are pretty small—but then it is also a small country,” Kierkegaard wrote with grudging enthusiasm. He continued: “And good luck with the transaction. In my view you have made yourself a very advantageous deal, and you will see that the venture will prosper. If I had not in so many ways worked directly against its sale in the days when I myself was the publisher, the situation would also have been quite different then.” The good luck that was supposed to accompany the venture (now that Kierkegaard was not working against sales) was, however, not sufficient for the second edition to sell out in Kierkegaard’s lifetime, and a third edition was not necessary until 1865.

Nonetheless, Kierkegaard earned more money on Either/Or than on any other book. The retail price of the first edition had been 4 rixdollars and 72 shillings. Reitzel received the 72 shillings, so Kierkegaard’s gross earnings for the entire first printing were 2,100 rixdollars. From this sum about 640 rixdollars had to be subtracted for paper and printing, reducing Kierkegaard’s earnings to 1,460, but neither was that sum his net income, because Kierkegaard had also had expenses for his secretary (“my little secretary, Mr. Christensen”) and for proofreading (Giødwad). There are no surviving accounts for these expenses, but Kierkegaard elsewhere reported that the proofreading of Concluding Unscientific Postscript had cost him 100 rixdollars, so an estimate of about 150 rixdollars for Either/Or is scarcely too low, and this gave the author net earnings of a bit over 1,200 rixdollars.

It was in general more the rule than the exception that Kierkegaard earned money on his products. From 1838 to 1855 he published fortythree separate titles, of which thirty-six were through Reitzel, six through Philipsen, and a single one was from Gyldendal. Thirteen of the titles with which Reitzel was associated were published on commission, which meant that Kierkegaard himself negotiated the contracts with Bianco Luno and paid him directly for paper and printing. When the book was finished at the press, a certain number of volumes at a time were delivered to Reitzel, who generally took twenty-five percent of the sales price, though in the case of Either/Or he took only sixteen percent.

Kierkegaard thus had standing business relationships with Luno and with Reitzel, and by looking at the surviving documentation of the accounts we can follow the economic fortunes of Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Stages on Life’s Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, A Literary Review, and Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits. Certain documentation is missing with respect to the remaining five books published on commission—From the Papers of One Still Living, Two Edifying Discourses, Fear and Trembling, Repetition, and Philosophical Fragments—but there is still enough information for a very good estimate of Kierkegaard’s earnings.

About half the books published on commission were pseudonymous, and until 1846, when Kierkegaard acknowledged paternity of these works, he found it absurd to negotiate directly with Reitzel and Luno and instead used J. F. Giødwad as his go-between in the negotiations. It is therefore Giødwad and not Kierkegaard who is named in Luno’s accounts, just as it was Giødwad who paid for the pseudonymous writings and received money from Reitzel as the various works were sold. Thus Giødwad signed the following sworn statement on May 11,1845: “I swear on my life that Mr. Magister S. A. Kierkegaard has the right to require of me what I receive in the way of income from the sale of the writings … from Mr. Reitzel, book dealer, and that in the event of my death he is obligated to pay the sum to Mr. Kierkegaard.”

This complicated traffic came to an end in 1847: During the course of the summer Kierkegaard negotiated with Reitzel regarding the fate of the remaining unsold copies of the books that had been published on commission. The two parties came to an agreement in August, and for the sum of 1,200 rixdollars Reitzel took possession of the remaining copies of Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Stages on Life’s Way, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and A Literary Review. Reitzel also assumed the expenses associated with the Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits from 1847, which had already been printed at Kierkegaard’s expense. Kierkegaard received 225 rixdollars for these discourses, his first regular royalties, after which he was an author paid royalties in the normal manner: Prior to the appearance of each book, he sold Reitzel the copyright to the first printing, but he always retained the subsequent property rights. He would write a new contract and receive additional royalties whenever another printing would appear.

The status of things as of July 1847 can be seen in a statement of his account that Kierkegaard sent Reitzel in advance of the negotiations about the books he had published on commission.

Work

Number Sold

Remainder

Either/Or (525 copies)

sold out

0

Fear and Trembling (525 copies)

321

204

Repetition (525 copies)

272

253

Philosophical Fragments (525 copies)

229

296

The Concept of Anxiety (250 copies)

165

85

Prefaces (525 copies)

208

317

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (500 copies)

181

319

Stages on Life's Way (525 copies)

245

280

Concluding Unscientific Postscript (500 copies)

119

381

A Literary Review (525 copies)

131

394

Kierkegaard’s earnings on all the copies of his books that had been sold, minus twenty-five percent for Reitzel, came to 3,674 rixdollars, to which must be added the 1,200 rixdollars Kierkegaard was paid in August 1847 when Reitzel took possession of all the remaining unsold copies. Kierkegaard thus earned a gross of 4,874 rixdollars on the ten books he produced on a commission basis. His expenses for paper, printing and binding must be subtracted from this sum—a total of about 2,200 rixdollars for all the commission books, which leaves about 2,674 rixdollars. And finally, from this sum must be deducted the cost of advertising, the cost of a number of free copies, as well as expenses for secretarial help and proofreading; these latter two items were the costliest, probably totaling about 500 rixdollars. Thus, all in all, Kierkegaard’s net earnings on the books he produced on a commission basis and sold through Reitzel’s were about 2,000 rixdollars.

From the Papers of One Still Living, which was also sold through Reitzel’s on a commission basis, is not included in this accounting. Information concerning this work is scanty, but from a statement dated March 30, 1850, we learn that Kierkegaard earned just under 43 rixdollars on the 121 copies sold between June 1839 and March 1850. This sum, paid to Kierkegaard in April 1850, probably covered his expenses for paper and printing. He probably broke even in the same fashion on Two Edifying Discourses, of which there remained seventy-eight unsold copies as of May 24, 1845, after which they were purchased by Philipsen.

The pattern is similar, though on a smaller scale, with respect to the six books produced on commission that were sold through Philipsen. These were the small volumes of Edifying Discourses that appeared in 1843 and 1844, plus On the Concept of Irony from 1841. All that is known with respect to the financial side of Kierkegaard’s dissertation is that its retail price was 1 rixdollar and 48 shillings; it is not known how many copies were printed, or sold, or what Philipsen received in commission. Kierkegaard himself noted, quite precisely, though without specifics, that “the book has cost me 182 rixdollars, 4 marks and 8 shillings to publish.” If Philipsen took twenty-five percent of the retail price as commission, Kierkegaard’s expenses would have been covered if he had sold 163 copies, which does not seem unrealistic, because the public defense of the dissertation appears to have been something close to standing room only. On the other hand, a small advertisement included in the first edition of the Sixteen Edifying Discourses from 1852, stated that On the Concept of Irony was still available for purchase, and thus had not yet sold out.

In 1843 and 1844 Kierkegaard published a total of eighteen edifying discourses, grouped in six small booklets. The first of these appeared on commission at Reitzel’s on May 16, 1843, while the others came out on commission via Philipsen, who in 1845 purchased the remaining unsold copies of these sixteen discourses, which he had had on commission, plus the remaining copies of the two discourses that had been on commission at Reitzel’s. On May 29, 1845, he published these discourses under the title Eighteen Edifying Discourses. The financial records show that as of January 1, 1845, after subtracting advertising costs and Philipsen’s commission, Kierkegaard had had a credit balance of 224 rixdollars, 1 mark, and 4 shillings with Philipsen. This would in any case have covered most of Kierkegaard’s expenses for paper and printing. If he had lost a bit of money on his dissertation, he had earned roughly 100 rixdollars on his discourses, the commercial value of which he appears to have understood, for in the contract with Philipsen, he expressly reserved his property rights: “As soon as the first printing is sold out, the work is again my property.”

Two Ethical-Religious Essays appeared in 1849; it was printed by Louis Klein and was the only work to appear on commission through Gyldendal. The press run was the typical 525 copies; the cost of paper and printing came to a bit over 53 rixdollars; and the retail price was 3 marks, with Gyldendal retaining twenty-five percent as commission. It was not a bestseller, and by 1852 only seventy-four copies had been sold, which in accordance with the usual financial arrangements would have meant that Kierkegaard received 21 rixdollars. Reitzel purchased the remainder of the press run in 1852, but the accounts are so fragmentary that Kierkegaard’s net earnings cannot be calculated. They were surely quite modest, but it is hardly likely that he lost any money on these Essays.

In sum, Kierkegaard earned money on his writings. The books produced on a royalty basis netted him 2,835 rixdollars, and the books produced on a commission basis netted him about 2,000 rixdollars, for a grand total of about 4,835 rixdollars. This was not an enormous sum of money, but for purposes of comparison it might be mentioned that a department head at the Customs Inspection in Copenhagen received an annual salary of 600 rixdollars, and that if one was reasonably careful one could support a family for 400 rixdollars a year. If you were a journeyman artisan, your annual pay was 200 rixdollars, but on the other hand you had free food and lodging at the master’s house. In addition to her food and lodging, a housemaid received 30 rixdollars a year. If she needed a new pair of shoes, she had to squeeze three entire rixdollars out of her budget, and she therefore wore her old shoes for a very long time.

“Year after Year, at My Own Expense”

Even though Kierkegaard’s earnings were not exactly overwhelming, they nonetheless constitute a direct contradiction of his repeated comments to the effect that he lost money on his literary production. Socrates refused to take money for his instruction, and with him in mind Kierkegaard described his royalties a number of times as “rather Socratic.” A passage in Prefaces is typical of this: “A Danish author must not only possess intellect, expertise, and the like, which have of course always been regarded as desirable, he must also have money and, above all, a quite unusual temperament in order to be able to take satisfaction in giving away his time, his efforts—and his money—without receiving much else in return except ingratitude.”

This complaint was a frequently recurring theme in his writings, and it became increasingly associated with satire about the literary situation in Denmark. As he writes at the beginning of On My Work as an Author: “When a country is small, naturally all things are proportionally small in the small country. This is also true in literature. Royalties and all related matters will merely be insignificant…. So if there is an individual who possesses the talent to be an author, and he is also fortunate enough to have some money, then he will become an author pretty much at his own expense.”

Such pronouncements cannot help but give the impression that Kierkegaard’s work was an enterprise that was not only nonprofit, but indeed ended up unprofitable. Quite early on, Emil Boesen and Hans Brøchner helped give currency to this idea, but it was Henriette Lund and her half-brother Frederik Troels-Lund, along with their father, Councillor of Justice Henrik Ferdinand Lund (who was a department head in the National Bank), who came to function more or less unwittingly as the great mythmakers with respect to Kierkegaard’s finances. Just five days after Kierkegaard’s death, Lund, the National Bank man, would write the following to his son: “If anyone talks about the great fortune that he left behind, just let him talk. But the truth is this, that while he was alive he disposed of his money in such a way—in part on his writings, in part on living expenses, and in part on the poor—that he leaves nothing except his library, etc.”

Thus the idea that Kierkegaard spent a considerable part of his fortune in publishing his works became a putative fact quite early, and it was reinforced by a certain ambiguity in Kierkegaard’s journals. During the period immediately following the attack by The Corsair, the author who had been the target of so much ridicule wrote: “It is undeniably an education to be situated in a little town like Copenhagen as I am. To work to the utmost of my abilities, almost to the point of despair, with profound agony in my soul and much inner suffering, to pay out money in order to publish books—and then, to have literally fewer than ten people who read them through properly.” During this same year and in the same tone, while reflecting upon Goldschmidt and P. L. Møller in a less-than-friendly fashion, Kierkegaard wrote: “Nowadays, royalties, even for well-known authors in the Danish literary world, are very modest, while the on the other hand, the gratuities that are distributed to literary rowdies are quite considerable. Nowadays, the more contemptible a writer is, the more he makes.” Or, again, from the same year and with bittersweet irony: “So, on the one side: honor, respect, monetary gain—and the erroneous opinion; and on the other side: dishonor, exclusion, monetary loss—and the correct opinion. If one were not an optimist already, with this in mind, who wouldn’t become one?”

While Kierkegaard was nonchalant and generally quite elegant in the way he discussed this issue in his published writings, he was close to the opposite of this in his journals, where he really complained about his distress, all the while protesting that he was not really complaining: “Denmark is a small country where a real author can earn nothing—that was something I knew before I started. I have never complained about it, nor will I—even if it is certainly saddening that if I had lived in a large country, I would have earned a considerable fortune during the time when I had to pay out money in order to live as an author.” During this same year, 1848, he seems to have had a sort of relapse into a Socratic position: “I reflect with great concern on the question of whether it is actually permissible for me to earn money through my work, perhaps guaranteeing myself a steady income, which would be reassuring to me right now. I reflect on this with great concern, because I certainly understand that at the very moment I did that, my work as an author, and my work in general, would be undermined, because I would have promoted a trivial definition of seriousness, of being regarded as a serious man—who earns money, who thus is read more widely and quoted more frequently. And why? Because now I have become serious—that is, now I am earning money.” At this point Kierkegaard was in his royalty period. The year 1848 was a productive and profitable one, bringing him 1,020 rixdollars according to his contract with Reitzel, and this is perhaps part of the explanation of his sudden hesitancy. But it was not long before his Socratic crisis was over: “Isn’t Concluding Postscript quite an accomplishment, more than enough for three professors! But of course the author did not have an official post and does not seem to want one. There were no weighty [Hegelian-style] ‘sections,’ so it was really nothing. The book was published in Denmark. It was not mentioned anywhere. Perhaps fifty copies were sold, so, including the expense of proofreading (100 rixdollars), publishing the book cost me about 400–500 rixdollars, plus my time and effort.” Here, for the occasion, Kierkegaard has suppressed the fact that the Postscript had in fact been discussed in detail—albeit venomously—by P. L. Møller.

Kierkegaard’s bitterness was unmistakable and it had come to stay. Similarly, the need to split himself up into many authors also grew steadily; by 1850 the number had reached ten: “Yes, if I could split myself up and become ten people—now that would be something in Denmark. Then there would be the requisite variety, one author today, another tomorrow, none of them amounting to very much. Even the brief pieces I toss off would be sufficient to establish a brilliant career in Denmark—and a career that would make me a great deal of money…. One word in print about the clothes I wear, and thousands upon thousands lap it up; it is remembered for ages.” Or, this especially emphatic remark from 1851: “I was nothing and amounted to nothing, but I devoted myself to the costly amusement—costly also in the financial sense—of being an author in Denmark.”

It would be easy to supplement what has been cited here with a welter of variations on this same theme, but there are also journal entries that correct, or at least moderate, the overall impression, as this one from 1850: “I have held out year after year, at my own expense. Sometimes I have laid out money; on balance I have covered my expenses; hence I have earned nothing.” This balance between expenses and income corresponds roughly to what Sibbern, who was generally well-informed, reported concerning the matter: “The publication of his voluminous writings must have cost him something for quite a period of time. Toward the end, on the other hand, he must have earned considerable royalties.”

But Kierkegaard’s earnings never covered his cost of living, so when he asserted that he “paid out money as an author,” he was not completely off the mark—if, that is, we accept the peculiar premises on which he based his argument: If he earned 500 rixdollars in royalties in a given year but spent 2,000 on his living expenses, then that year it cost him 1,500 rixdollars to publish books.

Though this accounting may lack something when we look at it from an economic point of view, it nonetheless makes sense psychologically. Kierkegaard began as a wealthy young man. He worked, quite literally, like a madman. He deprived himself in order to devote himself entirely to his work as an author. And year by year he saw his fortune disappear. So had the money not been used on the writings? Had he not “kept up an existence as an author free of charge”? Had he not “given Denmark an author virtually at his own expense”? And finally, had he not “diligently and strenuously worked himself into poverty”? It would have been difficult for it to have seemed otherwise to him, and it would not have made much difference if the direct economic costs of his being an author had only just covered his outlays or if they had produced a surplus of a bit under 5,000 rixdollars. For that amount of money Kierkegaard could not have supported himself for more than two or three years! And since he worked as an author for all of seventeen years, the books on average only brought in about 300 rixdollars a year—which at times would not even have been enough to cover his rent.

Kierkegaard’s finances cannot be examined in detail because there are too many blank spots and black holes in the surviving records. But both the major headings and the bottom line can be determined quite definitely: The fortune Kierkegaard inherited in 1839 totaled 31,335 rixdollars; his interest and dividend income from stocks and bonds totaled about 6,500 rixdollars; the income from his writings was in the neighborhood of 5,000 rixdollars; and he earned 2,200 rixdollars on the sale of the family house. Of this grand total of 45,035 rixdollars, he left just about nothing at his death in 1855. The only things remaining were his personal effects and furnishings, his collection of books, thirty bottles of wine in the cellar, and a credit balance of 599 rixdollars with Reitzel. The money had disappeared in seventeen years, which means that Kierkegaard had spent an average of 2,600 rixdollars a year.

What happened to the money? The answer is simple: Kierkegaard had an enormously high rate of private consumption. And the surviving bills speak their own unambiguous language about the lifestyle of a connoisseur. There are bills from book dealers; from bookbinders; from various hatmakers; from Agerskov and Schmidt, drapers and silk mercers; from Künitzer, a tailor; from Sølverborg, a shoemaker, who, for a pretty shilling, soled Kierkegaard’s special boots, installing flexible cork inlays. There are also bills from various artisans and five receipts from F. W. Ahlstrand, a barber, for “attendance in connection with shaving.” This “attendance” might set fantasies dancing, but in fact it was then not unusual for barbers to shave customers in their own homes, for which customer Kierkegaard paid four rixdollars in 1850–51. The oddest things in this bundle of bills, however, are the fifteen receipts for membership dues for various associations and societies and clubs of a rather esoteric sort. These included the Art Association, of which Kierkegaard was made member number 201 for the tidy sum of two rixdollars in ready silver, thereby automatically becoming a participant in a “lottery drawing for a work of art”—and amazingly, on February 3, 1855 he won an oil painting, The Italian Woman and Her Child, by Elisabeth Jerichau Baumann. Kierkegaard gave the painting to his brother-in-law, Henrik Ferdinand Lund, explaining that “you shall have the picture as a reward for never having read a word of what I have written.” He paid three rixdollars in ready silver for membership in the Athenæum, a private library. It is not surprising that Kierkegaard was also a member of the Society for the Promotion of Danish Literature, but what remains a mystery is why as late as 1850, by which time he was often complaining about his straitened financial circumstances, he would have spent four whole rixdollars for membership in the Society for the Promotion of Gardening. And the situation becomes utterly beyond comprehension when we leaf through the packet of neat little coupons, with their elegant pen flourishes, and learn that on October 26, 1850, he—as it is stated—“paid his generously subscribed contribution” of three rixdollars for membership in the Women’s Association of 1843. We ask ourselves whether his membership in these latter two societies was a form of benevolence or simply an expression of subtle irony.

It is easier to understand his membership in the Music Society. Kierkegaard had played a somewhat droll role in its founding. After a gala performance at the Royal Theater in honor of the composer C.E.F. Weyse, who celebrated his sixty-second birthday on March 5, 1836, some of those who had been present at the theater gathered at the Student Association where they decided to form the Music Society, which would have the promotion of Danish composers as one of its aims. According to the physician and amateur musician J. L. Lorck, as early as March 16, 1836 the society had no fewer than 141 members, so Lorck and Edvard Collin sat down to draw up bylaws that would govern the group’s future activities. Since the two gentlemen wanted to be sure that their regulations had been properly thought through, they turned to a “friend and associate” whose “dialectical acumen they trusted greatly”—Søren Kierkegaard. So one evening the three men assembled at Lorck’s apartment over a glass of punch and presented the young dialectician with a draft of the proposed bylaws for the society: “Søren Kierkegaard apparently took the matter very seriously and launched into a discussion of the details. But soon his skills at dialectical dissection took the wind out of the sails of the two legislators, who had hardly considered the consequences discovered in their bylaws by the philosopher they had summoned. With heads swimming, they left their adviser.”

Kierkegaard himself was the first to admit to his profligacy. In a journal entry with the dramatic heading “Judgment upon Myself,” he thus wrote: “God knows that I have been extravagant. I willingly acknowledge it and confess my guilt…. My extravagance is nonetheless essentially related to my productivity, which I understood as my only possibility and at the same time saw as the indescribable grace of God that gave my life such significance. So everything was lavished in order to keep me in a state of productivity. It would have been more pleasing to God or more truly Christian if I had behaved in precisely the opposite fashion and had been frugal. I understand this now, but at the time I neither understood it nor do I believe it would have been possible for me. On the other hand, it is certain that I have turned to God, that I have prayed to him, every time I had to resort to an expensive diversion, and it is certain that I had the youthful sense that this was permissible. I prayed to God that I might truly enjoy myself on such excursions, and I left the matter to him.” Here he at least seems to be putting his mouth where his money was, and both seem to have been put to good use: “Without extravagance I would never have been able to work on the scale that I did; for my extravagance has always been calculated solely in order to keep me productive on this enormous scale.”

Petty-minded posterity has reveled in taking offense at these expensive habits, but only because in its jealousy and jaundice it has proposed that Kierkegaard ought to have subjected himself to an asceticism to which posterity would itself say thanks, but no thanks.

18. The Corsair, issue no. 285, Friday, March 6, 1846: “There are moments when one’s ideas become confused and one thinks that Nicolas Copernicus was a fool when he maintained that the earth revolved around the sun. On the contrary, the heavens, the sun, the planets, the earth, Europe, and Copenhagen revolve around Søren Kierkegaard, who stands silently in the center and does not even remove his hat for the honor being shown him. So who, what, is Søren Kierkegaard, really? ask thousands who have heard about him and his enormous books.”

19. Peder Ludvig Møller. “Not much is known about his private life; his unsympathetic personality kept most people at a suitable distance,” wrote Carl Brosbøll (known as Carit Etlar) with respect to Møller, who was also called Kierkegaard’s demonic doppelgänger. He was a theological student, but like Kierkegaard, he passed the time with various studies, particularly of aesthetic and philosophical subjects; he was a fixture in cafés and was known for his malicious tongue—and for his insatiable desire for women. He aroused universal offense—and certainly universal envy, as well—by living out in real life the sensuality that others, including Kierkegaard, cultivated in so Platonic a medium as paper.

20. Meïr Aron Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt belonged to the generation of younger authors and intellectuals for whom Either/Or had been a literary revelation. As the editor of the satirical weekly The Corsair, he wrote an enthusiastic review of the work. Later the journal had the good, wicked idea of depicting Kierkegaard as a hunchbacked figure with trouser legs of unequal length. In no time at all, Kierkegaard’s relation to the people of Copenhagen was transformed; subjected to their gaping stares, he felt himself demoted from master thinker to village idiot. At the same time he felt promoted from the rank of poet to that of martyr. The four drawings along the lower margin of these pages are from The Corsair, issue nos. 277 and 278.

21. Strøget was called “the Route” in those days, and this was where one went to see and be seen, to greet one’s friends enthusiastically while demonstratively avoiding one’s enemies. The old-fashioned eateries had been modernized in accordance with foreign models and were now called “confectioneries” or “tearooms,” with exotic names like Apitz, Capritz, Capozzi, Ferrini, Lardelli, and Pleisch.

22. Jens Finsen Giødwad. “I call Giødwad my personal friend, and during the last three or four years I have spoken with him every single evening…. If he weren’t a journalist I would certainly have found in him the person whom I could most nearly have entrusted myself to in a genuine friendship.” Thus Kierkegaard wrote in 1850. But Giødwad was and remained a journalist, and furthermore he had decidedly liberal sympathies. Kierkegaard used him as a go-between when pseudonymous works were to be sent to the printer.

23. Berlingske politiske and Avertissements-Tidende, Friday morning, December 20, 1850. To avoid inundating readers in a sea of miscellaneous announcements, C. A. Reitzel placed one large advertisement that offered for sale a number of books, including Clara Raphael, Twelve Letters, Christian Winther, New Poems, and Henrik Hertz, Poems. Above them all was enthroned An Edifying Discourse by S. Kierkegaard, which could be had for sixteen shillings.

24. Rasmus Nielsen. Although Kierkegaard did not want any disciples, he found it appropriate to initiate one person into his work as an author. The choice fell on a professor of philosophy, Rasmus Nielsen, a many-talented man with interests in mathematics, chemistry, botany, and physiology. “I am like the horses who pull the omnibuses,” he said. “For me it is sufficient rest to be harnessed to a different wagon.” But the Kierkegaardian “omnibus” almost forced him to his knees. Kierkegaard believed that Nielsen stole his ideas and published them as his own, so he would surely have found it fitting that Nielsen had himself immortalized with hat in hand.

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