“Backstage Practice”
“A Somersault into the Siberia of Freedom of the Press”
After the French Revolution and the unrest that followed in its train, the absolute monarch Frederick VI issued a long series of ordinances and decrees to discourage in advance those who might entertain liberal or revolutionary sympathies. On September 27, 1799, he decreed: “For the person who merely denigrates, ridicules, or spreads hatred and dissatisfaction concerning the present constitution and government, or who merely denigrates the monarchical form of government in general, or who undermines belief in the existence of God and in the immortality of the human soul—for this person the punishment provided is exile for life or for a specified number of years. The death sentence awaits the person who agitates for changes in the existing form of government or for popular rebellion.”
This decree was synonymous with censorship, and among those it chased into lifelong exile was P. A. Heiberg, whose pen had been a bit too daring. If a court adjudged that a person had violated the decree on even one occasion, his writings were subjected to lifelong prior censorship by the chief of police. Thus none of the leading figures of the day felt tempted to flaunt revolutionary plans, and the common people said nothing at all because most of them were barely able to read. One firebrand, Dr. J. J. Dampe, wanted a free constitution, and in 1820 he founded a so-called Iron Ring Conspiracy, whose members were to wear an iron finger ring. But it received quite limited support, and in fact when Police Chief Kierulff infiltrated the movement the only people subject to arrest aside from Dampe himself were Dampe’s landlord and a smith named Jørgensen who didn’t really understand what the conspiracy was all about. Dampe was condemned to death but the sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment, at first in the Copenhagen Citadel and after 1826 on the island of Christiansø, where Dampe’s own constitution was forced to endure the next twenty years under rather unfree conditions.
This political martyr was a source of amusement, especially for intellectuals who had long taken up a moderate position with respect to social and political reforms. But, finally, as a part of his campaign to stamp out what he called “impudent writing” the king issued a decree, dated December 14, 1834, and this was just too much for many nabobs of the day. Late in February 1835 the king was presented with an “Appeal for Freedom of the Press,” signed by no fewer than 575 prominent people, including Professors H. N. Clausen and J. F. Schouw, who also happened to be the authors of the appeal. The king’s response came just four days later, and to put it mildly, its absolutist arrogance was dismissive in tone, and posterity turned the opening words of the king’s response into a well-known slogan: “We alone know.” And, for a very long time afterwards, that was that. Even as late as 1842, twenty-two of the country’s twenty-four daily newspapers were subjected to censorship. Only Kjøbenhavnsposten and Fædrelandet had avoided prosecution.
Johannes Ostermann was no rebel. He studied linguistics, wrote with an old-fashioned quill pen, and was also a senior member of the Student Association at the University of Copenhagen. At a meeting of the Student Association, on November 14, 1835, he delivered a lecture on “Our Latest Journalistic Literature” that was published in Fædrelandet a week later. For Ostermann, “journalistic literature” meant in particular the period’s various periodicals, most of which were of a literary character, but it also included the “mass of yellow journalism” that circulated in Copenhagen and whose coarse and vulgar nature he naturally had to condemn. Nonetheless, Ostermann could cite a paper as trashy as Raketten [Danish: “The Rocket”] to illustrate the fundamentally beneficial character of the press. Of course the paper was entirely devoid of “propriety in its mode of expression,” but it had courage: It dared to talk where others balked. It provided a channel for people to air their “complaints and grievances,” thus encouraging them to read and write, something the “lower-middle classes” were not otherwise accustomed to doing. Furthermore, a critical press could “be of help to the oppressed” while also having a deterrent effect, so that all in all it could strengthen the rule of law, provided that not only the judicial system but also “the public participates in the matter.” Ostermann (who had by then apparently got himself quite worked up) noted that what is true for the individual citizen is also true for the government, because “we should never forget that whenever the good prevails, it does so as a result of struggle; we should never forget that the government can err just as much as the people.” A person had to be cautious elaborating on this latter sentiment in the presence of an absolute monarch, so Ostermann tempered his remark by adding that a “government which is as moderate as the Danish government generally is, truly has nothing to fear from a little bitterness in a daily newspaper.” Today we can see that in his realistic appreciation of the democratic side of the daily press Ostermann had the future on his side. Two weeks later, however, he had Kierkegaard against him.
Kierkegaard also chose to “read aloud” (as it was called at the Student Association). Kierkegaard requested a copy of Ostermann’s manuscript, and on November 28, 1835, he presented a response: “Our Journalistic Literature,” subtitled “A Study from Nature in Noonday Light.” He read his paper in front of a large audience who applauded enthusiastically when he finished. Kierkegaard had prepared well, and he displayed an impressive knowledge of the history of the National Liberal press, particularly as it had been exemplified by Kjøbenhavnsposten. His point was that the liberal press had not been anywhere near as activist as Ostermann had claimed and that in actuality it had merely gone from “castles in the air—to mousetraps—and home again.” Kierkegaard does not say so directly, but if one reads between the lines he seems to intimate that the most important initiative for improvements in the situation of the times had been taken by Frederick VI himself. Kierkegaard, in short, was not about to participate in what he called a “somersault into the Siberia of freedom of the press.”
Ostermann heard Kierkegaard deliver his paper, but he had no desire to involve himself with an “opponent, whom I knew had only a slight interest in the reality of the matter.” Ostermann was thus very well acquainted with Kierkegaard, not only from the Student Association but also from the Copenhagen cafés where the two had often met and from which they had taken walks around the city’s lakes. Kierkegaard’s lively “intellect,” Ostermann explained, “took hold of any issue in those days, and he exercised his brilliant dialectical skill and wit upon it. The fact that my defense [of freedom of the press] had met with a favorable reception pushed him into the opposite camp, where he allied himself more or less as a matter of indifference.”
Ostermann was right. Kierkegaard’s contribution to the debate about freedom of the press was in fact a grandiose exercise in stirring up a tempest in a teapot. Nonetheless (or perhaps precisely because of this) he continued his polemics undaunted when Orla Lehmann, the leading spokesman for the liberals, published the fifth of his articles on “the case for freedom of the press” in Kjøbenhavnsposten. Lehmann, subsequently one of the godfathers of the Danish constitution, argued in this article that the hard times experienced in recent years—“war, defeat, humiliation, bankruptcy, crop failure”—had given rise to a widely shared popular gloom, which had been repressed by the invocation of patriotic and sentimental themes: “Public life was shrouded in the darkness of mourning; it was therefore no surprise that people took refuge in their family lives, seeking comfort and warmth behind closed doors and amusing themselves as best they could. There arose a sort of ‘still life’ in which people engaged in aesthetic pursuits, playing at ‘old Denmark’ and ‘grand old flag.’ ”
Lehmann was no enemy of the people, but he understood that, deep down, this patriotic self-aggrandizement, “this hullabaloo about Danishness,” was associated with a national sense of inferiority that was the parodic opposite of true patriotism. The people needed fresh air if they were to be freed from philistinism and bilious repression, and this was where a critical press could help. Despite the cautious concealment demanded by the times, Lehmann made the optimistic assertion that “we are at the dawn of a new era in the life and the freedom of the people.”
Six days later, on February 18, 1836, Kierkegaard picked up where Lehmann left off. His article “The Morning Observations in Kjøbenhavnsposten, no. 43” appeared in Flyveposten, J. L. Heiberg, editor. This was the most elegant aesthetic journal of the day, and notwithstanding its rather modest circulation it was very important in shaping public opinion. From the very beginning, Flyveposten’s mission was to increase interest in the art of drama, and Heiberg therefore frequently discussed and reviewed the productions of the Royal Theater. Although this could have given Flyveposten a rather technical character, burdening his readers with learned dissertations lay far from Heiberg’s journalistic sensibilities. On the contrary, Heiberg’s intention was to entertain, with the hope that Copenhagen would become a lively capital like Paris. Among the one hundred forty or so subscribers on a subscription list dating from 1834 were the young Crown Prince Christian; Royal Confessor Jakob Peter Mynster; physicist Hans Christian Ørsted and his brother Anders Sandøe Ørsted, a jurist and future prime minister; the young August Bournonville, who called himself a dancer and would eventually become Denmark’s greatest choreographer; and a certain Councillor of Justice Terkild Olsen, who had a daughter by the name of Regine. In addition to all these intellectuals the list of subscribers included Copenhagen businessmen, shopkeepers and silk merchants, various cafés, and the famous Danish chocolate manufacturer Kehlet, who kept the journal in his shop for the delectation of his sweet-toothed customers. Flyveposten, like The Corsair in later years, was one of those journals which everyone wanted to be able to talk about. It was spicy and interesting; eloquent authors played peekaboo with one another and loved to mystify curious readers by signing their contributions with pseudonyms or cryptic symbols. Heiberg himself published under the symbol “_,” but the merriment took on such proportions that writers who wished to remain incognito eventually used up all the uppercase and lowercase letters in both the Latin and Greek alphabets, and people finally had to resort to using numbers.
“B” was apparently still untaken at the time, so Kierkegaard was permitted to use it. Beginning with the very choice of his title, in which “morning” played upon Lehmann’s use of the word “dawn,” Kierkegaard telegraphed the impertinent and light-hearted style that would characterize his article. Employing roughly equal amounts of dialectical accuracy and ironic arbitrariness, Kierkegaard touched upon various details in Lehmann’s piece, blending them into an absurd, rollicking travesty that didn’t care a fig about objectivity. And reactions to Kierkegaard’s article were not long in coming. On March 4 Johannes Hage, the youthful editor of Fædrelandet, published an article “On the Polemic of Flyveposten,” in which he expressed his irritation at the belligerent witticisms which in B’s case served scarcely any other purpose than to “glorify his own little self.” What particularly irritated Hage, however, was the “shameless attack upon Liunge,” of which the aforementioned B was guilty. Kierkegaard had asserted that A. P. Liunge, the editor of Kjøbenhavnsposten, was really “too good to be the editor of Kjøbenhavnsposten,” a newspaper so terrible that the most reasonable solution would be to have “a complete zero” in the editor’s chair. Indeed, Kierkegaard had no doubt that just as “one sells one’s cadaver to the anatomy schools in England,” in Denmark it would only be a matter of time before one could “sell one’s body to be used as editor of Kjøbenhavnsposten.”
This was not polite. It was practically libelous, but it was nonetheless tactically shrewd because Liunge was one of Heiberg’s pet peeves: He always called him “the copyist.” So things went well, and the very next day Kierkegaard received support from an unexpected quarter. The weekly journal Statsvennen [Danish: “Friend of the State”]—conservative-leaning, as its name more than intimated—had attributed to Heiberg the article Kierkegaard had published under the pseudonym “B”! “Heiberg has written a number of witty pieces, but scarcely anything better than the article in Flyveposten,” reported Statsvennen in rapt admiration. Indeed, if “Rahbek were still alive and among us, he would call it priceless.” Kierkegaard was almost giddy with delight. He copied Statsvennen’s words into his journal, though not quite word for word, which shows that he must have studied them with such care that he (almost) knew them by heart! And to make the triumph complete, Kierkegaard added that Poul Martin Møller, who was also unaware of the true identity of the author, was just about to run after Heiberg on the street in order to thank him for the article—“because it was the best piece that had appeared since Flyveposten had become political”—when at the last second Emil Boesen stopped him and told him who had actually written it.
Nothing could be more flattering than to be confused with Heiberg, whose attentions were the object of every new author’s wildest dreams. Evidently it did not occur to Kierkegaard that such a confusion was only possible because Kierkegaard had managed to copy Heiberg down to the least detail, so that properly understood his article was merely a skillful imitation, a copy, a pastiche. Kierkegaard’s old schoolmate, the author H. P. Holst, thus wrote: “In his earliest days as a university student he was especially attracted by Heiberg’s notion of wit, and it would surprise me very much if his desire to present himself as an author was not first kindled by some witty and amusing articles in Flyveposten. I remember how in those days he frequently composed articles in that spirit about various things, and, displaying an admirable capacity for memory, he would recite them to me on the street.”
With this encouragement, Kierkegaard could sally forth under the name “B,” confident of victory, and he sent Flyveposten a double-length article “On the Polemic of Fædrelandet,” which appeared in the issues of March 12 and March 15. Over time, the entire affair had become so complex that Kierkegaard’s piece resembled more than anything else an account of a family feud in which, after a while, no one could remember who had said what, about what, or to whom—and certainly not why they had said it. But Liunge was treated to a few more jabs, and Hage was on the receiving end of a veritable haymaker because he had been so impudent as to have written that Kierkegaard had of course only written in order to “glorify his own little self.” Heiberg was very pleased with the verbal fracas, however, and on March 16, when he sent Kierkegaard “six special reprints” of the double-length article, he thanked him for his contributions and assured him that they had pleased him “even more on re-reading them.” And then, wonder of wonders, he signed himself “Most Respectfully, J. L. Heiberg.”
But this was not the end of the debate. In the March 31 issue of Kjøbenhavnsposten, Orla Lehmann published a “Reply to Mr. B. of Flyveposten,” in which he described B as a writer with a “genuinely unmistakable talent for use of powerful language and spirited imagery,” but whose intention we search for in vain. Indeed, it seemed to him in fact that “the kernel is hidden within a very thick shell” and that the whole business was no more than a “stylistic exercise in the humoristic manner.” Kierkegaard’s reply, “To Mr. Orla Lehmann,” appeared in Flyveposten on April 10, and was supremely dismissive, as might have been expected. For the first time in the battle, Kierkegaard removed his pseudonym “B” and signed himself “S. Kierkegaard,” presumably because he was pleased to acknowledge these playful skirmishes with his actual name.
The day before Kierkegaard’s twenty-third birthday, May 4, 1836, the affair took a sudden and unfortunate turn when an anonymous writer printed three articles in a publication he called Humoristiske Intelligensblade. In the first article, where he chattily explains the idea behind his journal, we can clearly sense that he has Kierkegaard in his sights, and in the next article he fires away. The author, who signs himself “X,” displays such agility in his dialectical sallies that for a moment we are tempted to believe that this is actually Kierkegaard, who has assumed another pseudonym in order to carry on the battle against himself. But the satire is an order of magnitude too vile for this to be the case. Thus, near its conclusion the article declares: “After having read an author who interests us, we generally tend to form a picture of his personality in accordance with the manner in which his physiognomy emerges from what he has written…. In this way we not uncommonly see a Mephistopheles leap out of books and journals, though more often it is one or another caricature upon whom exaggerated arrogance, pedantic affectation, or other such qualities have placed a fool’s cap.” The article goes on to say that unfortunately considerations of space do not permit the elaboration of this picture, but this could be done on a subsequent occasion, “especially if the author, through his continued literary activity, provides us more features of his unique physiognomy.”
It must have been painful for Kierkegaard to read these coarse allusions to his body and especially unpleasant for him to discover that somewhere or other in the city he had a literary doppelgänger whose polemics went one step further than he himself could dream of going. And in view of the fact that the discussion of the “journalistic literature” of the day had been set in motion by Kierkegaard’s rather condescending attitude toward the necessity of any increase in freedom of expression, it was an irony of fate that he himself had suddenly been threatened with reprisals—“a fool’s cap”—if he continued to publish. In the next article, however, the danger seemed to have passed, inasmuch as the author did not link his views to Kierkegaard. But then yet another piece from the mysterious X appeared, and the curtain went up on “Flyveposten’s Collegium Politicum: A Touching Comedy in Six Scenes.” In the manner of Ludvig Holberg’s comedies, the characters in the play all appear under pseudonyms, but they are easily recognizable, taken as they are from articles that had appeared in Flyveposten. Many of the lines in the play are borrowed from this same source, so that passages by Flyveposten authors are placed in their authors’ own mouths or in the mouths of other characters. Kierkegaard, who appears in the cast of characters as “K. (né B), an opponent and also a bit of a genius,” is depicted as a faithful disciple of Heiberg and is called his “amanuensis.” When he appears on stage—singing!—Heiberg turns to those present and exclaims: “Believe me, this is a crafty head. He can debate with his antipode and make him believe he is walking on his head.” Kierkegaard is just leaving the offices of Kjøbenhavnsposten, which he has “given a piece of his mind,” and he demonstrates this with a judicious selection of quotations from his own articles: “I said: cheap beer. I said: moral creamed kale. I said: ditto buckwheat porridge. I said: parsley. I said: beef consommé. I said: Niagara Falls. And I said: any port in a storm.” Kierkegaard has now written a new article, which he hands to Heiberg, who enthusiastically scans it and then inquires how in the world such a “cloudburst of ideas” can be contained in a single person. To this Kierkegaard responds: “Indeed, I suffer from them a great deal as long as they remain inside me. If I did not expel them every now and then with a sweat bath—this is how I metaphorically describe my activity as a writer—they would undoubtedly attack the nobler inner parts.”
Here—quite literally—the bottom has been reached. And aside from a little parting remark Kierkegaard is given no additional lines. But this was more than enough, for with this Freudian jab below the belt his literary activity during these spring months had been explained as a sublimation of inner—implicitly sexual—energy which ought to have found a more direct, biological discharge. It is not surprising that his rejoinder—which he never published—was marked by a rather ashen indignation. No one knows the identity of the person who hid behind this heartless X, nor did Kierkegaard, but he assumed that it must have been one of “the poets from the aesthetic period of Kjøbenhavnsposten.” Various earmarks, especially in matters of style, point in a slightly different direction, however, namely toward none other than P. L. Møller. Indeed, he was perhaps the only person who possessed the imitative talent needed to take the wind out of Kierkegaard’s inflated style, thus harnessing his own irony in order to puncture someone else’s ironic balloon.
Approximately a decade later, when Møller’s path again crosses Kierkegaard’s, it is precisely this talent he will put to use—and to such great effect that it would completely alter the direction of Kierkegaard’s life.
Within the Heibergs’ Charmed Circle
Even though Kierkegaard’s journalistic polemics were succeeded by a comical coda he had not exactly welcomed, he was viewed as the victor in the battle. Only a few days after Kierkegaard’s first article appeared, Peter Rørdam wrote that “there has been a change in the Student Association; their chief and leader, Lehmann, has fallen, totally defeated…. and with him has fallen Kjøbenhavns-Posten…. The victor is the younger Kierkegaard, who now writes in Flyveposten under the symbol B.” And on May 17 Pastor Johan Hahn wrote to Peter Christian, “I hear from many quarters that your brother Søren has made a witty and powerful appearance in Flyveposten.”
This successful literary debut meant that Kierkegaard would be admitted to the charmed circle of the Heiberg family. Johan Ludvig Heiberg was a poet, literary critic, translator, journal editor, playwright, and subsequently head of the Royal Theater, which he supplied with vaudevilles—delightful comedies of intrigue, replete with songs and never-insurmountable romantic complications—that delighted the audiences of the day. In brief, Heiberg was the paladin of elegance and wit, of irony and urbanity, good manners, and intellectual aristocracy, for better or worse. Thus Heiberg was an institution, an aesthetic supreme court, whose verdicts, while not always perfectly fair, were beyond challenge and were therefore of fateful significance. Furthermore, Heiberg was the administrator of a literary dynasty of noble lineage. At the time of his banishment from the country in 1800, his father, P. A. Heiberg, had unquestionably been the country’s best-known writer. During the period from 1827 to 1845, his mother, Thomasine Buntzen, known under the name of her second husband as Mrs. Gyllembourg, had anonymously published no fewer than two dozen novels and short stories. And, finally, Heiberg was married to Johanne Luise Pätges, a goddess sprung from the proletariat, who at the age of thirteen had become the object of his distinguished erotic lust and who was now indisputably the leading lady of the Danish stage, the dazzling, bespangled muse of the age. Everyone admired her, worshipped her, and fell in love with her so thunderously and passionately that they became profoundly depressed or even—in keeping with the tragic style of the day—committed suicide. When she starred in the title role of Oehlenschläger’s Dina, the Copenhagen crowd was so transported that they unharnassed the horses from her carriage and themselves drew it from the Royal Theater to her home, an homage previously shown only to King Frederick VI and the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen! Mrs. Heiberg was simply deified by her fans, who could purchase her likeness in the form of an engraving, or embroidered on handkerchiefs, or emblazoned on the crowns of their hats; if this was insufficient, people could also choose from a variety of products bearing Mrs. Heiberg’s name, including a brand of cigar, a houseplant, a lamp, a type of soap, stationery, tearoom pastries, chocolates, and a waltz by the Danish waltz king, H. C. Lumbye.
For a quarter century Mrs. Gyllembourg lived with her son and daughterin-law, which not only required a great deal of patience and understanding (the mother-in-law lived to age eighty-three!) but also facilitated a working partnership that mean-spirited wags dubbed “the Heiberg Factory.” While the son published his mother’s short stories and plays, she herself wrote for her son’s journals, and in the evenings Luise appeared on stage in the roles her husband and her mother-in-law had written with her in mind.
For older people, an invitation to the Heiberg family home at number 3 Brogade in the Christianshavn section of the city was an honor, and for younger people it held the promise of bliss on the “Parnassus” of Copenhagen. This was a gathering place for theater people, for actors and actresses who, like Heiberg, viewed the resurrection of the Royal Theater and the establishment of an independent Danish drama as one of the major challenges confronting the cultural life of the day. The brilliant actors Carl Winsløw and C. N. Rosenkilde, whose accomplishments Kierkegaard would later praise to the skies, were among the earliest regular guests. The author and playwright Henrik Hertz made his entrance in April 1832, quickly established a rapport with the Heiberg couple, and shortly thereafter translated portions of Goethe’s Faust in collaboration with the man of the house. In June of the same year Hertz accompanied the couple on their vacation in northern Zealand and fell madly in love with Heiberg’s wife, who beguiled him with songs by Carl Bellman whenever Ludvig’s back was turned. Hertz understood the art of self-control, however, and he remained the house poet and a friend of the family for twenty-five years, bringing with him his own little clique, P. V. Jacobsen and C. A. Thortsen, the former a jurist, the latter an educator, and both of them extraordinary aesthetic dreamers with a natural ability to flatten every impulse with the deadening caution that passed for good taste. Their tastes were fussy, almost burnt-out. They hated any display of emotion, fanatically cultivated poetic formalism, and became physically ill if they stumbled upon a broken meter or a failure of rhyme. Steen Steensen Blicher’s famous quip about “the Copenhagen cookie-cutter guild” fit these disciples better than it did Heiberg himself. Among the younger lights were Frederik Paludan-Müller, H. P. Holst, and P. E. Lind, while the older generation of the day included poets such as Christian Winther, Carl Bagger, and not least, Poul Martin Møller, at present serving as professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen and with whom Heiberg shared happy memories of the “Lycæum” debating society to which they had belonged as young men. And finally there was Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, the hosier’s son, who apparently, thank God, knew a bit more than what he had learned from the theologians. If anyone had said at the time that it would be because of young Kierkegaard and the gangling Hans Christian Andersen that later generations would concern themselves with the Heiberg family and its flock of retainers, it would have been regarded as an unusually bad joke.
It is uncertain when Kierkegaard made his initial entrance into the Heiberg home. Mrs. Heiberg mentioned in her memoirs that Kierkegaard would turn up in the evening every once in a while without having been invited. And Henrik Hertz’s diary makes it clear that Kierkegaard was present at an evening gathering on June 4, 1836, on the occasion of the Heiberg couple’s departure for a journey abroad. (After stops in Berlin, Weimar, and Leipzig, they would end up in Paris where the son would introduce his wife to his exiled father, whom he had not seen for fourteen years.) Hertz did not mention what people spoke about that evening, but we can easily imagine that the approaching journey gave the conversation a European focus and directed attention to the intellectual state of affairs in the wake of the departure of the titans Hegel and Goethe, who had died in 1831 and 1832, respectively.
Heiberg had just published On the Significance of Philosophy for the Present Age, in which he had defined the age as one of profound crisis, which could only be surmounted by philosophy—not one or another particular philosophy, indeed, but philosophy as such, because “philosophy is nothing other than knowledge of the eternal or speculative Idea, Reason, Truth.” Even though religion, art, and poetry were also “realizations of the infinite,” philosophy nonetheless occupied the supreme position in the hierarchy because it contains the truth as a concept. And Heiberg was a modern man. He had respect for Christianity, but religious movements, not to speak of pious feelings, were very foreign to his cool nature. For him “honest believers” were “those who lie only to themselves and not to others.” Thus his approach to Christianity was purely speculative, and he had no illusions about the future of religion: “It does no good for us to conceal or disguise the truth. We must admit to ourselves that in our time religion is primarily of importance only for the uncultivated, while for the cultivated world it is something past, something superseded.” Or, to use a provocative growth metaphor: “Knowledge of humanity … has grown far above knowledge of divinity.”
With this declaration in support of intellectual aristocracy Heiberg signed on to a long European tradition of Bildung [German: “cultivation,” here used as a synonym for the less-known Danish term Dannelse] which had reached its apex in German romanticism and in the philosophical idealism affiliated with it. Not surprisingly, Heiberg therefore cited Goethe and Hegel as unquestionably the greatest “representatives of our age.” Goethe, because he was a speculative poet whose work had attained clarity in the philosophical didactic poem whose “object is knowledge of the infinite—philosophical knowledge.” And Hegel, because his “system” was the most refined and ambitious attempt to formulate the entirety of a “central science.” The goal of the dialectical process was absolute knowledge in which the difference between subject and object, between knowledge and the object of knowledge, would be annulled. In this process religion, which was only a subordinate stage, would also be subsumed into philosophy.
Heiberg’s insistence upon the necessity of Bildung was first and foremost a programmatic declaration of a philosophy of which the ultimate guarantor was the spirit of the age itself, and this spirit, of course, was something with which one could not argue. Bildung was thus not merely etiquette, proper form, good manners, animated conversation, and general decorum—though these things did constitute nine points of the law. Beginning with the first issue of Flyveposten, Heiberg had written a series of articles on the importance of Bildung to individual and social life, and significantly, when these articles were subsequently collected and reprinted in his Prose Writings, he called them “Contributions to an Aesthetic Morality.” The first of these pieces was from 1828 and was titled “On the Prevailing Tone in Public Life.” Heiberg wrote it under the aptly chosen pseudonym “Urbanus,” and his mission was to impart to his amorphous times a well-defined concept of polite conduct as something more than conventional norms dictated by the fashion of the day: “Gallantry and social graces are viewed as outward forms that must be observed because they are in style; very few people understand that the person who does not truly possess them in his heart is like a man who wears a decorative cloak over dirty linen.”
In comparison to Heiberg, the host of advisers on etiquette who emerged in later generations resemble a crowd of modern-day bag ladies. He seemed to be making a calculated attempt to cultivate the art of restraint that obeyed the Hegelian prescription by mediating between opposites, tempering the passions so that they are forced down to the level of a certain lack of affect. From there it is not very far to the point at which good manners become mannerisms and lack of affect becomes affectation and denatured snobbism. The point, however, was that Bildung can and must be learned by rote, memorized by the individual, and this could only be accomplished by applying oneself to the study of cultivated behavior. In fact, this sort of practice was cultivating in itself, and consequently it endowed the individual with moral qualities. Indeed, Heiberg directly asserted that “morality and Bildung are inseparable, and the one increases in direct proportion to the other.”
Behavioral norms were not limited to higher social life, but were also to be adhered to in public affairs and in social spaces, for example, when visiting reading rooms, tearooms, and restaurants (where Heiberg had frequently encountered noisy individuals), and also, of course, at the theater, where as time had passed, the corruption of taste had become so widespread that the theater of the future would probably come to consist of such barbaric events as “tightrope dancers and cockfights, at best spectacles in which cavalry battles, cannon salvos, and deer or rabbit hunting are the focus of all attention.” Here Heiberg exhibited a clear parallel to Goethe’s horror at the triumph of externality in the theater—Goethe had resigned his post as director of the Weimar Theater when a dog was permitted on stage!
Heiberg’s campaign against bad taste—which, as is well-known, is the most prevalent sort of taste—was soon extended to every level, even to the more popular circles that he hoped to refine. This can be seen in his article “On Our National Pastimes,” which were singled out for the special attentions of his elegantly accusatory finger. The mere thought of the means of transportation preferred by the common people for their Sunday outings awakened his aesthetic revulsion: “What could be more tasteless than the sight of these huge, lumbering, four-seater Holstein coaches with three or four people sitting on each side, many of whom also have small children on their laps? The coach with its heavy load can be moved only with great effort, pulled along a dusty country road by a couple of emaciated horses…. And what is the objective of all these exertions? To reach the much sought after amusement place, the Deer Park, where they encounter all over again the Copenhagen that one might think they had wanted to escape; where they get caught up in a crush worse than anything in the capital; where they practically run one another over, swallowing vast quantities of dust and dirt, staring stupidly at one another and making insipid remarks about each other’s clothing and finery.” Kierkegaard took these lines to heart, and as we saw in the previous chapter, the scene is nearly identical to the conclusion of his letter to P. W. Lund, where he depicted the chaotic state of the theological disciplines.
To avoid such “tastelessness and platitudes,” Heiberg recommended restricting oneself to a limited social set with a more or less homogeneous level of Bildung, which was also the precondition of proper “conversation.” Since children are poor at conversation, they naturally ought not be included in the carriage tour, and an outing in the Royal Gardens with their governess might be a more appropriate way for them to pass the time. If a trip is to be a pleasure trip, it must not be repeated too frequently, and when you do take such a trip the important thing is not merely reaching your objective, but in particular the enjoyment of the trip itself, which is why it ought to be endowed with the requisite elegance: “Gentlemen may travel on foot, on horseback, or in small, light carriages of every sort. Parties that include ladies ought only make use of Offenbach-style or other light but roomy carriages which are equipped with a hood that can provide protection from wind and rain when necessary.” Heiberg appears to have been an adherent of a sort of knightly romanticism, adapted to urban circumstances. He was entirely up-to-date, on the other hand, when it came to the modern Hegelian philosophical formula in which the whole matter was embedded: “In the formation of taste it is important that we pay attention not merely to the material ‘what,’ but even more to the formal ‘how.’ ”
This formula also applied to domestic affairs, which constitute a chapter unto themselves in Heiberg’s aesthetic morality. In this connection Heiberg was furious that the best room in the house, the salon, was empty most of the time, while the family huddled together in a tiny room, and even the serving maid had to sit in this room with the family, who thereby came to lead an out-and-out “bestial existence.” There was also something bestial about the food that people dignified with the name “dinner” and poured down their throats along with the other oafs in Denmark: “It is true that we have a few national dishes that are not to be disdained, but the great bulk of milk-based dishes, sweet soups, sweet salads, and mealy sauces, et cetera are things that the majority of civilized countries would avoid placing on a dinner table…. There are also many reigning prejudices, for example, that every course that is brought to the dinner table must be hot, and people would rather eat warmed-over, thrown-together leftovers than some cold but juicy and nutritious meat. You also see more quantity than quality. People would rather eat two or three servings of the famous, watery Sunday soup than satisfy themselves with a single serving of a strong and hearty bouillon.”
It was not merely Heiberg’s preference for French gastronomy that caused him to disdain the amorphous and stew-like quality of ordinary Danish cuisine. He also had a sense for the ritualistic and social side of a meal, which completely disappeared if a meal was merely and greedily associated with food. He writes of this in a style that is both provocative and prophetic: “Dinnertime is of profound importance in the domestic life of a family. We may dare to assert that when this matter is dealt with in a manner that is lacking in propriety, order, and an aesthetic sensibility, these same qualities will be found lacking in other aspects of the family’s life. Who has not witnessed the all-too-frequent family mealtimes that more resemble the satisfaction of an animal need than a pleasant gathering? … The false economy of retaining servants who are inadequate in number or unequal to the task results in forcing the woman of the house and the older daughters to assume a large share of the burden of serving the meal. They must continually get up from the table and run in and out of the dining room, which destroys the conversation, and the soothing tranquillity vanishes. Small children sit at the dinner table with the adults, eating and drinking in a manner that causes the adults to lose their appetite, and their babbling tends to disturb peace and quiet as well as conversation. Finally one rises from the dinner table with a sense of emptiness and confusion such as one encounters at a stamping mill or in the repeated hammering of a coppersmith, and it is as though one’s soul has been deafened.”
The Heiberg marriage remained childless, so in their case the fear of the unfortunate babbling of children at the dinner table was groundless. The choice of whether to interpret Heiberg’s attempt to refine the manner in which people live as an expression of his aesthetic totalitarianism or as his beneficial corrective to the tyranny of formlessness is quite literally a matter of taste. But it is in any case difficult to call Heiberg a hypocrite, because he applied his aesthetic theories to his own domestic and public practice, and in so doing he thus possessed precisely the idea that Kierkegaard later on would so insistently accuse him of lacking.
Studiosus Faustus
Kierkegaard nowhere tells us what it was like for him to be a part of Heiberg’s circle, but the contrast between the pietistic Moravian moderation and simplicity of his family home and the delicate, crystalline sociability of the Heibergs must have been so glaring that it would have required an unusual effort for him merely to stay on his feet. There is a journal entry dating from around the time of the Heibergs’ 1836 farewell party that gives an especially extended account of Kierkegaard’s situation and mood after an altogether too exalted evening: “I have just come from a gathering where I was the life of the party. Witticisms leapt from my tongue, everyone laughed and admired me—but I left (yes, that dash ought to be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit _________________________________________________________________) and wanted to shoot myself.”
Kierkegaard confined himself to the dash, thank goodness. He was in fact so bewitched by the Heiberg cult that he appropriated its rituals and made their household gods his own. He began an intensive study of Goethe, whom the Copenhagen cultural elite had celebrated enormously after his death: University Rector Adam Oehlenschläger delivered an emotional eulogy for the German master, and during the following semesters he lectured on Goethe’s principal works; in April 1834 the curtain rose on Bournonville’s three-act ballet Faust; and three weeks later came the presentation of dramatic scenes from the same work in a translation by Heiberg and Hertz.
Goethe, in sum, was in, and Kierkegaard wanted to be a part of the action. At first he borrowed books from the various private libraries, but this proved too cumbersome, so on February 10, 1835, he went down to Reitzel’s Bookshop and purchased Goethe’s collected works in fifty-five volumes. The first thing he read was the great bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister, which he called “masterly” because of “the well-rounded Governance that pervades the whole work.” Indeed, as he noted in his journal, it was “really the whole world captured in a mirror, a true microcosm.” Kierkegaard’s journal reads as though Heiberg’s brain were speaking.
Of all Goethe’s works, however, it was Faust that fascinated Kierkegaard most and for the longest period of time. As early as mid-March 1835, he had worked out his first sketches for a portrait of the Faust figure, which he was studying on the basis of Stieglitz’s The Saga of Dr. Faust. Kierkegaard also chose the most important works listed in the extensive bibliography in that book for use in completing what he called his project. Now, a year later, he turned back to the bibliography and copied down all 107 titles, of which 14 were concerned with Goethe’s treatment of the Faust theme.
It quickly became clear to Kierkegaard that Faust was an eternal idea, though it had been interpreted differently in different eras. In earlier days, a moral point of view had been adopted, and consequently it had been necessary to write off the Faust figure as a fundamentally depraved being whose misery was his own fault. In Kierkegaard’s time the Faust figure had been examined from an increasingly psychological point of view, which led to a much more complex evaluation. Something similar had taken place with the figures of Don Juan and the Wandering Jew, whom Kierkegaard thought of quite early in connection with Faust. All three figures represented universal human conditions—pleasure (Don Juan), doubt (Faust), and despair (the Wandering Jew)—and they were thus archetypically present in every age, pagan as well as Christian: “The three great ideas … represent, so to speak, the three forms of life in the absence of religion, and it is only when these ideas become mediated and enter into the life of the individual person that morality and religion first appear.” Doubt is therefore both unavoidable and productive. Thus as Kierkegaard had already written in his letter to P. W. Lund, “it is this Faustian element that asserts itself to a greater or lesser extent in every intellectual development…. As our ancestors had a goddess of longing, so, I think, Faust stands as the personification of doubt.”
To elucidate the Faust figure in its current form Kierkegaard had to define the present age, which he did by means of a classical, tripartite hierarchy. At the bottom he had the dregs, the forms of wretchedness that Aristotle called praktikoi, manual laborers and peasants who lost themselves in merely material pursuits—including bringing their children up to be “confirmed consumers”—and thus lived out their lives in carefree indifference. “It is scarcely likely that anything Faustian will develop among these people,” Kierkegaard concluded, and he was surely right about that. The situation was better in the middle of the hierarchy, which was populated by average intellectual types, historians and natural scientists, who, however, generally kept so busy that the Faustian element did not really emerge—indeed, if this was to happen with these people, their “energy must first be paralyzed in some way or other.” The topmost position was occupied by an exclusive group that “intuitively attempts to comprehend the infinite multiplicity of nature, of life, of history in a total view.” Since knowledge grows so explosively in the modern world that no one, not even the most determined person is able any longer to keep up with it, “the Faustian element appears as despair at the inability to comprehend the entire development in an all-embracing vision of the whole.”
Kierkegaard’s hierarchy is not particularly strong on nuances, but it is interesting because it demonstrates how intellectual doubt veers in a psychological direction, thus becoming related to the despair that is really the province of the Wandering Jew. Indeed, in a journal entry from late March 1835 Kierkegaard wrote: “You often hear people say that someone is a Don Juan or a Faust, but not often that he is the Wandering Jew. But shouldn’t there also exist individuals of precisely the sort that have too much of the essence of the Wandering Jew in themselves?” The question was rhetorical. Such individuals do in fact exist, and it is clear that Kierkegaard identified himself with the figure. A figure such as the Wandering Jew did not fit into the system, and this suited Kierkegaard just fine, because his interest in Faust stemmed in large measure from the incompatibility that typifies the intellectual in the modern world. In that respect he is an intellectual relative of the romantic ironist whose sufferings are caused by weltschmerz—a condition as unconquerable as it is untranslatable and that generally leads to catastrophe and sudden death. This sort of Faust must insist on his rights as an exceptional individual, and must consequently oppose the monumental philosophical system that has abolished all sorts of contradictions, just as he must entertain an almost obsessive hatred for the naïveté with which the bourgeois philistine accommodates himself to the world as if it were a tractable, reasonable place and the meaning of life could be found in the wellupholstered bosom of family life.
As time went on, a Faust characterized by this great irreconcilability loomed larger and larger in Kierkegaard’s journals, pushing Goethe’s more conciliatory version of the figure into the background. Thus, even as early as his epistle to P. W. Lund, Kierkegaard noted that “it is surely a sin against the idea [of Faust] when Goethe allows Faust to be converted.” Similarly, exactly five months later, on November 1, 1835, Kierkegaard wrote: “It would have made me very happy if Goethe had never continued Faust. I would then have called it a marvel. But here he has been felled by human weakness …; the conversion is precisely what drags him down to the more commonplace level.” A Faust who no longer despairs over his doubt is not Faust but a heretical convert, a renegade who imagines that he has reconciled himself to his own irreconcilability.
Thus there was more substance in the medieval version of Faust that Kierkegaard first encountered in October 1836. At a shop at 107 Ulkegade, owned by the widow of a bookbinder named Tribler, Kierkegaard purchased a Danish chapbook on Faust. This was a greatly abridged version of older books about Faust, all of which were descended from the original German edition of 1587. A mere glance at the title page with its half-length picture of Faust, however, was enough to convince Kierkegaard that he simply had to own the book:
The World-Renowned Arch-Practitioner of the Black Arts and Magician, Doctor Johan Faust, and the Pact He Made with the Devil, His Astonishing Life and Frightful Doom
Kierkegaard’s copy of the book has been preserved, and from the many underlinings and marginal notes it can be seen that he read it very carefully. On one of his walks in the city the following spring, he chanced upon the book in one of the “lowliest bookshops,” and he found it very “touching” that in this humble fashion “the most profound things” are “offered for sale to the simplest class of people.” Faust was for aristocrats, and Kierkegaard was about to become one. Six years later, when he was working on the manuscript of “The Immediate Stages of the Erotic” (from Either/Or, part 1), in which Faust and Don Juan personify the demonic in its intellectual and sensual forms, respectively, he recalled the little chapbook on Faust: “There is a chapbook whose title is well-known even if the book itself is little used, which is especially odd in our times when we are so preoccupied with the idea of Faust…. And indeed, this chapbook is worthy of attention. More than anything, it has something that is praised as a noble quality in a wine: It has bouquet, it is an excellent medieval vintage, and when it is opened it confronts one with a fragrance that is so spicy, delicious, and distinctive that one feels quite strange.”
Along with his euphorical metaphorical language Kierkegaard does, however, permit himself a few harsh remarks about a “prospective assistant professor or professor,” who is attempting to “present his credentials at the court of the reading public by publishing a book on Faust in which he faithfully repeats what all other licentiats and scholarly confirmands have already said.” The bitter tone might seem unprovoked, but it was doubtless attributable to the circumstance that Kierkegaard was not the only person who was sitting at his desk at work on the Faust theme. Indeed, in 1836 Martensen had published On Lenau’s Faust in Stuttgart under the pseudonym “Johannes M——n.” Kierkegaard learned of it not long afterward, and in an undated note he called it “a little essay by Johannes M——(Martensen) on Lenau’s Faust.” He was apparently able to see through the pseudonym: “M” stood for Martensen. But it seems that Kierkegaard had not actually studied Martensen’s work, presumably because he already had a wealth of material to work through in connection with his own Faust studies, which were then under way. Later, on another similarly undated scrap of paper, he wrote: “Oh, how unhappy I am—Martensen has written an essay on Lenau’s Faust!” This desperate outburst was accompanied by a bitter acknowledgement: “Yes, right! Everything I touch turns out for me the way things do in a poem called ‘The Boy’s Magic Horn,’
A hunter blew hard into his horn, Hard into his horn, And everything he blew was Lost.”
Kierkegaard’s mood had changed suddenly: In June 1837 Martensen had published his German essay in a reworked Danish version under the title “Observations concerning the Idea of Faust, With Reference to Lenau’s Faust.” The analysis of Lenau’s work remained the principal focus, but in his introduction Martensen subjected the entire idea of Faust to a careful examination, placing it in a larger intellectual-historical context which—alas!—included the most important of Kierkegaard’s own points, namely that the medieval Faust is the genuine one, while Goethe’s is a falsification that lowers the stakes, bearing as it does the imprint of the pantheism of the times, et cetera.
Martensen had his essay published in Heiberg’s journal Perseus, and Sibbern wrote a detailed and almost affable review in the prestigious Literary Monthly. This was in itself a defeat for the ambitious Kierkegaard, but there was another development that was almost unbearable: During his study tour of Europe, which lasted several years, Martensen had stayed in Vienna where he had become a friend of the author Lenau (whose real name was Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau). Thereafter Martensen had traveled to Paris where he had met the Heiberg couple, and in his memoirs he gives such an infatuated description of their first real meeting that the reader comes to suspect that Martensen, who was otherwise such a keen and calculating careerist, also possessed a certain capacity for spontaneity and openness. When they first met one morning at the Heibergs’ hotel, Martensen was received with great friendliness, and soon afterward they were exchanging views on Hegel, whom Heiberg (according to Martensen), “as is well known, had introduced to Denmark.” Twenty-fouryear-old Luise listened attentively, occasionally asking questions that kept the conversation animated and caused her husband’s refined spirits to glow. Time flew. They became hungry, so they left for the Palais Royal and settled in at the Vefours restaurant: “We dined marvelously, and Heiberg did not skimp on the champagne.” The philosophical discussions continued during dinner, but they also touched on aesthetic subjects, including Shakespeare’s poetry, which Martensen admired, though Heiberg found it much too bombastic. After the delightful dinner the three strolled in the gardens of the Palais Royal, where they first discussed the theater of the day and then spoke of Danish poetry, a subject that especially pulled at the heartstrings of these expatriates. As they strolled around a fountain Luise sang “On a Summer’s Day I Went Out to Listen.” Martensen had never heard the song before, but with Luise’s help he learned it. Back at the hotel the discussion turned to Bellman’s songs, which consist of an ingenious combination of exuberant gaiety and the most profound sadness. Martensen had only rudimentary knowledge of Bellman, so Heiberg took up his “guitar” and played some melodies in order that Martensen might hear what he was supposed to understand in what they were talking about. And indeed, Luise sang that little summer song again and so beautifully that Martensen was compelled to break down and confess, “I was transported.”
That unforgettable day in Paris was the beginning of a friendship that lasted many years and for Martensen was of such far-reaching “significance for the whole of my humanistic and in particular my aesthetic education” that he was utterly unable to calculate the extent of its significance and therefore called it “incalculable.” With all its ambiguity this was a well-chosen term, for in actual fact the influences were quite mutual. Martensen indeed had a profound and long-lasting influence on Heiberg, who had originally been quite liberal in his views, but who came to swing toward the Hegelian Right and in the direction of the political conservatism affiliated with that philosophical position. This conservatism appealed to Jakob Peter Mynster and to Mynster’s son-in-law, Just Paulli, who from the beginning of the 1840s became a regular at the Heibergs’ home. The Heiberg-Martensen alliance made the intellectual milieu, if possible, even narrower than it already was, indeed almost mafia-like: Thus, shortly after his return to Denmark, Martensen published in the Literary Monthly a very positive review of Heiberg’s Introductory Lecture to the Logic Course Begun in November 1834 at the Royal Military College, while on July 12, 1837, Heiberg served as an elegant opponent ex auditorio when Martensen defended his theology dissertation for the licentiat degree, The Autonomy of Human Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Dogmatic Theology. On April 21, 1838, Martensen, scarcely thirty years old, was appointed an assistant professor on the theology faculty. Thus began his career as an unusually popular lecturer, which with his never-failing self-esteem he subsequently described as follows: “Without exaggeration, the effect of my lectures can be described as great and extraordinary.” Indeed, he continues, among those “who became my adherents at that time,” could be numbered “many” of those who are today “the most excellent men in the Danish Church.”
In 1838 Kierkegaard was still a theological student, and his comments on Martensen’s review of Heiberg were uttered through the clenched teeth of someone who has been passed over: “Martensen’s essay in the Monthly is quite peculiar. After having leapfrogged over all his predecessors he has gone forward into an indeterminate infinity.” Kierkegaard’s own position was no less indeterminate than Martensen’s, but in any event his attempt to come up with a general theory of the Faust idea was a flop. This was his first academic setback and it helped lay the foundation of a hatred of the Heiberg clique, a sentiment that would in time grow to almost monstrous proportions.
So it was the ship captain’s son Martensen and not the hosier’s son Kierkegaard who was awarded the laurels by Heiberg, and for the defeated the pain was great and—in the best Faustian fashion—something to despair over! It was truly infuriating, indeed enough to make one’s blood boil, that Martensen and all the other cultivated models of virtue who studied and worshipped Faust had of course never personally doubted or despaired over anything much, but had speculated and lectured and promulgated their freshly laundered and pressed thoughts in academic dissertations that they presented to one another with the sole aim of ascending through the ranks. Unlike Kierkegaard, they were never existentially touched by their frightful Faustian insights. They merely stood around over there in the apartment at number 3 Brogade, drilling good taste and nice manners into themselves and one another, so that they ended up forgetting that they, too, were a part of nature, made of instinct, mortality, and dust.
The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars
The worst thing about Martensen was that he was so capable, not only as a scholar but also in his tactical moves. On his study tour, which included lengthy stays in Berlin, Heidelberg, Munich, Vienna, and Paris, he had managed to get his foot in the door of virtually every significant theological and philosophical personage. And with his particularly well-developed talent for looking out for his career, he made sure to get back to Copenhagen in time for the opening of the Reformation Festival in 1836, when he could again see—and daily be seen with—the important theologian Philipp Marheineke, with whom he had become acquainted in Berlin.
Kierkegaard’s reaction to Martensen as an officious teacher’s pet was quite typical. He did not open a scholarly offensive against the annoying Martensen, but resorted instead to a genre that he well knew Martensen was unable to defend against, namely the parody. So he jotted down ten or so pages in his journal, and the result resembled the sort of comedies university students wrote and performed for one another’s amusement. It was in three acts, and Kierkegaard described it as a “heroic-patriotic-cosmopolitan-philanthropic-fatalistic drama in several episodes.” He explained further that the drama is “in the beginning very jolly; as it progresses it becomes very sad, yet it ends very happily.” And he entitled the whole affair The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars.
We do not know exactly when the play was written, but there can hardly be any doubt about why it was written. It was occasioned by displeasure over the mechanical use of Hegelian phrases by intellectuals and by the deification of philosophy which, as noted earlier, had reached a sort of nauseating zenith in Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s Introductory Lecture, which Kierkegaard presumably had read immediately following its publication in January 1837. A journal entry from February 4, 1837, appears to indicate that Kierkegaard was working on his soap-cellar satire, and the inexperienced playwright reflected on the art of “writing genuinely dramatic lines,” something that apparently required that “a person has attained considerable clarity and has got beyond generalities and foggy vagueness.” The play has the earmarks of a casual sketch and probably did not occupy him for very long. It is possible that he finished it as early as the end of March, but in any event he was done with it by May 29, 1837, when he flipped his journal over to begin writing on the reverse sides of the pages, back-to-front (as was his custom), and began a series of entries that had nothing to do with the satire.
Kierkegaard’s soap opera in fact has something to do with soap. Situated on Gråbrødretorv (which was called Ulfeldts Plads until 1842 and was defaced by the presence of a monument of shame erected to memorialize the treason of Corfitz Ulfeldt) were small stalls and specialized shops, including a number of businesses located in cellars where people boiled and sold soap. These soap dealers attempted to outdo one another with emphatic signs. One called his shop “The Old Soap-Cellar,” another “The Really Old Soap-Cellar,” while a third soap dealer put up a sign with the following message: “Here is the really old soap-cellar, where the really old soap-cellar people live.” An aggressive competitor in the next shop, though not a particularly good speller, posted the ultimate message, and the declaration over the steps that led down to his cellar read as follows: “Here is the new sope-cellar, intoo witch the old sope-cellar people have mooved.” People were amused by all this greedy clumsiness; for a time it was a popular topic of conversation, and the very expression “the battle between the old and the new soap-cellars” become a common phrase. Kierkegaard used the expression for the first time in a journal entry dated August 10, 1836, in which he asserted that “the battle between the orthodox and the rationalists can be interpreted as a battle between the old and the new soap-cellars,” because in both cases there is a “great mass of terminology.”
Talk of soap-cellars denoted not genuinely differing positions, but rather argumentativeness and wrangling of the more meaningless sort. Nor does Kierkegaard’s piece depict a battle between competing schools; it makes a spectacle of the absurdity that always accompanies philosophy when philosophy loses contact with reality.
Even though the title is perfectly appropriate for a parody of the pseudophilosophical frictions among the intellectuals of the day, for a time Kierkegaard continued to entertain doubts about it, because the soap-cellar title seemed to him to “contain a bit of misplaced flirtatiousness.” So he considered giving his satire a name that was apparently a little less flirtatious: “The All-Encompassing Debate of Everything against Everything, or The Crazier the Better.” Here, again, abstract nonsense clearly figures in the title, but this may have sounded a bit too zany, for shortly thereafter Kierkegaard proposed to change this title (yet again) to “From the Papers of One Still Living, Published Against His Will by S. Kierkegaard”—a title that was also abandoned but (in a slightly revised form) would grace the title page of Kierkegaard’s first independent publication, his book about Hans Christian Andersen, published slightly more than a year later.
In addition to a number of unspecified “polytechnic students” and “wholesalers,” a “pedestrian,” a “ventriloquist,” and, finally a “horn,” which is to function as the “organ of public opinion,” the cast of characters reads as follows:
Willibald, a young man
Echo, his friend
Mr. von Jumping-Jack, a philosopher
Mr. Hurryson, for the time being, a genius
Mr. Phrase, an adventurer, member of several learned societies, and contributor to numerous journals
Mr. Ole Wadt, active military councillor and formerly a writing teacher
A fly, who for many years was clever enough to winter with the late Hegel, and who, during the composition of his work The Phenomenology of the Spirit, was fortunate enough to have sat upon his immortal nose on several occasions.
Naturally, we must be cautious in our attempts at identifying these fictional figures with actual personages, but neither may we forget that a satire loses its comic power if one cannot identify the figures, so Kierkegaard surely meant to make them as recognizable as possible. Mr. von Jumping-Jack is in all likelihood Heiberg. And Mr. Phrase, von Jumping-Jack’s faithful disciple, who is called an “adventurer” (that is, a soldier of fortune), is Martensen; Kierkegaard lifted several expressions and turns of phrase from Martensen’s review of Heiberg and inserted them in the final portion of his play. Mr. Hurryson, has a first name, “Holla,” that resembles and sounds like “Orla,” as in “Orla Lehmann,” while Ole Wadt is perhaps J. F. Giødwad. It is less certain whether Echo is supposed to represent Henrik Hertz, but it is possible, just as we cannot completely rule out a certain resemblance between Willibald and Kierkegaard.
The play itself is rather forgivably sophomoric, with no real dramatic development from one act to the next. In the first act, which has no narrative connection with the rest of the play, Willibald has left a social gathering, embittered because his friend Echo had amused those present by regaling them with witticisms stolen from Willibald himself. Tired of Echo and of his so-called friends in general, Willibald chooses to leave the earth’s surface, and according to the stage directions he soon finds himself in a “region of fantasy,” a sort of philosophical utopia called the “Prytaneum,” in which everything is “arranged triangularly,” thus providing visual representations of the triads in Hegel’s philosophy. Ole Wadt and Holla Hurryson are arguing heatedly about “national issues” but soon lose themselves in elegant—or inelegant—turns of phrase. Messrs. von Jumping-Jack and Phrase consider entering into a partnership with Hurryson in order to make the results of scholarship accessible to the general public. As Phrase puts it, “the developments of our times ought to gain in extensity what they lose in intensity.” Von Jumping-Jack is skeptical, however, though as he pompously insists, his doubts are “by no means popular”: “It is not a doubt about this or that, about one thing or another—no, it is an infinite doubt.” And to make sure that no one has any doubts about the sort of doubt in question, he paraphrases passages from Martensen’s review of Heiberg’s Introductory Lecture, making a complete hash of its philosophical jargon. The famous phrase “de omnibus dubitandum est” (everything is to be doubted) fares worst, and in von Jumping-Jack’s mouth it becomes, with a Freudian slip of the tongue, “de omnibus disputandum est” (everything is to be argued about). And according to the increasingly confused von Jumping-Jack, this phrase, in turn, is the thesis that Descartes proposed as a replacement for the thesis “de gustibus non est disputandum” (there is no arguing about taste). This is patent nonsense, but Phrase, who is concerned about von Jumping-Jack’s reaction, hastens to explain that he certainly does not think that one should simply write for “peasants,” but rather for “the cultivated middle classes, for wholesalers and polytechnic students.” This point of view is supported by Wadt, for whom the most important thing is the “style” and “manner of writing,” while von Jumping-Jack, on the other hand, takes a completely pragmatic position: “Philosophy me up one side and down the other. It’s not about philosophy. It’s about practical questions, life-questions—in short, life.” Since this is an all-encompassing subject, there ensues a lengthy conversation about how we really ought to define life. “Life is a proceeding out of itself and a returning into itself,” Phrase then announces, citing some famous lines from Professor F. C. Sibbern’s mile-long—and utterly lifeless—definition, which university students had to learn by heart if their own lives were so unlucky as to sit for the examination in psychology.
In the middle of all these goings-on, Willibald enters. He looks around in astonishment but quickly flings himself to the ground, which he kisses in sheer joy at having been freed from “the dreadful relativity” that had characterized his previous life. He reverently approaches von Jumping-Jack, who declares without further examination that Willibald has been suffering from “Faustianism.” Von Jumping-Jack intends to expatiate on the topic, so the other members of the Prytaneum politely arrange themselves around the stage in order to listen. Phrase ingratiatingly thanks von Jumping-Jack for being permitted to listen to this philosophical lecture for the umpteenth time, and von Jumping-Jack returns the favor by holding out for him the prospect that he will one day be “appointed a lecturer in one of the Nordic countries.” Von Jumping-Jack now launches into his speculative gibberish, which the president of the Prytaneum repeatedly tries to cut off, even calling a couple of janitors to assist him. But the self-satisfied lecturer is deaf to the president’s appeals and continues discoursing obscurely on Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher and, of course, the colossal Hegel: “Now I have finished, and with Hegel world history is concluded. Just take me away, because now there is nothing left but mythology and I myself will become a mythological figure.”
Here the otherwise so affable Phrase dares to come forward with a minor objection. He finds von Jumping-Jack’s last remark too one-sided, and just like Martensen he proclaims that he himself has gone beyond Hegel: “I cannot yet say just where I have got to, but I have gone beyond him.” But since the president of Prytaneum does not want to have “strained tempers,” he asks everyone to leave. Willibald is directed to the “World-Historical College,” which has not yet been completed, but the courtyard alone is so enormous that four professors can stand there and lecture without disturbing one another—indeed, it is so large that the audience cannot even hear what the professors expound, “despite the fact that they continually wipe the perspiration off their foreheads, which have gone soft from their exertions.”
Without any transition, the next scene is of a general meeting in which those assembled discuss, with some concern, the significance of a fact noted by Willibald, namely that in the Prytaneum the sun apparently never changes its position at all. Hurryson comes out with a series of Grundtvigian clichés about “morning light” and “golden years,” while von Jumping-Jack argues that a permanent “evening light” would be appropriate in the Prytaneum inasmuch as philosophy of course denotes the evening of life, which must now “have world-historically begun” with Hegel. Phrase repeats his phrase and again insists that he has gone beyond Hegel. “The state is a galvanic apparatus,” a polytechnic student exclaims for no apparent reason, but von Jumping-Jack is quick to set him straight: “The state is an organism.” The atmosphere becomes increasingly heady: “I am fighting for freedom. We will no longer allow ourselves to be oppressed by these tyrannical philosophers,” Hurryson shouts, and in politically correct fashion he demands a vote about whether or not a vote should be taken. At length Willibald manages to get the floor and declares that the discussion is based on a misunderstanding: He had absolutely not had the actual, physical sun in mind, but in his remarks about the unchanging position of the sun he had been metaphorically referring to “poetic, philosophical, cosmopolitan eternity, which—in the spiritual sense—had already begun in the Prytaneum.” So even though misunderstanding a metaphor can indeed be a serious matter, tempers cool and the general meeting is adjourned.
In the last act Willibald is strolling in the neighborhood of the Prytaneum. Contrary to all expectations, he has been converted, and with ever-increasing emotion his youthful voice utters its praises of the Absolute Spirit (“Thou, infinite denominator of all human numerators”), whose dimensions he has now begun to sense, thanks to the efforts of von Jumping-Jack. And when a fly buzzes by, discoursing on a number of Hegelian propositions, he realizes that world history is over. The introduction of a new method of reckoning time would therefore be appropriate, but since time stands still it is of course difficult to distinguish between past and present. Similar difficulties await everyone who wishes to effect any change, so when Ole Wadt, von Jumping-Jack, and Willibald want to give the learned society an entirely new name, they only succeed in deciding to name the Prytaneum the “Prytaneum.” In a moment of daring, von Jumping-Jack suggests that they solve the problem by simply deleting the original inscription, “Prytaneum,” and then inscribing “Prytaneum” in its place, but this will not work after all, because in doing so, von Jumping-Jack reasons, we merely “return to the immediate, where the dialectical oppositions have not yet developed themselves and penetrated one another speculatively.” The matter was tabled, of course, and pursuant to a suggestion by Ole Wadt a monument is erected in commemoration of this unforgettable day, to the accompaniment of “many enthusiastic toasts, especially by Willibald.” Thereafter the manuscript reports: “The End.”
The soap-cellars satire was and remains a bagatelle, which with its interminable Latinate monologues and its obscure allusions would scarcely succeed on the stage, perhaps just barely even induce a quiet little smile from the more academic reader. Nonetheless the satire is a noteworthy document because it demonstrates how Kierkegaard, with his talent for teasing and foolishness, was able quite early to make use of satire as a philosophical rejoinder, responding with genuine laughter where others resorted to artificial intellectualism. Thus ten years later, in his Postscript, Kierkegaard explained that in order to get past Hegel “all that is needed is healthy human understanding and a pithy comic sense.”
The question of whether Kierkegaard carefully studied Hegel’s own writings or was acquainted with the great German thinker secondhand, from Danish Hegelian sources, has long been the subject of speculation. In any event, the soap-cellar satire demonstrates that if Kierkegaard ever had been a Hegelian, he had been an unusually irreverent one—which is to say he was not really a Hegelian!
Poul Martin Møller
Luckily there was Poul Martin Møller, a man of flesh and blood with a heart that was in the right place; he wasn’t one of those inexperienced straight-A students who merely wanted to show off their intelligence at the drop of a hat. Møller, too, had been a visitor at the Heibergs’, but after a while he had had his fill and had gone his own way. Heiberg called him “the deserter” because he harbored a growing skepticism about Hegel, who increasingly became the target of his sabotage. So when a young theology student by the name of Rasmus Nielsen turned to Møller to attain greater clarity in his understanding of Hegelian concepts, to his amazement he found Møller reclining on a sofa, covered with a blanket, puffing away full steam on a long pipe, full of tobacco. Student Nielsen explained his mission. Møller smoked for a couple of minutes in thoughtful silence but then suddenly removed the pipe from his mouth and said: “Hegel! Yes, he is really crazy. He thinks that concepts can unfold out of themselves—like this!,” whereupon Møller blew a cloud of smoke into the room.
It was an irreverent physical gesture, but Møller did not give a damn for philosophical systems, and instead of “unfeeling thinking” he emphasized “personal interest.” He had his own quite unphilosophical reasons for this because his life had often been beset with difficulties. Møller was born in 1794 in the village of Uldum, near the Jutland market town of Vejle, but he grew up in the village of Købelev, on the island of Lolland, where his father served as a pastor. After passing his university entrance examinations Møller studied theology. A secure position in the church would make it possible for him to marry Grethe Bloch, his sweetheart from Lolland and the sunshine of his youth, but when he proposed to her she turned him down and chose an army lieutenant instead. In his despair Møller embarked on a journey to the Far East, lasting from 1819 to 1821. He served as a ship’s chaplain on the merchant vessel Christianshavn, on which it was said that he would sometimes climb up the mast, perch there, and read Homer and Cicero. While on board his floating monastery Møller began to jot down his aphorisms (or “random thoughts,” as he preferred to call them in plain Danish). And in the summer heat of Manila in 1820 he wrote the poem “Roses Already Blush in Denmark’s Garden,” later to become one of the most famous poems in the Danish language, under the title “Joy over Denmark.” After his return home in 1821 he served for several years as a teacher at the Metropolitan School, but he also delighted people with the poetry and fiction he was writing. In 1824 Møller appeared at the Student Association and read aloud a portion of his Tale of a Danish University Student, about whimsical, curly-haired Fritz and his romantic escapades. From 1826 to 1831 he spent six miserable years in Norway at the University of Kristiania, first as an assistant professor then as a professor.
Like his Fritz, Møller himself was a bit unpredictable, and his young wife Betty had her hands full trying to get her unkempt husband, with his messy hair, to look like the professor of philosophy he actually was. One day, as he stood on Gammeltorv studying a poster, a street peddler asked him to deliver a pair of geese to a customer across town, but Møller politely declined: He was not a day laborer, and alas he had to go and give his lecture at the university! Nor was Møller’s conduct always entirely proper. Toward the end of October 1836 he served as an opponent at the defense of a quite mediocre dissertation in Regensen Church. He had jotted down his remarks on a number of loose slips of paper and tucked them into his own copy of the dissertation. In the middle of the whole affair the papers fell to the floor, however, and to universal amusement the great man had to crawl around on all fours, gathering them up again. Møller began each objection with an authoritative “graviter vituperandum est” (it ought seriously be objected), but no sooner would he receive a reply to his objection than he very good-naturedly said “concedo” (I yield) and went on to the next point. After an unusually brief period of opposition he expressed his regrets, noting with ill-concealed irony that considerations of time prevented him from continuing this otherwise so interesting conversation. Then he left the podium, made straight for Kierkegaard, and said in an audible whisper: “Shall we go down to Pleisch’s?” So they went to Pleisch’s, on Amagertorv, Møller’s favorite tearoom.
Kierkegaard related this incident to Hans Brøchner, who recalled how Kierkegaard always spoke of Møller with “the most profound devotion.” Brøchner continued: “Far more than his writings, it was Poul Møller’s character that had made an impression on him. He regretted that—after the vivid memory of Møller’s personality had faded and judgments of him would be based only on his works—the time would soon come when Møller’s significance would no longer be understood.” Kierkegaard was not the only one fascinated by Møller. The same was true of Emil Boesen, who at one point compared Møller’s achievement with Martensen’s, with Møller emerging the winner. Indeed, Møller was in fact “quite a bit superior” because—as Boesen put it —“Poul of course has a much stronger personality and a firmer notion of the world; his worldview was much more profoundly the product of his own soul.”
After the loss of Betty in 1835, however, Møller’s powers waned. He could be seen in one of the city’s cafés, sitting for hours, staring at the same newspaper column, his coffee getting cold. The children—four sons—had to take care of themselves, and a semblance of order was restored only after Møller married one of Betty’s girlfriends. Not long afterward, however, he fell ill, and in 1837 the wheezing, asthmatic professor had to give up lecturing. In October of that year he moved into Henrik Hertz’s old apartment at 17 Nytorv, where he began work on the essay Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of Human Immortality. The essay was scarcely concluded when the author died in March of 1838, not quite forty-four years old.
“In the kingdom of thought, man may be grouped with the ruminant animals,” noted Møller in one of his “random thoughts,” and this was particularly true of himself. Indeed, he worked extraordinarily slowly, constantly rewriting, and often involuntarily ending up with fragments. Apart from his translation of the first six books of the Odyssey, Møller published very little during his lifetime; he did not even succeed in finishing the Tale of a Danish University Student. Before his death he chose his half-brother, the poet Christian Winther, as his literary executor, while F. C. Olsen was charged with seeing to the posthumous publication of Møller’s philosophical and scholarly work, a nearly impossible task, for everything was jumbled together in heaps of manuscripts. A tolerably complete edition of Møller’s Posthumous Writings did appear in the years 1839–43, however. Kierkegaard purchased the three volumes as they appeared and studied them with care. Later he complained that the editors, out of a misguided sense of veneration for the deceased, had toned down Møller’s critical stance with respect to Hegel and Hegelianism: At first Møller had been drawn to Hegel, but in the end he amused himself heartily by fuming at him—quite literally.
“Sketches of Moral Nature”—Affectation and Self-Deception
On Sunday, April 1, 1838, a couple of weeks after Poul Møller’s death, Kierkegaard rose early, went outside, and looked at the sky. Later in the day he recalled the impression: “This morning I saw half a score of geese fly away in the crisp, cool air. At first they were directly overhead, then they were farther and farther away. Finally they divided into two flocks, arched like a pair of eyebrows above my eyes, which were now gazing into the land of poetry.” Nature bonds to what is not nature, becomes transformed into images, and crystallizes as art.
That evening, a memorial performance had been scheduled for the Royal Theater, where the actor N. P. Nielsen was to read a well-chosen selection of Møller’s lovely Danish poems. Kierkegaard attended the event, and the next day he wrote in his journal: “I was there to hear Nielsen recite ‘Joy over Denmark,’ but was so strangely moved by the words, ‘Do you remember the widely traveled man?’ Yes, now he is widely traveled—but I, at least, will certainly remember him.” Kierkegaard is alluding to the poem’s third stanza, which begins: “My friends in the Danish summer, / Do you remember the widely traveled man?” And he kept his promise to remember Møller, for six years later in the draft of The Concept of Anxiety he wrote:
To the late Professor Poul Martin Møller the happy lover of Greek culture, the admirer of Homer, the coconspirator of Socrates, the interpreter of Aristotle—Denmark’s joy in “Joy over Denmark,” though “widely traveled, yet always remembered in the Danish summer”—the enthusiasm of my youth; the mighty trumpet of my awakening; the desired object of my feelings; the confidant of my beginnings; my lost friend; my sadly missed reader, this work is dedicated.
In the final version Kierkegaard omitted the lines from “the enthusiasm of my youth” through “my sadly missed reader” and replaced them with “the object of my admiration, my loss,” but no one can doubt his devotion to Møller, who, apart from his father, was the only person he ever mentioned by name in dedicating one of his works. And on a later occasion Kierkegaard again praised Møller heartily and without affectation: “For who has been enamored of P. M. and forgotten his humor? Who has admired him and forgotten his wholesomeness? Who has known him and forgotten his laughter, which did you good even when you were not quite sure what he was laughing at—for his absentmindedness was occasionally a source of confusion.”
Kierkegaard became acquainted with Møller in 1831 after the latter returned from Norway and began his philosophy lectures in Copenhagen. In the ensuing years Kierkegaard sat in the hall when Møller lectured on Greek moral philosophy, on the general principles of metaphysics, and on Aristotle’s On the Soul, but apart from a few instances—a “very interesting conversation” in the latter part of June 1837 about the relation of Socratic irony to Christian humor; Møller’s good-humored invitation that Kierkegaard meet him at Pleisch’s after a dissertation defense; and the remark just cited about Møller’s laughter—the entirety of the evidence of their personal relationship amounts to little more than what Kierkegaard summarized in a journal entry from 1854: “I recall the words of the dying Poul Møller, which he often related to me when he was alive, and which, if my memory is not mistaken, … he enjoined Sibbern to repeat to me again and again: ‘You are so polemical through and through, that it is quite frightful.’ ” In a marginal note he appended to this remark, Kierkegaard expressed doubt as to whether it was in fact on his deathbed that Møller had uttered the words about being polemical. But Kierkegaard was quite certain that it was on his deathbed that Møller had asked Sibbern to “tell little Kierkegaard to be careful not to set himself too ambitious a plan of study, because doing so has caused me much harm.” If Sibbern conveyed Møller’s wishes, it does not seem to have done much good, because Kierkegaard’s “plan of study” was so all-encompassing it could scarcely be called a plan. With its extraordinary complexity, Kierkegaard’s plan was the basis for producing the works about which Sibbern would later sigh: “In vielen Worten wenige Klarheit” [German: “many words, little clarity”].
Although it seems almost symbolic that the first real entry about Møller in Kierkegaard’s journals is the one concerning his death, there is no doubt that Møller made a profound impression on the young student. At the same time, however, there may be some doubts about the nature and actual extent of his influence, which is about as difficult to ascertain as the effect of a random shotgun blast. Kierkegaard’s involvement with Møller’s writings is demonstrable, and it can in fact be followed in his journals, where he refers to Møller’s “excellent review” of Thomasine Gyllembourg’s novel The Extremes and later mentions the essay “On Telling Fairy Tales to Children,” which in 1837 inspired Kierkegaard to make journal entries on the same subject. Similarly, Kierkegaard commented on Møller’s essay on immortality and, like Møller, he concerned himself with the figures Don Juan, Faust, and the Wandering Jew. It goes without saying that Kierkegaard could not but be amused at Møller’s parody of Grundtvig, just as he now and then helped himself to one of Møller’s random thoughts, which lent liveliness and form to his own “Diapsalmata” in the first part of Either/Or. But there were also times when Kierkegaard would return repeatedly to Møller’s lyric poetry, particularly to the poem, “The Old Lover.”
Thus Møller struck some of the chords upon which Kierkegaard subsequently composed his own works. The harmonics are unmistakable in the second part of Either/Or, where Judge William’s notion of “the development of the personality” brings to mind Møller’s philosophy of personality, but indeed there is an echo of Møller wherever the theme of the person and thought is sounded. Kierkegaard feared, not without reason, that when Møller was no longer able to support his ideas with his own living personality—and thereby demonstrate their legitimacy—posterity would be unable to sense the scope of his contribution to a philosophy of living. For Møller practiced his philosophy by living it out—or, more precisely, out on the streets, in conversations while en route to greater insight into himself, just like his exemplar Socrates.
This conception of the dialogical nature of philosophy also heightened Møller’s interest in psychological matters and led him to make what he called his “sketches of moral nature.” The phrase is from the introduction to his essay on affectation, which he put on paper in 1837 but which had long been in the making, as can be seen from various preliminary studies and sketches. With its emphasis on the subjective, the intent of the essay is clearly anti-Hegelian, and indeed after a couple of lines Møller—with a bit of posturing that in fact looks a good deal like affectation—becomes busily engaged in bidding farewell to speculative readers who are expecting a system of thought “in which all concepts are produced out of nothing by means of an immanent development.” And later in the essay, when he proclaims that “symmetry in philosophical systems is affectation,” there can scarcely be any doubt that this salvo is directed at the Hegelian epigones who fool themselves and others into thinking that their experientially impoverished philosophical system reflects a coherent and balanced world.
In general Møller had a good eye for the way in which social circles provide a perfect environment for affectation, and it is difficult to avoid suspecting that his sense for the nature of affectation and for the vacuousness of affected persons had been awakened at evening social gatherings at the Heibergs’ home. And we also get the feeling that not a few of these “sketches of moral nature” are set in the salons of the illustrious, where Møller had succeeded in transforming himself, as it were, into a phenomenological fly on the wall, listening, taking readings, paying special attention to the discrepancy between what one sees and what can also be seen: “It is a very innocent sort of affectation to set your muscles in the position they assume when you laugh or smile while you are listening to an anecdote which is not amusing, but which has pretensions of being amusing.” The sense for affectation is clearly situated in the eye, in the sense of sight, and Møller is a first-rate observer, a vigilant Copenhagener: “Affectation can express itself when a person half-intentionally imitates the peculiarities of other people’s involuntary idiosyncrasies because they seem a good fit.”
A considerable part of affected behavior is to be found precisely in this imitative element, in the posturing of mimicry, and in the copying gestures that can lead to the externalization of the individual or to the dissimulation that is the unconscious by-product of focusing one’s attention on the expected reactions of others. Thus affectation is intense in the individual who “imagines himself to have certain opinions, interests, or inclinations because for one reason or another he wishes to have them,” as is the case, for example, when out of sheer vanity a person “deceives himself into believing that he loves one or another sort of art for which he has no sense.” Here affectation is connected with snobbism, prejudice, and arbitrary judgments of taste, but hypocrisy and moral slipperiness lurk just under the surface: “It is not unlikely that the person who judges a piece of literary work to be bad because it was written by his opponent would find it to be very good if he learned that it had been written by his friend.”
In his essay Møller tries his hand at a tripartite treatment of the forms of affectation: the momentary, the permanent, and the changeable. The first is rather harmless; at times it can simply be the helpful wish to adopt someone else’s point of view or to allow oneself to empathize with someone else’s emotional state. This generally facilitates social life. Permanent affectation is a more serious matter, because in this case affectation is on its way to becoming a person’s second nature. The individual has incorporated a “false element in himself and has distorted his personality,” with the result that his “utterances do not cohere with his actual self.” The individual gradually hardens into a mask that has no face behind it. The third form, changeable affectation, is the worst. Because in this case even the assumed role does not have any permanency. The individual is completely changeable, so he “quickly takes on first one definite form, then another,” resulting in an “utter absence of truth in personal life.” There is no longer “any lasting core to an individual’s thinking and willing, but at every moment he shapes his life into a temporary personality, only to abolish it the next moment.” For a visual representation of this changeableness, Møller chooses the chameleon: “In most cases these people are indeed like the sorts of animals that change their colors according to their surroundings and are thus the passive products of their circumstances.”
For Møller, affectation was quite a bit more than artificial verbal behavior. It was more a question of an ontological defect: “Affectation always has its origin in the fact that a person has been seduced by some sort of inclination without himself being aware of it.” Affectation, in sum, is identical with an individual’s self-deception, and it thus leads to a philosophical and psychological paradox—for who is it, really, that one deceives when one deceives oneself? This question forms the more or less explicit background of Møller’s analyses of affectation, and it is hardly an overstatement to say that in his sense for affectation Møller has picked up the trail of the inexhaustible significance of the unconscious, both for the individual and for society.
Psychology has got into the blood and the language of subsequent generations, so it may be difficult for us to understand the extent to which Møller’s analyses really were pioneering efforts and to see how beneficial they were as a judicious psychological alternative to the philosophical infatuation with Hegel that had typified intellectual circles. Møller’s analyses were (and remain) disturbing, however, because they place such vehement emphasis on the dark side of the subjective self, on dissimulation and repression, so that everyone is able to feel that the analyses are directed at himself: “Consider how much mendacity is to be found in scenes from everyday life.”
As a radical countermove to the one-dimensional self-understanding of the Biedermeier era, Møller thus formulated a sort of hermeneutics of suspicion. At some points Møller certainly does seem to revel in his skepticism concerning the natural innocence of spontaneity—“the girl pets the cat in order to appear tenderhearted”—but this places him in the company of the genuine radicals, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, who in earnest began the process of dismantling the reliable certainties they had inherited. “I am a Janus bifrons [Latin: ‘two-faced Janus’]: With one face I laugh, with the other I weep,” Kierkegaard noted on a slip of paper in 1837, the same year Møller penned his essay on affectation. The riven student must have taken that essay quite personally, but at the same time its theme served as a great impetus. It is also quite obvious that Kierkegaard was deeply indebted to Møller’s concept of affectation in subsequent years, when he set out to produce portraits of irony (conscious deception of others) and the demonic (unconscious self-deception).
At the same time, however, Kierkegaard was not merely interested in the psychological side of the matter; he was also attentive to the aesthetic dimension in Møller’s treatment, because it denoted a marked break with academic schematization, permitting life itself to speak. “The episode which Poul Møller has inserted in his essay on the immortality of the soul in the most recent issue of the Monthly is very interesting,” Kierkegaard wrote in a journal entry from early February 1837. “Perhaps this will become widespread, and the strictly scholarly tone will be replaced by lighter passages which, however, will permit life to emerge in a much richer form.”
The episode in question was a satirical tale about an unmarried bookkeeper who wanted to know what immortality really is. So when one of his theologian friends purchased a work on this very topic, the bookkeeper wanted to borrow it. The theologian was not very willing to lend it, however, because he knew how carelessly the bookkeeper treated borrowed books. Indeed, he once caught the bookkeeper in the act of “cutting a wad of Dutch tobacco on the binding of an account book.” The theologian’s refusal incensed the bookkeeper. “I am,” he protested, “fundamentally a religious person. I acknowledge wholeheartedly that clearing this matter up is worth the trouble, and for many years I have had the intention to sit down one day, when I have the opportunity, and read one or another good book on this matter. And just today I happen to have the time, because I am sitting and waiting for a couple of good friends with whom I will be taking a carriage out to Bellevue at one o’clock in order to eat some fresh cod.” The bookkeeper had exactly half an hour, and since he was still being denied access to the book, he asked that his friend “very briefly lecture to me on the best proofs of the immortality of the soul while I sharpen my razor and shave my beard.” And all this must take place before the carriage arrives. The theologian reluctantly agreed to this, but no sooner had he begun than the bookkeeper interrupted him with the brusque remark that for God’s sake the demonstration must not be couched in too much technical jargon. “Scholarship must be popularized, it’s what the spirit of the times demands,” he declared prophetically, and he continued in this pedagogical vein: “You must guard against using the technical language that the learned use to conceal their thoughts from the lay public and tell me the simple meaning of these things in good, plain Danish. But hurry up a bit, I’m afraid the carriage will be here any minute.” The bookkeeper managed to get to his fresh cod out in Bellevue, but he never got to a more profound understanding of the question of the immortality of the soul. Indeed, he never even understood that it was precisely the very manner in which he related himself so busily and restlessly to the matter that prevented him from coming to such an understanding, because immortality depends not upon objective proofs but upon subjective certainty.
What caught Kierkegaard’s attention was Møller’s literary dramatization of philosophical problems—the text as theater or as rostrum—and less than a decade later he himself was a master of the art. “Oh, thou great Chinese god, is this immortality?,” he writes in the Postscript, where Møller’s bookkeeper is in some respects resurrected in the person of a “well-trained university instructor” who preferred to speak of immortality abstractly and objectively rather than concretely and subjectively. This was completely backwards, and it therefore called for a pedagogical lesson with a few pointers: “Look, there are many things you can form a group in order to do. A number of families, for example, can form a group in order to rent a box at the theater, and three single gentlemen can join together for a riding horse, so that each can ride every third day. But it is not like this with immortality. The consciousness of my immortality belongs entirely and solely to me. At the very instant I am conscious of my immortality, I am absolutely subjective, and I cannot become immortal in rotation with two single gentlemen.” Instead of “seeking further proofs,” every individual ought “to seek to become a little subjective,” all the more so because “immortality is subjectivity’s most passionate interest, and it is precisely in the interest that the proof lies.”
“Backstage Practice”
If Møller had read these lines he would surely have laughed in his hearty, if unfathomable manner, for they are entirely in his spirit, only better, more elegant, and are themselves almost immortal in the literary sense. And they also cost Kierkegaard more or less equal quantities of ink and blood. In 1837 he worked on his style assiduously, day after day. His reflections had not yet found their proper expressive form; what he wrote was often too ponderous, revealing dangerous, unexpected bulges in the middle. Often his writing creaked under the burden of grammatical correctness or merely petered out in a blind alley. He hadn’t yet learned the knack of lightness or acquired the sure grasp provided by experience, and ideas rushed in on him from every quarter, like a meteor shower: “One thought succeeds another; no sooner do I think it and want to write it down, than a new one comes—hold on to it, grasp it—madness, insanity!”
Consequently, Kierkegaard’s journal entries most often have only loose thematic connections with one another—or none at all: A shrimpmonger can easily station herself right next to the dogma of the incarnation. An entry dated “14th Sept. 35” is typical: “Difficulties not only bind people together, they also produce a beautiful inner communion, just as when the cold of winter produces on window panes figures that are erased by the sun’s warmth.” This is a theme that invited variations, and five months later, “Jan. 36,” Kierkegaard made another attempt: “Difficulties bind people together and produce beauty and harmony in the relationships of life, just as the magic of winter’s cold conjures onto window panes the flowers that will vanish with warmth.” Many journal entries share an inclination for the lapidary, the trenchant zinger, and have a teasing partiality for a paradoxical fillip in the final phrase. A typical example of this can be found on an undated slip of paper: “Someone dies at the very moment that he has proven that Hell’s punishment is eternal, caught in his own theory. Remarkable transition from theory to practice.” Here the reader more than suspects that Kierkegaard has taken his inspiration from Møller’s preferred mode of expression, the “random thought,” which Møller had termed “a sort of hermaphrodite,” because it was “half poetry, half prose.” At one point in 1838, one such hermaphrodite of the more theological sort found its way onto paper: “That God could create beings who were free in relation to himself is the cross which philosophy could not bear and upon which it has remained hanging.” Another entry appeals a bit more to the senses, but is no less edifying: “The distant baying of a hound, calling to faraway, friendly, and familiar places, provides the most beautiful proof of the immortality of the soul.”
Tucked in among these carefully calibrated sentences we also encounter brief statements that can lodge themselves in the back of the brain and engender altogether too much reflection, precisely because what is said doesn’t really make any sense: “The moon is the earth’s conscience.” And then of course there are flighty little sayings that have simply alighted on the paper by accident: “P.S.: Now and then I get a strange desire to make an entrechat with my legs, to snap my fingers, and then die.” Or bizarre, unnecessary, helpful hints: “One way to prevent the theft of your watch: Let the hair nearest your neck grow, braid it into two pigtails which encircle your neck, and hang your watch from it.”
These verbal reflections do not conform to the usual notion of a journal as a repository for confidences or intimate narratives; they bring to the genre a sort of shimmering ambiguity. It is more the exception than the rule for a journal entry to report something about its author straightforwardly and without interruption, though of course it can happen, as in this example dated October 29, 1837: “The reason that I like autumn so much more than spring is that one looks at heaven in the autumn—in the spring one looks at the earth.” Here we seem quite literally to have solid ground under our feet, but before long we are forced seventy thousand fathoms up in the air, and in an entry such as the next one we haven’t the faintest idea of who it is who cannot abstract from which self: “Death and damnation, I can abstract from everything, but not from myself: I cannot even forget myself when I sleep.”
To the dismay of the biographer, Kierkegaard cannot be pursued “historically.” He has left behind nothing but fragments and scattered traces, and indeed it seems as if, from the very first moment he put pen to paper, he adopted free, fictionalized production as his preferred mode. To make use of a distinction he himself later formulated (and emphasized as a decisive underpinning of every artistic work), Kierkegaard did not remember, he recollected. Thus his “journal” or “diary” is perhaps best described with the words chosen by the editor of “The Seducer’s Diary” when he had to assign that work to a specific genre. According to this fictive editor, “his diary is not historically precise or a straightforward narrative; it is not indicative but subjunctive.” And so it is. Peter Christian—he could remember; his diary was a “straightforward narrative” and was thus “historically precise.” External events and inner feelings were subjected to a reasonably sequential presentation whose reliability was buttressed both by references to verifiable dates and locations as well as by a plainspoken narrative levelheadedness. With Peter Christian, we generally know where things stand. Things are completely different with his younger brother, whose diary was “subjunctive” and therefore was almost constantly pitching and tossing between actual events and the artistic reproduction of those events.
In a so-called resolution which he penned in his study, dating it precisely at six o’clock in the evening on July 13, 1837, Kierkegaard clarified his current situation as a writer. “I have often wondered why I have such great reluctance to commit various observations to paper,” the young man confessed at the outset. When he reread his journal entries they seemed to him either to be so “completely telegraphic” as to be almost meaningless, or to be “entirely random,” because they had presumably been accumulated over a considerable period of time and had then suddenly been written down, as if it “had been a sort of day of reckoning, but that’s wrong.” In reading some of his romantic models—for example, super-stylists like Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and G. C. Lichtenberg—Kierkegaard had indeed encountered informal, easy writing of a rambling sort, and now he thought he was able to explain why it had seemed to him “unpleasant, indeed almost repulsive” to commit his ideas to paper: “The reason was evidently that in each instance I was thinking of the possibility of publishing these thoughts, which perhaps would have required that they be given a more detailed treatment, an inconvenience with which I had no desire to be bothered. And while I was suffering from the exhaustion brought on by abstract possibilities (a certain literary nausea), the aroma of the idea and the mood evaporated. I think it would be better, instead, to take notes more frequently, permitting the ideas to emerge still bearing the umbilical cord of their original mood.” In so doing he hoped to achieve the “fluency in writing, in written articulation, which I possess to some extent in speaking.” Furthermore, as he had read in Hamann, there were “ideas that a person gets only once in his life.” The young man concluded: “This sort of backstage practice is surely necessary for every person who is not so gifted that his development is a sort of public event.”
Kierkegaard’s own development had not yet become “public,” but it is clear that the twenty-four-year-old university student was thinking about his writing in relation to a public forum. And this was precisely the reason he felt that individual journal entries had to be given more of the character of finished pieces than he had been able to manage—and the result had been that the ideas had evaporated while he waited and worried about their form. From now on, things were going to be different. He would write more frequently, informally, and impressionistically, so that he could catch ideas in flight, capture the aromatic moment, the sight, the sound, the life.
These exercises were carried out in twenty-six extremely varied notebooks, large and small, which he employed from 1833 until 1846, titling ten of them alphabetically with double capital letters: AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, GG, HH, JJ, and KK. He assigned titles to the notebooks after he had started using them, probably in the latter part of 1842, and accordingly they do not reflect any simple chronological sequence. Indeed, he used several of the notebooks simultaneously and wrote in others on the right-hand (recto) pages from front to back, then turned them over and wrote on the other (verso) pages from back to front. The other sixteen notebooks contain travel diaries, notes on lectures at the university, and excerpts from Kierkegaard’s often quite varied reading. The journals are an extensive and very miscellaneous complex, an experimental laboratory that was as much existential as contrived—and as time went by, this laboratory assumed vital importance in Kierkegaard’s continuing process of self-understanding. Kierkegaard would also go back to his journal entries in order to refine them, rework them, or merely to take joy in re-encountering a little bit of brilliance he had entirely forgotten. Thus, late in the summer of 1847 Kierkegaard delved into journal EE from 1839, and amid a great deal of material which he found to be neither “felicitous nor finished” he found “a particularly good observation.” In journal EE he read a passage where he had written “that marriage is not really love,” which is why “it is said that the two become one flesh—not one spirit—because it is impossible for two spirits to become one spirit. This observation could have been put to very good use in Works of Love.”
“At his death Søren Kierkegaard left a large quantity of handwritten papers, gathered together and, in some cases, put in order with a degree of care that was evidence of the author’s zeal to protect them against dispersal and destruction,” H. P. Barfod wrote in the preface to the multivolume set of selections entitled From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. And he continued in impeccable bureaucratic prose: “Before long, however, it could be seen that these volumes—like the later, much more detailed and internally interconnected ‘journals’—had held a significance for the author quite different from the role ordinarily played by diaries. For in addition to a number of entries (though not terribly many of this sort) where external circumstances are discussed side by side with disjointed outbursts of emotion, the journals contain investigations of subjects that interested the writer at one time or another: plans for essays and lectures, texts of sermons, and lastly, a great many individual ideas, notes, quotations, etc. In sum, in a partial parallel with the published writings, ‘the journals’ seem to have served the late hermit as a major channel of intellectual discharge.”
For all its opacity, Barfod’s description of the posthumous literature is quite lucid. Like subsequent editors, Barfod found the will to perseverance we glimpse behind Kierkegaard’s mountain of paper to be almost unnatural. Quite rightly, Barfod resisted calling the posthumous papers “diaries,” emphasizing instead their connection to the published works, which—incidentally—also makes it natural to trace the author back to his writings. Despite this clear-sightedness Barfod himself contributed to the confusion quite considerably by dint of his editorial practices, concerning which the later editors of Søren Kierkegaard’s Papers, P. A. Heiberg and V. Kuhr, offered withering comments: “With continually changing principles of arrangement and changing editorial points of view—and by means of cutting and pasting; the addition of catalogue numbers; the writing of notes to the printer on the manuscripts themselves; and much else, including deletions and corrections—part of the earlier portion of the papers was transformed into the printer’s manuscript for Barfod’s edition.” As a rule the original manuscript was sent to the printer, and in a good many cases when the printer was finished setting type, the manuscript disappeared into thin air or into the nearest wastepaper basket.
Barfod, however, was particularly notorious for his cutting of the manuscripts and for his subsequent pasting, which resulted in a completely new whole—deconstruction before its time. This was done with the best of intentions. Barfod was not a vandal but a conscientious jurist with aesthetic sensibilities. Thus, when he came across a manuscript with especially nice calligraphy he might clip it out tastefully and paste it to a piece of thin cardboard, whereupon he would have a postcard with which he could delight friends and acquaintances on special occasions! “The result,” Heiberg and Kuhr wrote, “is that a quite significant portion of the manuscripts mentioned in Barfod’s list, from the earliest papers all the way up to 1847, is missing from the collection at the University Library.”
Heiberg and Kuhr worked far more systematically and divided the material into three principal groups. Group A gathered together what from a traditional point of view might be called typical journal entries. Group B included drafts of pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous writings, both those Kierkegaard published in his lifetime and those he did not, as well as manuscript materials omitted from the final versions of such works. And group C was reserved for notes from Kierkegaard’s reading and other studies. This systematization, which was further divided into subgroups for aesthetic, philosophical, and theological materials, was laudable in principle but is unfortunate in practice, because it obscures the range of Kierkegaard’s journal entries and gives the reader a false notion of uniformity and consistency in the profusion of texts. And when they were finished, the editors repackaged the manuscripts in accordance with their own editorial principles, thus further disarranging the original archival units.
Thanks to these well-meaning men, who almost seem to have been imitating the wiles of Kierkegaard’s own pseudonymous editors, the primary source for Kierkegaard’s biography is no longer reliable. But we must also bear in mind that the first editor of Kierkegaard’s papers was Kierkegaard himself and that he always wrote with the awareness that future readers were standing there, so to speak, and looking over his shoulder. Accordingly we read “pages removed from the journal” where Kierkegaard intervened surgically in his journals and excised one or more pages, presumably because they did not further Kierkegaard the myth but merely exhibited the man of the same name. More straightforward methods of deletion such as lining out or scratching out words and densely crosshatching entire pages also reveal the meticulousness with which Kierkegaard planned his presentation of himself to the future. “After my death,” he wrote in a famous journal entry, “this is my consolation: No one will be able to find in my papers one single bit of information about what has really filled my life; they will not find the inscription deep within me which explains everything, which often makes what the world would call bagatelles into events of enormous importance to me, but which I, too, view as insignificant when I remove the secret note that explains everything.”
This note, in which Kierkegaard wrote what really took up his life, would be a wonderful thing to have. But it does not exist—not because Kierkegaard has removed it, but because it is unlikely that he ever wrote it. And perhaps this was the secret: that there was in actuality no secret at all, and that therefore literary invention was required. This journal entry looks like a miniature example of the seducer’s art, because, as we read in “The Seducer’s Diary,” there is “really nothing so steeped in seductiveness … as a secret.”
In the hunt for the real Kierkegaard people frequently overlook the fact that mystification, mummery, and fiction are constitutive features in Kierkegaard’s production of himself—and that this is precisely why these things help reveal the “real” Kierkegaard.