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 par-
ticularly 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 expres-
sion 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 philos-
ophy loses contact with reality.
Even though the title is perfectly appropriate for a parody of the pseudo-
philosophical frictions among the intellectuals of the day, for a time Kier-
kegaard continued to entertain doubts about it, because the soap-cellar title
seemed to him to “contain a bit of misplaced flirtatiousness.” So he consid-
ered 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