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 under-
standing of the question of the immortality of the soul. Indeed, he never
even understood that it was precisely thevery manner in whichhe related
himself so busily and restlessly to the matter that prevented him from com-
ing to such an understanding, because immortality depends not upon objec-
tive proofs but upon subjective certainty.
What caught Kierkegaard’s attention was Møller’sliterary 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 thePostscript, where Møller’s book-
keeper is in some respects resurrected in the person of a “well-trained uni-
versity 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 individ-
ual 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 pon-
derous, 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