- Death mask of Poul Martin Møller.
“In the kingdom of thought, man may be
grouped with the ruminant animals,” he
noted in one of his “random thoughts,” and
this was particularly true of Møller himself.
Indeed, he worked extraordinarily slowly,
constantly rewriting, and often involuntarily
ending up with fragments. As a professor of
philosophy he became increasingly skepti-
cal of Hegel, emphasizing instead the vital
philosophical importance of the idea of
personality. Møller’s analyses of affectation
sharpened Kierkegaard’s sense for the many
forms that self-deception and dissimulation
can assume. Apart from his father, Møller
was the only person to whom Kierkegaard
officially dedicated any of his works, specifi-
cally The Concept of Anxiety, in which
Møller is praised as “the happy lover of
Greek culture.” - Frederik Christian Sibbern. “He was,
inherently and in his innermost being, a
very inwardly complicated sort of person....
I don’t know whether he had a genuinely
Christian disposition and temperament,
although he certainly must have had some-
thing of that sort,” the eighty-four-year-old
Sibbern wrote about Kierkegaard, whom he
had come to know in the early 1830s in his
capacity as a professor of philosophy. Sib-
bern was on the committee that evaluated
Kierkegaard’s magister dissertation On the
Concept of Irony. During the period of
Kierkegaard’s engagement, Sibbern occasion-
ally rode along in the carriage when the
young couple drove out to the Deer Park,
but he never expressed himself on the subject
of their relationship even though—by his
own admission—he could “tell about things
that only a very few people know, apart
from myself.” He is shown here without his
wig, of which he owned many, and which—
owing in part to vanity and in part to
philosophical absentmindedness—he would
sometimes wear one on top of another.
romina
(Romina)
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