Soren Kierkegaard

but he wasn’t up to pushing the idea, since this sort of negotiation was of
course difficult and awkward in any case, and in Kierkegaard’s case would
probably have been unavailing. After this tirade Madvig returned the piece
on irony to Sibbern, who immediately forwarded it to F. C. Petersen, pro-
fessor of classics and the provost of Regensen College, who recommended
that “various excesses of the sarcastic or mocking sort be removed as inap-
propriate in a piece of academic writing.” After approving the change of
title proposed by Sibbern, Petersen sent the papers further to his colleague
(and temperamental opposite), P. O. Brøndsted, who responded a mere
twenty-four hours later with an elegantly written assessment in which he
noted that Kierkegaard had apparently found it impossible to resist an “inner
temptation to leap over the boundary that separates both genuine irony and
reasonable satire from the unrefreshing territory of vulgar exaggeration.”
Nonetheless, Brøndsted believed that if a “personal preference for tidbits of
this sort prevents the author from following advice in this regard,” he would
let the matter pass without further ado. But university rector Hans Christian
Ørsted, who had to give formal approval to the petition for dispensation
from the Latin requirement, would not simply drop the matter. Indeed, in
a private letter to Sibbern, Ørsted drily remarked that the dissertation
“makes a generally unpleasant impression on me, particularly because of
two things, both of which I detest: verbosity and affectation.” Ørsted was
further concerned about the haste with which the evaluation procedure was
being conducted, and consequently he suggested that Martensen or the new
professor of philosophy, Rasmus Nielsen, read the dissertation. Since Ras-
mus Nielsen had asked early on to have nothing to do with the matter, the
dissertation went to Martensen, who wrote four lines concurring with the
points of view already voiced, hence voting in favor of accepting the disser-
tation. After this, the matter—which by now had become rather difficult—
went back to Sibbern, who on July 16 declared on behalf of the philosophy
faculty thatOn the Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrateswas
worthy of being defended for the magister degree.
This was in turn communicated to Christian VIII, who in a letter of July
29, proclaimed that “Søren Aabye Kjerkegaard is granted permission to
acquire the magister degree with the philosophical dissertation submitted
by him and written in the Danish language.” The king, however, imposed
the condition that the oral defense was to take place in Latin, and that the
work was therefore to be accompanied by Latin theses setting forth “the
dissertation’s principal points” and approved by the examiners prior to the
oral defense. Kierkegaard did as the king required, and after yet another
trip through the university’s machinery, the dissertation and fifteen Latin
theses—of which three (numbers I, XIII, and XV) were at one point close