Soren Kierkegaard

The smashed windowpane is almost a symbol of Kierkegaard’s relation-
ship to the lectures that were the official reason for his journey. In a letter
to Sibbern dated December 15, 1841, he provided a rather detailed report
on his semester in Berlin. Henrik Steffens, who was supposed to be peerless
as a lecturer and whoseCaricatures of What Is Most HolyKierkegaard had
purchased in mid-January 1836 and had read with much enthusiasm, was
now lecturing uncertainly and hesitatingly on his almost twenty-year-old
Anthropology. Steffens had always been diffuse. Now, at age sixty-eight, he
was more diffuse than ever, and Kierkegaard could not follow the contours
of his argument: “The streets are too broad for me, and so are Steffens’s
lectures. One cannot see from one side to the other, just as with Steffens’s
lectures.” Kierkegaard also wrote Sibbern concerning his disappointment
with Steffens, whom Sibbern himself had heard in Breslau a generation
earlier, when he had described the lectures enthusiastically in letters tohis
Regine, whose real name had been Sophie Ørsted, the sister of the poet
Adam Oehlenschla ̈ger and wife of the jurist A. S. Ørsted.
Things were different, at least at first, with the Hegelian Karl Werder,
whose lectures on logic and metaphysics were so rhetorically impressive
that Kierkegaard had an insidious and mysterious suspicion that the man
must be a Jew, “because baptized Jews always distinguish themselves by
their virtuosity.” Werder could cavort and frolic like a juggler with the
mostabstract categories,anddespitethe factthathespoke likeamechanized
chatterbox, one could never catch him making a slip of the tongue. None-
theless it was not long before Kierkegaard grew tired of this virtuosity,
which reminded him of the strong man at the Deer Park amusement park
who played with “twenty-, thirty-, forty-pound balls,” which, like Wer-
der’s, were unfortunately “papier-mache ́balls.”
Then there was Friedrich Schelling, a shy man but perhaps romanticism’s
greatest philosopher, who in 1841 had just been appointed to Berlin to
combat the all-engulfing Hegelianism and who was now lecturing to a
packed house on hisPhilosophy of Revelation. The crowd was enormous, as
was the noise, and not a few showed up in vain and were compelled to
stand outside, knocking on the windows of the auditorium in which, inci-
dentally, Karl Marx also was sitting, trying to follow along as best he could.
Kierkegaard considered abandoning Schelling as early as the conclusion of
his introductory lecture on November 15, but he decided to continue de-
spite everything. And that was good, because during the second lecture a
little miracle, in fact, took place: “I am so happy to have heard Schelling’s
second lecture—indescribably so. I have long groaned, and the thoughts
within me have groaned, in travail. Then he spoke the word ‘actuality,’
about the relation of philosophy to actuality, and the unborn babe of