Soren Kierkegaard

thought within me leapt for joy as in Elizabeth. I remember almost every
word he said from that moment on. Here, perhaps, clarity can emerge. That
one word reminded me of all my philosophical sufferings and torments....
Now I have put all my hope in Schelling.”
But the ensuing months brought these hopes to naught. In the letters
from the beginning of 1842, Schelling was likened to a sour “vinegar
brewer,” an impression that was aurally amplified when one heard him say,
“ich werde morgen fortfahren[German: ‘I will continue tomorrow’] (unlike
the Berliners, who pronounce the ‘g’ very soft, he pronounces it very hard,
like a ‘k’:morken).” One day Schelling came half an hour late and fiercely
laid the blame on Berlin, which lacked public clocks. When, as a sort of
amends for the delay, he proposed to lecture beyond the scheduled hour,
the audience took up a disrespectful hooting. “Schelling became furious
and exclaimed: ‘If it is unpleasing to my gentlemen of the audience that I
lecture, I can gladly stop—Ich werde morken fortfahren.”
By February 3, 1842, after having followed forty-one lectures and sum-
marized them neatly in his little notebooks, Kierkegaard had had enough.
Schelling would have to continuemorkenaftermorkenwith one person
fewer in the auditorium. Three days prior to his decision Kierkegaard had
noted with terror that Schelling was now lecturing for “two hours at a
time,” which apparently was at least one hour too many. Not long after
this Kierkegaard remarked in a letter to Peter Christian: “Schelling spouts
the most insufferable nonsense....Tomake matters worse, he has now
got the idea of lecturing longer than usual, which has given me the idea
that I do not want to listen to him for as long as I might otherwise have
listened....Iamtoooldtolisten to lectures, just as Schelling is too old to
give them. His entire doctrine of potencies reveals the highest degree of
impotence.”
Ironically enough, it was precisely in these lectures that Schelling formu-
lated a series of anti-Hegelian points that anticipated Kierkegaard’s later
criticism of “the Great Lama,” as the university students called Hegel. But
of course neither Kierkegaard nor Schellling could be expected to have
known this in 1841. If Schelling had in fact spouted nonsense as insufferably
asKierkegaard maintained,itis oddthat throughoutthesemester hecontin-
ued to lecture to a packed auditorium. And others evaluated Schelling’s
accomplishments quite differently, for example, Martensen, who on his
study tour had heard Schelling lecture in Munich and in this connection
recalled the following: “That man could lecture. He must certainly be
viewed as one of the greatest lecturers the universities can boast of....It
was acalm, forward-moving flow, amethodically progressive development,
point by point—though the entire exposition was borne along and illumi-