1843
Either/Or
“Here I stand, then, face to face with the reading public at this important
moment. I confess m yfrailt y: I have written nothing, not a line. I confess
m yweakness: I have no part in the whole thing, or in an yof it—no part,
not in the slightest way. Be strong, my soul: I confess that there is a good
deal of it which I haven’t read.”
This penitential confession was put forward in the article “Public Confes-
sion,” which Kierkegaard felt compelled to publish inFædrelandeton June
12, 1842. The occasion was his embarrassment at having for some time had
the honor of being regarded as “the author of quite a number of weighty,
informative, and witt yarticles.” This recognition was completel yunde-
served, however, and therefore Kierkegaard now politel yrequested “the
good people, who take an interest in me, never to regard me as the author
of anything that does not bear my name.”
This sounds almost too humble to be true. And it was, in fact, neither
humble nor true. Compounded equall yof literar ysmoke and mirrors, on
the one hand, and a gidd ysatire of his times, on the other, the “Public
Confession” was in fact a dose of deceit, a part of the massive marketing
campaign that Kierkegaard set in motion in the period leading up to the
publication ofEither/Or. Seen in the light of a (presumably) reliable retro-
spective view he wrote in the summer of 1848, it is clear that the reason he
disavowed responsibilit yfor the articles in question—“which, in fact, no
one had attributed to me”—was to increase the confusion (read: “curious
customers”) that would be generated b ythe pseudon ym “Victor Eremita.”
In a length yepilogue to the “Public Confession,” Kierkegaard issued a
rejoinder to Frederik Beck, who had been an opponentex auditorioat the
defense of his dissertation and who had further developed his position in a
length yreview ofOn the Concept of Irony, published in two issues ofFædre-
landeton Ma y29 and June 5, 1842. The review was positive, but on the
last page Beck had criticized the language in the dissertation. Beck found it
laudable that the work was “free of narrow-minded scholastic terminol-
ogy,” but he really would rather have been spared the many insider “allu-214