with Shakespeare, nor with stylists or carpetmakers; they are all (Plato fully
as much as carpetmaker Hansen) without any comparison to him.” A genius
is what he is by his own doing, while an apostle is what he is by means of
the divine authority that is precisely a “specific quality which intervenes from
somewhere else.”
In a footnote Kierkegaard finds occasion to point out that he has always
described himself as an author by stating that he is “without authority,” and
he has used this phrase so emphatically that it is almost a “formula that is
repeated in every preface.” Therefore, if he has not accomplished very
much, he has “at least done everything possible to avoid confusion concern-
ing what is highest and most holy.” And if one is in doubt about Kierke-
gaard’s own placement, he willingly takes up his position: “I am a poor
individual human being. If, as some people think, I am a bit of a genius,
then in that regard I would say: Forget about it. But an apostle is in all
eternity qualitatively just as different from me as he is from the greatest genius
who has ever lived and from the stupidest person who has ever lived.”
Exaltation: 7–14–21; 7–14–21; 7–14–21
It was characteristic of Kierkegaard’s preoccupation with Adler that he not
only conducted a philosophical and theological examination of Adler’s
standpoint, he also judged the way Adler’s writings worked, the impression
his books made. It was very much on the basis of these observations of
Adler’s texts that Kierkegaard drew his conclusions, which were conclusions
fromthe form of what had been writtentothe psyche of the writer. This
was more or less the same maneuver Kierkegaard had used years earlier in
his critique of Hans Christian Andersen’s book, which he found to be a
failurebecausethe author lacked a “life view.”
Right in the introduction to his book, Kierkegaard emphasizes that Adler
is one of those writers who admittedly have certain premises, but who never
come to a genuine conclusion: “We do not have here a poet who produces
a poetically complete whole; nor a psychologist who organizes the individ-
ual details and the individual person as parts of a total view; nor a dialectician
who points out the areas that lie within the life view he has at his disposal.
No, despite the fact that he writes, he is not essentially an author.” In reality,
Adler’s four books were thus unfinished, since they were “four yards cut
from the same bolt of cloth.” They had been published separately, but they
could “just as easily have been twelve books as four,” and this is why Kier-
kegaard was compelled to conclude that they all fall into “the category of
random length.”