Soren Kierkegaard

uted to literary rowdies are quite considerable. Nowadays, the more con-
temptible a writer is, the more he makes.” Or, again, from the same year
and with bittersweet irony: “So, on the one side: honor, respect, monetary
gain—and the erroneous opinion; and on the other side: dishonor, exclu-
sion, monetary loss—and the correct opinion. If one were not an optimist
already, with this in mind, who wouldn’t become one?”
While Kierkegaard was nonchalant and generally quite elegant in the way
he discussed this issue in his published writings, he was close to the opposite
of this in his journals, where he really complained about his distress, all the
while protesting that he was not really complaining: “Denmark is a small
country where a real author can earn nothing—that was something I knew
before I started. I have never complained about it, nor will I—even if it is
certainly saddening that if I had lived in a large country, I would have earned
a considerable fortune during the time when I had to pay out money in
order to live as an author.” During this same year, 1848, he seems to have
had a sort of relapse into a Socratic position: “I reflect with great concern
on the question of whether it is actually permissible for me to earn money
through my work, perhaps guaranteeing myself a steady income, which
would be reassuring to me right now. I reflect on this with great concern,
because I certainly understand that at the very moment I did that, my work
as an author, and my work in general, would be undermined, because I
would have promoted a trivial definition of seriousness, of being regarded
as a serious man—who earns money, who thus is read more widely and
quoted more frequently. And why? Because now I have become serious—
that is, now I am earning money.” At this point Kierkegaard was in his
royalty period. The year 1848 was a productive and profitable one, bringing
him 1,020 rixdollars according to his contract with Reitzel, and this is per-
haps part of the explanation of his sudden hesitancy. But it was not long
before his Socratic crisis was over: “Isn’tConcluding Postscriptquite an ac-
complishment, more than enough for three professors! But of course the
author did not have an official post and does not seem to want one. There
were no weighty [Hegelian-style] ‘sections,’ so it was really nothing. The
book was published in Denmark. It was not mentioned anywhere. Perhaps
fifty copies were sold, so, including the expense of proofreading (100 rixdol-
lars), publishing the book cost me about 400–500 rixdollars, plus my time
and effort.” Here, for the occasion, Kierkegaard has suppressed the fact that
thePostscripthad in fact been discussed in detail—albeit venomously—by
P. L. Møller.
Kierkegaard’s bitterness was unmistakable and it had come to stay. Simi-
larly, the need to split himself up into many authors also grew steadily; by
1850 the number had reached ten: “Yes, if I could split myself up and