15 and started on NB 5 that same day; by July 16 it was filled with writing
and put aside in favor of NB 6, which was replaced on August 21 by NB
7, which lasted until November 28, when NB 8 was begun—it met Kier-
kegaard’s needs for the remainder of the year.
All of this remained in Kierkegaard’s writing desks, metal boxes, and little
burlap sacks, awaiting better days.
In Charge of His Own Posthumous Reputation
“What does Goethe do in hisAus meinem Leben[German: ‘From My Life,’
autobiographical writings], other than provide a clever defense of blun-
ders? ”Kierkegaard noted maliciously in 1844. In the same splenetic vein,
he continued: “At no point has he realized the Idea, but he is capable of
talking his way out of everything (young women, the idea of love, Chris-
tianity, et cetera). ”Indeed, as Kierkegaard noted in the margin, Goethe was
only “different in degree from a criminal, who also poetizes his way out of
responsibility, ‘distancing it from himself via poetizing.’ ”
If Goethe’s autobiography was a “defense of blunders, ”the reader is
tempted to ask whether Kierkegaard’sThe Point of View for My Work as an
Authoris not in principle open to the same objection. Yet Kierkegaard does
not in fact try to “talk his way out of everything. ”Indeed, the opposite is
the case: There is a great deal about which he does not talk at all (the
relationship with Regine, for example, which he refers to coolly as “that
fact ”and is pressed into a little parenthesis). But silence is also a sort of
defense of blunders. Nor does Kierkegaard simply poetize his way out of
his own responsibility; sometimes he dwells on it quite demonstratively.
But inherent in the very genre of autobiography is the tendency to slip,
sooner or later, into the very sort of apologia which it is in principle seeking
to avoid. And finally, Kierkegaard is not the “criminal ”he accuses Goethe
of being, but he certainly leaves as little as possible to chance and makes
every conceivable effort to present just the right profile to his future biogra-
pher. The more or less declared intention ofThe Point of Viewis to control
the narrative and mold the chapters in such a way that posterity will not
only have to accept the story, but will want to retell it and embroider on
it. So it is both symptomatic and troubling that when Kierkegaard founded
Kierkegaard research—which is what he did in writingThe Point of View—
he did so as a sort of fictional documentation or dramatization.
This fictional documentation finds expression, for example, in the second
chapter ofThe Point of View, where Kierkegaard wanted to place in evidence
his personal “existential idiosyncrasy, corresponding to the idiosyncratic