Soren Kierkegaard

during a carriage ride to Hirschholm when he began to entertain the idea
of having a disciple, perhaps even a confidant. And he had no doubt about
the type of person he was looking for: “What I need is a person who does
not gesticulate by waving his arms from a pulpit or wagging his finger from
a professorial chair, but a person who gesticulates with the whole of his
personal existence, with his willingness to deal with every danger, willing
that his deeds express precisely what he teaches. An assistant professor is a
person who has seventeen things to take into consideration: He wants to
have a permanent position, he wants to get married, he wants to be well
respected, he wants to satisfy the demands of the times, et cetera.”
Nielsen was not the most gesticulating of men, and furthermore he was
not a mere assistant professor, but a full professor as well as a Knight of the
Dannebrog, and on top of everything, he was married, which to Kierke-
gaard’s way of thinking was a serious debit in Nielsen’s account balance.
But Nielsen was at any rate the least inferior person in town. This must be
the explanation of Kierkegaard’s arrangements, because he had long had
very little respect for the professor of philosophy who had taken over Poul
Martin Møller’s vacant chair in April 1841. For example, shortly after his
successful defense of his magister dissertation, when Sibbern encouraged
him to apply for a university position as an assistant professor of philosophy,
Kierkegaard had replied that he would have to request a couple of years to
prepare himself. “Oh! How can you imagine that they would hire you
under such conditions?” Sibbern asked in amazement. “Well, of course,”
replied Kierkegaard, “I could do like Rasmus Nielsen and let them hire me
unprepared.” Then Sibbern became cross and said, “You always have to
pickonNielsen!”AndSibbernwasnotentirelywrong.In1839Nielsenhad
placed an announcement inAdresseavisen, inviting the public to subscribe to
Outlines of a Christian Morality, which he intended to publish in the course
of the coming winter; and in a later newspaper article, “Public Confession,”
Kierkegaard ironized about Nielsen’s undertaking: “The age is working its
way toward the System. Prof. Nielsen has already published twenty-one
paragraphs of his logic, which form the first portion of aLogic, which in
turn forms the first part of an all-encompassingEncyclopedia—this is noted
on the cover, although without specific mention of its size, probably in
order to avoid scaring people, for a person might dare conclude that it will
be of infinite size.”
Things got no better when Nielsen publishedOutlines of Speculative Logic.
Four installments of the work appeared in booklet form between 1841 and
1844, and in its preface the work referred to itself as a “fragment of a philo-
sophical methodology,” which it indeed became, inasmuch as it was never
completed and broke off literally in mid-sentence. This involuntary frag-