Soren Kierkegaard

has repeatedly confirmed that she never in her life (and she had had no little
experience) had seen a human being so deeply distressed.” Martensen goes
on to say that on the basis of this his mother had concluded “that he must
have an unusually profound sensibility. She was not wrong about this. No
one can deny him that.”
The profound honesty of Kierkegaard’s spirit was combined with a sense
of modesty, and if others suffered too obviously or displayed their feelings
in an all-too-conventional manner, he was quick to crawl into his shell and
wrap himself up in silence. Thus in the journal entry about his deceased
brother, Søren Aabye broods on the discrepancy between the grief itself
and the empty external symbols that trivialize it. With grotesque realism he
depicts the hubbub in a house on the day before a burial: Beset with cliche ́-
ridden sympathy and with the undertaker’s pronouncements about the ap-
proaching meal of “ham, sausages, and Gouda cheese,” the brother-in-law
stands there pondering his own image in the mirror and removing un-
wanted grey and red hairs with a little “tweezers.” Suddenly, he stands up
straight and—in a voice that grates with hollow pathos and parodies the
gentleman he is trying to resemble—exclaims: “ ‘Yes! What is man? ’‘A
clarinet, ’I replied, whereupon he really fell out of his role.” The editors of
Kierkegaard’s journals dutifully inform us that this odd scene is presumably
to be viewed as “fiction,” and this is true enough, especially if by “fiction”
they mean the medium in which personal experiences and repressed events
grope their way forward, finding their form. But in that case these editorial
guidelines for the consumer ought to be inserted in more or less every note
that accompanies Kierkegaard’s journal entries from this period.
If the journals are mute about the grief to which Martensen’s mother
could testify, outward circumstances, on the other hand, speak volumes
about how Kierkegaard intellectualized his way out of his sorrow. Earlier,
in the spring of 1833, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the chief tastemaker of the
day, had advertised a series of philosophical lectures at the Royal Military
College, and in his prospectus he had declared that although men usually
have a “sharper and more logical understanding, a greater talent for dialec-
tics, women, on the other hand, generally have a surer and more certain
touch when it comes to grasping the truth immediately.” And this was
something, at any rate, so women of cultivation were therefore welcome
to “join in the serious investigations that are the subject of these lectures.”
Indeed, they were all the more welcome because they would “grace the
group with their presence.” Only two cultivated ladies signed up, so the
lectures were canceled, but since the question of the emancipation of
women was in the air, the theologian P. E. Lind penned an article “In
Defense of Women’s Higher Origin,” which was published inKjøbenhavns