Soren Kierkegaard

tion is a more serious matter, because in this case affectation is on its way
to becoming a person’s second nature. The individual has incorporated a
“false element in himself and has distorted his personality,” with the result
that his “utterances do not cohere with his actual self.” The individual grad-
ually hardens into a mask that has no face behind it. The third form, change-
able affectation, is the worst. Because in this case even the assumed role
does not have any permanency. The individual is completely changeable,
so he “quickly takes on first one definite form, then another,” resulting in
an “utter absence of truth in personal life.” There is no longer “any lasting
core to an individual’s thinking and willing, but at every moment he shapes
his life into a temporary personality, only to abolish it the next moment.”
For a visual representation of this changeableness, Møller chooses the cha-
meleon: “In most cases these people are indeed like the sorts of animals that
change their colors according to their surroundings and are thus the passive
products of their circumstances.”
For Møller, affectation was quite a bit more than artificial verbal behavior.
It was more a question of an ontological defect: “Affectation always has its
origin in the fact that a person has been seduced by some sort of inclination
without himself being aware of it.” Affectation, in sum, is identical with an
individual’sself-deception, and it thus leads to a philosophical and psychologi-
cal paradox—for who is it, really, that one deceives when one deceives
oneself? This question forms the more or less explicit background of Møller’s
analyses of affectation, and it is hardly an overstatement to say that in his
sense for affectation Møller has picked up the trail of the inexhaustible sig-
nificance of the unconscious, both for the individual and for society.
Psychology has got into the blood and the language of subsequent genera-
tions, so it may be difficult for us to understand the extent to which Møller’s
analyses really were pioneering efforts and to see how beneficial they were
as a judicious psychological alternative to the philosophical infatuation with
Hegel that had typified intellectual circles. Møller’s analyses were (and re-
main) disturbing, however, because they place such vehement emphasis on
the dark side of the subjective self, on dissimulation and repression, so that
everyone is able to feel that the analyses are directed at himself: “Consider
how much mendacity is to be found in scenes from everyday life.”
As a radical countermove to the one-dimensional self-understanding of
the Biedermeier era, Møller thus formulated a sort of hermeneutics of suspi-
cion. At some points Møller certainly does seem to revel in his skepticism
concerning the natural innocence of spontaneity—“the girl pets the cat in
order to appear tenderhearted”—but this places him in the company of the
genuine radicals, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud, who in earnest
began the process of dismantling the reliable certainties they had inherited.