Soren Kierkegaard

“I am aJanus bifrons[Latin: ‘two-faced Janus’]: With one face I laugh, with
the other I weep,” Kierkegaard noted on a slip of paper in 1837, the same
year Møller penned his essay on affectation. The riven student must have
taken that essay quite personally, but at the same time its theme served as a
great impetus. It is also quite obvious that Kierkegaard was deeply indebted
to Møller’s concept of affectation in subsequent years, when he set out to
produce portraits of irony (conscious deception of others) and the demonic
(unconscious self-deception).
At the same time, however, Kierkegaard was not merely interested in
the psychological side of the matter; he was also attentive to the aesthetic
dimension in Møller’s treatment, because it denoted a marked break with
academic schematization, permitting life itself to speak. “The episode which
Poul Møller has inserted in his essay on the immortality of the soul in the
most recent issue of theMonthlyis very interesting,” Kierkegaard wrote
in a journal entry from early February 1837. “Perhaps this will become
widespread, and the strictly scholarly tone will be replaced by lighter pas-
sages which, however, will permit life to emerge in a much richer form.”
The episode in question was a satirical tale about an unmarried book-
keeper who wanted to know what immortality really is. So when one of
his theologian friends purchased a work on this very topic, the bookkeeper
wanted to borrow it. The theologian was not very willing to lend it, how-
ever, because he knew how carelessly the bookkeeper treated borrowed
books. Indeed, he once caught the bookkeeper in the act of “cutting a wad
of Dutch tobacco on the binding of an account book.” The theologian’s
refusal incensed the bookkeeper. “I am,” he protested, “fundamentally a
religious person. I acknowledge wholeheartedly that clearing this matter up
is worth the trouble, and for many years I have had the intention to sit
down one day, when I have the opportunity, and read one or another good
book on this matter. And just today I happen to have the time, because I
am sitting and waiting for a couple of good friends with whom I will be
taking a carriage out to Bellevue at one o’clock in order to eat some fresh
cod.” The bookkeeper had exactly half an hour, and since he was still being
denied access to the book, he asked that his friend “very briefly lecture to
me on the best proofs of the immortality of the soul while I sharpen my
razor and shave my beard.” And all this must take place before the carriage
arrives. The theologian reluctantly agreed to this, but no sooner had he
begun than the bookkeeper interrupted him with the brusque remark that
for God’s sake the demonstration must not be couched in too much techni-
cal jargon. “Scholarship must be popularized, it’s what the spirit of the times
demands,” he declared prophetically, and he continued in this pedagogical
vein: “You must guard against using the technical language that the learned