Soren Kierkegaard

and refresh every heart that can feel, even though it does not immerse the
reader in any philosophical bath, even though it contains nothing other
than what anyone could ‘say to himself at home on his sofa’—though cer-
tainly not ‘just as well.’ It is not in order to minimize my gratitude for this
sermon, but out of concern for the matter itself that I raise this question:
Do the three subsequent discourses have the same effect? And if they don’t,
isn’t it in part because here the ‘philosophical bath’ is too visible?” Mynster’s
biographical remarks brought joy to Kierkegaard, who would recall this
“little expression of his recognition” quite a few years later.
The Concept of Anxietywas not reviewed at all, but Frederik Beck, who
had also reviewedOn the Concept of Irony, dealt withPhilosophical Fragments
in a German theological journal where, to Kierkegaard’s regret, he commit-
ted the blunder of permitting “the contents to appear in didactic fashion,”
thereby forfeiting the “elasticity of irony” that had been a part of the work’s
experimental character .J .F .Hagen permitted himself to do something simi-
lar when, in mid-May 1846, writing under the symbol “80,” he reviewed
theworkintheTheological Journal, producing an eight-page review where
he gave due retrospective consideration toFear and Trembling, which he had
reviewed in the same journal in the latter part of February 1844 .On the
final page of his otherwise uncritical discussion, Hagen pointed out that
the distance between what washumanandwhatwasChristianhad perhaps
gradually become so pronounced that any possibility for a person to connect
himself to Christianity seemed to be threatened .“It is one of the usual shil-
ling reviews that is written ‘in very good language,’ with periods and com-
mas in the right places,” Kierkegaard grumbled in his commentary on the
review .Kierkegaard viewed the conclusion of Hagen’s review as typical of
the pernicious Hegelian craving for “mediation,” which he saw as well-nigh
the most insufferable of things: “An author who really understands himself
is better served by not being read at all, or by having five readers who really
read him, than—thanks to the approval of a good-natured reviewer—having
the all-too-widespread confusion about mediation broadcast even further
via his own book, which had been written precisely in order to fight against
mediation.” The catastrophe and the irony was thus complete: “Thanks to
the clumsiness of an approving reviewer, the book has been annihilated,
recalled, dismissed.” Having said this, Kierkegaard went on to argue more
coolly that hisPhilosophical Fragmentswas actually not at all suited to be
discussed in a newspaper because newspapers are of course written for people
through whom everything merely runs: “To newspapers may be left the
task of writing for the busy sort of people, who only have time to read
during the moment they are on the toilet, and who thus have at best a bit
of leisure only once in a while, when they have diarrhea.”