all the dark possibilities in a person’s nature and to bring them forth as if
they had either been actualized or were very close to being so. I believe
that he could have written to a good-natured, upstanding burgher in such
a way that, after reading it, the man would have felt as though he had sold
his father and betrayed his mother, and would be unable to free himself
from those thoughts without conceiving a furious hatred of the writer.”
Møller kindled this sort of hatred here as well. It was almost as though he
had clandestinely rifled through a carefully chosen selection of Kierkegaard’s
journals and had twisted into grotesquely reversed form the intimate confes-
sions they contained. The passion for writing, which Kierkegaard himself
viewed as the gift of Governance, was interpreted by Møller as a compulsive
activity designed to compensate for a number of biologically determined
defects in Kierkegaard’s daily rhythm and in his instinctual life. Kierke-
gaard’s love of dialectics was portrayed as morbid reflectiveness that led to
feminine indecisiveness, and the woman, Regine, was nothing but an inno-
cent victim in the hands of a perverse experimenter. If Kierkegaard was
going to lose his head, it would probably happen here.
“Would Only That I Might Soon Appear inThe Corsair”
It soon became clear that Møller’s overkill was in fact a suicidal undertaking.
On December 27, 1845, only five days after the publication ofGæa, Kier-
kegaard—alias Frater Taciturnus—published a stinging rejoinder, a five-
column article inFædrelandettitled “The Activity of a Traveling Aesthet-
ician and How He Nonetheless Came to Pay for Dinner.” Kierkegaard,
whose thoroughly polemical character reacted instantaneously when it was
provoked, made it abundantly clear how cynically deft he could be in de-
stroying his opponent. Like Møller, Kierkegaard, too, had mastered the art
of refining salacious gossip and rumors of every sort into a gnawing rhetori-
cal disquiet that could be read between the lines. Thus the fact that Møller
had perennial financial problems was one of the first things that Kierkegaard
let slip. Indeed, he more than implied that the expedition that “our active
and enterprising literary man Mr. P. L. Møller” had undertaken to Sorø
had been motivated by simple lack of money, which mirrored his lack of
ideas: “[O]ne helps oneself to the dishes served, and though very miserly
people do tend to tuck away a bit of the victuals—a piece of steak in the
pocket, some cake in the hat—Mr. P.L.M. is so voracious that he takes the
entire conversation home with him and has it printed.”
So dinner was served. But Møller was granted some real tidbits. Kierke-
gaard indeed conceded that “ ‘Guilty?’/‘Not Guilty?’ ” does border on mad-