Soren Kierkegaard

a bit off the mark when he more than implied that thePostscript—with its
swarm of chapters, sections, divisions, subdivisions, interpolations, exclama-
tions, departures, digressions, revisions, interpretations, discussions, appen-
dices, supplements, §§’s, footnotes, and quite a bit else—had in a sense be-
come an impossible book that had not been “worked through organically”
with sufficient care, and therefore even in the best of circumstances it would
only “find its place under the rubric of ‘chaotic literature.’ ” Any reader
who has ever attempted to find his or her way into, around, and out of the
Postscriptcannot but grant that Møller is onto something here.
This is also true of Møller’s description of Kierkegaard’s style. Here again,
Møller demonstrated that he was just about as fine as an observer as he was
coarse in the manner in which he presented his observations. “His dialectic
continually produces steam, his pen runs on like a locomotive on a railroad
track,” Møller noted, employing a modern metaphor. Very quickly, how-
ever, the metaphor jumps the track, for on the same page Kierkegaard is
also described as carrying out “acrobatic and sleight-of-hand maneuvers”
and cutting “capers.” These were mere platitudes, but Møller could also hit
the mark: “In his discourse one hears tattling gossips at one moment, biblical
simplicity and cadences at the next moment, Copenhagen cafe ́chatter at
another moment.” For all the caricature, this emphasis on the polyphony
in Kierkegaardian texts is admirably accurate because it was precisely by
employing a unique mixture of genres and a remarkable thematic range that
Kierkegaard’s works broke with philosophy’s traditional form of argumen-
tation and became endowed with a sort of perennial relevance.
As an experienced polemicist and trained parodist, Møller was of course
also aware of the devices Kierkegaard employed when he criticized those
who had not understood the point in his program of subjective thinking.
So with carefully calculated precision Møller collected a series of the verbal
caricatures that abound in Kierkegaard’s text: “ ‘assistant professors,’ ‘specu-
lators,’ ‘private tutors,’ ‘cataloguers,’ ‘bonded and guaranteed pastors,’ ‘orga-
nized, esteemed, Mssrs. Professors,’ ‘astronomers and veterinarians,’ ‘pre-
cious thinkers,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘world-historically concerned assistant barbers
and undertakers,’ ‘walking sticks,’ ‘office clerks,’ ‘rubbish mongers,’ ‘bellows
blowers,’ ‘money changers in the forecourts,’ and ‘tiny little gewgaws.’ ”
When Møller put forth a parody of a parody like this, it was to serve a
definite purpose. He had noticed that Kierkegaard’s work had a peculiar
characteristic, namely an “absorption in dialectical antitheses.” In fact, Kier-
kegaard had merely “described nothing but a dialectical circularity,” and
Møller artfully backed up his assertion with the following argument: In the
days when Kierkegaard wrote (here it comes) “really spicyCorsairarticles”
againstKjøbenhavnsposten, things went badly for philosophy, as can be seen