Soren Kierkegaard

to be convinced of it and has declared it to be the most remarkable thing
he has heard—and the Pope as well.’ The piece could end with a rebellion
by a group of laborers who knock over all the booths and smash everything
to pieces .This was what had happened: A man had invented a gigantic
microscope that was to surpass every remarkable thing that had ever been
seen, whether one looked at the microscope itself or looked through it .But
an enormous apparatus was necessary for this, and it had been worked on
for six months at an enormous cost .There were still three months of work
left to be done .But what happened? On that day news arrived from China
that on that very day (because owing to many remarkable discoveries, com-
munication will have attained astonishing speed) someone had invented a
microscope capable of even greater magnification, which could be con-
structed quite simply .The consequences of this were that the gigantic mi-
croscope had become worthless (before it was completed), the entrepreneur
was ruined, and the workers were without bread.”
It is probably unnecessary to remark that the comedy never made it off
Kierkegaard’s desk .And despite all the heralds, circus barkers, and other
sideshow amusements, the comedy’s theatrical qualities are not particularly
striking .What is striking, on the other hand, is the ending, which is any-
thing but comic and which transforms the play into a revolutionary drama
about an uprising of the proletariat against a late-capitalist system that, in
the truest sense, was the author of its own downfall, so that even the entre-
preneur is ruined .But the comedy is not a revolutionary drama .In them-
selves, the proletarian rumpus and revolutionary uprising are rather neutral,
serving as indicators of a future tendency in the alienating encounter of man
and machine .Thus what Kierkegaard had in mind was not in fact the myth
of the classless society but quite a different myth, that of the Tower of Babel.
The invention of the “gigantic microscope” that would “surpass every re-
markable thing that had ever been seen” is the modern era’s realization of
the old dream of storming Heaven and forcing one’s way into the innermost
precincts of the greatest secrets .“The gigantic microscope” is a symbol of
presumptuous inquisitiveness that wants to employ advanced technology in
order to peer over God’s shoulder.
Kierkegaard’s journal entries on natural science serve up a great many
microscopes of varying size and focal length, aimed in every imaginable
direction .Here, as in earlier entries, it is obvious that Kierkegaard had
mixed feelings, ranging from genuine interest to undisguised disdain .What
the new era offered was in fact not merely the making visible of what had
previously been invisible, but the making unlikely of things that had pre-
viously been likely precisely because they were invisible—for instance, the
circumstance that God established and governs the world, including the