Soren Kierkegaard

understand him poetically or to poetize him. But nothing more than...
this apology, because in other respects I have poetically emancipated myself
quite entirely from him. Indeed, even if he were to declare that my under-
standing of him was factually untrue with respect to one detail or another,
it would not follow from this that it was poetically untrue. And of course
the conclusion could also be reversed: ergo, Mag. K. has not measured up
to or realized what would be poetically correct.”
The attempt at a direct report to history has here been replaced by a
rhetorical game which is undeniably dialectical, but it is at the same time
destructive, because in its mischievous double game, involving the factually
untrue and the poetically true, it obliterates every difference between
A-O and Mag. K. This curious logic, which leaps lasciviously to an inverted
“conclusion, ”lets fiction have the final say. Andin this senseKierkegaard is
being quite consistent when he concludesThe Point of Viewby “permitting
someone else, my poet, to speak. ”And this “poet ”then goes on to end the
book by saying: “The martyrdom suffered by this author can be described
quite briefly by saying that he suffered by being a genius in a provincial
town. The standard against which he measured abilities, diligence, selfless-
ness, sacrifice, the absoluteness of thought categories, et cetera, was much
too far above the average level of his contemporaries; he jacked up the price
altogether too much.... He was unable to attribute the dialectical structure
he completed—of which the individual component parts are works in them-
selves—to any human being, and even less would he attribute it to himself.
If he had to attribute it to anyone, it would have been to Governance.”
Kierkegaard thus could not authorize “the totality of the works ”in his
own name, but had to distribute the authorization in many directions, so
thatThe Point of View, which was supposed to have been “a direct commu-
nication ”and a “report to history, ”became anything but direct, and its
reporting seems most of all to be about plural and competing points of view.
Kierkegaard therefore wrote a greatly abridged version in March 1849, but
he could not bring himself to publish that, either. It only appeared two
years later, on August 7, 1851, under the titleOn My Work as an Author,
while the original manuscript ofThe Point of Viewwas consigned to posthu-
mous publication, which was seen to by Peter Christian Kierkegaard in
1859, after which the manuscript apparently disappeared into one of the
greedy woodstoves in the bishop’s residence; in any event, it is gone. A
reviewer inDagbladetwas not exactly overwhelmed by the trustworthiness
of the author ofThe Point of View: “We are certainly not of the opinion
that he is consciously lying, but we believe that he does something that is
not uncommon and confuses the a posteriori with the a priori when, at the
conclusion of his work as an author, he looks at it retrospectively and dis-