Soren Kierkegaard

genre of the writings, ”alluding in this connection to the tactics he had to
adopt in publishing thePostscript: “I realized at once... that my personal
existence had to be reshaped for this situation. I had also conceived a notion
of what ought to be done when a little circumstance—which I saw as a nod
from Governance—intervened, coming to my assistance in a very conve-
nient fashion and enabling me to act decisively. ”The circumstance that had
intervened so conveniently was the entry ofThe Corsaironto the scene and
its effect on the people of Copenhagen. Because now “an enormous public,
arm-in-armin bona caritate[Latin: ‘with good nature’] had become ironic,
damn it!“ The rampant irony of his times had placed Kierkegaard in an
awkward position: He himself could not make use of irony, because it
would have been interpreted as merely a “newly invented and extremely
titillating form of irony.“ So he had to do just the opposite, making himself
into “the object of everyone’s irony.”
Kierkegaard’s presentation of what had been in reality a very complex
course of events is so oversimplified that it hovers somewhere between
parody and falsification. It appears to ooze fiction from every pore, an im-
pression that is strengthened when Kierkegaard portrays himself as having
been in charge of the entire affair: “I had now calculated that the situation
would be the dialectically appropriate one in which to reestablish indirect
communication. Although I was occupied solely with religious works, I
dared to count on these daily doses of mob vulgarity as a form of negative
support that would keep the situation sufficiently chilly to prevent the reli-
gious communication from being altogether too direct or gaining me adher-
ents too directly....Andeven those who had not been warned off by this
would be disturbed by the additional circumstance that I had voluntarily
exposed myself to all of this, plunged into it, a sort of madness....Ahyes,
and again, ah yes, because viewed dialectically, it was precisely Christian
self-denial. ”Self-assertion is not denied its due in Kierkegaard’s Christian
self-denial, which looks for all the world like a grandiose bit of theatrical
self-promotion, what with all the many metaphors of dramatic conceal-
ment: “costume, ”“finery, ”“suit of clothing. ”
This tendency is also clear in the journals. As the years passed, the loose
autobiographical sketches that had long been a specialty of Kierkegaard’s
became so tautly drawn and so frequently repeated that as art, they risked
ending as cliche ́s, while as psychology they began to verge on kitsch. These
self-portraits lost more and more in detail and depth, while on the other
hand theroleof self-chronicler itself gained in the sharpness of its contours.
Kierkegaard never tired of presenting himself as a marginal figure who,
from his exposed position, was capable of seeing many decisive develop-
ments that had gone unnoticed by other people. This role was often por-