Soren Kierkegaard

Pro dii immortales. By the immortal gods! It is amazing that Kierkegaard
evendeignsto make a fuss about what a random man has said about a random
hat. But for one thing, Kierkegaard never entirely got over the episode with
The Corsair, and for another, he was absolutely unable to ignore it. And
indeed, in his journals he was more than happy to cite Poul Martin Møller’s
remark—that he was “so polemical, through and through ”that it was “quite
frightful”—as a sort of legitimation of his polemical potshots at more or less
everything that moved.
Rather surprisingly, Kierkegaard’s relation to “the vulgarity of the mob”
mirrors his relation to what he called “the coteries, ”by which he meant
the intellectual cliques and cultural clans of Copenhagen that had more or
less closed their ranks to him. “If only they had given me my due as an
author in the beginning, ”he sighed in 1848, “then I would have had an
opportunity to speak about myself in a different fashion. People would easily
have seen how far I am from being haughty. ”Heiberg was among those
who at an early date had missed the opportunity to accommodate Kierke-
gaard’s need for acknowledgment, having chosen instead to turn thumbs
down, or at least to a forty-five-degree angle. Kierkegaard could not get
over this demeaning treatment, and in weak moments—of which he had
more than a few—he indulged in wild and exuberant fantasies of literary
success: “Besides, after having suffered the most extreme pains of melancho-
lia through having to be sacrificed, and suffering all possible abuse in the
world, it is not impossible that it could suddenly be God’s will for me that
I would in fact become a success in the world.”
This was never God’s will for Kierkegaard, and as time passed and the
cliques consolidated themselves more and more, he saw to his dismay that
not only was he being ignored, but that he had also been the victim of
underhanded intrigue, and for this reason he decided—with the assistance
of Governance—to carry out a series of tactical maneuvers that would shat-
ter the image of him held by the members of the various cliques. He re-
ported on this in detail: “My tactic has always been to sow discord in the
coteries. And now in retrospect I see once again how Governance has
helped me. The great coterie is Mynster, Heiberg, Martensen, and com-
pany. Because Mynster was a part of it, even if he never condescended to
admit to it openly. This coterie thus intended to destroy me by means of
negative resistance. Then there was the fortunate circumstance that I vener-
ated Mynster so absolutely. This was an annoyance to them, and in fact the
coterie could not get the rumor mill running. Then time passed and Heiberg
became less and less active. Furthermore, he saw that he had been wrong,
that I had absolutely no intention of becoming an aesthetician. Perhaps he
even had a bit of a feeling of having wronged me....Then I took his