Soren Kierkegaard

higher than the indirect variety, a view that Kierkegaard—very directly—
opposed, invoking an almost Nietzschean authority: “Indirect communica-
tion is the highest communication. But it really only exists in the category
of the superhuman. Therefore, I have never dared to use it under my own
name.”Fourth of all, it was outrageous for this village pastor—if it really was
a village pastor, which Kierkegaard had many doubts about—to publish an
anonymouspolemic: “At one point in the book, the village pastoranony-
mouslyconfronts me,naming my name, arguing heatedly—in an enchanting
lecture! objectively!—against concealment. Look, this is nonsense. And I do
not want to get involved in nonsense. This is precisely the sort of objective
nonsense I am constantly battling against. And all the bluster to the effect
that they are anonymous for the sake of the cause, et cetera—all these once-
popular slogans are already well on their way out.”
This having been said, the matter ought to have been made reasonably
clear, even to a narrow-minded village pastor. As had happened so often
before, Kierkegaard’s polemical rejoinders became less and less suitable for
use as he injected more and more aggressive bombast into his sentences,
draft after draft. Therefore, on a couple of new pages he produced a frac-
tional and compressed version of the original manuscript. Here he put for-
ward a “few preconditions” for future discussions, stipulating that, for one
thing, the village pastor would have to alter the title of his piece; for another,
he would have to indicate precisely which of Kierkegaard’s books he had
read; and finally he would have to reveal his name. Kierkegaard concluded:
“I dare say that I am... both accommodating and willing. But there is one
thing I want: The situation must make sense, it must be orderly, there must
be some decency—or I won’t get involved.” Like so many others, these
lines never reached their intended reader.
The conclusion of Kierkegaard’s canon was a waiting game.For Self-
Examination: Recommended to the Present Agewas published on September
10, 1851—the eleventh anniversary of the day on which Regine had agreed
to Kierkegaard’s proposal of marriage. Kierkegaard had conceived the idea
of the book in May 1850, and the manuscript had taken shape quite quickly.
The book was formed out of three sermons he had at one point considered
delivering—before he had been overwhelmed by his sermon at the Citadel
Church. The first of these sermons was thirty-eight pages long, however,
and had it actually been delivered as a sermon, it would have needed to be
reworked, while the other two were each seventeen pages long and thus of
a length that would have permitted their use as actual sermons. In this work
he once again gave Mynster a little prod: “Permit me to state exactly where
I stand, so to speak. There is in our midst a very reverend old man, the
leading prelate of this Church. What he has wanted, what his ‘sermons’