Soren Kierkegaard

but had also written of some of the most important contemporary philoso-
phers in a manner that the committee found “extremely improper and offen-
sive.” Schopenhauer published his two responses to these essay competitions
under the collective titleThe Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, accompa-
nying them with a lengthy introduction in which he ironized about the
narrow-minded verdict of the Danish Scientific Society. He was certainly
within his rights in doing so,if—and here was Kierkegaard’s objection—if
in so doing he had not placed himself in a ludicrous conflict with his own
ethics: “Yes, but it is not inexplicable, however. Representing as he does—
and with such talent—a view of life that is so misanthropic, he is so ex-
tremely delighted... that the Scientific Society in Trondheim (Good Lord,
in Trondheim!) has crowned his prize essay.... And when Copenhagen
failed to crown another prize essay by Schopenhauer, he rages over it, quite
seriously, in the introduction that accompanies its publication.”
Kierkegaard’s objection highlighted the central point in his criticism of
Schopenhauer, the absence of reduplication, the distance between theory
and practice. This was given a uniquely dramatic twist in connection with
Kierkegaard’s reflections on Schopenhauer’s “fate in Germany”: “Schopen-
hauer has truly learned to appreciate the fact that... within philosophy
there is a class of people who live off philosophy under the guise of teaching
it....Schopenhauer is incomparably coarse in this connection.” So far, so
good, but now things begin to go wrong: “Schopenhauer is no character,
no ethical character, does not even have the character of a Greek philoso-
pher, much less that of a Christian police officer....Howdoes Schopen-
hauer live? He lives a withdrawn existence, occasionally emitting a thunder-
storm of coarse epithets—which are ignored. Yes, see, there we have it.”
Kierkegaard viewed making oneself a spokesman for pessimism—while oc-
cupying such a privileged position—as the very incarnation of sophistry,
since “sophistry is to be found in the distance between what one understands
and what one is. The person who does not enter into the character of what
he understands is a sophist.”
Kierkegaard was far from the first person to raise this objection to Scho-
penhauer. And to this accusation Schopenhauer replied quite appropriately
that it would be quite peculiar to require that a moral philosopher not
recommend that others adhere to a higher standard of virtue than what he
himself has attained. We could add that this was more or less what Kierke-
gaard himself had been doing when he repeatedly called himself a poet, and
that his criticism of Schopenhauer’s lack of reduplication really only makes
sense when it is understood as displaced or indirect self-criticism. Further-
more, Schopenhauer did in fact follow his own ascetic instructions to a
considerable extent: Regardless of the weather, he took long walks in the