Soren Kierkegaard

and took out a book called ‘The New Testament of Our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ.’”
Kierkegaard’s words border on the utterly platitudinous, but they were
meant in deadly earnest, which is clear from various bits of evidence, includ-
ing a piece in the seventh issue ofThe Momentthat lays out in some detail
the danger the poet poses to religion. Here, once again, the expose ́is under-
taken by a “talented police officer,” who precisely by dissembling and by
disguising himself as “a poet,” has been able to see through the many masks
and various getups of the day. With several deft, dialectical moves, the
piece—titled “Why Does ‘The Human Race’ Love ‘The Poet’ Most of
All?”—presents “the poet” as a deceiver and illusionist par excellence. Ev-
eryone loves him because he appeals so evocatively to “the imagination”
that people simply forget that his writing is fictional and confuse it with
reality. Here again, the “talented police officer” could be arrested for a
number of aesthetic crimes, including his past as a “poet,” but since the
forces of law and order have been temporarily suspended, we will settle for
making the point, which is that Kierkegaard’s criticisms are, among other
things, more or less obvious self-criticisms.
Something similar applies with respect to the remarks about nonsense
(subsequently cited so often) which appeared in the ninth issue ofThe Mo-
ment: “The human race is shrewd. It has compelled existence to reveal its
secret. It has got wind of the fact that if one wants to have life made easy
(and that is exactly what we want), it can be easily done. All one needs
to do is to make oneself and make being a human being more and more
insignificant—then life becomes easier and easier. Be nonsense, and you
will see, all difficulties will disappear!... Be nonsense. Have one opinion
today, another tomorrow, and then once again have the one you had the
day before yesterday, and a new one on Friday. Be nonsense. Make yourself
into many people. Or parcel yourself out, have one opinion anonymously,
another under your own name, one orally, another in writing, one as a
public official, another as a private citizen,... and you will see, all difficul-
ties will disappear.” “Nonsense” is the category of lightness, of noncommit-
tal and experimental hovering, of the mutability of the subject. But precisely
in being all this, nonsense is also an insidious or involuntary metaphor for
Kierkegaard’s own works, which merely by virtue of the rapidly changing
characters, the exploding population of the portrait gallery found in the
pseudonymous works, and the edifying discourses in very varying spirits
provide an almost classic demonstration of the behavior of a person who
makes himself into “many,” who parcels out his “self,” who has one “one
opinion anonymously, another under [his] own name.”