Soren Kierkegaard

ent at an evening gathering on June 4, 1836, on the occasion of the Heiberg
couple’s departure for a journey abroad. (After stops in Berlin, Weimar,
and Leipzig, they would end up in Paris where the son would introduce
his wife to his exiled father, whom he had not seen for fourteen years.)
Hertz did not mention what people spoke about that evening, but we can
easily imagine that the approaching journey gave the conversation a Euro-
pean focus and directed attention to the intellectual state of affairs in the
wake of the departure of the titans Hegel and Goethe, who had died in
1831 and 1832, respectively.
Heiberg had just publishedOn the Significance of Philosophy for the Present
Age, in which he had defined the age as one of profound crisis, which
could only be surmounted by philosophy—not one or another particular
philosophy, indeed, but philosophy as such, because “philosophy is nothing
other than knowledge of the eternal or speculative Idea, Reason, Truth.”
Even though religion, art, and poetry were also “realizations of the infinite,”
philosophy nonetheless occupied the supreme position in the hierarchy be-
cause it contains the truth as aconcept. And Heiberg was a modern man. He
had respect for Christianity, but religious movements, not to speak of pious
feelings, were very foreign to his cool nature. For him “honestbelievers”
were “those who lie only to themselves and not to others.” Thus his ap-
proach to Christianity was purely speculative, and he had no illusions about
the future of religion: “It does no good for us to conceal or disguise the
truth. We must admit to ourselves that in our time religion is primarily of
importance only for the uncultivated, while for the cultivated world it is
something past, something superseded.” Or, to use a provocative growth
metaphor: “Knowledge of humanity... has grown far above knowledge
of divinity.”
With this declaration in support of intellectual aristocracy Heiberg signed
on to a long European tradition ofBildung[German: “cultivation,” here
used as a synonym for the less-known Danish termDannelse] which had
reached its apex in German romanticism and in the philosophical idealism
affiliated with it. Not surprisingly, Heiberg therefore cited Goethe and
Hegel as unquestionably the greatest “representatives of our age.” Goethe,
because he was a speculative poet whose work had attained clarity in the
philosophical didactic poem whose “object is knowledge of the infinite—
philosophical knowledge.” And Hegel, because his “system” was the most
refined and ambitious attempt to formulate the entirety of a “central sci-
ence.” The goal of the dialectical process was absolute knowledge in which
the difference between subject and object, between knowledge and the
object of knowledge, would be annulled. In this process religion, which
was only a subordinate stage, would also be subsumed into philosophy.