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The Corsair Affair
And Articles Related to The Writings
By Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1982 Howard V Hong
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14075-9
CHAPTER 1
Articles, 1842-1851
PUBLIC CONFESSION
To be disparaged and belittled undeservedly certainly can make one outraged for a time, but the proud mind quickly bounces back again and regains its composure simply because the charge was not true. To be praised undeservedly, to be attributed a worth that a person does not feel he himself has, to be extolled for something he has not done, something he may not even be capable of doing or is too lazy to do—has a far more profound, painful, and humiliating effect; by and large it is a dangerous test for the weak human heart. The vain mind may be tempted to confirm people in this mistaken belief; awareness of one's own unworthiness does not promptly give a person the courage to admit to himself and others the truth of the matter. Yet the undeserved praise burns in the soul. Even though it was not his fault that he got what does not belong to him, he not only feels undeserving of the honor but also feels an indirect reproach that is all the more emphatic because it does not come in a hostile, infuriating form but as a kind and friendly approval that makes him feel his unworthiness ever more deeply.
All this is said primarily for my own sake and to provide the text on which I wish to speak to myself. Many times during the last four months, I have enjoyed the undeserved honor of being regarded and considered to be the author of a number of substantial, informative, and witty articles in various newspapers, of several fliers that were fliers only outwardly, since their contents were solid, weighty, and unpadded, assuring them much more than an ephemeral significance. For a time, I tried to conceal from myself how much indirect reproach there was in this, but the more frequently it was repeated, the more difficult it became for me. Finally, the accusing voice inside me became so loud that I tried in vain to escape its judgment. Four months have gone by again, it said, and what have you achieved in that time? Now if you really were the author of all that good men have ascribed to you, or even if this were an inordinate wish, so much more so since at times you were said to be the author of something altogether different—if you had written any part of it, what a splendid activity you would then have to look back upon. Not only would you have benefited by your work, but your example, as the pastor is wont to say, would have been an encouragement to others. Then your life would not have been consigned to well-deserved oblivion, for your work would have made it unforgettable. And not only that, it perhaps would be analyzed, set up as an example, perhaps in Folkebladet or in Naturen, Mennesket og Borgeren. It would be said of you: So young and yet such a hard worker. They would point at you and say: Look, there he goes, indefatigable at work. Though I grow old and the years wipe out most of my memory, that impression will never be erased. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed before the good people who had fostered and spread such prepossessing ideas about me. My humiliated soul rallied to a firm resolve. You must openly confess your weakness, your idleness, or there is no hope of improvement for you. So here I stand, face to face with the reading public in this momentous moment: I acknowledge my frailty, I have not written anything, not one line; I confess my weakness, I have no part in the whole thing or any part of it—no part at all, not even the slightest. Be strong, my soul, I confess to not even having read some of it. They will severely condemn me as I deserve to be; they will give up the inflated opinions of me that they have fostered up until now—it is my just punishment. They will not tolerate my being considered the author of a single line and will let me stand completely stripped as a warning to the young—I feel the courage to be reconciled to this. But having borne my punishment, I beg my contemporaries on the basis of the moral courage I have demonstrated not to surrender hope for me completely. Someday I may live up to some of the expectations they once had for me. I do not doubt that my contemporaries will be good-natured enough to do this. Far from doubting their good nature, I rather fear it, fear that they will again regard me as an author, attribute to me an enormous capacity for work and collaboration in the service of the age. But this I cannot allow, for the sake of my own moral improvement I cannot tolerate it, and therefore I beg the good people who show an interest in me never to regard me as the author of anything that does not bear my name.
But it is not only for my own sake and with my own moral improvement in mind that I openly and candidly admit and acknowledge my unworthiness of the honor intended for me; it is just as much for the sake of those to whom it is rightly due, even if their modesty bids them conceal their names. We live in a remarkable age. The prospect of an extraordinary yield of imperishable results is so positive that this age will be unforgettable to the coming ages, which will owe everything to it. How very plausible, then, that a grateful posterity will remember all the heroes who fought for the good cause. If, then, I did not hasten to explain, to my own derision, that I had no part in it, how very plausible that I, altogether undeservedly, would become immortal instead of these men of distinction whose lives have made them worthy of it. Precisely because the age is so remarkable, silence on my part is all the more unforgivable. Here it is a question not only of the brief honor and glory that can fall to heroes in their lifetime but also of the immortal honor that will endure until the end of the world.
Yes, the age is truly remarkable. It is worth the trouble to heed the earnest, profound, significant signs, to heed the great forces stirring in literature everywhere in so many ways, to watch for the hints that everywhere point to the fullness of time. It is the system toward which the age is directing its efforts. Pro£ R. Nielsen already has published twenty-one logical that constitute the first part of a logic that in turn constitutes the first part of an all-encompassing encyclopedia, as intimated on the jacket, although its size is not more explicitly given, presumably not to intimidate, since people certainly will venture to conclude that it will be extremely large. An encyclopedia! I happen to have in my possession Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedia—as yet incomplete—I have only twenty-eight folio volumes. It has often been encouraging to me to think that Professor R. Nielsen is writing such a book. He already has written twenty-one and several years ago published a subscription prospectus for a systematic ethics that will amount to at least twenty-four printed sheets when it is finished. At least that was the word at one time, but since it is still not completed, it may turn out to be forty-eight sheets—when it is finished. Who has forgotten how much Bastholm has lying in his high desk? Who failed to notice that Dr. Beck has abolished religion in order to make room for the system? Yes, our age is remarkable, is profoundly stirred; it seems as if the system were already here. When I read some time ago that a young scholar had sent a sealed package to a scientific society to be placed in its archives, I thought: it is the system. Who knows, maybe it is the system; maybe we already have the system in a sealed package.
Everything indicates that the decisive moment is approaching. There are a yeastiness and ferment that cannot possibly fizzle out. There is a vigorous party spirit astir everywhere. This, of course, must not be interpreted to mean that we have only one party that is vigorous, for that, after all, would not be a vigorous party spirit but a vigorous spirit within the party. No, there is a vigorous party spirit in a variety of parties. We have Liberals, Ultra-Liberals, Conservatives, Ultra-Conservatives, juste-milieu. In politics we have every conceivable and inconceivable worthiness. We have Kantians, Schleiermacherians, and Hegelians; these in turn are divided into two large parties: the one party comprises those who have not worked their way into Hegel but nevertheless are Hegelians; the other comprises those who have gone beyond Hegel but nevertheless are Hegelians. The third party, the genuine Hegelians, is very small. We have five anti-infant Baptists, seven Baptists, nine Anabaptists. Among the Baptists there are three who think the adults should be baptized in salt water, two who think they ought to be baptized in fresh water, and one who mediates between the two factions and insists on brackish water. We have two Straussians. We have a tailor on Utterslev Heath who has formed a new sect consisting of himself and two tailor apprentices. For some time there was a lot of talk that he had gained a third disciple from another trade, but just as he was about to capture him there was a quarrel that caused the neophyte to forsake him and take one of the apprentices along, and the person from the other trade also came up with a new belie£ Right now in Pistol Street someone is supposed to have retired into solitude to think up a new religion, and his conclusions are expectantly awaited in the neighboring streets, Christen Bernikov Street and Peder Madsen's Alley. Party spirit is stirring everywhere. Soon there will be insufficient manpower to have one person for each party. Our age is as important and significant as any previous age. That a man is a great man and as such amounts to something has been heard before, but that every man is a party is unheard o£ (No wonder, then, that no one pays any attention to an experienced, earnest, stirring Right Reverend voice when it speaks—if not daily, at least once a month—for it is only a great man who speaks, not a party; it is only a solitary voice, not a party voice.) But this is important in other respects as well. It is an enormous advancement, analogous in our day only to the police-court judge who traveled in Sjælland-he was not only the judge in the court but also the jury. And that is not all. Soon one may well have to represent several parties, just like that remarkable man who was mustered by Lippe-Detmold and Schaumburg-Lippe in the field as a company, who on one side represented Lippe-Detmold and on the other Schaumburg-Lippe, on the one side was an infantryman and on the other was a cavalryman.
It is a momentous age. If anyone is still unconvinced by my statements, if he does not feel the tremendous energy in every individual, to say nothing of the sum of them, then I will cite another feature. Carstensen has gained importance not by virtue of the way he wears his hair, for on that point we all acknowledge him as master, but by virtue of his head; Professor Heiberg's importance has dwindled. This is a gallant expression of the momentousness of the age, a bold thought; I almost swoon at the thought, and perhaps I shall be unable to bear it beyond the moment I write it down here.
Everyone agrees that it would be incomparably foolish to think that nothing is going to come of this prodigious movement, this tremendous effort. I am no prophet and willingly admit that I am the least competent in Troy, but I, too, spy the system: there it is—twenty-eight volumes and Bastholm's aphorisms! We cannot go backward; Hegel's Logic has stood the test of Prof Nielsen's thought. The moment approaches; for the last time Stilling has undertaken to administer extreme unction to us, to establish us in the proper point of view, and if we will only stay there, it will come, it will surely come. But when it comes, what is the future going to undertake? There is nothing for it to do; we have done it all. It can blissfully rest in the system, it can read at leisure the twenty-eight volumes, which were no easy matter to write. But if posterity is going to be able to live so securely and carefreely in systematic contemplation, it will also have time to remember how much effort was required to attain that state, and it will feel called upon never to forget what it owes to our age and its heroes. What worries such an attainment has cost our authors, and what peace and quiet at night it has cost the reading public! The reading public never did have peace, for it had to be ready at all times, because the system was supposed to come, the one and only saving truth.
Since it would be difficult to give a precise idea of this movement and the painstaking research involved, I would rather suggest what it required by relating an experience I once had. In my younger days, I liked to watch the National Guard drill at the parade grounds. During a royal review, it so happened that a major stood facing his battalion when he should have been facing the other way. An experienced army officer present, no doubt fearful that this mistake would not escape the late king's sharp scrutiny, rode over to him and whispered softly: "Major, you are facing the wrong way. You must turn around." The major was no pighead. He willingly took the advice and in a loud voice shouted, "Battalion, all together, about-face!" making matters still worse. If that battalion were the reading public, one can imagine what it would suffer in having a new major make the same mistake every day. Still ringing in my ears are the hundreds upon hundreds of voices shouting to all of us: "Battalion, all together, about-face!" The battalion continues, as they say in the military, to mark time and yet does not make any headway, because it is constantly told: "Battalion, all together, about-face!"
But why recall these tiresome impressions. Let us rather dwell on the cheerful prospect ahead of us, when the system will have been discovered and the future will commemorate every ever so minor hero in our age of heroes. But that is why each and every one must make his contribution, so that this honor does not fall upon the unworthy. I have contributed my bit by confessing that I have no part in the whole thing, not the slightest.
POSTSCRIPT
My thesis that undeserved praise has a far greater effect than criticism, even if the latter is deserved, has been demonstrated to be true in my own slight experience. In a review in Fædrelandet, Dr. Beck has extricated my dissertation from oblivion in the reading world. My esteemed critic summarized the contents of the book, but I actually learned nothing new from it. He finally concludes that I deserve to be criticized because there are several allusions he does not understand. Well, admittedly he did not say it exactly that way; he said, in fact, that the majority do not understand them. But since I cannot possibly assume that Dr. Beck had the opportunity to poll the opinion of the majority, Dr. Beck no doubt is using this expression as a party man. It must, therefore, be regarded as a genuinely emotional party expression; "the majority" or "most" is the superlative of the word "many," which is ordinarily used. That being the case, it is entirely appropriate for me not to reflect on it but to limit myself to my first statement, that Dr. Beck has not understood them. The problem is to explain how Dr. Beck, who otherwise is a dialectician and an expert in categories, has not perceived that several other conclusions can be arrived at from the sentence presented. There are several allusions that Dr. Beck has not understood. From that Dr. Beck concludes that I deserve criticism. What if someone drew the conclusion that Dr. Beck deserves criticism? This conclusion is much closer to the point, because, after all, my treatise was not intended for Dr. Beck alone, whereas Dr. B. proprio motu [on his own initiative] has set himself up as my critic and thus may justifiably be asked to take the trouble to understand. The second conclusion could read: There are several allusions that Dr. Beck did not understand; therefore, the author deserves praise. A third conclusion could be set forth this way: There are several allusions that Dr. B. did not understand; therefore Dr. B. deserves praise—in other words, it indicates a laudable naiveté, but it by no means follows that the author deserves criticism. It is incredible that so much can be drawn from the fact that Dr. B. has not understood; would that one might conclude as much from what Dr. B. has understood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Corsair Affair by Søren Kierkegaard, Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong. Copyright © 1982 Howard V Hong. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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