GoKawiilThe year was 1845. At the time, the country of Denmark was experiencing a cultural renaissance of sorts. This “golden age” swelled with nationalistic fervor, artistic innovation, and intense political debate. Among its many rising cultural voices was Peder Ludvig Møller, a romantic poet and critic who often clashed with the rigid Hegelian orthodoxy seeping into the academy. He fancied himself a public figure in the mold of Lord Byron – sophisticated, worldly, and drawn to art and scandal.
Rising alongside him was Søren Kierkegaard.
The two men shared surface-level similarities. They were close in age and both studied at the University of Copenhagen. Each also saw himself as a rebel against the rote conventions of the day, yet their defiance took strikingly different forms. Møller’s public notoriety stood in sharp contrast to Kierkegaard’s introspective methods, defense of fidelity, and relentless pursuit of religious truth.
A confrontation between these two would ignite one of the most notorious clashes in Danish literary history.
Bad Press
The controversy began on December 22, 1845.
Around this time, Kierkegaard completed his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, which he regarded as the capstone of his work to date. With the tome finished, he intended to step back from public drama. He even toyed with the idea of pursuing the quiet life of a rural pastor. But the peaceful transition he envisioned never arrived.
The trouble began when Møller published an uncharitable review of one of Kierkegaard’s books in his well-regarded Gaea Aesthetic Yearbook.
Møller’s took aim at Kierkegaard’s philosophical novel Stages on Life’s Way, particularly the section featuring the character Johannes the Seducer. As the unsavory name suggests, this Don Juan figure offers a brazen defense of refined hedonism. Møller insinuated that many of his more vulgar antics were thinly veiled reflections of Kierkegaard himself, especially in light of the philosopher’s famously turbulent broken engagement to Regine Olsen.
Worse still, Møller seemed to miss the point of the book entirely. Taking Kierkegaard’s irony at face value, he ended up celebrating the libertine worldview of Johannes. In doing so, Møller did more than scorn the author – he mangled the work as an endorsement of the very message Kierkegaard sought to oppose.
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