Free Kierkegaard by Stephen Backhouse

1834. True to Søren’s form, studies with Martensen were not focussed, and Martensen seems to have been given free rein to choose the subject. Martensen led Søren through readings of Schleiermacher, the eighteenth-century “father of liberal theology.” Open warfare between the two men was still years away, but it is safe to say the two did not hit it off. At twenty-six, Martensen was five years older than Søren, not old enough to command respect yet still young enough to pose something of a professional rival. It is clear that Martensen’s popular style rankled Kierkegaard as much as his subject matter. That a complex set of thoughts could be packaged and presented in an easy manner bothered Søren. In later years, he would cast a critical eye on the young Martensen who “ fascinated the youth and gave them the idea they could swallow everything in half a year.”
    For his part, Martensen claims not to have been impressed with the callow Søren either. In his memoirs, also written long after Kierkegaard had become an avowed enemy, Martensen paints a picture of a mentally sharp but emotionally unbalanced man with “a crack in his sounding board.” It is from Martensen’s memoirs that we get a unique anecdote, which Martensen intends to demonstrate Søren’s temperament. Søren engaged Martensen in the same summer of 1834 that his mother, Anne Kierkegaard, died. At this time Søren paid a visit to the Martensen family home and met with Martensen’s mother. “ My mother has repeatedly confirmed ,” Martensen writes, “that never in her life . . . had she seen a human being so deeply distressed as S. Kierkegaard by the death of his mother.” From this Mrs. Martensen concluded that Søren had “an unusually profound sensibility.” Why did Martensen include this curious story? It was certainly not to redress the utter lack of mention of Anne Kierkegaard in Søren’s own writing. Instead, Martensen offers this incident as demonstration of how Søren’s development became stunted. As the years passed “the sickly nature of his profound sensibility” increasingly got “the upper hand.” Of their tutorials together, Martensen comments, “ I recognized immediately that his was not an ordinary intellect but that he also had an irresistible urge to sophistry, to hair-splitting games, which showed itself at every opportunity and was often tiresome.”

    Hans Lassen Martensen, a promising and popular academic and a private tutor to Kierkegaard. Søren dismissed Martensen as one who “fascinated the youth and gave them the idea they could swallow everything in half a year.” For his part, Martensen claimed that Kierkegaard had “a crack in his sounding board.”
    It was not only Søren’s enemies who noticed his tendency to latch, terrier-like, onto an argument and not let go. His friends too were concerned that his contentious nature would get the best of him. After one social engagement, Møller berated Søren for being so polemical all the time, a caution that Søren took to heart and mentioned in his journals more than once. Nevertheless, it was his arch, argumentative manner that catapulted Søren into the public consciousness.
    Søren’s first published works were examples of rhetoric and juvenile satire. An 1834 essay entitled “A Defence of Woman’s Superior Capacity” was printed in The Flying Post , a showcase for new writers and their ideas. The piece strains to be clever and funny about serious issues, a form typical to student journalism then as now. More significant for his reputation was the public debate that Søren undertook in the autumn of 1835. In November, J. A. Ostermann, an up-and-coming political leader, gave a paper to the Student Union in favour of increased liberalised press freedom. Two weeks later, Søren volunteered to offer a rebuttal. It would be his first foray into public debate. In the talk, titled “Our Journalistic Literature,” Kierkegaard took the position against