ABSTRACT

On 31 October 1841, the freshly graduated Master of Philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote in a letter from Berlin to his friend, Emil Boesen, in Copenhagen: “I have begun to attend lectures. I heard one by Marheineke with which I was quite pleased, for although it did not contain anything new, it was very nice to hear much of that which one is accustomed to seeing in print. Schelling has not yet begun.”1 The biographical background to this brief statement is probably commonplace: on 25 October, that is, just after the defense of his master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony, and just two weeks after the end of his engagement fiasco, Kierkegaard had sailed with the postal ship from Copenhagen to Berlin, where he stayed until 6 March 1842. The purpose of the stay was, on one hand, to work on Either/Or and, on the other hand, to attend the lectures of Schelling, who in 1840 had been hired as professor in Berlin in order “to wipe out the dragon seed of Hegelian pantheism” in German philosophy.2