ABSTRACT
In his book about Søren Kierkegaard from 1892, the philosopher Harald Høffding (1843-1931) wrote that from his years as a boy, that is, as a 12-year-old, he remembered The Moment’s “small white booklets and the stir that they caused in the minds and discussions of the grown-ups,” but that he only later became acquainted himself with the “serious message that they contained.”1 When in the winter of 191516 at the age of 73, in connection with writing his memoirs, he cast a glance back on his life and realized that “Kierkegaard’s problem”—and by this he meant, if one can judge from the context, the relation between knowing and personal appropriation, or between objectivity and subjectivity-“has pursued me from my youth, determined the direction of my life, again and again led me to an inward conception of many things, to a stricter testing of myself, to a disdain for what does not have personal truth.”2 What Kierkegaard wanted, namely, honesty, gave Høffding a direction. The demand for honesty led him in the years of his youth to Kierkegaard and to the understanding of Christianity that Kierkegaard advocated, and led him in the years of his manhood again away from Kierkegaard and from Christianity.
