Preface

The Preface opens with a comparison between the age and a clearance sale. Everything in the world of ideas can be had at such a giveaway price that one wonders whether anyone will bother to bid. Every philosopher claims to have doubted everything and gone further — past faith, past the old beginnings — without ever dropping a word about how it was done. Descartes, at least, was honest: he modestly confined his method to himself, confessed it grew from his own earlier botched learning, and never turned his doubt into a civic duty. Not so the present age.

Into this market, Johannes de Silentio introduces himself as a humble non-philosopher — a freelance writer who writes because for him it is a luxury that becomes more agreeable the fewer people read it. He has not understood the System, whether it exists or whether it is finished. He does not subscribe to it and does not sign himself over to it. He foresees his fate in an age that has drawn a line through passion in order to serve science: to be entirely ignored, or to be cut up into paragraphs by some industrious registrar and treated like a grammar exercise.

The Preface ends with a bow: "I prostrate myself in the deepest submission before every systematic peeping-Tom: This is not the System; this has not the slightest thing to do with the System. I call down every blessing upon the System and upon the Danish shareholders in this Omnibus — for a tower it will scarcely become." The signature is: "Most respectfully, Johannes de Silentio." In five short paragraphs Kierkegaard has established the tone — satirical, self-aware, scrupulously outside the dominant idiom — that the rest of the book will maintain.