Kierkegaard and P.M. Moller on Immortality
By Tamara-monet Marks

P.M. Moller and His Relation to S.A. Kierkegaard
Although virtually unknown today outside of Danish philosophical circles, Moller (1794-1838) was, during his lifetime, esteemed as one of Denmark’s most loved poets, and beginning in 1831 he held the position of professor of philosophy at the University of Denmark. While at the university Moller taught Moral and Greek Philosophy, and his early philosophical position has been regarded as Hegelian. Kierkegaard began his university studies in 1830, and the young professor made a deep impression upon him.
During 1834-36 two events occurred that transformed Moller’s philosophy and also influenced his relation to Kierkegaard. The first was the death of Moller’s wife in 1834, which caused him to question the adequacy of Hegel’s system. The second was the publication of some articles by Kierkegaard in 1836 in a journal called Copenhagen’s Flying Post. In these articles Kierkegaard attacked Orla Lehmann, the young leader of the liberal student movement. This attack pleased the conservative Moller, and the two developed a deep friendship. Despite the nineteen-year difference in their ages, the two shared similar views regarding Danish politics, a growing distrust of the Hegelian system, and a concern about the state of the Danish clergy. With the death of Moller in 1838, at the age of forty-four, Kierkegaard lost his nearest congenial friend, the person with whom, above all others, he could discuss freely his ideas and receive a sympathetic and intelligent response. After Moller’s death Kierkegaard cherished his memory and faithfully read his Posthumous Works when they were published in 1839-43. Kierkegaard also dedicated his book The Concept of Anxiety (1844) to Moller, with the following tribute:
To the late Professor Poul Martin Moller
The happy lover of Greek culture, the admirer of Homer,
the confidant of Socrates, the interpreter of Aristotle,
Denmark’s joy in “Joy over Denmark,” though “widely
traveled” always “remembered in the Danish summer,”
the object of my profound admiration, my profound loss,
this work is dedicated.

This dedication should illustrate, if not Kierkegaard’s indebtedness to Professor Moller, then at least his unyielding affection.

Moller’s Reflections on Philosophical Systems and Personal Immortality
The work by Moller that beyond all others influenced Kierkegaard was “Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs of the Immortality of Human Beings With Reference to the Most Recent Literature on the Subject.” H.P. Rhode stresses that it was this work on immortality that was Moller’s most important contribution to philosophy in Denmark, and most notably for the young Kierkegaard, who was “notoriously occupied” with it.
Moller’s essay takes up two aspects of the question of immortality, an analysis of the historical source of the question and a proposal for dealing with the question in a new way. Although most of his essay is taken up with the historical analysis, his notion of immortality also clearly comes out, and it is this proposal that was later picked up by Kierkegaard.
Moller analyzes the historical situation of the question as mired down in a hopeless impasse, between monists and pantheists, on the one hand, and dualists and theists, on the other. For Moller it is the debate between these two schools of thought that has led to the confusion surrounding the belief in the immortality of the soul.
On the monist/pantheistic side, the leader is plainly Spinoza, but much of the rest of modern philosophy must wind up here as well. When Spinoza applies the principle of unity to the science of his time, Leibniz, convinced of the multiplicity of things, reacts by developing his theory of monads. The fact that Leibniz adds the principle of a pre-established harmony to his doctrine, however, does not amend the essential absence of unity in his philosophy. While the addition of this principle is a good move, in the end it fails to prove more that a mechanical combining of the concepts of unity and multiplicity. By constructing a philosophical system that assumes a multiplicity of substances that simultaneously exist as eternal and independent, Leibniz renders superfluous the existence of an infinite essence.
Thus the spirit of Leibniz, which animates so much of the philosophy of Moller’s day, culminates in pantheism. Moller sees the new philosophical system of Hegel as a “logical pantheism,” constructed such that personal immortality can find no place in it. Moller sees the Hegelian system as holding that “one life permeates all” (that is, the Hegelian world-soul, the unfolding of spirit), and in this basic pantheism “the reality of the individual personality is lost. The absolute spirit may be said to be immortal in some sense or another, but you and I may not.
On the pluralist/theistic side things are no better. Narrow-minded theists, fearing pantheistic doctrines, actually further the opposition by turning God into a hyper-specific, immovable idol. Such staunch opposition to pantheism cannot revive the belief in a personal God or the immortality of the soul. On the contrary, if one denies an overall unity to existence-if one denies pantheism altogether-the immediate result is disunity, a multiplicity of isolated beings and objects. In opposition to modern day theists, Moller claims that they present a personal God whose finite essence becomes limited by the reality he posits in the world. In an attempt to preserve autonomy for human beings, theists create an obscure dualistic picture of the world, in which on one side there is an absolute God and on the other there is the rest of the world.
From Moller’s point of view, both the pantheistic and the theistic standpoints are one-sided. The pantheists claim that “God is all” and “There is nothing but God,” while the theists object that “The world is not part of God” and “God is not part of the world.” Moller maintains that both sides have outlived their usefulness. Pantheism has been a “theological preparatory school which each student must attend before reaching true religious insight.” Now, however, it is time to recognize that both the claims and the counterclaims of the pantheists and theists can be equally affirmed and denied, but that a more developed truth is expressed when both the thesis and the synthesis are stated as presenting half the truth.
Yet how is this to be done? The dilemma that results from Hegel’s world-view is the question: how does one reconcile the possibility of the unity of existence and the seeming multiplicity (individuation) of existence? According to Moller, this question arises from necessity. His interest in the question of immortality is motivated by the individual who is interested in one’s own personal immortality, not the general immortality of Hegel’s world-soul. While the unity of pantheism is a justifiable truth, according to Moller, any conviction of a personal immortality requires the conviction of a multiplicity of objects and beings, since it is through multiplicity that one arrives at individuals. Both the unity and the multiplicity of things must be fully recognized before the proof of immortality of the soul can be restored as a viable doctrine.
Left at this point, Moller’s essay seems to be calling for a new philosophical system, able to take full account of both the unity and the multiplicity of the world. Such a system would have to be more commodious and subtler than those of Leibniz or Hegel, but it would be a system all the same.
Kierkeggard, however, evidently found in Moller’s essay, and in his talks with Moller, ideas that pointed in exactly the opposite direction, away from systems and toward a more personal approach to the question than was common in the philosophy of the time. Moller has learned from the experience of losing his wife that systematizing is not enough, and he knows of cases of other philosophers and scientists who have felt the same way.
Those scientists who in their youth contributed the most to give philosophy its form have in their old age relinquished the abstract pantheism that was basic to their philosophy; of some of them it is known that the bereavement of someone to whom they were linked with strong sympathetic ties opened their eyes to the emptiness of their world-view. That such occurrences are found in the realm of science indicates that the systematic resentation of a world-view is not the ultimate ground upon which the conviction of its validity can be based.

The evidence for or against personal immortality thus cannot begin from the construction of some great philosophical system of the world, but instead from a personal conviction about what kind of world this must be if there is, or is not, room for personal immortality within it. Moller goes on later:
He who is capable of reconciling himself with the doctrine of annihilation either fails to learn from experience the knowledge of the infinity of human love, or he lacks the intuitive representation of the brevity of life, or he composes his realm of consciousness from obstinate fragments. The love that views its object as perishable is by necessity of a different nature than the love that knows its object to belong to what eternally exists.

The difference between a person who does, and a person who does not, accept the teaching of personal immortality is thus not merely an intellectual matter but a matter of experience, whether or not one is aware of a kind of human love so infinite that it will not accept that its object is perishable.
For Moller, therefore, the kind of proof that can be given for the idea of personal immortality is different from what is commonly thought of as proof. Once a person has lost the conviction of personal immortality, no amount of mere argumentation will recover it. As he says, “the doctrine of immortality, more than any other thetic proposition, when once shaken in its foundation, can never again dominate the human consciousness as it ought…” It cannot be recovered, he continues, “…unless the negation has developed itself freely in all its consequences. Only then will it become evident whether humanity can live with the world-view consistent with the negation.”
That is to say, the only way to regain the conviction is to examine in detail the consequences which result from a world-view which embraces and maintains the non-existence of personal immortality.

Kierkegard’s Application of Moller’s Reflections
Because Kierkegaard is a much more familiar figure that Moller, I will confine my discussion of Kierkegaard’s application of Moller’s insights to a few points. Briefly, Kierkegaard goes further than Moller regarding the project of making a system of the world, and he expands on Moller’s few remarks about a proof of immortality and uses them to lead into his general thesis about “subjective truth.”
Kierkegaard’s arguments about the limits of systematizing are contained in his central, and longest, book called Concluding Unscientific Postscript, written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. There he argues that, while it is perfectly possible to construct an abstract system of thought, it is not possible to construct a system that will account for everything that concretely exists, in the way that it exists. The reason for this impossibility is perfectly general, and it applies not only to classical systems, such as those of Leibniz and Hegel, but also to contemporary physical theories (as shown, for example, by Julia Watkin in her article entitled “Boom the Earth is Round”). The reason is that such a proposed system must necessarily be incomplete, given the the constantly expanding nature of scientific knowledge, while to do its work the proposed system would have to be complete in every detail. The only being for whom existence as a whole could be a complete system would be God. The person who claims to have such a system, therefore, would either be asserting the humanly impossible or else claiming to be divine.
In Postscript Kierkegaard’s Climacus also develops Moller’s ideas on immortality much further than they had been taken before. Climacus asks: Is it even possible for a person to have an objective, scientific knowledge of one’s own death? The difficulty is that the living individual cannot have an idea of his or her own death, because while living the individual cannot conduct an objective experiment with death without becoming a victim of one’s own experiment. The living individual cannot experience death and live to report the experiment’s results. Some objective knowledge is available-for example, that the death will occur-but when death will happen, and what it means, is not.
For Moller, however, and for Kierkegaard’s Climacus in the Postscript, the matter does not rest there. The question needs to be raised, Kierkegaard’s Climacus says, “subjectively,” in terms of the relation to the individual subject’s life. Becoming “subjective,” in this sense, raises the questions “what is death for the individual living person” “how the idea of it must change a whole person’s life,” and “what it means to prepare oneself for death” since the idea of death and the actuality of it may be two separate things. Becoming subjective places the question of death and immortality in relation to the subject’s life in such a way that, while they cannot comprehend death (much less immortality) while they are living, they are still confronted with the pressing issue of situating themselves with respect to it. Although there is much more Kierkegaard’s Climacus says on the matter here in the Postscript, this is where the crux of the issue is expressed. No general answer to the question of immortality is available, no proof in that sense. Instead, each person has to choose to live a life in the face of inevitable death; only that the life of the person who has conviction of personal immortality will lead a different life from the one who does not.

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