When Kierkegaard Got Cancelled

A story about Søren Kierkegaard getting dragged in 1845 somehow turned into a very modern internet brawl: less “deep thoughts on philosophy,” more “who even proofread this?” The article lays out a juicy old-school scandal. Romantic poet Peder Ludvig Møller slammed Kierkegaard’s work, hinted that a sleazy fictional seducer was basically the philosopher himself, and pulled the whole mess toward The Corsair, Copenhagen’s notorious gossip-and-satire paper. It’s all wonderfully dramatic already: wounded pride, bad reviews, hidden media ties, and a thinker who wanted a quiet life but got sucked into public humiliation instead.

But the real fireworks came from the comment section, where readers instantly stopped talking about Danish literary history and started fact-checking the article itself. One commenter snapped, “This is Søren, not Emil,” while another twisted the knife with, “I know nobody reads the things posted here before commenting, but this is pretty egregious.” Ouch. Then came the style police: one reader declared the piece “full of AI tells,” pointing to phrases like “surface-level similarities” and the dreaded em-dashes as proof the writing felt machine-made. That, in turn, triggered a perfect meta-joke from another commenter: instead of debating Kierkegaard or “the universality of the human condition,” everyone was now arguing about punctuation. Peak HN—that’s Hacker News, where the side quest often becomes the main event. In the end, the biggest plot twist wasn’t Kierkegaard being “cancelled.” It was the community putting the article on trial instead.