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Kierkegaard’s Papirer Available Online!

This brief post is a little holiday weekend gift to Kierkegaard scholars. As most readers of this blog will realize by now, the new 55 volume Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, that purports to be the definitive edition of Kierkegaard’s works in Danish is deeply flawed in that it is not actually complete, but missing quite a bit of the material the editors had originally promised it would include. That is, it was supposed to include everything, but it doesn’t. And some of the stuff that it leaves out, such as Kierkegaard’s unequivocal identification of himself as a universalist, is hugely important to understanding Kierkegaard as a thinker. 

The problem of missing material unfortunately affects the new 12 volume English translation of Kierkegaard’s unpublished works, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, as well, since this work was based on Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter. 

Sadly, so much time and effort went into the production of these two new editions of Kierkegaard’s works, it will be at least a generation before we can expect a genuinely complete and reliable edition of Kierkegaard’s works in either Danish or English. Happily, some, at least some of the volumes of the earlier, but also complete, collection of Kierkegaard’s unpublished works, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer are available online through the Hathi Trust website and are actually searchable via a little field to the left of the text (see illustration above). Unhappily, one can search only a single volume at a time and it appears that vols. 7 and 8 are not available in searchable editions (though one hopes perhaps they will be soon). 

Happily, I have two copies of the Papirer, a nice hardcover that used to belong to the library of Franklin and Marshal College and which I bought on eBay (yes, you can occasionally get stuff like that on eBay!) and an older severely dilapidated softcover edition that I bought many years ago from Bob Perkins and Sylvia Walsh Perkins, and I have decided to tear that one apart, scan it, and throw it up online as one huge searchable file. The scanning shouldn’t actually be too complicated or take too long. What I expect will take some time is finding a suitable home for the huge file once it is ready to be uploaded to the web. I can’t house such a file here on this blog. First, I doubt I would have the space for it. Second, what would happen to it after I died? It clearly needs to be housed on some library website. I’m applying for a sabbatical for the 2027-2028 academic year and plan to use some of that sabbatical on the project of making a searchable edition of the Papirer available online. 

Another bit of happy news is the fact that what is generally considered the best and most reliable edition of Kierkegaard’s published works, the second edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s Samlede Værker (Søren Kierkegaard’s Collected Works) is available online through something called Project Runeberg. This edition, despite being lauded as the best, is not popular among contemporary scholars because it was produced during a period the resurgence of Nordic nationalism and hence uses the old Fraktur, or what the Danes call Gothisk, typeface and many contemporary scholars find it difficult to read. In fact, it takes very little time to read it. Those who don’t have the patience to master it, however, will be pleased to learn that there is a Roman typeface version of each page immediately below the scanned version. 

Unhappily, this version hasn’t been proofread, so it is possible there might be some errors in it. Happily, anyone who has the truly minimal amount of patience that is required to learn to read Fraktur, can get some valuable proofreading experience, or “service” credit, for helping out Project Runeberg by proofreading some, or even all, the pages of a particular volume. You wouldn’t even need to be able to read Danish to be able to do that proofreading. You’d just have to learn to read Fraktur so that you could tell in the words were rendered properly in the Roman version of the text. In fact, it might actually be a disadvantage to be able to read Danish because of the well-known capacity the brain has to “fix” spelling, etc., if it knows how the word should be spelled, without ever consciously alerting the reader to the fact that the word in the text in question was misspelled. That bane of the existence of proofreaders would not trouble a proofreader who did not know Danish!

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Some Praise for the Hongs as Translators

I’ve been hard on the Hongs’ translations of Kierkegaard’s works in posts on this blog. My criticisms of the Hongs’ translations don’t stem from any personal animosity. That’s how I was trained. That is, I was taught that scholars needed to be hard on one another in order to push scholarship forward. I sincerely hope, however, that my criticisms of the Hongs’ translations have not blinded my readers to the debt everyone in the community of Kierkegaard scholars owes to them. Where would we be without their years of that selfless dedication? The Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College has been a real force for good, and for scholarly progress in the world of Kierkegaard studies. Don’t take my work for that, though, please check out the library’s website if you are not already familiar with the many programs they offer. 

I first met Howard and Edna Hong in the summer of 1987 when I had a fellowship to study at the Kierkegaard Library. They were both lovely people and wonderful hosts to all the visiting scholars. Howard was a ubiquitous presence around the library, which at that time was housed on the very top floor of one of the classroom buildings and was outfitted with large black slate tables that must have come from some science classroom. It was cool and dark and quite, just like a library should be. It was a wonderful place to work. 

Howard had put together a collection of used books that were duplicates of some of the books in the library. He invited the visiting scholars to purchase, at very modest prices, any of these books that took their interest. My purchases from Howard’s duplicates were the beginning of my own library of works on Kierkegaard. Both he and Edna were, as I mentioned, wonderful hosts. I was only a graduate student at the time, but I felt as welcome in the community there at the library as if I had been a full-blown scholar!

I like to think that neither Howard nor Edna would be offended by my criticisms of their work, that they would accept them in the spirit of commitment to the progress of scholarship, because it is certainly from such a commitment that those criticisms spring rather than, as I mentioned above, any personal animosity. I had nothing but admiration and affection for both of the Hongs, and for everything they did to advance Kierkegaard scholarship. I’m able to engage with Kierkegaard’s texts in the manner I do, at least partly because of the work they did before me. Everyone in Kierkegaard studies is enormously indebted to the Hongs for their selfless commitment to the promotion of Kierkegaard’s thought. 

I’m, therefore, deeply honored to have been invited to be the keynote speaker at the 10th International Kierkegaard Conference at St. Olaf College this summer and thought I would use this occasion to highlight some places where one of the Hongs translations has corrected some errors in an earlier translation. 

I’ve decided to focus on Works of Love because I am currently reading through it with Mark Lama, a newcomer to Kierkegaard studies, but an enormously talented scholar with a truly enviable affinity for Kierkegaard’s thought (check out this fantastic post by Mark on a mathematical metaphor in Works of Love)! And while reading through it, I’ve discovered several places where the Hongs’ translations, both the older translation for Harper and Brothers (1962) and the new translation for Princeton (1995), correct errors in the Swensons’ translation (Princeton, 1946). I generally love the Swensons’ translations, but there is no getting around that there are actual errors in their translation of Works of Love. 

The first of the Swensons’ errors concerns the translation of Kierkegaard’s “Christenhed” as “Christianity” on page 39. The Danish for the passage is:

Det kunde rigtignok synes, at da Christenheden nu saa længe har bestaaet, maa den vel have gennemtrængt all Forhold og  — og os Alle. Men dette er et Sandsebedrag. Og fordi Christendomen har bestaaet saa længe, dermed er jo dog vel ikke sagt, at det er os, der har levet saa længe eller saa længe været Christne. (SKS 9, p. 53.)

The Swensons have:

It might certainly seem that since Christianity has now existed for so long, it must by now have penetrated every relationship—and all of us. But this is an illusion. And because Christianity has existed so long, that is certainly not saying that we have lived as long, or have so long been Christian. (p. 39.)

The Hongs’ translation from 1962 has:

It might well seem that since Christendom has existed so long now it must have penetrated all relationships—and all of us. But this is an illusion. Because Christianity has existed so long it cannot thereby be said that it is we who have lived so long or have been Christian for so long. (p. 60.)

That is, the Hongs correctly translated Kierkegaard’s “Christenhed” as “Christendom” and Kierkegaard’s “Christendom” as “Christianity.” The passage is clearly talking about two different things, the enduring nature of Christian culture, or what one might think of as the visible church, on the one hand, and the enduring nature of genuine Christian faith, or the invisible church, on the other hand. 

Unfortunately, the newer Hongs’ translation for Princeton appears to make the same mistake as the Swensons’ translation (see page 46). My own experience with the copyediting that is done by publishing houses leads me, however, to believe that this was likely not an error on the Hongs’ part but on the part of some editor at Princeton. This belief is supported by the fact that both the second edition of Kierkegaard Samlede Værker, or “collected works” (which is generally considered the best of the three editions of the Samlede Værker), and the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter have first “Christenhed” and then “Christendom” in the passage in question and the Hongs knew well how each of these terms should be translated.

The next error in the Swensons’ translation occurs in the context of an analogy Kierkegaard draws between learning to read by first learning the alphabet and only later learning to recognize the letters in the combinations that constitute words. No child, observes Kierkegaard, has ever deluded itself that it could read long before it could spell. “But in spiritual matters, how seductive! Does not everything here begin with the great moment of the resolution, the intention, the promise—where one can read as fluently as the most accomplished lecturer presents the most practiced reading.” The problem, Kierkegaard points out, is that one then has to go out and live according to one’s resolution. That is, one has to conform one’s will and subsequent individual mundane, or everyday, actions to one’s great resolution. But how is one to do that? “[J]ust as it is with spelling,” Kierkegaard explains, “which separates the words and takes them apart” so that the meaning of the whole is lost, the mundane actions of everyday life do not stand in an obvious relation to the meaning of one’s great resolution (Hongs’ p. 133). 

That’s a pretty straightforward, and yet hugely important, point that the Hongs get right. Unfortunately, the Swensons seem to have been confused by the presence of the definite article on the end of the Danish “Stavning,” or “spelling” (the definite article is enclitic in Danish), and hence rendered Kierkegaard’s “Stavningen” (SKS, 136) as “the spelling which tears the words apart into letters” (Swenson, 109 emphasis added) with the result that it looks like Kierkegaard is talking about a particular kind of spelling, or a particular approach to spelling, when he is simply talking about spelling in general.  

The most egregious translation error in Swenson’s translation, though (or at least the most egregious I have found so far) occurs on page 126 where the Swensons have:

[F]or this is just the mystery of love, that there is no higher certainty than the beloved’s renewed assurance; humanly understood it is unconditionally to be certain of being loved, not of loving, since it is superior to the relation between friend and friend (Swenson, 126).

Does that make sense to you? I have to confess that it does not make much sense to me. The Danish is:

[T]hi dette er just Kjærlighedens Gaade, at der ingen høiere Vished er end den Elskedes fornyede Forsikkring; menneskeligt forstaaet er det, ubetinget at være vis paa at være elsket, ikke at elske, da det er at staae over Forholdet mellem Vennen og Vennen (SKS 9, 157.)

The Swensons appear to have been confused about the function of “er det,” literally “is it” but in this instance more properly understood as “it is.” That is, it actually qualifies “ikke at elske” or “not to love,” rather than “ubetinget at være vis paa at være elsket,” or “unconditionally to be certain of being loved.”

The Hongs, thankfully, again, get it right. They have:

[T]he very enigma of love is this—that there is no higher certainty than the beloved’s renewed assurances. In the human sense, to be absolutely certain of being loved is not to love, since this means to stand above the relationship between friend and friend (Hongs, 156). 

It might be tempting to assume that Kierkegaard is contrasting erotic love here with friendship. It is precisely friendship he is referring to in this passage, however, because the passage concerns Christ’s repeated question to Peter “Simon, son of John, do you love me?” That is, Kierkegaard is talking about Christ’s very human need to be loved by his friend, Peter, and loved in what philosophers call the preferential sense, or “more than these” (John 21:15-17).

I’d like to close with reference to what it is tempting to think of as a very mundane sort of error in the Swensons’ translation. That is, the Swensons translated “Vor Pligt at elske de Mennesker, vi see” (SKS 9, 155) as “Our Duty to Love the Men We See” (Swenson, 125)! I kid you not, Swenson translates the Danish “Mennesker,” which even a beginning student of Danish knows means “human beings” not “men,” as “men,” hence lending credence to the view that Kierkegaard was sexist, or even worse, a misogynist! Fortunately, the Hongs, again, get this right!

I don’t mean to suggest that I have suddenly done an about face on my view of the Hongs’ translations. I still prefer the the Swensons’, and Swenson-Lowrie translations, as well as Alastair Hannay’s translations for Penguin, to the new Hongs’ translations for Princeton from the perspective of style. I think it’s important for me to acknowledge, however, that there are instances where the Hongs get points of translation correct, where some of the works I prefer on stylistic grounds do not. I think it’s also important to point out that I like the style of the Hongs’ translations of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers for Indiana University Press, better than the style of much of the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks from Princeton. Just as is the case with the Hongs’ translations, though, style was sacrificed by the team that produced the Journals and Notebooks for what they were hoping would be increased accuracy and certainly the commitment to accuracy is a laudable one. 

My hope is that translators of Kierkegaard will one day get beyond what I believe is the false dichotomy of style vs. accuracy. We can do that, however, only by being relentlessly meticulous in both our reading of Kierkegaard and our holding one another to account in how we read him. This, I believe, is the responsibility of all scholars. At least that is what I was taught by my scholarly mentors, and I believe they were correct. We make progress by pushing one another forward, so a little rough and tumble is just as it should be. 

That said, by “rough and tumble” I mean holding one another to account for the quality of our scholarship by exposing flaws or weaknesses in it. I emphatically do not mean that it is ever acceptable to engage in ad hominem attacks of one another, or to misrepresent the substance of one another’s scholarship in an attempt to discredit it, etc., etc. There is too much of that now in the scholarly community, and not only is it contributing, I believe, to the diminishing esteem in which the humanities are held by the general public, it is antithetical to the objective of all scholarship — the search for truth. I’m sure the Hongs would agree with me there.

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Lee Barrett on Kierkegaard and Universalism

I promised in my last post that I would give my readers a little smags prøve, or taste, of the excellent paper on universalism that Lee Barrett presented at the inaugural session of the Society for the Study of Christian Universalism at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Boston last November. Barrett’s paper actually looked at universalism in three thinkers, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I’m going to present only the material on Kierkegaard, though, and not even all of that, because the paper really deserves to be published in full. 

What I love about Barrett’s paper is that, as I mentioned in my last post, Barrett makes a convincing case that Kierkegaard may have been a universalist without referring to the explicitly universalist passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. “That is, Barrett argues that universalism can actually be inferred from various passages in Works of Love.”

So here is a little smags prøve, of Barrett’s excellent paper!

“It probably seems strange to discuss Kierkegaard in the context of universalism. But his literature contains a recessive and often subterranean trajectory that gestures toward the universal salvation of individuals. … Works of Love, and other texts, contain remarks that implicitly suggest that no one will be excluded from God’s love, which is his definition of eternal blessedness. This becomes clear if we start with Kierkegaard’s account of the characteristics of human love, and then apply them to the divine font of love briefly sketched at the beginning of the Works of Love. My assumption is that what is most essentially true of the visible stream of human loving works must also be true of their invisible source.

Although Kierkegaard protests that this is not a book about God’s love, but about human works of love, the volume’s opening nevertheless spotlights divine love. In a mood of thankfulness Kierkegaard writes, “How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth…so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you…Savior and Redeemer who gave yourself in order to save all” (WOL, 3). Human love cannot be understood unless the reader realizes that it has its source and origin in the individual’s innermost being, where God’s love resides (WOL, 9). He writes, “Just as a quiet lake originates deep down in a hidden spring, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love” (WOL, 9). The hidden life of God’s love is made known and is recognizable by its fruits (WOL, 7-8). This entails that what is said about the human works can be transferred to God’s love, for the human works are generated by God’s love. What is true of the manifestation must be true of the source.

Let us consider the chapter “Love Believes All Things” (WOL, 225-245). Kierkegaard’s main point is that the reader should believe the best of others and refrain from judging them negatively. The basis for Kierkegaard’s advocacy of a hermeneutics of charity is his claim that the way we judge others manifests the spiritual and moral qualities that are in us. The decision to judge or not judge reveals whether there is self-protective mistrust or risk-taking and generous love in an individual. 

Genuine love does not remain intentionally ignorant of the unworthiness of its objects (WOL, 241). True love is cognizant of the ignoble nature of its objects, or their possible viciousness, but “hides” that unworthiness; love does not dwell upon it. A hope for an eschatologically postponed judgement, in which all the unloving scoundrels would receive their due condemnation, would be unloving; it would not be a hiding of unworthiness.

This “love believes all things” theme has profound consequences for the nature of God. If the loving thing for humans to do is to believe all good things about the other, and if God’s love is the font of human love, then this hermeneutics of charity must be the fruit of God’s love. God must overlook the unworthiness of the objects of God’s love, and those objects are all of us.

God takes no delight in exposing hidden sins, but hides them, puts them behind God’s back. Kierkegaard asserts that any type of love that is contingent upon a positive assessment of the other is false love. This does open the possibility that in eternity a hermeneutics of charity reigns universally.

The chapter, “Love Hopes All Things,” extends this trajectory (WOL, 246-263). Again the purpose of the chapter is to warn the reader to resist the worldly temptation to condemn others and, more emphatically, to never despair about the salvation of another person. Kierkegaard insists that hoping for the good of others, including the eternal blessedness of others, is a work of love, for it is an essential dimension of dealing lovingly with others (WOL, 253). One should never unlovingly give up on another person, never stop hoping for their salvation. Kierkegaard’s concern here is for the character of the lover.  If the individual were to give up on someone as hopelessly lost, she would demonstrate that her love was not an enduring disposition. He warns, “Woe to the one who has given up hope and possibility with regard to another person; woe to him, because he himself has thereby lost love” (WOL, 260). 

This hope includes the hope that God will be merciful to those who seem to be incorrigible reprobates (WOL, 262). One must not hope that divine vengeance will fall on the seemingly depraved other. Kierkegaard warns that the reader must never try to imagine God as a collaborator in vindictive hating. The cultivation of one’s own loving capacities requires that one preserves one’s hope for the divine forgiveness of everyone’s sins and for their becoming blessed.

But what about hope for the salvation of unloving people even after their demise? Kierkegaard raises this issue explicitly, asking if it is possible for someone to be eternally lost (WOL, 262). Changing the ending of the story of the prodigal son so that the prodigal does not repent and return home to his father, Kierkegaard asks if there is hope for the prodigal beyond the grave. Kierkegaard does not answer this directly; he does not speculate about the prodigal son’s post-mortem state. Rather, he shifts attention to the fact that the father continues to hope. Hoping for the blessedness of the departed, even those who seem to have been spiritual and moral failures, is a work of love (WOL, 248).  

The chapter “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” elaborates a cognate theme (WOL, 280-299). Love does not just overlook sin or ignore sin; it “removes” it. Kierkegaard even claims that it “believes away” what is seen. Kierkegaard then roots this more generally in God’s love. More particularly, the human imperative to not see evil is rooted in the fact that human evil is hidden behind God’s back (WOL, 295). Of course, God is not ignorant of the evil, but God refuses to see it; God forgets it. Kierkegaard dares to call God’s forgetting an act of decreation. Kierkegaard writes, “Forgetting, when God does it in relation to sin, is the opposite of creation, since to create is to bring forth from nothing, but to forget is to take back into nothing” (WOL, 296).”

There is more to Barrett’s paper than this, but to include even the entirety of the section on Kierkegaard, would make it too long for this post. Plus, as I said, I really think the paper deserves to be published, so I don’t want to put so much of it up on this blog that it would diminish Barrett’s chances of publishing it elsewhere.

I should also put in a plug for Barrett’s book Kierkegaard’s Two Ages, A Literary Review. The book is part of the Cambridge Elements series on Kierkegaard, and though I have not read it yet, I’m familiar with Barrett’s work, so I know it will be good!