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Kierkegaard on “Reasoning”

I don’t go looking for problems in translations. I find them, usually by accident. My research generally begins with word searches on the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. Though it is increasingly clear that SKS is not complete, it’s the most complete searchable version of Kierkeaard’s works and hence is enormously helpful. There are links in the hits on word searches that will take me directly to the text in question from which I can then cut and paste into a document of my own the text I want to use. This text is, of course, always in Danish. I could translate it myself into English, but as I’ve written before, I was taught that doing one’s own translation is acceptable only in instances where the text in question does not exist in a translation that has been accepted by scholars. So the next step, after I’ve found the passage I want in the original Danish, is to find it in one of the newer translations of Kierkegaard. I go to the Hongs’ translations first because these are the ones that are generally used by scholars.  Most of the time, the Hongs’ translations are fine. They aren’t always fine, though, as I have documented in earlier posts. Sometimes the problems are relatively minor and sometimes they’re quite significant. I ran across a passage with some problems of the latter sort recently. Not only is the translation problematic, but the problem in question illustrates the danger of over-translation that sometimes happens when translators take themselves, or their responsibility to properly represent the thought of the original author, too seriously. 

The passage in question appears in Two Ages. “What does it mean,” asks Kierkegaard there,

to be loquacious [at raisonere]? It is the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. As abstract thought, loquacity [Raisonnement] is not sufficiently profound dialectically; as conception [Mening] and conviction, it lacks full-blooded individuality. But in extensity loquacity [Raisonnerende] has the apparent advantage: a thinker can comprehend his branch of knowledge, a person can have a concept [Mening] of what is related to a particular subject, can have a conviction based on a specific view of life, but the loquacious man [den Raisonnerende] chatters [raisonnerer] about anything and everything (TA, 103.)

The Danish text reads:

Hvad er det at raisonere? Det er den ophævede lidenskabelige Disjunktion mellem Subjektivitet og Objektivitet. Som abstrakt Tænkning er Raisonnementet ikke dialektisk dybt nok, som Mening og Overbeviisning er det uden Individualitets Fuldblodighed. Men extensivt gaaer den Raisonnerende af med Skin-Fordelen; thi en Tænker kan omfatte sin Videnskab, en Mand kan have en Mening om hvad der hører til et bestemt Fag, kan have en Overbeviisning i Kraft af en bestemt Livs-Anskuelse, men den Raisonnerende raisonnerer om alt Muligt.

There are several problems here. The first, and to me, entirely inexplicable one, is that the Hongs have translated Mening as “conception” and “concept” rather than “opinion.” Danish has a term for “concept,” it’s Begreb, a cognate of the German Begriff and Kierkegaard makes frequent us of it. Mening, on the other hand, means opinion, as any Danish-English dictionary makes clear.

“[A]nulled” should also, arguably be “sublated,” since the Danish term in the original is ophævede, which is a cognate of the German aufgehoben, which scholars will immediately recognize as a Hegelian term. This term generally appears in English translations of Hegel as “sublated,” hence ophævede, when it appears in Kierkegaard’s works is probably also best translated that way. 

The biggest problem with the Hongs’ translation of this passage, however, is with the translation of Raisonnement as “loquacity.” The Hongs acknowledge themselves in a note that such a translation at least appears problematic in that Raisonnement is a cognate of “reasoning” and, in fact, was translated as “reasoning” in a translation that appeared from Oxford in 1940. “[A]t raisonere,” the note continues

does mean to reason. But it also means the dissipation of reason in verbosity, loquacity, garrulity, and therefore in Danish Raisonneur means “one who uses his mouth” (Ludvig Meyer, Fremmedordbog, 1844; ASKB 1034). On p. 97, at raisonere was changed in the final draft to at snakke. In the draft of p. 97 at snakke and at raisonere are used as synonyms” (TA, 173).

At snakke and at raisonere are not used as synonyms, however, in the final version of the book and this suggests that while Kierkegaard considered them related, he did not consider them to be synonyms.

Raisonneur, or “one who uses his mouth,” does not appear in the passage in question. What the Hongs translate as “the loquacious man” is not den Raisonneur, but den Raisonnerende, which suggests he does not mean to refer to a loquacious man as such, but to someone who is overly fond of reasoning. Ferrall-Repp lists the meaning of Raisonnere as “to reason, argue” and Raisonnement as “reasoning” (the foreign words are at the back of the book). It’s thus likely by den Raisonnerende, Kierkegaard has in mind someone who is overly fond of argument, or publicly debating with others. This, in any case, appears to be the sense in which Kant used räsonniert in What is Enlightenment. Kierkegaard was well aware of Kant’s use of räsonniert because he comments on it in his journals (see NB16:50). That is, den Raisonnerende is not someone who is simply fond of the sound of his own voice, but someone who is fond of rational disputation. The qualification “rational” is important, because otherwise Kierkegaard’s qualification of at raisonere as “abstract thought” does’t make much sense. 

I have an ebook version of the Hongs’ Two Ages, so after I discovered this problem with at raisonere, I did a word search on “loquacious” to see if it occurred elsewhere in the translation, and discovered that the only other place it appears is on page 22 (or thereabouts, ebook pagination is not always exact) where there is a reference to “every loquacious barber.” When I checked the original Danish, though, I discovered that the term there is snaksom, not raisonnerende. 

Snaksom ought properly to be translated as “talkative,” or “chatty,” rather than “loquacious” because the use of “loquacious” is an affectation and affectation was something Kierkegaard abhorred. That’s less important, however, than the fact that using a single English term, “loquacious” to translate what are clearly two quite distinct concepts in the context of the work in question conflates these two concepts for the reader. There’s a big difference between a barber who blathers on mindlessly about “anything and everything,” and someone who endlessly disputes about anything and everything. 

Finally, The Hongs have also inexplicably translated en Mand as “a person.” We might all wish that Kierkegaard had written et Menneske, i.e., “a person,” but he didn’t. He wrote “a man.”. In fact, its not impossible that Kierkegaard thought the problem of excessive cerebration, or the tendency to rationally dispute about anything and everything, was specifically masculine. 

I believe, and will argue in a paper I’m giving in a conference at Princeton next week, that what Kierkegaard says in this passage about what it means to raisonere gives us an important insight into his view of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. That is, Kierkegaard claims here that reasoning, in the sense in which Kant uses it, brings the two together. It simply does this in a way that for Kierkegaard is imperfect in that it lacks “full-blooded individuality.” There are times, however, such as when one is engaged in the study of nature or history, when “full-blooded individually” is arguably inappropriate. What the scholar and scientist want is objective truth, and that is entirely appropriate for them as scholars and scientists. It’s only when the “reasoning” in question is about what Kierkegaard identifies as as “subjective truth” that reasoning’s lack of “full-blooded individuality” would appear to be problematic. 

I know I am occasionally hard on the Hongs. It’s the job of scholars, however, to be meticulous in their treatment of their sources. That I’m often critical of the Hongs does not mean that I’m unaware that I owe them an enormous debt, as does everyone who works on Kierkegaard in English. They were the first people to do an extensive translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and I have to say that I prefer the language of that translation to the language of the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I still depend on that translation to correct the wording of passages in the latter when it seems to me to have gone terribly wrong. 

The Hongs’ contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship is not restricted, however, to their translations of Kierkegaard. They founded the Kierkegaard library at St. Olaf College and that library, and the fellowships it offers, has done incalculable good for scholars over the years. I had one of those fellowships myself, back when Howard was still alive and a constant presence there. He had a little of the vanity that I think nearly every scholar has, but he had a generous heart as well and helped me many times in my stay there at the library. I remember him, and Edna, very fondly. 

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More on the Decline of Editing

Everyone is familiar with Kierkegaard’s famous journal entry about the “secret note.” 

“After my death,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1843,

“no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note that explains it” (Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE-KK, p. 157).

Or did he write this? The answer is both yes and no. There are some issues with both the existing English translations of this passage, as well as with the passage as it appears in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter. Two are relatively minor and two are more serious. This post will address each issue in turn, leaving the more serious issues until the end.

The Danish in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter is:

“Efter min Død skal ingen i mine Papirer (det er min Trøst) finde en eneste Oplysning om hvad der egentlig har udfyldt mit Liv; finde den Skrift i mit Inderste, der forklarer Alt, og som ofte gjør hvad Verden vilde kalde Bagateller til uhyre vigtige Begivenheder for mig, og hvad jeg anseer for Ubetydelighed, naar jeg tager den hemmelige Note bort, der forklarer det.” (SKS, 18, p. 169.)

KJN’s translation of the original Danish is arguably defensible. That is, there is no glaring semantical mistake. The Hongs’ translation for Indiana University Press is thus very similar. It reads:

“After my death no one will find in my papers the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what really has filled my life, no one will find the inscription in my innermost being that interprets everything and that often turns into events of prodigious important to me that which the world would call bagatelles and which I regard as insignificant if I remove the secret note that interprets them.” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol. 5, p. 226).

Both translations work to convey the sense of the passage in the original Danish. The Hongs’ is actually closer to the original, though, than is the new KJN because there is no noun in the original that corresponds to KJN’s “importance.” KJN’s editors have changed “uhyre vigtige Begivenheder,” which translates literally as “enormously important events” into “events of enormous importance.” They’ve done this to get the subject to agree in number with Kierkegaard’s singular pronoun “det,” or “it,” at the end. That is, there appears to be a grammatical problem with the original where the subject appears to be “Begivenheder,” or “events,” which is plural, and Kierkegaard’s singular “det,” or “it,” at the end.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript of this journal entry appears to have been lost (more on that below). It’s thus possible that there was no such grammatical problem in the original. That is, it’s possible that the last word in Kierkegaard’s hand-written journal was actually “dem,” or “them,” and not “det,” or “it.” It would be relatively easy, I think, to mistake a hand-written “m” for a “t,” and also relatively easy to become confused about what the subject was and so to fail to notice what appears to be the grammatical problem. It’s also possible, of course, that the grammatical problem was in the original. It’s the type of mistake that’s easy to make, especially if one is writing quickly. Since the passage in question wasn’t originally intended for publication (we assume), Kierkegaard would have no reason to go back and proofread it.

Since there appears to have been a problem in the original, it is hard to fault either the editors of KJN or the Hongs for the manner in which each chose to correct it.

There is another minor issue with KJN’s translation of Bagateller as “trifles.” This translation is just annoying given that “bagatelles” is a perfectly acceptable English word that is a cognate of the Danish Bagateller. My suspicion is that the editors of KJN chose “trifles” as part of a general strategy designed to justify a new English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. That is, the more differences there are between the Hongs’ earlier translation and KJN the greater is the impression that a new translation was needed. The thing is, pretty much everyone in the Kierkegaard community knew that a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was needed, and not because there were serious problems with the Hongs’ translation (which I think is generally very good), but because the Hongs’ translation was not complete.

It is, of course, tempting, when doing a new translation of a work that has already been translated, to try something new. I did that in my own translations of Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. One should give in to that temptation, however, only when an alternative translation is arguably equally good. When there is actually a cognate in what translation theorists call the “target language,” which is to say the language of the translation, then no other term could possibly be superior to it.

Neither of the above issues is likely to cause a serious problem for scholars. Unfortunately, there are two more issues with both KJN and the Hongs’ translation of this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals that are more serious. 

My own translation would look something like this:

“After my death, no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least bit of illumination concerning what has really filled my life; [no one] will find that inscription, which is written in the core of my being, that explains everything, and which often makes what the world would call bagatelles into exceedingly important events for me, and which I, too, view as insignificant, if I remove the secret note that explains them.”

The translation of Oplysning as “information” that occurs in both KJN and the Hong’s version of this passage would indeed be defensible if there were no other English term that would work. That is, “information” conveys the sense here of the the Danish term Oplysning. The problem is that there is an English term that not only conveys the sense of Oplysning, but which does so more effectively than does “information.” In fact, there are several better options than “information.” “Information” is not listed as a possible definition for Oplysning in Ferrall-Repp, “Solution,” as in a solution to a riddle is the closest Ferrall-Repp comes. The venerable Vinterberg-Bodelsen, in contrast gives us “illuminate,” “elucidate,” and “enlighten” and these translations are much better than “information” because Oplysning includes a reference to light, i.e., lys. Lower down in Vinterberg-Bodelsen’s extensive list of definitions is “piece of information,” which is undoubtedly why both the Hong’s and KJN chose “information” for their translations, despite that any one of the three definitions that involve metaphorical references to “light” would be preferable.

An argument can be made, in fact, that Kierkegaard chose Oplysning precisely because of the metaphorical reference to light. That is, light is enormously significant in Christianity. Elsewhere, when Kierkegaard means to indicate information in the traditional sense, he generally uses other terms such as Efterretning, as is the case, for example, in the Postscript where he writes “What does it mean to give assurances that one has reflected oneself out [of the immediate] and to communicate this in direct form as information [Efterretning]—what does it mean?” (CUP, p. 281).

There is yet another problem with KJN’s translation of this passage about the “secret note.” I don’t know whether readers will have noticed by this point but some of the above versions of this passage have italics and some don’t. KJN, following the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, has italics, but neither the Hongs’ translation nor my own suggested translation has them. Why not? 

The italics are in the Efterladte Papirer. The question, however, is whether they were in the original? They are conspicuously absent from the same passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, which scholars generally consider to be superior to the Efterladte Papirer.  I’ve written about the Efterladte Papirer before. It is a somewhat flawed first edition of selections from Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals and papers. Indeed, Jon Stewart has an article entitled “An Overview of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. Part Two: the Editions” (Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Vol. 20, Issue I) in which he says that “[w]hen judged from a philological perspective by the standards of today, this edition [i.e., the Efterladte Papirer ] can only be regarded as a disaster.” 

Stewart’s article is worth a read. H.P. Barfod was the first editor of the Efterladte Papirer and Stewart goes into some detail concerning Barfod’s shortcomings as an editor. Stewart even includes a paragraph concerning what he charges is Barfod’s failure to give any account of his use of italics. 

“One thing not mentioned by Barfod,” asserts Stewart,

“is his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis. Perhaps the reason that he does not mention it is that he does not follow any consistent rule in his handling of it. In some cases when Kierkegaard has underlined something, Barfod has failed to reproduce it with extra spacing of w o r d s, which was the way in which emphasis was indicated at the time (instead of with the use of italics). However, elsewhere he inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352).

The weird thing is that, in contrast to Stewart’s claim, Barfod does, in fact, “mention” his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of “underlining,” or Skilletegn, as it was known then, in the preface to the Efterladte Papirer. To skille means to separate, and tegn is of course “sign,” so Skilletegn was the equivalent of italics in the old Gothic, or Blackletter, typeface where italics were not possible. Emphasis was indicated simply by increasing the space between the letters of the word to be emphasized. The use of Skilletegn can be see in the illustration to this post. That illustration is, in fact, a photo of the very mention Barfod makes of his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining, or Skilletegn, for emphasis that Stewart accuses him of not making. 

Is it possible that Stewart did not actually read Barfod’s preface to the Efterladte Papirer before he wrote his “Nachlass” article? That seems pretty incredible. Is it possible that his Danish was so rudimentary at that point that he didn’t know that Skilletegn was the Danish term for italics, which is to say for the emphasis indicated by underlining in hand-written manuscripts when those texts were typeset?  That seems equally incredible, but I can think of no other possible explanations for Stewart’s accusing Barfod of failing even to mention “his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis” when he actually devotes an entire, albeit brief, paragraph to precisely that issue.

Roughly translated, the passage from page XV of the preface of the first volume of the Efterladte Papirer reads as follows:

“The correct use of emphasis [S k i l l e t e g n], in contrast, has been difficult, because there has often here been no rule to be discovered in the hand-written [manuscripts]. I was thus forced, with respect to this issue, to adapt the use of emphasis according to what seemed most convincing and I believe that in the majority of instances that I have either approximated or actually captured the author’s own intention” (Efterladte Papirer, Vol I, p. XV).

That is, Barfod directly confesses that he occasionally “inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352). The original manuscript of this passage must have been lost because the editors of SKS indicate that they have relied for their rendering of this passage on Barfod! Why would they do that when Barfod is notorious, as Stewart correctly points out, for being too cavalier in his approach to standard editorial practices. Not only was he cavalier in that way, he had something of a mania for Skilletegn. He uses them all over the place. He uses them in his preface for every mention of Kierkegaard’s name, as well as for a variety of other terms. Page XIII of the preface includes eighteen uses of Skilletegn. 

If we don’t have the relevant original manuscript any longer, and we know that Barfod was given to inserting emphasis where there was none in the original, what a responsible editor should have done, and what the editors of the Papirer did do, was remove the emphasis that appears in the Efterladte Papirer but which evidence suggests was probably not in the original. 

So we have yet another failure of the editors of SKS to adhere to defensible editorial practices, a failure that then subsequently affected the new KJN. Emphasis is precisely the kind of thing that scholars occasionally seize upon as particularly significant. It seems unlikely to cause any serious misunderstandings of the text in question, but it is not impossible. 

More importantly, the decision of the editors of SKS to follow the Efterladte Papirer rather than the Papirer, when the former is universally acknowledged to be inferior to the latter, is part of a larger pattern of problems with both SKS and KJN (which was based on SKS) that it is disappointing to see in these new editions that were supposed to be improvements on the earlier editions but which it is increasingly clear are actually in some respects regressions to a lower editorial standard.          

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Kierkegaard and Danielson on Foreknowledge and Free Will

I’ve been working on a collection of short, short philosophical articles that I hope to publish under the title Flash Philosophy. I conceived the idea of the genre flash philosophy because I am very fortunate to be in a department of English and Philosophy that is home to a number of creative writers who exposed me to the genre of flash fiction. Flash fiction is basically very short short stories, often only a page or two and sometimes even shorter than that. 

Philosophical articles have increased in length over time. Quite a bit has been written about this, actually, including “A Plea for More Short Journal Publications,” “Are journal articles getting too long,” and my own article “Flash Philosophy,” which appeared in Philosophy Now. The problem is that as philosophical articles get longer, they take longer to write. It can take a year or more just to draft a decent philosophical article, and then, of course, even longer than that before it gets into print. Authors are increasingly asked to basically include surveys of all the literature relevant to their argument in any article they submit for publication, even if much of that literature isn’t actually directly relevant to their argument. Not only does that make the drafting of philosophical articles very tedious, it makes the reading of them very tedious. Quite simply, it is bad form. As I explain to my students over and over again, don’t put anything in your argument that you do not absolutely have.

Philosophical articles have not always been so long, however. It turns out that many of the most highly esteemed philosophical journals such as Mind, Thought, and Philosophical Review used to publish very short articles. So I got the idea to put together a collection of some of these articles and to publish it under the title Flash Philosophy. The purpose of the collection is to demonstrate just how short a really good philosophical article can be and hence to resurrect the art of writing such short articles. Short articles are both easier to write than longer ones and easier to read. Despite that the heyday short philosophical articles appears to have been around the middle of the last century, they are uniquely suited to the digital age in that they facilitate a far more rapid development of philosophical discourse than do longer articles. To resurrect the art of writing short philosophical articles would, I believe, go a long way toward  revitalizing the discipline of philosophy.  

I got a grant several years ago to hire one of my former students as a research assistant to help me track down short philosophical articles that we could then put together in this collection. My research assistant, Daniel Wiedinmyer, combed through hundreds of volumes of old journals and produced a list of more than one hundred articles that were five pages or less. Not did that take some time, after he’d found all those articles we had to read through them to see which would be suitable for the collection. Some were obviously going to be too technical for a general readership of the sort we hoped to have. The collection is actually intended for professional philosophers as well as philosophy students and grad students, but if you are working in ethics or the philosophy of religion, some of the more technical articles in epistemology, metaphysics, or the philosophy of language, for example, are going to be hard to process. We wanted articles that made important points and made them very persuasively, but we also wanted them to be easily digestible even for philosophers from other subfields. 

That reading process actually took more than a year. After that, I had to write a preface and an introduction. I got a decent start of both, but then got distracted with other projects, such as the Drexel-Yale conference on George MacDonald that took place last December, and a number of articles on Kierkegaard that I owed to the editors of various books. Fortunately, I’ve recently been able to return to the Flash Philosophy project. I’m working on the introduction now. Basically, I am going through the collection and drafting very short summaries of the articles. That has necessitated rereading them, of course, and while I was doing that, I came across an article that it seemed to me would be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars. 

The articles is “Timelessness, Foreknowledge, and Free Will,” by Dennis Danielson. It appeared in Mind, July., 1977). God’s purported foreknowledge is often used by philosophers to support arguments against free will. Dennis Danielson argues, however, that since God’s knowledge is timeless, God can be said to have foreknowledge, or knowledge of things that have not yet happened, only from the perspective of a temporal agent. This knowledge, Danielson points out, does not in itself entail any limits on human freedom. That is, what temporal agents can claim God foreknew is “unchangeable not because it is or was foreknown but quite simply because it is past. Yet no one,” he continues, “would want to say that the unchangeableness of the past dispenses with free will.”

Does that not ring a bell with those of you who are familiar with the “Interlude” section of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs? Kierkegaard argues quite explicitly there that the unchangeableness of the past is not the same thing as necessity and that “knowledge of the past confers no necessity.” Kierkegaard was not speaking there of God’s knowledge, but of our own knowledge of the past. What he says about knowledge being unable to confer necessity because “knowledge has nothing to give” (p. 146) could arguably be extended to God’s knowledge in the way Danielson does and Danielsen and Kierkegaard are in perfect agreement concerning the significance of the unchangeableness of the past.  

One wonders if Danielson ever read Kierkegaard.