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“Disciple” vs. “Follower” in Philosophical Crumbs

imagesI’m teaching an upper-level seminar on Kierkegaard this term. The text for the course is my own translation of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009). We’re reading Crumbs right now. One of my students, Victoria Godwin, asked what I thought was a very good question about the translation, so I thought I would share my answer with readers of this blog.

The Crumbs, as most readers will remember, looks at what Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus) asserts are two exhaustive and mutually exclusive interpretations of how people are related to the truth. The first interpretation he presents is what he calls the “Socratic” one. According to this interpretation, people are assumed basically to possess the truth, but to have contingently forgotten it. They thus need only to remember the truth, not to have it imparted to them by a teacher. This, of course, is the famous Platonic “doctrine of recollection,” or anamnesis. According to this interpretation, the role of a “teacher” in helping a person to remember the truth is merely what Kierkegaard calls “assisting” (105). The teacher and the student/learner/pupil are essentially equal.

The problem, according to Kierkegaard, is that the Socratic interpretation makes both the point in time at which a person “recollects” the truth and the “teacher” who helps occasion the “recollection” unimportant. This is not, in itself, a problem. The Eleatics, and in fact many people throughout the history of philosophy right up to the present have no problem with this. Even Kierkegaard does not suggest that this interpretation of our relation to the truth is inherently problematic. It’s a problem only for a reader who is already committed to an account of existence that attributes decisive significance to the point in time at which one comes to understand the truth, and requires that this understanding be facilitated by a “teacher” of equally decisive significance. This, of course, is precisely what Christianity does and Kierkegaard’s note at the end of the first chapter of Crumbs makes clear that he assumes his readers would immediately recognize that.

That is, Crumbs is a straightforwardly theological work despite what are obviously the disingenuous protestations of Climacus, the pseudonymous author. Hence the “learner” (Lærende) referred to in Kierkegaard’s explication of the “Socratic” interpretation of the relation of the individual to the truth, becomes the “disciple” (Discipelen) on the “alternative” view. From then on, the discussion concerns the relation between the “the god” and “the disciple.”

So back to my student. Victoria asked why sometimes the person whose relation to the truth was in question was referred to as a “learner” and other times as a “disciple.” The answer, of course, is that those two different characterizations appear in the original text. The reason this might be difficult to appreciate is that Howard Hong’s translation of Philosophiske Smuler (Philosophical Fragments, Princeton, 1985) obscures this fact. David Swenson’s translation of Smuler from 1936 translates Discipelen consistently as “disciple,” but Hong’s translation consistently renders Discipelen as “follower.”

“Follower,” isn’t dead wrong, of course, but it’s misleading to the extent that it obscures the explicitly theological nature of the work. Hong appears to have deliberately desired to do this in that he inserts a footnote to explain his preference for “follower.” “The Danish term Discipel,” writes Hong, “means ‘pupil,’ ‘learner,’ ‘apprentice,’ ‘follower,’ and ‘disciple.’ Here and elsewhere in Fragments (except for references to the relation of teacher and pupil or learner), ‘follower’ is most appropriate” (Philosophical Fragments, p. 281 note 38). Hong gives no justification, however, for his preference for “follower” over the English cognate “disciple.” He just claims “follower” is better.

“Disciple” is, actually the third of the three possible translations listed in the Ferrall-Repp A Danish-English Dictionary from 1845 (Hong would appear to have been relying on a 20th-century Danish-English dictionary). The first two are “pupil” and “scholar.” “Follower” is not listed as an acceptable translation, and the context of the appearance of this term in Crumbs makes it clear that “Disciple” is the most appropriate of the three suggested translations. “Pupil” is too close to Kierkegaard’s “Lærende” (i.e., “learner”) and would thus obscure the distinction he was trying to make with the the two terms “Lærende” and “Discipelen,” and “scholar” is obviously wildly inappropriate. So Hong’s claim that “follower” is a better translation of “Discipelen” than is “Disciple” is just wrong. It is worse because it makes the work less obviously theological than it is. Contemporary Western society has become so secular that that in itself makes it difficult for readers to appreciate how thoroughly religious was all of Kierkegaard’s authorship. The Hong translation of Philosophiske Smuler simply exacerbates this problem.

My guess is that Hong hoped to appeal to a broader audience by making the work less obviously theological. I fear that may amount, however, to throwing the baby out with the bathwater in that it encourages misinterpretations of what is perhaps the most central work in Kierkegaard’s corpus. This takes us into the area of translation theory. Should a translator adapt a work to appeal to a specific audience, or should he or she endeavor to represent the work in a manner that most closely approximates its original character? I’m a proponent of the latter approach. If a translator thinks he can improve on an author’s work, I think he should go write his own book!

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2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,700 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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2014 Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association

The annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association concluded this afternoon. This year was a good one for Kierkegaard. The Søren Kierkegaard Society always sponsors a session at the APA meetings, but this year, there was actually a colloquium paper on Kierkegaard as well.  The paper, entitled “Kierkegaard’s Revision of the Aristotelian Virtue of Courage,” was presented by Karl Aho, a graduate student from Baylor as part of a colloquium on Aristotle. The colloquium took place on the 27th, the first evening of the conference. I had only just returned from Denmark, where I’d spent Christmas with friends (and where I’d also attended a talk at the law faculty of the University of Copenhagen which will be the subject of a forthcoming post to my other blog: “The Life of the Mind”), so I missed Aho’s presentation. Fortunately, an abstract of the paper is available on the APA website. I took the liberty of copying it for readers who, like me, were not able to attend the session themselves. “Several authors,” observes Aho,

have proposed that we view Kierkegaard as a virtue theorist. In this paper, I further develop this virtue approach by discussing several Kierkegaardian arguments about the virtue of courage. Against Aristotle’s account of courage, Kierkegaard claims that we ought not limit courage to only those extraordinary individuals who risk their lives to perform noble deeds. Kierkegaard revises the Aristotelian virtue by expanding our understanding of which situations call for courage. By widening the scope of situations that call for courage, Kierkegaard’s understanding of courage enables people to respond courageously in those situations. I conclude by discussing the implications of Kierkegaard’s view of courage for his authorship more broadly construed. Kierkegaard’s understanding of courage can inform our interpretation of pseudonymous texts, like Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death, in which courage plays a central role.

My own feeling is that Aho is not doing justice to Aristotle here, but that, for Kierkegaard scholars anyway, is less interesting than the positive position Aho develops on Kierkegaard’s own view of courage. The latter appears promising, so it would be nice to see the paper in print soon.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to abstracts of the papers that were presented in the session sponsored by the Søren Kierkegaard Society. I do not want to summarize them for fear I wouldn’t do justice to them. The session was on Kierkegaard and Narrative and the speakers were John Davenport of Fordham, Jeffrey Hanson (whose coiffure is strikingly reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s own) of Australian Catholic University, and Frances Maughan-Brown, of Boston College. The commentator (whose name, for some reason, did not make it into the official program) was Clare Carlisle. The titles of the papers will give readers an idea of the content. Davenport’s paper, “Psychological Narrativity and the Limits of Ethical Self-Authorship,” was a continuation of a dialogue he and Anthony Rudd have been having for some time on the role of narrative in Kierkegaard (see Rudd’s Self, Value and Narrative: A Kierkegaardian Approach and Davenport’s Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard). Hanson’s paper was entitled “Aesthetic Ideals and the Task of Repetition,” and Maughan-Brown’s paper was entitled “Kierkegaard and Allegorical Narrative.”

The discussion after the papers was lively and productive. Davenport has one of the keenest minds among contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, not only were his comments during the discussion interesting, it was amusing to see him launching, on behalf of the other two panelists, even harsher criticisms of his own position than they had launched themselves.

Unfortunately, the discussion was marked by some confusion concerning the nature of Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition. The term was being used by nearly everyone, panelists, audience members, and even the commentator, Carlisle, in what Davenport finally correctly identified as “the profane sense of mere iteration.” Repetition, for Kierkegaard, is a specifically theological concept. Repetition, as the narrator of Kierkegaard’s eponymous novel discovers, is very far from mere iteration, so far, in fact that he concludes it is simply impossible.

Repetition would appear to be one of the most misunderstood of Kierkegaardian concepts. It’s tempting to conclude that this may be due, at least in part, to it’s theological nature. A closer examination of the concept reveals, however, that what one could call the “problem” of repetition, as Kierkegaard articulates it, is not specifically theological. Only the solution is. The problem is that for temporal creatures, or at least for human beings, mere iteration always involves some difference, no matter how minute. Even the kinds of daily tasks that were brought up during the discussion, things such as changing diapers or brushing one’s teeth, are never exactly the same, to say nothing of more complex sorts of events such as trips to favorite vacation destinations. The problem is that of recreating a sameness that temporality, in its essence, would appear to preclude, of capturing and preserving an experience that time wrests from our grasp. This, for Kierkegaard, can be accomplished only through divine intervention. Whether he is right about this should be viewed as a challenge to scholars, yet few seem to understand the concept well enough to take it on.