Page 13 of 21

Posted on

Clarification of an Ambiguity in Philosophical Crumbs

One of the highlights, for me, of the recent conference on Kierkegaard at Johns Hopkins University, was meeting Jonathan Lear. Lear is a distinguished professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is also a practicing psychoanalyst. I have an interest in psychoanalysis and, in fact, am a member of the Philadelphia Jung Seminar. It is a rare treat to meet such a distinguished philosopher who is interested in Kierkegaard, and a rarer one still to meet a philosopher who is a practicing psychoanalyst!

I discovered, in conversation with Lear, that he is teaching a course this fall on Kierkegaard and that he is using my translation of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Crumbs.  He wrote to me recently with a question about the text to which I did not immediately have an answer. “On p. 108 of your text,” he wrote, “Climacus says, ‘(This is the untruth of paganism.)’  I don’t think I understand.  Do you have any words of wisdom on that claim?”

The question about this passage from Crumbs is a good one, so I thought I would share my answer to Lear with readers of this blog. I wasn’t sure myself what that parenthetical comment meant, so I went to the online version of the collected works of Kierkegaard in Danish to check my translation against the original text and I discovered that I had, in fact, left something out. There is a word in the original Danish that does not appear in the translation, but which really ought to be there. I don’t know how I failed to include it, but I did. Here is the Danish text followed by my translation with the missing word inserted

Enhver anden Aabenbarelse var for Kjærligheden et Bedrag, fordi den enten først maatte have foretaget en Forandring med den Lærende (men Kjærligheden forandrer ikke den Elskede, men forandrer sig selv) og skjult for ham, at dette var fornødent, eller letsindigt være forblevet uvidende om, at hele Forstaaelsen var en Skuffelse (Dette er Hedenskabets Usandhed).

Any other revelation would, for love, be a deception, because it would either first have had to undertake a transformation of the learner and hidden from him that this had been necessary (but love does not alter the beloved, rather it alters itself), or it would have had to allow him to remain blissfully [letsindigt] ignorant of the fact that the whole understanding had been an illusion. (That is the untruth of paganism.)

“Paganism,” for Kierkegaard (and I believe many of his contemporaries) is a synonym for the Greeks. Kierkegaard often speaks of the Greeks (i.e., the ancient Greeks) as “lighthearted” because they do not have a concept of sin. Sin, according to Kierkegaard/Climacus is what separates human beings from God. SIN is the difference, the main difference. But the Greeks, of course, because they did not have the concept of sin, did not understand that there was an obstacle to their coming to understand the eternal, unchanging truth. They assumed they could just think themselves into it.  They thought they could “understand” the truth, but really, according to Kierkegaard, their understanding was an illusion (“untruth”).

I think that’s what Kierkegaard means in that passage. It’s possible, I suppose, to get that meaning even without the inclusion of “letsindigt/blissfully,” but I think it is harder, so I am grateful to Lear for his question and will add the missing word to the list of corrections I’m planning to send to Oxford.

 

Posted on

Literatur Kritik

eeYears ago, when I was working on my M.A. at Bryn Mawr, I had a friend who was doing his dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania (or Penn, as it is known around here). He was doing his dissertation on Stoicism and his dissertation director was Charles Kahn. Penn no longer required that students pass French and German exams for the Ph.D., but Kahn insisted that my friend learn German. All the best scholarship on Stoicism was in German, he explained.

Well, the same thing could be said about Kierkegaard scholarship. Perhaps not all the best Kierkegaard scholarship is in German, but a great deal of it is, so any Kierkegaard scholar worth his salt needs not only to learn Danish, but also to learn German.

But how is one to know what is being published on Kierkegaard in German and which, among those works, is worth reading? That’s a difficult question. You can always just wait to see which German scholars show up at English-language Kierkegaard conferences or which German works on Kierkegaard get translated into English. That isn’t really a very satisfactory approach to the problem, though, because not many German scholars show up at English-language Kierkegaard conferences, and even fewer German works on Kierkegaard get translated into English.

I have a better idea. For years I’ve been looking for a really good German book review. You know, something like The New York Review of Books. Well, I think I’ve finally found one. I don’t remember now how I found it, but I somehow stumbled across the journal Literatur Kritik. It’s great! Literatur Kritik publishes reviews of everything from novels to scholarly works on topics ranging from art history to zoology. You can get on their mailing list for free. You’ll receive several emails a week with links to the latest book reviews. If you want to search the archives, you really need a subscription though. A subscription is 20 euros per year, or two years for 30 euros. Fortunately, they take Paypal, so you can subscribe in a matter of minutes and then have access to all the articles an not just the current ones.

I found a very interesting review of a book entitled Der witzige, tiefe, leidenschaftliche Kierkegaard: Zur Kierkegaard Rezeption in der deutschsprachigen Literatur bis 1920 (the humorous, deep, passionate, Kierkegaard: Kierkegaard’s reception in German-language literature  before 1920) by Christian Wiebe (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012). The book, according to the reviewer, Dr. Christof Rudek, a professor of comparative literature at Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, was actually Wiebe’s doctoral dissertation and focuses on the literary reception of Kierkegaard in Germany rather than on the philosophical or theological reception.

Rudek is not entirely happy, however, with Wiebe’s treatment of this reception. The book is divided, he notes, into six chapters that looks at Kierkegaard’s influence on different types of literature. Wiebe defines “literature” very broadly, so examines novels, short stories, essays, diary entries, letters and articles that deal with religious, psychological, and existential issues. Rudek points out that the divisions sometimes seem arbitrary and that material that is considered under one heading could equally well have been considered under another. My guess is that this problem is the result of the fact that the book had originally been a dissertation. Drawing distinctions of the sort represented by Wiebe’s chapter divisions is one of the expectations dissertation committees have of Ph.D. candidates. It is often only later, when a scholar has established his reputation, that he is allowed to acknowledge that such categories are fluid. To make this sort of claim when one is still only a student is to risk the charge that one’s work is lacking in rigor.

That fault aside, Wiebe’s book sounds as if it is worth reading. In any case, Rudek’s review is certainly worth reading. It concludes with the observation that

Die Faszination Kierkegaards für Schriftsteller scheint damit gerade in der Affinität senies Denkens zur Literatur zu liegen; Während die Philosophie sich in Wesentlichen mit der Erkenntnis des Allgemeinen befasst, hat es die Literatur immer mit Besonderen, Individuellen zu tun. Bei Kierkegaard jedoch macht die Philosophie einen Schritt auf die Literatur zu, und das nich nur wegen Kierkegaards stilistischer Könnerschaft und seiner Integration fiktionaler Abschnitte in die Argumentation, sondern vor allem durch die Wahl des einzelnen Subjekts als Erkenntnisgegenstand. Dass Kierkegaard damit bei Literaten auf großes Interesse gestoßen ist, verwundert nicht.

The fascination writers have with Kierkegaard would appear to lie in the affinity of his thought with literature. While philosophy is essentially concerned with knowledge of the universal; literature is always concerned with particular individuals. With Kierkegaard, however, philosophy takes a step in the direction of literature, and not simply because of his masterful literary stile, or because of his integration of fictional, or narrative elements into his arguments, but above all because he chooses the subjective individual as an object of knowledge. It should thus be no surprise that Kierkegaard is of such interest to writers.

That is an excellent point!

Posted on

Ibsen (and Kierkegaard) at Temple

Henrik ibsen
Henrik ibsen

One of the nice things about living in Philadelphia is the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium. The consortium is made up of the philosophy departments of local colleges and universities (including The University of Delaware). The member institutions share information about events of interest to philosophers. Given the number of institutions in the consortium, there’s nearly always something good going on.

On Friday, May 2, I attended a symposium at Temple. Sponsored by Temple’s Department of Philosophy, the Center for Ibsen Studies of the University of Oslo, and The Center for the Humanities at Temple, the two-day symposium was entitled “Staging Skepticism: Ibsen and the Drama of Modernity.” Kristin Boyce and Susan Feagin presented papers on Thursday morning entitled, respectively, “The Method of Doubt and the Willing Suspension of (Dis)belief in Little Eyolf” and “Are Play Scripts Literature?” Frode Helland and Kristin Gjesdal presented papers in the afternoon entitled “The Use and Abuse of Truth: Skeptics and Skepticism in Ibsen,” and “Doubting the Past: Tragedy, Tradition, and Modernism in Ibsen’s Ghosts.”

Unfortunately, I was not able to make the event on Thursday. Fortunately, I was able to make it on Friday and was treated to two very stimulating presentations. The first, by the dashing and handsome Leonardo Lisi, was entitled “Ibsen and the Metaphysics of Doubt,” and the second, by the lovely and sophisticated Toril Moi, was entitled “Hedda’s Silences: Reading, Philosophy, Theater.”

It’s easy for those of us in the fields of philosophy and theology delude ourselves that we have a monopoly on scholarly work on Kierkegaard. This symposium demonstrated clearly, however, that Kierkegaard is of great interest to people in the field of literary theory. I don’t know to what extent Kierkegaard’s thought figured into the presentations the first day, but references to Kierkegaard were much in evidence on day two.

Lisi, whose first book was entitled Marginal Modernity: The The Aesthetics of Dependency from Kierkegaard to Joyce (Fordham, 2012) is hard at work on two new book projects, both of which involve Kierkegaard.

There was a stimulating discussion after Moi’s paper. It ranged far and wide, but the part that I thought would be of particular interest to readers of this blog concerned a problem of translation. Danish has two words that can be translated as “silent”: “stille” and “tavs.” The former is used to refer both to nature and to people. That is, one speaks in Danish of a wood (i.e., forest) being “stille,” just as one could in English refer to it as “still.” But “stille” can also be used to describe people. The expression “ti stille” means “be quiet,” or “be still,” as we also often say in English.

“Tavs,” on the other hand is never used to refer to nature alone. There is, as Moi explained, an “element of agency” to it. People, not nature, are “tavs.” The Ferrall-Repp dictionary defines “tavs” as “silent, hushed, discreet,” and the expression “ubrødelig taushed” as “inviolable secrecy.”

This is important because during the discussion after Moi’s paper, one of the participants in the seminar pointed out that while Moi had referred repeatedly in her paper to Hedda’s “silences” in Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler, Hedda is not really silent at all but speaks throughout, and at least occasionally on precisely the topics on which Moi had described her as “silent.” Moi conceded the point but then explained that although Hedda speaks throughout the play, her speech fails to reveal important truths that are relevant to the plot.

To my mind, Moi didn’t need to concede anything to her critic. Hedda is “silent” in the sense in which we often use the expression in English. That is, she is not forthcoming with information that is important to the circumstances of the play. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following as the second definition of “silent”: “Omitting mention of or reference to, passing over or disregarding, something in narration; containing no account or record.” “Unmentioned, unrecorded; marked by the absence of any record” is also given as a definition.

Another point that may interest readers of this blog. One of the participants mentioned to me during the break between Lisi’s and Moi’s papers that she was curious concerning whether Ibsen’s plays would have been performed in Norwegian in Norway. Many people don’t realize, I suspect, that though Ibsen was Norwegian, he wrote in Danish. Even fewer people realize, however, that all Norwegians at that time wrote in Danish. Danish was simply the written language of Norway. That’s why modern Norwegian (in contrast to “new Norwegian”) is known in Norway as “bokmål.” Modern Norwegian, which is effectively Danish with a few spelling changes, is the language of books (bøker). There were a few spelling differences even in Ibsen’s day, but so few that one could get all the way through a book from that period without realizing that it was actually Norwegian and not Danish. (New Norwegian, or nynorsk, is an attempt to reconstruct a common Norwegian language from the many dialects that were spoken in Norway before the Danes took over there in the sixteenth century.)

So yes, Ibsen wrote in Danish, but that’s basically the same thing as saying he wrote. Even today Danes and Norwegians rarely bother to try to speak one another’s language. Modern Norwegian, though it sounds very different from Danish, is more like a dialect of Danish than a different language.

Finally, I may have said this before, but it bears repeating. One of the benefits of learning Danish is that when you get very good at it, you’ll be able to read Norwegian. I keep forgetting that. I had such a good time at the symposium, though, that I’ve decided to read some Ibsen!