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Yet Another Error in the New Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks

I’ve found yet another significant error in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks. I don’t go looking for errors, as I believe I’ve explained in earlier posts, I discover them by accident, usually when I’m updating references from the old Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. Due to the generosity of my friend Sylvia Walsh Perkins, I have a complete set of both KJN and the earlier JP. Most of the journal references in my earlier writing, as well as the notes I’ve made over the years, are to the JP, so when I need to update those references to the new KJN, I go first to the relevant JP entry because that entry always includes a reference to the passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, the only complete edition of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers in Danish. When I find the passage in the Pap. I type the Danish into the searchable edition of the new Danish Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. That then gives me the location of the passage in SKS. The new KJN is keyed to SKS, so once I have the SKS info I can find the passage in the new KJN.

Unfortunately, I keep discovering problems with the new KJN. The problem I am going to talk about in this post concern the following passage from KJN

For a thinker there can be no worse anguish than having to live in suspense while people pile up detail upon detail; it always looks as if the idea, the conclusion, will arrive very soon. If a researcher in the natural sciences does not feel this anguish he must not be a thinker. This is the terrible tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is, as it were, in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit. (KJN 4, 72.)

The Danish for this passage is:

For en Tænker kan der ikke gives nogen rædsommere Qval end at skulde leve hen i den Spænding at medens man opdynger Detail, det bestandig seer ud som kom nu Tanken næste Gang, Conclusionen. Føler Naturforskeren ikke denne Qval saa maa han ikke være Tænker. Dette det Intellectuelles rædsomme Tantalisme! En Tænker er som i Helvede saa længe han ikke har fundet Aandens Vished.

The Hongs render the Danish as:

For a thinker there is no more horrible anguish than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it continually seems as if the thought, the conclusion, is just about to appear. If the natural scientist does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is literally in hell as long as he has not found certainty of spirit.

Here is how I would translate the passage: 

There is no torment more dreadful to a thinker than to have to live in the tension that while one is heaping up details it constantly seems as if the conclusion will come with the next thought. If the natural scientist [Naturforsker] does not feel this anguish, he must not be a thinker. This is the most dreadful tantalization of the intellectual! A thinker is in hell as long as he has not found certainty [Aandens Vished].

The Hongs’ translation of this passage is generally superior to the new KJN translation. There are numerous problems with the translation in KJN. First, the term translated in KJN merely as “worse” (rædsommere) is the same term that is translated later as “terrible” (rædsomme). The latter translation is more accurate in that rædssom has connotations of fear given that it is derived from ræd which Ferrall-Repp translates as “fearful, timid, afraid, frightened, timorous.” One can’t actually call the translation of rædsommere  as “worse” a error, though. It just isn’t ideal. The Hongs’ “more horrible” is actually preferable.

The same thing could be said of KJN’s tortured attempt to keep Kierkegaard’s simile “som i Helvede” a simile by translating in as “is, as it were, in hell.” The phrase sounds intolerably pedantic in English, whereas the original Danish, som i Helvede would not sound pedantic to a native Danish speaker. The tone of the original is far better preserved by rendering the simile as a metaphor. That is, som i Helvede is better translated as “is in hell,” without the Hongs’ “literally,” since if some translation of som were necessary, “figuratively” would be more appropriate, but would, again, render a passage that sounds more pedantic in English than it does in Danish.

The last annoying departure from the Hongs’ translation of the passage in question that I’m going to list in this post is the rendering of opdynger Detail  as “pile up detail upon detail.” Opdynge, according to Ferrall-Repp means  “to heap up, amass, accumulate,” so the Hongs’ “heaping up,” is arguably preferable to KJN’s “pile up,” but again, the new translation does not actually alter the sense of the passage. Even the fact that KJN renders Detail (which has no plural in Danish but which is clearly used in the plural sense in this passage) as “detail upon detail” doesn’t doesn’t actually alter the sense of the passage. 

There are lots of these unnecessary deviations from the Hongs’ translations in the new KJN translations. Rendering “Spænding” as “suspense” rather than “tension” is less desirable than the Hongs’ “tension” given that Ferrall-Repp does not list “suspense” as one of the possible English translations of Spænding. Those translations are: “1. tension; 2. estrangement; 3. excitement.” That said, “suspense” isn’t actually misleading. It’s just an unnecessary deviation from the earlier translation. One gets the sense, going through the new KJN, that many of the deviations from the Hongs’ earlier translations were made not because there was any problem with the original, but because the more changes the new translation team could come up with, the greater would be the impression that a new translation was necessary.  

No such justification for a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was necessary, however, because the Hongs’ translation was not complete. That is, there was definitely a need for a complete English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. Sadly, KJN is not a complete translation of all of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers because is it based on SKS and SKS is not complete. That is, there’s lots of important material missing from SKS (see earlier posts on the problems with SKS).

The error in the new KJN translation of the above passage is the translation of the Danish man as “people.” Not only is this incorrect, it is seriously misleading. Man, in Danish, just like man in German, is properly translated as “one” (as indeed the Hongs did render it in their translation of this passage). That is, it isn’t other people who Kierkegaard describes as piling up “detail upon detail” (opdynger Detail), but the researcher who is the subject of the passage. 

The error in KJN actually gives the passage a different meaning. That is, it makes it look as if the thinker in question experiences rising anxiety, or whatever, as he or she watches other people’s research amass more and more material that would be relevant to some issue to which the thinker is seeking a resolution, or some question to which he or she is seeking an answer. In fact, such a view could be attributed to Kierkegaard, as I in fact did attribute it in the paper I gave at Princeton in July. That is, I pointed out in that paper that science and scholarship, according to Kierkegaard, are collective endeavors, that no individual scholar or scientist can be the sole arbiter of truth in his or her discipline. 

The new KJN translation of the passage in question from Kierkegaard’s journals would appear to support such a view and could easily be appropriated by scholars as a reference that would support such a view. The thing is, it doesn’t. It isn’t inconsistent with such a view. It just doesn’t speak to the issue of how the establishment of truth in science and scholarship is a collective endeavor. The issue of this passage is how intellectuals, or scholars and scientists, are actually unwittingly searching for a kind of certitude, or mental calm, that cannot be found in the realm of science and scholarship, or of ideas more generally, but only in the realm of spirit. 

So scholars beware. If you are not actually fluent in Danish and have your own edition of Soren Kierkegaards Papirer (or easy access to a library that has it). Then you are going to want to get ahold of a copy of the Hongs’ Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. As hard as I sometimes am on the Hongs, I think they actually did a very nice job with the journals and papers. Sadly, as I mentioned about, their translation is only a selection, so serious Kierkegaard scholars are going to need to supplement it with references to the Papirer, and that, of course, means they are going to have to learn Danish!

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Kierkegaard at Princeton

From left to right: Lara Buchak, Hans Halvorson, Austen McDougal, and Z Quanbeck

I attended a Kierkegaard workshop at Princeton University last month and it was such a delightful experience I thought I should post about it. The papers were uniformly good and thought provoking. Many of the presenters, including Alexander (a.k.a Z) Quanbeck, who organized the conference, were young and that certainly bodes well for the future of Kierkegaard scholarship. I was also encouraged to learn that Princeton has two tenured members of the philosophy department, Lara Buchak and Hans Halvorson, who are Kierkegaard enthusiasts, and that bodes even better for Kierkegaard scholarship. 

Readers of this blog may be surprised to learn that neither Buchak nor Halvorson has a background in continental philosophy. Buchak focuses on “decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy or religion,” and Halvorson “focuses on applications of category theory in mathematical logic,” as well as the philosophy of physics. That is, both have the kind of highly technical math, logic, and science-based backgrounds that used to dominate Anglo-American philosophy and for which there is still a strong favorable bias on the part of most philosophy hiring committees. 

That two such traditionally-trained analytic philosophers would have an interest in Kierkegaard may seem strange to some, but it makes perfect sense to me. Kierkegaard, contrary to popular belief, was highly analytical and generally averse to speculation. That’s actually a conspicuous difference between Kierkegaard and George MacDonald, while both have very similar theologies at the most fundamental level, MacDonald’s prodigious imagination was drawn to speculating on issues such as the spiritual status of animals and the fate of souls whose moral progress is, on his view, merely interrupted by death, while Kierkegaard was far most skeptically inclined. 

Buchak presented a fascinating paper called “Why Should We Defer to Authority?” that reminded me very much of my paper, “The Social Implications of Epistemic Obligation in Kierkegaard’s Epistemology” (presented at a conference entitled “The Ethics of Doubt — Kierkegaard, Skepticism, and Conspiracy Theory,” at the University of Southampton, in September of 2024). There were lots of differences, of course, but I anticipate that Buchak’s paper will soon be published and that I will then be able to make a comparison of the two the subject of a future blog post.

Halvorson presented an equally compelling paper entitled “Climacus on the Objective Way.” My notes are too sketchy, sadly, to facilitate a responsible reconstruction of either Buchak’s or Halvorson’s that paper. I can summarize here very briefly, however, a paper Halvorson published earlier that I think every Kierkegaard scholars should read because of the massive implications it has for future Kierkegaard research. That paper is “The Philosophy of Science in Either-Or.” It originally appeared in Cambridge’s Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: A Critical Guide,and is available for download from PhilArchive. 

Halvorson argues in this paper that Either-Or “contains Kierkegaard’s argument against the predominant Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of scientific objectivity” and that this rejection “is a forerunner of Niels Bohr’s ‘epistemological lesson of quantum theory.’” That is, Halvorson argues very persuasively that “Either-Or is a central text for the transition from and enlightenment picture of scientific objectivity to the new picture that began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (pp. 1-2). 

The argument, very roughly, goes something like this. A, the protagonist of the first volume of Either-Or is paralyzed by indecision precisely because his perspective on his existence, or on existence more generally, is too objective. Objectively, everything simply is, and there is no reason to chose one thing, or one course of action, over another. Halvorson then traces this view of the existential effect of an extremely objective stance relative to one’s existence back to Kierkegaard’s teacher, Poul Martin Møller and, in particular, to Møller’s novel En Danske Students Eventyr (A Danish student’s adventure) which presents a character who, like Kierkegaard’s A, is paralyzed by indecision brought on by what Halvorson describes as “a hypertrophied capacity for reflection.” 

I’m ashamed to admit that while I own a copy of Møller’s collected works, I’m not much of a novel reader, so I had never read En Danske Students Eventyr (which is probably the best-known work of Møller’s, at least to contemporary Danes). One doesn’t have to have read it, though, to follow Halvorson’s argument. The only problem I have with the argument is that I think putting Hegel in the same class as Descartes, and the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity with which he is associated, is problematic. Everything Halvorson says about Kierkegaard’s attitude toward this ideal is, I believe, unassailable. I’m just not entirely confident that Kierkegaard would ascribe such an ideal to Hegel.

Hegel certainly thought he was objective, but he was no victim of the paralysis that characterizes both A and the protagonist of Møller’s novel. Kierkegaard appears to believe that, rather than exemplifying the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity, Hegel suffered from a kind of intellectual megalomania that was pathological. It is one of the great ironies of intellectual history that Kierkegaard, who is generally averse to speculation, is so often lumped together with Hegel as one of those “weak-minded continental thinkers” to which analytic philosophers have such an aversion. The Enlightenment ideal of objectivity arguably does lead to indecision, as Halvorson argues, and in that way, precludes the kind of wild speculations in which Hegel engaged. That is, it would preclude the conclusion that one had achieved absolute knowledge of the sort Hegel claimed (hence the practice of the Pyrrhonists, the paradigmatic objective inquirers [Σκεπτικό], of allowing assent only to appearances, or impressions concerning the nature of reality, rather than to beliefs about it).   

In support of this view is the fact that most contemporary Anglo-American philosophers trace their own philosophical stance back to the Enlightenment, but few see Hegel as an embodiment of that ideal, and more than a few have strongly negative reactions to him. Of course it’s conceivable that Kierkegaard thinks hewing too closely to the Enlightenment ideal of objectivity could eventually drive a person mad and that this was what had happened to Hegel. So from that perspective, I suppose, Hegel could be considered at least an anomalous exemplar of this ideal.

Whether Hegel is properly classed with Descartes is a minor point, however, in the context of Halvorson’s argument and hence in no way weakens it. Halvorson’s argument is that the role of subjectivity in knowledge formation was passed from Møller, to Kierkegaard, from Kierkegaard to Rasmus Nielsen (a friend of Kierkegaard’s and a professor at the University of Copenhagen), from Nielsen to his student Harald Høffding, and from Høffding to his student (drumroll…) Niels Bohr! 

Fascinating, eh? It’s no wonder that Halvorson, who has a background in in physics, has developed an interest in Kierkegaard. There is so much work to be done in the area of Kierkegaard’s relevance to, and influence upon, contemporary empirical science, and physics in particular. My hope is that Halvorson will lead that scholarly charge and that there will soon be a growing body of work in this area of Kierkegaard scholarship. 

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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.