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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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Good News and Bad News

KB SKS Portal

A reader, Cassandra Swick, wrote recently to ask me if I could help to clarify a particularly obscure passage in Kierkegaard’s Two Ages. “This passage,” she wrote, “is in the context of his discussion of the present age, where he is pointing out its various deficiencies.

“The Hong translation,” she continued “reads:

The coiled springs of life-relationships, which are what they are only because of qualitatively distinguishing passion, lose their resilience; the qualitative expression of difference between opposites is no longer the law for the relation of inwardness to each other in the relation. Inwardness is lacking, and to that extent the relation does not exist or the relation is an inert cohesion. (p. 78.)

The original reads:

Livs-Forholdenes Springfjædre, der kun i den qvalitativt adskillende Lidenskab ere hvad de ere, taber Elasticiteten; det Forskjelliges Fjernhed fra sit Forskjellige i Qvalitets-Udtrykket er ikke Loven for Inderlighedens Forhold til hinanden i Forholdet. Inderligheden mangler, og Forholdet er forsaavidt ikke til, eller Forholdet er en dvask Cohæsion

That is indeed a difficult passage to translate. The good news is that when you run into a passage such as this, where the new Hongs’ translation is particularly awkward and confusing, you can often get help by locating the same passage in an older English translation. I have an old Harper Torchbook edition of The Present Age and Of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle. Sure enough, the passage is there, and in much more lucid prose than the Hongs’. The translation, by Alexander Dru, is a model of the translator’s art. It reads:

The springs of life, which are only what they are because of the qualitative differentiating power of passion, lose their elasticity. The distance separating a thing from its opposite in quality no longer regulates the inward relation of things. All inwardness is lost, and to that extent the relation no longer exists, or else forms a colourless cohesion.

Of course Dru omits “Forholdenes,” or “relationships.” My sense, though, is that Dru’s intuitions were right there, that “relationships” can be omitted without any loss of meaning in that “life” effectively implies “relationships.” 

This passage highlights the value of collecting older translations of Kierkegaard, which are still readily available in both brick and mortar used book stores and on Abebooks.com. It also makes clear, a point I have repeatedly made on this blog, that no translation can provide a secure foundation for serious scholarship. I think Dru’s omission of “Forholdenes” doesn’t matter, but I may be wrong about that. 

As the title of this post suggests, however, the reason for it is not simply to make clear the value of collecting older translations of Kierkegaard. I also have some bad news for you. This news concerns the searchable online edition of the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. My old Bryn Mawr professor, and M.A. thesis advisor George Kline, drilled into me that I must always check the wording of quotations against the original text, so rather than simply cut and past the text of the Danish edition of Two Ages from Cassandra Swick’s email, I went to the online version of SKS to cut and paste it from there. 

I was surprised to discover that the online version of SKS has been moved from the website of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center to the website of the Royal Library, a.k.a. Kongelige Bibliotek. The interface is completely different and I had a great deal of difficulty, at first, figuring out how to search the text. The search function across the entire corpus is problematic in that it gets too many false positives. I typed “Livs-Forholdenes Springfjædre” into the search field and got an enormous number of hits that included only “Livs.” I figured that this might have been because I had selected “Mindst et ord,” or “minimally one word” in the search field, so I tried again after I selected “Alle ord” or “all words.” Those results were still problematic, though, in that while the results took me to En literair Anmeldelse, there were still lots of false positives. Only after I went specifically to En literair Anmeldelse and clicked on the link for a PDF of the text, did my search immediately take me to the right passage. 

To complicate matters even further, all the search instructions appear to be available only in Danish.  It is hard to imagine that they could have made it more difficult for foreigners to search across the whole corpus of the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter if that had actually been their objective. 

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Remembering the Dead

9d1af61698cd834326cd38729144efaa--mourning-jewelry-opalineI’m on sabbatical now. My plan had been to use this time to finish Fear and Dissembling, the book I have been working on for many years. I’d conceived that plan, however, before my father died, and since his death I’ve found it hard to get back to that project. I’ve actually found it hard to do anything constructive. I need to do something, though, to occupy my time until my powers of concentration have returned, something worthwhile, so I have hit upon a project that I have so far found very therapeutic. I am translating the chapter from Works of Love entitled “The Work of Love of Remembering the Dead.” My plan is to find a publisher for this little book so that it can be available as a comfort to people who have recently lost someone they love. It will be a very slim volume because the chapter is only ten pages or so long, so even with the original Danish text on facing pages, a translator’s introduction, a preface, and very wide margins, it should come in well under a hundred pages.

I think it should have very wide margins because wide margins make for a more attractive page. The volume I am envisioning will be small and thin and beautiful, something that the bereaved can carry around with them, like a breast-pocket New Testament; something they can find comfort in, not merely because of the words, but because of the beauty of the object itself. There is something comforting about beauty. People realize this at an instinctive level. That’s the reason, or at least part of the reason, for mourning jewelry. That’s also part of the reason, I believe, why there is so much work on the relation between aesthetics and religion.

I have pasted the first two pages of my translation below. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I favor what is known in translation theory as “semantic translation,” or translation that endeavors to preserve the sense of the original, or “source,” text but which tends to be freer than “literal” or “faithful” translation (see Peter Newmark, A Textbook of Translation). Hence I have taken a few liberties in the text below. The term “graveyard” (i.e., Kirkegaard) does not appear in the original. Where I have “go out to a graveyard,” in the second paragraph, the text actually reads “gaae ud til de Døde” ––i.e., “go out to the dead.” My husband thought, however, when I gave him the text to read, that this might be a little disorienting to the reader, so he suggested that for at least this first reference to “de Døde,” I substitute “graveyard” for “the dead.” That seemed to me a good suggestion, so I have taken it.

I have also added, at my husband’s suggestion, more paragraph divisions than exist in the original. The entire text below is only two long paragraphs in the original, and that is also, I fear, a little disorienting.

I used both the Swensons’ translation from 1946 and the older Hongs’ translation from 1962 as guides. The Swensons’ translation is, unsurprisingly, generally superior to the Hongs’, but even it is not without problems as I will explain in detail in the eventual “Translator’s Introduction.” For now, the only translation issue I want to draw your attention to, in addition to the aforementioned one, is my choice of “reduced circumstances” for Kierkegaard’s “indskrænke sig.” That, I hope you will agree, is a clear improvement on both the Hongs’ “cut back,” and even the Swensons’ “restrict itself.”

But read the text and judge for yourself.

When, for some reason or other, a person fears he will be unable to maintain a general grasp of something complicated and complex, he tries to make, or to acquire, a brief summarizing concept of the whole –– to help him maintain his grasp. Death, in this way, is the shortest summary of life, or life reduced to its shortest form. That’s why it has always been so important to those who reflect on the meaning of life, frequently to test what they have understood about it by means of this short summary. For no thinker has such a command of life as death has, that powerful thinker, who is able not merely to think through every illusion, but to grasp it in its parts and as a whole, to think it to nothingness.

If then, you become confused when you consider the many and various paths life can take, go out to a graveyard, there “where all paths meet” –– then the grasp becomes easy. If your head swims from constantly observing and hearing about life’s diversities, then go out to the dead; there you have control of the differences; there in “Muldets Frænder,” “the fellowship of mold,” there are no differences, only close kinship. That all human beings are blood relations, that is, of one blood, this consanguinity is often denied in life, but that they are of one mold, are related through mortality, cannot be denied.

Yes, go again out among the dead, so that you can, from there, get a view of life. This is what a sharpshooter does. He seeks a place where the enemy can’t hit him but from which he can hit the enemy, and where he can have the requisite calm for taking aim. Don’t choose the evening for your visit because the stillness of the evening, of an evening spent among the dead, is often not far from a certain exaltation of mood which strains and “fills one with restlessness,” creating new mysteries instead of solving the old ones.

No, go there early in the morning when the sun peeps between the branches, alternating light with shadow, when the beauty and friendliness of the sea, when the singing of the birds and the multitudinous life everywhere almost allows you to forget that you are among the dead. It will seem to you as if you have arrived in a foreign country, a place unfamiliar with the distinctions and confusion of life, a childlike place, consisting entirely of small families. Here is attained what is sought vainly in life: equality. Each family has a little plot of land for itself, of approximately equal size. Each has more or less the same “view.” The sun can easily shine equally over them all; no building rises so high that it cuts off the sun’s rays, or the nourishment of the rain, or the wind’s fresh breezes, or the songs of the birds, from a neighbor. No, here everyone is equal.

It happens sometimes in life that a family that has enjoyed wealth and abundance must accept reduced circumstances, but in death, everyone must accept reduced circumstances. There may be minor differences, perhaps six inches in the size of a plot, or that one family has a tree, which another inhabitant does not, on its plot. Why do you think there are these small differences? It is to remind you, by means of a profound jest, of how great the difference was. How loving death is! For it is certainly loving of death to use these small differences to remind us, through edifying humor, of just how great the difference was. Death does not say “there is absolutely no difference”; it says “you see there how great the difference was: six inches.”

If there were not these small differences, neither would death’s grasp be completely reliable. Life returns, in this way, in death, to childishness. Whether one owned a tree, a flower, a rock, made a great deal of difference in childhood. And the difference hinted at what later in life would appear on a very different scale. Now life is over and this little hint of a difference among the dead remains to soften, through humor, the memory of how things were.