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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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Kierkegaard’s Psychology

Forgive me for taking so long to put up this post. I was doing two posts a week during the winter because I don’t teach in the winter. Drexel is on quarters, and because my husband, the legal scholar Brian J. Foley, teaches in Florida and we have a house there, Drexel very kindly allows me to teach the spring-summer-fall terms rather than the standard fall-winter-spring.

Well, I’m teaching again, and that has slowed down my blogging activity considerably. I’m not stopping though, just slowing down. I anticipate being able to do one post every two weeks, and possibly even more frequently, until the summer. The summer should be a little better because that tends to be a light term and I am teaching only one small seminar class this summer.

But enough about my schedule. I wanted to pass on to you a bit of information I came across recently that I thought was very interesting. Years ago, when I was a graduate student at Bryn Mawr, George Kline, one of my professors there, told me that the former Kierkegaard scholar Josiah Thompson, had left his post at Haverford College to become a private detective. I remember at the time thinking that that was one of the strangest things I’d ever heard. What possible relation, I thought, could there be between philosophy and detective work?

OK, I was naïve. For those few readers, however, who do not immediately understand the connection, I have a little story for you. The title of this post promises to tell you something about Kierkegaard’s psychology. This is really only a teaser though. The real substantive entries on Kierkegaard’s psychology will come later. Still, I ran across a book that I didn’t know existed and which I thought people interested in Kierkegaard ought to know about. It is a book by the German artist-physician-philosopher Carl Gustav Carus. Never heard of him? Read on.

“I am happy,” writes Kierkegaard in his journals,

“to acknowledge that Carus’ book (Psyche) is excellent, and if he will give the qualitative its due, then I will gratefully take a few of his good psychological observations. At all decisive points he makes unqualified room for the miracle, for the creative power of God, for the absolute expression of worship, and says: This no one can grasp, no science, neither now nor ever. Then he communicates the interesting things he knows.” (JP, 3:2818.)

I read this entry years ago and was intrigued by it. Who was this Carus? What were the interesting things he knew? How could I get my hands on a copy of this book? I searched antiquarian bookshops in Denmark and in Germany without any luck. I looked both in person and on line. Once I found a copy in German on Abebooks and tried to buy it only to be informed, after having added it to my basket, that it had already been sold.

Last year, finally, I found the book, in an English translation, in an esoteric bookstore in Cambridge, MA. It was in the section on Jungian psychology. It was $25 because, the owner of the shop informed me sheepishly, it was out of print. It’s a short book, under one hundred pages, but it is indeed very interesting. I cannot tell who was responsible for the translation, but there is an introductory note by the famous Jungian analyst James Hillman. Apparently, Jungians are interested in Carus because Jung himself was influenced by Carus.

My friend, and publisher, Eric von der Luft, informs me that Carus was strongly influenced by Schelling. Interestingly, Kierkegaard appears to have had a higher opinion of Carus than of Schelling. I found out something else though that I thought would be of interest to readers. Carus’s view of the relation between the mind and the body is strikingly similar to the “physicalism” of John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind. This “physicalism,” though in a perhaps less well-defined form, appears to have come from Schelling, Schelling influenced Heidegger and Heidegger influenced Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a friend of John Searle…

Maybe we should all try our hands at private detective work if this philosophy thing dries up!