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On Scholarly Protocol

UK Theologian Daphne Hampson has commented on my earlier post on her book, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique. In fact, she has written a five-page response to the post. For some reason, however, she posted her comment not to my post on her book, but to my later post “Kierkegaard’s Conservatism,” so you will have to go there to read her comment, or more correctly, comments, in full. I could have replied to her comment there as well, but given the effort she appears to have put into her comment, it seemed our conversation merited a more prominent place on this blog than the “comments” section of an earlier post, hence I have decided to respond to her comments here.

“Given Marilyn Piety’s bombastically rude comments in your paper,” she begins, apparently unaware that the entire “paper” (i.e., blog) is mine and not simply the one post, “on my ‘Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique’ (Oxford University Press, 2013) … I feel obliged to respond.”

“First a minor point,” she continues, “My translating Kierkegaard’s ‘Begrebet Angest’ as ‘The Concept Angst’ is not ‘simply an affectation.’ ” She then holds forth on the difficulty of translating the “Danish/German ‘Angst’ as if I were challenging her understanding of the term rather than pointing out her violation of scholarly protocol in making up her own title for a work that already exists in translation under a different title––i.e., The Concept of Anxiety (Princeton, 1981 and W.W. Norton, 2014). When I first encountered Hampson’s reference to “The Concept Angst,” I immediately did a Google search to see if there were a new translation of the work under that title. There isn’t.

I firmly believe that “anxiety” is a fine translation of the Danish “angest.” That wasn’t the point, though. The point, as was driven home to me relentlessly by my professor and M.A. thesis director at Bryn Mawr, George L. Kline, was that scholars are not allowed to make up their own titles for works that already exist under other titles. The confusion that would ensue if they were allowed to do this doesn’t bear thinking about. What if scholars suddenly felt free to translate Plato’s ΠΟΛΙΤΕΙΑ as “Civil Polity,” or “The Business of a Statesman” (both of which are acceptable translations according to my edition of Liddell-Scott) rather than the traditional Republic? Or what if they decided to use the subtitle, “On Political Justice,” rather than the main title to refer to the work? Many people simply would not know what work they were referring to.

Scholars don’t get to make up their own titles for works simply because they think they can do better than the translator of the work. I had to refer to Kierkegaard’s Philosophiske Smuler as “Philosophical Fragments” whenever I spoke, or wrote, about it in English right up until the time my own translation of this work appeared under the title Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009). I knew “fragments” was not a good translation of “smuler” but still, I had to use it, because it was the only English title of the work a the time. If Hampson had done her own translation of Begrebet Angest, and decided to use The Concept Angst, she’d have been perfectly within her rights. She didn’t do that, though. She just decided she liked her own title better than the official title.

Making up her own title for Begrebet Angest isn’t the only violation of scholarly protocol of which Hampson is guilty. Her comment to my post contains numerous violations. For example, she resorts to ad hominem arguments (e.g., impugning my motives in criticizing her book without producing any evidence to support such a charge), and non-argumentative rhetoric (e.g., “bombastically rude,” “ridiculous,” “ire”). She also invokes the infamous argument from authority, discredited in the Enlightenment, when she defends her competence to write a book on Kierkegaard, not on the basis of her years spent studying his works, but because she “holds a doctorate in theology (from Harvard),” “held a post in systematic theology for twenty-five years,” “had a previous Oxford doctorate in modern history,” and “a Master’s with distinction in Continental philosophy.”

“I have been teaching the text which my book considers throughout my career” she writes. That didn’t surprise me because the overwhelming impression one gets upon reading the book is that it is a compilation of lecture notes from an undergraduate seminar on Kierkegaard taught by someone who doesn’t actually know much about Kierkegaard, but was nonetheless required to teach a seminar on him (a not uncommon phenomenon). I say “undergraduate” seminar because Hampson goes on at some length about Kierkegaard’s “epistemology” without a single reference to any of the scholarly works on that subject (i.e., Anton Hügli’s Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität und die Objektivität des Erkennens bei Sören Kierkegaard [Editio Academica, 1973], Martin Slotty’s Kierkegaard’s Epistemology [originally published in German in 1915, now in English translation], and my own Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology [Baylor, 2010]). You couldn’t get away with that in a graduate seminar. You would have to look at at least some of the relevant secondary literature.

I want to be clear here. It is not my view that only people who have devoted their entire professional lives to the study of Kierkegaard’s thought should venture to write scholarly works on it. It is entirely possible for non-specialists to do excellent work on Kierkegaard. Jonathan Lear comes to mind. When I remarked that Hampson was “not a Kierkegaard scholar,” that was not to discredit her book, but to venture an explanation for how it could be so conspicuously wrong on so many fundamental points.

Hampson’s is an impressive intellect, there is no question about that. It would appear, however, that she is a victim of confirmation bias. That is, she thinks that she sees things in Kierkegaard’s works (e.g., his purported pre-modern tendencies, or his supposed rejection of the idea that there are laws of nature) because she expects to see them.

I’ll look at the substance of Hampson’s comments in a later post. My objective here was simply to address the form of her comments, not their substance. In fact, I addressed the substance in my original post and appear to have done a sufficiently good job of that to have hit a nerve, so to speak.

The reason I wanted to address the form of Hampson’s comments was that it illustrates many of the things I try to impress upon my students that they must not do in their own writing, so it occurred to me that once the post was up, I could direct them to it as a teaching exercise.

Speaking of teaching, I taught a Kierkegaard seminar at Haverford College this past term. It was a small seminar with only five students, all excellent. They have given me permission to post their papers to this blog, so in my next post, I’m going to talk about my the class, give brief summaries of each paper, and include links to downloadable pdfs of them. Each one is so good, that I think it would actually be helpful to many readers of this blog.

After that, I’ll return to Hampson.

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New Book on Kierkegaard’s Epistemology!

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Martin Slotty’s book on Kierkegaard’s epistemology is now available in an English translation! This is great news for Kierkegaard scholars because until now, there was only one book available in English on Kierkegaard’s epistemology, my Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (Baylor, 2010). Slotty’s book is an introduction. It is shorter and more accessible than Ways of Knowing, so it is the better volume to start with for those who want to understand something about Kierkegaard’s epistemology. Kierkegaard scholars should read both, of course, because, as I argue in Ways of Knowing, Kierkegaard’s epistemology provides the foundation for his views on the nature of faith in general and religious faith in particular.

So far, Slotty is available only in paperback. I understand from the publisher, however, that there will soon be an ebook version!

I was honored to be asked to do the foreword to Slotty’s book. What follows below is the first part of the foreword.

Foreword

I had written the first draft of my dissertation on Kierkegaard’s epistemology before I stumbled upon this little book in one of the “hollandsk bogauktioner” that are held in Helligåndshus in the center of Copenhagen every summer. These “Dutch book auctions” are huge used book sales where individual antiquarians get rid of what is effectively their overstock. All the books are priced the same and the price is reduced by half on succeeding days. These sales are mana from heaven to a poor graduate student trying to build a collection of nineteenth-century Danish philosophy and theology on budget. The books are generally inexpensive to begin with but become even cheaper with time. I went generally looking for works by Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, figures such as Hans Lassen Martensen, and Poul Martin Møller. The only way I could find such works, however, was to pore over the titles of each and every one of the thousands of books on the many long tables laid out in the medieval annex to the famous old Helligånds Kirke (Church of the Holy Spirit). I found quite a few invaluable reference works this way, including the famous Ferrall-Repp A Danish-English Dictionary from 1845.

No find was more important to me, however, than this little book by Martin Slotty. I couldn’t believe my eyes when they landed upon a slim volume, that appeared to date from the turn of the century, with the title Die Erkenntnislehre S. A. Kierkegaards. Someone other than Anton Hügli had actually written a book on Kierkegaard’s epistemology, and that long ago! The book, as it turned out, was Slotty’s Doktorarbeit for Friedrich-Alexanders-Universität Erlangen. It isn’t nearly so deep-going an analysis of Kierkegaard’s epistemology as Hügli’s Die Erkenntnis der Subjektivität und die Objectivität des Erkennens bei Søren Kierkegaard from 1973. It’s an introduction to Kierkegaard’s epistemology, as is clear from the title. In fact, it is comprised primarily of passages extracted from Kierkegaard’s works with only the occasional addition of an analysis of their meaning. The relative paucity of analysis is explicable, however, by the fact that the passages more or less explain themselves. That is part of what makes the book so important. It shows very clearly that one does not have to dig deep to see that epistemological concerns were central to Kierkegaard’s thought.

Peter Brown, paraphrasing the view of Byzantine scholar Averil Cameron, wrote in a recent edition of The New York Review of Books that “Byzantine studies should be put into a sort of intellectual receivership.” It’s an “undertheorized field,” he continues, quoting Cameron, “as well as an understudied one” (NYRB, December 18, 2014). I’ve often felt that Kierkegaard scholarship should be put into intellectual receivership. There is plenty of work being done on Kierkegaard, of course, and much of it is highly theoretical. That isn’t the problem. The problem is that while there is excellent work being done on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard scholarship as a whole still suffers from some fundamental misconceptions about just what kind of thinker Kierkegaard was. Most people writing on Kierkegaard today do not have even a passing familiarity with the Danish language, let alone a command of Danish that would allow them to read Kierkegaard’s works in the original. Scholars tend to focus on a select few books, which, read in isolation from the much larger authorship of which they are a part, are difficult to interpret.1 This little book will provide a necessary corrective to the view that Kierkegaard was a proponent of irrationalism or subjectivism, as well as to the view that epistemological concerns did not figure largely in his works. They did.
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1. It is worth noting that nearly all Kierkegaard’s contemporary readers would have been familiar with his whole authorship. The number of Danish intellectuals was relatively small and works of the sort Kierkegaard published were not numerous. Also, the device of pseudonymity did not conceal the origin of Kierkegaard’s works for very long. Copenhagen was, and remains, a small town.

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Danish Art

140-2  A kind reader wrote to me yesterday to inquire why I had not posted anything to this blog in January. He said he enjoyed the blog and that he hoped I was not ill, or anything. I’ve not been ill (well, okay, I have been ill, for only for about a week). I’ve just been very busy. I’m teaching online this term and that actually takes more time than conventional teaching. I’ve also been finishing a book. It’s not a book on Kierkegaard. It’s a book on figure skating entitled Sequins and Scandals: Reflections on Figure Skating, Culture, and the Philosophy of Sport. So it is a philosophy of sport book, sort of. It’s actually a collection of many different pieces that I had published on skating over the years, as well as a few new pieces. It was mostly written already, but it did take some time to put together.

I am also finishing an article on Kierkegaard for a volume Oxford is doing on “theological epistemology” and I am editing the bibliography and writing an introduction to the forthcoming English translation of Martin Slotty’s book on Kierkegaard’s epistemology. Yes, I have been very busy. In between these projects, however, I have been doing a little Ebay shopping.

One of the things that was hardest for me about leaving Denmark was that it meant I could no longer spend my spare time haunting Danish junk stores looking for fine old paintings. That was how I used to relax when I lived in Copenhagen. Sometimes, when I had been working for many days without leaving the apartment (I can actually go a long time without seeing other people because I am kind of a recluse), I would just head out to one of the local junk stores. What most people outside Denmark don’t realize is that Danes suffer from an inferiority complex relative to the rest of Europe. Den danske mindreværdskompleks it’s called (literally “the Danish less-worth complex”). Legions of Danes appear to have taken up a serious study of painting since the turn of the century, but since relatively few of them became internationally famous, no one wants their paintings. Danes buy up these domestically produced works of art when the artists are young in the hope that these artists will become famous. But of course most of them never do, so when older Danes die, their heirs generally do not want these paintings, so they end up being carted off by the local junk dealer. Every junk store in Copenhagen is filthy with them, floor to ceiling. When I lived there I could often pick up a beautiful old painting from the first half of the century in a heavy guilt frame for under $100.

Over time, I gradually accumulated about fifty such paintings. Unfortunately, I could not take them all with me when I left Copenhagen. I still have plenty of paintings, so you should not feel sorry for me. I miss the trips to the junk stores though. Or did, until a couple of weeks ago when I discovered that there are some very nice Danish paintings available on Ebay! Yes, that’s right–Ebay. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any for under $100, but I’ve found some really beautiful ones in an Ebay store called Art-Gate from between $200-$500, which is really very good for an original oil painting in a beautiful old frame. 140-5

None of these paintings date from Kierkegaard’s time. They are mostly from the first half of the twentieth century. Many are stereotypical Danish landscapes, though, that will mean a lot to scholars who have spent time studying in Denmark. There are some nice interiors and still lifes as well, and all at very reasonable prices. In fact, Art-Gate invites people to make offers for the paintings, so you could easily end up paying even less than the official asking price. It’s not quite so much fun as combing through the junk stores yourself, but at least you won’t have to do the packing and shipping!

I’ll be back soon with more news!