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End-of-Year Bits and Pieces

The last few months have been packed with Kierkegaard-related activities. There were not the standard two Kierkegaard sessions at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego in November, but actually five! You can find a list of the sessions as well as the presenters here.

The papers were of varying quality, but none stood out as particularly bad. I realize that that observation is sort of damning with faint praise. Sadly, however, faint praise is often all that is appropriate with respect to contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. The problem isn’t just that a decent command of Danish is all too rare among Kierkegaard scholars, it’s also that far too many are not familiar with the breadth of Kierkegaard’s writings. Many scholars continue, for example, to view Kierkegaard as sexist simply because they are unfamiliar with the material from Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that I presented in my paper “Kierkegaard on the Paradox of Feminist Progress” as part of a session of the Nineteenth Century Theology Unit and that I have presented here on this blog. 

There are several difficulties here. First, Kierkegaard’s unpublished material collected first in Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, and then again in the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, while not complete is still very extensive, so it takes some time to get through it all.

Second is the fact that the short cut of searching for relevant material in the online edition of Kierkegaard’s works is unavailable for scholars who don’t have a very good knowledge of Danish. A little knowledge just isn’t enough because in many instances, there will be literally thousands of hits on a search for a particular term such as Evighed (i.e., “eternity”). There are 149 pages of hits for that term and each page has what appears to be a minimum of ten hits, but which can be greater because each hit will give a number of appearances of the term in question for a particular text. So that’s over a thousand hits for a single term, each of which must be read for its relevance to the topic being researched. One has to be able to scan these hits very quickly to see if they are indeed relevant, and most scholars simply can’t do that. 

Third, as I mentioned above, and have mentioned before, even the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (and the new Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, which is based on the Skrifter) while purporting to be complete, is not actually complete. Some very important material is missing. That material can be accessed only in the old Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Very few people have a set of the Papirer, though. I did a search just now for a set and couldn’t find a complete one, though I did find this set that has 19 volumes. The listing says that the complete set is actually 20 volumes. My own hard-cover set actually has 25 volumes, though. Three of those volumes are indexes, but that means that a complete set, sans the indexes would be 22 volumes and not 20. 

But enough of the problems with contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship. There is other news, both good and bad, to report. The good news first: The Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College is doing its best to improve the quality of Kierkegaard studies. First, they offer courses in Danish during the summer for visiting scholars and will be offering one on translation as well in the summer of 2026. Second, they have launched a new journal dedicated to Kierkegaard scholarship.

Finally, the bad news. Robert Alastair Hannay passed away on the eighth of December. Hannay was an outstanding Kierkegaard scholar, though perhaps not always so sensitive to the depth and influence of Kierkegaard’s religious convictions on his thought more generally. He was rare among Kierkegaard scholars in having had a rigorous analytical training in philosophy and he put that training to good use in his scholarship. He was also an outstanding translator. His translations of Kierkegaard’s works for Penguin are unsurpassed in both their accuracy and readability. Hannay will be sorely missed. 

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Kierkegaard on “Dialectic”

A reader wrote recently to inquire about what Kierkegaard meant by “dialectic.” That’s a good question because whatever he means, it is clearly not the same thing that Hegel famously means by this term. First, I have to say that like so many of Kierkegaard’s favorite terms, it does not appear to have a single meaning.

“Dialectic,” or more correctly, Dialektik, comes originally from the Greek διαλεκτική, dialektikē, so you won’t find it in Christian Molbech’s Dansk Ordbog, the standard Danish dictionary from Kierkegaard’s time, but must turn to Ludvig Meyer’s Fremmedordbog (dictionary of foreign words) from 1853. Meyer defines Dialektik as “samtalekunst” (i.e., the art of conversation), as well as “Fornuftlære,” “Tankelære,” “Logik” (the first two translate literally as, ”teachings of reason,” and ”teachings of thought, ” but are probably best translated as ”informal logic,” while Logik is best translated as “formal logic”). In Plato, continues Meyer, Dialektik refers to “higher speculative philosophy,” whereas in Aristotle and more recent thinkers it refers to “probability theory” as well as “eristic,” “sophistry” and “casuistry.”

Interestingly, Kierkegaard never seems to use Dialektik in the last two pejorative senses. My guess is that that is not because a dialectical contemplation of something could never lead one way from the truth, but because of the high esteem in which he appears to have held ancient skepticism. That is, a dialectical contemplation of any question that does not admit of a clear and uncontroversial answer, will ultimately bring the individual back to him or herself and in that way accentuate the role of decision and the will.

There is an extremely helpful Terminologisk Register, or glossary, by Jens Himmelstrup in the second half of volume 15 of the second edition of Kierkegaard’s Samlede Værker. The glossary contains a long entry on Dialektik. Himmelstrup explains here that the term comes originally from the Greek διαλέγομαι, dialegomai, meaning “to carry on a conversation with someone.” “The term,” he continues, “became associated with Socrates, in that he employed the art of conversation, or dialogue, in his activity as a philosopher which was generally aimed at achieving clarity concerning the precise meaning of individual terms and concepts.”

Himmelstrup then proceeds to give a brief history of the meaning of the term in philosophy. What is important for our purposes here, however, is what he says concerning its meaning for Kierkegaard. Sometimes, he explains, “dialectic” refers to “purely logical determinations” (I presume that by this he means it refers to formal opposites such as a and ~a). Other examples he gives of Kierkegaard’s use of the term suggest it means something more like “dynamic,” as when Kierkegaard writes in the first volume of Either-Or: “Love from the soul has, secondly, yet another dialectic, for it differs in relation to every single individual who is the object of love” (This reference is from Alastair Hannay’s translation for Penguin. Even though the ebook version provides only a location number [1587-1588] rather than a page number, the Hongs’ translation of this passage is so tortured that I could not bring myself to use it. This is probably also a good place to point out that neither the Hongs’ “psychical love” nor Hannay’s “love from the soul” is a particularly felicitous translation of Kierkegaard’s “sjælelig Elskov.” That expression is probably best translated simply as “romantic love”).

Suffice it to say in answer to the question of what Kierkegaard means by the term “dialectic,” that the meaning appears to be as protean as is the meaning of the term “knowledge.” That’s not to say that Kierkegaard equivocates on its meaning, but simply, as I explain in Ways of Knowing, that Kierkegaard was extremely sensitive to how fluid are the meanings of most terms in everyday speech and that he abhorred the tendency of academics to artificially fix meanings.

Stay tuned for my next blog post “Those Crazy Hongs!” an examination of how the Hongs (or more likely Howard Hong) could conceivably have rendered “Sandselig Genialitet, bestemmet som Forførelse” as “The Elementary Originality of the Sensuous Qualified as Seduction.”