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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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More on the Decline of Editing

Everyone is familiar with Kierkegaard’s famous journal entry about the “secret note.” 

“After my death,” wrote Kierkegaard in 1843,

“no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least information about what has really filled my life, find that script in my innermost being that explains everything, and which often, for me, makes what the world would call trifles into events of immense importance, and which I too consider of no significance once I take away the secret note that explains it” (Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 2: Journals EE-KK, p. 157).

Or did he write this? The answer is both yes and no. There are some issues with both the existing English translations of this passage, as well as with the passage as it appears in the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Skrifter. Two are relatively minor and two are more serious. This post will address each issue in turn, leaving the more serious issues until the end.

The Danish in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter is:

“Efter min Død skal ingen i mine Papirer (det er min Trøst) finde en eneste Oplysning om hvad der egentlig har udfyldt mit Liv; finde den Skrift i mit Inderste, der forklarer Alt, og som ofte gjør hvad Verden vilde kalde Bagateller til uhyre vigtige Begivenheder for mig, og hvad jeg anseer for Ubetydelighed, naar jeg tager den hemmelige Note bort, der forklarer det.” (SKS, 18, p. 169.)

KJN’s translation of the original Danish is arguably defensible. That is, there is no glaring semantical mistake. The Hongs’ translation for Indiana University Press is thus very similar. It reads:

“After my death no one will find in my papers the slightest information (this is my consolation) about what really has filled my life, no one will find the inscription in my innermost being that interprets everything and that often turns into events of prodigious important to me that which the world would call bagatelles and which I regard as insignificant if I remove the secret note that interprets them.” (Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol. 5, p. 226).

Both translations work to convey the sense of the passage in the original Danish. The Hongs’ is actually closer to the original, though, than is the new KJN because there is no noun in the original that corresponds to KJN’s “importance.” KJN’s editors have changed “uhyre vigtige Begivenheder,” which translates literally as “enormously important events” into “events of enormous importance.” They’ve done this to get the subject to agree in number with Kierkegaard’s singular pronoun “det,” or “it,” at the end. That is, there appears to be a grammatical problem with the original where the subject appears to be “Begivenheder,” or “events,” which is plural, and Kierkegaard’s singular “det,” or “it,” at the end.

Unfortunately, the original manuscript of this journal entry appears to have been lost (more on that below). It’s thus possible that there was no such grammatical problem in the original. That is, it’s possible that the last word in Kierkegaard’s hand-written journal was actually “dem,” or “them,” and not “det,” or “it.” It would be relatively easy, I think, to mistake a hand-written “m” for a “t,” and also relatively easy to become confused about what the subject was and so to fail to notice what appears to be the grammatical problem. It’s also possible, of course, that the grammatical problem was in the original. It’s the type of mistake that’s easy to make, especially if one is writing quickly. Since the passage in question wasn’t originally intended for publication (we assume), Kierkegaard would have no reason to go back and proofread it.

Since there appears to have been a problem in the original, it is hard to fault either the editors of KJN or the Hongs for the manner in which each chose to correct it.

There is another minor issue with KJN’s translation of Bagateller as “trifles.” This translation is just annoying given that “bagatelles” is a perfectly acceptable English word that is a cognate of the Danish Bagateller. My suspicion is that the editors of KJN chose “trifles” as part of a general strategy designed to justify a new English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. That is, the more differences there are between the Hongs’ earlier translation and KJN the greater is the impression that a new translation was needed. The thing is, pretty much everyone in the Kierkegaard community knew that a new translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers was needed, and not because there were serious problems with the Hongs’ translation (which I think is generally very good), but because the Hongs’ translation was not complete.

It is, of course, tempting, when doing a new translation of a work that has already been translated, to try something new. I did that in my own translations of Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs. One should give in to that temptation, however, only when an alternative translation is arguably equally good. When there is actually a cognate in what translation theorists call the “target language,” which is to say the language of the translation, then no other term could possibly be superior to it.

Neither of the above issues is likely to cause a serious problem for scholars. Unfortunately, there are two more issues with both KJN and the Hongs’ translation of this passage from Kierkegaard’s journals that are more serious. 

My own translation would look something like this:

“After my death, no one will find in my papers (this is my consolation) the least bit of illumination concerning what has really filled my life; [no one] will find that inscription, which is written in the core of my being, that explains everything, and which often makes what the world would call bagatelles into exceedingly important events for me, and which I, too, view as insignificant, if I remove the secret note that explains them.”

The translation of Oplysning as “information” that occurs in both KJN and the Hong’s version of this passage would indeed be defensible if there were no other English term that would work. That is, “information” conveys the sense here of the the Danish term Oplysning. The problem is that there is an English term that not only conveys the sense of Oplysning, but which does so more effectively than does “information.” In fact, there are several better options than “information.” “Information” is not listed as a possible definition for Oplysning in Ferrall-Repp, “Solution,” as in a solution to a riddle is the closest Ferrall-Repp comes. The venerable Vinterberg-Bodelsen, in contrast gives us “illuminate,” “elucidate,” and “enlighten” and these translations are much better than “information” because Oplysning includes a reference to light, i.e., lys. Lower down in Vinterberg-Bodelsen’s extensive list of definitions is “piece of information,” which is undoubtedly why both the Hong’s and KJN chose “information” for their translations, despite that any one of the three definitions that involve metaphorical references to “light” would be preferable.

An argument can be made, in fact, that Kierkegaard chose Oplysning precisely because of the metaphorical reference to light. That is, light is enormously significant in Christianity. Elsewhere, when Kierkegaard means to indicate information in the traditional sense, he generally uses other terms such as Efterretning, as is the case, for example, in the Postscript where he writes “What does it mean to give assurances that one has reflected oneself out [of the immediate] and to communicate this in direct form as information [Efterretning]—what does it mean?” (CUP, p. 281).

There is yet another problem with KJN’s translation of this passage about the “secret note.” I don’t know whether readers will have noticed by this point but some of the above versions of this passage have italics and some don’t. KJN, following the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, has italics, but neither the Hongs’ translation nor my own suggested translation has them. Why not? 

The italics are in the Efterladte Papirer. The question, however, is whether they were in the original? They are conspicuously absent from the same passage in Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, which scholars generally consider to be superior to the Efterladte Papirer.  I’ve written about the Efterladte Papirer before. It is a somewhat flawed first edition of selections from Kierkegaard’s unpublished journals and papers. Indeed, Jon Stewart has an article entitled “An Overview of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. Part Two: the Editions” (Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, Vol. 20, Issue I) in which he says that “[w]hen judged from a philological perspective by the standards of today, this edition [i.e., the Efterladte Papirer ] can only be regarded as a disaster.” 

Stewart’s article is worth a read. H.P. Barfod was the first editor of the Efterladte Papirer and Stewart goes into some detail concerning Barfod’s shortcomings as an editor. Stewart even includes a paragraph concerning what he charges is Barfod’s failure to give any account of his use of italics. 

“One thing not mentioned by Barfod,” asserts Stewart,

“is his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis. Perhaps the reason that he does not mention it is that he does not follow any consistent rule in his handling of it. In some cases when Kierkegaard has underlined something, Barfod has failed to reproduce it with extra spacing of w o r d s, which was the way in which emphasis was indicated at the time (instead of with the use of italics). However, elsewhere he inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352).

The weird thing is that, in contrast to Stewart’s claim, Barfod does, in fact, “mention” his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of “underlining,” or Skilletegn, as it was known then, in the preface to the Efterladte Papirer. To skille means to separate, and tegn is of course “sign,” so Skilletegn was the equivalent of italics in the old Gothic, or Blackletter, typeface where italics were not possible. Emphasis was indicated simply by increasing the space between the letters of the word to be emphasized. The use of Skilletegn can be see in the illustration to this post. That illustration is, in fact, a photo of the very mention Barfod makes of his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining, or Skilletegn, for emphasis that Stewart accuses him of not making. 

Is it possible that Stewart did not actually read Barfod’s preface to the Efterladte Papirer before he wrote his “Nachlass” article? That seems pretty incredible. Is it possible that his Danish was so rudimentary at that point that he didn’t know that Skilletegn was the Danish term for italics, which is to say for the emphasis indicated by underlining in hand-written manuscripts when those texts were typeset?  That seems equally incredible, but I can think of no other possible explanations for Stewart’s accusing Barfod of failing even to mention “his treatment of Kierkegaard’s use of underlining for emphasis” when he actually devotes an entire, albeit brief, paragraph to precisely that issue.

Roughly translated, the passage from page XV of the preface of the first volume of the Efterladte Papirer reads as follows:

“The correct use of emphasis [S k i l l e t e g n], in contrast, has been difficult, because there has often here been no rule to be discovered in the hand-written [manuscripts]. I was thus forced, with respect to this issue, to adapt the use of emphasis according to what seemed most convincing and I believe that in the majority of instances that I have either approximated or actually captured the author’s own intention” (Efterladte Papirer, Vol I, p. XV).

That is, Barfod directly confesses that he occasionally “inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is no underlining from Kierkegaard’s own hand” (Stewart, p. 352). The original manuscript of this passage must have been lost because the editors of SKS indicate that they have relied for their rendering of this passage on Barfod! Why would they do that when Barfod is notorious, as Stewart correctly points out, for being too cavalier in his approach to standard editorial practices. Not only was he cavalier in that way, he had something of a mania for Skilletegn. He uses them all over the place. He uses them in his preface for every mention of Kierkegaard’s name, as well as for a variety of other terms. Page XIII of the preface includes eighteen uses of Skilletegn. 

If we don’t have the relevant original manuscript any longer, and we know that Barfod was given to inserting emphasis where there was none in the original, what a responsible editor should have done, and what the editors of the Papirer did do, was remove the emphasis that appears in the Efterladte Papirer but which evidence suggests was probably not in the original. 

So we have yet another failure of the editors of SKS to adhere to defensible editorial practices, a failure that then subsequently affected the new KJN. Emphasis is precisely the kind of thing that scholars occasionally seize upon as particularly significant. It seems unlikely to cause any serious misunderstandings of the text in question, but it is not impossible. 

More importantly, the decision of the editors of SKS to follow the Efterladte Papirer rather than the Papirer, when the former is universally acknowledged to be inferior to the latter, is part of a larger pattern of problems with both SKS and KJN (which was based on SKS) that it is disappointing to see in these new editions that were supposed to be improvements on the earlier editions but which it is increasingly clear are actually in some respects regressions to a lower editorial standard.          

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Kierkegaard, MacDonald, and Universalism

SK Universalism quote

I wrote earlier about how I had recently discovered a thinker, George MacDonald (1824-1905), whose views were very similar to Kierkegaard’s. What I don’t know is whether MacDonald was familiar with Kierkegaard’s work, and if so, to what extent. My post on Kierkegaard’s early reception in Germany provides evidence to support that MacDonald likely had at least some exposure to Kierkegaard’s works, both in German translation and via reviews and responses to those translations in German theological journals. 

I still haven’t had time to do any research on the extent of MacDonald’s exposure to Kierkegaard. That would require tracking down which books MacDonald personally owned, which books and periodicals would have been available to him in the libraries he used, and going through all his correspondence in search of any mention of Kierkegaard. I did, however, stumble across a reference in the second volume of MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons that I believe provides further support for the view that MacDonald may have been influenced by Kierkegaard. The sermon in question is entitled “The Word of Jesus on Prayer.” “Convince me,” protests MacDonald’s imaginary interlocutor, “that prayer is heard, and I shall know. Why should the question admit of doubt? Why should it require to be reasoned about? We know that the wind blows: why should we not know that God answers prayer?’ 

MacDonald replies, “What if God does not care to have you know it at second hand?”

Kierkegaard scholars will immediately recognize not merely the expression, “at second hand,” but also the precise sense in which MacDonald uses it here, as identical to Kierkegaard’s use of it in Philosophical Crumbs and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  

My first thought, actually, was that this philosophical-theological use of the expression “at second hand” might actually have a biblical origin. I did a word search on both the King James Version and the Revised Version (to which MacDonald makes frequent reference in his writings) of the Bible, but could not find it in either version. That doesn’t preclude, of course, that both Kierkegaard and MacDonald got the expression from some third source independently of each other, so if any reader knows of such a source, I would be very much in your debt if you would share it with me. 

The question of the relation between Kierkegaard and MacDonald raises another interesting issue. MacDonald was a universalist. Was Kierkegaard? I don’t mean to suggest that MacDonald would have gotten his universalism from Kierkegaard, because if Kierkegaard was a universalist, that is far from obvious. There are scholars who appear to think he was, and there are places in Kierkegaard’s works that suggest he may have had universalist leanings. Kierkegaard famously says, for example, in Crumbs that if a person did not receive the condition for understanding the truth from the god (i.e., Christ) in this life, “[i]f they met each other in another life, this teacher would again be able to give the condition” (Crumbs, p. 95). Since the “condition” in question is faith, the implication is that those who lack faith, for whatever reason, are not damned to hell for eternity, but will have multiple chances to attain it. Kierkegaard may even have believed that the faithless would continue to be presented with such chances until, finally, they did receive it.

The difficulty with this interpretation, apart from its apparent reliance on the doctrine of reincarnation, is that the passage in question continues “[b]ut one who had once received it [but lost it again] would be a stranger to him,” because “[t]he condition was something entrusted, for which the receiver would always be required to give an account” (Crumbs, p. 95). That doesn’t mean that someone who had not had faith in this life would be damned to hell, but it does have ominous implications for those who had faith in this life and then lost it. 

There are multiple references to hell in Kierkegaard’s writings (though, interestingly, exponentially more references to hell in the commentaries on Kierkegaard’s writings in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter than in the writings themselves). Even that doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that Kierkegaard believed in eternal damnation because MacDonald also refers occasionally to hell, though as a place of corrective rather than retributive punishment. 

A casual search I did on the online edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter was not encouraging for those of us who would like to think of Kierkegaard as a universalist. 

I discovered a place in Kierkegaard’s journals where he says: “The NT [i.e., New Testament] is clearly based on the view that there is eternal damnation” (JN vol. 9, p. 262).

It’s possible, of course, to argue that Kierkegaard did not feel compelled to agree with everything in the New Testament.

“In an article in Nordisk Kirketidende,” Kierkegaard writes, “Fenger from Slotsbjergbye wrote affirming the eternity of punishment in hell and scoffing at the Christians who imagine themselves to be Christian without having heaven-hell. From a Christian point of view he is right” (JN vol. 11: Part 2, p. 345, emphasis added.)

The rest of the entry goes on to argue that there is insufficient concern among Christians for the situation of those who may be damned to hell for eternity and that Fenger was himself among those whose concern seemed insufficient. It is conceivable, of course, that Kierkegaard was simply pointing out that, if there were a hell to which God damned anyone eternally, as so many Christians believe, then Christians should be far more concerned with the spiritual situation of their fellow man than they tend to be.

I’m sympathetic to such attempts to preserve the possibility that Kierkegaard was a universalist. It’s not only more morally appealing than the view that some people would be damned to hell forever, it actually seems to cohere better with the basic tenets of Christianity. I’m inclined to agree with Keith DeRose, Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Yale who writes 

Universalism is far from a mere doctrine of barren theology; many, like Paul, find great joy in the belief. Part of the joy some find is in the thought that not only they, but their fellow humans, will, eventually at least, experience everlasting life with Christ. But, like Paul, you may find the joy is focused rather on God, and on how wondrous and complete a victory will be won by the God “who desires everyone to be saved” (I Timothy 2:4). And, on the other side, the non-universalist picture may come to look strangely dim, not exclusively because of the awful fate that awaits some of your fellows on this picture, but because God is deprived of such a complete victory, and, in winning only a partial victory, his desire that everyone be saved will ultimately be frustrated.

(“Universalism and The Bible”).

That is, not only does the idea of eternal damnation fail, I would argue, to cohere with the idea that God is love, it also fails to cohere with the idea that God is omnipotent. God desires that everyone should be saved, but then everyone isn’t saved? So God doesn’t get what God wants? If God truly desires that everyone should be saved as I Timothy 2:4 (among other biblical passages) suggests, but everyone isn’t saved, then God is outright defeated, which suggests that he isn’t omnipotent. 

But if Kierkegaard was a universalist what is one to make of passages such as the two above, as well as the one in Works of Love where Kierkegaard asserts that Christianity “discovered” (opdagede) what the world found ludicrous — the idea of “eternal damnation” (evig Fortabelse)”? Is it possible that such passages were simply hyperbole? Kierkegaard was always concerned with the effect his writings would have on others. Is it possible that he thought the idea of universal salvation just wouldn’t be very helpful to people in that it would incline them to take Christianity less seriously if they felt everyone would eventually be saved? 

There is an intriguing passage in the Hongs’ translation of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers that suggests that may in fact have been the motivation for his references to eternal damnation (though the fact that some of these references are in his journals and papers poses problems for such a thesis). The passage in question makes a pretty unequivocal statement in favor of the idea of universal salvation. It reads: 

“[W]at the old bishop once said to me is not true — namely, that I spoke as if others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell, then I am going along with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I too, and this awakens my deepest wonder” (JP vol. 6, p. 557).

The problem is, I could not find this passage in the new Journals and Notebooks (2007-2019). Nor could I find it in the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (1997-2013) I did find it, however, in Vol. 11, Tome 3, p. 57 of the purportedly superseded Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (1909-1948). Since that provided me with the actual wording of the original Danish I plugged the wording into the search function of the online edition of SKS.

Nothing! 

I will leave open the question of whether the omission of what appears to be an absolutely essential passage from Kierkegaard’s papers from both the new Danish and English editions of Kierkegaard’s journals and papers, editions that purport to be complete, is part of a conspiracy to conceal from the public that Kierkegaard subscribed to a doctrine that most denominations of Christianity (and the Danish Lutheran Church in particular) consider heretical.

One thing is clear, however, both the new Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter and the new Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks are deeply flawed, as one might guess by comparing how few years were put into their production relative to how many years were put into the production of the older Papirer The new Skrifter was produced in only 16 years and the  Journals and Notebooks, which was based on the Skrifter, was cranked out in only 12 years, as opposed to almost forty years that was put into the production of the Papirer. 

Serious Kierkegaard scholars will need to continue to use the earlier Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers and Søren Kierkegaards Papirer. Fortunately, it is still possible to get your hands on these invaluable works. I found a copy of the Journals and Papers on Ebay for $125.00 for the whole set, and another on abebooks.com for $495.00. I also found a set of the Papirer for 660 euros, and sets do occasionally appear for sale by Danish antiquarians. Both the Journals and Papers and the Papirer will become increasingly hard to find, though, so if you are serious about Kierkegaard scholarship and you do not already own these works, I urge you to buy them now!