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Death and Nonsense

Death has been on everyone’s mind for awhile now. I’m presenting a paper on the topic of death in Kierkegaard at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. As regular readers of this blog will know, I recently completed my own translation of the portion of Works of Love that deals with loving someone who has died. (That translation will appear in print soon, from Gegensatz Press in an edition that will have the original Danish and my English translation of that text on facing pages.) I thought I ought to review Kierkegaard’s other writings on death, as well, to help me prepare the presentation.

One such work is the religious discourse “At a Graveside” from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. I don’t know whether I had ever read it before. If I did, then it was either in the original Danish or in a translation that preceded the Hongs’ translation from 1993. Until reading “At a Graveside,” I would have said that the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death was the most problematic of their translations. “At a Graveside” may actually have it beat, though, for reasons I will present below.

The first indication I had that it wasn’t a good translation is that it doesn’t read well. Kierkegaard’s writing is not always equally brilliant, but it is never bad. This, is bad, though: 

“Death’s decision is therefore not definable by equality, because the equality consists in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” 

The expression that the Hongs consistently translate as “decision” here and elsewhere in the discourse, is Afgjørelse. The Danish term that most closely corresponds to the English “decision” is not Afgjørelse, however, but Beslutning. According to Ferrall-Repp, Afgjørelse means “finishing, etc., completion; decision, adjustment, settlement.” “Decision” is there. The definition makes clear, however, that an Afgjørelse is a “decision” in a formal, or legalistic sense, such as the decision of a referee or a judge. This explains, at least in part, why the passage above is confusing. 

Dødens Afgjørelse would be better rendered here as “Death’s reckoning.” 

To make matters worse, not only is Dødens Afgjørelse confusingly translated as “Death’s decision” in the passage above, it’s consistently translated that way throughout the entire discourse, even where it is used as a section heading. This, along with additional translation problems I will detail below, makes the discourse anything but “pellucid” in the manner Gordon Marino claims in his essay “A Critical Perspective on Kierkegaard’s ‘At a Graveside,’” in Kierkegaard and Death. 

There’s more to this lamentably translated passage than the unfortunate translation of Afgørelse as “decision.” The preposition ved that the Hongs have translated as “by” is probably better translated as “through.” “By” is listed before “through” in Ferrall-Repp, but the latter is there as well, and I think it is preferable because Kierkegaard appears to be trying to say that we can’t actually grasp death by thinking of it as the great equalizer, because the equality is established through annihilation and we have no better grasp of that than we have of death. That is, he isn’t suggesting we ever attempt to define death as equality, but that we often think we can come to a better understanding of it by thinking of it as, among other things, the great equalizer.

What about the second sentence: “And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” The use of “alleviating” there is unidiomatic. “Alleviating” generally takes a direct object in English. We say, for example, that a particular lotion is good at alleviating itching. We don’t normally speak of something being alleviating for someone. 

The Danish term that is translated as “alleviating” is formildende. Formildende isn’t in Ferrall-Repp. Formilde is though, and it’s defined there as “to soothe, soften, mollify, appease, assuage, alleviate, temper, mitigate.” So once again we see that the Hongs have chosen an English term that could, in principle, be an acceptable translation of the Danish term in question. It just doesn’t work in this passage. 

“And pondering this is supposed to be soothing for the living” is clearly preferable to “And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living.” I’m going to go out on a limb here, however, and suggest that “comforting” would actually be the most idiomatic translation. It isn’t offered as a possible translation of formilde in Ferrall-Repp, but it captures the sense of formildene in this passage. 

Let’s try out our new translation of the passage and compare it with the Hongs’. The Hongs have:

“Death’s decision is therefore not definable by equality, because the equality consists in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be alleviating for the living!” 

We have:

“Death’s reckoning is therefore not definable through equality, because the equality is in annihilation. And pondering this is supposed to be comforting for the living!”

The Hongs have interpolated “consists” here. That isn’t really a problem, however, in terms of understanding the meaning of the passage. It’s just what Strunk and White would call bad form in that it’s unnecessary. The real problems are with the Hongs’ translations of Dodens Afgjørelse as “Death’s decision,” ved as “by,” and formildende as “alleviating.” The first, I would argue, is both unidiomatic and confusing. The second suggests an equation of death with equality that is clearly not intended in the original, and the third is unidiomatic. 

There are lots more of the kinds of problems described above. Page 86, for example, has four instances of  the same unidiomatic use of “alleviating” as appears in the passage above. This is arguably simply a stylistic problem rather than a substantive one, but not only is it a disservice to both Kierkegaard and readers of the Hongs’ translation to render Kierkegaard’s flowing Danish in an awkward an unidiomatic English, it can lead to substantive problems. That is, readers may wonder what is being alleviated and why Kierkegaard is being so mysterious about it. 

These are not the worst problems with the Hongs’ translation of “Ved en Grav” (literally, simply “At a Grave”). The Hongs’ inexplicable choice to translate Afgjørelse as “decision” leads to even greater problems in another passage. This one is on page 97 where, in what Ralph Waldo Emerson would refer to as a foolish attempt at consistency, the Hongs translate Uafgjørtheden as “indecisiveness.” Afgjørt is the past participle of Afgjøre, which, according to Ferrall-Repp means “to finish, complete; to decide; to settle, adjust.” It is, of course, related to Afgjørelse, hence the Hongs’ apparently decided to translate it as “indecisive” in order to preserve in the translation a terminological consistency found in the original Danish text. 

The problem is that meaning was sacrificed here to consistency. The passage includes two references to holding death “in the equilibrium of indecisiveness.” It isn’t at all clear, however, what that could possibly mean. That is, the passage does not concern someone contemplating suicide who can’t make up their mind. It concerns our difficulty in grasping what, exactly, death is.

It gets worse. “To paganism,” reads the translation on page 97, “the highest courage was the wise person (whose earnestness was indicated expressly by his not being in a hurry with the explanation [i.e., of death]) who was able to live with the thought of death in such a way that he overcame this thought every moment of his life by indecisiveness.”

What? How can one overcome anything by indecisiveness? Kierkegaard would never say such a thing. If there was anything of which Kierkegaard was contemptuous, it was indecisiveness. By this point, you can probably figure out for yourself how Uafgjørtheden should be translated here. It refers to indeterminacy, or, more awkwardly, undecidability, not indecisiveness. This is made clear in the text that follows. “The wise person,” the passage continues, “knows that death exists [er til]; he does not live thoughtlessly, forgetting that it exists [er til]. He meets with it in his thoughts, he renders it powerless in indeterminability [Ubestemmelighed], and this is his victory over death.”  

Finally, translators of Kierkegaard should avoid, if at all possible, rendering er til as “exists,” because “existence,” i.e., Existens, is a technical term for Kierkegaard. The passage above would be less misleading if er til were translated simply as “is,” or “is [real]” with brackets to indicate that “real” is an interpolation.

How can Gordon Marino have thought that the Hongs’s translation of “Ved en Grav” was “pellucid”? Portions of it are flat out nonsensical. Kierkegaard and Death, the volume in which Marino’s essay on “At a Graveside” appears, is a collection of essays by various scholars. Many of the essays understandably focus on “At a Graveside.” What is less understandable is that none of them mentions the numerous problems with the translation. 

The strange silence of the contributors to Kierkegaard and Death concerning the problems with the Hongs’ translation of “Ved en Grav” reveals a serious challenge to rigorous Kierkegaard scholarship. It would appear that either the impression that Kierkegaard’s writing is often nonsensical even in the original must be so pervasive among scholars that many don’t bother to check awkward and confusing passages in translations against the original Danish, or that knowledge of Danish, even rudimentary knowledge, is so rare among Kierkegaard scholars that most are simply unable to determine problems with translations even when they suspect they may exist.

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Kierkegaard and von Balthasar on Anxiety

41yorNv6sLL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_My sister-in-law Kelly Foley is a devout Catholic with a growing interest in theology. She has begun reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Christian and Anxiety. (Way to jump in at the deep end. My sister-in-law is no intellectual slouch!) She asked me if I were familiar with the book because it begins with a reference to Kierkegaard. I was familiar with von Balthasar, of course, but not with that particular book. This was obviously a significant lacuna in my theological background, so I promptly purchased an ebook version of it and began reading it.

“Schelling, Hegel, and Baader … were the immediate influences” writes von Balthasar in his introduction,

that prompted the Dane to treat this theme as a theologian, even if only in an introductory manner (as he puts it, “psychologically” rather than “dogmatically”). He never could bring himself to write a dogmatic tract, and he deliberately posed his questions within a psychological framework-intending, of course, to let the inquiry lead eventually into inevitable dogmatic truth. As a result, anxiety remains for him a matter of the finite mind horrified by its own limitlessness, and God and Christ are rarely mentioned explicitly in this work, which was in fact meant to be an exclusively Christian book. (31-32).

“[I]f a theologian is to give this topic the treatment that is due to it,” observes von Balthasar he must “continue along more dogmatic lines the work that Kierkegaard began” (34).

“[I]t will become evident,” writes von Balthasar, “whether the biblical approach can be more instructive and more profound than the great-Danish thinker’s “psychological” approach” (38).

My immediate response to this assessment of Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety was the judgment that von Balthasar had failed to take into account what is arguably the companion volume to Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety — The Sickness Unto Death. While the former is indeed described by its pseudonymous author as “a simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin” (emphasis added), the latter is described as “a christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening” (emphasis added). That is, The Sickness Unto Death involves precisely the dogmatic approach to the psychological phenomenon of despair that von Balthasar faults Kierkegaard for failing to involve in his analysis of anxiety in his eponymous book.

Ah yes, you may be thinking, but anxiety and despair are different psychological phenomena. But are they? “[D]eep deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness,” writes Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death, “there dwells also anxiety, which is despair” (SUD, 25). Some readers might object that the Hongs’ translation of The Sickness Unto Death is the most problematic of all their translations and that the equation of anxiety with despair there may be the result of an error in translation. It isn’t. The Danish for the passage reads: “[I]nderst inde i Lykkens Forborgenhed, der boer ogsaa Angesten, som er Fortvivlesen” (emphasis added). Anxiety and despair are two different phenomenological expressions of the same ontological state — sin. Anxiety is, arguably, despair that refuses to recognize itself as such.

There is, thus, a limit to which anxiety can be understood when approached merely psychologically. Von Balthasar is right about that. It would appear that he fails to appreciate, however, that Kierkegaard was well aware of this. The very last line of The Concept of Anxiety reads: “Here this deliberation ends, where it began. As soon as psychology has finished with anxiety, it is to be delivered to dogmatics” (CA, 162). That is, arguably, precisely what Kierkegaard did five years later in The Sickness Unto Death where he identifies anxiety with despair.

The introduction to The Sickness Unto Death begins with a quotation from The Gospel of John where Christ responds to the news that Lazarus is ill with the declaration that “This sickness is not unto death” (John 11:4). This clearly indicates the dogmatic, as opposed to merely psychological, nature of book’s approach to understanding the experience of sin. Sin, which is to say despair, is the sickness unto death according to Kierkegaard.

“Sin Is Not A Negation But A Position” is the heading that begins chapter three of The Sickness Unto Death. “That this is the case,” continues Kierkegaard,

is something that orthodox dogmatics and orthodoxy on the whole have always contended, and they have rejected as pantheistic any definition of sin that made it out to be something merely negative—weakness, sensuousness, finitude, ignorance, etc. Orthodoxy has perceived very correctly that the battle must be fought here, or as in the preceding portion, here the end must be fashioned very firmly … orthodoxy has correctly perceived that when sin is defined negatively, all Christianity is flabby and spineless. That is why orthodoxy emphasizes that there must be a revelation from God to teach fallen man what sin is, a communication that, quite consistently, must be believed because it is a dogma (SUD, 96.)

So von Balthasar’s claim that Kierkegaard “never could bring himself to write a dogmatic tract” on anxiety and that “[a]s a result, anxiety remains for him a matter of the finite mind horrified by its own limitlessness” is simply false. The Sickness Unto Death is Kierkegaard’s “dogmatic tract” on anxiety. Von Balthasar failed to appreciate this for the simple reason that anxiety is subsumed there under the larger heading of “despair.”

This brief examination of von Balthasar’s criticism of Kierkegaard’s treatment of anxiety is an example of a new philosophical genre known as “flash philosophy.” Flash philosophy takes its name from flash fiction, which is essentially very short short stories. Flash philosophy is thus very short philosophical articles. I’ve created a website, Flash Philosophy, dedicated to publishing such short philosophical articles. I invite interested readers to take a look at the website and to send me any material they have that they think might be appropriate to publish there.