Reviews. The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer"-Winner of the National Book Award for Translation, 1968*

Transcription

1 Reviews The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer"-Winner of the National Book Award for Translation, 1968* Perry LeFevre / Professor of Constructive Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary The publication of the first of Hong's five-volume edition of the most significant parts of Kierkegaard's Papirer is a major event for English-speaking students of Kierkegaard's life and thought. Until now English readers have been limited to Dru's The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard (less than 6oo pages of text), Rohde's The Diary of Soren Kierkegaard (about 250 pages), Smith's The Last Years, The Kierkegaard Journals (384 pages), and to a number of valuable but limited quotations from the Papirer translated by various Kierkegaard scholars for use in the texts of works devoted to inter- preting either SK's life or thought (e.g., Walter Lowrie's distinguished biography entitled Kierkegaard). In purely quantitative terms, the limited nature of what we have had in English up to this time becomes clear when one realizes that the Danish Papirer themselves take up twenty substantial volumes. Quantity alone does not distinguish the Hong translation from the earlier journal publications in English. The editors have undertaken a new-and at this juncture in the study of Kierkegaard-a more useful approach. Like the distinguished Italian edition of the journals produced by Cornelio Fabro (Il Diario, ), the Hong edition is organized topically. In this volume the reader may, if he wishes, begin with the selections discussing "Abstract" and "Absurd" and move through to the end to such topics as "The Extraordinary, The Exception." The selections are arranged chronologically within each group. According to their prospectus, the Hongs intend to follow this procedure for the first four volumes. The concluding volume will gather together autobiographical material. The edition is further distinguished by a section devoted to notes, commentary, and topical bibliography. There is also a listing of Kierkegaard's works in English and of a number of English language works dealing with Kierkegaard. A collation of entries from the Papirer completes the volume. When the fourth volume is ready an even more useful scholarly tool will become available, since the editors plan a general index to the first four volumes, and another for the final volume. * Soren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, vol. I, A-E. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). 539 pages. $I5.oo. 69

2 The Journal of Religion Since nearly half of the Danish Papirer are made up of Kierkegaard's journals, and since all but 105 of the translated selections in this first volume of the Hong edition are drawn from the journals, it may be useful to enter a comment about the Papirer themselves and especially about the journals. At his death Kierkegaard left a great body of papers and manuscripts. He is reported to have been asked for instructions about them by his friend Emil Boesen. His reply: "No, let come what may, it depends upon chance..." 1 These papers were left in the care of his brother-in-law, and then carried by the sackful to his brother, Peter Kierkegaard. The papers included a large number of journal entries, a group of materials related to his published works, and another body of materials related to his reading and studies. The history of the publication of these materials is itself interesting.2 The definitive edition was published over a period of forty years, and it designates each of these three groups of materials within each volume simply as A, B, and C. The journals, the most important part of the Papirer, were begun by Kierkegaard in 1834 when he was twenty-one years old. He had already been a university student for three years. Initially the journal materials are perhaps best described in Kierkegaard's own terms as "Miscellanies" (Blandinger). Here are notes and reflections, and though they may be discontinuous and disorganized in contrast to the journals proper which begin in 1846, they are nevertheless even in the earliest period indicative of a very penetrating and sophisticated mind. In an entry for July 1837, Kierkegaard speaks of his previous resistance to keeping a journal because lurking behind the thought was the possibility of publication, but he then declared, "I think instead, that it would be good, through frequent notewriting to let the thought come forth with the umbilical cord of the original mood, and to forget as much as possible all regard for their possible use." Perhaps, he writes, by such a means he can "gain the possibility of selfknowledge." In any case, one who does not set down his ideas develops an uneasiness like that of a cow that is not milked at the proper time. "Therefore, one's best method, if external conditions are of no help, is, like the cow, to milk oneself." 8 Up until this time, SK had put his reflections and notes largely on loose sheets of paper. In 1835 he began a series of notebooks marked AA, BB, etc., and in 1846 a new series of even more significant journals marked from NB I to NB 36, which extended into his last year. The journals marked NB appear to have been developed with an eye to 1 Hong, p. xv. 2 See Aage Henriksen, Methods and Results of Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1951). 3 Quoted by Hong, pp. xiii-xiv, from II A I9. Except for quotations from the Hong edition, hereafter citations are given to the Danish Papirer. 70

3 The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer" eventual publication. They are, in part, an effort of Kierkegaard to explain himself to his future readers after his death. He writes in an entry for 1847 that he has never confided in anyone. Though the public has been his confidant in a sense in relation to his public work, it is posterity which he makes his confidant "in respect of my relation to the public." He suggests in 1849 that should his journals be published they might be titled The Book of the Judge. And in evaluating the significance of his journals he writes: " Were I to die now the effect of my life would be exceptional; much of what I have simply jotted down carelessly in the Journals would become of great importance and have a great effect, for then people would have grown reconciled to me and would be able to grant me what was, and is, my right." 5 Kierkegaard's own assessment of the significance of his journals has proven true. It is no exaggeration to say that the journals have been of crucial significance in opening up the levels of meaning in Kierkegaard's published work and in helping his readers understand both the author as a man and the relation of his life to his thought. Frithiof Brandt has written: "It may be prophesied that Kierkegaard's position in world literature will be still more consolidated when the Journals are translated in full." 6 Perhaps the Journals may never be completely translated into English, but it is clear that the Hongs have taken the English readers of Kierkegaard a long next step toward that goal, and we must be grateful for their invaluable contribution. The contribution of the journals for the understanding of Kierkegaard can be spelled out in a more systematic and detailed fashion. Without entering the debate as to fundamental viewpoint necessary for the understanding of Kierkegaard's works, whether of Kiem, or Hirsch and Lindstrom, or of Bohlin, it is clear that there is some kind of intimate connection between the life and.spiritual development of the man Kierkegaard and his published works. The journals offer the reader the opportunity to explore this relationship, whatever conclusions he may come to. Further, they are a key to the inner biography of the man, as well as being, at important points, a disclosure (as he said, for posterity) of what his intentions were. Many studies of Kierkegaard have made use of these materials to try to grasp Kierkegaard's intentions. But the journals also offer rich opportunities for studying the characterological and psychological dimensions of Kierkegaard's personality. The psychological and psychiatric dimensions of Kierkegaard's person, while perhaps not finally decisive for comprehending his published works or for determining their validity, are of considerable interest in themselves. Gordon Allport has written a basic work on the use of personal documents in 4 VII A See X' A 239 and X2 A FrithiofBrandt, Soren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Det danske Selskab, I963), p. Io6. 7'

4 The Journal of Religion psychological science, pointing out that such documents may be used for nomothetic or for idiographic purposes, that is, to compare and generalize in relation to a number of personal documents or to extract revelations concerning the single personality. Though Kierkegaard has often been compared with other writers of personal documents (Pascal, Augustine, etc.), the study of his journals has largely been devoted to idiographic purposes. An exception is Michele Leleu's Les Journaux Intimes (Presses Universitaire, 1952), one of a series of work in the series Caracteres, a collection published under the direction of Rene LeSenne. Leleu has studied over 300oo "journaux intimes," subjecting a more limited number to intense scrutiny as a means of studying the character of their writers according to the principles of the French characterology. A close study of SK's journals convinces Leleu of the possibility of such a characterological classification. Whatever one's convictions about the merit of such approaches, the journals do show the considerable degree to which the published writings are autobiographical in character, both in the sense that events in SK's personal life-his relation with his father, Regine, the encounter with The Corsair-enter into his understanding of the Christian faith and in the sense that segments of his pseudonymous writings are direct, if sometimes interpreted, expressions of his own inner condition, representing facets of his own being and experience. Lowrie points to more than one interesting example of this fact. For example, many of the Diapsalmata which introduce Either/Or and are meant to convey the emptiness and despair of the aesthetic sphere are transcribed directly from the journals and reflect Kierkegaard's own state of being during his student days. An even more poignant example of the revelatory character of the journals for understanding Kierkegaard's own existence situation is the remark reported by Kierkegaard's niece, Henriette Lund, uttered by her Uncle Christian Lund, who declared, "Yes, what an uncomfortable thought, that a man who always looked so cheerful should have been so fundamentally melancholy."7 All of this would be keeping with SK's own dictum that the inner is not the outer, but the journals help students of Kierkegaard come closer to the inner man. One further comment about the significance of the journals for revealing Kierkegaard himself might be made, a comment which is neither psychological nor characterological. Leleu has spoken of the journal as a way to salvation for Kierkegaard, as a means of breaking through his shutupness. This remark seems to me to be appropriate, but it points to a deeper dimension of self-revelation. I believe that the journals show, more than any of his other writings, the deep personal religious struggle of Kierkegaard's own life. In this sense they are a key to his whole authorship. Dru puts it this 72 7 A. Dru, The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard (London: Oxford, I938), p. 560.

5 The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer" way: "It is in the entries dealing explicitly or implicitly with his relation to God that is to be found the center of gravity of the Journals."8 I would add, this is the center of gravity of his whole work. My own studies of Kierkegaard and his journals have convinced me that Kierkegaard was primarily a religious thinker, a man struggling for his own soul. He was essentially a man of prayer. There is a danger, perhaps, that the topical arrangement of the present selection of materials from the journals may hide this central nerve of his life and thought, even as it clarifies the development of his thought on the various topics. A chronological selection may better direct attention to the pilgrimage itself. In any case it is too early for any conclusion on this matter, for the autobiographical volume, or the Hong's selection of topics for ordering the additional materials may in fact disclose this dimension of Kierkegaard even more clearly than a purely chronological order of all the selections could do. What of the content of the present volume of selections? The volume contains fifty-three subject headings. A few of the topics have but a page or two of selected material. Entries on "Childhood," "Christendom," "Church," "Esthetic," and "Extraordinary" have ten to fifteen pages devoted to them, but the Hongs' major rubrics for the organization of this volume are "Anthropology"-twenty-five pages; "Christ"--twenty pages; "Christianity"-sixty-five pages; "Communication"-sixty-eight pages; and "Exist, Existence "-nineteen pages. It would be interesting to know what the Hongs' criteria were for selecting material to translate from the journals. The only explicit clue they give is that after having made their own selection, they checked the use made of the Papirer by scholars throughout the world, naming a number of leading Kierkegaard scholars. The problem is an embarrassment of riches. A quick comparison for the subject heading "Christ" (surely central to SK's authorship) between the Hong translation and the collection of selections dealing with Christ made by P. H. Tisseau (Christ-Fragments extraits du Journal [Geneve: Editions Labor, 1937]) indicates that where the Hongs have twenty pages of material, Tisseau has nearly 300, and the Hongs have translations of some entries which Tisseau leaves out. Many of the Tisseau selections may, of course, reappear under other rubrics in later volumes of the Hong translation. Nevertheless, the problem of selection from such a large body of material is a serious one. In part, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of a given reader with the selection which has been made will depend on what he is interested in, and perhaps the only final solution is for the reader to learn Danish so that he will have access to the complete Papirer. The largest, and in many ways the most interesting, single section of this volume of the journals assembles a large body of material on the topic of communication. While a part of this material concerns Kierkegaard's view 8 Ibid., p. I. 73

6 The Journal of Religion of preaching, it chiefly deals with his characteristic themes: the contrast between direct and indirect communication. What Kierkegaard has to say about communication is important in itself, but it is also intimately interrelated with the whole puzzle of the Kierkegaardian authorship-the question of the pseudonyms, the question of the unity of the total authorship, the relation of one part of his work to another and the whole in relation to SK's self-understanding. It is doubtless true that Kierkegaard's writing on communication is a reflection of his own personal history and his changing mode of being. His melancholy and his sense of sin prevented him from being open and direct, and the theory of indirect communication may well be a rationalization of his own incapacities. By his own account, the notion of indirect communication is also derived from his personal relationship to Regine.9 Parts of his published writings were certainly an attempt at indirect communication with her. Moreover, it is true that as his own life-style changed, he came to see his use of indirect communication in negative terms. He felt that he had to explain himself and his work, at least to posterity, and he made some gestures in that direction during his lifetime. He also came to recognize his resort to indirect communication as in some sense demonic. Toward the end of his life as he apparently became able to break the hold of his melancholy, he was able to speak out more directly. Even though such an account has much truth in it, it is not the whole truth, for Kierkegaard's interest in the distinction between indirect and direct communication has an intellectual dimension which goes back to his thesis on irony and to his interest in Socrates. It discloses itself in his dis- tinguishing between the Platonic and the Socratic in Plato's dialogues. It is also obviously related to his fundamental distinction between Christianity as doctrine and Christianity as a mode of existence, a distinction which inevitably raises the question: how is Christianity to be communicated if it is not simply doctrine? In another sense, the question of direct and indirect communication arises out of the christological center of his thought and the conception of the Incognito and the Offense. Kierkegaard's published works shed some light on all these issues.10 The journals are, however, even more important because they show Kierkegaard wrestling with these issues. One can read between the lines his growing misgivings about his own use of indirect communication. In this connection, the most interesting sections of the Hong edition dealing with communication are Kierkegaard's notes for a series of lectures on "The Dialectic of Ethical 9 X3 A See esp. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Point of View of My Work as an Author, Training in Christianity, A Note Concerning My Authorship. A monograph dealing with these matters is Lars Bjerholm's Meddelelsens Dialectik Studier i Soren Kierkegaard's teorier om sprak, kommunikation ach pseudonymitet (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, I962). 74

7 The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer" and Ethical Religious Communication." As Lowrie points out, this is Kierkegaard's last formal defense of his tactic of indirect communication, and it is noteworthy that he resorts to a mode of direct communication to explain and justify indirect communication. These notes and the two more fully written-out lectures call for careful study, for here Kierkegaard sums up his diagnosis of the problem of his age and explicates what he was reaching for in much of his authorship, whether by direct or indirect communication. The gist of Kierkegaard's diagnosis is that "what it means to be human has been forgotten." Men have lost self-knowledge; they live in the abstract. Man has lost the capacity to be a single human being. The problem is how to help man become human, to gain self-knowledge, to become a single human being.11 For Kierkegaard this means moving away from the aesthetic mode of existence into the ethical-religious. But how is the ethical-religious mode of existence to be made known, to be communicated? Like the latter-day Robert Hutchins, Kierkegaard thought it would do no good to give a sequence of courses in Goodness I, Goodness II, and Goodness III. Kierkegaard held that the communication of the ethical mode of existence is not the communication of knowledge about something. "The ethical presupposes that everyone knows what the ethical is... The ethical does not begin with ignorance which is to be changed into knowledge but begins with a knowledge and demands a realization." 12 The dialectic demanded is different from that required by the communication of knowledge. What is required is the art of developing "capability," not an instruction in knowledge. For this reason an indirect mode of communication becomes necessary. What is involved is a kind of training or upbuilding, a maieutic enterprise. In developing his thought, Kierkegaard proceeds to a careful analysis of the distinction between the communication of knowledge and the communication of a capability by comparing the two modes of communication with respect to the object to be communicated, the communicator, the receiver, and the communication, in order to support his view that "the ethical and ethical-religious have to be communicated existentially (existentielt) and in the direction of the existential (Existentielle)." 13 The tragedy of modern times is that it has abolished the personal "I," for "ethical-religious truth is related essentially to personality and can only be communicated by an I to an I. As soon as the communication becomes objective in this realm, the truth has become untruth. Personality is what we need."14 Yet at this point Kierkegaard himself says: "I never venture to use 11 Hong, p Hong, p Hong, p. 30o. 14 Hong, p

8 The Journal of Religion quite directly my own I," and then he goes on to indicate how he views his own authorship. Here we can see the further emergence of his misgivings concerning his own use of indirect communication. The whole passage is worth quoting: If anyone were to ask me how I regard these lectures in relationship to my whole work as an author, I would answer: I regard them as a necessary concession for which I intend to bear responsibility. You will remember what was said at the beginning of the hour, that in respect to the truth he has understood, every man is duty-bound to God, if he wants to communicate it, to communicate it in its truest form. If it seems to him that he thereby produces no effect, then it can very likely be his duty, at least by way of experiment, to choose another form, but maybe it is also only his impatience to demand quick results instead of having faith. He thereby incurs a responsibility; and in any case it becomes his duty, if he now quickly produces a great effect by that other form he chose, to remember that there is a "please note" here, since it was because he used the less rigorous form. Especially in the communication of ethical truth and partially in the communication of ethical-religious truth, the indirect method is the most rigorous form. Yet a more direct form which runs parallel to this can also be necessary in order to support that by which in another sense it is itself supported. This I have understood right from the beginning of my activity as an author. Therefore along with the pseudonyms there always was direct communication in the guise of the upbuilding or edifying discourses, and in the last few years I have used direct communication almost exclusively. And these lectures are also in the form of direct communication (and in a certain sense are to be regarded as an even greater concession). But in a stricter sense I am not a lecturer or professor; that would be too, too satirical: an appointed lecturer in ethical-religious communication, i.e., in something which neither can nor should be taught because it must not become science and scholarship but must relate itself to existence (Existents).15 Caught in this predicament, Kierkegaard goes on in the following year in his journal to speak of the meaning of "witness": Witnessing is still the form of communication which strikes the truest mean between direct and indirect communication. Witnessing is direct communication, but nevertheless it does not make one's contemporaries the authority. While the witness's "communication" addresses itself to the contemporaries, the "witness" himself addresses God and makes him the authority."16 The understanding of Kierkegaard's theory of communication is crucial for grasping his authorship and his view of Christianity, but the issues he works with transcend his own life and thought. The same issues are at stake not only in the religious life on the contemporary world but also in the whole range of problems related to personal and social transformationwhether in education, individual or group psychotherapy, or the renewal and redirection of institutions and social structures. What he writes about lies close to the center of many of the problems of contemporary theological education as well. 15 Hong, pp Hong, p

9 The Hong Translation of Kierkegaard's "Papirer" Kierkegaard has been criticized again and again for overemphasizing his category of the Individual-the single one-and of refusing to recognize the significance of human sociality whether in his ethics or in his supposed lack of a real doctrine of the church. The reader of the journals will naturally be interested to test the justification of such criticisms. One could hold that, conceived as a corrective to current conceptions, the published works have a right, perhaps, to overemphasize one side of what might otherwise be a more balanced or polar approach, but the journals should reveal the truth of SK's personal position. To some extent Kierkegaard recognized this criticism and offered Works of Love as a kind of answer.17 Whether Works of Love is an adequate answer to this charge may be debated, and perhaps a fuller answer may appear in later selections to be published in the Hong translation of the Papirer. But what of the church, for one of the topics in the present volume is "Church"? At this point the Hong translation disappoints us. There are only nine pages of material on the church (twenty-six selections). One of these clearly deals with the issue of the relation of the individual to the church, and it ends with the sentence, after having declared that it is man's relationship to God which determines his relation to the congregation, "Consequently, from a religious point of view, there is only the single individual (in contrast to "public," "crowd," etc., which can have their validity politically)."18 This passage appears to put almost all the weight on the category of the individual. If the Hong's had quoted selection X5 B 208, instead of number 245, which is almost identical except for a concluding sentence, a different impression might have been conveyed. In the concluding sentence to number 208, Kierkegaard says that because the possibility of offense makes the Christian first of all an individual, the concept " Christian congregation " (christelig Menighed) is qualitatively assured of being different from the public. It is just this attitude of Kierkegaard toward the Christian cong'regation or community that we might be interested in. It would have been helpful if the Hongs could have found other such passages (what of such passages as X2 A 390, X2 A 478, or IX A ?). To be sure, Kierkegaard thought of the existing church as an abstraction-a protective abstraction he calls it,19 and undoubtedly he thought of the "real" "church in eschatological terms, but what of his observation that though true Christianity is not found in " the church," it is to be found, if at all, in the sects; that the sect is the only thing which resembles New Testament Christianity See introduction to Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp Hong, p. 23I. 19 XI2 A 43!. 20 XI2 A

10 The Journal of Religion Perhaps all that one is saying in raising such questions is that it would indeed be good to have an even fuller translation of materials from Kierkegaard's journals. Perhaps it is to say that a fuller translation would be particularly helpful in relation to topics and issues on which there is critical debate, or in relation to significant criticisms of SK's published views which are, as Kierkegaard himself admits, both polemical and one sided in keeping with his own goals as an author. Though all of us who have struggled to understand Kierkegaard's life and work would indeed like more, it is clear that the present Hong translation is a magnificent accomplishment both of the translators and of the Indiana University Press. They have our gratitude. 78