Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 43: February 2002

 

A Last Stitch in Time…

or

A Map of the Map of Kierkegaard's World

 

The Essential Kierkegaard

edited by Howard and Edna Hong

 

By Jamie Lorentzen

 

When a woman works on a cloth for sacred use, she makes every flower as beautiful, if possible, as the lovely flowers of the field…she spares nothing but uses the most precious things in her possession; then she disposes of every other claim on her life in order to purchase the uninterrupted and opportune time of day and night for her sole, her beloved, work.  But when the cloth is finished and is placed in accordance with its sacred purpose–then she is deeply distressed if anyone were to make the mistake of seeing her artistry instead of the meaning of the cloth or were to make the mistake of seeing a defect instead of seeing the meaning of the cloth.–The Essential Kierkegaard, 270 (fr. "Preface" to Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits)

 

To my knowledge, no St. Olaf College student ever looked at an abridged or selected volume of any kind with a more skeptical eye than after having participated in one of Howard Hong's courses.  Hong's anti-abridgement, anti-anthology, anti-secondary criticism mantra was one of his classic and most durable professorial positions among his young charges.  It ran something like this:  Carry on, but remember to read the primary text, the whole text, and nothing but the text…before you read it again.  Then Hong would strike terror in young awakening hearts by promising to return to follow up on how his students studied.  Appropriating the Button-molder's words to Peer Gynt, he would say, "We'll meet at the next crossroads…and then we'll see–I won't say more."

 

Hong's reasoning was nobly spawned, informed as it was by a changeless telos.  He meant to help students think for themselves about a particular author instead of merely witness them parrot an editor or critic's perceptions of an author that either is stated or implied in criticism or abridgements.  In addition, Hong assumed Thomas Mann's assertion that "only the exhaustive can be truly interesting."  In other words, Hong had no time for abridged, half-baked ideas.

 

In the 520-page anthology, The Essential Kierkegaard (ed. Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton University Press, 2000), Hong still does not waver from his passion for plenary reading.  In fact, two paragraphs of his ten-paragraph "Introduction" constitute a disclaimer, or at least an explanation, of difficulties he and Edna faced when unstitching unabridged texts that they so artfully sewed up in English translations for more than a half century–only to restitch an abridged text.

 

"A sample," Hong concedes, "is certainly not the whole, and a plurality of samples is still not the totality of the comprehensive plan."  Then comes the anthology's purpose: "Each sample, however, is an invitation, an invitation to appropriate the part and then to move on to the source, the work itself, which in turn invites the reader to seek out its neighbor volumes" (xi).  Savvy to the draw that a good anthology may have to both new and lapsed Kierkegaard readers, Hong comes to terms with the apparent contradiction.   If the anthology invites or reinvites readers into Kierkegaard's plenary world (and, by extension, into readers' own plenary worlds), then whatever contradiction that may exist is negligible.  In other words, anthologies can be upbuilding books, too.

 

This being said, the Hongs still are obliged to deliver a substantive and qualitatively unique anthology, an anthology that goes beyond the Bretall anthology (Princeton, 1946) in scope and vision–an anthology that maps out Kierkegaard's own comprehensive map.

 

Obvious advances are made upon the Bretall anthology, beginning with the Hongs' good fortune of selecting from the entire corpus of Kierkegaard's writings–a canon that they, in great part, translated, edited, and recently completed in the Kierkegaard's Writings series (26 definitive, systematically uniform volumes, Princeton), Further:

 

·As in the Kierkegaard's Writings series, volume and page numbers exist in the margins of The Essential Kierkegaard that refer to the first collected Danish edition, Søren Kierkegaard Samlede Værker.  Marginal pagination offers a cursory understanding of the size of breaks in the abridged texts and the degree to which the abridgement surveys all or particular sections of the primary text.

 

·The Hong selections span the whole of Kierkegaard's authorship (the Bretall anthology excludes more than a dozen of Kierkegaard's titles, including From the Papers of One Still Living, The Concept of Irony, Johannes Climacus, The Concept of Anxiety, Prefaces, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, articles from the Corsair affair, Christian Discourses, The Lily in the Field…, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, For Self-Examination, Judge forYourself!, and The Book on Adler).

 

·Hong's introductions to each selection are briefer and more historical. The uninitiated reader is given more exposition to read with a clear understanding of each selection's purpose (but no so much exposition that the reader's interpretation of the selection may be tainted before the selection is even read).

 

·From scores of advisors, the Hongs received nominations of "must-be-included" selections to help compile a more objective, publicly definitive anthology.  Conversely, Bretall states in his "Preface" that he picked selections for his anthology that interest him and that "may have an interest for others."  Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Bretall's mode of selection, a substantive ethical component is at work in the Hong's method.  The latter's mode of attempting to frame a difficult author like Kierkegaard in a single volume is something akin to Ishmael's mode of comprehending a painting in Moby-Dick (a painting that also appears to be so dark, defaced, murky, boggy, soggy, and squitchy that it could "drive a nervous man distracted"): "only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose."  Careful inquiry of the neighbors, then, seemed especially significant to the Hongs in their compilation of The Essential Kierkegaard.

 

·

A Survey of the Contents

 

Entries from Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers are an excellent introduction to the anthology.  More likely than not, they may be the first pages of Kierkegaard read by a first-time, college-age reader.  The entries, then, are appropriately penned by a young Kierkegaard trying to find a voice and a purpose:  "What I really need is to get clear about what I am to do" (8).  The second selection (fr. From the Papers of One Still Living–ostensibly a critique of Hans Christian Anderson) is an equally appropriate follow-up.  In it, Kierkegaard emphasizes the need for each human being to establish an earnest life-view upon which to build a life of thought and action.

 

The abridgements from Kierkegaard's dissertation, The Concept of Irony, link the young writer not only to his life-long mentor, Socrates, but also to one of his life-long literary styles: irony.   Other substantive themes that surface throughout Kierkegaard's authorship find their soil in Irony; Hong notes some of them in his "Introduction" to the selection, which include immediacy, reflection, selfhood, subjectivity, objectivity, the esthetic, the ethical, the religious, and anthropological contemplation.

 

Selections from Kierkegaard's Either/Or are important to any anthology, given Kierkegaard's perennial dedication both to distinguishing between the esthetic and the ethical/ethical-religious and to his discussion of human freedom.  Both the Hongs and Bretall offer selections from "Diapsalmata,"  "Rotation of Crops," "The Seducer's Diary," "The Esthetic Validity of Marriage," and "The Balance Between the Esthetic and the Ethical…".  Selections from the "Seducer's Diary" are fewer in Hongs' edition, perhaps to save space for choice passages from "Immediate Stages of the Erotic."

 

From Four Upbuilding Discourses, the Hongs select part of the discourse entitled "To Need God is a Human Being's Highest Perfection."  Their abridgement includes a favorite of Howard's: an extended analogy of a self and its deeper self (a sort of imaginative rehearsal to the opening pages of Sickness Unto Death).  In addition, it asks directly what most every age of Kierkegaard either directly or indirectly asks:  "What is a human being?  Is he just one more ornament in the series of creation; or has he no power, is he capable of nothing?  And what is his power, then; what is the utmost he is capable to will?" (87).

 

Fear and Trembling and Repetition, like Either/Or, also are central to a Kierkegaard anthology.  Aside from Johannes de Silentio's discussion of the tragic hero versus the knight of faith and of the teleological suspension of the ethical, the Hongs include the wonderful passage on how Silentio attempts to identify a knight of Faith by appearance alone–only to discover that such a knight would look just like a tax collector.  In Repetition, the Hongs include the parable of the repeating professor (perhaps as invitation to lapsed Kierkegaard readers to reread?).

 

The selection from Fragments (primarily from "Thought-Project") is necessary insofar as the reader may appreciate Kierkegaard's distinctions between his intellectual prototype (Socarates) and religious prototype (Christ).  The bits from Johannes Climacus brings the concept of doubt into sharper relief.  From The Concept of Anxiety comes an abridged version of Adam as the universal particular, both entire race and individual person.  Many aspects of the "becoming of the self" and of the "anthropological aspects of freedom" (Hong's words in his "Introduction") surface here.

 

The selection from Prefaces includes perhaps Kierkegaard's most compact and expansive figurative construction: a rapid-fire, multi-imagistic smile of what a preface is like (this is worth the whole selection itself).  As an ode to earnestness, "At a Graveside" (from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions) is invaluable to the Kierkegaard canon as it centralizes earnestness in Kierkegaard's thought.

 

In the selection from States on Life's Way, the Hongs are smart to keep it brief (only parts of the beginning and end of that big book are offered), yet they are able to catch the intoxicating flavor of the pseudonyms in the "In Vino Veritas" selection.  Perhaps the Hongs were banking pages for the big 60-page abridgement of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which highlights the subjective existing thinker, the art of communication, the maxim "truth is subjectivity," the development of the (religious) self, further notes on humor and irony, distinctions between Religiousness A and B, and "A First and Last Declaration."  The whole selection begins with Johannes Climacus's famous discussion of how he came to "make difficulties everywhere"–a passage quoted at the outset of Hong's "Introduction" to the anthology.

 

A brief selection follows, recognizing Kierkegaard's affair with The Corsair and the preface to his "second authorship."  Then comes a selection from Two Ages, which ostensibly represents Kierkegaard's hand at direct literary criticism.  The Hongs wisely select from the Part Three of the critique–the culturally prophetic examination of "The Present Age," which especially critiques the media, the public, and the passionless.

 

Hong's "Introduction" to the selections from "An Occasional Discourse" (or "Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing") includes an apt observation.  He writes that,  in "Purity of Heart," "Kierkegaard relentlessly pounds sand in every evasion rat hole of double-mindedness and typically leaves the reader to work out the implications of the clues to the nature of the good" (269).

 

From Works of Love, selections tend toward the core aspect of that volume, namely, Kierkegaard's implicit sense of social and Christian ethics.  Representative pieces from Christian Discourses, The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air (particularly his discourse on silence), and Two Ethical-Religious Essays (particularly "The Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle") follow.

 

Then comes what perhaps may be considered Howard Hong's own primary "must-read":  the opening pages of Sickness Unto Death, which may be considered the crystallization of Kierkegaard's philosophical anthropology.  Also included in this selection is Anti-Climacus's discussion of despair as sin.

 

The Practice in Christianity selection includes the parable of the child looking at the crucified Christ and Anti-Climacus's discussion of Christ as the prototype to imitate (the prototype theme surfaces again in the selection from Judge for Yourself!).  Following a brief selection from Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, some of Kierkegaard's most beautiful parables, found in For Self-Examination, are offered: the parable of the love letter, of the royal coachman, and of Nathan.

 

Selections from The Book on Adler are dedicated primarily to Kierkegaard's concept of authority, while selections from Late Writings reveal a directness of "hard-hitting criticism" and "caustic caricature" (Hong's words) of the established order that is Kierkegaard's endgame to an authorship that began in indirect communication.

 

The anthology concludes first with selections from Kierkegaard's On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for my Work as an Author, about which Hong writes: "These works are about the writings and the personal engagement of the author in the writing…which Walter Lowrie has called 'a religious autobiography so unique that it has no parallel in the whole of literature in the world'" (449).  The ultimate selection is from The Changelessness of God, which Hong claims to be "representative of the total Anlæg  [comprehensive plan] at its core and in its intent" (482). The selection begins with a prayer, and then considers what some have claimed to be Kierkegaard's most beloved New Testament passage, James 1:17-21: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation…."

Just as Howard takes the task of plenary study of primary texts seriously, so do he and Edna take the task of creating the new anthology seriously.  The result is not simply a hodgepodge patchwork of Kierkegaard's writing nor a reconstruction of his greatest hits.  Rather, it is a plenary portraiture based upon the Hongs' 60 years of passionate Kierkegaard studies, translations, and persistent neighborly dialogues; it is a fine textus, or needlework sample, of Kierkegaard's more profound ideas regarding what it means to be a human being.  Consequently, the volume begs to be read in its entirety, if only to figure out the map that the Hongs have unfolded to guide the reader to as proper an understanding of the map of Kierkegaard's world as is possible in one volume.  In this context, and through such an anthology, the Hongs carry on Kierkegaard's words about his own writings; namely, they "hope to achieve the following: to leave behind…so accurate a characterization of Christianity and its relationships in the world that an enthusiastic, noble-minded young person will be able to find in it a map of relationships as accurate as any topographical map from the most famous institutes" (Journals and Papers, i., p. 455).

 

Carry on, Howard and Edna, with the knowledge that your map in a single individual volume (the final fruit of a long, rich vine) will help any noble-minded single individual to  approach the final crossroad with a noble heart.

 

Jamie Lorentzen teaches English and humanities at Red Wing High School, Red Wing, Minnesota.  He co-edits the Kierkegaard Newsletter and chairs the Friends of the Hong Kierkegaard Library. His book, Kierkegaard's Metaphors, was recently published by Mercer University Press.