Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, Volume 11, Part 2: Loose Papers, 1843–1855

779 Pages·2020·20.204 MB·English

by  Søren Kierkegaard

KIERKEGAARD’S JOURNALS
AND NOTEBOOKS
BRUCE H. KIRMMSE
GENERAL EDITOR

KIERKEGAARD’S JOURNALS
AND NOTEBOOKS
VOLUME 11, PART 2
Loose Papers, 1843–1855
Volume Edited by
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse,
David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, and Vanessa Rumble
Published in cooperation with
the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre
Copenhagen
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
KIERKEGAARD’S
JOURNALS and NOTEBOOKS
Editorial Board
Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H. Kirmmse,
David D. Possen, Joel D. S. Rasmussen, and Vanessa Rumble
in cooperation with the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Copenhagen
Volume 11, Part 2, Loose Papers, 1843–1855
Originally published under the titles
Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter: 27 Løse Papirer and
Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter: K27 Kommentarer til Løse Papirer
© 2011 by the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre Foundation, Copenhagen
The Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre Foundation at the University of Copenhagen was
established with support from the Danish National Research Foundation.
English translation Copyright © 2020 by
the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre Foundation at the University of Copenhagen, and
the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton
University Press
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All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Control Number 2011925169
ISBN: 978-0-691-19730-2
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
The publication of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks is supported by grants from
the Danish Ministry of Culture, the United States National Endowment for the Humanities,
and Connecticut College.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily
reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks is based on Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, which is published
with the support of grants from the Danish National Research Foundation and
the Danish Ministry of Culture.
Except as otherwise noted, all photographs have been provided by
the photographic studio of the Royal Danish Library.
This book has been composed in Palatino and Optima
by Katalin Nun Stewart, Bratislava, Slovakia
Text design by Bent Rohde
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Overview
Volume 11, Part 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loose Papers, 1830–1843
Volume 11, Part 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loose Papers, 1843–1852 and 1852–1855
Introduction to the English Language Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii
Introduction to the Loose Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxix
Loose Papers, 1843–1852
Paper 305–Paper 446 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Loose Papers, 1852–1855
Paper 447–Paper 591 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Notes for Paper 305–Paper 446 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 409
Notes for Paper 447–Paper 591 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 609
Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 693
Calendar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 697
Concordance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 725

vii
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks
Introduction to the English Language Edition
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks is based on Søren Kierkegaards
Skrifter (hereafter, SKS) [Søren Kierkegaard’s Writings] (Copen-
hagen: Gad, 1997–2012), which is a Danish scholarly, annotated
edition of everything written by Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855),
and comprises fifty-five volumes. SKS divides the entirety of
Kierkegaard’s output into four categories: 1) works published by
Kierkegaard during his lifetime (e.g., such well-known titles as Either/
Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death); 2) works that lay
ready―or substantially ready―for publication at the time of Kierke-
gaard’s death, but which he did not publish in his lifetime (e.g., titles
such as The Book on Adler, The Point of View for My Work as an Author,
and Judge for Yourself!); 3) journals, notebooks, excerpts, and loose pa-
pers, collectively titled Kierkegaard’s “journals and notebooks”; and
4) letters and biographical documents. Clearly, Kierkegaard was not
only a prolific author; he was also a prolific writer, and his literary
activity found expression not only in his published works but also
in the mass of writings that were not published in his lifetime. It is
these writings, the third category listed above, titled Kierkegaard’s
Journals and Notebooks (hereafter, KJN) that constitute the material of
the present English language edition.
I. Danish Editions of Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Writings
In November 1855, shortly after Kierkegaard’s death, his neph-
ew Henrik Lund visited his apartment accompanied by a clerk
named Nørregaard from the Copenhagen Probate Commission.
What Lund and Nørregaard encountered when they entered Ki-
erkegaard’s apartment was “a great quantity of paper, mostly
manuscripts, located in various places.”1 Lund viewed himself
1) Flemming Christian Nielsen, Alt blev godt betalt. Auktionen over
Søren Kierkegaards indbo [Everything Fetched a Good Price: The
Auction of Søren Kierkegaard’s Personal Effects] (Viborg: Holken-
feldt, 2000), p. 7.
viii KIERKEGAARD’S JOURNALS AND NOTEBOOKS
not merely as a relative but also as a disciple of his famous and
controversial uncle, and he initially believed that he had been
called to sort through and catalogue the mass of Kierkegaard-
ian papers, with an eye to their eventual publication. Lund pro-
ceeded systematically, probably beginning as early as the end of
November 1855, and during December of that year and the first
half of January 1856 he worked his way through the great trove
of papers and manuscripts. As the work progressed, Lund noted
where each pile, case, box, roll, folder, and notebook lay when
Kierkegaard had died, e.g., “in the desk,” “in the lower desk draw-
er,” “in the left-hand case,” or “in the second chest of drawers, ‘B,’
top drawer, to the left.”1 And he took careful note of which pages,
scraps, and slips of paper were found together with which oth-
ers. Although Lund eventually tired of the task and left the job of
publication to others, he is the one who has provided the earliest
account of Kierkegaard’s papers, and he compiled a valuable and
quite detailed―though never completed―inventory of Kierke-
gaard’s posthumous writings, entitling it “Catalogue of the Manu-
scripts of S. Kierkegaard, Drawn up after His Death.”
After a rather vagabond existence, these papers eventually
found their way to the residence of Kierkegaard’s elder brother,
Peter Christian, bishop of Aalborg in Jutland, Denmark, and
in February 1865 they were entrusted to Hans Peter Barfod, a
former newspaper editor to whom the bishop had assigned
the task of “examining, registering, etc. Søren’s papers.”2 Much
of what confronted Barfod (and before him, Lund) in the wel-
ter of papers was of course drafts and other materials related
to works that Kierkegaard had published during his lifetime
and to works that lay ready or almost ready for publication
at the time of his death (that is, the above-mentioned materials
that constitute categories 1 and 2 of SKS), plus letters and other
biographical documents (category 4 of SKS). But there was also
another group of materials, an enormous quantity of writing that
did not fit into the other categories, an amorphous mass of jour-
nals, notebooks, and loose sheets, pages, and scraps of paper
(category 3 of SKS).
1) Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, and Johnny Kondrup, Writ-
ten Images: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals, Notebooks, Booklets, Sheets,
Scraps, and Slips of Paper, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 11.
2) Carl Weltzer, Peter og Søren Kierkegaard [Peter and Søren Kierke-
gaard] (Copenhagen: Gad, 1936), p. 311.
INTRODUCTION TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION ix
Faced with this daunting pile of paper, but armed with
Lund’s above-mentioned “Catalogue,” Barfod plunged into the
papers to construct his own inventory, and in November 1865,
ten years after Kierkegaard’s death, Barfod completed his own
“Catalogue of the Papers Found after the Death of Søren Aabye
Kierkegaard.” Barfod’s “Catalogue” had 472 numbered items,
and up through number 382 its enumeration was identical to
that of Lund’s “Catalogue,” which itself appeared in Barfod’s as
number 473. Two years later, in the autumn of 1867, after much
hesitation, Bishop P. C. Kierkegaard gave Barfod “a free hand to
deal with Søren Kierkegaard’s literary remains”1 and indicated
his intention that they be published.
Barfod set to work preparing the material for publication.
Though not a trained philologist, Barfod (who has been much
maligned for reasons that will become evident) was merely act-
ing in accordance with the standard practice of his day when he
wrote his own corrections, notes, and printer’s instructions on
the pages of Kierkegaard’s journals, after which he sent them off
to the printer. Sometimes he cut manuscript pages into sever-
al pieces, rearranged the order of the entries, and apparently
glued them onto larger sheets of paper before sending them to
the printer. Some of the original manuscripts themselves were
lost―thrown away by the printer or by Barfod. Thus, some ar-
chival materials have been damaged, and others―including, for
example, Journal AA, which contained the famous line about “a
truth for which to live and die”―have been almost completely
lost, so that the only source we have for these entries are the
versions in Barfod’s published edition, or in a number of cas-
es, merely the fragmentary headwords listed in Barfod’s “Cat-
alogue.” Of the ten journals AA through KK from the period
1833–1846, only the final one, KK, is completely intact today.
For all the remaining volumes―some entirely dismantled, some
still in their original bindings―varying numbers of pages have
been lost. As has been noted, Barfod was not particularly cul-
pable, for he shared the view of his times, according to which
literary remains had served their purpose after they had been
examined and their contents published.
Barfod’s principal responsibility was to serve Bishop P. C.
Kierkegaard as secretary and treasurer of the Aalborg diocese,
and he was thus unable to work full-time on Søren Kierkegaard’s
1) Søren Kierkegaard, Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer [From
Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers], ed. H. P. Barfod, vol. 1
(Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1869), p. ix.