1.1 The Initial Discovery and Cataloging of the Material

Kierkegaard’s Nachlass was originally found by his nephew, the medical student Henrik Lund (1825–1889).Footnote ²³ He claimed that he should take the responsibility for publishing the journals and papers posthumously since Kierkegaard in some way had indicated that this was his wish (contrary to the aforementioned designation of Rasmus Nielsen, which at the time was not yet known).Footnote ²⁴ For this reason after Kierkegaard’s death, Lund went to his apartment in order to look through the material. He found countless notebooks, journals, loose sheets, and scraps of paper in Kierkegaard’s writing desk, in drawers in a cabinet, in bags, and so on. He made a detailed four-page overview of each unit of material, indicating where he had found it, that is, “in the desk,” “in the lower desk drawer,” rolled up “tied with a bowknot,” and so on.Footnote ²⁵ He called this overview simply “The Order of the Papers.” He numbered each unit of material that he found from 1 to 389. From this overview it is clear that the most recent things that Kierkegaard was working on were understandably in the most obvious and prominent places on or around his desk, whereas the older material was buried somewhat deeper and kept in less accessible places. When Lund completed this overview, he started on a more extensive catalog of the material, which he completed on January 17, 1856. This catalog used the numbers from the overview as its point of departure and gave more precise information about each of the numbered units of text. He thus gave a brief account of the content of each individual journal or notebook, the date, the number of pages it contained and an indication of the format or size of the paper. He called this the “List of the Manuscripts of S. Kierkegaard, Recorded after his Death.”

When Lund received a position as doctor on the island of St. Jan in the West Indies (now a part of the Virgin Islands) and was thus to leave Denmark, it was clear that he would be unable to carry out the publication of the material and someone else would have to be found. First, Kierkegaard’s lifelong friend Emil Boesen (1812–1879) was asked, but he politely declined. In May of 1857 the material was eventually sent by Lund’s father, Johan Christian Lund (1799–1875), to Kierkegaard’s elder brother and only surviving sibling, Peter Christian Kierkegaard (1805–1888), who was then bishop in Aalborg.Footnote ²⁶ In 1859 P. C. Kierkegaard himself published what appeared to be a more or less complete text by his brother in the mass of posthumous material, namely, The Point of View for My Work as an Author.Footnote ²⁷ After this, however, he seems not to have done much with the material for the next several years.

At the beginning of 1865, he delegated to Hans Peter Barfod (1834–1892), a jurist and newspaper editor, the job of making an overview of the rest of his brother’s posthumous writings.Footnote ²⁸ In the course of that year Barfod worked out an elaborate and more or less exhaustive catalog that contained 472 numbered units, the first part of which followed Lund’s catalog.Footnote ²⁹ Barfod assigned numbers not just to individual journals and notebooks but also to loose sheets of paper. In addition, he meticulously registered every single journal or notebook entry by writing the date, the first few words of the entry or its heading if it had one. The entries in bound journals or notebooks were also referenced by means of page numbers. Entries especially relevant for Kierkegaard’s person or biography were noted with a special double underlining. In all, this detailed catalog came to fill 223 pages.Footnote ³⁰

Barfod’s labor was clearly done with an eye toward the publication of the material. He was therefore startled when on March 9, 1865, while working on his catalog, he found a scrap of paper on which Kierkegaard clearly indicates his desire that Rasmus Nielsen publish his posthumous works: “It is my wish that after my death Prof. Nielsen do whatever is necessary with respect to the publication of the entirety of my literary remains, manuscripts, journals, etc., which are to be turned over to him.”Footnote ³¹ Given the circumstances under which it was found, it was unclear if this was to be regarded simply as a fleeting thought that Kierkegaard had entertained during the period around 1848 when he was on close terms with Nielsen. If this were the case, then it could be safely ignored. But if it was to be considered in a juridical sense as his final testament, this was an entirely different matter, and it needed to be respected at all costs.

Barfod was quite vexed by the matter since if the latter were deemed to be the case, then his own plans for editing and publishing the material would be in danger. He was doubtless further troubled by the fact that Nielsen had in fact already edited a volume of Kierkegaard’s newspaper articles in 1857 and thus seemed in principle to be a good candidate for the job of editing the Nachlass.Footnote ³² He discussed the matter in detail with P. C. Kierkegaard. After careful consideration, it was decided that this could not have been Kierkegaard’s final wish given that he ultimately became alienated from Nielsen. The argument that clinched the matter was provided by another passage from the Nachlass. In a sketch of an article, “Rasmus Nielsen’s Relation to My Activity as an Author,” which Kierkegaard never published, Barfod found, among many abusive comments about Nielsen, the following: “Now the point has been reached that if I were to die now, for example, Prof. N.[ielsen] would be the person whom I would least of all wish to be regarded as possessing the correct interpretation of my efforts.”Footnote ³³ This provided the evidence that Barfod was looking for since it seemed to show that the scrap of paper was not Kierkegaard’s final wish and that it could in no way be regarded as a legal testament with any binding force. Therefore, P. C. Kierkegaard decided not to inform Rasmus Nielsen of the matter.

1.2 The First Publication of the Nachlass

After completing the task of cataloging everything, Barfod asked if he could have permission to publish some of the material. In the fall of 1867 P. C. Kierkegaard consented and gave Barfod free hand over the posthumous authorship.Footnote ³⁴ From 1869 to 1877, Barfod published the first three volumes of this material in an edition simply called Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer, that is, From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers.Footnote ³⁵

When the initial volumes of Barfod’s edition began to appear, the reading public in Denmark was scandalized by it. Due to the attack on the Church in the last year of his life, Kierkegaard was fixed in the public mind of the generation as one whose name was associated with scandal. It seemed to the sensibilities of many people embarrassing or lacking discretion to trot out all his old animosities once again with renowned and respected Copenhagen figures such as Martensen, Mynster, Heiberg, Grundtvig, or Goldschmidt. Kierkegaard’s friend Emil Boesen had even requested ahead of time that Barfod not print some of this highly polemical material.Footnote ³⁶

Although by no means a neutral party, Kierkegaard’s long-time rival, the theologian Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884), makes a comment on this edition in passing, which seems to be characteristic of the general view at the time. Writing in the first volume of his memoirs in 1882, he says,

In Martensen’s eyes, Barfod did Kierkegaard’s reputation no service by publishing the posthumous material, which presented a quite unflattering side of his personality that was best forgotten. The initial volumes of this edition thus did not enjoy a positive reception.Footnote ³⁸ This seems to be one of the reasons why Barfod decided not to continue with the work.Footnote ³⁹ Criticism of this kind also explains the somewhat defensive tone in the Foreword to the second volumeFootnote ⁴⁰ and in that to the first volume published by Barfod’s successor Hermann Gottsched (1849–1916) in 1880.Footnote ⁴¹

A German philologist, Gottsched became interested in Kierkegaard as a student in Tübingen. Already by this time there were several German translations of Kierkegaard’s works, including biographical selections based on the volumes edited by Barfod. In Tübingen there was a small circle of interest in Kierkegaard that was due to the work of the professor of theology Johann Tobias Beck (1804–1878).Footnote ⁴² Gottsched belonged to this circle.Footnote ⁴³ Motivated by this interest, he learned Danish and visited Denmark briefly. He met Barfod in the fall of 1878 in Germany,Footnote ⁴⁴ when the latter was visiting the pastor Albert Bärthold, who was responsible for a number of the German Kierkegaard translations and was previously also one of Beck’s students in Tübingen. After their meeting Gottsched developed an intense desire to work on Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. When his post as a teacher in a secondary school in his hometown of Wernigerode (in Harz) expired, he moved to Aalborg in July 1879 in order to work on the edition.Footnote ⁴⁵ He completed it with remarkable speed, publishing the last five volumes in just two years (1880–1881).Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, in all, this initial edition contained nine volumes (the first of which was a double volume), but this was only a small part of the entire body of material.

Nielsen was ultimately informed of the scrap of paper that was found but only several years later in 1875, that is, after the first volumes of Barfod’s edition had already appeared and at a time when P. C. Kierkegaard’s health seemed to be failing. The situation was explained to Nielsen in a letter written jointly by P. C. Kierkegaard and Barfod. Nielsen was offended that he was not told when the note was found in 1865 and interpreted it as an authentic and binding document.Footnote ⁴⁷

While work on the Barfod–Gottsched edition was still going on in Aalborg, P. C. Kierkegaard fell ill in 1875, and the next year he published his brother’s manuscript, Judge for Yourself!, almost seventeen long years after he had published The Point of View for My Work as an Author.Footnote ⁴⁸ It was perhaps Peter Christian’s failing health that precipitated the publication, which he had possibly been planning for some time previously. He could presumably have done more, but he left the rest of the Nachlass to Barfod and Gottsched to publish as they wished.

Also in 1875 P. C. Kierkegaard donated what remained of his brother’s Nachlass to the University Library, and after this time the materials had to be sent back and forth between the editors in Aalborg and the library in Copenhagen. The manuscripts were sent to the University Library not in their original form but rather reorganized in a more chronological order by Barfod.

It is not known with certainty if P. C. Kierkegaard kept something for himself or destroyed things that he found particularly troubling or offensive. In the closing remarks to his catalog, Barfod writes, “For the sake of completeness and to be on the safe side, it is noted that in storage and among his papers, Bishop Kierkegaard has at least a few lesser articles and letters, which, because I have not had an opportunity to inspect them, are excluded from this catalog.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It should be noted that the relation between the two brothers had been strained to the point of complete alienation due in part to Peter Christian’s comments about his brother’s work at the Clerical Conference of Roskilde in 1849.Footnote ⁵⁰ Clear testimony to the profundity of this alienation can be found in the fact that when Kierkegaard was on his deathbed, he refused to see his brother, who came to visit him in the hospital.Footnote ⁵¹ Peter Christian doubtless ran across the many journal entries in his brother’s Nachlass, which were highly critical of him.Footnote ⁵² To his credit, he did not remove this material or at least not all of it.

1.3 New Material is Added to the Nachlass and Further Publications

An important addition to the Nachlass came in 1904 with the death of Kierkegaard’s former fiancée Regine Schlegel, née Olsen (1822–1904).Footnote ⁵³ In Kierkegaard’s will (written in 1851), which was found in a sealed envelope addressed to his brother, he named Regine Schlegel as his sole heir.Footnote ⁵⁴ P. C. Kierkegaard then dutifully wrote to her and her husband Johan Frederik Schlegel (1817–1896), then the governor of the Danish West Indies, and informed them of this. The response he received was that Mrs. Schlegel was interested in receiving only those materials among Kierkegaard’s journals and papers that concerned her directly. Thus, her entire correspondence with Kierkegaard as well as seven letters, which Kierkegaard had written in Berlin and sent to his confidant Emil Boesen concerning the dissolution of the engagement, were mailed to her in St. Croix. In addition, she was sent a notebook entitled, “My Relationship to Her.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Before her death she destroyed her side of the correspondence, that is, the letters that she as a young woman had written to Kierkegaard during their courtship and engagement.Footnote ⁵⁶ The rest of the material, however, was donated to the University Library and thus added to the collection in 1904.

Regine had entrusted Kierkegaard’s niece Henriette Lund (1829–1909) with the manuscripts in 1893, which she used to create a semi-fictional novel about the broken engagement. When Regine saw the beginning of this work and was not pleased with it, she asked to have the materials back again in 1898, pretending that she was concerned about possible damage to the manuscripts which could take place in the event of fire or other disasters, with the manuscripts being kept in a private home without adequate security.Footnote ⁵⁷ Regine entrusted the material to the librarian and philologist Raphael Meyer (1869–1925), who published it upon her death in 1904 under the title, Kierkegaard’s Papers: The Engagement, Published for Mrs. Regine Schlegel.Footnote ⁵⁸ Henriette Lund ultimately published her version of the material in the same year under the title, My Relation to Her: From Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers.Footnote ⁵⁹

1.4 The Papirer Edition and the Wave of Biographical Studies

The next major event in the history of the Nachlass was a new edition. The pioneering efforts of Barfod and Gottsched were important steps in the publication of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. Their edition effectively whetted the appetite of interested readers for more. With the growing interest in Kierkegaard studies, it was inevitable that there would be a demand for more of the posthumous material to be published. This need was felt acutely by the turn of the century, and thus the wheels were set into motion for a new edition. A new group of editors set to work with the ambition of producing the first more or less complete edition of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. This appeared between the years 1909 and 1948 with the title Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (abbreviated as Pap.), under the care of the editors Peter Andreas Heiberg (1864–1926) and Victor Kuhr (1882–1948). The first collected edition of Kierkegaard’s published works, the Samlede Værker, had just been completed in 1906.Footnote ⁶⁰ Given that the published works were now generally available, it was logical that an attempt be made to publish his Nachlass in a complete edition as well.Footnote ⁶¹ When working out the regulative principles for their edition, the editors of the Papirer edition consulted their colleagues who had worked on the Samlede Værker.Footnote ⁶²

The Papirer edition was the idea and the ambition of Peter Andreas Heiberg, who was the driving force behind the project. Heiberg, like Barfod before him, was intellectually drawn to Kierkegaard and thus selflessly dedicated himself to promoting him by means of the edition. Heiberg’s interest in the Nachlass seems to have come from his fascination with Kierkegaard’s biography, a fascination that he cultivated during his work on the edition. The time when Kierkegaard’s name was immediately associated with scandal was now past, and one could undertake this project with the hope of a more favorable reception than Barfod had received. At the beginning of the work, P. A. Heiberg, like Barfod before him, registered all of the material.Footnote ⁶³ He then repacked it not according to Kierkegaard’s original notebooks and journals or according to Barfod’s chronology but according to the same principles used in the Papirer edition (described below).Footnote ⁶⁴ P. A. Heiberg and Kuhr worked on this edition jointly until Heiberg died in 1926; then a new editor, Einer Torsting (1893–1951), joined Kuhr, and the two of them completed the project. The completion of this edition was delayed during World War II when the two main editors had to go underground. The penultimate volume XI-2 was published in 1938, but the final volume XI-3 had to wait until after the war and the occupation, until 1948, to see the light of day.

It should be noted that this edition did fulfill at least in part its function by spawning a huge wave of biographical works on Kierkegaard. These include P. A. Heiberg’s An Episode in Søren Kierkegaard’s Youth from 1912,Footnote ⁶⁵ A Segment of Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Development from 1918,Footnote ⁶⁶ Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Development from 1925,Footnote ⁶⁷ Valdemar Ammundsen’s (1875–1936) Søren Kierkegaard’s Youth from 1912,Footnote ⁶⁸ Eduard Geismar’s (1871–1939) Søren Kierkegaard: His Life and Authorship from 1926–1928,Footnote ⁶⁹ Frithiof Brandt’s (1892–1968) The Young Søren Kierkegaard from 1929,Footnote ⁷⁰ Hjalmar Helweg’s (1886–1960) Søren Kierkegaard: A Psychiatric-Psychological Study from 1933,Footnote ⁷¹ Sejer Kühle’s (1886–1957) “Some Information about Søren Kierkegaard from 1834–1838,” published in five installments from 1931 to 1935,Footnote ⁷² and Johannes Hohlenberg’s (1881–1960) Søren Kierkegaard from 1940.Footnote ⁷³ The Papirer thus opened the door to all manner of biography, including psychologizing and psychoanalyzing.

1.5 The Kierkegaard Archive at the Royal Library

In 1938 Kierkegaard’s Nachlass was transferred to the Royal Library, which established the Kierkegaard Archive.Footnote ⁷⁴ The Archive included not just Kierkegaard’s manuscripts but also several of the books which he owned, some of which the library had bought at the auction immediately after his death and some of which it acquired later in the course of the years.Footnote ⁷⁵ It further included a number of biographical documents such as certificates for Kierkegaard’s baptism and confirmation, as well as a number of receipts for books and other expenditures. During World War II, from 1940 to 1945, Kierkegaard’s Nachlass was prudently hidden away in Esrum Monastery in North Zealand, where the material would be safe from the contingencies of the German occupation. After the war it was returned to the Royal Library.Footnote ⁷⁶ Today Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks are still to be found at the Kierkegaard Archive at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, where they are kept under tight security and with limited access. The Archive contains six different groups of items.Footnote ⁷⁷

First, there are the numerous drafts of works that Kierkegaard published. This includes everything from first drafts, to fair copies, to typeset page proofs. For early texts such as From the Papers of One Still Living and The Concept of Irony, no drafts or proofs exist; by contrast, for later texts such as The Concept of Anxiety or The Sickness unto Death, there are drafts from every stage of the composition right up until the fair copy and the typeset proofs.

Second, there are Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks. These are in very poor condition. The journals AA–KK have been badly damaged or wholly lost, primarily by Barfod. These were originally written in bound volumes, which Barfod proceeded to cut up for the publication of his edition. He apparently cut individual entries out and then pasted them onto another piece of paper in the order that he wanted to have them in his edition. He could then send these pasted pieces of paper to the typesetter. Unfortunately, of this group of early journals, only Journal KK survives intact. For five of the remaining ten, all that is left is the binding with the cut-out stumps of pages and a few loose sheets. The notebooks have suffered a mixed fate, with some of them coming down to us complete, while others have suffered the loss of individual pages and entries. The NB journals, by contrast, come down to us in good condition. The journals and notebooks (as well as the loose papers mentioned further) are still organized according to the individual volumes of the Papirer edition.

Third, there is a collection of letters to and from Kierkegaard that was supplemented as the material came to light over the course of the years. What survives here is also fragmentary. Sometimes one can follow his correspondence fairly closely, while sometimes only his side of it remains (as with his correspondence with Regine).

Fourth, there are the aforementioned biographical documents that include not merely official things like his birth certificate and university diploma but also various bills for books, services, and membership to clubs and societies.

Fifth, there are a number of loose papers, not belonging to any journal. This category is highly heterogeneous, containing at times quite cryptic snippets of text written on small scraps of paper. Finally, the Archive contains some of the books in Kierkegaard’s private library, some of which contain his own marginal comments.

The material from Kierkegaard’s Nachlass that comes down to us today is thus far from complete. Moreover, that which does survive is rarely in its pristine condition since it often bears the marks of later editors. Nonetheless, one can be thankful for the material that we do have and for the fact that it is recognized today as a national treasure of Denmark to be carefully preserved and guarded for future generations. For Kierkegaard research, the physical state of the manuscripts is in some sense less important than the way in which those manuscripts have been presented to the reading public. We must therefore now explore in more detail the different editions of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in order to evaluate how well they reflect the actual manuscript material.

2.1 The Edition of Barfod and Gottsched

We begin with the first edition of the Nachlass, that is, Af Søren Kierkegaards Efterladte Papirer (abbreviated as EP), edited by Hans Peter Barfod and Hermann Gottsched.Footnote ⁷⁸ Barfod explains in his editor’s Preface that his goal was to present material that could ultimately form the basis for a kind of intellectual biography for Kierkegaard. Thus, he was careful to select material that he considered to be autobiographical and to put it into an order so that it would tell a more or less continuous story. He explains his plan thus:

Barfod conceived of this project as a complement to the published works, which, to his mind, did not adequately reveal Kierkegaard’s personal side.Footnote ⁸⁰ With this said, he was moved by a sense of discretion not to publish things which he regarded as too personal; these included primarily Kierkegaard’s statements about his family and his relation with Regine Olsen. Finally, he hoped to indicate the way in which Kierkegaard’s life, as reflected in the Nachlass, overlapped with his authorship. He thus indicates, although certainly not exhaustively, passages in the journals and notebooks that are later taken up and used in the published works.

Given this goal, it was logical for him to organize his edition in a chronological fashion. Each volume thus covers a determinate period of time in Kierkegaard’s life and literary development.Footnote ⁸¹ Barfod indicates that he sought natural breaks in Kierkegaard’s life for the beginning and end of individual volumes.Footnote ⁸² He further divides each volume into individual chapter units usually covering single years. Among the journal entries themselves, Barfod also included individual letters or unpublished articles, thus regarding the Nachlass in a sense as a single, homogeneous unit of material.

The biographical look of this edition is enhanced by Barfod’s “Introductory Notes” in his first volume. These “notes,” despite their nondescript title, are essentially biographical. In this section Barfod gives information about both Kierkegaard’s familyFootnote ⁸³ and his biography,Footnote ⁸⁴ with special emphasis on his youth and early student days (which is natural given the content of the first volume). Here he quotes extensively from letters and firsthand testimony from people who knew Kierkegaard. This is one of the first attempts at a Kierkegaard biography.

When judged by modern standards, Barfod, as a philologist, was particularly heavy-handed in a number of respects. While he mentions some of his editorial principles in his Preface, he fails to note all of the ways in which he altered the text of the original manuscripts. In other words, he gives the impression of being less intrusive than he actually is. The following can be regarded as a cursory list of his dubious editorial practices.

He edited the texts with his own hand on Kierkegaard’s manuscripts themselves, crossing out, writing arrows, cutting out passages, and pasting them together with others. He then sent Kierkegaard’s own manuscripts directly to the publisher without bothering to rewrite them in his own hand.Footnote ⁸⁵ The publishers then typeset the text using Kierkegaard’s original manuscripts as edited by Barfod. Some of this material was not returned after the publication of the work and, as a result, many of the manuscripts containing the material that appeared in Barfod’s original edition have been lost. In contrast to Barfod, his successor Gottsched was careful to preserve all the original manuscripts.

Barfod argues that since Kierkegaard’s orthography is inconsistent, as editor, he was obliged to change it in accordance with his own linguistic intuitions.Footnote ⁸⁶ Further, Barfod changes Kierkegaard’s punctuation throughout.Footnote ⁸⁷ Barfod failed to reproduce Kierkegaard’s underlinings and spacing of w o r d s, which was the way in which emphasis was indicated at the time. However, elsewhere he inserts his own emphasis into the text where there is none from Kierkegaard’s own hand.Footnote ⁸⁸

Kierkegaard tended to use a number of abbreviations in his journals. Instead of writing out “Menneske” (human being) every time, he would abbreviate it with “Msk.”; similarly, instead of always writing out “Christendom” (Christianity), he would write “Xstdom” or “Xstd.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Doubtless in order to make his edition more readable, Barfod eliminates Kierkegaard’s abbreviations and writes out the whole word,Footnote ⁹⁰ thus presenting a text that gives the impression of something more polished than was actually the case.

Barfod tries to convey to the reader that he is philologically careful in the places where he adds something to the text. He says that all cases of editorial supplements to the text have been indicated with square brackets.Footnote ⁹¹ However, a closer comparison of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts and Barfod’s edition reveals that this is not always the case. In fact, when Barfod judges that Kierkegaard’s sentence is either incomprehensible or grammatically inadequate, he goes ahead and adds individual words or punctuation marks without putting these additions in brackets in order to indicate that they are not actually in Kierkegaard’s manuscript. Conversely, Barfod has often deleted words or phrases in Kierkegaard’s texts, thus changing the wording in many passages. He does nothing to indicate these deletions in his edition.Footnote ⁹² This practice of crossing out material directly on the manuscripts is particularly pernicious since today it is not easy to see what Kierkegaard actually wrote underneath Barfod’s deletions, and this has been the cause of later misreadings.

Throughout his text Barfod added short notes to indicate the origin or context of an entry. All of these appear in square brackets. The result is that the reader is never able to read Kierkegaard’s own text for very long without being interrupted by the constant editorial commentary. Although these have been indicated by square brackets, they are clearly a foreign element in Kierkegaard’s texts. It is, in a sense, odd that Barfod, who with regard to orthography, grammar, and punctuation, was so interested in readability, seems indifferent to it with regard to this matter.

One can perhaps best summarize Barfod’s way of working by saying that instead of treating Kierkegaard’s text as an object for philological work, he in effect copyedits it in the way that editors of academic journals and publishing houses do today with works that are to appear under their imprimatur. The reason for this is doubtless Barfod’s own education and experience. Barfod was not a trained philologist but rather a journalist. His journalistic background presumably gave him the model for his treatment of texts. Copyediting texts was what he was used to doing as editor of the newspaper Aalborgposten. But philological work seems to have been something foreign to him.

When judged from a philological perspective by the standards of today, this edition can only be regarded as a disaster.Footnote ⁹³ To be sure, Gottsched’s contribution was an improvement over Barfod’s, but it was inevitable that the standard set by their edition would in time be surpassed.

2.2 The Papirer Edition

The next edition of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass was Søren Kierkegaards Papirer.Footnote ⁹⁴ The original editors of this work, Peter Andreas Heiberg and Victor Kuhr, explain that the goal of their edition is to be as complete as possible. They thus proposed to find and publish as many of Kierkegaard’s manuscripts as possible, including not just those in public libraries and archives but also those in private hands. This was to include Kierkegaard’s journals, notebooks, and loose papers, along with letters, biographical documents, and even “manuscripts from another hand, insofar as they refer to Kierkegaard,”Footnote ⁹⁵ by which they presumably mean contemporary secondhand accounts of Kierkegaard.Footnote ⁹⁶

Right from the beginning it was clear that this ambitious goal would have to allow for some exceptions. These included the notes that Kierkegaard took as a student at the University of Copenhagen and as a guest auditor in Berlin. Also among the exceptions are some of his longer excerpts from works that he was reading.Footnote ⁹⁷ Later as it turned out, another exception had to be made with Kierkegaard’s letters and biographical documents, which ultimately were not included in this edition but were published separately.Footnote ⁹⁸ Despite these exceptions, the Papirer edition is nonetheless impressive in its size and represents a vast improvement over the Barfod–Gottsched edition.

The editors of this edition regarded Kierkegaard’s Nachlass as being inherently chaotic and discontinuous. Therefore, they saw it as their task to bring some kind of order to it for the sake of making the material accessible and usable for the reader. Thus, the main editor Peter Andreas Heiberg, after a careful study of the vast material, developed a set of organizational principles.Footnote ⁹⁹ The main principle was twofold: thematic and chronological.

With regard to the thematic principle, the editors claim that the vast mass of material falls naturally into three categories, which they designate by the letters “A,” “B,” and “C.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ These were defined as follows: “A” was reserved for entries that could be understood as a part of a diary in the normal sense of the word. “B” included outlines and drafts of published and unpublished material, and “C” contained Kierkegaard’s reading notes connected with his studies along with his lecture notes. The editors further subdivided the category “C” into sections called “Theologica,” “Philosophica,” and “Aesthetica.” This categorization of entries belonging to Kierkegaard’s main areas of interest is, in their view, also merely a natural reflection of the material itself. Moreover, Kierkegaard himself made use of these headings for some of his own notebooks.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Further, he kept three envelopes of loose papers from the period from 1834 to 1836 which were labeled, “Theologica, older,” “Philosophica, older,” and “Aesthetica, older.”Footnote ¹⁰²

When using this edition, reference is made to volume number in Roman numerals (I–XI), plus the designation of the category or group with Latin letters (A–C) and finally the individual entry numbers. Thus, a complete entry would be, for example, I A 25 or X-5 B 61.Footnote ¹⁰³ These reference numbers were written by the editors on the actual manuscripts themselves in pencil.

The editors also used a chronological principle in their organization of the material. In the aforementioned thematic units, the editors organized the material according to date, a practice that was of course aided by the fact that many of the entries were dated by Kierkegaard himself. These dates were then printed in the margin of the text. However, when the date was unknown, the editors had to speculate about where individual entries belonged in the chronology. These entries without a date are accompanied by the marginal abbreviation “u.d.” (“uden dato” or “without date”) to indicate that the placement of the entry in the given chronological sequence is the decision of the editors and not the result of a dating given by Kierkegaard himself.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

While this edition had important merits above all in its completeness, it also had some serious problems.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ With regard to the thematic principle, the editors of this edition were heavy-handed in their rather arbitrary organization of the material into the three aforementioned categories. With these divisions they imposed a structure on Kierkegaard’s papers that was foreign to the material itself. As noted, Kierkegaard kept his journals and notebooks carefully organized and labeled. They represented more or less discrete units often corresponding to the different projects or topics that he happened to be working on. The editors of the Papirer, then using their own topical categories, were obliged, so to speak, to take the material out of these various bound journals, where they were arranged by Kierkegaard, and reorganize them according to entirely new criteria. As a result, different projects were rather arbitrarily mixed together, and all semblance of continuity was destroyed.

The chronological principle, which seems reasonable enough when considered in the abstract, becomes somewhat more dubious when one looks at the matter more closely. A pure chronology does not reflect the way in which Kierkegaard worked and developed his ideas. He often worked on different journals and notebooks simultaneously. This means that individual entries from different journals treating quite different themes could well be written on the same day, although they have absolutely nothing to do with one another thematically. Moreover, some entries in individual journals and notebooks are very complex since after writing the original entry, Kierkegaard often returned to it later and added another thought or reflection on the issue.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sometimes he would return to an entry to add a quotation or key words from a text he happened to be reading that referred to the topic treated in the entry. The nature of the material thus lends itself to a strict chronological organization only to a limited degree.

With regard to the chronological principle, the editors of the Papirer, as noted, inserted undated entries into the chronological scheme, which they created without sufficient evidence for their dating.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The editors of the Papirer are forthcoming about this in their Preface, where they say that their assignments of these dates should not be regarded as final.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, for many readers, the inclusion of the undated entries in the places where they appear cannot help but have an air of authority about it and thus has come to be accepted uncritically by many students and scholars.

Since many of the original manuscripts were lost during the publication of Barfod’s edition and were thus not at their disposal, the editors of the Papirer edition were obliged to use Barfod’s text for those entries for which there were no longer manuscripts. But this meant that they had two different textual bases: (1) the preserved manuscripts for the majority of the entries and (2) Barfod’s text for the entries where the manuscripts had been lost. This is of course highly significant from a philological perspective since, in the one case, one has Kierkegaard’s own manuscript as a point of departure, while, in the other, one has only an (apparently heavily edited) printed copy. However, in the Papirer edition the textual basis is not immediately clear in the text itself, and the reader must seek this information for every individual entry in the text-critical apparatus.

Further, the editors of this edition elected to put their text-critical apparatus not at the foot of the page but rather in an appendix at the end of each volume.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In addition to information about the textual basis, this apparatus includes an account of Kierkegaard’s own changes in the text, that is, when he later crossed something out or added something. But some of these changes are also indicated in Kierkegaard’s text itself. The fact that the apparatus appears at the end of each volume makes it difficult to use since the reader is obliged to constantly flip back and forth between the text and the apparatus. As noted, this is particularly cumbersome when one is interested in finding out from entry to entry what the textual basis is.

This edition has a very minimal commentary apparatus.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Brief commentaries are given at the foot of the page and referred to as “editors’ notes.” These commentaries have as their goal primarily to give complete bibliographical references to works that Kierkegaard quotes, paraphrases, or alludes to in the text. These are occasionally helpful when taken on their own, but they are so few in number that they are of little use when taken as a whole since the reader is left without an enormous amount of information that would be necessary for truly understanding individual entries. The textual references that the editors give to Kierkegaard’s readings seem rather arbitrary when one sees the enormous number of places where they fail to provide this information. The odd fact should also be noted that while the editors decided to consign Kierkegaard’s own changes and internal variants to the text-critical apparatus at the end of the volume, they decided to put their own notes or commentaries at the foot of the page of the text itself.

Probably the main problem with the text of this edition for the average reader with no particular interest in philology was the utter lack of continuity in the material as it was presented. As one critic contends, by means of their organizing the material according to the three categories A, B, and C, and the three subcategories “Theologica,” “Philosophica,” and “Aesthetica,” “the editors have succeeded in creating a perfect and absolute chaos.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Each of the thousands of journal entries stands on its own as an individual isolated unit, with no connection to the other entries. This meant that the study of this material was particularly tedious. One could not simply look up the entries that were relevant for one’s own interest since there was no way of finding them, given that they were often spread out through several volumes. The material was not organized like a normal book with an informative table of contents or a transparent structure so that one could quickly find the passages or sections relevant for one’s interests. Thus, the editors of this edition unwittingly made it difficult for students and scholars to approach this part of Kierkegaard’s authorship. This is particularly problematic since the goal of reorganizing the Nachlass into the categories “A,” “B,” and “C” was precisely to render the otherwise chaotic mass of material into comprehensible units. However, this organizational structure clearly did not fulfill its intended function of making the material more accessible.

2.3 Thulstrup’s Supplemented Reprint of the Papirer Edition

The original Papirer edition was hailed as a monument in Danish philology and Kierkegaard studies. In time it went out of print and was subsequently published again by Niels Thulstrup in a photomechanical reproduction from 1968 to 1970 under the auspices of the Society for Danish Language and Literature.Footnote ¹¹² Thulstrup used the opportunity to supplement it with two more volumes (XII–XIII). He thus continued to pursue the goal of the original editors to publish as much of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass as possible. Further, an extensive three-volume index (XIV–XVI, published from 1975 to 1978) was added with this reprint. Since this was a photomechanical reproduction of the old edition, there was no new philological work done on the texts of the old edition. However, the supplemental volumes (which did involve new philological work), together with the index, did make a very significant impact on Kierkegaard research.

All the entries (except for one)Footnote ¹¹³ that were published for the first time in Thulstrup’s supplement volumes come from the “C” group, that is, material related to Kierkegaard’s reading and studies. In the first three volumes of the Papirer edition, this material was generally omitted, and its presence was simply indicated with a number and a title as a kind of placeholder.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Only with the fourth volume did the editors of that edition begin to include the material from the “C” group more systematically. But they never went back to publish the extensive material that they had already left out in volumes I–III. This was unfortunate since that material was crucial for research on the development of the young Kierkegaard during his student years and immediately thereafter. This material thus constitutes the main body of Thulstrup’s supplement volumes.Footnote ¹¹⁵ They made available for the first time (1) a number of somewhat longer excerpts from Kierkegaard’s readings of, for example, Schleiermacher, Franz von Baader, and various works on the Faust legend, (2) his often detailed notes to Clausen’s lectures on dogmatics, Martensen’s lectures on speculative dogmatics, Marheineke’s lectures, Die Christliche Dogmengeschichte, Schelling’s lectures, Philosophie der Offenbarung, and Werder’s lectures, Logik und Metaphysik, (3) Kierkegaard’s translations of the New Testament, and (4) a number of materials on biblical exegesis. The latter two categories were clearly related to Kierkegaard’s studies for his degree in theology.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The publication of this material was significant since it made possible for the first time a careful examination of Kierkegaard’s sources and the early development of his thought. While Thulstrup is to be praised for his attempts to make more of this material available, his supplement volumes were flawed with regard to (1) their editorial selection, (2) their philological work, and (3) their apparatus of commentaries.

1. (1) With regard to selection, Thulstrup, in a rather misleading fashion, includes a text that is in fact not Kierkegaard’s. He prints as Pap. II C 25 a detailed set of lecture notes to Martensen’s lectures, The History of Philosophy from Kant to Hegel, which were given at the University of Copenhagen in Winter Semester 1838–1839.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While these notes might be interesting on their own, there is a significant disparity between this text and the others that Thulstrup publishes: This one is not written in Kierkegaard’s hand. (These notes seem merely to have been found among Kierkegaard’s things.) Nothing speaks against publishing these notes separately, but given that they are not notes that Kierkegaard himself took, it is not clear why they should be included in an edition of his Nachlass.

   One can also ask why Thulstrup did not include Kierkegaard’s letters and biographical documents as one of the supplement volumes since this was clearly the intention of the original editors.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The reason for this seems to be that he had already published them with the publishing house Munksgaard by the time he had the idea for a supplemented second edition of the Papirer.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Since the Papirer edition appeared with Gyldendal publishing house, it would have led to a copyright conflict, had he attempted to republish the letters and documents in the reprinted edition of the Papirer.

2. (2) It can also be said that the philological work in these supplement volumes is inadequate. There are a significant number of misreadings of the manuscripts. For example, in his lectures, Die Christliche Dogmengeschichte,Footnote ¹²⁰ Marheineke discusses the issue of suffering and even dying for one’s faith and argues that supernaturalism denies the voluntary death or as he says “mors voluntaria.” Kierkegaard then writes this in his notes to Marheineke’s lectures, which span Notebooks 9–10.Footnote ¹²¹ Thulstrup misreads this and writes “mors voluptaria,” that is, a pleasurable death.Footnote ¹²² The context of this passage, which explicitly concerns free action and voluntary suffering for the truth, should have tipped him off that there was something amiss with this reading if indeed the oxymoron of a pleasurable death did not.

3. (3) Finally, the commentaries that Thulstrup writes to the texts in the supplement volumes are quite arbitrary and full of errors. For example, in the same lectures just mentioned, Marheineke, somewhat oddly, attributes a Latin saying to Kant as follows: “Kant said: mutato nomine de te narratur fabula [change the name, and the story is about you].”Footnote ¹²³ To this passage, Thulstrup, with great authority, writes the following commentary: “The quotation is from Horace, Sat.[ires] I.1.69–70 and is not used by Kant.”Footnote ¹²⁴ In other words, Thulstrup takes the reference to Kant to be an error either on the part of Marheineke, who said it, or on the part of Kierkegaard, who heard incorrectly and wrote down “Kant” in error. However, as it turns out, this quotation from Horace is in fact found in Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.Footnote ¹²⁵ Thulstrup would have done better simply to say that he had not been able to locate the passage in Kant, instead of categorically denying that it was there at all.

Another example of a similar kind can be found earlier in the same lectures where Marheineke makes a reference, which Kierkegaard writes as follows: “Freedom in the creation of the world has been made valid by Strauss in his Rechtsphilosophie ….”Footnote ¹²⁶ To this Thulstrup writes, “Rechtsphilosophie,” that is, a book on political philosophy or philosophy of law is “presumably an error for ‘Religionsphilosophie,’ i.e., S.[trauss]’ Die christliche Glaubenslehre (§ 47).”Footnote ¹²⁷ Thulstrup cannot reconcile himself with the idea that Marheineke, in his account of the creation of the world in these theological lectures, could give a reference to a work on political philosophy. He thus assumes that either Marheineke misspoke or Kierkegaard misunderstood him since what was meant was a reference to the work of the German theologian David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) entitled, Die christliche Glaubenslehre.Footnote ¹²⁸ Thulstrup seems to decide the issue definitively by giving a specific textual reference to § 47 in Strauss’ book. However, when one looks up this passage, one is disappointed to find that it does not fit the context of what Marheineke is saying in his lectures. However, when one looks up the passage in Marheineke’s posthumously published lectures, System der christlichen Dogmatik, which corresponds section for section and virtually line for line with Kierkegaard’s lecture notes,Footnote ¹²⁹ one discovers that the reference is not to Strauss at all but to a book by the philosopher of law Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–1861), entitled Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht.Footnote ¹³⁰ Here Marheineke presumably said “Stahl,” a name not entirely familiar to Kierkegaard, who instead heard and wrote down “Strauss.” Thus, there was in fact an error but not the one that Thulstrup thought that he had found.

It might be argued that anyone can make a mistake of this kind in the inexact science of commentary writing; however, the real problem in Thulstrup’s commentaries to this text is not that he fails to identify certain individual references properly but that he apparently did not even bother to look to see if Marheineke’s lectures had ever been published. If he had, he would have discovered that, in fact, a whole series of his theological lectures had appeared posthumously in the 1840s, edited by Stephan Matthies (1807–1856) and Wilhelm Vatke (1806–1882),Footnote ¹³¹ and among these he would have discovered the very lecture that Kierkegaard attended. As was mentioned, these lectures, published under the title System der christlichen Dogmatik, correspond closely with Kierkegaard’s lecture notes and are thus an invaluable guide for the commentator.

While the Papirer edition had become more complete in Thulstrup’s reprint, it still remained notoriously difficult to use. As was noted earlier, it was not easy to find one’s way around the text since there was such a large mass of material with no apparent structure or organization. This changed when Thulstrup’s edition was supplemented with a three-volume index (XIV–XVI) by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. This extensive index includes general concepts, names of people, places, as well as titles of books and articles.Footnote ¹³² Textual references are given with brief excerpts so that the reader can see immediately if the passages are relevant for his or her purposes, without having to look up every single reference and read every single passage. An extensive Bible index is also included, which contains all the biblical passages that Kierkegaard refers to or comments upon.Footnote ¹³³

This index marked a major step in the accessibility of the journals and papers since it for the first time opened the door to this material, then more than twenty-five years after the completion of the original edition. This tool made it possible for anyone to make strategic use of the Papirer in connection with research on specific themes. This index was used assiduously by students and researchers as well as translators interested in selecting material for a foreign language edition. This index remains to this day an important tool for every serious Kierkegaard scholar.

While this index greatly facilitated work on the Papirer edition, this still meant that scholars tended to use the Nachlass in an ad hoc or episodic fashion and did not treat the material as an object of research on its own terms. The index made it easy to find passages relevant for individual themes or topics, but it could not on its own encourage a more systematic study of the journals and notebooks as such. Thus, while the index was probably the best thing that could have happened to this edition, it could not compensate for the editorial and philological shortcomings inherent in it.

2.4 Rohde’s Editions

There are other Danish editions of the Nachlass that are smaller and less significant than the ones mentioned above. The editors of these editions did no new philological work on the texts and used as their textual basis the Papirer edition and not the original manuscripts. Moreover, these other editions have not had the same degree of influence on Kierkegaard studies due to the fact that their selection was generally rather limited.

In 1953 Peter P. Rohde (1902–1978) published a one-volume selection of the Nachlass, entitled Søren Kierkegaards Dagbøger, that is, Søren Kierkegaard’s Diaries.Footnote ¹³⁴ The selection proved to be very popular and was reprinted three times with the third edition appearing in 1973. One can see this edition as trying to respond to the discontinuities of the Papirer edition and to present a more continuous selection of texts that is easier for the reader to use. As is indicated by the title, the editor rather uncritically selects various passages from Kierkegaard’s journals that he takes to be autobiographical. These are then put together and ordered into eight chapters in such a way that they tell a more or less continuous story. But this does not mean that the entries appear in a strictly chronological order. Instead, often entries written at a much later period are inserted into a place where they illuminate earlier events.Footnote ¹³⁵ This edition also contains a minimal commentary apparatus at the end of the work.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect about this edition is the way that it misleads the reader into thinking that what it is presenting is actually Kierkegaard’s diary. The reader is not adequately informed or forewarned that what he or she is reading is in fact an artificial construct of the editor. An attempt is made to justify this heavy-handed editing in the Preface, where Rohde writes, the journals

Rohde thus entirely gives up on any notion of continuity in the journals at all. He then takes this as giving him editorial license to do what he wishes with the journals and to put them together in any way that he likes.

The real absurdity of Rohde’s position lies in the claim that there is no “wholeness” in Kierkegaard’s journals and papers. It might well be that there is no “wholeness” in the Papirer edition, but this is because the editors have reorganized the material according to their own whim. But there is a “wholeness” in Kierkegaard’s own organization and ordering of the journals and notebooks into discrete units under the headings AA, BB, CC, and so on; and NB, NB2, NB3, and so on. Rohde thus seems to blame Kierkegaard for the fact that later editors have reorganized his journals in a confusing fashion. Moreover, he justifies his own editorial principle based on the shortcomings of the earlier editions.

Rohde uncritically presupposes that the journals and notebooks are in fact autobiographical. But this presupposition completely overlooks a number of interpretive difficulties associated with the richness and diversity of the material. There is a tremendous amount of material that has nothing per se to do with Kierkegaard’s biography. Moreover, as was noted earlier, even most of the passages that lend themselves to an autobiographical interpretation are highly poetical, suggesting at least some fictional element.Footnote ¹³⁷

Given the success of this initial edition, Rohde then made an expanded selection that he published from 1961 to 1964 in four volumes under the same title, Søren Kierkegaards Dagbøger.Footnote ¹³⁸ This edition was also organized chronologically with volume 1 covering the period from 1834 to 1843, volume 2 that from 1844 to 1848, volume 3 that from 1848 to 1850, and volume 4 that from 1851 to 1855. As with the one-volume edition, this selection is based on the Papirer edition, and most of the featured texts come from the “A” category. There is a minimal commentary apparatus at the end of each volume similar to that of the one-volume edition, as well as a concordance of the featured entries with the Papirer edition. Finally, at the end of the fourth volume there is an index of persons and concepts.

In his foreword, Rohde once again shoots over the mark with respect to his ambition with his edition. He writes, the edition “tries to give such a representative and full selection of excerpts that one could with justice say that here one has the entire Kierkegaard just as one finds him in his private entries.”Footnote ¹³⁹ He says further that the goal of his edition is “to establish an edition which can satisfy all interested Kierkegaard readers …. The selection is not meant for the handful of people doing scholarly work on Kierkegaard.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Thus, while he tries to be careful by indicating that his is not a scholarly edition intended for academic use, he nonetheless naively ventures to claim that his prudent selection has captured “the entire Kierkegaard” in the private sphere. In principle, the new edition is very similar to the first one, with the only real difference being that it is considerably longer. In this regard, this edition falls victim to all the shortcomings of the previous one mentioned earlier.

2.5 The Edition Dagbøger i udvalg 1834–1846

There is a more recent edition from 1992, which, like Rohde’s editions, misleadingly purports to present Kierkegaard’s diaries. This selection, under the title Dagbøger i udvalg 1834–1846, that is, Selected Diaries 1834–1846, was edited by Jørgen Dehs together with Niels Jørgen Cappelørn.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This work appeared as a part of the series of Danish Classics produced by the Society for Danish Language and Literature, and this generally determined its goals. As the title indicates, the primary objective of the series is to publish and keep in print important works of Danish literature and culture. It aims to present texts that are accessible to students and generally educated readers, and thus it would be a mistake to look to this series for a new scholarly edition aimed at researchers. Prior to the publication of this work, editions of Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death (along with some edifying discourses) and The Concept of Anxiety had appeared in the series,Footnote ¹⁴² and the idea of producing a volume with Kierkegaard’s journals presumably seemed a natural supplement to the works that had already been produced.

Dagbøger i udvalg concentrates on Kierkegaard’s development during the period that corresponds to the first half of the authorship, that is, up through 1846 and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. What is reproduced is thus material from the early journals, and there is nothing from the NB journals. This edition presents texts from the “A” section of the first seven volumes of the Papirer edition, which is used as its textual basis.Footnote ¹⁴³ As with the Papirer, the individual entries are presented in a chronological manner in keeping with the idea of a diary. So there is no claim made for new philological work with this edition. Dagbøger i udvalg does, however, supply more than fifty pages of commentaries to the texts presented, many of which have been borrowed from the Papirer. Given that this edition aims to be a popular introduction to Kierkegaard, it has limited academic pretensions, especially with regard to its commentary apparatus.

Given the diversity and ambiguity of the Nachlass, the objection can be raised to this edition and those of Rohde that by presenting the material as straightforwardly autobiographical and designating it “diaries,” they end up not presenting Kierkegaard himself or his life but rather some odd mixture containing, in part, fictional elements, some of which may well have been quite different from Kierkegaard’s own life and person. The designation “diaries” oversimplifies the diverse nature of the material from the Nachlass and risks giving the reader a misleading picture of it. In fairness, it should be noted that in the afterword to Dagbøger i udvalg Jørgen Dehs makes it clear that he too is skeptical about the use of these materials as autobiographical and draws attention to Kierkegaard’s complex communication strategies.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

2.6 The Nachlass in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter

Just a year before the Kierkegaard jubilee year 2013, the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen completed a new critical edition of all of Kierkegaard’s works, under the title Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This new edition comprises fifty-five volumes, which include Kierkegaard’s texts and extensive volumes of commentaries. SKS is the first unified edition to contain both the Nachlass and the published works. In short, this project is an attempt at a complete edition of everything by Kierkegaard’s hand: (1) the works which he himself published, (2) the more or less finished texts found among his journals and papers but which he never published in his lifetime, (3) the various journals, notebooks, and loose papers, and (4) the letters, dedications, and biographical documents. This edition appears in both a book and an electronic version. Here I will speak only of this edition’s treatment of the Nachlass and not the published works. This edition organizes the material from the Nachlass according to three main principles: an archival one, a chronological one, and a systematic one.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

1. (1) The main principle is the archival one, according to which each individual or archival unit of text is respected and published as a whole.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The goal is to preserve Kierkegaard’s own organization of the material. This means that the integrity of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks is maintained, with each of them being treated as an independent text in its own right and being reproduced in its original form. SKS thus tries to present the individual entries in precisely the sequence in which they originally appeared in the journals and notebooks. In other words, it attempts to recreate the individual texts as Henrik Lund found them in Kierkegaard’s apartment at the end of November 1855.

   This might seem at first glance to be an impossible task given that so much of the material has been lost and what survives has been hopelessly mixed up in the course of the years due primarily to the editorial work of later editors. Despite these formidable obstacles, the material in its original form can be reconstructed based on the abovementioned catalogues of the material made by Henrik Lund and, most importantly, by Barfod in 1865. On the basis of this information, it is possible, so to speak, to put back into the original journals, notebooks, and folders the material that earlier editors have removed and reorganized. With regard to the lost manuscripts, at least a version of the text of most of these has been preserved in the Barfod–Gottsched edition. This text is then used for the places in Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks where there is no other extant textual basis. SKS is thus the first edition ever that reproduces the journals AA–KK, the notebooks 1–15, and the NB journals in the form in which Kierkegaard wrote them and kept them.

   This edition is, of course, limited in its endeavor by the fact that some manuscripts have been irretrievably lost, and in some cases not even the text is preserved in Barfod’s edition. For these cases SKS can do nothing more than simply print the first words or sentence of the lost entry as they appear in Barfod’s catalog of the manuscripts.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

2. (2) The second principle is a chronological one.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ When one speaks of “chronology” here, this refers not to individual journal entries (since often the chronological sequence is broken within individual journals) but to the time when the journals and notebooks generally were written. Thus, the journals AA–KK appear in their sequential order, as do the notebooks 1–15 and the NB journals. The chronological principle applies also and indeed primarily to the loose papers where the individual entries do not appear in any journal or notebook. Thus, in the absence of any genuine archival unit, these loose papers are ordered chronologically, where it is possible to date them.

3. (3) The third principle is the systematic one.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ This means that an attempt is made to preserve Kierkegaard’s own system of organization. Thus, the three “series” are published as individual units – the journals AA–KK (SKS, vols. 17–18), the notebooks 1–15 (SKS, vol. 19), and the NB journals (SKS, vols. 20–26) – as are the loose papers (SKS, vol. 27) and letters (SKS, vol. 28).

A significant improvement can be found in the formatting and layout of the journals and notebooks in SKS.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The edition is formatted in two columns so as to mirror more closely Kierkegaard’s own text. The editors are thus spared the problems of having to decide exactly where any given insert or addition is intended to go and can leave it to the reader to interpret this in the individual contexts. The reader can thus see on the page a spatial relation between the entries that accurately mirrors that in Kierkegaard’s own manuscripts, but which was totally destroyed in the previous editions, where the material was simply presented as a single continuous text.

A further improvement in this new edition with regard to formatting concerns the use of justified and unjustified margins. In order to reflect the character of the journals and notebooks as work in progress, the texts are, as a rule, presented without a justified right margin. This holds for the presentation of the texts where the manuscripts are preserved and therefore used as the textual basis. However, when the manuscripts are no longer extant and the textual basis is Barfod’s edition, this is signaled in the text itself by a justified right margin, indicating that the textual basis is in fact a published text. Moreover, diacritical marks in the form of small arrowheads indicate where the text taken from Barfod’s edition begins and ends. Further, the actual textual reference to the place in that edition where the given text is found is also provided in the text-critical apparatus at the foot of the page. By means of this simple formatting feature, this new edition is able to distinguish clearly between the two different textual bases that it uses in a way that the Papirer edition did not.

Each individual entry in SKS is accompanied by a number. Reference is made to the journal or notebook plus the entry number, that is, AA:25 (= Journal AA, entry 25), Not8:5 (= Notebook 8, entry 5), NB5:17 (= Journal NB5, entry 17). Further, there are running line numbers (as well as the customary page numbers) to facilitate more specific references, for example, to individual words. In addition to these features added by the editors, Kierkegaard’s own original pagination in the journals and notebooks is, when preserved, given in the margin with a vertical line in the text to indicate a page break. At the top of the page there appear the name of the journal, the running entry numbers, and the year, all of which help to quickly orient the reader.

A significant improvement over the Papirer edition is found in the text-critical apparatus in SKS.Footnote ¹⁵² Instead of distracting the reader by putting Kierkegaard’s own changes in the text itself with different typographical variations or making it inconvenient to use by putting them at the end of the volume, SKS puts these textual variants at the foot of the page. Readers who are interested in studying questions about the genesis of the text need simply look down at the apparatus and see what changes Kierkegaard made and what the earlier variants were. These notes also include the editors’ emendations, that is, their corrections of corrupt text.Footnote ¹⁵³ Although these are few in number, they can be valuable.

For each of the individual journals and notebooks there is (in the corresponding commentary volume) a short “Critical Account of the Text” (Tekstredegørelse). Here an account is given of the state of the actual manuscripts for the given text and thus the textual sources employed in the edition. One can read how much of any given manuscript has been preserved, what it looks like, and what condition it is in. Further, an attempt is made to date the individual entries as precisely as possible and further to explain the genesis of their composition. Finally, a brief overview of the content of the entries is given.

As mentioned, SKS also appears in an electronic version.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This electronic edition, which was the work of Karsten Kynde, is freely available on-line, and this open access format makes Kierkegaard’s texts available to readers all around the world. The electronic edition allows users to make the usual word searches for key concepts or themes or to identify quotations. But it also has a number of other useful features that are a great help to scholars. With a simple click, one can see the pagination of the original first edition of the text, the book edition of SKS, and the third edition of Kierkegaard’s collected writings.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ One can also read the primary text side-by-side with the commentaries or click back and forth between them. The electronic edition further contains a useful set of resource files, including an invaluable concordance that allows one using SKS to locate quickly specific pages or journal entries as they appear in the old Papirer edition or, vice versa, to find the corresponding passage in SKS when one only has a reference to the Papirer edition.

The original plan was that the material included in the Papirer edition under the category “B,” that is, Kierkegaard’s various drafts to his works, would appear in the electronic version.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Unfortunately, due to financial constraints this idea had to be dropped. It is possible, however, to read the critical accounts of the text (in both the book and electronic editions), which contain a section describing the genesis of the text and thus the different drafts. It can be said in this regard that the old Papirer edition was ultimately more complete with respect to its “B” section, where such material was printed, although that edition too is ultimately incomplete and selective in the material from this category that it chose to publish.

SKS prints a selection of the Nachlass in the third rubric called unpublished works (distinguished by the green label at the top of the spine), published in volumes 15 and 16. The argument here was that these works, such as Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est and The Book on Adler, were more or less finished works that Kierkegaard never published. They thus differ from both the published works and the journals and notebooks, and are therefore given their own category. But by creating this special third rubric and selecting which texts belong to it, SKS, it might be argued, makes itself guilty of the charge of arbitrariness. In volume 15 it publishes, for example, the brief “One Moment, Mr. Andersen!” presumably because Hans Christian Andersen is a well-known figure today and this work will be of interest to many readers. However, SKS, by contrast, does not publish a vast amount of draft material of around 60 (!) articles that were written in connection with the attack on the Church but never used.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In the Papirer edition this covers some 300 pages, but only a small fraction of this material is printed as loose papers in SKS volume 27. Here one might argue that this should have been included since it also seems to constitute more or less finished works that remained unpublished. It does not take too much imagination to see that arguments like this can go back and forth for a long time with a number of examples from the Nachlass. Suffice it to say that there is no ideal solution here with such a large mass of material.

As was noted, Barfod wrote directly on Kierkegaard’s manuscripts. At times, he crossed out individual words or even whole sentences or passages. This creates two problems: first and most obviously, it often renders the text simply unreadable (as was the intention when Barfod crossed out passages that he believed were too personal for publication), and second since Barfod’s ink was quite similar to Kierkegaard’s own, it is not always clear which of these changes come from Kierkegaard’s hand and which are the result of later editorial intervention. The editors of SKS were able to resolve a few of these problems by means of a newly developed electron microscope. With this tool the different kinds of ink can be magnified and analyzed so that in some cases it is possible to distinguish them. Further, individual letters or punctuation marks can be enlarged to the point that the handwriting itself can be distinguished. It is thus possible, at least in some cases, to remove Barfod’s additions and thereby restore the original text by Kierkegaard.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

The results of the use of the electron microscope have often been quite surprising. For example, the capital letter “R” (for Regine Olsen), which appears above an entry in Notebook 7, which was always assumed to be from Kierkegaard,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ in fact proves to be from Barfod.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Another example is found in the subtitle of Notebook 8, “Digteriske Forsøg” (“Poetic Experiments”), which was crossed out by Barfod and read erroneously by the editors of the Papirer as “Damskibs-Kahyt” (a cabin on a steamship).Footnote ¹⁶¹ This misreading was presumably caused by the influence of the next entry, which speaks of “en Kahyt rystet af et Dampskibs Dobbeltbevægelser” (a cabin rocked by the pitching and rolling of a steamship).Footnote ¹⁶²

An important feature of this new edition is the commentary volumes. These are provided both for the published works and for the individual texts of the Nachlass. The commentaries for the journals and notebooks follow, generally speaking, the same principles as the commentaries for the published works.Footnote ¹⁶³ In order not to disturb the reader’s own original experience with Kierkegaard’s text, no markers appear in the text volumes to indicate the presence of commentaries. In the commentary volumes, reference to the passages commented upon is made to page and line number. The commentaries are punktkommentarer, usually translated as “explanatory notes,” that is, they attempt to provide information to clearly delimited words, sentences or passages in the text, without entering into a general discussion of the work. Further, each of the journals and notebooks is treated, for the purposes of the commentary apparatus, as an independent unit, and thus there are rarely cross-references between two different journals, unless they are made explicitly by Kierkegaard himself.

The general goal of these commentaries is to provide readers with the necessary information that they need in order to understand the text, without any further interpretation added. The commentary volumes attempt to recreate the situation of a contemporary reader of Kierkegaard and to make the texts accessible – with all the allusions, references, wordplays, and so on – to the reader today in the same way they were accessible to Kierkegaard’s contemporaries.

Great care is thus taken to avoid anachronisms. In other words, since the perspective taken is one of a contemporary who would have no knowledge of Kierkegaard’s future works or of future writings on his thought, reference is not made to works published later, either Kierkegaard’s own works or modern secondary literature. The goal is to supply the modern reader with factual information that is needed to understand the text fully, but then to leave the actual task of interpretation to the readers themselves as much as possible. This is of course an ideal desideratum, and the separation between factual information and interpretation is itself a matter of interpretation. These commentaries for SKS, taken as a whole, are the most extensive ever to appear in any Kierkegaard edition.

There can be no doubt that the presentation of the Nachlass in SKS will set the standard for future research for many years to come. However, SKS cannot be said to render the old Papirer edition obsolete due primarily to the fact that the latter published such a large amount of material in the “B” section. It is to be hoped that SKS will become better known internationally by means of translations and will thus come to change the shape of Kierkegaard research.

3.1 Research Monographs or Articles on the Nachlass

While there have to date been no works by anglophone scholars on the Nachlass as such, there do exist some English translations of works by Danish scholars which treat this material in its own right. These works have exercised a significant influence on Kierkegaard research in the English-speaking world.

One such work is Henning Fenger’s Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins. Studies in the Kierkegaardian Papers and Letters from 1980.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ This is a translation of Fenger’s Kierkegaard-Myter og Kierkegaard-Kilder, with the omission of the long final chapter.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Fenger’s work is somewhat technical and presupposes a fair degree of background knowledge of Kierkegaard. He comments on Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in a way that assumes that the reader is already familiar with it. Moreover, this work goes into several philological issues in order to criticize the editors of the Papirer edition as well as Thulstrup’s reprint. Despite its short length and readability, this work is somewhat difficult to get a handle on. Fenger’s analyses, although interesting, are somewhat rambling, and it is not always easy to discern the main issue. In his Preface, Fenger does not state in any very clear terms what the book is actually about; indeed, he does not even mention the Nachlass. It is only at the end of the first chapter that one learns that his goal is to explore “the extent to which the papers of the young Kierkegaard are fiction.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ This can be regarded as the theme which runs through the entire work. Fenger’s thesis is that many of the entries in the journals and notebooks are in fact fictional sketches and thus should not be taken as historically or biographically factual. He uses this intuition to reexamine critically a number of hobby-horses and standard views in Kierkegaard research.

The actual discussion of the Nachlass itself begins in Chapter 2, “Kierkegaard’s Papers and Library.” Here Fenger critically discusses the two main Danish editions of the posthumous material available at the time. He is quite critical of the Papirer for the way in which the editors have rendered their edition difficult to use due to their reorganization of the material. Somewhat surprisingly, he defends the Barfod–Gottsched edition, arguing that their editorial principles were less heavy-handed and served to create a more coherent and readable text.

Fenger’s long Chapter 4 is probably the best in the book and seems to represent his main argument with regard to the Nachlass. Here he analyzes the famous Gilleleje entries in the Journal AA, where Kierkegaard tells of his summer in North Zealand and of his various excursions. Fenger’s argument is that these entries, some of which appear explicitly in the form of letters, are in fact a sketch for an epistolary novel. He argues that Kierkegaard had several contemporary models for this kind of work in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Sibbern’s Posthumous Letters of Gabrielis,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ and various works by the Danish poet and novelist Steen Steensen Blicher (1782–1848). He claims further that these sketches are echoed in the “Diapsalmata” in Either/Or and that these attempts in the genre of a novel in letters can be seen as the forerunner of “Guilty?/Not Guilty?” from Stages on Life’s Way. This claim is interesting since if Fenger is correct, then this interpretation would seem to imply that most all the Gilleleje entries have a fictional element and thus cannot be read, as they almost invariably have been, as autobiographical. Fenger is further critical of the editors of the Papirer edition for what he regards as the dubious dates that they assign to some of the entries.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Fenger in every detail is not important. The value of his provocative argument is that it enjoins the researcher and the philologist to caution when working with this material. It can no longer be taken at face value as straightforwardly autobiographical.

The short Chapter 6 is dedicated to the story of Kierkegaard’s much-discussed relation to Regine Olsen. Fenger draws on some of the famous journal entries from AA and EE, which seem to concern this relation, and tries to raise the suspicion that they too might be fictional. Unfortunately, this chapter is not very developed, and Fenger’s claims remain merely interesting suggestions for future research.

Chapter 7 concerns Kierkegaard’s trip to Jutland in the summer of 1840, which he recorded in Notebooks 5 and 6. Here Fenger argues precisely as he did in Chapter 4 regarding the trip to Gilleleje and North Zealand: He inveighs against the editors of the Papirer (who print the material in Pap. III A 14–84) for taking these entries as historically and biographically veridical. By contrast, he claims Kierkegaard made this journey in part to collect material and ideas for his epistolary novel, again with the inspiration of Blicher.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Fenger thus challenges the datings of the entries, often in a rather technical way, in order to show that they can only be fictive.

This is a highly readable and interesting book in many ways, although it is too poorly organized and presupposes far too much prior knowledge to be a useful introduction for beginners. Its merits are primarily its lack of deference for much of the Danish secondary literature and the refreshing way in which it calls into question several standard views in Kierkegaard research. Moreover, Fenger, in his willingness to criticize Kierkegaard’s positions and person, represents a useful opposition to the many Kierkegaard apologists of the era, not least of all Niels Thulstrup. With regard to the book’s main thesis about Kierkegaard’s purported novel in letters, it must be said that Fenger does not adequately prove his case.Footnote ¹⁷¹ He does, however, explore in an interesting manner what the potentially far-reaching consequences of such a view might be if it were taken to be proven. In a sense the bulk of the book is about drawing out these consequences, whereas Fenger’s case would have been better served if he had concentrated his energies on proving the original claim.

Another important work is an essay in English by the aforementioned Danish editor Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, entitled “The Retrospective Understanding of Søren Kierkegaard’s Total Production.”Footnote ¹⁷² Although an article and not an extended monograph, this work is worthy of note for several reasons, not least of which is its pioneering nature. This essay was originally delivered as a paper at the conference “Kierkegaard: Resources and Results” that was held at McGill University in Canada in 1980. It was subsequently published in the volume of proceedings that appeared in 1982.

This article argues for two theses. The first of these is as follows: “The Journals are not independent of the entire production but constitute a part of it.”Footnote ¹⁷³ This thesis is aimed polemically against the view that the journals are to be conceived as Kierkegaard’s diary and thus as something separate and different with respect to genre from the published writings. The second thesis reads thus: “A complete understanding of the entire production can be obtained only through a retrospective process of interpretation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ This is more of an interpretative thesis than a polemical one. Although this is not made explicit in the article itself, this second thesis could be conceived as aimed against those who would argue that the individual works of the individual pseudonyms can and indeed must be understood on their own without reference to Kierkegaard’s other works or the Nachlass. It should be noted that by “journals” here the author means the Nachlass generally and not what is today understood as the journals strictly speaking, that is, the journals in contrast to the notebooks or the other parts of the Nachlass.

This article can be divided into three sections. The first section is dedicated to showing that, according to Kierkegaard, his life and work could only be understood backward or retrospectively.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This is demonstrated beyond any doubt by means of several journal entries where Kierkegaard says so rather straightforwardly in a number of different ways.

The second section, which is the most relevant for our purposes, is concerned with the Nachlass specifically.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The main argument in this section is, as just noted, that the Nachlass is not to be conceived as a kind of private diary in contrast to the published works. While it is true that there are some journal entries that seem to contain some biographical information or to be based on some factual event in Kierkegaard’s daily life, the accounts of these as they appear in the journals always have some fictional or poetic element about them. Evidence for this is also provided by journal entries in which Kierkegaard reflects on his writing praxis and says that he cannot help but embroider on the facts when he begins to write.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ The conclusion is that it is impossible to distinguish the kind of fictional or poetic writing that appears in the published works from that which appears in the journals. It would be naive to think that Kierkegaard attempted to give a straightforwardly veridical and factual account of the events of his life in his journals, while so much of the rest of his writing was dedicated to creating literary or fictional works. With this claim, the conclusion is drawn that the Nachlass should not be considered something separate and different but rather forms a substantive and integrated part of what Kierkegaard conceived as his total literary production. This argument is generally convincing and well documented.

The third section examines Kierkegaard’s posthumous work, The Point of View for My Work as an Author.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ This section tries to show once again Kierkegaard’s own understanding of the authorship retrospectively. This can hardly be doubted since The Point of View is itself a retrospective consideration of the authorship as a whole. The author shows how Kierkegaard intended there to be two parallel strands, one of pseudonymous works and one of edifying works up until the Postscript, which was the turning point in the authorship.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Works from each of these two strands correspond to one another and treat similar issues according to their own genre and style. The texts from the pseudonymous authorship can thus be said to comment upon and be in dialogue with those of the edifying authorship and vice versa.

This is an outstanding article not only with regard to what it says about the Nachlass. The second section is noteworthy for its main argument and also for the clear characterization that it gives of the nature of the Nachlass. It provides a useful overview of the different kinds of material that it contains and how Kierkegaard used his journals and notebooks in relation to the published works. In one telling entry, Kierkegaard characterizes journal writing as a kind of “backstage practice” for the published works.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Cappelørn’s article can in some ways be seen as pioneering with regard to the way in which it takes the Nachlass seriously and tries to use it not to understand some specialized detail in one of Kierkegaard’s published works but rather Kierkegaard’s project as an author in general.

The best introduction to the actual history of the Nachlass is a highly readable, short book entitled Skriftbilleder from 1996, which is the joint effort of three Danish scholars who were directly involved in the creation of SKS, namely, Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, and Johnny Kondrup.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The English translation by Bruce Kirmmse from 2003 bears the title Written Images.Footnote ¹⁸² This work sets for itself three main goals. First, in Chapters 1 and 2, it simply tells the story of the Nachlass from the time when it was found by Henrik Lund to its present condition today at the Royal Library. It does an excellent job of describing the birth pains of the publication of the Barfod–Gottsched edition and gives the reader an insight into the problematic reputation that Kierkegaard had in Denmark in the decades following his death.

Second, in Chapter 3, this book attempts to give the reader a sense of the nature and size of the material that is included in Kierkegaard’s Nachlass: the drafts of the published and unpublished works, the journals and notebooks, letters, biographical documents, loose papers, and the books from Kierkegaard’s own private library. The fourth and final chapter departs somewhat from the topic of the Nachlass and provides a sketch of Kierkegaard’s personal habits as a writer in general. This account could apply equally well to his published works and his Nachlass and thus has nothing intrinsically to do with the latter.

This work is not a piece of new research but rather aims merely to introduce the Nachlass in an accessible manner. It succeeds eminently in this goal. It is readable and informative for both the Kierkegaard specialist and the layman. One of the best features of this work is the fact that, in addition to the narrative descriptions of the material, it contains several excellent color photos of the actual manuscripts, journals, and notebooks and gives the reader a good sense of the kind of materials that are at issue. If one is interested in embarking on a study of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass with little or no prior knowledge, this book is without doubt the best place to start.

3.2 Research Monographs Which Treat or Use the Nachlass

While the aforementioned works are the only ones in English that are dedicated solely or primarily to the Nachlass, there is another group of works, which uses the Nachlass for special purposes. In other words, these works draw from the Nachlass in the service of an analysis of some specific issue in Kierkegaard’s authorship, which is the real object of investigation. Since nowadays it has become fairly common for works in the anglophone secondary literature to quote or refer to individual passages from the Nachlass, it would be impossible to treat all of them in this context; instead, I will confine myself to works which make extensive use of this material.

In this context, mention must be made of Walter Lowrie’s classic biography of Kierkegaard, which first appeared in 1938.Footnote ¹⁸³ As a brief glance at the apparatus of endnotes will show, this work relies heavily on the Nachlass as a source of biographical information about Kierkegaard. It is impressive that Lowrie realized the value of this body of material so early, at a time before the Papirer edition was complete and even before there were any English translations. He writes in his Preface, “I recognize now that it was absurd to expect to know S.K. without becoming acquainted with the eighteen volumes of his Journals and Papers which can be read only in Danish.”Footnote ¹⁸⁴

In this book, Kierkegaard’s life is sketched with the help of numerous, often lengthy, quotations from the Nachlass. Lowrie notes that he is compelled to quote so extensively due to the fact that the material is otherwise not available in English translation. While this is certainly understandable, the second reason he gives for the extensive use of quotations appears more questionable. Lowrie argues that Kierkegaard should be allowed to tell his own story in his own words. Lowrie claims that he himself could not begin to approach the accuracy or stylistic felicity of Kierkegaard’s own autobiographical account.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Here it becomes obvious that Lowrie makes use of the material in an entirely uncritical fashion. He strikes one today as almost positivistic in the way in which he seems naively to believe that whatever Kierkegaard writes in his journals, while using the first-person singular, is a true autobiographical statement. While feigning humility in wanting Kierkegaard to tell his own story, Lowrie seems oblivious to the fact that he, qua biographer, is the one who is taking the individual passages from the Nachlass and putting them into a specific biographical context. He does not seem to realize how he is shaping the interpretation of the individual entries for his reader ahead of time.

Despite its interpretative naiveté, Lowrie’s biography was a major event not just in anglophone Kierkegaard research but also internationally. Its success is attested to by the fact that he was later commissioned to write another shorter biography of Kierkegaard that appeared for the first time in 1942 and was reprinted subsequently.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ This work follows generally the same methodology as the first biography. The main difference is that in the later work Lowrie is less dependent on extensive quotations. With regard to Lowrie’s big biography, his use of the Nachlass, albeit uncritically, was one of the very first glimpses of the material that the English reader ever received. He is to be lauded for the fact that he takes the Nachlass so seriously, unlike many later authors. For these reasons this work must be regarded as significant for the history of reception.

Aage Henriksen’s work Kierkegaard Studies in Scandinavia from 1951 is a prize-winning publication that appeared as the initial volume in a publication series of the Danish Kierkegaard Society.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ This is a work of history of reception. It divides the material into two large sections, the first covering Kierkegaard research from 1869 to 1909, and the second from 1909 to 1949. This work is important for our purposes since the first of these sections is introduced with a brief subsection dedicated to the Barfod–Gottsched edition,Footnote ¹⁸⁸ while the second is introduced with a similar subsection dedicated to the Papirer edition.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ The oddity will be noted: In a treatment of Kierkegaard research in Scandinavia, the author takes as his point of departure not Kierkegaard’s primary texts or the Samlede Værker (that is, the collected works edition) but instead the two editions of the Nachlass available at the time.

The discussions of both the Barfod–Gottsched edition and the Papirer are rather philologically oriented in nature. No account is given of the history of the Nachlass, and little is said about its actual content. However, these two discussions are among the best accounts in English of the philological merits and shortcomings of these two editions. The author is generally quite positive about the value of the then recently completed Papirer edition, while he is forgiving of Barfod’s shortcomings. These accounts are probably a bit too technical to be of any substantial use for beginners since they presuppose that one has had some experience working with the Danish editions under discussion. In addition to giving a brief, informative philological account, the author, in accordance with the goal of the book as a whole, discusses the reception and use of these editions by later authors. He convincingly shows the importance of the Nachlass in the later biographical and psychological studies of Kierkegaard. This work is probably not the first place to go when embarking on a study of the Nachlass, but its discussions do constitute a useful supplement to the other works mentioned here.

Niels Thulstrup’s study Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel (from 1967 with an English translation in 1980)Footnote ¹⁹⁰ is also significant for its use of the Nachlass. Thulstrup purports to make a systematic examination of this material, looking for possible clues concerning Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel and Hegelianism. This study works through the first half of the authorship, that is, until 1846. However, it should be noted that by far the bulk of this investigation covers the period from the earliest journal entries until Either/Or in 1843. Thulstrup’s influential thesis is that Kierkegaard was a rabid anti-Hegelian from start to finish. His claim is that “Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common as thinkers, neither as regards object, purpose, or method, nor as regards what each considered to be indisputable principles.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ As Fenger has noted, this one-sided thesis overlooks the many positive points of contact between Hegel and the early Kierkegaard. Since there has already been much written on this issue generally,Footnote ¹⁹² I will forego an evaluation of this thesis and instead focus here on Thulstrup’s use of the Nachlass.

It is somewhat surprising to discover that Thulstrup treats the Nachlass more extensively than he does the published works. He systematically goes through the Nachlass as presented in the Papirer in search of anything that could be relevant for Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel or Hegelianism. One can see this most clearly when the content of the individual chapters is broken down. After the introductory first chapter, which treats the Hegelian movement in Denmark, Thulstrup embarks on his textual exegesis. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the Nachlass from the summer of 1835 to November 1837. Chapter 3 continues with the period from November 1837 to September 1838. Only in Chapter 4 does the reader find the first analysis of a published text, namely From the Papers of One Still Living, and even this analysis is rather cursory,Footnote ¹⁹³ while the rest of the chapter is dedicated to the journals from the period from September 1838 to July 1840. Chapter 5 is dedicated to The Concept of Irony, but the attention to the Nachlass continues immediately in the next two chapters, which are concerned exclusively with it. In the final perfunctory chapter, Thulstrup attempts to squeeze in his account of seven different books, including the edifying discourses. In sum, apart from the first chapter, the last chapter, and Chapter 5 on The Concept of Irony, this is generally a work about Hegel and Kierkegaard as found in the Nachlass.

There is not much that can be objected to in the fact that Thulstrup regards the Nachlass as so central for the object of his investigation. When one considers texts from the Nachlass such as The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, and The Book on Adler (which is not treated by Thulstrup), then it is clear that any extended study of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel would have to take this part of the authorship seriously. Moreover, a wealth of information can be gleaned from the Nachlass about Kierkegaard’s relation to the best-known Danish Hegelians, such as Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791–1860) and Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884). Thulstrup is thus quite right to use the Nachlass in this fashion.

Unfortunately, Thulstrup’s analyses of this material are not particularly insightful due to the fact that he seems to have already made up his mind about the matter before starting. For passages where Kierkegaard seems to be positively disposed toward Hegel, Thulstrup, without argument, either dismisses the statements as ironic or underscores that Kierkegaard did not know enough about Hegel’s philosophy to make a qualified judgment on the matter. While it is laudable that Thulstrup makes such extensive use of the Nachlass, his actual discussions of the material are not as interesting as what they might be. In any case, Thulstrup’s book has become a classic in Kierkegaard studies and has played a role in bringing the Nachlass into the mainstream research.

Also noteworthy in this category is Gregor Malantschuk’s Kierkegaard’s Thought from 1971.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ This work is a translation of Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard, from 1968.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Malantschuk’s work is unabashedly hailed by its translators as “the best book currently available on Kierkegaard in any language.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The book consists of three long chapters, the first two of which are dedicated in a sense to Kierkegaard’s early journals. The stated goal of this work is to identify the “dialectical structure” and the underlying “comprehensive plan” behind Kierkegaard’s vast and heterogeneous authorship.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Although Malantschuk rarely mentions secondary literature and focuses almost exclusively on the primary texts, his polemical stance seems to be aimed against those who would deny that there is any such unity in Kierkegaard’s authorship and who attempt to interpret individual works in isolation from the other ones and from the Nachlass. This work aims to demonstrate, so to speak, the logos in the chaos and the unity in the plurality.

The first chapter, entitled “Anthropological Contemplation,” explores Kierkegaard’s various studies in the early journals and tries to show how Kierkegaard “gradually moved away from the objective branches of knowledge toward a steadily stronger emphasis on the subjective elements which bear on man’s existential development.”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Malantschuk takes a tip from one of Kierkegaard’s entriesFootnote ¹⁹⁹ and claims that the unifying theme of these early investigations is authentic “anthropological contemplation.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ These anthropological studies take many forms and cover many different fields, of which the following are listed: “mythology, esthetics, anthropology, philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and – first and last – theology.”Footnote ²⁰¹ One could also add psychology, which is treated in some detail, although it does not appear on the list. In this initial chapter, Malantschuk examines these different headings in turn on the basis of various passages from the Nachlass. Some of the headings are further subdivided; for example, under “philosophy” Kierkegaard’s relations to individual philosophers are treated, for example, Hegel, J. G. Fichte, I. H. Fichte, and Kant,Footnote ²⁰² as well as specific philosophical problems, that is, ontological problems, the problem of freedom, and the boundary between metaphysics and ethics.Footnote ²⁰³

Disappointingly, Malantschuk’s analyses in this initial chapter are rather superficial due to the fact that he wants to give an overview of the material. He thus frequently quotes from Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks but rarely explores the quoted material in any detail. What is most unfortunate is that Malantschuk’s methodology undermines his ultimate goal of demonstrating the unity of the material. By running through so much and such varied material so quickly, he simply reinforces the perception that there is no continuity. This is exacerbated by the fact that the discussions following the individual themes are not always clearly demarcated but rather blur together. This can be seen already from the list of themes that he gives. It seems rather odd, for example, that philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, and esthetics are listed as separate topics. On the usual understanding, the latter three are thought to be individual branches of philosophy and not discrete topics. These problems are further aggravated in the English translation; while in the original Danish text, the long chapters are broken up into individual sections, the English translation has eliminated the section headings and breaks, presenting the reader with a long continuous block of text. The decision of the translators to leave out these section breaks renders the English text considerably more difficult to follow than the original Danish one. In any case, in this first chapter little evidence is given for the continuity that this work wants to demonstrate. On the contrary, the reader is simply given a very quick overview, which would hardly facilitate an understanding of the material if the reader was not already familiar with it ahead of time. The original claim to show how Kierkegaard “moved away from the objective branches of knowledge” and toward the subject is never demonstrated.

While Chapter One is concerned with specific themes in Kierkegaard’s early journals and notebooks, Chapter Two is concerned to sketch what Malantschuk regards as Kierkegaard’s dialectical method. The hidden premise in this discussion is that Kierkegaard developed, rather early, a single method, which he used consistently in his authorship from then on. Malantschuk chooses to give an account of this method not based on the published works, as one might expect, but rather on the journals and notebooks due presumably to the fact that he wishes to show how Kierkegaard developed this method there in large part prior to the beginning of the published authorship. The analyses in this chapter are considerably better developed than in the previous one. Here one can see more clearly Malantschuk’s own line of interpretation in contrast to Chapter One, which had more the look of a simple inventory of themes and topics of interest to Kierkegaard. This second chapter is probably somewhat less useful as a discussion of the Nachlass as such since the focus is on Malantschuk’s interpretation of the method and not on the texts of the Nachlass in their own right. This is understandable given that Malantschuk was working with the Papirer edition, which did not allow him to treat any specific journal or notebook as a coherent whole. It was thus natural for him to look through this material with an eye toward a specific theme, in this case Kierkegaard’s statements about method.

The second chapter sketches what Malantschuk regards as the method in terms of Kierkegaard’s attempt to see different elements in terms of an organic unity. The goal of the method, claims Malantschuk, is to see the different kinds of organic unities at all different levels of human existence.Footnote ²⁰⁴ He claims, “Kierkegaard seeks to embrace the total actuality of the subject within ever new perspectives until he finds an exhaustive interpretation of all the issues related to this actuality.”Footnote ²⁰⁵ Perhaps the most interesting of all is Malantschuk’s account of what he calls “interdependent concepts” or “coupled concepts.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ Here he claims that an original feature of Kierkegaard’s method is to see conceptual pairs such as “temporal-eternal,” “necessity-freedom,” and “finite-infinite,”Footnote ²⁰⁷ as dialectically related to one another.

Malantschuk claims that these “coupled concepts” represent the first aspect of the methodology, which he designates as “latitudinal.” The “longitudinal” aspect contains the movement of these categories through different stages. He identifies three different elements of this second aspect of the method: (1) “the changes which emerge during the subject’s movement through the different levels and positions toward Christianity,”Footnote ²⁰⁸ (2) the “theory of the leap,”Footnote ²⁰⁹ and (3) “the law of repetition.”Footnote ²¹⁰ These are all understood in contrast to Hegel, although Kierkegaard derived much of the inspiration for the concept of the leap and of repetition from Hegel himself.Footnote ²¹¹

A third element of the dialectical method, in addition to the latitudinal and the longitudinal, is introduced with the term “the depth perspective.”Footnote ²¹² This seems to be concerned with the relation to the individual in contrast to an objective body of knowledge. Malantschuk claims that Kierkegaard is interested in arriving at a complete, exhaustive view of the subjective actuality of the human being in contrast to other philosophers who regard things from a larger, more abstract perspective where the experience of the individual is diminished or reduced to irrelevance.

Malantschuk continues with a detailed account of Kierkegaard’s development of his theory of stages in the journals and notebooks.Footnote ²¹³ This is used presumably as an illustration of the method as it has been sketched. There is once again a conscious and consistent effort to distance Kierkegaard’s theory of stages from that of Hegel. Toward the end of the chapter Malantschuk tries to answer a potential objection to his interpretation. By claiming that Kierkegaard’s method is concerned to give an exhaustive account of the human subject and represents a unity in the authorship, Malantschuk might seem to be ascribing to him a system or some form of systematic thinking, which, as is well known, Kierkegaard clearly rejects. Malantschuk tries to respond to this charge by pointing out what he regards as significant differences between Hegel’s system and Kierkegaard’s thinking.Footnote ²¹⁴

On the whole the dialectical method that Malantschuk wants to ascribe to Kierkegaard remains rather scattered. However, individual elements of it are clear enough. The problem is that most of these are well known to be key aspects of Hegel’s dialectical methodology, which Kierkegaard is often thought to have been in a polemic with. This complicated and problematic relation is not adequately addressed.

Ultimately, this work cannot be said to be about the Nachlass in the same way Written Images and Kierkegaard: The Myths and their Origins are. Malantschuk’s work does not make the Nachlass in itself the object of the study and does not address himself to any problem intrinsic to it. In other words, he could probably have put forth this same theory without referring to the journals and notebooks; indeed, this is what he does in the long third and final chapter of the work where he explores Kierkegaard’s purported method in the published works. While this book is valuable for anyone concerned with Kierkegaard’s method, it is probably not the best place to go for a general account of the Nachlass.

The next work to be discussed is Habib C. Malik’s excellent study, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard from 1997.Footnote ²¹⁵ Far surpassing Henriksen’s effort, this is a profoundly well-documented and researched book on the history of the reception of Kierkegaard. It traces the reception of Kierkegaard’s works from his own times to around the outbreak of World War I. For our purposes this work is worthy of note since it contains one of the rare discussions originally in English of the history of the Nachlass and the Barfod–Gottsched edition. This discussion comes at the beginning of Malik’s Chapter 6,Footnote ²¹⁶ where he discusses briefly the story of how the Nachlass was moved into the care of P. C. Kierkegaard, who in turn entrusted the publication of the material to Barfod. There is further discussion of the note discovered by Barfod, in which Kierkegaard expressed his wish to have Rasmus Nielsen publish his posthumous papers; the misunderstandings that this led to between Nielsen and P. C. Kierkegaard are also briefly treated. Malik’s work traces the story of the edition chronologically, that is, following the appearance of each volume and its immediate influence. Gottsched’s entry on the scene is thus discussed later in the chapter.Footnote ²¹⁷ There is no discussion of the Papirer edition since it appeared at the turn of the century at around the time that Malik’s narrative stops.Footnote ²¹⁸

There is no detailed discussion of the philological aspects of the Barfod–Gottsched edition, but this cannot be conceived as a criticism since it lies outside the purview of Malik’s work. Instead, this edition is presented as a part of the history of reception of Kierkegaard’s works and thought generally. Following the lead of Henriksen’s work, the point that the author makes with his discussion is that with the publication of the Nachlass “was born what can be described as the biographical-psychological approach to Kierkegaard and his oeuvre.”Footnote ²¹⁹ This is doubtless correct. It would have been impossible for the obsession with Kierkegaard’s personal life and psychological complexities to arise in the secondary literature if it were not for the publication of his Nachlass. As has been noted, this material had frequently been taken as immediately autobiographical or as a personal diary containing Kierkegaard’s most intimate thoughts. As a result, there was an open field for the many biographical and psychological studies that followed.

Like the other works featured in this section, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard does not treat the Nachlass as an object of study in its own right but rather makes use of it for its own end, the history of Kierkegaard reception. Although the discussion of the Barfod–Gottsched edition does not cover many pages, it is a useful general introduction to the material that covers some of the same ground as Written Images. The author does an excellent job setting the Barfod–Gottsched edition in its proper historical context. Although there are no analyses of the actual content of the Nachlass itself, this work is still a valuable contribution to an understanding of its historical importance both for the Kierkegaard reception and for the Danish culture at the time.

The next work to be examined is Louis Pojman’s book, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion from 1999.Footnote ²²⁰ This work is a slightly revised edition of Pojman’s The Logic of Subjectivity from 1984.Footnote ²²¹ In his Preface to the revised version, the author states that, while much has happened in Kierkegaard studies in the interim, his theses in the original work are still relevant.Footnote ²²² He thus puts them forward again in modified form some fifteen years later. For the sake of simplicity, I will take the revised edition as my point of orientation for the purposes of this overview. The author has made only very minor changes to these sections in the second edition, and thus what is said here about that work is equally valid for the original study. While this work refers to Kierkegaard’s Nachlass throughout, there are two sections that purport to treat Kierkegaard’s “papers” explicitly.

The first of these appears in the initial chapter of the work and is entitled “Christianity and Philosophy in Kierkegaard’s Early Papers.”Footnote ²²³ The first chapter in general and this section in particular can be regarded as a kind of preliminary outline of an intellectual biography. The author uses various entries from the journals and notebooks from 1835 to 1840 as documentation for a sketch of Kierkegaard’s development from philosophy to Christianity. The picture of Kierkegaard that is presented is that of a young existentialist struggling forward to true faith. In this short section, Pojman, in a rather unsystematic fashion, sketches a handful of issues which would become central for Kierkegaard’s authorship later, for example, “the concept of subjectivity,” “the relation of philosophy to Christianity,” “the stages of existence,” and “free will.”Footnote ²²⁴ He further sketches, also very briefly, a couple of Kierkegaard’s early influences: Schleiermacher, Hamann, and Martensen. The discussion in this section is rather superficial, which is perhaps due to the fact that it is after all merely intended to be an introduction. This section thus serves only to flag certain issues presumably for later use, but it presents no extended argumentation or analysis on its own.

The second section that purports to treat the Nachlass appears in Chapter 8 and is entitled “‘Faith’ and ‘Hope’ in Kierkegaard’s Later Papers.”Footnote ²²⁵ This section, appearing as it does in the body of the work and not as a part of the introductory chapter, seems to promise a more detailed analysis of the material. This expectation is, however, disappointed. The section is dominated by a rather analytic discussion of the concepts of faith and hope and their relation to one another. The author, in fact, only quotes a handful passages from the Papirer edition, and only a few of them can be said to belong to the later papers, which is usually taken to mean after 1846. Moreover, these are quoted after he has already given his main analysis of the concepts at issue. Thus, this section in no way gives an overview of the relation of faith to hope in the later papers as the section title would seem to promise.

This work does not treat the Nachlass as an independent object of research. The author himself explains his use of this material in the Preface: “Although most of this book is directed to the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus writings, I have used material from Kierkegaard’s private Papers as well as other of his published works where the context warrants their use in providing further support or illustrative material for the issue or argument at hand.”Footnote ²²⁶ This means that the author does not treat any of the problems intrinsic to the Nachlass as such. He takes, for example, the early journals to be straightforward autobiographical statements about Kierkegaard’s intellectual growth and development. This work, for whatever its other merits may be, cannot be said to represent a contribution to a new understanding of the Nachlass.

Also in the biographical genre is Alastair Hannay’s intellectual biography of Kierkegaard.Footnote ²²⁷ This work makes extensive use of the Nachlass toward its end, which is rather different from that of Lowrie. Right away from his Preface, it is easy to see that Hannay is in no way uncritical in his use of this material.Footnote ²²⁸ On the contrary, he is highly reflective about the relation between the written text, be that Nachlass or published work, and Kierkegaard’s biography. It should also be noted that Hannay’s work is an intellectual biography and not a biography in the straightforward sense that Lowrie’s is. Thus, while Lowrie’s use of the Nachlass is invariably related to Kierkegaard’s actual life, Hannay can make use of individual entries to understand Kierkegaard’s works and ideas without making any commitment about the true biographical Kierkegaard. Thus, Hannay’s use of the material is very much in line with any number of other works in the secondary literature today, which quote individual entries in order to illuminate some aspect of one of the published works. Needless to say, this is methodologically on much safer ground than Lowrie’s approach. This book can be highly recommended for any number of reasons having nothing to do with Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. For our purposes, it distinguishes itself by the way in which it makes extensive use of this material to tell a story about the development of Kierkegaard’s thought, while avoiding the methodological pitfalls to which Lowrie fell victim.

3.3 English Translations of the Nachlass

The history of the reception of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass has been shaped not just by the aforementioned works but also by the different translations of it. If one wants to see how Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks have been used and understood in the anglophone world, one is obliged to look at how the different editors and translators have presented the material to the anglophone public.

There are several different editions that use differing principles of selection. These principles obviously play an enormous role in the picture of Kierkegaard that emerges from a given edition. In a sense the main editorial problem facing English translators was no different from that facing the Danish editors. The question for both was how to present the enormous mass of material to their readers in an accessible manner. For potential translators, it was implausible to attempt a translation in toto of Kierkegaard’s journals from the Papirer edition. Therefore, for practical reasons, a principle of selection had to be found that would enable them to present this body of material to their anglophone audience.

The first edition in English appeared in 1938 under the title The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard.Footnote ²²⁹ This pioneering effort was the work of the English translator Alexander Dru. It will be noted that at the time the Danish edition of Kierkegaard’s Papirer by Heiberg, Kuhr, and Torsting was still not quite complete.Footnote ²³⁰ In 1938 the final two volumes appeared: volume XI-2 containing the entries under the section “A” from October 1854 to January 1855 as well as the loose papers from 1853 to September 25, 1855, and volume XI-3 containing the entries under the section “B” from 1854 to 1855. Thus, these last two volumes were not included in Dru’s edition, and for these final years of Kierkegaard’s life, he was obliged to use volume IX of the Barfod–Gottsched edition.Footnote ²³¹

Dru’s edition had the goal of presenting Kierkegaard’s biography. This is obvious given the fact that for his selection of entries Dru followed the German edition of Die Tagebücher by Theodor Haecker (1879–1945),Footnote ²³² even though he translated from the Danish text.Footnote ²³³ The organization of Dru’s edition is purely chronological. There are no chapter divisions or breaks in the long continuous body of entries. Dru provides a lengthy introduction about Kierkegaard’s life, which gives some background to the text. In keeping with the concept of the volume as biographical, it also contains an appendix with contemporary descriptions of Kierkegaard from Henriette Lund, Israel Levin, and Hans Brøchner.Footnote ²³⁴ This brief section can be regarded as an early forerunner of Bruce Kirmmse’s Encounters with Kierkegaard.Footnote ²³⁵ Dru’s edition contains no apparatus of commentaries.

While Dru’s edition was an excellent work for its day, it falls victim to the Achilles’ heel of all editions that conceive of the journals as primarily autobiographical. As Fenger has argued, there is no obvious reason to assume immediately that the journals and notebooks are autobiographical. To separate the fact from the fiction is very difficult since it is hard to find corroborating evidence for the factual aspect of what he writes.

Despite these editorial problems, this edition was an important first effort at introducing Kierkegaard’s journals to an anglophone public at a time when Kierkegaard was not particularly well known. Moreover, the felicitous language of Dru’s translations is praiseworthy.

Another selection of Kierkegaard’s journals is entitled simply The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard.Footnote ²³⁶ This edition was published in 1960 and was not based on the Papirer but rather on the aforementioned edition entitled Søren Kierkegaards dagbøger, edited by Peter P. Rohde.Footnote ²³⁷ In a sense a translation can be no better than the original that it uses as its textual basis. Given the shortcomings of Rohde’s original edition outlined earlier,Footnote ²³⁸ it is hardly surprising that the English translation is in many ways inadequate. This edition was considerably shorter than Dru’s selection, containing less than 200 pages of primary text. It has not made any new contribution to research, although it has doubtless served to introduce Kierkegaard to introductory students in the English-speaking world. One can, however, call into question the value of such an introduction.

Another edition in English appeared in 1965 under the title The Last Years: Journals 1853–1855.Footnote ²³⁹ This selection contains some 350 pages of translated text. As the title indicates, this edition features passages from the journals from the last two years of Kierkegaard’s life. There is thus no pretense, as with the first two editions treated, to give a general overview of Kierkegaard’s biography. The editor has added a brief heading before the individual entries conveying the sense of the content of the entry in question. The references to the Papirer edition are given at the end of each entry. While there is a quite good general index as well as an index of biblical texts, there is no commentary apparatus. This edition also contains a chronological survey of Kierkegaard’s life,Footnote ²⁴⁰ following that presented in the Papirer.

The translator and editor of this work is Ronald Gregor Smith, who in his Preface gives his rationale for selection for this edition. First, it is stated that the edition was originally conceived as a supplement to the earlier edition by Alexander Dru. Smith writes,

Smith’s edition can thus be seen as completing the biographical story that Dru began. The second reason behind the selection has to do with the importance of this final period of Kierkegaard’s life for his entire authorship. Smith continues, “the last years of Kierkegaard’s life saw a remarkable concentration of the motifs which controlled his whole authorship. This comes vividly to life in the present selection of the journals and papers of that time, and casts light on all that went before it.”Footnote ²⁴²

This edition is very limited in its ambition. It has a clearly defined goal, which it can certainly be said to achieve adequately. At the time it was surely a welcome supplement to the Dru edition. But insofar as it is based on the Papirer edition and on the same biographical concept as the Dru edition, it ultimately imposes a structure onto Kierkegaard’s journals which is foreign to them. But given the resources that Dru and Smith had at their disposal at the time, that is, the Papirer edition, they could hardly have done things much differently.

For years the most complete edition of the Nachlass in English was that of Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, entitled Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers (abbreviated as JP). This edition, which appeared from 1967 to 1978, uses the Papirer edition as its textual basis, although its principle of selection is entirely different. It comprises six volumes of translations plus a comprehensive index. This edition uses two different principles of selection: one topical and one biographical. Volumes 1 to 4 are organized according to different themes arranged in alphabetical order. Volumes 5 and 6 are designated explicitly as “autobiographical” and thus follow the model initiated by Dru’s edition. These two autobiographical volumes are divided into nine different chapters that treat individual periods of Kierkegaard’s life in a chronological fashion. These chapters are not always even, some containing as many as 430 pages and others as few as 29. This edition also includes a few letters and other documents that are not, strictly speaking, included in the Danish edition of the Papirer. It also includes a detailed commentary apparatus, which surpasses even the Danish editions of the period.

In their Introduction, the translators argue for the need for organizing the material according to themes or concepts. They begin by quoting Walter Lowrie’s complaint that with the present editions even in Danish it is impossible to gain an overview of Kierkegaard’s opinions on any specific topic, given the diversity of the journal entries and the lack of a good index. Lowrie writes,

Prior to computer technology and above all prior to Niels Jørgen Cappelørn’s index to the Papirer,Footnote ²⁴⁴ the problem was how to locate Kierkegaard’s treatment of specific philosophical or theological issues without being obliged to read through every volume.

The Hongs took to heart Lowrie’s plea for the need for an arrangement of the entries by topic and even argued that the existence of an index would not ultimately solve the problem. They make the case for their principle as follows:

The Hongs, like their friend Gregor Malantschuk, were primarily concerned about the apparent discontinuity of the journals and papers. There was such a mass of material and seemingly little or no order in the sequence of thoughts, insights, reflections, and so on. Their suggestion was then to set forth certain running themes and then to assign the various passages from the Nachlass to them. In this way, they argued, the continuity of Kierkegaard’s thought would become visible. An attempt was also made to organize the entries assigned to any given theme in a chronological fashion so that the development in Kierkegaard’s thinking on any given issue could also be discerned.

In deciding on the themes to be included, they availed themselves of the suggestions of Malantschuk,Footnote ²⁴⁶ who wrote up a brief account of the individual concepts and categories. These accounts were then translated and included at the beginning of the section of commentaries, which is dedicated to each of the concepts (i.e., in volumes 1–4). Thus, the reader is provided with a general overview of Kierkegaard’s use of specific concepts prior to the more detailed commentaries on the individual entries. Malantschuk’s original notes in Danish were subsequently published under the title Nøglebegreber i Søren Kierkegaards tænkning or Key Concepts in Søren Kierkegaard’s Thinking.Footnote ²⁴⁷

The problem with a thematic organization of the material is obvious. There is a high degree of arbitrariness at a couple of different interpretive levels. First, it is not clear that the categories and topics themselves can really be separated from one another so discretely even on their own terms. Kierkegaard’s universe of concepts is complex and contains countless areas of overlap. Topics such as Christ, Christianity, and faith ultimately belong to the same general constellation of concepts. It is thus rather problematic to try to abstract individual concepts from their different contexts and examine them separately. The editors in part recognize this problem since some of the entry topics are multiple, for example, “Humor, Irony, the Comic.” But needless to say, there are also several interpretive steps involved in the lumping together of concepts. Moreover, it is not clear that this general procedure of presenting the Nachlass in terms of different topics helps to make Kierkegaard less scattered, but rather it compounds the problem by presenting the reader with a plethora of seemingly unrelated categories and topics.

Second, it is always a matter of some arbitrariness just which topics one decides to use as genuinely essential or representative for Kierkegaard’s thinking. There is enough difference of opinion in Kierkegaard scholarship about what is central to his thought to make one wary of any attempt to give a catalog of terms intended to capture this. Everyone has his or her own favorite concept which is not included in this edition, for example, mediation, simplicity, or movement. Further, while entries are given to figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Savonarola, and Montaigne, who had an extremely limited influence on Kierkegaard’s works, undoubtedly major figures such as Marheineke, Schelling, Baader, or the Younger Fichte are omitted. From this the unwary reader might conclude that Savonarola was more important for Kierkegaard than Schelling.

Third, and perhaps even more damaging, the individual entries are in themselves highly complex; there is a great deal of subtlety and variation in even very short entries. Thus, even if one could agree with some certainty on which categories or concepts were central in Kierkegaard, the interpretative task of assigning the individual journal entries to these categories would be extremely difficult. Some entries, indeed, most of them, touch on a number of different topics. This would imply that a given entry that treated two different topics should be reproduced twice under two different headings. This would lead to the endless repetition of the material under an indefinite number of different headings, which would ultimately make the edition so long as to be unrealistic and would undercut precisely the desired goal of readability. How does one adjudicate which theme of the many treated in any given entry is the central one to that entry?

Moreover, the way in which the entries are grouped according to this principle will then shape the way in which the individual entries are read and interpreted. When a number of different entries are put in certain contexts, specific aspects or themes will emerge, while others, which are not obviously relevant for the heading under which they appear, will fade into the background. This editorial principle then adversely affects the reader’s understanding of Kierkegaard since, instead of presenting the texts in as neutral a fashion as possible in order to leave all of its interpretative possibilities open for the readers themselves to decide upon, this principle leads the reader in a specific direction and ultimately closes off interpretive possibilities by in effect implying that the individual entries properly belong under just the one heading under which it appears.

Volumes 5 and 6 fall victim to much the same problem, although they are not organized thematically but rather biographically. Despite the fact that the editors are careful to note that the journals “do not have the character of a diary,”Footnote ²⁴⁸ this does not prevent them from making them into one in these last two volumes of the edition. While this procedure seems to be on safer ground with regard to interpretation, for reasons previously noted it is in fact no less problematic than the procedure followed in the first four volumes.

The quality of these translations is a matter of some dispute. This was one of the first things that the Hongs translated and published, and there are signs of a less than certain grasp of the language, for example, the confusion of “And” (duck) with “den Anden” (the other).Footnote ²⁴⁹ A similar error can be found in a confusion of the word “Teleologien” with “Theologien.”Footnote ²⁵⁰ Another indication of this can be seen in the complaint frequently heard about this edition that it sticks too slavishly to the syntax of the original Danish. This edition thus often reads somewhat awkwardly and does not adequately reflect the stylistic brilliance and variation of Kierkegaard’s original. However, it should be noted that, somewhat amazingly, volume 1, when it appeared in 1967, received the National Book Award for translation.

One of the best things about this edition is the apparatus of notes that is provided at the end of the text. This was the first time that Kierkegaard’s journals in any language had been provided with detailed commentaries. The Hongs’ commentaries clearly laid some of the groundwork for later, more elaborate commentaries, including those in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. While they are at times rather subjective in their interpretation, these commentaries or explanatory notes provide a great deal of useful information about the individual entries. Many of them hold up even today. Howard Hong’s achievement in this regard is particularly impressive when one considers the limited resources that he had at his disposal at the time.

Moreover, this edition should be praised for the sheer quantity of material that it presents. While six volumes are far from being a complete translation of Kierkegaard’s journals, it is still very significant, and up until that time no other English translator had even come close to rivalling it with regard to quantity. This shows the remarkable dedication and work ethic of the translators.

This edition has played a significant role in the reception of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in the anglophone world. It is the source that many scholars still use today when they want to find supplemental information about Kierkegaard’s views on specific themes or topics from the published works. This edition has thus facilitated this ad hoc use of the Nachlass which has become so common.

In addition to the edition of Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, the Hongs also translated a vast number of journal entries, which they included in the supplement section to the various volumes of their celebrated translation series, Kierkegaard’s Writings.Footnote ²⁵¹ As is well known to readers of this series, in the supplementary section following the translations of the individual texts, the editors collected a series of journal entries, often drafts, related to the featured text. Some of these entries have been taken from their earlier edition and revised, while others have been translated for the first time for this purpose.

This is an excellent resource for understanding Kierkegaard’s published works, many of which can hardly be adequately understood without the help of his journals. This editorial innovation was an excellent idea which does not exist in any of the Danish editions. This offers an enormous service to the reader by placing the relevant journal entries conveniently together with the published texts. These various entries can also easily be referenced by means of the cumulative index to the works in the series.Footnote ²⁵² The disadvantage of this supplement section is that it is drawn primarily from the “B” section of the Papirer and is thus only a very limited selection, which may or may not be representative of all the extant material. But the translators cannot be held responsible for the shortcomings of the Danish edition on this score.

It should also be mentioned that in the Kierkegaard’s Writings series, several texts are presented as individual works, which strictly speaking belong to the Nachlass. These include the following: Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, The Book on Adler, The Battle between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars, Writing Sampler, and the Schelling Lecture Notes.

Another edition of Kierkegaard’s journals in English is Alastair Hannay’s excellent volume, entitled Papers and Journals: A Selection, published in 1996.Footnote ²⁵³ This volume is a judicious selection primarily oriented toward Kierkegaard’s biography and is obviously the forerunner to Hannay’s aforementioned intellectual biography of Kierkegaard.Footnote ²⁵⁴ This selection of entries, which contains almost 700 pages, is divided into 7 chapters and a postscript, each dedicated to a more or less discrete period of Kierkegaard’s life. Hannay gives a brief introduction to each chapter in which he provides the necessary background information about Kierkegaard’s biography required for understanding the featured entries. He also provides a minimal apparatus of explanatory notes at the end of the text.

This is a highly readable edition aimed primarily at students. It provides an excellent introduction to Kierkegaard’s life and thought. The quality of Hannay’s translation is impeccable both with regard to accuracy and felicity. It is generally agreed that the language of his translations is stylistically the best that exists in English today. This is not a minor point given what an important role style plays for Kierkegaard and indeed how closely connected his style is to the actual content of his message. Hannay’s translations do an excellent job at capturing the tone and flavor of Kierkegaard’s original.

The most recent edition of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in English is also the most complete and the most scholarly, namely, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (abbreviated as KJN), which was published in eleven volumes from 2007 to 2020. This edition is based on the volumes of the journals, notebooks, and loose papers (volumes 17–27, with the orange label) and their accompanying commentary volumes (K17–K27) in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. This edition was the collective labor of several distinguished scholars from the world of anglophone Kierkegaard studies.

This edition presents for the first time in English the material in its original form, that is, in the original journals and notebooks that Kierkegaard himself kept. By restoring the various entries to their original context, this edition, in an apparently simple way, solves the problem that has plagued all the earlier editors, namely, how to present the vast mass of material in an accessible manner. Most of the individual journals and notebooks are of a size that the reader can get a sense of the general character of the whole. Moreover, the individual entries take on a clearer meaning and continuity when they appear in their original context. There is thus no need to provide this continuity artificially by some adventitious construction of the editor. The continuity is in the works themselves as Kierkegaard organized them. Moreover, this edition avoids being heavy-handed and making interpretive decisions for the reader. On the contrary, it simply presents the material in the form that Kierkegaard himself organized and kept his journals and notebooks, leaving it to the readers themselves to decide whether they believe specific passages are biographical or if there are certain continuities in the texts. These can now become a matter of responsible academic discussion based on arguments and evidence. This is where the matter should be debated and not in the privacy of the mind of the individual editor.

The commentaries from Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter appear in slightly modified form. The linguistic commentaries, from the Danish edition, that is, those concerning old Danish words or expressions, have been omitted in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks since they have been taken account of in the translation of the primary texts. Anyone who has ever worked with Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter knows what a tremendous help these commentaries are in understanding Kierkegaard. With this material available for the first time in English, it is possible for anglophone scholars to begin to gain a greater appreciation for the sources of Kierkegaard’s thought.

It is still too early to say anything concrete about the significance of this edition for anglophone Kierkegaard research. There can be no doubt, however, that by presenting Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks in a way that is so unlike any of the previous English editions, and by virtue of the sheer volume of material from the Nachlass that it has made available, this English edition will make an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of this part of Kierkegaard’s authorship.

It can be fairly said that true research on the Nachlass in the anglophone world has only just begun. With the present volume and with the new English translation of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks, it is to be hoped that anglophone scholars will at long last overcome the old prejudices which regarded this part of the authorship as a source for biographical information or for ad hoc aphoristic statements about individual issues treated more extensively in the published works. The hope is that scholars will begin to take the material more seriously in its own right in their investigations of Kierkegaard’s thought. Such a move would represent an important enrichment of Kierkegaard research internationally.