Abstract

One opens this first volume of the Hong's long-awaited translation of Kierkegaard's Papirer with a sense of astonishment. For there on the first page in bold face type is the topic heading:, Abstraction. One reads further. Absurd; Action; The Ancients, The Classical; Anselm; Anthropology, Philosophy of Man-the topic headings unroll in alphabetical order. With a profound sense of the waste of it all, one gets the point: the Hongs have decided to present the Papirer in a topical not a chronological ordering. Toward the end of their Preface the translators try to justify their topical presentation by noting: "Although the plan of the present English edition of selections primarily according to subject is in harmony with an emphasis by Kierkegaard, the Danish editors, and [Walter] Lowrie upon contiguity of content, the extent to which it exceeds what has been done in this direction is unabashedly in the interest of the reader." The appeal here to the authority of Kierkegaard himself and to his Danish editors is clearly misplaced. For Kierkegaard did not group his Papirer entries under topical headings—he wrote his thoughts down when they occurred to him, and collected them in notebooks in chronological order—and the Danish editors basically preserved this chronological ordering in their twenty volume edition. The chief benefit for a reader of the Danish edition is the possibility of following the evolution of Kierkegaard's thought and personality. What an irony that this new edition of the papers and journals of the arch "subjective thinker" actually makes it impossible to follow the subjective development of his thought!—J. T.