Customer Reviews

Kierkegaard (The Arguments of the Philosophers)

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Okay, some things get lost in the translation to the Kindle. The full title of the book is: The Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. One of the reasons the book is so larded and repetitious is that Kierkegaard wrote it as a sight gag. The Philosophical Fragments Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 7 is a tiny book (so small, in fact, that Princeton University Press spoils the joke by coupling it to another book in order to make a medium sized volume). The joke is supposed to be a 700 page postscript to a 100 page book. You lose that on the Kindle, but, as I just mentioned, Princeton messed up the joke in an actual book, and, with the Kindle, you also lose the thrill of lugging around a 700 page tome for however long it takes you to read it, so there's that. It is the measure of my devotion that I have successfully fought gravity several times (this is the third different translation I've read) without giving up and going back to Sickness Unto Death The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition For Upbuilding And Awakening (Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 19) (v. 19).
In any case, the virtue of this translation is that I have always imagined the book as taking place at table, where, after dinner, a nineteenth century fop, between drags on his cigar and the occasional sip of cognac, tells me very efficiently, if somewhat tipsily, what's what. The translator, from what I have read, gets the character, Johannes Climacus (our first person narrator), spot on. I really get the feeling I am with the character and that is quite an accomplishment.
I suspect that such verisimilitude is rare because most translators are academicians and Kierkegaard is an amateur, as interested in literary effect as in philosophical cogency. Scholars tend to forget that this is not a philosophical treatise, but a novel with a protagonist who delivers an ordered monologue about religion, history, theology and faith. Hannay seems very aware of this and of conveying the book's novelistic quality. Good for him.

I have had the Hong translation (1992) for years but had difficulties reading it. Comparing it to an older translation in the selections included in Deconstruction In Context, I was glad that Hong used the idea of a spurious infinity. In mathematics, an idea which produces a march down the road to a spurious infinity is considered absurd and easily dismissed. The 2009 translation of Concluding Scientific Postscript by Alastair Hannay goes back to the idea of a bad infinity and explains it with a note on Hegel: In Hegel a bad infinity is one that cannot be accommodated to the dialectic of opposition in which oppositions are cancelled in the true infinity.

The thinking in this book is like philosophers considering themselves more advanced than geometers because the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, which makes it impossible for geometry to consider a triangle with two right angles but the philosophers are setting up a dialectic in which two sides are infinitely long or the line between the two right angles is becoming infinitely small. The idea of a tangeant in calculus is the kind of pure idea that makes Kierkegaard choose Lessing as a thinker in the section on Possible and actual theses of Lessing, as opposed to: "Maybe this infinity of reflection is the bad infinity -- in that case we are soon finished, for the bad infinity is meant to be some despicable something or other that has to be given up the sooner the better." (p. 95).

Bubbles in economics work like a spurious infinity when everybody can see that nobody will be able to keep track of where to send the interest on all the borrowed money when the electricity goes out and the lights are shut off. Shooting for $14 trillion of money that has already been spent is a method that is not all that scrupulous about not understanding a joke.