By Subhasis Chattopadhyay –
Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks,
Volume 10: Journals NB26–NB30
Søren Kierkegaard
Edited by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, Bruce H Kirmmse, David D Possen, Joel D S Rasmussen, and Vanessa Rumble
Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540, usa.
Website: https://press.princeton.edu.
2017. 800 pp. $150. hb. isbn 9780691172415.
Volume 10 of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks is a treatise on theodicy which spans from meditations on empathy (255–6) to an attack on the Enlightenment (362–3). Throughout this volume, we have Kierkegaard writing of the need to suffer because he correctly sees suffering as the only way to commune with God and in particular, Christ. It is, as it were, the entire cosmos worships God while intensely suffering. It is this theme of cosmic suffering that we find in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament.
This service to God as equivalent to suffering is a form of theodicy that is ignored by philosophers. Suffering is not caused by God but is itself the solution to the problem of evil. One suffers because to suffer is to become mystically one with God. In the Psalms, the Psalmist writes of this need for the worshipper to suffer for and with Yahweh. Within the Christian worldview, unlike within the Hindu worldview, God is weak. God participates fully in human pain. It is from this understanding of pain in the Bible, to Anti-Climacus’s, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, writings (256), to the explicit writings of Kierkegaard himself collected in this volume, we have the same symphony on suffering which will be later picked up by Edith Stein and Simone Weil.
Both Stein and Weil would later stress on the primacy of suffering in their works. Stein, of course, had to struggle with what has come to be known as the problem of empathy or the problem of other minds. Strangely, Stein does not elaborate on Kierkegaard too much and stresses on phenomenology in her corpus. This is perhaps because she was not too well versed with Kierkegaard’s works. As this volume proves, Kierkegaard is the ontic origin to not only Stein and Weil’s intellectual moorings but he is also the base from which Western theodicy takes a modernist turn.
Hannah Arendt and now, Susan Neiman, owe a lot to Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. Here, we need to pause and reflect why Kierkegaard is not taught in many Christian seminaries, why he is not part of the philosophy syllabi in many university departments of philosophy—if he is, then only a small part—and why he is not considered a literary theorist. This is where these Princeton editions of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks come into the picture. Kierkegaard’s output is vast and earlier, was not available in English. Had they been available then certainly Stein, Weil, Arendt, and Neiman would have constructed their theodicies around Kierkegaard more fully, abandoning the charlatanism of Martin Heidegger’s Nazi histrionics.
These Princeton hardbacks, handsomely bound, with appealing fonts and meticulous notes will help disseminate Kierkegaard’s writings to a broader audience. The end notes are copious and without pedantry. Doctoral work can be done referring to these volumes. Congratulations are due to both Princeton University Press and, to the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, Copenhagen for undertaking such a project which they have been able to meticulously execute with nary a typos.
This review appeared in Prabuddha Bharata published by the Ramakrishna Mission and Math headquartered at Belur. The reviewer is a Hindu who specialises in Christianity and contributes regularly to this website. He teaches English at the PG and UG Department of English at Nara Sinha Dutt College, Howrah. This non-community college is affiliated to the University of Calcutta. The review as is can be accessed here.