Soren Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard would also go back to his journal entries in order to refine
them, rework them, or merely to take joy in re-encountering a little bit
of brilliance he had entirely forgotten. Thus, late in the summer of 1847
Kierkegaard delved into journal EE from 1839, and amid a great deal of
material which he found to be neither “felicitous nor finished” he found
“a particularly good observation.” In journal EE he read a passage where
he had written “that marriage is not really love,” which is why “it is said
that the two becomeone flesh—not one spirit—because it is impossible for
two spirits to become one spirit. This observation could have been put to
very good use inWorks of Love.”
“At his deathSøren Kierkegaardleft a large quantity of handwritten papers,
gathered together and, in some cases, put in order with a degree of care
that was evidence of the author’s zeal to protect them against dispersal and
destruction,” H. P. Barfod wrote in the preface to the multivolume set
of selections entitledFrom Søren Kierkegaard’s Posthumous Papers. And he
continued in impeccable bureaucratic prose: “Before long, however, it
could be seen that these volumes—like the later, much more detailed and
internally interconnected ‘journals’—had held a significance for the author
quite different from the role ordinarily played by diaries. For in addition to
a number of entries (though not terribly many of this sort) where external
circumstances are discussed side by side with disjointed outbursts of emo-
tion, the journals contain investigations of subjects that interested the writer
at one time or another: plans for essays and lectures, texts of sermons, and
lastly, a great many individual ideas, notes, quotations, etc. In sum, in a
partial parallel with the published writings, ‘the journals’ seem to have
served the late hermit as a major channel of intellectual discharge.”
For all its opacity, Barfod’s description of the posthumous literature is
quite lucid. Like subsequent editors, Barfod found the will to perseverance
we glimpse behind Kierkegaard’s mountain of paper to be almost unnatural.
Quite rightly, Barfod resisted calling the posthumous papers “diaries,” em-
phasizing instead their connection to the published works, which—inci-
dentally—also makes it natural to trace the author back to his writings.
Despite this clear-sightedness Barfod himself contributed to the confusion
quite considerably by dint of his editorial practices, concerning which the
later editors ofSøren Kierkegaard’s Papers, P. A. Heiberg and V. Kuhr, offered
withering comments: “With continually changing principles of arrange-
ment and changing editorial points of view—and by means of cutting and
pasting; the addition of catalogue numbers; the writing of notes to the
printer on the manuscripts themselves; and much else, including deletions
and corrections—part of the earlier portion of the papers was transformed
into the printer’s manuscript for Barfod’s edition.” As a rule the original