Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter — Issue 38: July 1999

Kierkegaard’s four main accounts of his “authorship” are increasingly simple, direct and focussed upon the relation of the works to one another and to its overall strategy. The last of these accounts, “On My Work as an Author,” was written in March, 1849 more than six and a half years before his death and naturally makes no mention of the ten pieces he wrote after that date. Near the end of that work he writes: “This is scarcely the place for a lengthy account. Here it is just a matter of being able very briefly to fold together in simplicity what is unfolded in the many books or what unfolded is the many books, …”[1] This short study aims to observe the spirit of this striking remark and to update his account by including these ten later writings.

Briefly, this study presents some of the results of a correspondence analysis of the frequencies of the 50 most common nouns and names in the 35 writings contained in the third edition of his Samlede Værker. This was done by creating a matrix showing the frequency of each of these words in each of these writings and doing a correspondence analysis of this matrix to determine the precise co-ordinates of each word and book on each of the first two dimensions[2] of this space. For the sake of simplicity I omit all these words from both the plot and my discussion but stress that the location of each work in this space is a strict mathematical function of the “profile” of these words in these works, that this function reflects the nature of these works and is so complex that even a literary genius such as Kierkegaard could not contrive it. By contrast, I have named the poles, dimensions and clusters of this array using some of the information provided by the program and my own knowledge of these works.

Figure 1 is the core of this study and shows the relation of these 35 works to one another in their first two and most important dimensions.[3] This figure will speak for itself to those familiar with his works and I have simply indicated the obvious by naming the positive pole of the first dimension “esthetic and religious,” the negative pole “attack,” and this dimension “ALL WRITINGS.” Similarly, I have named the positive pole of the second dimension “religious,” the negative pole “esthetic,” and this dimension “ORIGINAL THEMES,” i.e. the themes of the original “authorship” prior to the attack. Partly following Kierkegaard’s own lead, I have also named the works in the lower left quadrant “esthetic,” those above the first dimension “religious,” those in the upper corner of the lower right quadrant “meta” works and those on the outer edge of the lower right quadrant “attack” works. I will say more about these names shortly but for the moment stress instead that this plot gives the precise location of each of these works on each of these dimensions and so shows both their location within this self-defined space and their relation to one another within it. Of course even this plot is no substitute for reading the works but it places each work in its context and should help the reader to read them with greater insight and understanding. In fact, it is the simplest possible visual representation of “what is unfolded in the many books” and represents the logical development of Kierkegaard’s successive attempts to indicate the role of the various works in his overall strategy.

The central point of this study has been made and I pause to comment briefly upon these clusters and the location of certain works within them. The esthetic cluster is dense and compact and occupies most of the bottom left quadrant with EE1 naturally lying much closer to the “esthetic” pole of the second dimension and EE2 much closer to the “religious.” The religious cluster is almost equally compact but its works fall on both sides of the second dimension and IC clearly lying in the direction of the attack, a fact consistent with Kierkegaard’s own account of this work.[4] The meta works form a triangle and lie relatively close to the point of origin which is quite natural since three of them deal almost exclusively with the nature and strategy of the “authorship” and even AE implicitly discusses this question at length. But there are perhaps also other reasons why this work lies in this particular position. Kierkegaard himself said that it marks out another way to become a Christian,[5] that it was “the turning point”[6] in the authorship and he clearly intended it as an attack upon Christendom.[7] It is then both fitting and plausible that it should lie within this group and at the same time be more or less equi-distant from the other major clusters. By contrast, and as the reader can see, the attack works form a very elongated ellipse which means that these five works differ greatly from each other along both these dimensions. Finally, note that most of the works in the upper right quadrant are relatively close to the point of origin, that the remainder of this quadrant is quite empty and that there are no works other than IC showing high frequencies of the nouns and names characteristic of both the religious and attack groups.

Some may object that Kierkegaard’s works differ from one another in many different respects and that these cannot be adequately represented in merely spatial terms and certainly not in only two dimensions. In fact, any difference can be represented as a dimension and the various works plotted percisely thereon. For example, an earlier study of FB using the 128 words most characteristic of that work showed that its fifth dimension is Abraham as unbeliever vs. Abraham as believer[8] and another of all the writings using their 250 most common nouns and names that their fourth dimension was love of neighbor vs. worship of God, their fifth the pathology of society vs. the pathology of the self,[9] etc. Indeed, the present study suggests a name for their third dimension but we deliberately omit this because our data is very sparse and, particularly, because our goal here is to simplify. It is however clear that, given a sufficiently large number of words, such studies can preserve the detail and nuances of traditional ones and perhaps much else as well. Indeed, they both enable and force us to make differences which most of us have never noticed but which, like the above, are crucial neverthelss.

Others may object that the first two dimensions in such studies are perfectly obvious but that the rest are at best conjectural. In fact this objection contains the seeds of its own destruction. We may know the names of these two dimensions but the program certainly does not. Instead, it identifies or, more accurately, enables the investigator to identify or confirm these dimensions and it uses exactly the same routines and produces exactly the same kind of information for all lower dimensions. In short, one cannot dismiss the names of the first two as obvious and reject those of the remainder simply because, left to our own devices, we would never suspect their presence nor, certainly, succeed in naming them.

Kierkegaard knew that one day the “machinery” of his life and writings would be studied and studied[10] and he was human enough to take some small pleasure in this thought. He also saw and perhaps regretted that in the future graphic results such as those in this study would increasingly replace detailed textual accounts as models of explanation. Indeed, perhaps the only aspect of this study which would have surprised him is that it is possible to construct such an accurate and perceptive plot of his writings simply on the basis of the profiles of the 50 nouns and names most common in them. But this is neither accident nor mere serendipity. Rather, it is because there is a vast amount of information stored in these profiles, information which so far perhaps only few of us have imagined. Of course it requires new tools and skills to achieve this understanding but I hope that this small study may persuade at least some that it is well worth the effort.

NOTES

Appendix

LP Af en endnu Levendes Papirer From the Papers of One…

BI Om Begrebet Ironi The Concept of Irony

EE1 Enten - Eller. Første halvbind Either/Or, vol. 1

EE2 Enten - Eller. Andet halvbind Either/Or, vol. 2

G Gjentagelsen Repetition

FB Frygt og Bæven Fear and Trembling

T Atten opbyggelige Taler Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

BA Begrebet Angest The Concept of Anxiety

PS Philosophiske Smuler Philosophical Fragments

F Forord Prefaces

SV Stadier paa Livets Vei Stages on Life’s Way

TTL Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder Three Discourses…Spirits

AE Afsluttende…Efterskrift Concluding Unscientific Postscripts

BFF Bladartikler, …”Forfatterskabet” Articles Related to the Writings

LA En literair Anmeldelse Two Ages

OTA Opbyggelige Taler…Aand Upbuilding Discourses…Spirits

KK Krisen og en Krise…Liv The Crisis…Life of an Actress

KG Kjerlighedens Gjerninger Works of Love

TSA Tvende…Smaa-Afhandlinger Two Ethical-Religious Essays

CT Christelige Taler Christian Discourses

SD Sygdommen til Døden The Sickness Unto Death

IC Indøvelse i Christendom Practice in Christianity

SFV Synspunktet…Forfatter-Virksomhed The Point of View…an Author

LF Lillien paa Marken og Fuglen… The Lily of the Field and …

FV Om min Forfatter-Virksomed On My Work as an Author

YTS “Ypperstepræsten”…”Synderinden” Three Discourses…Communion

TAF To Taler ved Altergangen… Two Discourses at the Communion

EOT En opbyggelig Taler An Upbuilding Discourse

GU Guds Uforanderlighed The Changelessness of God

TS Til Selvprøvelse, Samtiden anbefalet For Self-Examination…

DS Dømmer selv! Judge for Yourselves!

B21 Bladartikler 1854-55 I-XXI Newspaper Articles, 1854-5

DSS Dette skal siges; … This must be said…

O Øieblikket, nr. 1-10 The Instant, nos. 1-10

HCD Hvad Christus dømmer… Christ’s Judgment…Christianity

[1] “On My Work as an Author,” in The Point of View, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) p. 12. The original reads as follows: “Til vidtløftig Fremstilling var da her mindst Stedet; her gjaldt det netop om ganske korteligen at kunne folde Det sammen i Eenfold, Det, som er udfoldet i de mange Bøger eller som udfoldet er de mange Bøger; …” FV, p. 68.

[2] These dimensions are the graphic counterpart of the polarities or dialectical oppositions within Kierkegaard’s works.

[3] I had originally intended to use the titles of these works in this plot but these obscured even its most obvious patterns and I have therefore used my own title codes and explained them in the Appendix. I do not apoligize for this: Kierkegaard scholarship is now a truly international affair and we need designations which everyone who knows even a smattering of Danish can immediately recognize. Equally important, we must learn to think of Kierkegaard as present to our discussions and I have always valued these markers because they would have told him immediately which of his many works we were actually discussing.

[4] Cf., e.g. ibid., p. 18.

[5] SFV, pp. 31 and 55 f.

[6] SFV, pp. 31 55 and 63.

[7] Alastair McKinnon, “Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom: Its Lexical History,” Toronto Journal of Theology, vol. 9, no. 2 (1993) pp. 95-106.

[8] Alastair McKinnon, The Multi-Dimensional Concordance: A New Tool for Literary Research,” Computers and the Humanities, vol. 27, (1993) pp. 165-183.

[9] Alastair McKinnon, “Mapping the Dimension of a Literary Corpus.” Literary and Linguistic Computing, vol. 4, no. 2 (1989) pp. 73-84.

[10] Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trs. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) 6078.