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The Reception of Kierkegaard’s Nachlass in the English-Speaking World

In the anglophone world little research has been done directly on Kierkegaard’s Nachlass. There exists to date no independent research monograph from the pen of an anglophone scholar dedicated exclusively to this body of material. But this is not to say that the Nachlass is wholly unknown to anglophone students and scholars. It has been used primarily for two different purposes. First, the Nachlass has been regarded as a biographical source. Thus, it has been mined for autobiographical statements and anecdotes which could be put together often for the purpose of introducing Kierkegaard to an audience of introductory students. This approach is fostered in part by editions which explicitly present the material as autobiographical or as Kierkegaard’s diary. Works that use the Nachlass in this way cannot be said to make it an object of real research since they tend to take an uncritical view of the material as a biographical source of information; they simply assume that whatever Kierkegaard writes there must be true and accurate statements about his life. Thus, while these editions have been quite successful in the classroom at introducing Kierkegaard to students, they have not made any significant contribution to anglophone Kierkegaard research as such. Second, many scholars in the anglophone world tend to make use of the journals in an ad hoc fashion in order to support their interpretations and analyses of specific themes in the published works. In other words, the actual object of research is invariably an issue in one of the published works, and the Nachlass is used to supplement that when possible. Given the problems with the difficulty of using the material in the Papirer edition, it is clear that it was the creation of the three volume index from 1975-78 that made research of this kind possible at all.1