The interesting and the interested

stages on a concept's way

pp. 17-28

in: Patrick Stokes, Kierkegaard's mirrors, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

Kierkegaard's rich psychological vocabulary, populated with evocative terms such as "passion," "despair," "anxiety," and so on, has excited extensive commentary. Yet one such term that has received relatively little attention in the course of English-language Kierkegaard scholarship (and only slightly more in Danish) has been the term interesse, universally translated as the English "interest." This lack of attention is understandable. In the pantheon of Kierkegaardian psychological descriptors, interesse appears to be a relatively minor entity compared to some of the other terms mentioned above. On the whole, Kierkegaard's interest in the term (and it's only fair to warn you that "interest" puns like that are unavoidable from this point onward) is largely confined to the earlier phases of his authorship, occurring mostly in the journals around 1842–43 and the Postscript. The word interesse occurs around 165 times in the published works, which, given that (like its English counterpart) the word has ubiquitous, everyday uses, is hardly remarkable.¹