Customer Reviews:
Comprehensible.......2006-09-25
Written with humor and very concisely. I love the pictures (comics) Donald Palmer did a great job of introducing Kierkegaard and his philosophy to the masses.
Amazingly Accurate and Fun Portrayal for the Beginner.......2006-05-28
Author/illustrator Palmer brings out Kierkegaard's brilliance in a way accessible to all, simply conveying the complexity of Kierkegaard the person and Kierkegaard the writings while providing a continuous laugh fitting for SK's own serio-comic ironic style. Kierkegaard's the epitome of epigrammatic writing and living, a zealous genius misrepresented by both secularist existentialists as well as respected Christian theologians/teachers who wrongly accuse SK of throwing out objective Christian truth, when really SK's subjectivity IS the evangelical truth of personal relationship with God, not mere external religious tradition. As for the comics in this book, they (as is SK) are HILarious, though probably more so because of the Bible allusions. This book contains a glossary and bibliography, and after this SK intro I'd recommend 'The Essential Kierkegaard' by the editors Hong, then skipping 'Concept of Irony' and starting with 'Either/Or' reading thru the rest of SK's books, which from the outset were written on 2 parallel tracks, one being pseudonymous works (from which it is unfair to attribute quotes to SK) and the other being signed works. P.S.--it's ironic that SK is now associated with the existentialist all-about-self-and-living-in-the-moment philosophies when SK lived so dead to self (his name even means 'graveyard') and with vision, methodically poured himself out in a planned series of books so that his readers entrapped in dead state church religiosity might become aware that they're dead and need to get a life (a self).
Digestible Kierkegaard for Postmodern People.......2006-02-16
Few initially realize that the aesthetic slug which Kierkegaard often decried was he himself. Kierkegaard stuggled with determining, or rather willing, who he would be as a man in books like Either/Or. All of this is what makes him so relevant for postmoderns, existentialism students and even for card-carrying religionists.
The format of the For Beginners series is very inviting and helps make the subject matter less daunting and far from boring, which is the point, and a good reason to use this series' versions whenever getting to know a thinker for the first time. You will get a broad overview of the person's career without getting bogged down too quickly in any one particular life phase. Once you see what it is you appreciate in the career timeline, you can more easily zero in on that selection of books and go from there.
Kierkegaard For Beginners covers the Either/Or argument, the felial Abraham sacrifice delimma and explores Soren's own Christian commitment in a way that will charm and attract even nonchristians as it did me. His inspired figure of the "Knight of Faith" is a fascinating hook and resolves his existentialist concerns heroically.
At the bottom of his writing is the need to account for and deal productively with the bitter anxiety bedrock of the human psyche, and how to resolve that energy and bring it into a sort of freeing self-affirmation by resolving one's will on the issues on which it brings anxiety to bear (thus the "Either/Or" theme elsewhere in title by same name). The comical critique of this is "which breakfast cereal ought I to eat today?!" but the practical application is more in line with "should I renounce playing bridge with the back-stabbing cretins at the moose lodge and take up philosophy/working with kids/see Tibet.") The concern is on changing those things that make one anxious so that they no longer cause anxiety. This said, there is a positive spin on anxiety as the doorbell that "God" rings when he is ready to visit. The feeling of dread, thus, is the threshold over which one comes into contact again with the Divine or whatever makes your life unquestionably, profoundly worthwhile.
This book, as typically the series does, makes the full nature of the life and work roughly, excitingly intelligible in the space of about an hour. No small feat. Definite MUST for Kierkegaard beginners.
Profound Book with Funny Illustrations.......2004-12-29
I don't consider this a comic because the content is too profound to be called a comic. If you understand the content of this book well, the illustrations make you laugh heartily. I find them entertaining.
I would have never understood what Kierkegaard's work is all about if I didn't start with this book because Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is said to have used more ink than anyone on Earth, having written more than what an average person can read in one lifetime. I would have understood nothing if I had to read several of his major books and try to figure out what they are all about. The author did a great job in summarizing his philosophy.
Though Christianity pervades his work, I do not think his philosophy is about Christianity. Instead I would say that he established a universal philosophy by using concepts of Christianity. In other words, his philosophy can be applied to any area of life in any culture.
One can spend money on a book and let that book sit somewhere, but this type of book becomes valuable when digested with effort. It becomes something money cannot buy.
Didn't Sartre Get his Own Book in this Series?.......2004-09-20
This is a serviceable introduction to the writings and life of Soren Kierkegaard (SK). It hits several of his major works and emphases and does a pretty good job unpacking some difficult concepts (dread, despair, irony etc..). Palmer falls into a common trap, however, of interpreting SK through the lens of the twentieth century existentialists that utilize him. There was a point in the text where I had serious questions whether he had quoted Sartre more than SK himself (it is of note that Palmer also wrote Sartre for Beginners). This leads at times to anachronism in Palmer's presentation and less than full treatment of those ideas that were important to SK but dismissed by those who followed (namely passionate, ironic and devotional theological prose). The illustrations were typical of what I have come to expect from this series: helpful aids for visual learners, occasionally comical (there is a great one on Woody Allen's take on the intro to Sickness Unto Death), but usually a little disappointing, particularly considering the vast reservoir of ironic and comical material availed by SK's sharp wit and various pseudonyms.
Book Description
"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history.
Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured.
Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come.
Customer Reviews:
On the basis of a bit - a broad judgment that this is the major biography.......2007-03-16
I have read a number of reviews of this book. They are unanimous in acclaiming it the definitive Kierkegaard biography, both in its comprehensiveness and its readability. It tells the story of Kierkegaard's life year by year, with special emphasis on what happens from 1835 when he was twenty- two to his death in 1855. The biography places special emphasis on the literary poetic Kierkegaard. It does not interpret in depth his varied and paradoxical philosophical and religious works. It does however provide the valuable biographical information which can enable us to better understand those works.
Mankind has few geniuses and when they come along they shock us into a new awareness. It is possible to argue that where Kierkegaard most shocked was in his emphasis on the 'lived life' the 'real experience' the 'authentic encounter with God' .And this as opposed to the false, formal and protected encounter.
This of course is the major reason why the Existensialists, including the atheist Sartre could find a true predecessor in him.
Kierkegaard 's labors in decrowning Hegel, and in showing the official Church to be at odds with the true experiencing of Christianity were couched in a language, ironic, paradoxical, parabolic and witty. The pseudonymous authors who spoke for various sides of his personality enabled him to express sides of a personality which always wished to remain somewhat hidden, secret and mysterious.
I have read only a small part of this work and am very eager to read more. And this because Kierkegaard like Kafka is one of those thinker- poets one of those supreme individual masters of their own way of writing in the world as to to seem to me as for so many others, a true spiritual forbearer.
the new sk gold standard.......2007-01-18
First published in Denmark in 2000, Joakim Garff's massive and monumental biography of the "melancholy Dane" makes its English debut just in time to commemorate Kierkegaard's death exactly 150 years ago ( November 11, 1855). Anyone who has taken a college freshman class in western civilization or philosophy has a vague familiarity with the name, if not his thought, and some have even dared to tackle his complicated and brilliant work of "indirect" communication via pseudonyms and his later "direct" (and was it ever direct!) communication under his own name. In grad school I took a turn at Kierkegaard, and even now in my office there hangs a poem by him thanks to my wife's calligraphy:
Herr! gieb uns blöde Augen (Lord, give us weak eyes)
für Dinge, die nichts taugen, (for things that do not matter)
und Augen voller Klarheit (and eyes full of clarity)
in alle deine Wahrheit! (in all your truth!)
Kierkegaard prefaced his work The Sickness Unto Death with this prayer-poem.
Although a wild diversity of interpreters from existentialism to deconstructionism has claimed Kierkegaard as their own, and although SK's personality and complex oeuvre present any biographer with an extraordinarily difficult task, Garff shows that he is rightly understood as an artist-poet whose focus was distinctly and deliberately religious. He treats the reader to large doses of SK himself, and reviews all his major writings and journals, focusing on Kierkegaard's life and not really his thought. In this sense he treats Kierkegaard personally rather than intellectually or theologically. He starts with his early years, and proceeds year by year. I would have enjoyed an epilogue that took a stab at Kierkegaard's ecclesiastical, pastoral, and theological legacy. How did a writer in backwater Denmark whose books had print runs of 500 copies (only one of which sold out), whose grave remained unmarked for twenty years after his death, and who barely traveled, emerge as one of the most seminal thinkers of Christian history?
Throughout his short life (1813-1855) Kierkegaard battled a pronounced and chronic melancholia that resulted from a number of factors--his pietistic and stern father, his public humiliation in Copenhagen's rollicking newspaper the Corsair, his sense of victimization, his scathing denunciation of the Church of Denmark's chief bishop (Mynster), and his broken engagement with Regina Olsen. His hypochondria did not help, nor did his estrangement from his lone surviving sibling (his five siblings and mother all died by the time Kierkegaard was about 20). For much of his life, he tells us, through a monumental effort of repression, diversion, and displacement, Kierkegaard distracted and protected himself from his melancholia through his prodigious writing. And there is no doubt that his melancholia served as a fund for enormous artistic creativity and interior reflection (a fact not lost on psychiatrist Peter Kramer in his recent book Against Depression). Writing was his therapy, he once observed: "I saved my life by telling stories." Like Mozart, he just might have been the artistic genius whose sickly body could hardly contain its pulsating brilliance.
What infuriated Kierkegaard was pious pretense, intellectual sophistry, the evisceration of the radical Gospel, and a bourgeois religiosity that tamed Christianity of what he called its "terror." The state-paid clergy, he sneered, derived social and financial gain from the Gospel: "In the splendid cathedral, the high, well-born, highly honored, and worthy Geheime-General-Ober-Hof-Preacher, the chosen darling of the important people, steps before a select circle of the select, and movingly sermonizes on a text chosen by himself, namely, 'God has chosen the lowly and despised of the earth'--and no one laughs" (p. 773). Since no one laughed at the discrepancy between genuine Christianity and the pale imitation of cultural Christendom, Kierkegaard intended to provoke a collision or catastrophe between the two. This was train wreck by design. He was an agitator and pyromaniac who employed his literary brilliance to utilize satire as an act of arson: "I am the one who has set the fire in order to smoke out illusions and trickery" (p. 774).
Garff honors his subject but does not ignore his faults. Kierkegaard could be unctuous, petty, shrill, cynical, inaccessible to anyone he did not care to see, and vindictive. One subject of his lethal pen lamented, "he could make you feel small." His father was one of the wealthiest people in Denmark, and it was not lost on his critics that Kierkegaard never worked while he enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle. But he had little money at his death, and financed most of his own publications. One observer complained that while Jesus cried over Jerusalem, Kierkegaard employed dripping sarcasm to laugh at the church.
There is something like a scorched-earth smell in Kierkegaard. It is hardly news that the church "swarms with many faults" (John Calvin). I rather like the choice of the feminist Catholic writer Joan Chittister who describes herself as a "loyal member of a dysfunctional family." Still, we can thank Kierkegaard for never letting us forget the ideal, how far and so self-servingly we fail it, and forcing us to consider what it might mean for each one of us as a "single individual" whom he addressed.
this book is not absurd .......2006-02-17
K fans-and in this day of badly needed freely speaking Danes, who is not one?-can at last rejoice. Here finally is a book about SK that makes clear the Corsair magazine affair, the matter of K's trousers and thin legs and curved back and how he took his coffee (strong with lots of sugar), the unending engagement to Regine, and oh yes K's attack upon Christendom.
Garff is learned, witty and a master prose stylist. Under a photo of K's elder brother Peter Christian we read...'Irresolution seems almost to shine forth from the eyes...' A self-promoting K enthusiast named Sommer is described as having the 'zeal of a plagiarist.' One could go on and on, and Garff's observations always seem to hit the mark.
Also wonderfully, there is nothing here about 'the father of existentialism.' Garff tells the life, and leaves the impact on the future to others.
Somewhat ironically, a fun book to read.......2005-10-16
It may seem astonishing to many that a nearly-900 page biography of Soren Kierkegaard would ever be described as riveting, or as a page-turner, but that is exactly what this book by Joakim Garff, translated by Bruce Kirmmse from the original Danish, turns out to be. I first noticed it at the bookstore of my seminary, and, intended only to read through a few pages at the beginning to be somewhat familiar with the text (having a friend who is very into Kierkegaard), I noticed when I next looked up that I was 60 pages into the book, and half an hour late for my next appointment.
As Garff states in his preface, biographies of Kierkegaard are few and far between. Even in his native Danish language, 'biographies of Kierkegaard that have appeared since Georg Brandes' critical portrait was published in 1877 can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand.' Part of this was Kierkegaard's own stated desire that readers read his works, not into his person, and he often published under pseudonyms. However, this is an ironic situation, Garff writes, because Kierkegaard puts so much of himself into his writing that there are definite autobiographical elements. Israel Levin, Kierkegaard's secretary for many years, also recognised the paradoxical situation in dealing with a Kierkegaard biography - 'this is a life so full of contradictions that it will be difficult to get to the bottom of his character.'
One of the things Garff should be credited for is not trying to force a particular paradigm or interpretation on Kierkegaard. We don't discover 'Kierkegaard the existentialist' or 'Kierkegaard the religious rebel' or other such personas here - rather, these elements and more are all interwoven into Garff's text to show a complex and not always comprehensible figure. Garff is neither a true-believer nor an official apologist from any set place - he instead set out 'not only to tell the great stories in Kierkegaard's life but also to scrutinse the minor details and incidental circumstances, the cracks in the granite of genius....'
Kierkegaard was a troubled and troubling figure. His life was very brief for someone with such a prodigious output - he lived only 42 years, and his productive time as an intellectual was really only half that time. Garff organises the biography chronologically, taking a year-by-year approach (after putting Kierkegaard's childhood and adolescence together into one chapter, 1813-1834), each year being devoted to its own chapter. In this fashion, Garff looks much more closely at the events and relationship in Kierkegaard's life (both personal and institutional relationships) rather than systematically looking at themes and ideas in his works.
Garff seems to assume some familiarity with Kierkegaard's works at various points - this is not a critical analysis of Kierkegaard's thinking, nor is it even necessarily descriptive of his work in many cases. However, the biography is accessible to those who do not have much experience with Kierkegaard (and I must count myself among those; I have read a few of Kierkegaard's works, and a few analyses, but would never consider myself an expert on the subject).
As translator Bruce Kirmmse states, the book is done in a rather conversational style with an informal sense about it - it is not a dry and dusty historical tome. Not being familiar with Danish, I cannot but take his word that this is true of the original text by Garff, but given the reading here, one cannot imagine that Garff or the editors would have been happy with it done in any other way had this not been faithful to the original. In keeping with this more informal style, there are endnotes rather than footnotes. There are nearly three dozen illustrations (paintings, photographs, other line-art and maps), an extensive bibliography.
I will dare to say, as ironic as it may be both to the subject of reading the biography of a philosopher as well as to the subject of this particular figure, this was a fun book to read.
Kierkegaard for Everyone.......2005-10-10
A very well written, and readable book. The author does a good job of fleshing out the context in each time period of SK's life. The reader comes to know the people who were important to SK both personally and professionally. And, SK's important writings are put within the context of his life and culture. Garff has a sense of humor, and temperance in his editorializing. You don't have to be a fan of Kierkegaard to enjoy this book.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent one- volume selection of the journals.......2006-05-18
The 'Journals' of Kierkegaard are not simply the testing - ground for many of his ideas and projects, they are the life- record which indicates his mood and feeling. He began them in 1833 when he was twenty, and wrote them to the end of his life. They served in a way as his most important and trusted friend. In them he contemplated important life- decisions. They are an important supplement to his most important works, and contain many of his most original thoughts and aphorisms.
To give a real feeling of the Journals I will quote one of the most famous passages at some length. It was written in 1843.
" . What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know, except in the way knowledge must precede all action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. And what use here would it be if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way through the philosophers' systems and were able to call them all to account on request, point out inconsistencies in every single circle? And what use here would it be to be able to work out a theory of the state, and put all the pieces from so many places into one whole, construct a world which, again, I myself did not inhabit but merely held up for others to see? What use would it be to be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and for my life? "
In this passage Kierkegaard contemplates and fleshes out his own life- mission. Note how rich the passage is in the figurative 'as if 'language which so enriched his writing. Note too how the writing despite its somewhat awkward mode of motion makes definite progress towards a wise and turning- point life decision."
A superb one-volume distillation of Kierkegaard's journals.......2004-02-07
Along with an older and somewhat smaller one-volume edition by Alexander Dru (worth seeking out, but very difficult to find), this provides readers of Kierkegaard's works a usable collection of highlights from his massive and exceedingly important JOURNALS AND PAPERS. Although this volume runs to over 700 pages, it does not represent a tenth of the complete edition in Danish.
There are many reasons for someone to read in Kierkegaard's journals. He used his journals for dry runs for many ideas that later cropped up in his various books and discourses. He often presents these ideas in a more straightforward manner than he would in his books. But he also often writes things that he did not intend to be seen by the public in his lifetime. Make no mistake about it: Kierkegaard definitely wrote these journals with the assumption that they would later be read by others in published form. But the knowledge that this would only come after his death freed him from any form of constraint, not that even here he is terribly forthcoming.
Reading the journals is also essential because it is the only way to get a truly balanced picture of his literary career and life. For instance, the caricature of Kierkegaard is of a soul who unhappily engaged in a Quixotic battle with the Danish Lutheran church in the final years of his life. The image is of an unhappy, isolated, tormented soul who never finds his rest. In fact, from the journals we find a person who has achieved a great deal of personal peace and a quiet contentment. This cannot be drawn from the books he published in his lifetime, but only from the journals. For all these reasons, anyone interested in Kierkegaard will profit enormously from these pages.
My lone complaint is that Alastair Hannay is not the most gifted prose stylist in the world. I have read just about all his words in English (all dealing with Kierkegaard or translations of Kierkegaard), and while I have no doubt about his accuracy as a translator, I have no confidence in his literary abilities. As a result, the volume--like the other volumes he has translated for Penguin--is highly serviceable, but not something that will thrill and inspire.
I should mention that Amazon shows a Princeton University Press edition of the JOURNALS scheduled to appear in the fall of 2004. I do not know very much about this edition. I am assuming that it is a single volume edition, but I have no idea how extensive of an edition this will be. Princeton's publications of Kierkegaard's works tend to be somewhat schizophrenic. While their edition of Kierkegaard's works are likely to be the standard edition for a very long time to come, they also produce some odd collections that seem to be targeted at a more popular audience. Perhaps their edition will be scholarly (my hope). Either way, this excellent volume by Penguin will either serve if the Princeton is unhelpful, or a useful alternative if it is successful.
Average customer rating:
- what a great diary
- A Smattering of SK's Voluminous Journal Entries
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The Diary Of Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard
Manufacturer: Citadel
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Papers and Journals: A Selection (Penguin Classics)
ASIN: 0806502517
Release Date: 1998-08-31 |
Book Description
Soren Kierkegaard, who was born in Denmark and died there at the age of forty-two, is regarded by many as the father of existentialist thinking. During his lifetime the Hegelian theologian he reacted against the Hegelian theologists in Denmark, denounced organized religion and held that the act of choice by an individual was all-important.
The Diary covers the important elements in Kierkegaard's life, including his childhood, his relations with his father, the influence of other writers on him, his broken engagement (which had a far-reaching effect on the rest of his life), and his celebrated quarrel with the Church.
Kierkegaard's writings are important because he is almost the first European writer to take a modern, analytical, psychological approach to religion. Proust, Joyce, and Aldous Huxley were only a few of the modern writers influenced by the Dane; and Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of existentialism is based on his thinking.
Customer Reviews:
what a great diary.......2001-03-10
Well it isn't really a diary. It's more like reading his philosophy, but more intimate. Even though I like his philosophy, I preferred this the most. In this, he doesn't make subtle hints about his father and Regine. He completely bares his relationship with them and it's rather heartbreaking. Also
Kierkegaard has a fresh sarcastic wit that I wasn't expecting.
A Smattering of SK's Voluminous Journal Entries.......2000-10-25
This highly condnsed anthology of some of SK's journey entries provides a good overview of many of the key events which shaped his life, as well as his own reflections about these events. Worth reading in conjunction with other works.
Book Description
Soren Kierkegaard's influence has been felt in many areas of human thought from theology to psychology. The nearly one hundred of his prayers gathered here from published works and private papers, not only illuminate his own life of prayer, but speak to the concerns of Christians today.
The second part of the volume is a reinterpretation of the life and thought of Kierkegaard. Long regarded as primarily a poet or a philosopher, Kierkegaard is revealed as a fundamentally religious thinker whose central problem was that of becoming a Christian, of realizing personal existence. Perry D. LeFevre's penetrating analysis takes the reader to the religious center of Kierkegaard's world.
Customer Reviews:
Authenticity.......2005-08-15
If only more Christians sought God as authentically and deeply as Kierkegaard did. The prayers that are prayed here are not meant to impress the reader or to demonstrate theological insights(though they most assuredly do), but are simply the product of a man who wanted nothing other than to know and please God.
An inspirational and thought-provoking collection of prayers.......1998-07-06
I have actually only read excerpts found in the book Devotional Classics. I was so moved and affected my the prayers including in that book, that I have been searching for the entire book. The prayers are insightful and thought provoking. They would make a terrific daily devotional.
Book Description
Encounters with Kierkegaard is a collection of every known eyewitness account of the great Danish thinker. Through many sharp observations of family members, friends and acquaintances, supporters and opponents, the life story of this elusive and remarkable figure comes into focus, offering a rare portrait of Kierkegaard the man.
Often viewed by his contemporaries as a person who deliberately cultivated an air of mystery and eccentricity, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) has been, then and now, a subject of great speculation. His startling attack on the established church, his broken engagement with a young woman from a respected family, and his searing criticisms of literary figures--from the editors of The Corsair to Hans Christian Andersen--are among the acts that brought him much notoriety during his short lifetime. Yet arriving at a sense of the philosopher's personality and motives behind his behavior has been a difficult task. He left no memoirs of autobiography, but in the enormous cannon of his published writings, the author and the person Søren Kierkegaard is problematically present in a welter of disguises. An indispensable path to understanding what he was like as a person, maintains Bruce Kirmmse, is through the observations of his contemporaries.
These accounts, ranging from the writings of Meïr Aron Goldschmidt, editor of The Corsair, to the recollections of Kierkegaard's fiancée, are organized around the major episodes of the philosopher's life. They enable us to glimpse, among many things, his spiritual and intellectual development, to get a sense of what it was like to be the object of his friendship or his wrath, and to examine various persons' opinions about his relationship with his young fiancée. The memories of this woman, Regine Olsen, who later married Fritz Schlegel, are among the most moving passages: they reveal her profound suffering, her personal understanding of Kierkegaard, and the satisfaction she ultimately felt, knowing that "he took her with him into history." This collection of first-hand accounts invites the reader to compare and interpret a wealth of fascinating stories, and in the end forms an intriguing "do-it-yourself" biography for both the scholar and general reader.
Average customer rating:
- The 'Journal 'as window of the Soul
- Absolutely essential for Kierkegaard lovers, but badly done
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Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks: Volume I: Journals AA-DD
Soren Kierkegaard
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
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ASIN: 0691092222 |
Book Description
I would like to write a novel in which the main character would be a man who got a pair of glasses, one lens of which reduced images as powerfully as an oxyhydrogen microscope, and the other of which magnified on the same scale, so that he perceived everything relatively.
A flight of fancy by an aspiring science fiction writer? While it may sound as such, this wistful musing is one of the little-discussed personal reflections of nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose remarkable journals and notebooks, unpublished during his lifetime, are presented here.
The first of an eleven-volume series produced by Copenhagen's Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, this volume is the first English translation and commentary of Kierkegaard's journals based on up-to-date scholarship. It offers new insight into Kierkegaard's inner life. In addition to early drafts of his published works, the journals contain his thoughts on current events and philosophical and theological matters, notes on books he was reading, miscellaneous jottings, and ideas for future literary projects. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the marginal comments he added later. The new edition of the journals reproduces this format and contains photographs of original manuscript pages, as well as extensive scholarly commentary. Translated by leading experts on Kierkegaard, Journals and Notebooks will become the benchmark for all future Kierkegaard scholarship.
Customer Reviews:
The 'Journal 'as window of the Soul .......2006-05-18
Robert Moore has written an excellent review in which he details the strengths and failings of the Howard Hong edited and translated 'Kierkegaard Journals' published by Indiana Press.
I would just want to say a word about the character of Kierkegaard's journals, and perhaps of journals in general in relation to the 'more formally constructed 'major works' of a writer.
Here I think of other journal - writers like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka , Emerson, Camus who were not simply writers, but like Kierkegaard 'thinker- writers'. All these writers used their journals as means and methods for preparation of their major works.
The Journal provides a means for the writer of putting down new conceptions, of trying ideas out, of exploring in new ways directions in thought.
It too provides a means of contemplating 'life situations and decisions'And too provides a way of trying to figure out the way ahead.
Often 'poetic- thinkers' like Kierkegaard and Kafka provide in their Journals examples of their very best thought.
Kierkegaad as a writer of Journals makes those Journals his confidante, and at the same time boasts that in and through them he conceals himself.
Reading the 'Journals' however one does not have the sense of being misled, but rather of knowing the intimate inner life of a very great thinker. It is a chance to 'look inside' and explore the area where Psychology , and Philosophy meet. The 'Journals' are thus a window to the Soul.
Here I might add that while I believe Robert Moore is right in preferring Journals presented chronologically in accord with the idea that they were written, the Hong idea of organizing the Journal entries according to topics also has a certain advantage, that of enabling one to explore a subject readily in depth.
Absolutely essential for Kierkegaard lovers, but badly done.......2004-02-07
If one accounts oneself a serious student of Kierkegaard, reading and studying the JOURNALS AND PAPERS is not really an option: it is a necessity. I own Kierkegaard's journals and his complete works in Danish, and side-by-side the journals dwarf the books (how anyone who died at the age of 42 could have been so prolific is an unanswerable question). But unfortunately those not willing or able to delve into the Danish are left with something of a dilemma: either read an abridged edition of Kierkegaard's Journal, or read this substantial four-volume edition. What is wrong with this edition? Well, a great deal indeed.
First, I should express appreciate to Howard Hong for having taken on the task of providing a English-language edition of this essential work. Even though it is exceedingly difficult to use, it does manage to make available the bulk of Kierkegaard's journals. Hong is a very solid translator, and one can have considerable confidence in any of the passages he translates.
So, what is wrong with the work? First, it is still incomplete. Perhaps Hong was unable to talk Indiana University Press into doing a complete translation. Final editions of works are not always reflections of what the editor/translator hoped to produce, but represents a compromise between scholar and publisher. It is not impossible that that is the case here. Still, although it is a substantial selection, it is incomplete. The more serious problem is the way that the text is presented. Instead of arranging the passages that are translated chronologically, which is the only way that really makes sense, Hong made the utterly bizarre decision to arrange the passages topically. Arranging the journals chronologically, and then providing a topical index could easily have achieved the same effect.
Still, the serious student of Kierkegaard really doesn't have a choice. This is a must-own for the Kierkegaard scholar, but because of the bizarre arrangement, I have found over the years that I spend considerably less time in these volumes than I do his other works. This is unfortunate because one often gets glimpses of a less formal Kierkegaard, finding him franker and less apt to hide behind masks. I'm grateful that these volumes exist, but I still regret they exist in the form that they do.
Addition -- September 24, 2004: Since writing this review I have learned that Princeton University Press, under the project editorship of Bruce Kirmmse, one of the world's finest Kierkegaard scholars, will be bringing out a new edition of Kierkegaard's PAPERS. Completion of this project is undoubtedly a few years off, but assuming they don't make the same mistake of this project, it will unquestionably be the edition to get in English.
Average customer rating:
- Probably the place to start in reading Kierkegaard
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The Point of View : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 22
Soren Kierkegaard ,
Howard V. Hong , and
Edna H. Hong
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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The Moment and Late Writings: Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 23
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Without Authority : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 18
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Christian Discourses : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 17
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Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 5
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The Book on Adler : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 24
ASIN: 0691058555 |
Book Description
As a spiritual autobiography, Kierkegaard's The Point of View for My Work as an Author stands with such great works as Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia pro vita sua--but with a difference. It is neither a confessional autobiography nor a defense. It is an author's story of a lifetime of writing, his understanding of the common aim and comprehensive coherence of the maze of his greatly varied pseudonymous and signed works.
In an earlier work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard acknowledged his authorship of the series of pseudonymous works that began with Either/Or. With the imminent publication of the second edition of Either/Or, the pseudonymous series would come full circle, and Kierkegaard again intended to cease writing. Now was the time for a direct "report to history" on the authorship as a whole. In addition to the resulting Point of View, which was published posthumously, the present volume also contains the companion pieces Armed Neutrality and On My Work as an Author, a contemporary substitute for the postponed Point of View.
Supplementary entries taken from Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers document the context and the development of the writings on the authorship as a whole. In addition, they disclose Kierkegaard's considerations as he wrestled with decisions about publishing the three works and other works that were the "fruit of the year 1848 ... the year of my richest productivity."
Customer Reviews:
Probably the place to start in reading Kierkegaard.......2002-08-13
The greatest challenge for any newcomer to Kierkegaard is finding the best place to gain an overview. In my opinion, this is the finest place to start. In the main work in this collection, THE POINT OF VIEW (the book also contains some smaller pieces on his Authorship), Kierkegaard sets out to explain his purposes and strategy in writing the books constituting what he calls his Authorship. Students of Kierkegaard generally refer to these books as his Pseudonymous Authorship, because in all of these he writes none of them under his own name, but employs a variety of fictionalized authors, who represent a particular point of view that is not that of Kierkegaard himself. The Pseudonymous works are contrasted with what has become to be known as Kierkegaard's Second Literature (a descriptions attributed to Kierkegaard scholar Robert L. Perkins), which comprises his edifying works and his later religious works, most of which were published under Kierkegaard's own name, though with a couple of his greatest later works published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus.
Some of these works, such as EITHER/OR I, contain writings on a variety of aesthetic topics. Many of the books deal with either ethical or religious topics, though the latter never from within a religious perspective. Kierkegaard's main argument in the POINT OF VIEW is that from first to last he was, even when writing on aesthetic topics, a religious author. The Pseudonymous works all presuppose a theory of stages, which Kierkegaard describes as moving from the aesthetic to the ethical and into the religious (the precise prepositions, according to SK, being of the utmost importance).
It is not clear that Kierkegaard had a precise understanding of all this at the moment he was writing the first of his Pseudonymous works, but it is unquestionable that he moved to this point of view fairly early on. This little volume is, therefore, a wonderful introduction to Kierkegaard's most famous works, and remains one of the most fascinating reflections by a great writer on the nature of his own work ever written.
Average customer rating:
- Best clear, concise intro/orientation book on Kierkegaard !
- An absolutely first class intro to Kierkeaard!!!
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Kierkegaard (Philosophers)
Michael Watts
Manufacturer: Oneworld Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
General
| Biographies & Memoirs
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Existentialism
| Movements
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General
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Modern
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ASIN: 1851683178 |
Book Description
A lucid and understandable guide to Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and founding father of Existentialism.
Customer Reviews:
Best clear, concise intro/orientation book on Kierkegaard !.......2004-07-17
What an absolute pleasure it was to finally read a book on Kierkegaard that not only gets to the salient themes & thought of `The Father Of Existentialism' but also presents them in a readily understandable manner. Michael Watts has added a very important source book to the ever-expanding library of literary works on Kierkegaard. He has been able to distill Kierkegaard's complex original works into meaningful & manageable vignettes that compel the serious reader to seek out & explore more of the Danish philosopher's works. Michael Watts' work on Kierkegaard invites the reader to stop, look & listen to personal `truths' in Kierkegaard's works that one can be guided by in one's own ongoing process of becoming the `self'.
An absolutely first class intro to Kierkeaard!!!.......2004-03-07
I regard Kierkegaard not only as the true father of existentialism but also as an outstanding philosopher whose ideas have been, and still are, a major inspiration for thinkers in the world of philosophy, psychology and religion. Michael Watts has presented an extraordinary introduction that will appeal not only to the complete beginner but also to advanced students of philosophy. His lucid and inspiring explanations of Kierkegaard's thought have considerably improved my understanding of Kierkegaard's conceptions of faith and anxiety, and his coverage of Kierkegaard's most important work 'Fear and Trembling' is by far the clearest and most comprehensive I have come across. I thoroughly and confidently recommend this text, expecially since Professor Alistair Hannay of the University of Oslo, who is an acknowledged world authority on Kierkegaard, wrote a two page foreword in praise of this book!
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