Kierkegaard Anthology

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Anthology
Review: Although SK is not an easy read due perhaps to his prolixity and sometimes tortuous reasoning, this anthology provides the reader with an excellent overview and foretaste of his more demanding, full-length works. Perhaps the single-best introduction to SK in print.

Rating:
Summary: not so much a philosopher's Kierkegaard
Review: Many consider it objectionable (probably Kierkegaard among them!) to chop up philosophical works so literary in style into pieces to be patched together in an anthology. Others would note that a philosopher is best introduced through a painstaking reading of a classic and definitive text, and thus Plato is to be met in "The Republic," Nietzsche in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and the later Wittgenstein in "Philosophical Investigations." In the case of Kierkegaard, however, no one work adequately expresses the multi-faceted nature of his messages. His individual works are incomplete as representations of his overall vision. I find, anyway, that they each represent a finely crafted meditation on a crucial aspect of his thought which cannot be fully understood without having all the other aspects in mind. They serve more like chapters in a larger book than they stand independently on their own. That's why Bretall's anthology which presents them as a whole is so valuable.

Bretall also avoids chopping up chapters and ripping quips and humorous digressions or controversial statements out of their context. For the most part he presents key chapters in their entirety and helps to reproduce their context for the reader either by explaining it in his helpful introductions or by presenting enough chapters from a given work that the context of a particular chapter is clear.

Understanding Kierkegaard's context and that of his writings and that of the chapters within them is so crucial to fruitful engagement of his ideas that this compiled tornado of thought that Bretall provides is the best place to start reading him.

But then again, I could be bias because that's how I started reading him...

Rating:
Summary: The Best Place To Start Reading Kierkegaard
Review: Many consider it objectionable (probably Kierkegaard among them!) to chop up philosophical works so literary in style into pieces to be patched together in an anthology. Others would note that a philosopher is best introduced through a painstaking reading of a classic and definitive text, and thus Plato is to be met in "The Republic," Nietzsche in "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," and the later Wittgenstein in "Philosophical Investigations." In the case of Kierkegaard, however, no one work adequately expresses the multi-faceted nature of his messages. His individual works are incomplete as representations of his overall vision. I find, anyway, that they each represent a finely crafted meditation on a crucial aspect of his thought which cannot be fully understood without having all the other aspects in mind. They serve more like chapters in a larger book than they stand independently on their own. That's why Bretall's anthology which presents them as a whole is so valuable.

Bretall also avoids chopping up chapters and ripping quips and humorous digressions or controversial statements out of their context. For the most part he presents key chapters in their entirety and helps to reproduce their context for the reader either by explaining it in his helpful introductions or by presenting enough chapters from a given work that the context of a particular chapter is clear.

Understanding Kierkegaard's context and that of his writings and that of the chapters within them is so crucial to fruitful engagement of his ideas that this compiled tornado of thought that Bretall provides is the best place to start reading him.

But then again, I could be bias because that's how I started reading him...

Rating:
Summary: Earth Shattering
Review: This book was assigned to my Kierkegaard/Nietzsche course, of which 276 pgs of selected material is necessary. It covers Kierkegaard's entire career, in answer to the problem: What does it mean to become a Christian, to be a Christian, in Christendom?
Kierkegaard refers to himself as "the corrective" who will make things harder.

On that note, he draws a comparison between the New Testament Christianity and the "lemonade twaddle" of the Danish State Church. He later on writes a book called "Attack On Christendom" in which, evidently, he is not just going after the Danish State Church. His "attack" is applicable to churches still, Danish or otherwise. He begins by calling Christ an "insane combination." How can God, Who is outside time and space, enter time and space and become a man? If I point to a man across the street and say, "look, it's God over there" you'll think I am crazy. The idea of God being among us, as a man, in the form of a poor servant, is offensive to all reason. It is an "absurdity," a "paradox." And yet, says Kierkegaard, this is why he believes in it. But churches everywhere have forgotten the tension of the paradox. They have made being a Christian too easy. It has become a social routine going through the motions, without struggle. But true Christianity, says Kierkegaard, is hard and almost impossible because "Faith is risk."

If you believe in the Absurd (God Incarnate, Jesus Christ), you are forced to maintain this belief passionately and inwardly. You engage yourself to self-scrutiny and self-activity. He compares it to be stranded in the middle of the ocean: there is no certainty, all is faith-not reason.

Kierkegaard is called a philosopher, but he himself repeatedly calls himself a poet. All his writings have poetic traces in them, which puts him apart from any other philosopher. He is simply unorthodox, revolutionary, sarcastic, and strange. He declares that "truth is subjectivity" and that Christian love is superior to romantic love. He write a novel about a man who stalks women and gets them to fall in love with him, only to desert them later. He writes a 500 pg doctoral thesis on Socrates and presents it in Latin. He writes a book on despair, and gives the world an early dose of psychology. He lives only 42 years but writes 25+ books, all of them of genious.

Yet, all his books were written "For Her." "Her" is Regina Olsen, the women he would never stop loving. But he broke his engagement with her and no one knows why. He writes his books for his father, who sternly forced him to bring home the 3rd best grade all the time.

Kierkegaard influenced all of the later existentialists one way or another. Colin Wilson called him a "neurotic genious." This is because Kierkegaard had a deeply unhappy life, always alone, always misunderstood. But he won in the end.

Rating:
Summary: not so much a philosopher's Kierkegaard
Review: this is a good collection but I think some selections from The Concept of Anxiety - which is Kierkegaard at his philosophically most sophisticated- and maybe even the Concept of Irony, would make this more interesting to philosophy students. Beside these shortcomings its a good anthology available at good prices.