The Essential Kierkegaard

by Hong, Howard Vincent

• ISBN13: 9780691019406
• ISBN10: 0691019401
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-05-30
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

This is the most comprehensive anthology of Søren Kierkegaard's works ever assembled in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton's authoritativeKierkegaard's Writingsseries by editors Howard and Edna Hong, the selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard's extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. With an introduction to Kierkegaard's writings as a whole and explanatory notes for each selection, this is the essential one-volume guide to a thinker who changed the course of modern intellectual history. The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the finalThe Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, includingEither/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, andThe Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings asThree Discourses on Imagined OccasionsandThe Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; . . . what it means to be a human being." Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard's writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Early Journal Entries	3	(244)
From the Papers of One Still Living	13	(7)
The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates	20	(17)
Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, I	37	(29)
Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, II	66	(18)
Four Upbuilding Discourses	84	(9)
Fear and Trembling	93	(9)
Repetition	102	(14)
Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy	116	(10)
Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est	126	(12)
The Concept of Anxiety	138	(18)
Prefaces	156	(8)
Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions	164	(6)
Stages on Life's Way	170	(17)
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments	187	(60)
``The Activity of a Traveling Esthetician and How He Still Happened to Pay for the Dinner''	247	(246)
Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and The Present Age. A Literary Review	252	(17)
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits	269	(8)
Works of Love	277	(35)
Christian Discourses	312	(21)
The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air	333	(6)
Two Ethical-Religious Essays	339	(11)
The Sickness unto Death	350	(23)
Practice in Christianity	373	(12)
Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays	385	(8)
For Self-Examination [First series]	393	(11)
Judge for Yourself! For Self-Examination, Second series	404	(7)
The Book on Adler	411	(13)
Fædrelandet Articles and The Moment	424	(25)
On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author	449	(33)
The Changelessness of God	482	(11)
Acknowledgments	493	(2)
Notes	495	(10)
Bibliography	505	(2)
Index	507