People told me this book reads like a novel and is the optimal starter to Kierkegaard. But I can barely understand a single page. Am I stupid or is this actually really hard to read?
kierkegaard is a based schizo, it's not gonna get any easier. Take your time.
>>25355030I remember reading this at 16 and somehow coming to opposite conclusion everyone else had about this book, not that I remember anything about it now.
>>25355035>16Holy shit, you must be a genius then. I can't understand a single page.
>>25355030You're not stupid but it is hard to read. The more of it you read, the easier it gets -- once you see what Kierkegaard's driving at things start to make more sense
>>25355030That looks nice, I have the paperback edition. What sort of binding does the hardcover have
>>25355054It costs $291 on Amazon: https://a.co/d/08xCveOG
>>25355033Huh? I read Fear and Trembling when I was 19 and it was pretty easy. In retrospect some stuff went over my head but not much.
>>25355073Some people say Fear and Trembling is one of his hardest books. How high is your IQ?
>>25355030He's odd but I like him
>>25355030From what I remember, the first half is written by an alter ego, a hedonist/materialist if you will. I suppose you are to decide who is more convincing.
>>25355030I'm not sure it's really the best start. It's a bit complicated, in that there's several things he's doing in Either/Or. If you recall the introduction, both volumes are presented not as Kierkegaard's own work, but as a bunch of manuscripts by two (possibly three) distinct authors by an editor: volume 1 is by a young man with an overly strong aesthetic view of life, and the thrust of the volume is to show implicitly that it's a troubling and unhappy life. Mixed in is something called "The Seducer's Diary" apparently by another author, who lives in a similar way, cultivating a relationship with a young woman...for the sole purpose of breaking it off (it comes across as Freudian, sort of, wanting to be the object of love in order to avoid loving). Volume 2 is presented as a set of letters by an older man, a judge, to the younger man, and he lives a more satisfying life according to a moral view of things. But Kierkegaard seems to reject both stances as unsatisfactory, where the missing type of life is the life of faith. But it gets complicated because, for example, while Kierkegaard rejects these, the aphorisms that start volume 1 off are basically entries from his own journals, and the Seducer's Diary seems like a work meant to punish himself over breaking off an important engagement, so he may have been wrestling with the ideas in Either/Or privately himself, trying to work out his temptation to succumb to an aesthetic viewpoint, and the plausible counter-temptation of moralism as a false (if decent) antidote.A better starting point might be his Uplifting Discourses, which are under his own name, and which get as close as he desired at the time to expressing his own thoughts publicly.
>>25355033FPBP & check'd. Works of Love is probably his most accessible but you need to take your time no matter what.
>>25355104Upper 120s probably. Maybe I'm just getting filtered without knowing it but most of it wasn't particularly obtuse, except maybe some stuff in problema 2 or 3 or whatever the last section of the book is called.
Only the Seducer's Diary does
>>25355905Does what?
Don't worry about being stupid, OP. Kierkegaard wrote Either/Or as a fake editorial project with pseudonymous authors specifically to confuse people and force them to think for themselves. It's supposed to feel like a puzzle.If you're stuck on the first half, remember that the "Aesthetic" life (Volume 1) is designed to look seductive but feel empty. The "Seducer's Diary" is intentionally manipulative. You're supposed to be bored by it.If you want to actually understand his core ideas without the fake-editorial shell, skip to Purity of Heart or Four Upbuilding Discourses. They're written under his own name and are way more direct. Or just stick with it; once you get the dialectic between the Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious stages, the rest starts clicking.Also, the hardcover is overpriced. Get the Penguin paperback.
>>25356271If Either/Or was written under a pseudonym does that mean Kierkegaard didn't truly believe what he wrote in that book?
I read this and The Sickness unto Death in middle school I think you'll be fine man
>>25355030All continental philosophy is just obscurantist garbage that you're supposed to pretend to understand and like.
>>25356264Read like a novel
>>25356275Nta, but flip a coin; he rejects the contents by the time he wrote it as a book, but they're derived from experiences he'd just been working through. A bunch of it is culled from his diaries.
>>25357083Does he not believe in what he wrote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript either? Since that one was also written under a pseudonym and is one of his most famous works.
>>25357157It's unsatisfying to put it this way, but in a certain sense yes, and in another sense no. There are certain grounds in common between Kierkegaard and all of his pseudonyms, but his settled position isn't simply identical to those of his pseudonyms. In the same year that he published Fear and Trembling (under a pseudonym), he also published a discourse under his own name on the same subject with a somewhat opposed conclusion. Both the discourse and Fear and Trembling take up many of the same issues, but comparing them does reveal differences.Later in the decade that he really began writing, he started showing frustration at readers conflating him with the pseudonyms (everyone already at the time figured out he was the author behind all these strange books coming out), and he complained in (an unpublished) reply to a reviewer:>Anyone with just a fragment of common sense will perceive that it would be ludicrously confusing to attribute to me everything the poetized personalities say. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, I have expressly urged once and for all that anyone who wants to quote something from the pseudonyms will not attribute the quotation to me (see my postscript to Concluding Postscript). It is easy to see that anyone wanting to have a literary lark merely needs to take some quotations higgledy-piggledy from "The Seducer," then from johannes Climacus, then from me, etc., print them together as if they were all my words, show how they contradict each other, and create a very chaotic impression, as if the author were a kind of lunatic. Hurrah! That can be done. In my opinion anyone who exploits the poetic in me by quoting the writings in a confusing way is more or less either a charlatan or a literary toper.
>>25357203Does that mean he didn't hate or disagree with Hegel then? Because Concluding Postscript is a criticism of Hegel AFAIK.
>>25357209I really don't know if he hated Hegel, but I get the impression he sees flaws in Hegelian thought. He cracks jokes about Hegel in his diaries, so it wouldn't surprise me if a critical stance toward Hegel was a point in common between him and his pseudonym, but I don't know enough to say whether Kierkegaard shares the same grounds as his pseudonym.
>>25357223Where's the best starting point for Kierkegaard?
>>25357327I'm not sure. If your focus is on wanting to be clear about what Kierkegaard believed in a considered way, then probably the Upbuilding Discourses, The Concept of Irony, and The Point of View of My Work as an Author.But, fwiw, it's totally plausible to read the pseudononymous writings and get something from them even if it means ending up in opposition with Kierkegaard; that's pretty much what everyone does anyway, and I imagine he found that tolerable to the extent that readers thought for themselves about the issues instead of taking his word as a dogma. It only really makes an issue of what we assert Kierkegaard believed and wanted others to believe, but the pseudononymous writings are justly praised and worth reading regardless.
>>25357377>The Concept of Ironynta. I can't tell if I "got" it reading that.i.e. that if he is writing a thesis about irony which is evidence of knowing a subject implies he knows the subject regardless of knowing.ofc then you have the whole layer of Socrates being ironic (saying how dialogue is superior despite lecturing, put in written form by Plato & being ignored by people at the end of nights)
