Translated from the Danish by Walter Lowrie, David Swenson, and Alexander Dru The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard is one of the master thinkers of the modern age, a defining influence on existentialism and on twentieth-century theology, and this brilliantly tailored selection from his vast and varied writings--made by the great English poet W.H Auden--is a perfect introduction to his work. Auden's inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen in 1813 and deceased in 1855, was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, and social critic, widely regarded as the first existentialist philosopher. Throughout his career, he wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and philosophy of religion, showing a particular fondness for figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and allegory. The work " Fear and Trembling" is one of the most well-known and esteemed among Søren Kierkegaard's vast production. In this work, Kierkegaard does not deny his Christian past; rather, he asserts that this religious doctrine must be internalized by the individual according to their own subjective demands. The analysis contained in "Fear and Trembling" is based on parameters that are still fully relevant for contemporary reflection on religious conduct.
One of Soren Kierkegaard's most important writings, Works of Love is a profound examination of the human heart, in which the great philosopher conducts the reader into the inmost secrets of Love. "Deep within every man," Kierkegaard writes, "there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the household of millions upon millions." Love, for Kierkegaard, is one of the central aspects of existence; it saves us from isolation and unites us with one another and with God. This new edition of Works of Love features an original foreword by Kierkegaard scholar George Pattison.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, born in Copenhagen (1813–1855), was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, and social critic, widely considered the first existentialist philosopher. Throughout his life, he wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and philosophy of religion, displaying a particular fondness for figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and allegory. His work " The Sickness Unto Death" (Sygdommen til Døden in Danish), written in 1849 under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, deals with the concept of despair, equating it with the Christian concept of sin. Many of the themes explored in this work demonstrate an undeniable connection with the topics later explored by Freud.
A nineteenth century Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard was a major influence on the development of existentialism and Protestant theology. He attacked the literary, philosophical and ecclesiastical establishments of his day for misrepresenting the highest task of human existence—becoming oneself in an ethical and religious sense. His critical works on organised religion, Christianity, morality, ethics and psychology reveal a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Many of his philosophical essays deal with how one lives as a “single individual”, giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, while highlighting the importance of personal choice. This eBook presents Kierkegaard’s collected works, with numerous illustrations, rare translations, concise introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1) * Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Kierkegaard’s life and works * Concise introductions to the treatises * All the major essays, with individual contents tables * Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts * Excellent formatting of the texts * Rare translations by David F. Swenson, Lillian Marvin Swenson and Walter Lowrie, digitised here for the first time * Includes the seminal autobiography– available in no other collection * Features a bonus biography – discover Kierkegaard’s intriguing life * Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres CONTENTS: The Books Either/Or (1843) Fear and Trembling (1843) Repetition (1843) Upbuilding Discourses (1844) Philosophical Fragments (1844) The Concept of Dread (1844) Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845) Stages on Life’s Way (1845) Works of Love (1847) Christian Discourses (1848) The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air (1849) Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849) The Sickness unto Death (1849) Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard (1923) The Autobiography The Point of View for my Work as an Author (1851) The Biography Introduction to Kierkegaard (1923) by Lee M. Hollander
Philosophical Fragments is a Christian philosophical work written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. It was the first of three works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, the other two were De omnibus dubitandum est, 1841 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 1846.
In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.
Now recognized as one of the nineteenth century's leading psychologists and philosophers, Kierkegaard was among other things the harbinger of exisentialisim. In Fear and Trembling he explores the psychology of religion, addressing the question 'What is Faith?' in terms of the emotional and psychological relationship between the individual and God. But this difficult question is addressed in the most vivid terms, as Kierkegaard explores different ways of interpreting the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac to make his point. Søren Kierkegaard not only transformed Protestant theology but also anticipated twentieth-century existentialism and provided it with many of its motifs. Fear and Trembling and The Book on Adler–addressed to a general audience–have the imaginative excitement and intense personal appeal of the greatest literature. Only Plato and Nietzsche have matched Kierkegaard’s ability to give ideas so compellingly vivid and dramatic a shape. Translated by Walter Lowrie
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.
This indispensable guide to the search for kinship with God written by a great nineteenth-century Danish philosopher whose writings set the stage for existentialism. Kierkegaard struck out against all forms of established order–including the established church–that work to make men complacent with themselves and thereby obscure their personal responsibility to encounter God. He considered Training in Christianity his most important book. It represented his effort to replace what he believed had become "an amiable, sentimental paganism" with authentic Christianity. Kierkegaard's challenge to live out the implications of Christianity in the most personal decisions of life will greatly appeal to readers today who are trying to develop their personal integrity in accordance with the truths of revealed religion.
One of the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard (1814-55) often expressed himself through pseudonyms and disguises. Taken from his personal writings, these private reflections reveal the development of his own thought and personality, from his time as a young student to the deep later internal conflict that formed the basis for his masterpiece of duality Either/Or and beyond. Expressing his beliefs with a freedom not seen in works he published during his lifetime, Kierkegaard here rejects for the first time his father's conventional Christianity and forges the revolutionary idea of the 'leap of faith' required for true religious belief. A combination of theoretical argument, vivid natural description and sharply honed wit, the Papers and Journals reveal to the full the passionate integrity of his lifelong efforts 'to find a truth which is truth for me'.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard; Copenhagen (1813 - 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, and social critic, widely considered the first existentialist philosopher. Throughout his career, he wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and philosophy of religion, showing a particular penchant for figures of speech such as metaphor, irony, and allegory. The work "The Diary of a Seducer" portrays what Kierkegaard understands as the aesthetic way of life, characterized by romantic and sophisticated hedonism. The seducer is an individual who chooses to immerse himself in passion, in the contradictions of amorous existence. He chooses pleasure as the purpose of life, personally enjoying the aesthetic and aesthetically enjoying his own personality.
Writing under the pseudonym of Johannes de silentio, Kierkegaard uses the form of a dialectical lyric to present his conception of faith. Abraham is portrayed as a great man, who chose to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in the face of conflicting expectations and in defiance of any conceivable ethical standard. The infamous and controversial 'teleological suspension of the ethical' challenged the contemporary views of Hegel's universal moral system, and the suffering individual must alone make a choice 'on the strength of the absurd'. Kierkegaard's writings have inspired both modern Protestant theology and existentialism.
One of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard explores the concept of 'despair', alerting readers to the diversity of ways in which they may be described as living in this state of bleak abandonment - including some that may seem just the opposite - and offering a much-discussed formula for the eradication of despair. With its penetrating account of the self, this late work by Kierkegaard was hugely influential upon twentieth-century philosophers including Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The Sickness unto Death can be regarded as one of the key works of theistic existentialist thought - a brilliant and revelatory answer to one man's struggle to fill the spiritual void.
Provocations contains a little of everything from Kierkegaard's prodigious output: his famously cantankerous (yet wryly humorous) attacks on what he calls the "mediocre shell" of conventional Christianity, his brilliantly pithy parables, his wise (and witty) sayings. Most significantly, it brings to a new generation a man whose writings pare away the fluff of modern spirituality to reveal the basics of the Christ-centered life: decisiveness, obedience, and recognition of the truth.
For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term "diaries." By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects—philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure—but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially (or almost entirely) completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. Volume 11, Parts 1 and 2, present an exciting, enlightening, and enormously varied treasure trove of papers that were found, carefully sorted and stored by Kierkegaard himself, in his apartment after his death. These papers—many of which have never before been published in English—provide a window into many different aspects of Kierkegaard's life and creativity. Volume 11, Part 2, includes writings from the period between 1843, the year in which he published his breakthrough Either/Or, and late September 1855, a few weeks before his death, when he recorded his final reflections on "Christendom." Among the highlights are Kierkegaard's famous description of the "Great Earthquake" that shaped his life; his early reflections on becoming an author; his important, though never-delivered, lectures on "The Dialectic of Ethical and Ethical-Religious Communication"; and his final, incandescent assault on the tendency—new in his time—to harness Christianity in support of a specific social and political order.
Collected here in one volume are three of Søren Kierkegaard's most important works: Fear and Trembling, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, and Sickness Unto Death. Fear and Trembling: In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be . . . going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows. . . except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further. Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing: Father in heaven! What is a man without Thee! What is all that he knows, vast accumulation though it be, but a chipped fragment if he does not know Thee! What is all his striving, could it even encompass a world, but a half-finished work if he does not know Thee: Thee the One, who art one thing and who art all! Sickness Unto Death: Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis.
In Either/Or, using the voices of two characters - the aesthetic young man of part one, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section - Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence, contemplating subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman. A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is a brilliant exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical - both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.
In Kierkegaard’s view, faith is the most essential task of life. Faith is not a matter of dogmatic adherence, but rather of subjective passion. In Purity of Heart, Kierkegaard discusses multiple facets of human existence, particularly the responsibility of each person to single-mindedly seek out spiritual understanding and ethical integrity. While insisting that each reader must find their own path, Kierkegaard does offer clues to the nature of goodness. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish philosopher and theologian. Much of his work deals with religious problems such as faith in God, the institution of the Christian Church, Christian ethics and theology, and the emotions and feelings of individuals when faced with life choices. “About the greatness of the book there can be no question. It should be regarded as the equivalent of shock therapy.”—The Living Church
Those who would know Kierkegaard, the intesely religious humorist, the irrepressibly witty critic of his age and ours, can do no better than to begin with this book. [In it] we find the heart of Kierkagaard. It is not innocuous, not genteel, not comfortable. He does not invite the reader to realx and have a little laugh with him at the expense of other people or at his own foibles. Kierkegaard deliberately challenges the reader's whole existence. "Nor does he merely challenge our existence; he also questions some ideas that had become well entrenched in his time and that are even more characteristic of the present age. Kierkegaard insists, for example, that Christianity was from the start essentially authoritarian--not just that the Catholic Church was, or that Calvin was, or Luther, or, regrettably, most of the Christian churches, but that Christ was--and is. Indeed, though Kierkegaard was, and wished to be, an individual, and even said that on his tombstone he would like no other epitaph than 'That Individual,' his protest against his age was centered in his lament over the loss of authority." --Walter Kaufman, in the Introduction
Johannes is an aesthete, dedicated to creating the possibility of seduction through the careful manipulation of young women. He stealthily pursues the innocent Cordelia until she becomes increasingly drawn to him. But when she is ready to give herself completely, she realizes she may have got everything wrong. United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love’s endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love....
Regarded as the father of Existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard transformed philosophy with his conviction that we must all create our own nature. In Fear and Trembling he argues that a true understanding of God can only be attained by making a personal 'leap of faith.' This revised edition of the standard English translation of Fear and Trembling updates some of the more archaic language and presents this landmark philosophical work in modern American English.
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