Where to start with Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling compresses faith, dread, and Abraham's impossible choice into the book where Kierkegaard's voices become audible.
‘Father of existentialism’ tells you almost nothing, and Either/Or feels too large and theatrical for a first encounter.
Starting with Either/Or and getting lost in the pseudonyms and the volume changes; or reading Kierkegaard as a religious writer when the actual project is a critique of Christendom from inside Christianity that has more in common with Nietzsche than with any catechism.
Books in order
- Fear and Trembling — Read it slowly. The Abraham passages are the spine; the four versions of the binding of Isaac at the start are not warm-up — they are the argument. Notice how the prose is closer to a sermon than to a treatise, and how that closeness is doing the philosophical work.
- Either/Or — The two-volume book that made him famous. The first volume — the aesthete's diary, the seducer's diary, the papers on the immediate and the rotational — is the most readable. The second volume — Judge William's long letters — is the ethical answer the first volume forces. Read both; the argument is the contrast between them.
Further reading
- The Sickness Unto Death — The textbook second move — Kierkegaard on despair, written as a Christian psychology. Not in this catalog yet, but it is the natural sequel to Fear and Trembling.
- Concluding Unscientific Postscript — The deep-end Kierkegaard — six hundred pages, the systematic philosophical work that pretends not to be one. Save it for last among the major books.