Where to start with Kierkegaard
Read Fear and Trembling first — the shorter, sharper book — and Either/Or stops being a doorstop and becomes the next conversation.
You have heard Kierkegaard called the founder of existentialism and the great Christian melancholic, you have looked at Either/Or and the pseudonyms and the scale and put it back down, and you want a door that lets you meet his voice before his system.
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.
The reading path
- 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.
Why this order
Kierkegaard's pseudonyms are not literary games; they are the form of an argument that the most serious questions about how to live cannot be answered in the philosopher's own voice — and meeting him through the sharpest pseudonymous work first is meeting the procedure as he wanted it met.
Held back, and why
- 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.