Existentialism at its best. I read Kierkegaard in the years after finding no truth in religion, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche helped fill the void and answered many questions.

*Finished reading Fear and Trembling*

This is the best book I have ever read. I have not read The Sickness Unto Death yet - only Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard will forever be special to me after this. I look forward to reading The Sickness Unto Death, Either/Or, The Concept of Anxiety, and Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing.

Two profoundly beautiful works that I don't want to talk about. Kierkegaard was grappling with deeply personal themes, things about ourselves that make us tick.

I read just Fear and Trembling. Not a fan of Kierkegaard's style. It felt more like he would rather have been a poet than a philosopher. The work was full of mythic, poetic, and biblical examples (beyond just the main one, Abraham and Isaac) that didn't add that much to the work. Could probably have been half as long and made more sense. I'm looking into secondary literature to make more sense of Fear and Trembling.

I'm also not convinced that Abraham wasn't just a murderer.

i adore this/these books. i’ll re-read them again and again and never tire. they’re so well written and kierkegaard is such a sad soft boy i just want to hug him and tell him he isn’t going to hell, to take a breath. sigh.

If you are as new to philosophy as I am it will be a slow but understandable read. I kept a journal on it to put his ideas into my own words and found that I was understanding the material just fine.

This book certainly makes a reader realize the extent to which the bible needs to be explained. Just from one chapter Kierkegaard develops the three problems with Abraham's sacrifice on mount Moriah. I certainly left the book with a deeper understanding and respect for the father of faith that is Abraham.

Very good but this is probably not the best for first philosophy/theology book to start with. Kind of confusing at points but still good

These books have been very important to me. Kierkegaard taught me to give up on trying to make sense of God, but, instead, to be authentically myself and to relate to God. Kierkegaard posed faith as something that isn't in opposition to doubt, which is important, because I doubt a lot. Kierkegaard is a terrible writer, his sentences use eight commas, he's very oblique, but the things I get out of him, I find singularly profound and theraputic.

hmmm… not altogether the most pleasurable read. Very interesting to experience 'psychology' that has one foot still in German idealism and fairly strict dialectics, but also is reaching forward to what would come half a century later in Vienna.
SK's tone is frantic and quite hectoring, and you get the impression that he was not a man in the best of moods.

i think bro should check himself into IMH

Well, I think I may be being baffled by Kierkegaard here. On the plus side, I think that this translation is much more readable than, say, the last of the Camus I read. However, Kierkegaard is notoriously slippery — for instance in the way he uses pseudonyms to give plausible deniability to anything he asserts.

His schtick here is to suggest that there’s something beyond ethics — something that is of the same sort of pull on our behavior but that is less publicly justifiable. We can justify our deviations from self-interest by appealing to a Kantean universal standard, but Kierkegaard says there’s also a possible appeal to an entirely immediable relation between the individual and God that may justify any goddamned thing at all.

His prototype for this is the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. He goes to great pains to make this story vivid and awful, and succeeds to some extent. But every once and a while, I have to retreat from my suspension of disbelief, and at that point the whole exercise reminds me of those cheap op-ed pieces in which the author does the math to determine just how much effort Santa Claus would have to go through to deliver that many packages to that many children in that little time, and whether it worries the laws of physics that he does so.

The fact that the whole exercise seems to (biographically) have been a horrible post-facto excuse for a terribly bungled love affair doesn't make it more interesting in my eyes, but merely more pathetic.

I can’t help but think that I’m just not getting it on some grand level, and if I devoted myself to the pursuit of the rest of Kierkegaard’s more challenging oeuvre, I’d get it.

ADDENDUM: I made it through Fear and Trembling but gave up early into Sickness when I hit the sentence that read “The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.” Life’s too short to spend it trying to unravel that sort of thing.