Search results for ""Author Edna H. Hong""

Kierkegaard, a poet of ideals and practitioner of the indirect method, also had a direct and polemical side. He revealed this in several writings throughout his career, culminating in The Moment, his attack against the established ecclesiastical order. Kierkegaard was moved to criticize the church by his differences with Bishop Mynster, Primate of the Church of Denmark. Although Mynster saw in Kierkegaard a complement to himself and his outlook, Kierkegaard challenged Mynster to acknowledge the emptying and estheticizing of Christianity that had occurred in modern Christendom. For three years Kierkegaard was silent, waiting. When Mynster died, he was memorialized as "an authentic truth-witness" in the "holy chain of truth-witnesses that stretches through the ages from the days of the apostles." This struck Kierkegaard as blasphemous and inspired him to write a series of articles in Faedrelandet, which he followed with ten numbers of the pamphlet The Moment. This volume includes the articles from Faedrelandet, all numbers of The Moment, and several other late pieces of Kierkegaard's writing.

Read more less

A work that "not only treats of irony but is irony," wrote a contemporary reviewer of The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Presented here with Kierkegaard's notes of the celebrated Berlin lectures on "positive philosophy" by F.W.J. Schelling, the book is a seedbed of Kierkegaard's subsequent work, both stylistically and thematically. Part One concentrates on Socrates, the master ironist, as interpreted by Xenophon, Plato, and Aristophanes, with a word on Hegel and Hegelian categories. Part Two is a more synoptic discussion of the concept of irony in Kierkegaard's categories, with examples from other philosophers and with particular attention given to A. W. Schlegel's novel Lucinde as an epitome of romantic irony. The Concept of Irony and the Notes of Schelling's Berlin Lectures belong to the momentous year 1841, which included not only the completion of Kierkegaard's university work and his sojourn in Berlin, but also the end of his engagement to Regine Olsen and the initial writing of Either/Or.

Read more less

The final volume of Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings series, the Cumulative Index provides wide-ranging navigation to the preceding twenty-five volumes. Composed of over 90,000 entries, the Cumulative Index offers access to Kierkegaard's complex authorship and the extraordinary range of subjects he addressed in his writing. Covering the series' historical introductions, primary works, supplementary material (journal entries), and footnotes, the Cumulative Index provides a comprehensive entryway to more than 11,000 pages of text. Readers are able to survey via extended entries Kierkegaard's dual authorship, pseudonymous and signed; his numerous biblical allusions; his references to Christianity, God, and love; and his frequent use of analogies. A cumulative collation of the extensive supplementary material is also included, giving researchers and avid readers the opportunity to cross-reference Kierkegaard's Writings with his journals and papers published elsewhere in both English and Danish.

Read more less

A comprehensive anthology of Kierkegaard’s writings that offers an unmatched introduction to one of the most original and influential modern philosophersThis is the most comprehensive anthology of Søren Kierkegaard’s works ever published in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton’s authoritative Kierkegaard’s Writings series by editors Howard and Edna Hong, these carefully chosen selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard’s extraordinary output, which changed the course of modern intellectual history with its mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism. The anthology reveals the most important themes of his work, especially what it means to exist and to be human, and captures the unique character of his writings, with their shifting pseudonyms, complex dialogues, and powerful combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. A superb introduction and guide to the Danish philosopher, The Essential Kierkegaard vividly demonstrates why his work continues to speak so directly to so many readers. Traces the full span of Kierkegaard’s writings, from his early journals to his final work Features generous selections from all of Kierkegaard’s most important works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death Presents selections from lesser-known writings, including Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air Includes an introduction to Kierkegaard’s writings and explanatory notes for each selection

Read more less

First published in 1848, Christian Discourses is a quartet of pieces written and arranged in contrasting styles. Parts One and Three, "The Cares of the Pagans" and "Thoughts That Wound from Behind--for Upbuilding," serve as a polemical overture to Kierkegaard's collision with the established order of Christendom. Yet Parts Two and Four, "Joyful Notes in the Strife of Suffering" and "Discourses at the Communion on Fridays," are reassuring affirmations of the joy and blessedness of Christian life in a world of adversity and suffering. Written in ordinary language, the work combines simplicity and inwardness with reflection and presents crucial Christian concepts and presuppositions with unusual clarity. Kierkegaard continued in the pattern that he began with his first pseudonymous esthetic work, Either/Or, by pairing Christian Discourses with The Crisis, an unsigned esthetic essay on contemporary Danish actress Joanne Luise Heiberg.

Read more less

After deciding to terminate his authorship with the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard composed reviews as a means of writing without being an author. Two Ages, here presented in a definitive English text, is simultaneously a review and a book in its own right. In it, Kierkegaard comments on the anonymously published Danish novel Two Ages, which contrasts the mentality of the age of the French Revolution with that of the subsequent epoch of rationalism. Kierkegaard commends the author's shrewdness, and his critique builds on the novel's view of the two generations. With keen prophetic insight, Kierkegaard foresees the birth of an impersonal cultural wasteland, in which the individual will either be depersonalized or obliged to find an existence rooted in "equality before God and equality with all men." This edition, like all in the series, contains substantial supplementary material, including a historical introduction, entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers, and the preface and conclusion of the original novel.

Read more less

Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions was the last of seven works signed by Kierkegaard and published simultaneously with an anonymously authored companion piece. Imagined Occasions both complements and stands in contrast to Kierkegaard's pseudonymously published Stages on Life's Way. The two volumes not only have a chronological relation but treat some of the same distinct themes. The first of the three discourses, "On the Occasion of a Confession," centers on stillness, wonder, and one's search for God--in contrast to the speechmaking on erotic love in "In Vino Veritas," part one of Stages. The second discourse, "On the Occasion of a Wedding," complements the second part of Stages, in which Judge William delivers a panegyric on marriage. The third discourse, "At a Graveside," sharpens the ethical and religious earnestness implicit in Stages's "'Guilty'/'Not Guilty'" and completes this collection.

Read more less

This is the most comprehensive anthology of Soren Kierkegaard's works ever assembled in English. Drawn from the volumes of Princeton's authoritative Kierkegaard's Writings series by editors Howard and Edna Hong, the selections represent every major aspect of Kierkegaard's extraordinary career. They reveal the powerful mix of philosophy, psychology, theology, and literary criticism that made Kierkegaard one of the most compelling writers of the nineteenth century and a shaping force in the twentieth. With an introduction to Kierkegaard's writings as a whole and explanatory notes for each selection, this is the essential one-volume guide to a thinker who changed the course of modern intellectual history. The anthology begins with Kierkegaard's early journal entries and traces the development of his work chronologically to the final The Changelessness of God. The book presents generous selections from all of Kierkegaard's landmark works, including Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, Works of Love, and The Sickness unto Death, and draws new attention to a host of such lesser-known writings as Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions and The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air. The selections are carefully chosen to reflect the unique character of Kierkegaard's work, with its shifting pseudonyms, its complex dialogues, and its potent combination of irony, satire, sermon, polemic, humor, and fiction. We see the esthetic, ethical, and ethical-religious ways of life initially presented as dialogue in two parallel series of pseudonymous and signed works and later in the "second authorship" as direct address. And we see the themes that bind the whole together, in particular Kierkegaard's overarching concern with, in his own words, "What it means to exist; ...what it means to be a human being." Together, the selections provide the best available introduction to Kierkegaard's writings and show more completely than any other book why his work, in all its creativity, variety, and power, continues to speak so directly today to so many readers around the world.

Read more less

Stages on Life's Way, the sequel to Either/Or, is an intensely poetic example of Kierkegaard's vision of the three stages, or spheres, of existence: the esthetic, the ethical, and the religious. With characteristic love for mystification, he presents the work as a bundle of documents fallen by chance into the hands of "Hilarius Bookbinder," who prepared them for printing. The book begins with a banquet scene patterned on Plato's Symposium. (George Brandes maintained that "one must recognize with amazement that it holds its own in this comparison.") Next is a discourse by "Judge William" in praise of marriage "in answer to objections." The remainder of the volume, almost two-thirds of the whole, is the diary of a young man, discovered by "Frater Taciturnus," who was deeply in love but felt compelled to break his engagement. The work closes with a letter to the reader from Taciturnus on the three "existence-spheres" represented by the three parts of the book. Stages on Life's Way not only repeats themes, characters, and pseudonymous authors of the earlier works but also goes beyond them and points to further development of central ideas in Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Read more less

Presented here in a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, Fear and Trembling and Repetition are the most poetic and personal of Soren Kierkegaard's pseudonymous writings. Published in 1843 and written under the names Johannes de Silentio and Constantine Constantius, respectively, the books demonstrate Kierkegaard's transmutation of the personal into the lyrically religious. Each work uses as a point of departure Kierkegaard's breaking of his engagement to Regine Olsen--his sacrifice of "that single individual." From this beginning Fear and Trembling becomes an exploration of the faith that transcends the ethical, as in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command. This faith, which persists in the face of the absurd, is rewarded finally by the return of all that the faithful one is willing to sacrifice. Repetition discusses the most profound implications of unity of personhood and of identity within change, beginning with the ironic story of a young poet who cannot fulfill the ethical claims of his engagement because of the possible consequences of his marriage. The poet finally despairs of repetition (renewal) in the ethical sphere, as does his advisor and friend Constantius in the aesthetic sphere. The book ends with Constantius' intimation of a third kind of repetition--in the religious sphere.

Read more less

Kierkegaard was driven to write The Book on Adler after news spread that a Danish pastor, Adolph P. Adler, claimed to have experienced a revelation in which Christ dictated a new doctrine. Like many others, Kierkegaard was intrigued by Adler--but for different reasons than most. Over the eight years during which Kierkegaard worked on the manuscript, the phenomenon of Adler became a concern secondary to the larger question of authority. Kierkegaard revised the manuscript many times, and published a segment of it as "The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle" in Two Ethical-Religious Essays, but did not publish the work as a whole before his death. The latest integral version of The Book on Adler is included here, along with excerpts from the earlier drafts and a sampling of writing by Adler himself.

Read more less

After deciding to terminate his authorship with the pseudonymous Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard composed reviews as a means of writing without being an author. Two Ages, here presented in a definitive English text, is simultaneously a review and a book in its own right. In it, Kierkegaard comments on the anonymously published Danish novel Two Ages, which contrasts the mentality of the age of the French Revolution with that of the subsequent epoch of rationalism. Kierkegaard commends the author's shrewdness, and his critique builds on the novel's view of the two generations. With keen prophetic insight, Kierkegaard foresees the birth of an impersonal cultural wasteland, in which the individual will either be depersonalized or obliged to find an existence rooted in "equality before God and equality with all men." This edition, like all in the series, contains substantial supplementary material, including a historical introduction, entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers, and the preface and conclusion of the original novel.

Read more less

Of the many works he wrote during 1848, his "richest and most fruitful year," Kierkegaard specified Practice in Christianity as "the most perfect and truest thing." In his reflections on such topics as Christ's invitation to the burdened, the imitatio Christi, the possibility of offense, and the exalted Christ, he takes as his theme the requirement of Christian ideality in the context of divine grace. Addressing clergy and laity alike, Kierkegaard asserts the need for institutional and personal admission of the accommodation of Christianity to the culture and to the individual misuse of grace. As a corrective defense, the book is an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for the established order, which would involve the order's ability to acknowledge the Christian requirement, confess its own distance from it, and resort to grace for support in its continued existence. At the same time the book can be read as the beginning of Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom. Because of the high ideality of the contents and in order to prevent the misunderstanding that he himself represented that ideality, Kierkegaard writes under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.

Read more less

Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher rediscovered in the twentieth century, is a major influence in contemporary philosophy, religion, and literature. He regarded Either/Or as the beginning of his authorship, although he had published two earlier works on Hans Christian Andersen and irony. The pseudonymous volumes of Either/Or are the writings of a young man (I) and of Judge William (II). The ironical young man's papers include a collection of sardonic aphorisms; essays on Mozart, modern drama, and boredom; and "The Seducer's Diary." The seeming miscellany is a reflective presentation of aspects of the "either," the esthetic view of life. Part II is an older friend's "or," the ethical life of integrated, authentic personhood, elaborated in discussions of personal becoming and of marriage. The resolution of the "either/or" is left to the reader, for there is no Part III until the appearance of Stages on Life's Way. The poetic-reflective creations of a master stylist and imaginative impersonator, the two men write in distinctive ways appropriate to their respective positions.

Read more less

"In the vast literature of love, The Seducer's Diary is an intricate curiosity--a feverishly intellectual attempt to reconstruct an erotic failure as a pedagogic success, a wound masked as a boast," observes John Updike in his foreword to Soren Kierkegaard's narrative. This work, a chapter from Kierkegaard's first major volume, Either/Or, springs from his relationship with his fiancee, Regine Olsen. Kierkegaard fell in love with the young woman, ten years his junior, proposed to her, but then broke off their engagement a year later. This event affected Kierkegaard profoundly. Olsen became a muse for him, and a flood of volumes resulted. His attempt to set right, in writing, what he feels was a mistake in his relationship with Olsen taught him the secret of "indirect communication." The Seducer's Diary, then, becomes Kierkegaard's attempt to portray himself as a scoundrel and thus make their break easier for her. Matters of marriage, the ethical versus the aesthetic, dread, and, increasingly, the severities of Christianity are pondered by Kierkegaard in this intense work.

Read more less

The various kinds and conditions of love are a common theme for Kierkegaard, beginning with his early Either/Or, through "The Diary of the Seducer" and Judge William's eulogy on married love, to his last work, on the changelessness of God's love. Works of Love, the midpoint in the series, is also the monumental high point, because of its penetrating, illuminating analysis of the forms and sources of love. Love as feeling and mood is distinguished from works of love, love of the lovable from love of the unlovely, preferential love from love as the royal law, love as mutual egotism from triangular love, and erotic love from self-giving love. This work is marked by Kierkegaard's Socratic awareness of the reader, both as the center of awakened understanding and as the initiator of action. Written to be read aloud, the book conveys a keenness of thought and an insightful, poetic imagination that make such an attentive approach richly rewarding. Works of Love not only serves as an excellent place to begin exploring the writings of Kierkegaard, but also rewards many rereadings.

Read more less

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers.

Read more less

In Philosophical Fragments the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus explored the question: What is required in order to go beyond Socratic recollection of eternal ideas already possessed by the learner? Written as an afterword to this work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript is on one level a philosophical jest, yet on another it is Climacus's characterization of the subjective thinker's relation to the truth of Christianity. At once ironic, humorous, and polemical, this work takes on the "unscientific" form of a mimical-pathetical-dialectical compilation of ideas. Whereas the movement in the earlier pseudonymous writings is away from the aesthetic, the movement in Postscript is away from speculative thought. Kierkegaard intended Postscript to be his concluding work as an author. The subsequent "second authorship" after The Corsair Affair made Postscript the turning point in the entire authorship. Part One of the text volume examines the truth of Christianity as an objective issue, Part Two the subjective issue of what is involved for the individual in becoming a Christian, and the volume ends with an addendum in which Kierkegaard acknowledges and explains his relation to the pseudonymous authors and their writings. The second volume contains the scholarly apparatus, including a key to references and selected entries from Kierkegaard's journals and papers.

Read more less

Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher rediscovered in the twentieth century, is a major influence in contemporary philosophy, religion, and literature. He regarded Either/Or as the beginning of his authorship, although he had published two earlier works on Hans Christian Andersen and irony. The pseudonymous volumes of Either/Or are the writings of a young man (I) and of Judge William (II). The ironical young man's papers include a collection of sardonic aphorisms; essays on Mozart, modern drama, and boredom; and "The Seducer's Diary." The seeming miscellany is a reflective presentation of aspects of the "either," the esthetic view of life. Part II is an older friend's "or," the ethical life of integrated, authentic personhood, elaborated in discussions of personal becoming and of marriage. The resolution of the "either/or" is left to the reader, for there is no Part III until the appearance of Stages on Life's Way. The poetic-reflective creations of a master stylist and imaginative impersonator, the two men write in distinctive ways appropriate to their respective positions.

Read more less

As a spiritual autobiography, Kierkegaard's The Point of View for My Work as an Author stands among such great works as Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua. Yet Point of View is neither a confession nor a defense; it is an author's story of a lifetime of writing, his understanding of the maze of greatly varied works that make up his oeuvre. Upon the imminent publication of the second edition of Either/Or, Kierkegaard again intended to cease writing. Now was the time for a direct "report to history" on the authorship as a whole. In addition to Point of View, which was published posthumously, the present volume also contains On My Work as an Author, a contemporary substitute, and the companion piece Armed Neutrality.

Read more less