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.
The first new translation of Kierkegaard's masterwork in a generation brings to vivid life this essential work of modern philosophy. Brilliantly synthesizing human insights with Christian dogma, Soren Kierkegaard presented, in 1844, The Concept of Anxiety as a landmark "psychological deliberation," suggesting that our only hope in overcoming anxiety was not through "powder and pills" but by embracing it with open arms. While Kierkegaard's Danish prose is surprisingly rich, previous translations—the most recent in 1980—have marginalized the work with alternately florid or slavishly wooden language. With a vibrancy never seen before in English, Alastair Hannay, the world's foremost Kierkegaard scholar, has finally re-created its natural rhythm, eager that this overlooked classic will be revivified as the seminal work of existentialism and moral psychology that it is. From The Concept of Anxiety: "And no Grand Inquisitor has such frightful torments in readiness as has anxiety, and no secret agent knows as cunningly how to attack the suspect in his weakest moment, or to make so seductive the trap in which he will be snared; and no discerning judge understands how to examine, yes, exanimate the accused as does anxiety, which never lets him go, not in diversion, not in noise, not at work, not by day, not by night."
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.
Authorship is a complicated subject in Kierkegaard's work, which he surely recognized, given his late attempts to explain himself in On My Work as an Author. From the use of multiple pseudonyms and antonyms, to contributions across a spectrum of media and genres, issues of authorship abound. Why did Kierkegaard write in the ways he did? Before we assess Kierkegaard's famous thoughts on faith or love, or the relationship between 'the aesthetic,' 'the ethical,' and 'the religious,' we must approach how he expressed them. Given the multi-authored nature of his works, can we find a view or voice that is definitively Kierkegaard's own? Can entries in his unpublished journals and notebooks tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought? How should contemporary readers understand inconsistencies or contradictions between differently named authors? We cannot make definitive claims about Kierkegaard's work as a thinker without understanding Kierkegaard's work as an author. This collection, by leading contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, is the first to systematically examine the divisive question and practice of authorship in Kierkegaard from philosophical, literary and theological perspectives.
Besides a sense of personal loss at the death of David F. Swenson on February 11, 1940, I felt dismay that he had left unfinished his translation of the Unscientific Postscript. I had longed to see it published among the first of Kierkegaard's works in English. In the spring of 1935 it did not seem exorbitant to hope that it might be ready for the printer by the end of that year. For in March I learned from Professor Swenson that he had years before "done about two thirds of a rough translation." In 1937/38 he took a sabbatical leave from his university for the sake of finishing this work. Yet after all it was not finished- partly because Professor Swenson was already incapacitated by the illness which eventually resulted in his death; but also because he aimed at a degree of perfection which hardly can be reached by a translator. At one time he expressed to me his suspicion that perhaps, as in the translation of Kant's philosophy, it might require the cooperation of many scholars during several generations before the translation of Kierkegaard's terminology could be definitely settled. I hailed with joy this new apprehension, which promised a speedy conclusion of the work, and in the words of Luther I urged him to "sin boldly."--Editor's pref., p. [ix].
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'.
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.
This volume contains a new translation, with a historical introduction by the translators, of two works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. Through Climacus, Kierkegaard contrasts the paradoxes of Christianity with Greek and modern philosophical thinking. In Philosophical Fragments he begins with Greek Platonic philosophy, exploring the implications of venturing beyond the Socratic understanding of truth acquired through recollection to the Christian experience of acquiring truth through grace. Published in 1844 and not originally planned to appear under the pseudonym Climacus, the book varies in tone and substance from the other works so attributed, but it is dialectically related to them, as well as to the other pseudonymous writings. The central issue of Johannes Climacus is doubt. Probably written between November 1842 and April 1843 but unfinished and published only posthumously, this book was described by Kierkegaard as an attack on modern speculative philosophy by "means of the melancholy irony, which did not consist in any single utterance on the part of Johannes Climacus but in his whole life. . . . Johannes does what we are told to do--he actually doubts everything--he suffers through all the pain of doing that, becomes cunning, almost acquires a bad conscience. When he has gone as far in that direction as he can go and wants to come back, he cannot do so. . . . Now he despairs, his life is wasted, his youth is spent in these deliberations. Life does not acquire any meaning for him, and all this is the fault of philosophy." A note by Kierkegaard suggests how he might have finished the work: "Doubt is conquered not by the system but by faith, just as it is faith that has brought doubt into the world!."
