Retail $50.00 Cloth

Philosophy

ISBN 978-0-86554-800-8

MUP / H698

Just as Howard V. and Edna H. Hong’s translation of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits marked the first appearance of this complete title in English in a single volume, this collection of essays is the first to explore the fascinating and powerful compilation of Kierkegaards’s writings that clearly initiate the “second authorship.” …

Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole is a series of such approaches to human unity and wholeness, beginning with his early presentation of the disasters inherent in the aesthetic form of life in Either/Or. The pseudonymous authorship is sustained and varied presentation of a deepening moral psychology at odds with the hedonism and egoism characteristic of the modern age. From these flawed understandings of the “single individual” Kierkegaards attempted to retrieve an understanding of human being that moves from the philosophic (Socratic), toward the religious, and finally arriving at the Christian.

In this volume at the beginning of the “second authorship: Kierkegaards presents/argues the moral and theological viewpoints that will occupy his attention for the remainder of his life and which ended in the wrenching spiritual experience of his attack on Christendom. The novelty in the second authorship is not the change of Kierkegaard’s authorial goals but the change in the tone…[and] the definitive shift to an explicit privileging of the Christian ethics of love, the increasing variety of his literary methods from the early upbuilding discourses to Christian discourses in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, the writings contained in Without Authority, the Christian deliberations in Works of Love, the works of Anti-Climacus which contain Kierkegaard’s final synthesis of psychology, ethics, Christian theology, and social criticism, the exhortations of For Self-Examination, the unpublished Judge for Yourself!, his published and unpublished reports to history, and the tumultuous struggle against the church he never ceased to love. Neither should we forget the discourses/sermons associated with the public attack. The presuppositions of all this earnest thinking, writing, and struggle are in the present volume.

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