Bifurcated Life

I am about to embark on writing about each and every book published in the Hongs’ Princeton translation of the works of Kierkegaard. The occasion for this enterprise is that I’m taking a class on several of K.’s books this semester and decided to make a completist project of it; also, that I’m trying to get more readers for this blog. Although I’ve read various works by Kierkegaard in the past, the vast majority of them are new to me. Moreover, I am coming to them purposefully naive: Kierkegaard is a writer who, some years ago, I decided that I would like to know intimately, and I find the best practice for initiating a productive relationship with a corpus is to read it without any initial recourse to secondary literature. So I’m going to avoid secondary literature apart from editorial notes and prefaces. (Though after the project is finished, there will be an orgy of secondary literature reading, you may be sure.)

Several things should be noted in advance about the series.

- This series will be an unedited set of notes and commentary. I’ve often struggled with what form genuinely good book-blogging should take, and I’ve been disappointed with the results of reviewing, of excerpting, of summarizing. This series will be segments of the exact document that I would keep for myself even if I had no blog, a document intended to preserve what seemed to me the important contents of the books. It occurred to me that this document would make good blog-content when I realized that it would be of interest — potentially — both to people who had never read the given texts, because of my care to restate clearly and simply what I take K. to be saying (something I do to compensate for the deficiency of my own memory), and also to those colleagues of mine who are already expert, because in my efforts to understand and internalize K. I will inevitably carry out of some systematic integration of his texts into my own conceptual universe — and one of the highlights of intellectual friendship is observing one another metabolize identical texts in different ways.

- All quotations in this series will be from the Princeton Paperbacks series of Kierkegaard’s complete works. The specific book will be specified in the title of a post, and I will provide page numbers for my quotations. I mention this here to avoid the necessity of including any bibliographic apparatus beyond em-bracketed page numbers in the course of the actual series.

- This series is not a cheat sheet for Kierkegaard’s books. That would be any easy mistake which I hope no sly googler, perhaps an undergraduate on the lookout for a good substitute to doing the actual work of reading their class assignment, will make. These are my notes, not spark notes. That means I am extracting some of what I read, only the parts that seemed important to me at the time, and recording it together with my commentary for my own future use. Obviously I can’t police the use to which my notes are put, but be warned cheaters: you’ll look like an idiot if you take my posts as outlines of the books they’re about.

The full series is listed in chronological order below:

I. Early Polemical Writings. S. Kierkegaard; J. Watkin, ed. and trans.

II. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

III. Either/Or. Part I. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

IV. Either/Or: Part II. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

V. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

VI. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.
VII. Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy/Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est. (Two books in one volume). S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.

VIII. Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. S. Kierkegaard; R. Thomte, ed. and trans.

IX. Prefaces: Writing Sampler. S. Kierkegaard; T.W. Nichol, ed. and trans.

X. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. S. Kierkegaard;

XI. Stages on Life’s Way. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XII. Volume I. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume I. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XII. Volume II. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Volume II. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XIII. The Corsair Affair and Articles Related to the Writings. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.

XIV. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age A Literary Review. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.

XV. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XVI. Works of Love. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XVII. Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XVIII. Without Authority. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XIX. Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. S. Kierkegaard; E.H. Hong and H.V. Hong, eds. and trans.

XX. Practice in Christianity. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XXI. For Self-Examination / Judge For Yourself!. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XXII. The Point of View. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XXIII. The Moment and Late Writings. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XXIV. The Book on Adler. S. Kierkegaard; H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong, eds. and trans.

XXV. Letters and Documents. S. Kierkegaard; H. Rosenmeier, ed. and trans.