Kierkegaard! Kierkegaard! There are too many books! They're too long! Too involved! How is one to begin to read Kierkegaard? How does one set off? With the very first book, proceeding to the second, and so on? Or should one read the major works first, giving a sense of the real themes that occupied the thinker, so that one can glimpse them in nuce when looking, later, at his earlier writings? Will weariness exhaust the reader before he reaches the explicitly Christian writings, the ones under Kierkegaard's own name?
Perhaps we should begin with them, the Christian writings, W. says. Perhaps that is what incumbent upon the scholar in our age: to take Kierkegaard seriously as a Christian thinker. But then, too, there is the question of Kierkegaard's relation to his contemporaries, to the Danish church, to opinion in Copenhagen. Perhaps one ought to begin with a biography. Is that how we should attune ourselves to Kierkegaard?
In the end, W. can't decide. He leaves it to me, he says. I'm to be his guide. I'm to direct his reading and our reading. What do I recommend?
Lars Iyer's Blog 