We're method thinkers, W. says. A bit like method actors. It's a question of immersing ourselves in what we study. Of plunging into it. We have to become more Kierkegaardian than Kierkegaard, he says. More Danish than the melancholy Dane!
It's a bit like reverse engineering, W. says. We begin with the finished product, i.e., the complete works of Kierkegaard in English translation, in the Hong and Hong editions, and work our way back to the mind of the writer who wrote them. And not only the mind! To the culture of the thinker, in this case, Danish culture of the nineteenth century. To the physiognomy of the thinker, in this case, a melancholy disposition, a heaviness of the soul. We must move from the outward to the inward, and only then, having reached the secret centre of the works, their engine room, so to speak, might we work our way back out again.
But how are we to do that?, W. wonders. How, when we could only ever be the apes of Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard's monkeys?
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