Kierkegaard: A Single Life Kindle Edition

I teach philosophy, ethics and the Christian Tradition in college and regularly spend some time with Soren Kierkegaard, particularly his book "Fear and Trembling." SK focuses on the single individual and the angst of possible futures that arise from free will. SK's nemesis is the crowd, the herd. Often called the Father of Existentialism, SK is at the headwaters of a philosophical movement that pushed back against the collectivism of Hegel and those who followed, those who saw history as revelatory of truth and of "God." As history progressed, so it was asserted, the Real and the Absolute were manifest. It was much of this genre of thought that was behind the work of Karl Marx and his utopian communism. To stand against the people manifest in the State was to stand against the flow of history and time. One can only imagine the minimal attention given to the significance of the individual and individual choice.SK was thoroughly Christian and saw in the biblical characters, particularly Abraham, true Knights of Faith, ones who saw their Absolute Duty to God and did not rely on others to mediate to them the true way. The true Christian is not a second-hander, to use the phrase of Ayn Rand.Understanding and appreciating SK is critical to unwrapping 19th century philosophical movements that rushed like a torrent into the 20th. Yet SK is notoriously inaccessible. His use of Socratic irony and his playful use of pseudonymity for and in his books can easily lose the reader. He meant it to be so. He wrote like life is. Things don't go in straight lines. So a book that brings some blue sky to cloudy terrain is appreciated, and Stephen Backhouse's Kierkegaard: A Single Life is just that book.I have finished one reading and now on my second. I see a third reading quickly following. Not only does Backhouse offer of a graspable outline of SK, he stimulates us with it to think more deeply about the nature of truth, the depth of our struggle, and the exploits of true faith.The bottom line is that he motivates me to want to read SK more widely by giving me a frame of understanding, a rhythm of his thought process and identification of the currents and cross currents I will encounter.I will have more to add later on. But for now there is only one point to make - BUY THIS BOOK. And, oh yeh, read it, too. :-)

Stephen Backhouse's Kierkegaard: A Single Life is a brisk, breezy look at Denmark's pre-eminent philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. This text is written in a clear, readily accessible style for the general, non-specialist reader. Accordingly, it is especially useful to readers unfamiliar with Kierkegaard or his works. It serves very well as an entry point into the writings of this notoriously difficult thinker.The book is divided into two sections. The first section, which takes up the bulk of the text, is a straightforward biography that makes use of Kierkegaard's own journals and papers as well as materials from his contemporaries. This distinguishes Backhouse's biography from Lowrie's earlier hagiography which relied almost exclusively on Kierkegaard's journals and published texts as his source materials. Lowrie believed Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works were keys to Kierkegaard's life, a belief Backhouse does not appear to share.A final chapter explores the enormous impact Kierkegaard had on global culture, ranging from Karl Jaspers, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Franz Kafka, to Japanese anime and the Matrix film trilogy. Kierkegaard's influence has indeed been unmistakable.The second, shorter, section of Backhouse's book is an overview of each of Kierkegaard's published and posthumous works. Lowrie integrated these works into his coverage of Kierkegaard's life. Backhouse, however, separates them; he briefly references each work in the biographical section of the text as the books are published, and then devotes one to three pages to each work in the overview section. I believe this is an effective way to introduce a reader to Kierkegaard and his works.This book probably would not provide anything new for those who are already familiar with Kierkegaard, although the material provided by Kierkegaard's contemporaries is content I had not encountered before. The chapter on Kierkegaard's influence also might be of interest to the more advanced reader. Otherwise, I can readily recommend this text to the reader who is curious about this important thinker and is seeking a general introduction.

This biography gives you a sense of Kierkegaard's life experience as the maligned, tormented, ridiculed figure, largely for his physical appearance which often made people, being what they are, ignore the quality of his ideas. The writing in this book is somewhat awkward with some rather unusual usages of common English terms. After the life story is told, the author than provides one- or two-page summaries of each of K's publications, so the book is a useful digest if you want to pursue further reading in K's work. Overall, an ok read.

This book is a good overview of Soren’s life and work. I would complain it’s a bit too sensational, as it focuses too much on Soren’s quirkiness and maybe less on his actual creed and impact on modernity as a whole. But for me it was definitely a good starting point. I would definitely read Ether/Or based on the book’s recommendation. While I appreciate Soren’s view on the individual’s relationship to God as opposed to a collective one, At the same time Soren’s later work focuses a lot on Christendom versus true Christianity and this is a subject I would not want to pursue further.

Everything the author hoped it would be as described in his purpose for writing it - an accessible, engaging, living biography of a legend.

Excellent and interesting biographical work on a popular theologian and writer!

In short, the author accomplished what he set out to do. No small feat, but a credit to him and a blessing to us. Well worth the time and effort invested by author and reader alike.

I loved how much I got to know about the life of the great thinker but it made a minor attempt to connect the life and thoughts as much as I was hoping. Overall I would recommend this a great primer on the Danish Gad fly.