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Kierkegaard (Past Masters)

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I disagree with some of the easy complaints voiced in other less sympathetic reviews of this book and I welcomed Gardiner's approach to Kierkegaard as being an antidote to the widespread tendency to view this writer as an impish yet melancholy anti-philosopher. Unfortunately Kierkegaard has been reduced through decades of superficially motivated and self-seeking interpretations to the status of a finger-in-your-eye trickster who conducted lifelong guerrilla warfare against institutionalized religion and academic philosophy. And, even though his quarrels with bishops and professors are well-known, in the hands of those who would appropriate Kierkegaard for their own variously anti-intellectual and/or breast-beating approaches to life, these same episodes have been reduced to a historical theatrics, the contrived symbolism of those who habitually confuse defiance with authenticity.

Gardiner lets us in on the simple fact that Kierkegaard does not--even in the light of his own undeniably original genius--stand on his own. And if the Dane chose to write at length about, say, the dizzying prospect of real human freedom or the ineluctable pull of the infinite in our finite persons, then it was because such themes were still very much in the air in those days. For example, people need to be reminded that Hegel's philosophy, far from freezing intellectual or religious life, was an unbelievably stimulating development, and yes, contrary to the popular picture of Kierkegaard as a morbidly introspective but entertaining soul, this most unusual man wrote expressly in reaction to the issues that Hegel had raised and the answers he was providing.

And Gardiner's CONTEXTUALIZING of Kierkegaard is immensely valuable because it helps the reader to see in a clearer and more balanced manner just why it is that this man's writings continue to be so provocative and influential to our own day. If Kierkegaard was at loggerheads with the idealist metaphysics of the professors, it was because he was able to see and willing to confront the implications of that line of thinking vis-a-vis the unavoidable demands of Christian faith. Gardiner is not at all interested in downplaying this aspect of the man or in consigning it to the sidelines as an almost arbitrary detail (some Kierkegaard interpreters do end up treating his faith as a more or less incidental aspect of the man or even as a necessary quirk in his character): rather the author places it front and center because Christian faith--contrary to that modern prejudice which would have us assume the opposite--is more than just a set of personal convictions that must take a backseat to just about anything else.

For those who prefer to view Kierkegaard as some kind of countercultural anti-philosopher (read: modernist hero/individualist freethinker before his time, etc.) Gardiner reminds us that his uniquely challenging assertions had as much to do with his inner Christian convictions as they did with the defiant stands he made against the likes of Kant, Hume or Hegel. And any book which allows the reader to re-think the ideas and the debates in which so original a creation as Kierkegaard's emerged is worth the time and the effort it takes to read, understand, and appreciate how it all happened.

Gardiner chooses to focus on Kierkegaard's difficulties and dilemnas in his own time. He tells the story of S.K.'s great renunciation of his Regina( The famous follow- up is his years later remark, " Had I had faith I would have married Regina") and speculates briefly on the motives. But there is tremendously more to be said about this including a question about Kierkegaard's real meaning for what he called ' his thorn in the flesh'. One logical but I agree not very pleasant speculation might have to do with S.K.'s sense of his own physical inadequacy given the terrible insults and sufferings he had been subject to because of his dwarfish physiognimy.
Gardiner outlines Kierkegaard's quarrel with the Church and his effort to define an authentic Christianity based on true inwardness. He also mentions the odd and ironic eulogy by Kierkegaard's older brother at his funeral where he on the one hand praises his brother's writing and on the other condemns him for the very crusade against false Christianity that S.K. dedicated himself to.
The description by Gardiner of Kierkegaard's first major work 'Either-Or' is excellent and he gives a deeper sense of the meaning of the ' aesthetic' and ' ethical ' for Kierkegaard. He too gives a good background to the revolt against Hegelianism, and shows how S.K. was not alone in this in his own time.
The great literary originality, the play between philosophy and literature, the invention of , and focusing on new religious categories are all parts of S.K.'s legacy to the world.
This book gives much, but only skims the surface of a thinker who with every reading is deeper and more complex and more ambiguous.
He is nonetheless for many in the world still , the example not only of the individual as authentic Christian, but the individual as authentic individual. .

I bought this book because I wanted to read a book about KIERKEGAARD. Instead I got one that focuses as much as Hegel and Kart as it does on Kierkegaard. I would not recommend this book. This is a disappointment because I have several other books in this series, Islam, Judaism, Descartes, etc, and they are all very well written. This one strays fromt he true topic way too often.

It is rather disappointing that professor Gardiner, who otherwise seems himself to be an astute and conscientious writer, so patently overlooks the essential character of Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard's struggle to exist in the "how" (not the "what") of the truth. Sadly, Gardiner seems to fall victim of becoming almost doctrinaire(!) about Kierkegaard -- quite an irony, esp. considering that SK anticipated such reconstructions by pedantic professors after he was long dead.

I do NOT recommend this book, for many reasons, but esp. since it vainly attempts to consider SK as a mere thinker, using the spurious canons of rational acceptability all too common among Anglophone philosophes who merely play with the truth -- and never dare to actually venture out and live it in their lives.

On the other hand, if you want to read Gardiner -- for Gardiner's sake -- and you wish to refine the game of reconstruction and dour pedantism, buy the book, by all means...

I think that it is important for this series of short introductions to decide who it is they are catered for. It seems to me that many of the writers are more academic than is probably necessary and while this doesn't diminish the information presented, it does stifle the life and personality of the subject matter. It appears that the demands of academic rigour and its associated authority are a lot more deeply entrenched than I would have thought.

I was introduced to the Great Dane by the sermons of a rigorous Presbyterian pastor, then lent a copy of Gardiner's book by a fellow Jewish student of Kaballah and comparative theology. When I later read Neil Johnson's 1982 the History of Lithium, it struck me, from Peter Gardiner's thoughtful analyses, how tragic it was that Soren died from his own obsessions just as he was reaching his peak, when lithium carbonate had been discovered in his own country and lifetime and- at the time of his death by apoplexy from raging against his Bishop - could have saved him from his manic depression. Not for nothing is he the father of both reformed modern western religion and psychology. The humanists, the secularists and the fanatics who followed him overlooked his eternal truths, the very manner of his tormented death, that, no matter your faith, ethics and personal conduct and responsibility matter above all(as eg Maimonides wrote before him in his commentary on the Mishnah Torah), and acceptance of a spiritual deity is a personal matter and transcending act of faith, never scientifically provable. He, we let the riddle of Abraham's dilemma(sacrificing his son) get at us at our peril.