Customer Reviews

Kierkegaard's Socratic Art

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Put simply, Daise is a uniquely clear thinker. His ability to unpack -- to truly and comprehensively unpack -- the social context for a particular idea lends dimension and accessibility to his readings. Anyone interested in Kierkegaard generally, or the Fragments particularly is urged to read this book. The author achieves a refreshing clarity that is rare in a field that sometimes speaks only to itself through scholarly references and tireless over-explanations.

I have been reading Kierkegaard for years and have consulted many secondary sources that simply don't compare to this one. Daise provides interprative keys that will make it valuable not only to the philosophical community (concerned as they are with textual fidelity) but also to the general reader who has an interest in the failures of a modernity which prefigures our own world so thoroughly.

Lastly, in an age currently dominated by irony, at times hip, tragic, subversive and liberating, one could truly benefit by returning to the orignal jester, the romantic rebel and perhaps greatest voice for our current contradictions and deepest anxieties. Daise is an incomparable guide, a true student of Kierkegaard's texts and the wider world which gave birth to them. It is a rare event when someone can bring clarity to a thinker who waged war against all clarity. This work deserves alot of attention.

It was a proverb in Israel, "Was Saul, too, among the prophets (1 Samuel 10.12)?" Saul was a madman and prophesied out of his madness. Does that also make him a prophet? One questions whether Kierkegaard, too, was among the philosophers (e.g. see Alistair Hannay's comparatively inept handling of this question at the beginning of his Kierkegaard. His problem is that, while there is much unphilosophical about Kierkegaard, Hannay's book is part of the "Arguments of the Philosophers" series. To argue in a book labeled "Arguments of Philosophers" that his subject is no philosopher would seemingly set him afoul of Godel's theorem.). Daise's theory seems to be tha Kierkegaard was not a philosopher, which he argues persuasively. All the more so, because he picks up on his real opposition. Not Hannay who claims Kierkegaard is some sort of para-philosopher, but Strawser who, in his book, Both-And, claims that the question is indeterminable, that Kierkegaard left a corpus than may be consistently interpreted in any of two ways or, as he provocatively puts it, you can't deconstruct Kierkegaard because he has already deconstructed himself. Daise argues, successfully I think, that this interpretation is superficial and that there are grounds, within the individual documents and the corpus as a whole that lead us to a single valid interpretation.