How to Misunderstand Kierkegaard

An Instruction Manual for Assistant Professors and Other Immoral and Disreputable Persons

Stuart Dalton

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781666732252, 9781666725711
• eBook ISBN: 9781666725728
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophen

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many excellent jokes about assistant professors as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy; specifically: - Don't cease to be human. - Don't be a parasite, merely feeding off other people's creations and never creating anything new.- Don't reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard's ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point).- Don't kill Kierkegaard's philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived.Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism--a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: How I, an assistant professor, found a way to justify writing a book about Kierkegaard’s philosophy in spite of Kierkegaard’s many excellent jokes about assistant professors who write books about his philosophy, and why this is a fragmentary, sketchy, scrappy, and crumby book
• Chapter 1: How to misunderstand Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks as nothing more than supplements and appendices to his other books rather than works of philosophy themselves
• Chapter 2: How to misunderstand the many concluding summaries that Kierkegaard wrote to explain his strange indirect authorship by imagining that they are somehow outside his strange indirect authorship and therefore should be trusted completely
• Chapter 3: How to misunderstand religion in Kierkegaard’s writing and thus succeed in completely overlooking some of the most interesting ideas in his philosophy
• Chapter 4: How to misunderstand what Philosophical Fragments can teach us about human (all-too-human) education
• Chapter 5: How to misunderstand Either/Or by assuming there’s only one nihilist in the book, and that only Part I is comical
• Chapter 6: How to misunderstand Repetition by ignoring the fact that the book’s author, Constantin Constantius, loves a good farce
• Chapter 7: How to misunderstand Johannes Climacus by missing the methodological manifesto that it contains
• Conclusion: And now this crumby book is finally over
• Bibliography