_The Sickness Unto Death_ is a good place to start reading Kierkegaard. It is shorter than most of his works, and provides a good overview of his most important concepts. One such concept is man's intense desire to understand or somehow obtain proof of the existence of God. Because of our intense fear of death, we are constantly seeking out ways to relieve our doubt concerning the immortality of the soul. Kierkegaard examines this death-drive with remarkable insight, stating that it is in some ways noble, but in other ways is a gross imposition upon God, and a disrespect for God's privacy. In one passage, Kierkegaard suggests that we seek out reasons to experience despair simply in order to drag God across hot coals; that is, in order for us to reach a satisfactory understanding of the existence and/or goodness of God, we have a tendency to go out of our way to find reasons NOT to believe in God. Sometimes these reasons consist in outward examples of atrocities and widespread acts of destructive evil. Other times our despair is of a more inward form, in which we seek to disprove God because of our own shortcomings in avoiding sin. In other words, if we are evil, and consider ourselves to be abnormally bad sinners, we have a vested interest in disproving God; because of our fear of punishment, the existence of God runs counter to our best interests. On the other side of the spectrum, Kierkegaard portrays the more virtuous type of faith as one that avoids higher levels of understanding. Considering the over-abundance in this world of acts we percieve to be evil, it stands to reason that God does not WANT to be fully understood. On page 98, Kierkegaard states: "Is it such great merit or is it not rather insolence or thoughtlessness to want to comprehend that which does not want to be comprehended?" On p.38 he states: "to believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God". All of this is not to say that Kierkegaard is an anti-intellectual or nihilist. Kierkegaard, who once admitted that he "gropes for the tragic in every direction" in a perverse and convoluted desire to "see" God, is just as guilty as anyone of this "imposition" upon God. His intention is simply bringing to light the dynamics of our strange tendencies to unearth the tragic and the role of death and fear in propelling our desire to understand God. Kierkegaard is not judgemental or admonishing in his treatment of these natural human drives towards knowledge; he just wants to enlighten us on why we act the way we do, and what are the inner springs of our creativity and curiosity. The sources of these creative drives do not always present a pretty picture, but Kierkegaard is honest with himself and with the reader in exposing the dark forces underlying our seemingly innocent intellectual curiosity.

Overall I highly recommend this book to all readers, especially those wanting to get a brief overview of some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas. It is also an excellent precursor to _The Concept of Anxiety_, which picks up where this one left off.

In sum, Kierkegaard shows that despair is the inability to live with oneself. We all experience depression, disappointment, and anxiety rooted in the identities we strive to establish apart from the one we were meant to have in God. Therefore, there is no greater truth to eradicate despair than this: that God has made us for relationship with Himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Him. Only when a person relies on his perfect relationship with God, and not his imperfect relationship with his parents, his society, his friends, as the sole criterion for the worth of his soul will he find rest from despair.

Using a highly compressed schematic of the self as a fundamentally relational being that confronts itself and otherness primarily through the imagination and its determination of anxiety and despair, SK both exposes the pathologies latent within imbalances of the relational unity that mark the integrated life, and points to a fundamental misrelation of the self to the Ground of Being as the source of our alientation. Restoration of that relation -- healing and integration of the self -- comes by means of an authentic faith that "annihilates the possibility of despair" by trusting in God as the answer to the self and its alienation.

For me, SK has an almost providential gifting to communicate the essential truth of the inner meaning of anxiety and despair, and does so the most prodigious profundity, brilliance, and passionate faith.

Highly recommended!!! If you take the time (and energy) to attune yourself to this message of Kierkegaard, your life will be changed....

Although Kierkegaard had written other books before this one, mainly some literary critical works as well as his dissertation THE CONCEPT OF IRONY, this is the book that begins what he calls his "Authorship." The works constituting his Authorship have two main things in common: 1) they are all written by Pseudonymous Authors that represent points of view that do not precisely correspond with Kierkegaard's beliefs and 2) they are intent on delineating what Kierkegaard called the three stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and religious stages.

Of all the great philosophical writers, Kierkegaard was one of the greatest masters of literary form. In each work, he adapts a style and form that is appropriate to the particular point of view he is attempting to illustrate. In EITHER/OR I, he is concerned with showing various aspects of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence. Unlike the later stages of existence, the Aesthetic is extremely diverse, and can take more forms and be expressed in a larger number of shapes. Kierkegaard therefore writes a series of essays that bring out various aspects of the Aesthetic stage. Some of these are among his most famous writings. His essay on Mozart's DON GIOVANNI, "The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical-Erotic" ranks among the most famous pieces of musical criticism ever written. Perhaps even more famous is "The Seducer's Diary," in which an individual records his attempts to snare a young woman, though more in the sense of a Mephistopheles than a Don Juan. My favorite section, and the one that illustrates an especially developed form of the aesthetic is "The Rotation of Crops," in which our anonymous author attempts to deal with the one great difficulty facing the Aesthetic Mode of Existence: boredom. As he writes, "Boredom is the root of all evil." Therefore, the challenge to the Aesthetic is to thrust away continually boredom, and in this essay our writer provides a guide to making life as interesting as possible. We are required to continually find new friends, new jobs, new interests, since all obligations lead to tedium. Marriage is, of course, to be avoided, since this is boring (the contrary to this will be asserted in EITHER/OR II). That this task is impossible is taken up in later works by Kierkegaard.

EITHER/OR begins in classic Kierkegaardian fashion. Kierkegaard was probably the greatest master of the Preface in the history of literature. His Prefaces are such masterpieces that they can profitably be read on their own, and he himself delighted in writing them to such a degree that he wrote one book that consisted in nothing but Prefaces. In the one to both volumes of EITHER/OR, a gentleman by the name of Victor Eremita explains how he accidentally discovered the papers filling the two volumes that had been hidden in a desk. He separates them into two groups, "A" and "B". He possesses no great certainty as to the authorship, but believes that one person may have written the first group, and another the second group. Or, alternately, that the author of the "A" papers may have written the "B" papers later in life. The latter is probably what Kierkegaard wants us to believe, for it is his fundamental belief that the Aesthetic mode of existence is doomed to failure, and that it is possible (though not necessary) that this could lead to a higher level of existence, The Ethical. This new stage is dealt with in the second volume of EITHER/OR.

You will have the most fun reading the first book of Either/Or. The book is actually the master fisherman's best hook -much like Socrates was a midwife of thoughts- to bring you out into reflection of the question at hand: Either the esthetic or the ethical life. This book and the second part is this elaborate question concerning two opposing ways of life. This first book is ironically and seductively entertaining. He deals with various subjects like Mozart, Drama, unhappiness, Boredom and finallly the seduction of young girl. If anything else, read the last two portions of the book. One of the things that I like about the way K writes is his ability to use words from other disciplines and to incorporate them into his language so beautifully that reading him is literally an excursion.

Kierkegaard's brilliance lies in his ability to take such deeply personal experiences--love, lust, sorrow--and comment universally in a way that is at least unmatched in philosphy and probably in all of literature. He understands life in a way that seems obvious but is in actual fact merely fundamental to all of us. The book is a collection of papers and texts on a variety of subjects that at first seem disconnected but in the end all tie perfectly together with the truly brilliant "seducer's diary". Philosophy is a literary discipline that generally provokes either intimidation or a feeling of pointlessness (by this I mean that people wonder why should I care what someone else thinks if it is all unprovable anyway). I feel that Kierkegaard represents everything that is good about philosphy and is worth an attempt at least even if one is trepedatious. This book will not overwhelm you in complex language or termanology, rather it will leave you invigorated with fresh ideas and new questions about everything around. Everyone should read this book.

In addition to the parallels between this story and SK's relation with his father mentioned by previous reviewers, another important parallel is his failed engagement with Regine Olsen. She is his Isaac, who he must sacrifice. Perhaps he thinks his own calling, means that he too can "teleologically suspend" the ethical (duties to Regine). Its remarkable, that we now should be so concerned about the private live of a pseudonymous author. Is Johannes de Silentio a poetic side of Kierkegaard? Poetic yes, but paradoxically he also says he is purely dialectic.

The different takes of the Abraham story, remind me of Rabbinical midrash. The four different accounts did not happen, but they might have. It is a way of stretching the story, and a way to introduce his "faith by virtue of the absurd". The tragic hero remains in the ethical, but Abraham is different that this, and is related to the Absolute. Very thought provoking!

These two books are twins: published on the same day, with the same purpose: the failed explications of an essential Kierkegaardian concept: Repetiton. Why, when an author clearly knows the meaning of a concept in his own terminology, would he fail to be able to explain it? Why would an author make failure part of the purpose of a book? There is a reasons. The authors of both books are pseudonyms. Kierkegaard does not use nom de plumes. He creates characters and then writes the book from that perspective. Johannes de Silento (the author of "Fear and Trembling")is a poet. Constantine Constantinus (the author of "Repetition") is an experimental psychologist. These characters attempt to define repetition, but their methods will not allow them. Repetition is not reducible to poetry (romanticism) or science (reason). Now why is that? It is necessary to Kierkegaard's project (the book "Repetition" shows that it is necessary) because his project is essentially Christian and Revelation cannot be derived philosophically (Hence Constantine Constantinus' failure). But how do you get to discuss Christian ideas, then? By an elaborate method of importation and laundering. For instance, Constantine Constantinus introduces Repetition by comparing it to Platonic recollection. But the real source for importation is the Old Testament. Fear and Trembling is an elaborate interpretation of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. Repetition ends with the Young Man (the guinea pig for Constantine Constantius' psychological experiments) writting on the Book of Job. In each case, something is sacrificed and yet the one who sacrifices finds the sacrifice restored to him. Much ink has been spilt showing how this copncept relates to Kierkegaard's abortive engagement or his relations to his father (and I am sure SK appreciates this muddying of the waters; he never liked an audit trail), but the primary image is that of God the Father sacrificing his Son, and, through the Ressurrection (as Johannes de Silento would say, by virtue of the absurd) receiving him back again.

SK once claimed had he written no other book, Fear and Trembling would have sufficed to make his reputation as one of the greats of literature. A fair assessment, but he did indeed write other books and Fear and Trembling needs to fit within that context. This is especially the case in relation to its twin: Repetition. This is even more urgent when you recognize Fear and Trembling's subject matter, which is: Repetition. SK introduces the concept with typical irony: neither Constantine Constantinus nor the Young Man, nor Johannes de Silento actually achieve repetition. Repetition is negatively defined: we are told not what it is, but what it is not. We are told that repetiton occurs "by virtue of the absurd." Sartre took this construction directly into his philosophy and made himself a laughing stock. This goes to show that either you keep you sense of humor fully operational in reading SK's books or he will make you look like a jerk. People who do not laugh long and loud at these books will not be able to interpret them without claiming for themselves absolute idiocy. And people who do not understand Repetition may as well stop wasting their time on Kierkegaard. Perhaps the can do Nietzsche and perspectivism instead?

_Practice in Christianity_ is one of Kierkegaard's more underrated books, and should not be overlooked. I will summarize his concepts as best I can: In this book Kierkegaard encourages a rigorous and "militant" practice of Christianity. By "militant" he does not mean violence in the physical sense, obviously. What he means is a determination to constantly find better ways to understand God and Christ, even though every question that gets answered seems to spawn more questions. Rigorous Christianity is a continuous chasing after that which perpetually eludes us. Even though we may never reach a true catharsis in our understanding, the process of continually seeking understanding is still beneficial to the individual. It helps to strenthen the uniqueness of our individuality, and helps to set us apart from society in a way that preserves the "heterogeneity" of society. Kierkegaard stresses the importance of maintaining heterogeneity within society because this is essential in the creation of individual personalities, and is an essential ingredient to conscious life in general. Kierkegaard states it thus: "woe to the Christian Church when it will have been victorious in this world, for then it is not the Church which has been victorious but the world. Then the heterogeneity between Christianity and the world has vanished, and Christiantiy has lost" (p. 223). It is important that society does not ever reach a consensus on what to believe in, because then we will all rest on our laurels and abandon the continual, rigorous striving that is essential in enhancing our individualist personalities. The loss of individualism is synonymous with the end of conscious life and self-awareness as we know it. There must always be individuals who stand out as beacons of virtue, if for no other reason than to infuse other people with life by making them feel inadequate and subjugated. Rigorous, militant Christians must always turn their back on the world and strive for something better, and indoing so they help to blaze a trail into higher realms of understanding, dragging the reluctant congregation behind them.

If these concepts sound interesting to you, I highly recommend this volume. Die hard atheists will probably view this book as a fruitless discussion over a moot point. But people who consider themselves Christian, and want to set themselves apart from other lackadaisical, so-called Christians, could benefit greatly by reading this book. This is not a book for people who show up to church just to show up and then fall asleep in the pew - it is for people who want to reach a higher standard of rigorous practice in religion.

This book is somewhat hard to review. To me its sole purpose is to get you away from rationalizing about God and to develope an uncompromising faith in the God of Christianity. The book is revelant even to our times when nominal Christianity runs rampant and doctrinal beliefs akin to the Health and Wealth message gain acceptance from the naive masses. I guess in the end this book made me think about what i do believe about God and Jesus...something some of us are afraid to do candidly because of what we might find.

To describe Kierkegaard is, to say the very least, difficult! Not that his style of writing is boring or even overly difficult. Not at all! His style is poetic, warm, and loving. Yet all the while, he makes you feel uncomfortable, leads you to questioning your faith, and often makes one angry! However, the thing that I admire most about the author and the book "Practice in Christianity", is how he has led me to recklessly look inside myself, so that I can see the the truth about who I am! In short, no other author has ever made me just "think", the way that SK has. I have read and heard much of modern theology. For me, this "modern theology" only scratches the surface of these important thoughts. SK will take your mind and heart, to spiritual depths that are thus far, undiscovered.

This book, page for page, may be Kierkegaard's best ever. This is a rather slim volume, but is packed with Kierkegaard's most profound and life-changing philosophy. Compared to his other works (almost all of which I highly, HIGHLY recommend) this book comes across as one of the most potent and dense. Therefore, I would recommend this one first and foremost to a reader who is pressed for time and is intimidated by the sheer length of Kierkegaard's other works. If you have not devoted every minute of your spare time to reading every page of every book ever written by Kierkegaard, my first question, of course, is WHY NOT?!?!? What are you thinking??? Get with the program!!! I am willing to forgive you, however, if you could just find time in your busy schedule to read this one slim pamphlet. It is the "Reader's Digest" condensed Kierkegaard for realistic 50-hour-a-week men, and it could radically change your life for the better. Profound, uplifting, loving, hopeful, and positive, I recommend this book to all readers.

Kierkegaard exposes what it means to be a Christian. And be warned. It is impossible to read the book and walk away. A spiritual mirror is setup for those who dare to look. Individual's life including Scripture study is the core of this book.

For a long time, _Stages on Life's Way_ sat atop the list of my favorite books of all time. This book is a gut-wrenching account of Kierkegaard's tragic problems with women, and is a vivid portrait of a man who is snake-bit in his love life. I can especially relate to this book, being that I am not married, most likely never will be married, and am singlemindedly obsessed with sitting around reading philosophers like Kierkegaard and Jung. I can honestly attest that I broke up with the love of my life, with no regrets, just because she was preventing me from reading as much Kierkegaard as I would have liked. And this is eerily similar to Kierkegaard's own experience in this book.

Although this book still qualifies as non-fiction philosophy, it often has an autobiographical, and sometimes outright ficticious feel to it. This ultimately enhances the readability of the book, because it often refers to situations inspired by the author's own experiences; these real-life situations then help to exemplify and clarify Kierkegaard's key concepts. It is frustrating to read authors who expound one abstract theory after another and never bother to set-up a realistic situation in which these human-behavioral concepts might come into play. Kierkegaard is almost never guilty of doing this. His style is always firmly grounded in reality, and is thereby more readily translatable than most other authors from the same time period.

I highly recommend this book to anyone out there, especially someone who, like myself, has found himself torn between a philosophy-centered avocation and a love life which always seems to be trying to tear us away from our real passions and duties. If I could give it 6 stars I would. Unconditionally recommended.

This book is a second and more complete version of Either/Or. It is more complete in that instead of ending with a sermon (The edification to be found in the thought that before God we are all in the wrong)as does Either/Or, it actually explores the religious sphere, the highest sphere of existence in Kierkegaard's schema. As in all of Kierkegaard's writings, this is not an abstract exploratiton of the spheres, but is embodied in characters, the most characters in any of Kierkegaard's work. It is an alarmingly complex and aggravating work. The aggravation comes in with the characters occassionally demanding to know whether the reader has a life and how can s/he possibly waste his time with drivel like this. The work is divided into three parts, one for each sphere. The aesthetic sphere is represented by a updating of Plato's Symposium, with Kierkegaard repeating a number of pervious characters, (Constantine Constantinus, Victor Eremita, the Young Man, Johannes the Seducer) and introducing a new character, the Fashion designer. The subject of the speeches: Women. The second part, presenting the Ethical sphere, heralds the return of Judge William from the second part of Either/Or, this time uncomfortably sandwiched between the Aesthetic and the religious spheres. In Either/Or he is smug, but in this book he cannot pretend his position has any kind of ultimacy. The Religious calls his position constantly into question. The ethical is the relative, the religious the absolute. The Ethical claims we should repent our sins, while the religous claims that all the sins of the world are our sins, and not only collectively, but individually. We must repent the sins of the entire world. This is something the ethical cannot accept. The Religious sphere is represented by "Quidams's Diary." This is a repetition on the "Seducer's diary" which ends the first half of Either/Or. This time, however, the principal is a sufferer instead of a predator. He is hopeless, sad and sorrowful having just ended an unhappy love affair. This sorrow launches him beyond the ethical into a dark night of the soul. The Diary entries are interpursed,on the fifth of each month (Kierkegaard was born on the fifth of May) by brilliant little stories which comment on the process of the soul's healing. Frater Taciturnus (Brother Silent, perhaps related to Johannes de silento of Fear and Trembling?) also provides a commentary. The problem with the book is that once Kierkegaard claimed that he wanted his reader to expend as much effort reading his books as he did in writing them. He has made sure in this case that he would achieve this goal. If it weren't for the quality and overwhelming wealth of the content, this one wouldn't worth it. As it is, you should probably read the earlier books of Kierkegaard's authorship first. With this one, you need all the help you can get.

_Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus_ is essential reading for anyone who wishes to read the sequel, _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_, which is arguably Kierkegaard's most important work. This first volume, even taken by itself, is still a valuble, well written, and entertaining work. But its primary purpose is to establish the personality of Kierkegaard's infamous, neurotic character "Johannes Climacus", the pseudonym under which he wrote this book as well as the monumental _Postscript_. It is very important that any Kierkegaard scholar realize the author's intentions behind the creation of the Johannes Climacus character, and the exact relationship between Kierkegaard's real views and the often-antithetical, illogical, absurd, and even farcical views of his pseudonymous alter-ego. In this book, the character of Johannes Climacus is established, and the careful reader should be able to identify the discrepency between Climacus' ideas and Kierkegaard's real ideas. This characterization process is very interesting and makes for a good read, but to get the full effect you must also read _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_, in which the reader is treated to the full effect of the neurotic ramblings of Kierkegaard's alter-ego.

The greatest challenge for any newcomer to Kierkegaard is finding the best place to gain an overview. In my opinion, this is the finest place to start. In the main work in this collection, THE POINT OF VIEW (the book also contains some smaller pieces on his Authorship), Kierkegaard sets out to explain his purposes and strategy in writing the books constituting what he calls his Authorship. Students of Kierkegaard generally refer to these books as his Pseudonymous Authorship, because in all of these he writes none of them under his own name, but employs a variety of fictionalized authors, who represent a particular point of view that is not that of Kierkegaard himself. The Pseudonymous works are contrasted with what has become to be known as Kierkegaard's Second Literature (a descriptions attributed to Kierkegaard scholar Robert L. Perkins), which comprises his edifying works and his later religious works, most of which were published under Kierkegaard's own name, though with a couple of his greatest later works published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus.

Some of these works, such as EITHER/OR I, contain writings on a variety of aesthetic topics. Many of the books deal with either ethical or religious topics, though the latter never from within a religious perspective. Kierkegaard's main argument in the POINT OF VIEW is that from first to last he was, even when writing on aesthetic topics, a religious author. The Pseudonymous works all presuppose a theory of stages, which Kierkegaard describes as moving from the aesthetic to the ethical and into the religious (the precise prepositions, according to SK, being of the utmost importance).

It is not clear that Kierkegaard had a precise understanding of all this at the moment he was writing the first of his Pseudonymous works, but it is unquestionable that he moved to this point of view fairly early on. This little volume is, therefore, a wonderful introduction to Kierkegaard's most famous works, and remains one of the most fascinating reflections by a great writer on the nature of his own work ever written.

What begins as a critique of Gyllembourg's "Two Ages" developes into Kierkegaard's most powerful examination of the confrontation between individuality and society. Chapter Three is, as far as I know, THE definitive existentialist manifesto of human individuality and its constant battle against being swallowed up by the mindlessness of modern culture. In a critique that is especially applicable in today's culture of mass media, body-babble and relationship-babble, Kierkegaard shows how conscious individuality is drained out of the individual by chatter and leveling. When the innermost private matters of the individual become public, then individuality loses its meaning, human consciousness collpases, and we have "the present age... relaxing in indolence." This is nowhere more clearly seen that in the present-day "talk shows", where the innermost private matters of the individual are bared for public consumption with all the tact of a street corner flasher. Kierkegaard's analysis, over 150 years old, is more relevant than ever in today's culture. If you are sick of hearing about "relationships", this book is a must. It is worth every penny, and may well be the most important book you will ever read.

To the top 1000 reviewer. Yes, Kierkegaard's conception of the world can be simplified (if you try VERY very hard) into an EITER/OR, but even then, you missed some of the irony of the position. The original conception of EITHER/OR was between the aesthetic and the ethical, and only later did he develop the religious. Of course, I am not so dimwitted as to say that the religious is a synthesis of aesthetic and ethical, in fact there is in Kierkegaard no pendulum motion between the ethical back to the religious, but to him only a farther upward motion.

The characterization of Kierkegaard's response to Hegel is misinformed because Hegel himself believed that the historical processes, once resolved, the movement of humanity was toward God. There was a directed upward motion in the dialectic that pointed to God. What Hegel was positing, therefore was that the dialectic was scientific (and therefore the scientific logic could no longer be classified as an either/or, but as a both/and, which makes the Kierkegaard's titleling all the more ironic) and objective, and by extension, God too is objective, at least to the extent that 'God' was the deus ex machinia of the system.

What Kierkegaard posits instead is that the world is absurd, and real meaning is subjective. Therefore, if the subjective is taken out of god, then the absurdity of life was meaningless, but with the restoration of the absurd to God, there was at least a teleologic to the absurdity of human existence which may or may not redeem it. (See Fear and Trembling).

Of course, this coming from the atheist/ironist/pseud-nietzschean-romantic who believes that Kierkegaard made a big mistake turning away from Lucinde in Irony and in turning away from Regine in life.

However, Kierkegaard is absolutely necessary, as much to the trembling christian as to the laughing aesthete. However, this should not be your first Kierkegaard book. (The title alone should tell you that, but in fact, you miss a lot of The Philosophical Fragments if you miss The Concept of Irony. Start there.). Also, I hereby disclaim any references to the 'God' word i just made, including this sentence.

This is Kierkegaard's most important work - the real meat of his writings. It is more difficult then most of his works and should be approached with caution, but it is absolutely essential to achieve a full understanding of Kierkegaard. Keep in mind that _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_ was originally written under the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus, the sceptical and pessimistic alter ego of the real Kierkegaard. Not to spoil the surprise, but in reading this book you should remember that much of what is being said is contradictory to Kierkegaard's real beliefs. In my experience reading this book, I only began to realize this gradually. This is because not EVERYTHING in this book is antithetical or diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's real views; only portions of it are antithetical. Kierkegaard truly engages and challenges the reader by exposing views that make sense at first, but then after letting Climacus get riled up, his rantings and ravings become increasingly illogical and pessimistic. The challenge consists in discovering where the real Kierkegaard leaves off, and where the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus picks up. The reader must constantly be on alert for antithetical and contradictory statements, and must approach this book with a highly critical mindset. The end result is one of the most fantastically thought-provoking, creative, original, and entertaining books you will ever read. By forcing the reader to take this critical approach, Kierkegaard gives us an opportunity to formulate and fortify our individual beliefs in contradistinction to those of Climacus, forcing us to truly think for ourselves. The reader is bombarded with profound philosophical statements which are oten true and sensible, and can be proven consitsent with Kierkegaard's real beliefs. But sandwiched between these logical statements, Climacus will say something so off the wall that the reader must subject these statements to a critical re-evaluation. This is what makes the _Postscript_ such a profoundly thought-provoking and personally enriching experience.

One more thing to consider before you read this book: As I said, this book was written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. To fully understand the inner workings of this character, you must also read _Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus_, which is the precursor to _Concluding Unscientific Postscript_. This first book helps the reader understand the pseudonymous and sometimes antithetical beliefs held by Kierkegaard's neurotic alter-ego. Taken together, the _Johannes Climacus/Philosophical Fragments/ Conlcuding Unscientific Postscript_ series is the be-all end-all philosophical work of the 19th century. It is a monumental achievement of epic proportions and will go down in history as the most important and profound work of literature to come out of Europe during that time period.

Be warned! The Princeton edition of this book comes in two volumes. Volume 1 is just the body of text to Kierkegaard's book. There is no historical introduction in the first volume, just Kierkegaard's satirical introduction that was intended for the original book. The historical introduction and scholarly apparatus are in the second volume. If the reader does not wish to inquire beyond Kierkegaard's text, he need not worry, the second volume is for the person who did not find Kierkegaard mind numbing enough and sees need to go behind the text. I am one of those kind of people, but you might not be.