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Originally Posted by nomadicfollower
I'm currently attempting The Sickness Unto Death, and it seems to me (with my limited philosophical knowledge) that this is what Kierkegaard is trying to argue. That the self relates to the self (but I was very confused at this part). This relation, however, is incomplete, and thus, is the source of despair - or man's advantage over the beasts - and is the grounding for the soul, which would complete the relation.
Static harmony also seems to exemplify Kierkegaard's not wanting in despair to be oneself.
(atari, please correct me if I'm wrong. This book has plagued me for the past two weeks, and I'm not yet halfway in, and I would hate to be on the wrong track)
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Kierkegaard is not walk-in-the-park as a reading experience. Once you get the way he structures things, he still has loops yet to throw you for and you also have to be familiar with the dialectic nature of his philosophy. His primary influences are Schopenhauer, Socrates (Plato), and the New Testament. I'm glad that I can read him and other authors like Jung. I have read some Karl Jaspers, but I can't understand it. I have also tried and am always trying to muddle through Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.
The Sickness Unto Death is a weird one (although very succint Kierkegaard-wise) because it is a very late work and one of his most religious, yet it is authored under the pseudonym Johannes
Anti-Climacus. It is important to note that Kierkegaard also wrote under the name Johannes Climacus and many other names.
I'd say get The Attack on Christendom next since you started with that one. As far as what you were asking about, ultimately Kierkegaard believes (like myself, like Mohammed, Buddha, Lao-Tzu, Jesus) that the Self is an illusion that causes Despair, Dread and anxiety. It is the human condition, "the sickness unto death." Union of the individual with God is the only remedy for the illness and area for True Possibility and Becoming; it's the only way to become a True Individual, indivisible.
Kierkegaard did write some works in his own name as "edifying discourses." The greatest of these, and perhaps his greatest work, is the slender Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: The Good in Truth. It's very religious. It's a sermon. And it also beautifully unifies poetry, philosophy, and psychology with Christian religion.
He chose to write by pseudonym when the material was too controversial as in the case of Either/Or Part I, or because when he deliberately attempts to lure you in with a seductive philosophy of easy answers (albeit through a series of rather complicated analogies), which he then proceeds to tear down.
Fear and Trembling is probably the most well-known of his anti-Hegelian diatribes. He was ridiculed in his time, but now he is known as the father of existentialism.