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He succeeds for the most part in describing faith by saying what it is not; the knight of faith can be reduced to neither the knight of infinite resignation nor the tragic hero (eg. It is as John of Silence says, 'faith was a task for a whole lifetime, not a skill to be acquired in a matter of weeks or days.'I would recommend this to any reader with an intellectual and religious bent and for the reflective Christians who are wondering what to make of his faith. Soren Kierkegaard's works are notably difficult to read. Still, in this book some knowledge of Hegelian philosophy/ terminology and Greek mythology is almost indispensable in understanding him aright. Yet, it is a faith that does not come cheap. It is this sort of 'universal ethic' that he wants to separate from bona fide Christian faith.Abraham's famous act of faith in offering his to be sacrificed at the behest of God is a supreme example of what Christian ethic is all about - not a simple conformity to what is generally accepted by human society but a radical obedience to divine commands that may at times fly in the face of the prevailing sensibilities. who seeks to penetrate the mystery of faith with his rational mind.
It is better to see faith, from SK's point of view, as a supra-rational act, or better still a gift that is wrought by God. Many are mistaken to see this as a blind leap or a mindless choice.
They have specific meanings given by Hegel referring more or less to what conforms to cultural norms and in Kierkegaard's milieu to its middle class morality. It stands as a class of its own - and this is the radical call of faith, which even the articulate silent John has no words to positively explicate it, save that it is a 'marvel', a 'miracle'.
Fear and Trembling is perhaps the least formidable in comparison. Agamemnon in Greek mythology).
Not an easy read but rewarding to those who plough at it, preferably with some help. Words like 'ethical', 'universal' are not to be taken in the contemporary sense.
This is what is meant by the famous line that Abraham's act was 'a teleological suspension of the ethical'.Kierkegaard here writes through his pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio (John of Silence, who is anything but silent).
It looks like it was printed on cheap printer paper with a cheap printer, folded, stapled and then glued to a thin waxy cover that has no printing on the spine. The paper quality is poor. Typos abound to the point of compromising clarity. It looks more like a pamphlet than a book.So, by all means, buy and read Fear and Trembling, but do not buy this Wilder Publications version. There are open parentheses not followed by closed parentheses. This review is only for the Wilder Publications edition of Fear and Trembling and does not refer to the content of the book at all.
There are blank pages within the text.the whole text is there, presumably, but the blank pages are distracting. The print quality is poor. I have not finished reading Fear and Trembling yet, but there are some interesting ideas about faith but also, I think, some theological and philosophical errors, but perhaps I will comment on those once I've read the text a few times.My main reason for writing this review regards the quality of this specific printing. There are open quotation marks not followed by closed quotation marks. Amazon should not even be selling this poor a quality printing at any price. IT IS UNBELIEVABLY BAD.
Punctuation is incorrect and sometimes completely absent.
No translator named. On the other hand, it does read smoothly, since the Kindle device is such a pleasure. The banquet is the first part of three and represents the esthetic stage. The first page and the following read right along, but little oddities begin to show up, like words running together, missing punctuation (especially the dash), stilted and archaic expressions and other trifles. However, the text is obviously scanned from that 1959 edition, so SK will be there.
He's electrical. Text shot through space at the speed of light. The other two stages are the ethical and the religious. The characters are drawn from SK's other works, and the source is a big book I have had for many years but disgracefully not read.It is STAGES ON LIFE'S WAY. Then there are notes--that is to say, numbers in superscript following certain names and Latin phrases, but not linked to the endnotes at the end of the text, so that you have to guess the "location numbers" (there are no page numbers) and navigate to the end and back again to your reading place for each one.
But if you don't care about appearance, and just want the fun of reading etc., you can get the real text of that book fast and cheap, and the misplaced headers and page numbers actually will allow you to know where you are in the printed edition, something you cannot know in a Kindle edition which is cleanly converted from a printed one. The title page came up. However, the scanned text was never corrected, so that it is all jumbled: words that are hyphenated at the end of a line remain hyphenated in their new positions within the lines and even the header and page numbers (which no longer apply) appear faithfully in the middle of paragraphs throughout. Well, we wanted the ease of reading, and here it is. SK flew through the air, leaving Walter Lowrie behind--there is nothing of his notes and prefatory remarks.
No translator named. Ye gods and little fishes. In short, an unprofessional, slap-dash job. Ye gods and little fishes. I pressed the sample-button. But the rest, as so often in uncertain human existence, proves more problematical.I had just purchased the Kindle 2 and needed to buy a book to see how it worked. Also no scholarly apparatus--a whole page of Latin is left untranslated.
On Kindle. The first words of SK's pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, grab me: "Not merely in the realm of commerce but in the world of ideas as well our age is organizing a regular clearance sale." The great and visionary Kierkegaard. And discovered that the anonymous one has a great advantage: you can increase the size of the font. I fetched my book and compared his translation with the anonymous one offered on Kindle. Finally, expecting the worst, I decided to sample the third SK title available in Kindle: FEAR AND TREMBLING.
What an irresistible idea: an existential philosopher sails through the air and appears in your reading device in less than a minute. I pressed the buy-button and experienced that ineffable anticipation of existentialism coming my way.Now about the reading part. It's the translation by Walter Lowrie, solid and full of passion. I entered his name in the search window of the Kindle store, and the title IN VINO VERITAS (THE BANQUET) came up. From the content--the coming together of five friends at a banquet to talk about women and love--I began to guess the source of IN VINO VERITAS. No problem with the speed of delivery when you need words of wisdom nowadays. Or rather, Dru sailed alone, because the sample offers the first 26 pages of his 35-page introduction, which is excellent, and nothing by SK.
Title page as stated. Next page: no copyright, no publisher, no table of contents. Even though the Kindle edition costs a mere $1.54, I decided to take advantage of the free sample. The table of contents is indeed linked--i.e., you can click each section heading and go immediately to that section. Since I had recently been reading Soren Kierkegaard the old-fashioned way, in a printed book of many years antiquity, I got the happy idea of checking to see how SK had been updated and packaged for the present digital day. The price is a steal: $1.38.
SK and Dru sailed through the air. And updated from what.--you don't need to know. But it's a great classic SK text, in the translation of WL, and I want it, because some years ago a disreputable drifter ripped off my cherished paperback. Later I found that the anonymous translation is posted on the web, and I suspect that this free posting is the source of the Kindle IN VINO VERITAS.Disappointed with my first Kierkegaard e-book experience, I went back to the Kindle store and saw that THE JOURNALS OF KIERKEGAARD, selected and edited by Alexander Dru, was available. I have this edition in an old paperback (1959), so I decided to compare the two. The price was right: $2.39. In all other respects, however, it is inferior, lacking words, passages and, of course, a scholarly apparatus. I pressed the buy-button.
I recognized the title from somewhere, but couldn't quite place it. Only a blurb: "updated with linked TOC." Of course there is plenty of room to spell out "linked Table of Contents." But it is an unwritten law of the new existential condition of man that all acronyms should be used without ever saying or even knowing what they stand for. Thus if your purpose is to read text just for the fun of it, for the impression of a work, and not for any intellectual purpose, or any connection to culture or scholarship, then this is the edition for you. Instead, the first page of text. My edition is translated by the man who almost single-handedly introduced the works of SK to the English-speaking world, Walter Lowrie.
is unbelievable. He is so brilliant, and his ability to process difficult topics in such an interesting, sophisticated and succinct way at age 30. The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the most intriguing and disturbing Bible stories to me for its complexity. I am definitely not a scholar of philosophy and has not read many books,so I had some trouble in the beginning in following his thoughts, but in the end the experience was very gratifying.
There is no text on the spine (good luck finding this after it's been on your bookshelf for a few months) and there are no credits beyond Kierkegaard's -- that's right, no one takes or is given credit (or blame) for the translation. Some of them are also responsible for presenting that work in the poorest possible light. Fear and Trembling This is not a review of Kierkegaard's work (which is a seminal piece of modern philosophy), but instead of the quality of the Wilder Publications edition. It's not enough to say I wouldn't have paid the asking price had I seen this in a store -- I WOULD NOT HAVE BOUGHT THIS if I had seen it in a store.Print-on-demand publishers are responsible for keeping some great work available. Choose this book from a publisher you've heard of. Most of the reviews you will see of this title here on Amazon refer to the Penguin Classic edition, which would undoubtedly have to be a better-produced version of this book. The Wilder edition is a thin, print-on-demand paperback that resembles a pamphlet more than a book.
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