I find Sickness Unto Death nea uncomprehensible, are Kierkegaard's Other Works better

[dratsab]

Curious, since I was expecting better than this, because his writing seems to lack clarity.

[mal4mac]

I gave up on "Fear and Trembling". Found it near incomprehensible, and very tedious.

[stlukesguild]

There's a reason that a good many works by philosophers are not included among the lists of "great literature".

[Ramona Tudor]

I've come across Sickness unto Death only recently and managed to read most of it, but I had to drop it when I arrived at the last part. I also dropped Fear and Trembling, as I found myself unable to finish it.
Kierkegaard's works are often regarded as difficult to read (and understand), and there should be a reason to that... I suppose his style is too abstract, and his way of presenting his ideas is sort of ambiguous. It's rather difficult to go through his read and, it seems to me, it is rather hard sometimes to understand what his point is, or what point is he actually trying to make. Even though I wouldn't go as far as comparing him to Nietzsche's writing, I find that the two have something in common... the similarity lies in the incapacity of coherently/straight-forwardly transmitting a piece of information, or in the hardship a reader endure have while trying to understand the point that is trying to be made. While we could say that Nietzsche's works are sometimes hard to understand because of his cynicism, Kierkegaard is different. I don't really know the answer myself, but he might have been constraint by some reasons or another to write in this way; and whether these constraints were internal or external, I cannot know.

I also find it a very arduous task to try synthesise his work -it's difficult to extract ideas and structure them in a logical manner: A, B, C, trying to make a scheme out of his ideas/writing/book. Not that I truly think that all philosophical works should be easy to structure in this manner, but it is also very disturbing if one is unable to synthesise a certain work only because it is too dense (regarding the ideas and style of presenting them). I haven't tried to seriously synthesise any of his works, but I believe it would be a very difficult task.

[mal4mac]

I've read most of Nietzsche and found him much easier to read than Kirkegaard, and very entertaining. I don't find Nietzsche cynical, I find him realistic! I agree that Nietzsche isn't straightforward, but I find his divergent style interesting.

[dratsab]

Thanks for informing me. Speaking of Nietzsche, what works of his do you recommend I read? I made it through Beyond Good & Evil and enjoyed aspects of it, but I couldn't finish Thus Spake Zarathustra, though I may consider going back and giving it another shot... if only I could understand it better. Also, does Immanuel Kant have anything of his that is understandable? I've heard that he is very difficult to read, but I glanced through his book on Morals at a bookstore, and it didn't look intolerable.

[mal4mac]

Thanks for informing me. Speaking of Nietzsche, what works of his do you recommend I read? I made it through Beyond Good & Evil and enjoyed aspects of it, but I couldn't finish Thus Spake Zarathustra...

I had to force myself through Zarthustra, I found it well-nigh unreadable, didn't understand much of it. I'd have given up if I hadn't read several of his other works. Besides Beyond Good and Evil I found The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morals the most readable.

(Now some will come on here and say Zarathustra is his greatest work. I'd say, ignore them and trust your own instincts. They actually concur with those of Harold Bloom, who calls Zarathustra "unreadable", but includes the other three works mentioned so far in his Western Literary Canon. He includes no Kant in his canon, no Kirkegaard, and few other philosophers...)

From my brief excursion, I've found lack of clarity and imperviousness to straightforward comprehension describes most of philosophy. The only way I've got through the small amount of Kant I've read is with the "The Kant Dictionary" and Google, to hand, spending hours over each page. I decided that life was too short, and left him to professional philosophers.

Bloom's Western canon:

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html

[Vota]

I have a hard time taking philosophers seriously that can't expound upon their ideas in a clear and coherent fashion. Is it gibberish or genius? I incline toward the former.