Volume 20, Number 14 · September 20, 1973
Risking Kierkegaard
By J.M. Cameron
Kierkegaard
by Josiah Thompson
Knopf, 286 pp., $8.95
To write a book on Kierkegaard is to take a fearful risk. Either one will take Kierkegaard's own sense of his work seriously—and this is on the whole what Lowrie did in his great and quite properly unseductive life—or one will produce a work that is aesthetic in the sense in which Kierkegaard uses the word. The latter may well be exciting, as a fine study of Plato or John of the Cross may be; indeed, it would have to be very incompetently done not to be exciting, given the interconnections of dialectic and life and attentive reader of Kierkegaard can tease out; but by choosing this approach to the task of writing Kierkegaard's intellectual biography one would be discarding Kierkegaard's own criteria for dealing with philosophical and religious topics.
Review, 1739 words
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