Start with Fear and Trembling, published in 1843 and best read in Alastair Hannay's Penguin translation (1985): short, self-contained, and every Kierkegaardian habit at full strength — the pseudonym, the irony, the vertigo. Choose your translator before you choose your book; the choice matters more here than with almost any other modern thinker.
Why Does Reading Order Matter With Kierkegaard?
Because he wrote against systems. Many of his books appeared under pseudonyms — fictional authors whose positions he refused to endorse — and the exchange only works if you meet them in rough order: Either/Or in February 1843, Fear and Trembling that October, The Sickness unto Death in 1849. He also signed devotional works under his own name, in parallel, on purpose.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) spent his whole writing life in Copenhagen, attacking what he took to be Christianity's comfortable reduction to culture — “Christendom,” he called it — with books that behave like novels, satires, and sermons taking turns. Read him the way you read a novelist's corpus: early doors first, the systematic mopping-up later. The pseudonyms are characters; the signed works are the man; he wanted the difference felt.
What Is Fear and Trembling Actually About?
Genesis 22 — Abraham told to sacrifice Isaac. “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest” (Genesis 22:2, King James Version). The pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, cannot make Abraham intelligible and says so; the book is his record of that failure. Faith, here, is not opinion but a motion of the whole person.
De Silentio distinguishes the knight of infinite resignation, who gives up the beloved and is noble about it, from the knight of faith, who believes the absurd — that Isaac will be returned, that the impossible is not final — on no strength beyond the believing itself. The book's most quoted phrase, the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” names the scandal: if Abraham is praiseworthy, then the highest religious motion can outrank ethics, and no general rule survives. Note what the book does not do: it never says Abraham was right to obey. It says De Silentio cannot understand him, and that pretending otherwise is dishonest.
Which English Translation Should You Choose?
Three families. Alastair Hannay's Penguin Classics volumes — Fear and Trembling (1985), The Sickness unto Death (1989), and the one-volume Either/Or (1992) — are the place to begin: contemporary English, strong introductions, no apparatus. Howard and Edna Hong's versions for Princeton's Kierkegaard's Writings are the scholarly standard. Walter Lowrie's 1940s translations are out of copyright in Europe and circulate free online.
| Translator | Series | Strength | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alastair Hannay | Penguin Classics | Contemporary idiom; strong introductions | A certain British coolness |
| Howard and Edna Hong | Kierkegaard's Writings, Princeton University Press | Completeness; collated journal entries as supplements | Front matter that can overwhelm beginners |
| Walter Lowrie | Various, 1940s | Free online; period urgency | Dated diction and dated notes |
The Hongs' volumes — The Sickness unto Death (1980), Fear and Trembling paired with Repetition (1983), Either/Or in two volumes (1987) — let you watch Kierkegaard think around the book in your hands, through his notebooks. Lowrie's diction is dated, but the urgency survives, and the price is unbeatable.
Related stories: Reading Dante in English Translation · Where to Start With Annie Dillard.
What Order Should You Read Kierkegaard In?
- Fear and Trembling (1843), in Hannay's translation. One long sitting is possible; two sober ones are better.
- Either/Or (1843). The maximalist double book — aesthete against judge — and the reason people think Kierkegaard is merely gloomy if they read it out of order. Hannay's single volume (1992) includes the “Diapsalmata” and “The Seducer's Diary.”
- The Sickness unto Death (1849). Despair, defined with unnerving precision as a misrelation in the self. Hannay (1989) or the Hongs (1980).
- Works of Love (1847), in the Hongs' translation. The signed, Christian Kierkegaard — slower and kinder than his reputation.
- For the committed: Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), the summit and the longest climb.
Where Do Readers Give Up, and What Helps?
At Either/Or's bulk, at the Postscript's deliberate feints, and — most of all — at humorless readings that mistake the irony for doctrine. What helps: read him aloud, since much of the prose was written for a voice; use Hannay's introductions, which say plainly what the pseudonym game is doing; keep a pencil; and treat the pseudonyms as characters whose positions must be tested before they are attributed to anyone. An ironist rewards suspicion as much as trust.
It also helps to know that Kierkegaard was funny on purpose, that he wrote some of these books in weeks, and that the fragmentary, pressing tone is not a symptom you are tolerating but the instrument being played. Readers who give up usually gave up at the exact sentence where the book stopped performing sincerity — which was the sentence doing its job.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do the pseudonyms mean Kierkegaard didn't mean it?
No. Indirect communication was his method: the pseudonym forces you to work out your own position rather than absorb his. He signed the devotional works under his own name, in parallel, on purpose.
Is Kierkegaard a religious writer?
Yes, Christian and exacting — an attacker of comfortable, cultural Christianity rather than of faith itself. Skeptical readers get plenty from him precisely because he takes doubt seriously as a condition, not a stage to be rushed.
Which book is the hardest?
Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) by length and mock-scholarly apparatus; The Sickness unto Death by conceptual density, though it is short.
Is Lowrie a respectable place to start?
It is free and readable, and generations did. But his Victorianizing diction flattens the jokes, and the jokes matter — start with Hannay, keep Lowrie on the device for the odd volume.