How to Begin Reading Kierkegaard
Beginning to read Kierkegaard can be strange. His most regarded works are generally pseudonymous while he has a massive veronynous oeuvre as well. To get into this, I’d generally recommend starting with the pseudonymous works and going to the veronymous ones after and dependent on interests. If you wanted me to give a syllabus of Kierkegaard readings there are some veronymous works I’d certainly include (one of them is basically the highlights of Being and Time, because Heidegger was plagiarist).
The only veronymous work I might start with is The Concept of Irony, which it is worth noting is his Magisterial thesis. It requires a bit of Hegel and some Plato to really dig into, but it’s a pretty decent work of philosophy on it’s own and if you go on into his works can be a bit of a codex for understanding his irony, which is a very important concept to understand in him from a secular perspective.
In general, if you just want to get a basic “What is considered ‘Kierkegaard’ by most people?” sense of his works, always begin with Fear and Trembling. It is his most popular work by far and with good reason–Sartre learned Danish seemingly just to read it despite him claiming it was to read Kierkegaard. It is accessible compared to many of his works and gives a decent overview of some of the key themes in his work, though I do feel that can also obfuscate how it is pseudonymous. It does bring up faith, repetition, the knights of infinite resignation and faith, tragedy, and the distinction between the ethical and the religious. Reading it secularly, the ideas around tragedy, faith, and repetition are very important in other thinkers as well. In the contrast between the ethical and religious, we see what it means to act in faith and the difficulty of it. Abraham had to be completely silent as the word would cause an ethical relation to Isaac or Sarah. This is easily interpreted around matters of authenticity, that is that authenticity as an action is difficult and hard and mostly not something other people will like or understand.
To that end, Christianity is weird and difficult to actually obtain and most people who say they have it are deluded to Kierkegaard. Christendom, the term Kierkegaard attributes to everyday self-proclaimed Christians, makes believing one is authentically Christian easy. You can drop the Christianity and maintain the overall critique of authenticity in it’s contemporary form. Important to this reading, though, is that Kierkegaard himself, as a Christian writer, isn’t a Christian. He doesn’t consider himself a believer, instead he is a poet of the religious. He didn’t obtain authenticity very self-consciously and so had to write in a matter that distanced himself from the things he could see but not fully understand. That’s why these pseudonyms matter.
As to the issue of how to read and interpret Kierkegaard more broadly secularly, well, he is in many ways a thoroughly post-modern thinker in the sense of being after modernism. He deconstructs and disassembles systems. He gives us the death of the author in a very lived way. He brings to the fore the idea that history is accidental and should never be understood as a necessary unfolding of event from efficient, formal, material, or teleological causality. He is one of the three main anti-philosophers, along with Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, for a reason. Kierkegaard’s work is a true rupture from what came before it and many ideas of later thinkers, particularly in the Continental tradition, can be found to have precedent in him.
Kierkegaard’s most invaluable contribution, though, is one suffused in his irony and authenticity and all of the ideas that he plays with: subjectivity. Kierkegaard is one of the first philosophers truly of the subjective and how it functions. There are facts and objective things in the world, sure, he doesn’t debate that, but that doesn’t change that those facts are interpreted by interpreting subjects. I can think of few ideas that are more important to understand in the world than the fact that we come to our world with ideas inscribed upon us. The world isn’t neutral for us to interpret the facts of it but comes to us from our preconceptions that are so ingrained we can never truly get to a perfect science of understanding it. We always already are inscribed with a world–we bear the mark of hereditary sin in more Christian terms. We begin fallen into this. There are already words for things. Kierkegaard demonstrates and argues this idea in a way that I feel is important, though others have picked up the torch since, but it’s also one of the most important ideas secularly and not just from Christianity.