Kierkegaard for Beginners

Writers & Readers Documentary Comic Book #66

by Donald D. Palmer

Traces the life of the philosopher in illustrations and examines his major ideas

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Biography, Comics

150 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. He is known for writing introductory books on philosophy and philosophers which attempt to make philosophical ideas accessible to novices. He also illustrates his own books.

Currently he is visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me reading books about existentialism:



Me reading books by existentialists:

[Shane Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was basically Kierkegaard for Dummies...and yet after reading it I am still confused by this Dane's ruminations!

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great overview of the weird life and weirder ideas of the Father of Existentialism. Extra star because the cover illustration makes Kierkegaard look like the protagonist of a Tezuka manga.

[Iulian · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this was of genuinely literary significance, maybe I would've rated it a 5 star. Instead, due to a reader's prejudice I will give a solid 4 stars rating because of the invisible label "user guide". Other than this childish fact, I really enjoyed this piece of fun, contemplative and interesting insight in Kierkegaard's work. Just for the fact that a debate with a religious person is itself not open to the mind but instead to heart and if you can't relate to faith without judgment, you cannot relate at all. Also, the three forms of existence, an authentic look at one's own characteristics as forms of behavior - a really good read.

[Nola Brown]

Funny pictures, cool, comprehensive, understandable. Seems to have me convinced Kierkegaard is the literary saint of teenage angst… like he kinda got us there with Dread being the whole foundation of consciousness and everyone is in varying states of not identifying as their true self and wanting to die because of or despite of their existence as a self to pursue. Can’t wait to pick up Kierkegaard and not finish any of his work!

[Steve Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Quick and easy”? I don’t think so. The concepts reviewed in the first five chapters could have been presented in a far more accessible fashion. There were times I wished Palmer had fleshed out an idea more fully, and other times where I thought he could have said it far more succinctly. In any case I thought it unnecessarily opaque.

He brings up the title of Kierkegaard’s work “De Omnibus Dubitandum Est” and discusses it at length without once giving a translation from the Latin. It turns out that would have been tremendously useful in grasping the section’s theme. So the “beginners” this book addresses have a working knowledge of Latin? It was written in 1996, so I don’t suppose any back then Googled it as I had to. It means “everything must be doubted”. How hard would it have been for him to stick that into parentheses after presenting the Latin?

Palmer mentions a work of Franz Kafka at the end of chapter five, saying that the character “K” was turned into a cockroach. He is confusing “The Metamorphosis” character of Gregor Samsa with that of Josef K. from “The Trial”. Samsa is turned into an insect, “K” is not.

In the chapter on the ethical sphere he describes a character/personality type as a “schizoid aesthete”. If this is Kierkegaard’s term it doesn’t ring right with the modern definition. A schizoid individual wouldn’t be able to adopt the faux personalities that Palmer describes in Kierkegaard’s “Either/Or”.

In the glossary Palmer describes Sartre as being a “wayward” disciple of Kierkegaard’s without qualifying the statement. He states there are several definitions for “freedom” but doesn’t provide a definition of freedom as Sartre would have described it in contrast to the way Kierkegaard would have. Is there a difference?

In the glossary Palmer describes the synoptic gospels as “first-hand eye witness accounts”. They are not. Mainstream Biblical scholarship refutes this, as does an unbiased casual reading of the texts.

So Kierkegaard’s ideas are tough to grasp, as some here write? No doubt. But a thirty second search on YouTube yields an interview with a British philosopher and an overview of Kierkegaard by yet another...all clear and easy to understand without dumbing it down and insulting one’s intelligence.

This is poorly written, and the cute cartoons don’t mitigate that.

[Michael Shockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

For what it's worth, I think this is a great introduction to Kierkegaard. Obviously, you're not going to be an expert in his philosophy or anything after reading this text, and you will likely need to supplement it with other materials, but I think it does an okay job of accomplishing what it sets out to do, that being to provide the neophyte with a big-picture view of Kierkegaard's philosophy and its lasting influence on philosophy in the 20th century.

[Keith]

i definitely recommend reading this book before reading Kierkegaard directly. This helps break down basic concepts and terminology and gives a broad overview of the most relevant works and shows the overall development of Kierkegaards philosophy.

[Nativeabuse · Rating 3 out of 5]

This series is great, especially when you want to understand a philosophers ideas, but don't want to put in the time to read their actual books.

This book sums up the ideas behind all of his major works, and connects them all together for you nicely. In an easy to read format.

[Trey]

A great intro to the man and his occasionally difficult philosophy. I took this as a starting point for reading his material directly. Very entertaining visually, too, since it's well-illustrated.

[Drew Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wasn't expecting to like this to the extent I did, almost wish they had a book like this for every big name philosopher. Breaks down Soren's complicated life and ideas in funny and understandable ways, and it made the themes of Fear and Trembling become clearer. For a book that doesn't look like much on the outside, I couldn't keep myself from ranting to my girlfriend about Kierkegaard after reading this one.

[David Dunlap · Rating 3 out of 5]

A helpful overview of the life and major ideas of the great Danish philosopher/theologian. Also a fun book -- the illustrations and the text are all spiced with a dollop of humor that serves to leaven the heavy, serious thoughts that form the basis of the book. I learned a great deal rather painlessly. -- How much of it I *retain* is, of course, an entirely different matter -- and not the responsibility of the authors (Palmer AND Kierkegaard). Recommended!

[Barawe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the 'for dummies' version and I still feel like I didn't get a lot of what was said. The written part of the book is very clear and pleasant to read but what disturbed my reading and musings were the qazi 'funny' illustrations that just tried too hard. The combination of their 'haha pee pee' humor and Kierkegaard's complex ideas about f.e. dread of our own existence was beyond bizzare.

[Logan Stafford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a long read at all, but greatly helped me flesh out my understanding of Kierkegaard. As someone who’s been aware of Kierky for years and read him all throughout my college years, this book was still helpful to grow in understanding him.

[Pashmina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting... the pictures were an excellent match for Kiekegaard's mind-boggling philosophies...

[Erica Guzzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Renders the inaccessible accessible

[Colleen Grablick · Rating 3 out of 5]

wasn’t going to list this one due to embarrassment but then i remembered… aestheticism is a form of alienation from true selfhood 😔🤘

[Mfaiella2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always room for improvement, but generally does a good job balancing difficult concepts, jokes, and teaching. Would be interested in reading others from this series. 3.5.

[Jeff J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

An objective account of a subjective subject.

[Mo Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

kierk wouldve loved trans girl twitter

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I wish I had read when I was younger.  As a teenager just becoming interested in philosophy as a formal subject, this would have been a good book to read, not least because it paints Kierkegaard as a troubled but relatable person.  It is all too commonly the case that the philosophers of modern period have been particularly troubled souls, and that was certainly the case here.  Moreover, the sort of trouble that Kierkegaard faced is trouble that I can certainly believe, with his concern about ancestral curses thanks to the behavior of his father, the fact that he was a bright and caustically witty person who was bullied by peers when young and who grew up to be an eccentric and somewhat combative adult.  Even his awkward relationships with others, including a young woman he loved but did not marry, is something that strikes this reader at least as somewhat Nathanish, a matter that this book discusses in somewhat unpleasant detail, given that it appears to have been an important layer of meaning within his writings.  Obviously, when someone talks a lot about their personal life and happens to be a notable thinker it is worthwhile to understand their biography.

This book is a bit more than 100 pages and is divided into eight chapters.  The author begins with a biographical discussion that attempts to describe who Soren Kierkegaard was (1).  After that, the author discusses the very Nathanish idea of indirect communication that Kierkegaard used in his heavily ironic writings (2) as well as the tricky relationship between subjective and objective truth (3) that the author does not entirely correctly convey.  After that the author discusses "death" and "existence" as subjective truths (overlooking their objective reality) (4), and then discusses the way that consciousness is itself a problem by cutting ourselves from the objective reality outside of us (5).  After that the author discusses angst (dread, anxiety) and its importance for Kierkegaard (6) as well as the many-layered problem of despair that leads us into a genuinely faithful relationship with God (7).  After that the author ends his discussion with a description of Kierkegaard's three spheres of existence, namely the aesthetic (where people focus on pleasure), the ethical (where people have made a decision to live according to right standards of living), and the religious (where people have a vulnerable but intense relationship with God) (8), at which point the book ends, having been full of illustrations and a good bit of dark humor.

Even so, although this book is enjoyable it is not quite perfect.  The author, unfortunately, misunderstands Kierkegaard as a subjectivist when he was in contrast a strong defender of objective reality, even if one who commented on the different between truth as intellectually known (and somewhat barren) and truth as lived out in acts of love and faith.  Like many intellectual people, Kierkegaard well understood the ethical demands of life but struggled to get out of his own head sometimes.  Likewise, the author is somewhat anachronistic in viewing Kierkegaard in terms of the thinking of Sartre rather than according to his own deeply Christian (if not very traditional) perspective.  The author's misunderstandings are not the sort that would be fatal to someone who read Kierkegaard deeply, but it would likely give the sort of mistaken view that would especially appeal to young readers looking for the intellectual support for their own quixotic quests against authorities that young people tend to be frequently caught up in.   In short, this is a book that I would have greatly appreciated as a teenager, but it is one whose value to me in terms of instruction and example would have been a bit doubtful.

[Pamela Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

These series of book gives the bridge from Hegel to Existentialism and he adhorred Hegel's abstract, know-it-all-idealism. Kierkegaard's sophisticated aesthete concludes: There are the unsophisticated bores ("the mob, the crowd") who bore others. And there are the sophisticated bores ("the elect, the aristocracy") who bore themselves. The sophisticated form of boredom has DEATH as its natural consequence: these aristocratic aesthetes "either die of boredom (the passive form) or shoot themselves out of curiosity (the active form)." To avoid the boredom to which the pursuit of pleasure usually leads, the aesthetic author of the above passage prescribes what he calls "the Rotation Method." This method like most of us will do to keep from boredom will create your own world of pleasure. To do so you must avoid, friendship, love, marriage, business, commitments of any sort, and intense pleasures and pains. So what he is stating is that you perform certain acts that allow you to create your own unpredicted pleasures. Existentialism is what they rediscover in the twentieth century and produced in this philosophy. Most of what he writes is about his family, but then they turn out to be about you and me too.

[Caleb Greenwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

The benefit of this book, as many in the "Beginners" series, is it's very accessible. The illustrations makes the otherwise dry philosophy more palatable, even humerus at times. The content is good, but in its brevity there is a flaw, it's hard to retain. It is the long discourses that such complicated theories are understood. A paragraph is not sufficient to detail a rich Kirkegaardian work where one can internalize it; among the numerous key contributions Kirkegaard has made to philosophy, the reader will be able to say they are all interesting, but unlikely be able to explain them with any real depth.

[Kyle York · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is really cool. I keep it in my bathroom and come out knowing a little more about Kierkegaard each time. The cartoons make it really easy to follow and digest (no pun intended). The cartoons also help to tame the scariness of some of Kierkegaard's darker thoughts. I need to get more of these, I'll never use my phone in the bathroom again. Also, I'm not trying to be insulting or ironic here, I genuinely really like the book and I'm sure it would be nice to read outside of the bathroom as well.

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gotta be honest, most works by "philosphers" that I have read have been waaaaaaaaaaay over my head and the meaning lost to me. This is the first "beginners" book that I have read in some time and I really like how they present the bigger picture in a funny, accesible way. Last time I read one like this is was sort of a "cliffs notes" for a philosophy course but now I have read it and enjoyed it just for the hell of it. A nice read!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really opened my mind up to the profound, intense spiritual and intellectual striving of the Melancholy Dane.

I love how many of Kierkegaard's biographical details and philosophical insights (and the two converge here in a way that just isn't the same for (m)any other philosophers) are illustrated. The authors really do know what they're talking about and they do an excellent job of making notoriously dense and complicated and confusing material fresh, lucid and engaging.

[Deesign · Rating 4 out of 5]

Umumnya buku pengantar filsafat sulit dimengerti. Kali ini beda. Dengan sajian karikatur menarik, serta penuturan yang (seringkali) lucu, membuat Kierkegaard for Beginner mudah dibaca bagi pemula sekalipun.

[John Martindale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it, the comics and illustrations that came along side the text were excellent and often pretty funny. It was fun getting a overview of Keirkegaard thought in a entertaining, easy reading manner.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

These graphic novel summaries are so fun and incredibly informative

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I lol'd