What would Kierkegaard have thought about this book?
He would have perhaps appreciated Stathern's humor, his narrative skill, his quickness of mind, his emphasizing Kierkegaard's thought as directed not to abstraction but to 'lived life.' But he probably would have resented the effort to reduce the complexities of his thought, their contradictions and dialectical intricacies to easily digestible form.
For Kierkegaard 'difficulty' in itself has a value, and the path of the true truth seeker is not one which can be achieved readily, easily without suffering.
The essence of Kierkegaard can only be found in confronting his own complex, and highly qualified prose.
I like Strathern's books very much, but it seems to me here he chose a subject not especially amenable to this kind of treatment.
