How to Misunderstand Kierkegaard

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many excellent jokes about assistant professors as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy; specifically:
- Don't cease to be human.
- Don't be a parasite, merely feeding off other people's creations and never creating anything new.
- Don't reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard's ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point).
- Don't kill Kierkegaard's philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived.
Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism--a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life.