Edward Mooney has an impressive record of scholarship on Søren Kierkegaard; his Knights of Faith and Resignation is among the important studies of Fear and Trembling from the boom in Kierkegaard studies that followed the publication of new English translations of Kierkegaard's works in the 1980s and 1990s. In Excursions with Kierkegaard, Mooney meanders through ten essays about how Kierkegaard's texts can inform a person's self-understanding in the face of others, God, and death. Much of the work here was previously published in journals and collections over the past five years.
The essays have a strong focus on selfhood. Among Mooney's most prominent points is that Kierkegaard shows us that the self is not an “executive” or “CEO,” a stable center for managing the person's faculties, but rather a decentered and unstable interweaving of many strands, including those of others and ultimately of God, too. In Mooney's account, Kierkegaard's use of pseudonymity in about half of his published works, as well as his mélange of genres within many of the pseudonymous works, evokes the self as “carnivalesque,” a riot of disparate voices. Though Mooney offers a number of compelling images for the reader to make sense of this approach to selfhood, he does not break truly new ground.
A larger concern I have with the book is that Mooney's Kierkegaard is almost entirely ahistorical. There are no references to the major studies of Kierkegaard's life or historical context, and hardly any references to Kierkegaard's contemporaries. Mooney sees Kierkegaard in Socratic terms, as a benevolent yet mischievous sage. And he does indeed have much to teach us. But we still have license to criticize his motives and decisions as an author, which come to light once his works are historicized. In fact, we might then be able to learn more from him.
For example, the puzzle of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms seems different once we note that pseudonymity was a common practice in the Danish and German literary scenes of Kierkegaard's time. Perhaps Kierkegaard is using pseudonymity to educate the reader about selfhood—but he's also adhering to a convention within his literary circle. Even Kierkegaard's great ecclesiastical rival, Jakob Peter Mynster, wrote under a pseudonym. Granted, Kierkegaard took pseudonymity much farther than his contemporaries. This and the other literary flourishes that Mooney admires are all methods of “indirect communication”—but they are also sometimes annoying and might betray an author too much in love with his own talent. There might be a different lesson about selfhood at work here.
In the wake of Joakim Garff's massive biography of Kierkegaard, published in English in 2005, book-length studies of Kierkegaard the author cannot ignore Kierkegaard the man—including Kierkegaard the rich, obnoxious, and petty man. To admit that the title of one of Kierkegaard's books, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the “Philosophical Fragments”: A Mimical-Pathetical-Dialectical Compilation, An Existential Contribution, oversteps the line separating clever from stupid is not to diminish Kierkegaard's genius. It is rather to see him as a truly human author, who, like every other, makes missteps in the pursuit of a point.
Mooney is right: we should read Kierkegaard's books as “works of art that address us” (71). That means we should treat them not only in the way we treat philosophical treatises, not only in the way we treat existential alarms, but also in the way we treat novels and paintings: by putting them in context, attending to their reception, and acknowledging their triumphs and flaws.
Though Mooney writes in an accessible way, he presupposes familiarity with Kierkegaard's body of work and much of modern philosophy. For this reason, I cannot recommend this book for an undergraduate course. The lack of either close philosophical analysis or a consideration of history makes it inappropriate for graduate courses. Readers who know Kierkegaard somewhat and wish to kindle his thoughts in their minds will get the most out of this book.
