It is customary for scholars who write about Kierkegaard to apologize for doing so. Kierkegaard made constant fun of the “professor” and predicted, with some bitterness, that after his death, his literary corpus would be picked over by the scholars for their own purposes. And so it has been.

Nevertheless, I offer no apologies for this effort to introduce Kierkegaard as a philosopher to those who are interested in reading him. Those of us who love Kierkegaard and who regularly teach Kierkegaard know how stimulating and provocative an encounter with his works can be. Nevertheless, for the contemporary student, and even for the professor, there are cultural and philosophical differences between Kierkegaard's world and our own that make it difficult to understand his writings. The current work is by no means an attempt to “summarize” Kierkegaard's thought as a substitute for reading him. It is rather an attempt to remove some of the barriers to a genuine reading of Kierkegaard.

Obviously, there are many ways one might organize an introduction to Kierkegaard's thought. One would be to discuss and explain some of Kierkegaard's major works, such as Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and The Sickness Unto Death. I have chosen not to follow this route, for several reasons. One is that I feared it would encourage a kind of “Cliff's Notes” approach involving summaries of these works.