Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses

"Upbuilding, or edification, is the central theme of Kierkegaard's authorship: "Only the truth that builds up is truth for you" (EO, 2:354). He stressed life development and the necessity of a lifeview for an author in his first work, the little book on Andersen, From the Papers of one Still Living. Either/Or, Part One, sketches numerous lives, victims, and victimizers, who are in desperate need of upbuilding or, more pathetically, rebuilding, or is the proper term rebirth? The letters of Judge William in Either/Or, Part Two, lay out the basic psychological presuppositions for upbuilding a life, presuppositions that Kierkegaard never repudiated, although he did deepen and enlarge them even as he rejected the comfortable complacency of the Judge. The crucial sermon that closes the volume shows the necessity of transcendence to break the domination of social conformity and worldliness that can appear as moral smugness. These early works should have made clear to each and all Kierkegaard's basic intention to become an upbuilding religious author, one critical of much in the common life.Somewhere along the way, probably soon after the publication of Either/Or, Kierkegaard developed a plan to publish a number of upbuilding discourses to "accompany" the pseudonymous works, even those he had not yet written. These discourses, collectively called Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses are the focus of the commentaries in this volume. We have to infer Kierkegaard's reasons for writing them, but the popularity of the worst modes of life presented in Either/Or, Part One, no doubt contributed mightily to his decision" --