ABSTRACT
Vincent McCarthy's monograph, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard, was groundbreaking for its time because it is conceived against the grain of many commonly held presuppositions about Soren Kierkegaard's writings. McCarthy's influential text also brings into sharp focus for the first time a systematic overview of Kierkegaard through an analysis of moods or emotive states in Kierkegaard's literary constructions. McCarthy refuses to accept popularized interpretations of Kierkegaard's writings as representative of irrationalism, aesthetic dandyism, or mere literary fragmentation, thereby allowing a very insightful, hermeneutically generous, and compellingly cohesive account of Kierkegaard's thought. The battle has long raged as to whether one has the right to take what the pseudonyms say as the thought of Kierkegaard himself. The two extreme possible positions are either to "erase" the pseudonyms and take everything as Kierkegaard's, or else to accept nothing as Kierkegaard's, as he himself counsels, unless it is published under his name.
